Chapter 75: Ticket Taking

Lena repositioned herself so she could push her chair back, then hopped off it. After a few clicks of her mouse, her Discord icon changed to reflect the fact she was streaming.

“Haven’t done video chat in a while,” she said. “Here’s hoping my camera didn’t get disconnected when we moved the PCs.”

I clicked her name in the interface and was rewarded with a second view of her. This one showed her in her Third Eye finery. I could even see Bernie stirring in his pet bed just at the edge of the screen. He rolled one eye in our direction and made a little chuffing sound.

“Which did you install on your computer?” I asked. “Third Eye, or the camera software Zhizhi uses?”

“The app itself,” Lena said. “I didn’t used to have it on there, but after my phone broke, I wanted a second copy running.”

I nodded. I’d begun the sign-up process on my PC in the first place, and had noodled around with the desktop version of the app enough to know that our status and resources transferred across them. It made sense, as much as anything in Third Eye did. The vast majority of the app’s functions were handled in the cloud.

How much of that cloud consisted of servers, and how much drifting fields of pixie dust, we were not at all sure.

Regardless, that was good, because now that we knew we weren’t going to have to rent a car for the trip, it seemed marginally more palatable for us to replace Lena’s cracked phone.

If not for those cracks, I thought she might have continued typing her Discord messages into her phone. I’d seen her do that back when we’d first started video chatting. As it stood, though, every time she touched the screen, she risked either damaging it further or depleting her HP.

She spoke instead. “Can everybody hear me?”

Inevitably, two members of the audience could not. If you’ve ever started a Discord call without somebody’s audio being set to the wrong device, you’ve had far better luck than us.

Once we got that squared away, however, and Lena did another test, she nodded at the camera.

“Okay! Tickets. The story so far. OldCampaigner?”

“Not much, Ashbird.” Why were we presenting this like an episode? I didn’t know, but it felt right. Belatedly, I turned my own webcam on. “We got six Tickets each, given to us by Ryu, who is listed in your interface as a Ticket Daimon. We seemed to get them as a reward for beating arcade games within a Realm.”

“Right now, we’re not sure if the Tickets come from the Realm or from Ryu modifying a game. He’s modded other games for me since, and I haven’t gotten any Tickets for winning, but I also don’t have a printer attached to my device.”

“That’s another, much smaller bit of help we’re hoping someone on the team can provide us with,” I said. “Do any of you have a printer we can test it on?”

Literally every local member of the team responded with “yes,” as – uselessly – did Joon Woo and LikeItsNinetyNine. What the hell, people? Only Salamancer shared our proper respect for a paperless home office.

“Sounds like we won’t have any trouble running that test,” Lena said.

ShakeProtocol: Why don’t you just buy a printer? You’re out here asking to borrow people’s cars but you won’t ask us to loan you twenty dollars for cheap electronics?

I didn’t trust myself not to talk about waste paper, the inevitable hassle of incompatible drivers, or the suite of bloatware every printer I’d ever used tried to worm into a computer unlucky enough to share a network with it. I bent over my keyboard and typed instead.

OldCampaigner: Good call. We’ll think about it.

“The way I see it,” Lena said, “there’s four possibilities. From worst to best. One, the Tickets were a one time offer and we blew it by not winning more of them when we had the chance.”

“There’s got to be some way of getting more,” I said, which could have been a quote from a couple people in the Discord if it hadn’t been my own sentiment.

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Lena nodded. “Second, the Realm and Ryu are both Ticket typed, and they have to work together to generate more. In that case, assuming we can get back in, we can get a few more, but the supply is pretty limited because we have to skip town.”

“If they prove to be crazy useful,” I said, “maybe we should rethink our plans?” I shook my head. “I don’t think so, though. If we’re taking whole days to explore outside of town, I’m sure we can get more resources than anything we could get by just farming Tickets here. Plus, I’d much rather keep Omar guessing about our ETA.”

“Makes sense,” Lena said. “Third, the Tickets come from Ryu. In which case, we just need to figure out how to rig up a printer to work while we’re on the road, or at least in hotels. We won’t have anything to offer anybody else, which is a bummer, but it would be a good thing to know and it’ll make us even stronger by the time we get to Florida.”

“Fourth is that the Realm can generate Tickets on its own?” I asked.

“Yep!” Lena flashed double thumbs up and a grin at her webcam. “Then the people who stay behind can stock up, while we get other resources.”

“You said there were only four possibilities, but you actually missed the best one,” I said.

She cocked her head.

“The ideal,” I said, “would be if both Ryu and the Realm can generate tickets independently.”

“Oh hell yes.” Lena pumped her fist. “Let’s not get too excited, though. It could legit be any of the above.”

“Enough about how we got them, and how we might get more.” I skimmed the commentary in the Discord to confirm my guess about our audience’s mood. Yep. Interested but impatient. Joon Woo, in particular, seemed to think we were stalling.

I thought he was right, although I wasn’t exactly sure why.

I still felt weird about the Tickets. Why hadn’t these Refinements come with a spectacular alteration of reality the way Reactants had, despite the fact that they seemed to come from an even rarer class of resources?

Or was it just because we’d gotten them from Miguel’s Realm, and he wasn’t able to get his own?

Hell. We still weren’t a hundred percent sure he hadn’t been able to absorb the Tickets because he was no longer an active player, and not because he bailed on the Street Fighter game that had inspired Ryu’s name. So far, every person we’d seen collect Tickets was both an active Third Eye player *and* someone who had just won a game Third Eye had altered.

If we could get back into Miguel’s realm, even if it was just once more before we left, we’d have plenty of time to discover the answer.

For now –

“Let’s find out what we can actually do with them,” I said.

I caught a line of text on my computer screen.

ShakeProtocol: That was the original question, yeah.

For a wonder, neither Lena nor I were inspired to put off our Ticket test any longer. If you want to send in our applications for sainthood, you can start with that.

Lena’s fingers picked their way around the cracks on her phone. Through Discord, it looked like her avatar was playing a piano in thin air. Where she touched the invisible screen, she left little puffs of flame.

“I’m on the Refinements page now,” she said. “The only thing I have here is Tickets. Six of them, like we said.”

“What happens when you press the entry?” I asked, for my benefit, and the benefit of the audience.

Her tongue poked through her lips. In person, it looked undignified, if cute. On her avatar – pretty much the same. Third Eye made the effort to faithfully translate our mannerisms, even when they didn’t fit the personas it assigned to us. “It brings up a menu with all of my resources, the same as when we use a Reactant.”

Considering how bad the app’s UI was, I supposed that would get pretty cumbersome as we obtained more different resources. How many types of items were listed in the game’s store? Too many to fit on a drop-down without scrolling, the way it displayed them. I asked, “What are you going to try?”

“Wood, I guess.” She shrugged. “It’s what we’ve got the most of, and especially now, what we’re likely to get more of.”

We’d never really had to care about the different resources in our stockpiles, apart from our Reactants. From what we’d seen, though, we were in for absolute piles of Wood and Stone when we scouted outside of town. Iron, Glass, and especially Plastic, not so much.

“And...” Lena frowned. “Huh. I’m not sure. It bumped me back to the main page.”

We looked around the apartment, with and without our phones. There was no new panel of Wood, the way there would’ve been if she’d manifested it with a Reactant.

I stepped sideways so I could peer over her shoulder. “What do your stats look like?”

She squinted at the screen. One of the cracks ran right through the upper area where Third Eye displayed HP, MP, and XP. “I’m down one MP, the same as if I’d used a Reactant. It must have done something.”

“Try your Refinements page.”

She did. “Five Tickets left.”

“So one got spent. Again, it must have done something,” I said. “Did it take your Wood, too?”

“Lemme check.” She tapped twice, once to close Refinements, once to open Materials. “Oh shit!”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to see what had made her react. “Three hundred and eighty seven Wood. How much did you have before?”

“I wrote it down when we sat down tonight.” She had. She brought the note up on her computer, partially covering the Discord window. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped almost to a whisper. Props; a whisper was more than I could manage. “Before I hit that button, I had three hundred and eighty six.”