Chapter 71: Wizard

I thought that was a pretty good line to end my demonstration on. Still, I wasn’t sure how Sandy would take it, especially after she’d seemed so shaken by the demonstration itself.

Not on my bingo card: her bustling over to the table, putting her hands on my shoulders, and pressing me down into my chair.

I sat, more from surprise than anything else.

“No,” she said. She clicked her tongue. “Absolutely not.”

I blinked. “What?”

“How can you even talk about that? You can’t!”

“I just did –”

“Well you shouldn’t,” she snapped. Her glare shifted to Benji as he joined us at the table. “And you, Ben. How could you encourage him like this?”

He drew back. “Trust me, I don’t understand this shit enough to encourage anything.”

Sandy pointed her finger, not quite at him, but close enough to his general direction for him to dodge. “You don’t have it in your head that Cameron and Lena are going to go down to Florida and get back the money you lost?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “I mean, isn’t that the best outcome?”

“Of course not,” she said.

Which left both of us staring.

“Would I like that money back?” she asked. “Of course. It’s better for us, better for our parents, better for Mason. I don’t have to figure out if I can justify staying home, or if I can justify going back to work, or if there’s no good answer. It’d be smiles all around.”

It sounded like the lead-in to declaring it was, in fact, the best outcome. Somehow, I found the sense not to say as much.

Benji didn’t. “Exactly. If they were going already, it’s just a bonus –”

“None of that,” Sandy said, “is worth sending them into the castle of a God. Damn. Evil wizard.”

I started to laugh but the sound got lost somewhere on its way up my throat.

What part of Sandy’s description of Omar did I find laughable? There’s the joke. Once I thought about it, nothing.

I could quibble that Albie and her brother were the only real wizards (and/or aliens, I added, if only in my head – I’d left that complication out of my description of Third Eye). Omar might have a head start, but he was one of the apprentices, right alongside Lena and I.

But he did have his head start, and if I was right, he also had a small army of employees swarming around South Florida with an eye toward turning it into an insurmountable advantage. If he wasn’t a full-fledged wizard yet, he was at least, like, a second level magic-user.

Evil? Well, why not? One of the very first things I’d learned about him was that he was willing to take his investors’ money and use it on his personal projects. He was, at minimum, unscrupulous, and not bound by any legal niceties he thought he could get away with ignoring. He might not be building thrones of skulls and plunging the land into darkness. Then again, I didn’t actually know he wasn’t.

And castles? I thought about the stage hazards that had excited me so much I hoped someone would try to stall a match in the tournament so I could see them trigger. Omar had, or at least claimed to have, some kind of Third Eye-based control over the environment we would be plunging into. It was his compound, staffed by his loyalists, equipped with his VR technology. Pretty good approximation of a castle.

Lena and I had fretted about taking on Mask on the strength of a weird pattern of invasion reports. We’d never proven he’d done something wrong, though, and he’d evidenced at most a little more power than us.

So why did we plan to walk cheerfully into the stronghold of somebody we knew for a fact was, one, a lot more powerful than us and, two, willing to commit actual crimes?

I think Sandy must’ve seen all that run through my head, because she folded her arms and sat down.

I had the strangest impression she thought she’d mommed me, which was especially weird because I couldn’t remember a case of my own mom adopting a tone like that. Her management style, whether for her kids or her subordinates, was to provide clear goals and frown meaningfully until people either achieved them or gave up hope of ever doing so.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Maybe that was why Sandy’s approach didn’t work on me.

“You’re right,” I said.

She nodded to herself.

Until I kept talking. “It could be dangerous, and we have to treat it as such. But that’s all the more reason we have to go.”

She straightened up. “Cam!”

I spread my hands on the table and leaned forward. “I promise I’m not taking this lightly. Maybe more lightly than I should have, yeah, so your reminder was legit really helpful. Thanks.”

“You can thank me by staying at least a thousand miles away from Florida.”

I shook my head. “That’s the thing, Sandy. I couldn’t, even if Lena and I didn’t already have business we have to finish there. Which we do. Apart from that, we might legit be the only people in the world who can both suss out what Omar is up to and know to try.”

Sandy pressed her lips together. “If you were an evil wizard, what would you do with the only two people in the world in position to foil your scheme?”

I scratched my chin. “Probably send an army of skeletons to stab them to death.”

She stared at me.

This time, I got all the way through laughing. “We’re not that kind of wizards, Sandy. And we’re not in a fantasy kingdom where we’re the only chosen ones. Long before we set foot in Florida, we will have told other people who can stop Omar. Including one of the Third Eye devs, and if anyone involved is an actual wizard, it’s her.”

“And will she?”

“Stop him?” The thought of Albie pushing a button to turn Omar’s powers off – or, more likely, waving her hand to do it – made me smile. I couldn’t picture it, though. He was breaking financial rules, not Third Eye ones. “Not over anything he’s done so far, I don’t think.”

“So after the skeletons get done stabbing you,” she said, “somebody qualified can solve the problem?”

“Well, yes.” I held my hand up and shook my head, chuckling. “So, Omar has an incentive to try to handle us more diplomatically.”

“And what would that look like?” Sandy asked.

I shrugged. “He’s not a real evil wizard, he’s a techbro who stumbled onto a weird technology and tried to exploit it. His first, second, and final plan will be to try and buy his way out of trouble. He’ll try to hire us, and we’ll string him along until we know what he’s up to.”

Sandy shot a glance at Benji.

“I’m not about to defend the bastard,” he said, “but I did listen to his podcast for years. I think he found out about a crazy opportunity and decided to throw everything away to try and get on top of it. Not that he’s been some kind of Bond villain all along.”

“Don’t remind me about the podcast, Ben.” She rubbed her temples. “This is all so crazy.”

“Believe me,” I said, “I know. I’ve been living it for over a month now.”

“And it’s still a secret?” Sandy asked.

“More or less.” I thought of Lena appearing on that woman’s camera with her flaming wings. A hoax, as far as mainstream society was concerned. For now. How long before enough incidents piled up that they stopped being dismissed, though? “We do intend to go public with it. We’re just waiting to do it until we have enough eyes on us, and enough proof.”

“That’s one smart move, at least,” she said.

In the interests of not disabusing her of that notion, I neglected to mention that we planned to make the reveal at the end of Omar’s tournament.

We all settled back into our chairs, stewing in our thoughts.

I felt like I’d made a hash of justifying why Lena and I needed to go to Florida. I hadn’t expected it to need justification. Benji had accepted it right away, once we couched it in terms of stopping Omar rather than in terms of playing his game.

It was a very “playing a game” way of looking at things, though, wasn’t it? You got powers, somebody’s doing something bad with the same powers, so you run off to stop them and expect to be showered with rewards.

If there was a morality mechanic in Third Eye, though, we hadn’t encountered it. I thought the game seemed to want to help its players, even if it wasn’t always good at it. Past that, neither the game nor the devs had ever expressed an interest in how we used the powers we obtained.

Albie might congratulate us if we foiled Omar’s scheme, but only because she liked us or because we’d won at PVP. Not because we were doing something heroic and he was doing something villainous.

Hell. Look at Mask. We thought he was doing something a hell of a lot worse than Omar, and nobody on the wiki team had so much as suggested that the devs might strip him of his powers.

What had I been thinking, dropping all this on Sandy? If anything, I should’ve worked harder to hide it from Benji. They had plenty to worry about without my tearing down their understanding of reality and substituting one full of evil wizards.

At least I hadn’t mentioned the monsters this afternoon. Maybe the conversation could drag on and I’d blurt that out, too.

If the kitchen chair had been plusher, I think I would’ve found ways to sink deeper into it. It was hardwood, though, so I just sort of ground my back against it.

If the powers Third Eye had granted me included invisibility, I’d have been sorely tempted to disappear.

Instead, the sound of footsteps charging up the stairs snapped me to alertness.

Mason burst into the kitchen. “Mom! Dad!”

They turned to the doorway and I shifted my chair to follow their gaze.

Mason held Bernie up over his head. “Check it out! Aunt Lena’s got an actual dragon.”

“And a very cute one,” Sandy said. I didn’t know where she conjured a smile from, but would have liked access to it.

Mason shook his head. “What? Not like this. You can’t see him for real unless you look through your phone.”

Lena appeared in the doorway behind him. I knew exactly where she conjured her smile from.

I found myself mirroring it.

At least someone had done a good job with her Third Eye reveal. Of course, she’d had Bernie’s help.

Sandy glanced at me, then at Lena. Whatever she expected from us, she apparently got, because her smile didn’t slip. She waved Mason to the table. “Why don’t you and your aunt come on over and show me.”