Chapter 73: Open Windows

The plushie didn’t move.

I didn’t know what I’d expected to see.

I turned back to Lena and started to speak.

The plushie version of Bernie lay by her feet, tucked into his corner of the pet bed. As if he’d never moved when she called him the first time.

I shot a frantic glance back at her desk. Nothing. “Holy shit!”

She looked around. “What did you see?”

I shook my head. “I... nothing. He was over by the desk. The plushie was, I mean. And then as soon as I looked at you he was back in the pet bed.”

“Huh.” Lena hugged her arms.

“So that,” I said, “was kinda creepy.”

“Lil’ bit.” Lena lifted the smart glasses from her eyes and looked down at Bernie.

Then she pushed the glasses back into place and knelt beside the pet bed. She ran her hand along Bernie’s head. I heard his cheerful burble.

“It could have come straight out of a creepy doll movie,” I said. “I feel like we should be more worried about this.”

“Probably.” She scratched under Bernie’s chin.

“You’re not,” I said.

“Nope.” She closed her eyes and knelt there, petting her familiar and/or childhood stuffed toy, a contented smile on her lips.

And I, damn me, couldn’t make myself worry, either.

“You want to try feeding him now?” I asked.

“Let’s let him get used to his bed. We’ve got plenty of other stuff to do.”

“Next time, we need to set things up so we can film that test,” I said.

“We really should do that with all of them,” Lena said.

“We need a phone that doesn’t have Third Eye installed,” I said. “Which rules out everybody on the wiki team, and even Miguel. I guess if he got a new one, it’s probably fine?”

“You know, now that we’ve seen Bernie, it puts what happened in the tunnel in a different light,” Lena said. “Not so much the Water, but the sounds we heard when we were leaving?”

“You think maybe there’s another familiar down there?” That dripping, splashing sound. That glistening object, always lurking at the edge of our lights. A Water familiar?

“Could be!” She cocked her head. “They’re called Daimons, by the way.”

“I remember seeing something about that on the Kickstarter. Helper Daimons.” I called the page up and examined the stretch goals. Were Player Created Artes next? I didn’t know what those would entail, but I sure wanted to find out.

Further Dimensions sounded... a little less enticing, considering what we’d experienced.

“Also, I got the ‘chieve.” Lena took her phone out and showed it to me. Another of those clipart scrolls. In fact, she’d gotten two. Elementary My Dear for getting her Fire, the same as I had for my Air. Little Helper, for gaining her first Daimon. A thousand XP for each hadn’t caught her up to me – the construction site really had been a windfall, despite how creepy I’d found it – but she’d closed the gap.

“I wonder if anyone else has posted about this yet,” I said.

Our original plan had been to check up on all this Third Eye stuff yesterday, but somehow it had ended up pushed to the back burner.

Lena gave Bernie one last pat and stood up. “Why don’t you check while I get the stuff ready for our next test?”

“Sounds good.” I jogged over to my PC and thumbed the power button. I preferred reading the wiki there.

Lena set the weathervane up on one end of the counter. We weren’t going to drill holes in the surface to screw it into place. For one thing, our landlord would probably murder us. For another, while it looked kind of cool to have a metal outline of a rooster perched at the end of the counter, we needed the space.

Also, we didn’t own a drill.

Point was, she’d have to hold it when we did the actual test.

She left it balanced there and got the scale out. She eyeballed the distance between the weathervane and the scale; we’d need some space between them.

Finally, she propped the thermometer up against the wall, next to the microwave.

By then, my computer had finished booting. Discord came up first, so I fired off a couple of DMs to the people we needed to talk over our discoveries with. Unfortunately, Erin and Miguel were offline. Donica wasn’t, but she didn’t respond immediately. Probably at work.

Well, messages sent. They could respond when they got the chance. While I waited, I opened the wiki.

There was no page for Daimons. Speculation had it as a heading, but it was just people wondering if the feature had been implemented yet, and if so, how they might go about accessing it.

Confront a painful part of your past, I thought, dig a lost childhood toy out from a replica of your old home, and show your steel when confronted by a monster. What could be simpler?

Of course, even that had only worked for Lena because of the tier she’d backed at. I noticed that she wasn’t complaining about pay to win when it came to Bernie.

I listened to her hum as she set up our test equipment.

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Money well spent.

Third Eye really had done exactly what she wanted, hadn’t it? I understood better now the depth of how much she’d wanted to break out of her rut, and how much the loss of her savings had forced her to.

I wanted to believe that if she hadn’t been forced out of that apartment, she’d have come out of her shell eventually, slowly, honestly, comfortably.

I worried she would have fanned the flames of her metaphorical moat until they kept out everyone, even me.

It didn’t matter now. Whether intentionally or not, Third Eye had pushed her out, and we’d dealt with it. We needed to focus on the game now.

I checked the Game Mechanics page, just in case someone had posted about Daimons there without making a whole extra page. I hadn’t experimented with the wiki’s interface enough to know if Erin had to make pages; either way, any contributor could add data to the existing ones.

No mention of Daimons, but we weren’t the only ones making new discoveries. There was a subheading for something called Refinements. According to the chatter beneath it, a couple of posters who’d found Gold and Crystal had started to experiment with their use. Even though they sounded like Materials, they were, according to these people, actually a whole new class of resource. Collecting one of them for the first time triggered a new achievement and opened a new window in the Third Eye app.

It irked me that we would eventually have two windows that both started with “Re.” Another example of Third Eye’s UI failings. Even as someone who hated crafting systems, I thought they could have just called it Crafting.

The reminder of the windows did make me wonder about something, though. “Did you get a window for Daimons?”

Lena looked up. “Yep.”

“What’s it look like?”

“Magnificent, obvs.” She joined me at the computer and showed me her phone screen.

It started with the usual archaic table structure, but, amazingly, formatted worse. The table’s cells stretched oddly, but it had only a single line, for Fire, with a single unit listed.

Below that was a header too big for the window. For crying out loud, the windows themselves didn’t have proper headers! Anyway, this one read “Personal,” which made me wonder what other kinds might show up.

More importantly, Bernie’s name was listed beneath the header.

I shot Lena a glance.

“Wondering if his name was there from the start?” she asked.

I nodded. Would that prove the devs had pulled Bernie from her memories rather than somehow associating the Daimon with the real stuffed toy? At the very least, it would point in that direction.

Lena reached down and clasped my hand. She spent a moment massaging it.

“Nope,” she said brightly. “It originally just said ‘Salamander.’”

I groaned. “Quit it.”

She chuckled, then, abruptly, stopped. “Hey. Do you really want me to stop? I’m trying not to do things that legit bug you.”

“No, it’s fine. A plus, even.” I squeezed her hand. “If I had to take all this stuff completely seriously, it would drive me crazy.”

She leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “Good. Because it would also make it a lot less fun.”

I tilted my head back, but she’d already skipped over to the counter and I returned my attention to the wiki.

The Gold and Crystal users had very different stories about what happened when they used their new menu.

There were now four different accounts – I checked the edit history to make sure they came from different IPs, and they did – of people using Crystal to turn Materials into persistent objects.

Which didn’t seem all that impressive, since we still had the relics of my Air and Water experiments stacked around the apartment. Except that the Crystal constructs seemed to have at least one game mechanical function. They could be re-collected, like the objects we found out in the world, and re-manifested in whatever form they’d been left.

No one had mentioned an infinite XP glitch like I’d speculated about, but they hadn’t addressed it one way or another. Hope continued to spring!

Did I still want to find an infinite XP glitch if this stuff could affect the real world?

Well.

I didn’t want one to exist.

But if one did, I wanted to find it.

Using Gold seemed to have a dramatic effect, as well. In the opposite direction.

MP was spent, objects disappeared, and then –

Nothing.

A shitty outcome, you might think, and that was what the initial poster had said. Erin had actually chimed in on this discussion last night, though. She speculated – or stated, if she’d made the discovery and discussed it with the wiki team in the day and a half since I’d last checked her Discord – that Gold might turn Materials into Tickets.

So why didn’t the Tickets show up? Because those genuinely hadn’t been implemented yet. Lena and I already knew that, because she hadn’t gotten the one hundred Tickets that were supposed to be part of her backer tier. Maybe they wouldn’t appear until Third Eye left beta.

“You know,” I began. I hesitated.

“I do, lots of things.” Lena leaned over the counter. “What do I know in this case?”

“Unless magic is super cheap,” I said, “there’s no way Third Eye could turn a profit.”

“Meaning what?” Lena’s eyes flicked to the pet bed.

I spread my hands. “I don’t mean it’s going to fail. We know the creators are way beyond being simple game devs. There’s something here. Something real and powerful.”

“Okay...” She frowned down at Bernie. “I’m hoping you’re not just saying this to worry me.”

“Kind of the opposite,” I said. “We’ve been assuming, since it’s a mobile game with a shop, that it’ll be a cash shop, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” Lena said. “I’ve reviewed about a million mobile games, Cam. That’s how they work.”

“But nothing else about Third Eye works like a normal game. What if its whole economy is based around this Gold-into-Tickets thing they’re talking about on the wiki, with no real money at all?”

“Loving the optimism,” Lena said.

“I’m just trying to understand the incentive structure. If there’s no way they can make money off it, then why are we thinking money’s part of their goal?”

“Okay, but what if their CPAs are only as good as their UI designers?”

I grimaced. “Point.”

“I wasn’t kidding, by the way. It’s awesome that you can be optimistic about this stuff.” Lena lowered her eyes. “I sure hope you’re right. If it goes pay to win, neither of us can afford to do anything but lose.”

“Another reason we need to get the next video out.” I slumped back in my chair. Suddenly, I felt overwhelmed, exhausted. The previous night had been more relaxing than restful, and we’d let so much build up on our plates. I closed my eyes. I rubbed them.

Neither of us had Gold or Crystal or a line on how to get them. Hell. Maybe we’d personally be better off if Third Eye did go pay to win. At least then, if our videos continued to do numbers, we had a path, however implausible, to staying at the forefront of the game.

Well, did we? I knew consistent uploads were a huge part of building a YouTube channel. We’d allowed ourselves to get distracted for multiple days, and unless we found Earth or recruited somebody else to show it off, we’d have to spring our long-teased Fire sooner than promised. It was only a matter of time until somebody who’d been luckier in collecting Materials outpaced us. Maybe they already had.

And that was ignoring the elephant in the room. If Third Eye Productions wasn’t doing this for money, then what did they want? Whatever Lena thought of me, I couldn’t muster enough optimism to believe they’d done it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Because Bernie was such a charming manifestation, because Lena had been charmed, because Third Eye had pushed us to confront our issues, I wanted to extend it the benefit of the doubt over and over again.

But the dread I’d felt at the construction site was probably a part of the game, too. What if that represented a taste of what Third Eye really was, and all of the rewards were just to sugarcoat it?

I felt Lena’s hands on my shoulders.

I opened my eyes to see her smiling down at me.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said.

“We got this.”

I found my smile. “Now who’s the optimist?”