Chapter 93: Four Stories

Flat land, dry grass, wet air, as far as the naked eye could see.

I couldn’t complain, aloud, because the Third Eye could see so, so much. We couldn’t collect everything because a lot of it lay on well-fenced private land. Some of what we had to leave behind looked fascinating enough to make it onto the wiki. The roadsides alone showered us with Materials and drip-fed us Reactants, though.

My parents had dragged kid me across the high plains for a road trip three times. On each, I spent as much of it as possible trying to sleep. When Benji made that impossible, which was always, I’d traded sleep for trying to read or play on first my GameBoy, then my DS. When Benji interrupted those, too, I’d concentrated on bitching at him.

It had passed the time.

The bus trip Lena and I had taken to Kansas had been, by contrast, incredibly restful. With both of us glued to our phones, there had been no one to unstick us. Apart from not being able to access our PCs, it was practically like taking our apartment with us. (The flu we caught on the way home proved somewhat less restful. Oh, to have had HP then!)

Now, as always, I found myself looking at my phone whenever I wasn’t at the wheel.

This trip, however, I wasn’t reading or surfing the internet. I was, technically, playing a mobile game, but Third Eye’s nature meant I couldn’t take my eyes off my surroundings.

Which brought me back around to flat land, dry grass, wet air.

I’d seen almost nothing else.

We’d developed a policy for cities:

Avoid them.

Anyone who knows me can imagine how much I loved that. In case there’s any ambiguity, the answer is “not at all.”

We ourselves had helped pick Denver clean. Colorado Springs had been a bust. Pueblo, same. Hell, even the town of Dalhart where we’d stayed last night had been emptied of Third Eye objects in its city center, and that was, like, a tenth the size of Castle Rock!

Anywhere with consistent internet access, we’d find gamers. Anywhere there were gamers, there was a chance someone had thrown ten bucks at the Third Eye Kickstarter. How many players had fallen out of the beta after a few days without realizing that if they ranged just a little ways out of town, they’d find they were playing the one AR game that catered to rural life?

I tried to feel bad for them, but we were damned lucky. Dalhart was less than an hour’s drive from the Rita Blanca National Grasslands; if the player there had just gone for a long walk, we’d be way poorer in Third Eye resources.

The next major city our route should have taken us to was Amarillo. On a normal road trip, I’d have been counting the miles to it. Restaurants! Museums! Five bars of connectivity! An honest-to-God downtown!

Erin had shown us wiki entries indicating that, at least for the first three weeks of the beta, Amarillo had played home to a couple of active players. They’d either dropped out of the beta or out of the habit of posting to the wiki, but the entries they’d already made were enough to indicate stopping there would be another waste of our time. Besides, it was where I-40 met I-27; we’d been burned by interstate highways before.

So, instead of cutting through the city, we were taking a long, wide loop to the southwest of it. Our plan was to check Palo Duro State Park for Third Eye content, film another video there, then start winding our way north again.

Good plan. Smart plan. Wise plan.

The Palo Duro website even made it look like it had terrain, so that would be a relief.

But holy shit did I want to see a building more than four stories tall.

Grain silos and wind turbines didn’t count.

I swallowed a sigh and pried myself up off the windowsill I’d sunk down. I peeked over the top of my phone camera, then through it. Yep, there was another Third Eye object. “Wooden signpost coming up.”

“Worth stopping for?” asked Zhizhi, who was taking her turn behind the Yukon’s wheel.

“Eh.” That would be one, maybe two Wood. “Record and move on, I think.”

She nodded.

“I see it,” Erin said. I heard her fingers tap on her screen. “Marked.”

“Thanks,” I said.

We no longer got out of bed – or, less colloquially, out of the Yukon – for two Wood, or four, or an equivalent amount of Stone. Maybe we’d kick ourselves for that someday. This day, we marked the location, uploaded it for anyone else who was interested in sweeping up our crumbs, and moved on.

Which didn’t help my boredom.

The only breaks in our routine came when we found a state or national park, or some unincorporated (or at least unfenced) area where we could pull over and scout on foot.

Rita Blanca had been such a win. We’d only explored a third of the park and it had delivered everything we could ask for. Additional Reactants for all four of us active players, tons of Materials, a video, a practice session.

Such a win.

So why did I see myself frowning in the side mirror?

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That goddamn practice session.

“You can’t scout players for shit.” Donica’s words echoed in my mind.

I hadn’t repeated them to Erin or Michelle. I wasn’t that oblivious. Even when Lena and I were alone in our hotel room, though, I’d clammed up. Let her distract me.

In my defense, she was good at it.

What’s that? Objection!, cries the prosecution?

(In the evenings, I’d bounced off Trowel Samurai 2 on Switch, as Gerry had predicted. What was it missing that the first game had in, well, spades? Regardless, I’d switched to the Ace Attorney Collection and its dialogue was derailing my train of thought.)

Objection sustained. Lena didn’t have to be good at distracting me to make me shut up about what Donica had said. I didn’t want to face it.

I pulled myself away from my phone camera to glance back at Erin and Michelle.

Erin waved and I conjured a smile.

It had vanished by the time I was looking out the window again.

Donica was a good scout.

Erin was an amazing Third Eye player – when she had time to sit down, experiment, bounce ideas off others, take notes, and run her experiment again. Along with Matt, she’d pioneered using Earth to move a conjured object. Air always moved stuff faster, though, so how much good did that do? Turning Wood into fiber with Water, weaving it into a net with Earth, then moving it with Air? A sick combo. Slow to execute, though, and would it even do anything to restrain an enemy who could sink into the floor? Erin had loosened up after my “coaching” and tried all kinds of cool techniques. By the end she’d even seemed to be enjoying herself. Everything she did was a step too slow, though. Too cautious, too defensive. I wondered if she’d taken a single HP off Lena; after I tagged in, she sure hadn’t hit me once.

Michelle was even worse. She’d had less practice with her Reactants, but that would improve with time. Of all of us, she’d been the most athletic before the game started, and with the addition of Air, she could absolutely zip around a battlefield. The only way she wanted to zip, though, was away from harm. I didn’t blame her, but the contrast between her evasion and her attacks was ludicrous. By the end of the session Lena and I struggled to tag her, but her hits came in slow, predictable, and feeble.

Neither of the girls would be of much help against Mask.

Best case scenario, their participation would take him by surprise and create an opening for Lena or I.

Worst case scenario, them being present would turn the encounter into even more of an escort mission than just having Zhizhi along.

Which was... fine, right?

Before the trip started, I’d thought Lena and I would have a chance of defeating Mask.

Since, we’d doubled our Reactants, swelled our stockpiles of Materials, and practiced extensively.

The missile Lena had asked Zhizhi to cut from our video was the single strongest attack I’d seen a regular Third Eye player use, Mask very much included. Only Albie’s big techniques surpassed it, her tornado of blades and the firestorm she’d used after the rest of us fled. I thought the lower-level strikes she’d used to fend off the creature might have been less powerful than Lena’s missile, though.

I didn’t have a trump card on that level, but after Rita Blanca I had at least one of each core Reactant, and the speed and power I could get from Air had soared past my previous limits. I’d have to see if I could up my offense with the single Fire I’d gained from a Third Eye-only bonfire, but my defense would give anyone fits.

But.

We’d also seen the kind of windfall a Third Eye player could get on the road.

Had Mask gone on the road? If he’d driven cross-country, especially earlier in the beta before the major highways mostly got picked clean, then what we’d seen from him was not him fighting us with his full strength.

I could hope his Key let him teleport wherever he wanted, and I could hope he’d had the same tastes as me. City to city, and skip the wide open spaces in between.

I couldn’t bet on that, though. The record of Mask’s invasions left plenty of time for him to have driven to each location and only used his Key to return to places he’d already visited. That was how teleportation worked in a lot of games, and while Third Eye bucked plenty of design conventions, sometimes, as with the types of Daimons and the classical elements of the Reactants, it followed them.

I still thought Lena and I could, would, beat him.

Could we do it while protecting Erin and Michelle?

The thing about escort missions is that you fail not when you’re defeated, but when the NPC you’re protecting is. We wouldn’t be protecting NPCs, but real people, our friends.

Who I’d encouraged to come with us.

Sad to say, I thought Erin was safer with us. She was a famous enough Third Eye player that Mask would have come after her sooner or later. Hell, he’d recognized her instantly in Cinder Alley.

Which, I realized, told me something about Mask’s equipment.

I glanced at the rear-view mirror. Erin sat one row back, one hand on her lap, the other holding her phone. She’d dressed more girlishly since we’d left Denver: skirts and floral blouses every day, big hoop earrings like her avatar wore, and heavier, if still artfully applied, makeup. I smiled to see her feeling comfortable expressing herself around us. Still, no one would confuse her for her regal Third Eye avatar, and that was the only image of her the wiki had ever had. What had she worn to Cinder Alley? Her in-town uniform of androgynous jeans and flannels, I was pretty sure.

To have recognized Erin, Mask had to have been wearing smart glasses beneath his eponymous headgear. Not unexpected, but good to confirm. Could we use that somehow? Something to workshop with Lena, perhaps.

Regardless, I knew he knew Erin, and I suspected he’d have come after her.

Michelle, though. She’d wanted to walk away. Her only online participation in Third Eye had been on Erin’s private Discord. Maybe Mask knew about that from capturing Matt, but if Michelle had gone through with her plan to drop out of the beta, she would also have dropped off his radar.

Lena and I had convinced her to keep her hand in the game.

At the time, I thought we’d been recruiting a teammate. At worst, someone who could watch Erin’s back while we focused on offense. At best, another attacker to ambush and overwhelm Mask. Either way, someone who could keep enjoying Third Eye as soon as we humbled the worst of its bad apples.

Now, I wondered if we’d given ourselves one more potential victim to escort into danger.

She bolted upright and for one horrible moment, I thought I’d muttered something out loud. Instead, she said, “Got a big one coming up on the far side of the road.”

I leaned forward to direct my camera over the dashboard.

“Ooh,” Lena said. “Looks like an oil pump!”

Through Third Eye, we were already in its shadow. It looked like an old design, turn of the previous century maybe, but massive, with a wooden frame and a big counterweight that made the Civ player in me think of a trebuchet.

“That’s easily a tree’s worth of Wood, at least, if we can collect it,” Michelle said.

“What if it has oil with it?” Erin asked. “Would it be Oil? No one has reported it as a Material. Or it could be Fire, since it’s an energy source, or Water, since it’s a liquid, or Plastic, I suppose...”

“Or Gold,” Lena suggested. “People call oil black gold, yeah?”

“That’s a stretch,” Donica said.

Lena grinned as Zhizhi did a U-turn to pull onto the shoulder of the road. “Wanna bet?”

“Against someone who can’t pay if she loses?” Donica sniffed, but she was grinning, too. “Pass.”

I grinned as well, but didn’t say a word. If I explained why the giant pumpjack put a smile on my face, even Lena would call me a dumbass.

I was just happy to see another structure more than four stories tall.