Chapter 88: Inventory Management

Lena flopped onto the middle of the bed. She stretched her arms as far as they would go and, just barely, wiggled her fingers over the edges.

This wasn’t quite the twin bed in a closet of a room in a dive motel like I’d imagined for our trip. It was a reasonable double bed in a full-sized room with a working TV, an en suite bathroom, and log cabin walls. I hadn’t gotten out a tape measure and checked, but I suspected it had more living space than our apartment.

Lena and I wouldn’t spend the night cramped in each other’s arms because we had nowhere else to sleep. Of course, being stuck in a twin bed while Benji stayed with us had made me realize how uncomfortable that would get night after night, especially when Lena wouldn’t turn off her Third Eye app and let her flames die down.

Plus, this way, we wouldn’t have to share the bed with any cockroaches so bold they didn’t even bother to hide from us.

Even the shithole I’d fantasized about would have been too rich for our blood. This cabin represented an unfathomable expense for us.

We weren’t paying for it.

Donica had looked over the reviews for the motel Lena and I had picked out and given it a measured critique. Or maybe she’d said, “I wouldn’t kennel a dog in that.”

“Well yeah,” Lena had said. “It doesn’t have a vet on staff or anything.”

Instead, we were staying the night at a cluster of lodges right in the Black Forest. In the morning, Donica, who had declared herself fit to drive “after a whole day taking it easy,” would head into Colorado Springs to do her scouting and we would wrap up ours.

“Tired?” I asked Lena.

She rolled over and patted the bed. As much as I wanted to join her, I remained crouched by the TV, hooking it up to my computer. What would I do if we got one without an HDMI port? Hopefully never find out.

Bernie jumped up in my stead. Lena hugged him and said, “I feel like I should be.”

“Right?” While I fired up the computer and navigated to the Third Eye wiki, I propped my phone next to the TV. I scrolled up and down on the document I’d filled with shorthand even I could barely parse. I tapped over to the list Erin had given me and smiled crookedly at the neat, precise, almost spreadsheet-like accounting of her finds. I would add these lists together and post them to the wiki to make it look like I’d grabbed half of everything we discovered.

“I guess I better put my entries in, too.” Lena kissed Bernie’s head and took her phone out. She chuckled as she swiped something off her screen. “Gimme a little while, Ryu. I’ll play with you after I upload all this.”

Lena couldn’t gain any more Tickets from Ryu today, but I knew that wouldn’t stop her from playing his games.

Frankly, I was a little surprised she let the task we’d set ourselves do so.

At the bottom of Erin’s list, she had totalled up her finds for the day. As I flipped back and forth, I mentally tallied mine as well. I called, “Did you and Michelle add up everything you got?”

“Mmhm,” Lena said. She crawled to the edge of the bed and showed me.

I read over each tab as she flipped between them. “Damn.”

“Mmhm.”

Now that I had a keyboard to work with, I typed out a quick list of everything we’d gathered. At the end of the document, I recorded the total we’d gained of each resource and the number of times we’d found it.

Lena and I sat there a while, reading and rereading each line as I wrote it.

Two hundred and forty two Wood across thirty seven finds.

Fifty one Stone across seventeen finds.

Eleven Iron across five finds.

Three Plastic from one find.

The total haul of Materials outweighed what we’d gained on any single day of scouting in or around Denver, even at the beginning when no one had picked over anything. Since we’d been dividing the results two ways instead of four on our trip to Parker, though, we’d gotten more for ourselves that time.

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More basic Materials, that was.

Reactants, on the other hand...

Three Air from the wind through the boughs of the great tree, which I’d convinced Michelle to claim.

“Considering what we found,” Lena asked, “do you wish you’d taken that Air, after all?”

“Nah,” I said.

“You’re too nice of a guy.”

“I’ll be sure to finish last tonight.” I leaned back so she could see me wiggle my eyebrows.

She laughed as she kissed the top of my head. “I could get behind that.”

Not that I didn’t really, really want more Air.

Michelle had risen skyward when she accepted the Reactant into herself, and the hooplike sleeves of her Third Eye robes had made passable wings. When the moment passed and she returned to the ground, though, three Air had proven insufficient for her to fly under her own power. She weighed less even than Lena, let alone me. Could I have pulled it off with five? It would’ve put me at the highest single Reactant total of anyone we knew. The magic carpet ride I wanted to take Lena on would require even more, but what about personal flight?

Well, maybe. I’d rather have a teammate.

I could save up my Tickets if I had to, but after today, I no longer harbored the slightest doubt about our scouting plan. This road trip might not be the fullness of how Third Eye was meant to be played – we were still doing far too little with the ARG side of it for my tastes – but it came far closer than how we’d played it until now.

I would open myself to the new things the game wanted to show me, and I’d grow far stronger for it. Flight was just a matter of time, and along the way, who knew what other wonders I would discover?

“Besides,” I said, “this way I’m one Reactant away from the whole set.”

I continued down the inventory of our finds.

Two Earth, from the ground beneath the roots of the great tree.

We’d realized that something was weirder than usual when Michelle touched gracefully down before us – and all four of us active players continued to appear as our Third Eye avatars.

Erin’s eyes had widened and her face had lit with the biggest smile I’d ever seen. I realized she must’ve been imagining that she could stay as her avatar indefinitely. After a moment, though, her delight had ebbed. Only a little. She’d said, “There must be another Reactant near.”

The heaviness came when I approached the tree and touched its bark. I hadn’t absorbed it as Wood, but my feet had sunk into the loamy dirt. I’d felt like the whole weight of its vast trunk was pressing down on my chest, and when I dragged my eyes away from it, I’d seen Lena on her knees and Erin and Michelle clinging to each other as they tried to stand.

As much to try to prop myself up as anything, I’d dug my fingers into the dirt. Instantly, I’d felt lighter, stronger. The same hadn’t been true for the rest of the team until the dirt streamed up my arms and formed a suit of earthen armor over me, then vanished into my amulet.

Only then had I blinked and found my amulet gone, and all of our avatars with it.

“You could have completed the set, Cam,” Lena said.

“Yeah, well.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “I want to say it wasn’t my turn, but...”

“It was just too weird for you guys, I know.”

We’d roamed far from the great tree after that. After another hour’s walk, our path had looped into a patch where most of the real trees were much younger, interspersed with thick underbrush. At the heart of the new-growth area stood a single tree, not as spectacular as the oversized Realm-tree, but as tall as the ones we’d been walking beneath most of the way.

Tall, but also blackened and dead.

Ten years ago, a horrible wildfire swept through this part of Colorado. Which doesn’t narrow things down much; every summer, we have to deal with some stretch of the state turning to kindling.

The Black Forest fire set records at the time, though, bad enough ones to sear it into our memories. Erin, Donica, Michelle, and I had paced around the edges of the new-growth area. Even Zhizhi had only crept a little ways in, more shaken by the sight of the burned dead tree than she had been by Mask getting right in her face.

If Third Eye had chosen to seed Fire there, I thought it was a pretty fucked up thing for the devs to do. I wouldn’t blame Albie, but I’d sure give her brother a piece of my mind.

Increasingly, though, I’d begun to doubt that there was anything like that level of intentionality on the part of the devs. There was Fire in the Black Forest because it was a place associated with fire, either as part of its nature as a force of death and rebirth, or in the minds of people who thought of the tragedy before they did the park itself.

An association strong enough to keep almost all of us from approaching.

Only Lena, the out-of-towner, had pushed ahead.

Ten years ago was ancient history for Lena. While the fire in the Black Forest darkened the evening news for all of us, she’d still have been living at her parents’ store in Lawrence, Kansas, doing online college between record sales by day and binging ancient VHS movies by night.

She’d approached the burned tree and it had blazed back, not to life but to flame.

I’d called to Lena, but for once, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to run to her side. I’d remained rooted at the edge of the new growth, too far to even feel the effects of Lena gathering a Reactant to herself. Not even Erin had wanted a part of that transformation.

The conflagration had rippled down the trunk of the dead tree and up Lena’s outstretched arms.

And when it had passed –

Back in the cabin, I reached up and caught Lena’s hands. I traced my fingers up and down them. She sighed happily at the contact. I grinned up at her.

After today, we had a truly extraordinary amount to smile about.

Like the last line in our inventory.

“What do you think you can do,” I asked, “now that you’re up to seven Fire?”