Chapter 63: Adoption

Squeezing in and out of the backs of cabinets and automatons was one thing. A person the size of the Daimon couldn’t do it, unless maybe they were an expert contortionist. Other creatures, though, more flexible or compressible, could’ve managed. It would’ve been a piece of cake for an octopus.

When the Daimon grabbed Lena’s phone, though, and squeezed into that?

Yeah, there was no natural animal, maybe no natural substance, capable of it.

I think the weirdest thing about it – and that’s saying a lot – is that I didn’t feel the wrench of nausea I did when watching the creature at the construction site, or even the hints of it when I looked too closely at distorted space.

The Daimon’s arm narrowed and elongated and then its whole body followed suit, and it streamed through the cracks on the phone screen and into every port. It seemed less like it distorted or liquefied and more like it turned into a yellow laser beam.

Still, Lena almost fumbled the phone. “Holy shit!” She caught it before it could hit the floor and shatter the rest of the way.

“God,” Zhizhi whispered. She tilted her head back to stare at her camera. “And I’ve got the whole thing recorded. No one will believe this wasn’t a special effect.”

“Then they will believe it was a good one,” Miguel said.

She glanced at him. “Heh.”

Then we all crowded around as Lena flicked to the Third Eye app. Including Bernie, who must’ve climbed up her leg and onto her shoulder, because when I looked at the screen and back to Lena, I saw his plushie form balanced beside her head.

She opened the app to the same achievement scroll I’d gotten when I acquired my Tickets. She swiped it out of the way with more force than necessary and hissed when her finger scraped a crack. She jabbed the header for the Daimons window.

The table at the top had expanded with another row. In addition to Fire 1, Lena now had Tickets 1. Weird! But I supposed it made sense. If Tickets were a resource in Third Eye, why shouldn’t a Daimon be associated with them?

Then there was an oversized header called Personal, with Bernie’s name in smaller text beneath it. Lena told me this had read “Salamander” when she first got Bernie, and she’d been able to change it by tapping it.

Then, and this was new, another header (similarly oversized, but I suppose that was better than using a different font and making it look like a subheading) called Utility. The name, or title, beneath it? Gremlin.

I assumed the default names tied in to the associated resources. Fire, Salamander; that made sense, salamanders were a traditional fire elemental. Tickets, Gremlin; odd, but only because Tickets themselves were odd. I’d heard IT people joke about gremlins in computer systems, which seemed to be the reference here.

I nodded to myself. It seemed right.

Lena apparently didn’t think so.

“That’s just wrong.” She mushed her finger against the screen and tried to drag Gremlin up into the Personal section, but when she released her finger, all it did was bring up a name entry screen. She tapped out of that and tried again, but got the same result.

I understood why the screen annoyed her – I mean, besides it being a UI disaster. She didn’t want to think of Daimons as tools, so Utility was the last way she’d ever categorize one.

For my part, though, I found it fascinating. What did it mean to have, more or less, a “Tickets elemental,” both in terms of what the gremlin could do and in terms of how we ought to understand the resource? What kind of Utility did Daimons have? Would other categories appear? Was it like a paper doll inventory system, and Lena could only have one Daimon per slot, or more like a -mon game, and she could pick one – or had been assigned one – as her personal companion, and all the rest would slot into Utility?

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Most of those were questions we couldn’t answer yet. They still buzzed in my mind.

“Congratulations,” Miguel said. I half expected to hear it in the mechanical voice the gremlin had used to communicate with us.

Lena hung her head. “I’m sorry, Miguel. You should’ve been able to –”

“Invite a mischievous little monster into my phone?” he asked.

Lena blinked at him.

“I love cats,” he said. “Dogs are delightful. Parrots are very clever. Tropical fish are beautiful.”

Zhizhi got it immediately. “And you enjoy all of those pets, when a friend or family member keeps them?”

The smile he gave her was one of the warmest I’d ever seen on his face.

It took me a second longer than it had her, but I understood what he meant. He liked animals, enjoyed their company, appreciated their best qualities, but he wasn’t going to seek out the responsibility of pet ownership.

“I don’t get it,” Lena said. “If you’re really not upset, though, I guess that’s a good thing.”

Miguel clapped her shoulder. “Believe me, I’m not. This evening has been... interesting. Better than expected, perhaps. I am, however, very glad it ends this way.”

“It hasn’t ended,” Lena said.

“True,” Miguel said. “We haven’t all had a turn at one of the games.”

Zhizhi shook her head. “Yeah, no. No thanks. If you hand me one of those tokens I’m just going to throw whatever game you make me start. Total waste.”

“Papa would be so disappointed.” Miguel clicked his tongue. “I, on the other hand, have no intention of forcing anyone to do something they don’t want to.”

I’m not saying he was drawing a contrast with what he perceived Third Eye as having tried to do.

I’m not not saying that, though.

Lena put a hand on her hip. “Okay, but, that’s not what I meant.”

“Now I am sorry,” Miguel said. “Go on.”

“The evening’s not over,” she said, “because we’ve still got to pick out a name!”

Miguel and Zhizhi chuckled. Bernie chuffed.

Lena turned to me. She did a pretty good job of hiding her annoyance, but I caught the twitch of her eye.

Daimons were by far and away her favorite part of Third Eye. To her, obtaining a new little monster was one part being dubbed into knighthood and one part being given a puppy. I couldn’t think of another subject about which she’d think other people were insufficiently reverential.

I couldn’t decide if I agreed with her or not, but I certainly found it charming. I kissed the top of her head. “I think you and I are going to have to work that one out on our own.”

She wrapped an arm around my waist. “Any ideas?”

Bernie’s name was an awful pun. Burn-y, for a stuffed dragon. Either of her parents could’ve been responsible for that, but personally, I suspected her dad.

Should I try to come up with something equally groan-worthy? Absurdly, I felt a bead of sweat roll down my forehead. It’s one thing to know you’re not ready for the responsibility of being a dad, even a pet dad. Quite another, to be faced with the awful weight of trying to tell a good dad joke.

No, puns weren’t the right approach. Whatever Lena might say about Fire, it was a concept we all grasped. It might be weeks or months or forever before I understood Tickets and gremlins well enough to even try.

“The only thing I’ve got,” I said, “is Ryu.”

Lena cocked an eyebrow. “A gremlin named ‘dragon?’ That’s what it means in Japanese, right?”

“I think so.” I scratched the back of my neck. “What can I say? Street Fighter was the first game we played, so that’s the first name I associated with it. You could go with Ikaruga?”

“I don’t even know what that one means,” she said.

“Is that better or worse than knowing it means the wrong thing?”

“I’m not sure if it’s much of a name. Also, I would totes end up using Icky as a nickname, and that seems mean.” She sighed against me and held her phone up. The name entry screen remained open. A gray text box with a flashing black cursor, like something from a computer as old as the mall. She murmured, “Ryu, huh?”

I rubbed the small of her back and she rubbed her chin.

“What do you think?” she asked.

I opened my mouth to answer before I realized she’d leaned closer to her phone’s microphone.

“I don’t really know how to communicate with you,” she said. “So much to learn! Whatever the game says, you better believe I’m gonna figure it out. However many of you I get, you’re all ‘personal’ to me. So, c’mon, let me know, please?” She hesitated. “... Ryu?”

Her screen flickered. A smiling emoji, big smile, the kind phones liked to turn “:D” into, appeared in the text entry space.

I was pretty sure it was one of the stock Android emojis, but it struck me that it was the exact same color of yellow as the gremlin.

Lena pumped her fist. She gave Bernie a peck on the cheek and me one on the collarbone. Her thumb darted across the bottom of the screen, dodging cracks, and the emoji was replaced with the three letters of the gremlin’s new name.