Chapter 91: Consenting Adults

Was the air ten percent hotter? The humidity, ten percent thicker? The hats, ten gallons bigger?

Okay, that last one was unambiguously true. Lena grinned from beneath the brim of her brand new cowboy hat. It would’ve looked humongous on just about anyone. She looked like a cartoon character in it. Even Third Eye didn’t help; it rendered the ten-gallon hat as a miter-like crown, but threw up its proverbial hands at making it fit.

I raised an eyebrow.

“It’s a business expense,” she said.

My eyebrow didn’t get any lower.

She put her hands on her hips. “For the videos!”

“I’ll let you explain that to the IRS,” I said.

“The sad part is,” Zhizhi said, “costuming is a legitimate business expense for a Youtuber.”

Lena adjusted the brim of her hat and beamed.

We’d crossed the narrow strip of Oklahoma separating Colorado from Texas, which had inspired her choice of accessories. Despite my complaints about the weather, the hat seemed to be the biggest change in our trip.

We still found one Material after another as long as we stuck to small towns and two-lane roads. (Dirt roads were even better, but Erin had vetoed them after Donica insisted a little too loudly that the bumpy ride didn’t make her ankle worse.)

We still found enough Reactants to make our weeks of searching around the Denver metro area feel like an absurd waste of time.

We still left a real-time record of our finds for the edification of wiki readers –

– and we still hadn’t seen any sign of Mask.

“Of course,” Zhizhi said, “if you want to count that hat against your taxes, you’ll have to wear it in a take we can actually keep.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lena said. “I’ll get it right this time.”

I couldn’t find a trace of annoyance in Zhizhi’s smile. What had her newsroom internship entailed, that a couple of amateurs doing one bad take after another in the shockingly warm, wet weather didn’t so much as make her twitch?

“Everybody ready?” she asked.

Lena and I nodded. Erin and Michelle said, “Mmhm.”

The two of them were standing behind phones attached to fold-out tripods that Zhizhi had deployed to catch the action from multiple angles.

One other thing we were still doing:

Filming and uploading a new video every day.

On Tuesday, we’d focused on scouting in the Black Forest and how other players could benefit from extending their efforts outside of town. On Wednesday, we’d shifted to Lena and I volleying with Air and how much we’d learned about using it. That had been a lot of fun, not least because it evoked my session playing catch with Albie.

The daily uploads had pushed Lena’s channel higher, too. Not so far that we could allow ourselves to believe it would cover our living costs, but far enough we could at least imagine it.

Far enough I suspected Lena was allowing herself to do exactly that.

If nothing else, filming videos had been a lot of fun.

Today, though, we were going to focus on PVP.

I got it, okay?

First, we had to practice. It did us no good to lure Mask to us if we couldn’t actually beat him, and I had no doubt that he would be practicing – and engaging in – PVP every day. We had to strike a balance between dropping our HP, and thus rendering ourselves vulnerable if he chose that particular day to strike, and falling behind in the skills we’d need to defeat him.

Second, we had to film some of our practice. The fact was, Omar’s tournament remained the biggest news in the Third Eye community. If we wanted to keep people watching, we had to give them at least a taste of the action they craved.

Did we want that?

We needed that.

Lena’s hat and our portions of the food and the printer and the rent on an apartment we weren’t going to use for a month and the gas that no one asked us to pay for but we both wanted to cover our share of? All of those expenses were going on our credit cards, and that bill was going to come due all too soon.

We could pay all of it if Lena won the tournament, and Omar actually paid out to the winner, and we didn’t expose his fraud and put him out of business before he had the chance to.

And, you know. If we didn’t get dragged to another dimension first.

I supposed that would eliminate our financial worries, at least.

“What are you smiling about?” Lena asked.

“Silver linings,” I said.

She looked skyward, maybe for clouds. There weren’t any, gray or otherwise, just a sun that shimmered down on us as we stood at the edge of a camping area in the Rita Blanca National Grasslands.

From here, we could already see dozens of impossible objects. They seemed as dense as in the Black Forest, but with almost nothing but unfenced open plains between us, they would be even easier to collect.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Our plan was to leave them visible in the backdrop of the video to drum up extra excitement in the players watching. Of course, our plan was also to collect them all before we moved on. The objects would – hopefully – generate more buzz on the subreddit and the official Discord, get a few more eyes on Lena’s channel, but if somebody wanted to jumpstart their own supply of Materials, they would have to find their own national park.

“Are you two in position?” Zhizhi asked.

I shifted so I stood closer to parallel with Lena, with a selection of anomalous trees, poles, signs, hills, and one structure that looked like a sort of geodesic shed at our backs.

I was still partially turned toward Lena, though, so I got to watch her transformation.

In its own way, I found the way she changed when she felt the camera on her as profound an alteration as when she activated or deactivated Third Eye. Not that I’d seen her drop the app in – how long? Weeks? Had she turned it off since the construction site? She certainly hadn’t since our first fight with Mask.

Her slipping into streamer mode, on the other hand, was just as impressive as ever. Her posture straightened, her smile broadened, her eyes lit up. That hat that looked so absurd on Lena was exactly the right kind of silly for The Magnificent Ashbird.

She did a half-turn and struck a new pose, tipping her oversized hat. “Howdy, folks,” she said.

“Absolutely not,” I said.

She turned to me and gave an exaggerated pout. “What are y’all talking about?”

“I’m sorry, Ashbird, but we’re not doing a whole video where you put on your idea of a ‘Western’ accent. Especially when we’ve actually traveled east from home.”

She thrust her chin forward. Her hands curled into finger guns. “I reckon, OldCampaigner, if you’re fixing to stop me, we’re a’gonna hafta slap leather.”

“Are you going to say that this town ain’t big enough for the both of us?”

Lena cocked her head. The hat fell off and she caught it without looking.

“No, that would be super dumb,” she said, in her normal, or at least streamer, voice. She turned to the camera. “Do you guys even see a town around here?”

Zhizhi gave us both thumbs up. That hat catch had gone wrong four takes in a row. If Lena had missed it again, I was pretty sure we’d have had to abandon it, if only to keep Donica from prying herself out of the Yukon to strangle us.

I pinched my nose. “Accents aside, distinguished guests, we really are going to slap leather today. In a Third Eye sense.”

“That’s right, folks,” Lena said. “It’s the day you’ve all been waiting for. My lovely assistant and I are going to have a fight right here on camera!”

“You say a fight,” I said, “but it’s not as though I’m going to show them my true power just for the sake of your video.”

“Are you holding out on us with a sealed secret technique?” Lena’s eyes grew huge. “Something you’ll only reveal when the world is in direst peril and everyone else has fallen?”

“No,” I said, deadpan as I could. “I’m just holding out for when I launch my own channel.”

Lena tossed her hair. “After people see how bad you get your ass kicked here, they sure aren’t going to go there in search of PVP tips!”

“Big words, Ashbird. Let’s see if you –”

Lena’s explosion cut me off.

It would’ve knocked me flat, if not worse, because she’d poured four Fire into it and that was enough to burst Stone in an instant the way she used to do with Wood.

Even if we hadn’t been engaging in a rehearsed bit, though, I think I would have gotten my own Stone shield raised in time to deflect the blast away from me. It wasn’t just that I’d emptied out my Tickets to add one more Air to my arsenal. Daily practice, not just against Lena but, off-camera, against Erin and Michelle as well, was seriously improving my reflexes.

“– you can manage to land even a single hit,” I finished.

Lena’s puffed out cheeks and the way she hunched over were purely for the video, I was sure. Just like my shit-eating grin.

I think my tone, or the fact that this was the fifth time we’d filmed ourselves bantering over accents, infused her glare with some genuine feeling, though.

At the very least, she lashed out with her next move like she meant it. She snapped her hand to the side and manifested Stone with Air. It skipped around my shield and darted toward me. Whenever she wanted, she could switch to Fire and turn that spinning plate into a bomb.

She wasn’t the only one with new tricks, though.

My shield twisted in the air in the throes of Earth, changing from a simple plate to something more like a rocky gauntlet. It closed over Lena’s projectile, then rocketed skyward, pitting my Air against hers.

We were past the scripted part of the video. This was legit practice now. If need be, we could always dub more banter in later.

Still, I couldn’t quite resist stoking Lena’s fire. It blazed so magnificently, even if, at the moment, I was its target. “Speed is nothing without technique, Ashbird. I know you’re new to Air and all, but you should’ve learned that much yesterday.”

“Technique ain’t shit without power, OldCampaigner,” Lena snarled. “I know you haven’t got any, so here’s a taste.”

How much had I pissed her off and how much was for the sake of the viewers?

Either way, I thought she was fantastic.

My big dumb grin wouldn’t fit the mood of the video, but I was sure Zhizhi could cut around it.

Lena clenched her fist and narrowed her eyes. Her hand shot forward, almost flat, then she brought her other hand up and held them level. She could manipulate her conjured object like this while watching the effects through her smart glasses, but to swap or increase her Reactants she’d have to touch the phone strapped to her chest.

Iron formed before her. I couldn’t tell if she’d called it with Air or Fire.

I couldn’t tell what she was planning to do with it, either.

I swallowed and conjured my shield again. Still Stone, because we’d found so much more of that than Iron, but depending on what Lena planned to do, I might be giving myself a serious handicap. Every Third Eye discovery we made recontextualized most of what we knew about how to use the tools the game had given us. Nonetheless, I still found Stone to be the least useful and interesting Material. Iron seemed to do everything it could, better.

In a serious fight, I doubted I would risk matching Stone against Iron. Here, I was perfectly content to let Lena take her best shot.

I wasn’t going to make it easy, though.

She moved with an odd slowness, rotating her hands and, with them, her Iron.

A new technique? Flashiness for the sake of the video? Or just something to confuse me about when she would actually strike?

It didn’t do her any favors. While she dallied, I prepped my shield.

With Water, I adjusted its properties, changing its surface from featureless concrete gray to a porous off-white. This form of stone was softer, more malleable, but seemed to deform rather than shatter under explosive force. Then I used Earth to form the shield into a convex shape for even more resilience.

Lena gave me enough time to swap back to Air. She’d let me craft my ultimate shield and direct it as swiftly and precisely as I could? What the hell was she planning?

My eye twitched.

She wiggled her eyebrows.

Still, nothing happened. Was she going to try to outlast me? Bait an attack? Wouldn’t happen. There were a thousand skills and virtues in which Lena lapped me; patience sure as hell wasn’t one.

Still, not all the sweat trickling down my forehead came from the unseasonable mix of heat and humidity.

She shrugged. Her Iron sagged in the air. “Eh. It wouldn’t be fair to use ‘that.’”

“Don’t you dare take pity on me,” I said. “Hit me with your best shot.”

“Clip that!” Lena flashed a grin for the camera. “You heard my lovely assistant, folks. He literally asked for it. Everything you’re about to see is between consenting adults. Only trouble is...”

Her grin widened, while my smile froze. Zhizhi and Erin frowned, while Michelle and Donica leaned forward.

“... it might get a little hot for YouTube,” Lena said.

She snapped her hands up and slammed her palms together.