Chapter 94: Home To Roost

We still didn’t know whether Third Eye oil would give us Fire, Water, Gold, or a hitherto undiscovered resource of its own. The pumpjack turned out to be eighteen Wood and three Iron worth of dried-up well. A good haul for a single object, but still kind of disappointing.

It set the tone for the next leg of our trip.

My eyes tracked more Third Eye oil equipment as we drove past. This one looked more modern, all metal, half again as tall, and lacked the distinctive counterweight. Awesome! But it was also behind a fence taller than I was. Lena and I might have risked climbing over for something that would either give us a Reactant or double-digit Iron or both. Not when our objective stood right next to a cluster of real buildings and was surrounded by people at work, though.

That find went onto the wiki as Not Collected.

So did a cluster of trees, a rocky outcropping, a barn, a lone dead tree with huge gnarled branches, a windmill of the old grain-grinding variety, a wind turbine of the modern energy-producing variety, a silo, another copse of trees, a big flat rock like a miniature mesa, and something like a cell tower.

Erin dutifully entered them all. By the time we saw the last one, she was the only one of us who had the heart to.

We did come across one more find on the side of the road. A small bush that turned into a single Wood. Probably less than one of us would have gotten from the sign I’d turned my nose up at, yet we stopped for it anyway just so we could feel like we were making progress.

Technically, we were gaining XP from each object we focused our cameras on. XP to keep us in the beta. Would it ever do anything else? Getting kicked was too distant a threat to motivate us. I suspected Lena and I were in the uppermost 1% of players in terms of XP at this point, Erin couldn’t be far behind, and Michelle? A few days ago she’d wanted out.

I would’ve thought Third Eye was trolling us if I hadn’t believed that the objects were either procedurally seeded or echoes of some preexisting magical world. We’d just had a run of bad luck.

Our route took us through the outskirts of Canyon, which was probably the biggest town we’d visited since Pueblo, but all we saw of it were some industrial buildings, billboards, and the usual cluster of roadside services like gas stations and fast food joints. I didn’t see an actual canyon, either; maybe it was named for the one in Palo Duro State Park, even though it was still pretty far away?

Zhizhi navigated some gnarly intersections to get us headed toward it.

We’d driven that way for a few minutes when Erin said, “Hm.”

“Sup?” Lena asked.

Erin pointed to an odd, conical Third Eye structure sandwiched between a pair of storage buildings. Fenced off. Of course. “Did anyone get a hundred XP for focusing on that?”

“I kind of spaced out,” I admitted. I checked the app. My XP had ticked up by ten.

“Ten here,” Lena said.

“Same,” Michelle said. “Didn’t you get the hundred, Erin?”

Erin shook her head. She frowned at her phone. “Let’s keep an eye on this, okay?”

We did. The next two objects gave the same result. We didn’t find so much as a scrap of Wood to collect along the roadside.

“Somebody else came this way,” I said.

“It seems so,” Erin said.

“We’re pretty close to I-27,” Zhizhi said. We would have to cross under the interstate on our way to Palo Duro. “It makes sense this area would be better-traveled.”

I leaned over to look in the back seat.

Lena, Erin, and Michelle were all frowning. I supposed I was, too.

“Does it change anything?” Donica asked.

“We could skip Palo Duro,” Erin said. “It’s an hour out of the way and probably a half-hour back. If it’s already been scouted, that’s a waste.”

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“If there aren’t any objects to stop for,” Donica said, “it will only be a half hour each way. We’ve allocated most of the day to this park, we can afford to detour for that long.”

“Besides,” Lena said, “on their website it looked like a really pretty park.”

Donica chuckled. “God forbid any of us enjoy the trip.”

“Personally,” Zhizhi said, “I’d rather stick to our plan. Navigating these roads is... interesting... enough when we’re not changing our minds at the drop of a hat.”

Erin lowered her eyes. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Staying flexible is good. If we need to make a change, we can do it at a rest stop and trade off drivers. For now, though, the upside of an unscouted park seems worth checking out, and at minimum we need somewhere to film an Ashbird episode.”

Nods all around.

I nodded back, but the way the conversation had flowed bugged me for reasons I couldn’t quite pin down. I scratched the mental itch while Zhizhi drove on.

I was still scratching as she pulled through a gate marked with the name of the state park. Hadn’t figured it out, though.

Beyond the sign lay a big gravel parking lot. The tallest things in sight were a couple of RVs. A dozen pickup trucks and SUVs and a single dwarfed-looking compact sedan occupied a third of the lot.

Zhizhi brought the Yukon to a stop and our team piled out.

Palo Duro was supposed to be named after a canyon, but everything we’d seen on the ride in had been just as flat as the surrounding area. When I got out and approached a railing, I finally saw where the name came from. It seemed like a broad wedge had been carved out of the flat surface of Texas, all the way to the horizon, into which all the rocks and scrub trees and terrain of the whole region had poured. I felt in-world again; another boundary break survived!

“Ooh,” Lena said, “this is sick.”

I reached over and squeezed her hand. We grinned at each other.

She raised her phone and panned it around. “That’s weird.”

“What?” I tried mine.

There were no impossible objects near the parking lot, nor at the trailhead. Down in the canyon itself, however, Third Eye weirdness abounded. Either it wasn’t as dense as at Rita Blanca or the more complex terrain hid some of the objects. Still, the supply more than justified the trip. I started trying to tally what we might collect but got distracted by the mystery of why everything was so far from where we’d parked.

“Why would somebody come this far,” I said, “only to turn back when all the best stuff was right in front of them?”

Lena scratched her head. “Maybe their phone ran out of battery?”

Instinctively, I checked mine. Close to full. Donica’s Yukon had about as many USB ports as my and Lena’s apartment, so all our devices stayed topped up on the road.

“What’s the deal?” Zhizhi asked. She rolled her shoulders and rubbed the back of her neck. “Does it look like it’s worth me getting my camera?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Seems there’s plenty to scout, although it’s all far away. In any case, we should find a spot to film an episode. If you need a minute –”

“I do.” Her hands stretched skyward and she sighed. “It’s been a while since I drove this much.”

I chuckled. “As you can probably guess, same.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.” She laughed.

After a delay to check that I didn’t look annoyed, so did Lena. She said, “Next time we’re on a back road, you guys should let me have a turn at the wheel. I’ve gotta get back in practice, but I do have a license.”

Zhizhi narrowed her eyes. “Spoken like somebody with magical defenses against a car wreck.”

“Yep!” Lena winked.

Erin and Michelle were at the back of the Yukon, unloading Donica’s wheelchair. Donica claimed her ankle felt better every day, but I suspected the regimen of hiking through parks and riding in an SUV for hours would wear on even a healthy person who didn’t have Third Eye. After the first day, Donica had swallowed her pride and no longer complained about us bringing the chair along.

I turned to help them out and found a trio of phones practically in my face.

Two were held by a couple wearing his-and-hers jeans and long-sleeved tee shirts. They looked maybe a couple years younger than Lena and I. I recognized the Trowel Samurai on the woman’s shirt, while the man’s advertised something I didn’t know. A band, probably.

Their eyes started out wide and they got wider when I turned to face them.

The third phone was held in both hands by a little girl sandwiched between the couple. She was the only one who didn’t seem in on whatever had amazed them, but she wore a miniature version of the same clothes. She blinked at me, then up at her – mom and dad? In my head they were too young but they were probably as old as Lena’s parents would’ve been when she was that age.

None of which explained why their whole family would be staring at me. I blinked back at the kid.

“Oh my God,” the woman whispered. She had a much lighter, much more authentic version of the accent Lena had faked at the start of our last video. She nudged the man.

He grinned and nudged her back. Their kid jostled between them. “Told you, didn’t I, hon?”

I cleared my throat. “Hi there...?” It came out as more of a question than I’d intended.

Instead of answering it, the woman repeated, “Oh my God!”

Not because I’d spoken, but because Lena had turned at the sound of our conversation. She cocked her head. “Sup?”

Both the adults’ phones had shifted to her in an instant, which, yeah. Who wouldn’t rather look her way?

The kid kept her phone pointed up at me. We exchanged another round of blinks.

The woman gripped the man’s arm and squealed, “It really is The Magnificent Ashbird!”