Chapter 86: The Forest for the Tree
“We’re not going to clear this place out today,” Lena said.
That was for sure. One thing that had become obvious as we circled through the woods was just how vast a forested park could seem when you weren’t restricting yourself to the premade trails someone had cut through it. It didn’t help that every few minutes, we spotted a new Third Eye object and rushed over to document and collect it.
We’d been walking for over an hour and still hadn’t reached the huge tree. Every time we came to a gap in the canopy, we saw it looming over us, ever closer but still out of reach.
Some kind of spatial distortion? Nope. I checked my Maps app again and confirmed that it was just taking us that long to wind our way toward it.
As a jutting rock flashed and turned to Stone beneath her hand, Erin asked, “Do you think we should change our plans and come back here tomorrow?”
I’d have let Lena field that question, but when I glanced back, I saw her biting her lip.
I said, “No.”
“We’re going to leave a lot of materials uncollected,” Erin said. “It just doesn’t seem very efficient to flit around the country instead of cleaning out a promising location.”
“I understand,” I said, “but... I think it might be important that we keep moving forward.”
Erin cocked her head. “How so?”
“We’ve had the most luck when we’ve done what Third Eye wants us to do, right?” I asked.
Lena and Erin nodded. Zhizhi didn’t, but she shifted the hand bracing her camera to a thumbs up to indicate agreement.
“Well,” I said, “this seems like more of the same. The game wants us to push ourselves onward, literally and figuratively. Maybe it’s stupid, maybe it’s just an affectation, but I don’t think making this forest our new base and scrounging up every last Material in it is the intended model of play.”
“I didn’t mean we should just stay here for weeks,” Erin said. “One more day while Donica does her work in Colorado Springs seems like something we could stretch to.”
I scratched the back of my neck. “That’s fair. Is the practice you’re going to in the morning or the afternoon, Donica?”
“Morning,” she said. I’d already suspected as much; if what was convenient for her had lined up with Erin’s proposal, I was sure Donica would have volunteered it without prompting.
“Play it by ear?” Lena asked.
I cocked an eyebrow, wanting Erin to answer first.
That proved to be a mistake. She tapped her finger on her cheek, lost in thought and oblivious to my reaction.
I looked away, feeling silly, and mumbled, “That works for me.”
“Oh!” She blinked. “Yeah. We can decide tomorrow. Or even later today, depending on what we find.”
I had trouble verbalizing why I thought it would be a bad idea to stay in the Black Forest. Someone could just as easily argue that Third Eye rewarded diligence as much as curiosity.
Maybe now that I’d gotten behind the wheel of a giant SUV for a couple of hours, I’d developed an insatiable thirst for the open road. On second thought, staying here didn’t sound so bad. We could camp overnight and not have to drive for days.
“Hey,” Zhizhi said. “Can one of you take over with Donica’s chair? Not you, Cam –” I spread my hands and stepped back. “– one of the girls. Let’s get some footage in the can so I can edit the episode tonight.”
On top of Erin’s reluctance to appear on camera, either her or Michelle being caught in frame would tip off Mask that we’d brought a whole team. Although we were all taking notes and would post everything we’d found tonight, the plan was for Lena and I to claim to have scouted everything. Miguel had agreed to write up a series of plausible finds for Erin and Michelle to post from somewhere that fit their supposed itinerary.
Our hope was that not only would it make our team appear smaller than it was, it would also make our personal XP totals look swollen to irresistible heights. The juiciest 10% in Third Eye, open to any PVP player willing and able to take it from us.
“I’ll get the chair,” Michelle mumbled.
It struck me that she’d said almost nothing else during the walk. She went through the motions of acting as a Third Eye player, then shrank back in on herself.
I felt like I should talk to her, but to say what? The truth was, I didn’t know her well enough to begin to guess how to cheer her up.
Especially since she had every reason to worry. Missing teacher, missing friend, too little power, too much need for it. On top of that, she’d been roped into a scheme that could get her in trouble with the authorities if it didn’t work – her college for sure, and maybe even the cops.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
If bringing any of that up was my idea of a pep talk, better to keep my mouth shut.
I felt my own smile fade, until Lena danced ahead of us and struck a pose for Zhizhi to film.
“Heya, folks,” she said. “It’s ya girl, Ashbird, back for kind of an unconventional tutorial. Today, we’re gonna talk about scouting. If you’re still in the beta, I’m sure you’ve gotten up to plenty of it. You’ve probably scoured your whole neighborhood, right? You hit up the coffee shop downtown, the game store on the main drag, the outdoor mall. Every place you’d go to find something in an AR game, amiright?”
Watching her, I couldn’t help but grin. I shot glances at the rest of the team before I sprinted forward to join her for the shoot. Erin and Zhizhi looked almost as delighted as I felt. And was it my imagination, or did Donica’s eyeroll look more forced than exasperated? Lena’s performance didn’t seem to be enough to lift Michelle’s mood, though, which just went to show I had no chance.
I joined Lena in the camera’s frame. “Sounds like a pretty solid itinerary, Ashbird. So... how come we’re in a forest?”
“The Black Forest,” Lena said. She did a twirl, but slowly enough that it panned her camera around the canopy.
“The one in Colorado,” I said. “Not the one in Germany.”
“We’ll have to go there, next!”
I laughed. “Let’s take it one at a time.”
“I guess.” Lena’s twirl finished with her camera pointing upwards, through the canopy. In Third Eye, the edges of a second canopy stretched over us, the outermost branches of the great tree. “See that up there? That’s what we’re heading for. We don’t know yet what it’s going to end up turning into. A ton of Wood? One Wood, but presented super spectacularly? Or something fancier?”
“Why don’t you tell our distinguished guests why we’re so far out of town in the first place,” I said.
Lena tossed her hair. “And give up our chance to grab all this before someone else finds it?”
“That’s kind of the point of a tutorial, isn’t it?” I asked.
After a theatrical sigh, she grinned. “You heard the man, folks. In addition to being my lovely assistant, OldCampaigner doubles as my conscience.”
I turned to Zhizhi’s camera. In what I hoped was a deadpan, I said, “I’m the hardest-working man in show business.”
I thought the line must’ve landed, because even Donica openly cracked a smile.
“And don’t I just appreciate it,” Lena said. She hesitated. I didn’t turn to look, but I knew she’d be eyeing me suspiciously. Just for the video. Surely. “Anyway. The point is, we’ve recently made kind of a massive discovery when it comes to the distribution of Third Eye resources...”
Over the next half hour, we spelled out what we’d found. We kept getting interrupted to collect the Third Eye objects we passed, which made the point better than anything we could say.
Two or three of those finds might make the final video, but Zhizhi said she thought the scouting process would get repetitive if we included too much.
Plus, we were only collecting half of what we saw. The other half went to people who weren’t supposed to be on camera.
At least, that was the idea. In practice, we got two thirds.
It took me a while to notice, but once she’d taken over pushing Donica’s wheelchair, Michelle stopped grabbing Materials. She panned her camera around and accepted her 10 XP per object, but she made sure to do it slowly enough that someone else always got the 100 XP for being the first to focus on a find, and she never left Donica’s side to actually collect something like Erin did.
On the one hand, it made sense. Michelle didn’t have a Reactant yet, so anything she collected would, at least temporarily, be unusable.
On the other hand, if she got a Reactant, she was going to need resources to practice with, and even more to burn if she was going to help us in our attempt to rescue her friends.
I wasn’t going to call her on it in front of everyone. Still, I tried to make eye contact to at least let her know I’d realized.
She averted her eyes. Message sent?
It probably would’ve helped if I knew what I wanted my message to be.
She’d agreed to come with us because the alternative was to stay in class and potentially be questioned about Matt and Gerry’s disappearance. I wasn’t going to force her to play Third Eye if she didn’t want to, though; Miguel’s reaction to his Realm had taught me that much.
Instead of dwelling on it, I let myself get sucked back in by Lena’s chatter. Now that we were working with Zhizhi on the videos, Lena tended to say whatever popped into her mind if it fit her streamer persona, and we worked on editing it into something coherent after the fact. That might burn us someday, if we did a real livestream, but the audience seemed to like the edited version almost as much as I did.
Mid-sentence, the stream of Lena’s consciousness dried up.
Silently, she panned her phone upwards. Zhizhi did the same with the camera.
I turned and pointed my own camera in the same direction.
What looked like more of the same piney woods to my naked eye was, through the Third Eye filter, almost a solid expanse of bark.
It silenced me, too. It stole my breath.
I told myself we’d known this tree would be huge. I told myself it still wasn’t as big as some real ones, giant redwoods and sequoias and shit.
I had to tell myself those things, because seeing the tree up close, it looked impossibly, overwhelmingly vast. The shadows of its boughs stretched farther than we could see. Just hints of the wind whipping through the branches were enough to make Lena’s flames flicker. All the smaller trees that weren’t overwritten by this single, vast one bent in the breeze, but its own trunk remained unmoved.
I stepped forward and put my hand on the small of Lena’s back. “Who’s... who’s going to try collecting this?”
“I don’t want to,” Lena murmured. There was nothing of The Magnificent Ashbird in her voice.
Which should’ve made me stare at her, but I didn’t.
I kept gazing at the tree.
Why not? I understood exactly how she felt.
We’d collected some cool objects in Third Eye. Some interesting ones, even a few impressive ones. I’d never been the least bit bothered by it. Collecting them was the game, especially at first. Besides, we took extensive photos and notes and shared them on the wiki.
For the first time, though, I felt like if we could collect something, we’d be depriving the world of it.