Chapter 76: Cost-Benefit Analysis

Lena and I stared at each other, wide-eyed.

If we’d just been experimenting on our own, I think we might both have stood there like a couple of idiots for, conservatively, a while. Thankfully, a Discord chime broke us out of our shock right away, letting us know a message had come in.

It wasn’t the last.

I’m not going to repeat them all, because they repeated themselves. They also more or less repeated what was playing on repeat in my head.

If we were looking at an exchange rate of one Ticket for one resource, regardless of what that resource was, then Lena and I were about to become two of the four most powerful Third Eye players we knew of. Also, we’d probably discovered why Omar was willing to part with Reactants in a volume we’d never even seen anyone else possess.

Why the hell were we standing here thinking about it instead of splurging on new purchases, though?

I snapped my phone up and tabbed to the Refinements page.

I forced myself to slow down, just a little, because we were still in a call.

“I’m going to try it with a Reactant next,” I said.

“If it’s one to one for everything...” Lena shook her head. Why finish saying it? It was what everyone was thinking.

I felt sweat trickle down my back as my finger pressed the line for Tickets. The dropdown menu appeared. It already reached the bottom of the screen. Such poor UI design! Eventually, we might have Gold and Crystal on this page, and perhaps other Refinements, so we wouldn’t be starting from the top of the table and even more would be pushed off the screen.

Out of curiosity, I dragged up at the side. I half expected it to close out of the dropdown menu, meaning that, barring a UI update, we literally wouldn’t be able to access the bottom of the list as we got more options on it.

That wasn’t what happened.

The list scrolled upwards and I saw its final entries.

It made sense, in retrospect, because they were things that we’d seen in the in-game store and had hated to think of people being able to buy.

I said, “It looks like I can buy HP, MP, and XP directly.”

If the first two raised the maximum, then whatever else Tickets could do, they would finally provide me with a way of permanently increasing my shitty starting values for HP and MP. When I at last burned through Albie’s Potion, I wouldn’t have to be quite so cautious.

NugsFan15: That’s interesting, and we should explore the exchange rate, but surely a Reactant would be a better purchase?

If her Discord server was any indication, Erin spoke for the masses.

The masses didn’t have 10 HP and 10 MP.

Nonetheless, I nodded. If my choice was between raising my maximum HP to eleven or getting a second unit of Air, that was no choice at all.

If it was just between another unit of Wood, or even Plastic, and raising my maximums? At a certain point, buying the resource I couldn’t just find out in the world would make more sense, even if the exchange rate was terrible.

This might sound insane, but I found that thought almost as exciting as realizing we were allowed to buy resources at all.

Whatever else Third Eye was, it was a game, and whatever else it involved, it required quite a bit of strategy. But the strategic parts weren’t very gamey, and up till now, the gamey parts hadn’t been very strategic. We collected what we could find, we learned to use it as best we could. At most, we could optimize where we scouted and what we practiced.

Here, though, was a Third Eye game mechanic I could strategize about!

I allowed myself a tiny fantasy of getting Gold, which nobody had yet posted a use for but which Erin suspected could turn resources into Tickets. I would spend the whole day shuffling everything back and forth until I had my stats and resources arranged exactly as I liked them.

And then I’d reshuffle them the next day!

This day, however, I had no Gold, six Tickets, and was getting way the hell ahead of myself.

“I’m going to try Air now,” I declared.

I scrolled back up and pressed the entry.

The results left me with a lot less ambiguity than Lena’s purchase of Wood had.

As soon as my fingertip brushed the screen, a blast of lukewarm air erupted from the overhead vent. It wasn’t our landlord finally, belatedly fixing the furnace, as I’d once thought he had when Lena’s flames first warmed our apartment. For one, there was zero chance that even a repaired furnace would put out a gale like this. For another, it surged through the apartment, scattering my written notes and swirling into the amulet on my chest.

I reached up to clasp it, but by the time my hand got there, I’d blinked, and the amulet – along with the rest of my avatar, and Lena’s, except through her webcam – was gone.

Instead, my phone was in my hand.

She brushed her hand over her windblown hair. “I’d call that a successful test.”

“Holy shit,” I said.

At the push of a button, I’d just changed the world. Also, gained a Reactant.

I was pretty sure my MP had changed, the same as Lena’s had, but I hadn’t written my total down in advance so I couldn’t be certain. A quick trip to the Reactants page confirmed what I already knew. I was now the proud owner of two units of Air.

Not enough to fly, but getting closer. I wondered if I could pull off a proper glide with two Air.

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But why wonder? All I had to do was buy more!

I closed out of Reactants and went back to Refinements.

My grin wavered. “Ah.”

Lena cocked her head. “Sup?”

I showed her my screen while I explained to the people watching over Discord. “Buying a single unit of Air cost me five Tickets.”

“So much for buying our way to previously unheard of levels,” Lena said. “Still, that’s totally worth, isn't it?”

“Of course!” Now that I was back to figuring out what I could accomplish with two units of Air, I started running through the possibilities in my head. Gliding seemed like it might be possible, but I would need a wider, more stable frame to do it. If I had Earth I could shape something to my exact specifications, but even if I’d had more Tickets, it didn’t seem like we could buy our first unit of anything, since it didn’t appear on the dropdown. Unless we could use the shop, after all? Something else to check.

Would it work better if I used a real object as a glider, rather than another conjured one like a sheet of Plastic? My Air would be less aligned with the object, but the object would be fully aligned with the world and my body.

It wouldn’t hurt to save on Plastic, in any case.

Speaking of saving...

“Are you going to hold onto your last Ticket?” Lena asked.

Good question.

I wanted to spend it on HP or MP, now that I knew the exchange rate wasn’t a simple one for one. How much would I get? Ten? A hundred? Somewhere between those two numbers lay the point at which I would start pumping any Tickets we did get in that direction as soon as I got enough Air to fly with.

For now, though, it made no sense to buy what I hoped would be a permanent increase to my maximums, because until the Potion ran out, my maximums didn’t really do anything.

“I’ll save it for now.” I started to explain my reasoning, but hesitated. I’d never sat down and told the rest of the wiki team about the Potion. I hadn’t hidden it, not intentionally, but the details had never come up in conversation. Explaining now just felt awkward. Instead, I said, “That way if we get four Tickets for something, I can buy another unit of a Reactant.”

“Good thinking,” Lena said. “God, I wish I hadn’t bought a stupid Wood.”

“We had to find out, and it was the safest thing to risk losing.” I touched her elbow. “You’ve got five left, right? Get yourself something cool.”

“Mmhm!” She wiggled her shoulders and held her phone out in front of her. She hesitated. “Air or Fire?”

“Your call. Do you think three Air would be enough to fly with?”

“‘Prolly not.” She bit her lip. “That would be so sick, though...”

I said nothing.

She kept chewing on her lip. I was about to try to distract her, just so she didn’t lose HP, but abruptly, she tossed her hair and stepped back. “Fuck it. Air’s your thing, Fire is mine. I want to be able to hit harder, and I want to see how much juice I can squeeze out of it when I use it for electricity.”

I gave her a thumbs up and braced against the arm of my chair. Not so much for the eruption of Fire itself, because I didn’t think that would be aligned enough to harm anything in the apartment, us included.

More so I could catch the moment of transfiguration when Lena and I appeared as our avatars.

Trouble was, that moment never came.

Lena frowned. “It bumped me back to the main screen, but I didn’t lose any MP.”

“What does it say on your Reactants?”

She shook her head. “Three Fire. Same as before.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You definitely had five Tickets left.”

“Still do. At least it didn’t spend any of my Tickets when it failed.” She perked up. “You do realize what this means, right?”

“I really, really don’t.”

“It means Third Eye agrees with me!” She grinned. “Fire really is the best.”

I supposed it was possible. Some games costed their most powerful or direct offensive options higher than anything else, even if as a result, they ended up not being especially practical. Was Third Eye such a game?

I glanced at Discord.

NugsFan15: I’m not sure that’s right, although it would be very funny if so.

NugsFan15: You have two Air right now, yes? Please try buying another.

“I guess I can settle for maybe being able to fly.” Lena heaved an exaggerated sigh. She tapped her screen.

Nothing happened.

She said, “What the shit?”

“It sounds like you already have a theory, Erin,” I said.

NugsFan15: From what we’ve seen, having more than one unit of a Reactant is exceptionally powerful. I suspect the cost to purchase another scales based on how many you already have.

NugsFan15: It’s how I would design such a system, at least.

“It also,” I said, “explains why Omar would be willing to give away five of each Reactant.”

“Trade away his extras, make himself look super generous to everybody who doesn’t have this part of the game unlocked, then buy his way back at a lower cost?” Lena chuckled. “Pretty slick.”

DU_Goldie: can tell ur not in chs class.

It took me a second to realize “chs” was “CannibalHafling’s.” Matt’s. Sometimes DU_Goldie’s abbreviations tipped over into incoherence.

Lena glared at her monitor. “Why?”

DU_Goldie: ur not thinking like an exploiter.

DU_Goldie: u get it rite nf?

NugsFan15: Although I hope you’re wrong, I think I do.

Now that they’d brought it up, I suspected I did, as well. “You think that if Omar has some way to package his Reactants up for someone to absorb later, he can set himself back to one of each, buy them back, then reabsorb the ones he had before?”

DU_Goldie: wouldnt u?

“I totally would,” I said. “Hell. One of the first things I ever did in this game was hunt for an infinite XP glitch.”

NugsFan15: You didn’t find one, did you?

“Alas, no.” I rubbed my chin. “I mean, it’s good if there isn’t one. But if there is, I sure as hell want to be the one to find it.”

“What are we figuring Omar has, then?” Lena asked.

“A source of Tickets and at least some Crystal,” I said. “That’s what Crystal is supposed to do, right, Erin? Make constructs the user can reabsorb?”

NugsFan15: Everyone who’s tried it has used it that way, yes. If anyone’s been able to experiment with giving constructs as Materials to other players, they haven’t reported it yet.

It was easy for us to forget sometimes, but most people were performing their Third Eye experiments on their own. They could benefit from what people were willing to share with the community as a whole. When it came to their own discoveries, though, they ended up with weird gaps in their knowledge.

Eventually, that would change. Playing with a team offered too many advantages. Anyone who went solo would either have to reach an extreme level on their own, as Mask seemed to have, or they’d fall out of the beta entirely. Of course, I had only my impression of Mask’s character to lead me to believe he was playing without a team. Maybe he was the Matt of his group, one PVP-mad player supported by a bunch of friends who were more interested in exploring the game’s systems.

Was that the optimal configuration?

Or was it to hire a bunch of other people, equip them with the ability to see Third Eye phenomena, and turn them loose to act as your proxies?

Hell. Between Omar’s money and the ability to give out Reactants, why was I assuming his employees were non-players? If I hadn’t known he was scamming innocent investors, would I have turned down an invitation to act as a full-time scout on his payroll? I supposed it depended on the pay I’d be rolling in.

“Depending on how much Omar has been able to pull that trick off,” Lena said, “and how long he’s been doing it, how strong do you think he’s gotten by now?”

“Depends on a lot of factors, I suppose.” I started counting them off on my fingers, but stopped at one. Right now, it was the only one that mattered, because it was the only one we could answer.

And, depending on what that answer was, the only one we could benefit from ourselves.

“Starting with,” I said, “does he have a steady supply of Tickets?”