Chapter 95: The Other Team

“It’s such an honor to meet you! We’re just the biggest fans.” The woman reached out to grab Lena’s hands. When those remained pressed to Lena’s sides, the woman wrung hers and looked back and forth between us. “Oh, I mean, fans of both of you!”

“There’s no show without the lovely assistant.” The man flashed a wry grin my way and went back to looking at Lena through his phone.

“Uh,” said Lena.

“You weren’t serious about starting your own channel, though, right, OldCampaigner?” the woman asked. “You just can’t. You two are so great together.”

“That was them doing a bit, hon,” the man said.

“‘Course it was a bit, but sometimes...” She leaned in and Lena, in a tremendous act of will or maybe just a daze, didn’t lean back. “There’s no drama, right?”

“Britt can’t stand YouTube drama,” the man said. I wasn’t quite sure but I thought I caught a hint of sarcasm.

“It’s just awful,” said – Britt, I supposed. “Sometimes I hear a circle’s going through a bad patch and I’m up all night refreshing their sub for news.”

I’d watched plenty of YouTube gaming content, but only vaguely understood the ecosystem around it. Probably something I should fix, considering where Lena and I were pinning our financial hopes. I supposed Britt meant a group of creators when she mentioned a circle, and the sub in question was a subreddit for their channel?

I shot a glance at Zhizhi, but she was leaning against the railing and failing to hide her smile. No help at all.

Then I glanced at the Yukon. Erin, Donica, and Michelle hadn’t emerged from behind it, which I supposed was for the best since we didn’t want to advertise their presence to Mask. Not that I thought these two were connected to him. Either way, it meant no help from them, either.

“No drama, I promise.” I shifted to interpose myself between Britt and Lena and offered my hand.

Britt clasped it instantly, pumped it up and down, and dragged it over to the guy, who gave me a normal-ass fistbump.

“I’m Jim,” he said. “You’ve met my wife Britt, and this here’s our little jewel. Say hi, Zealia.”

The little girl reached up and offered a tiny fistbump of her own. Her dad had taught her right! I returned it and she mouthed, “Hi.”

“I guess you guys know us,” I said. “Our handles, anyway. I’m Cam, this is Lena.”

“Oh!” Jim coughed. “Should we use our handles instead of names? Is that how folks do in Third Eye?”

“I don’t think it matters,” I said.

“It’s just, we haven’t met any other players before. Not in person. We want to do it right.”

Britt grabbed her husband’s arm. “Oh my God. I think about you two being the first we met and I get shaky all over. When Jim said you might be here today, we just had to try.”

I really could’ve used some backup with this conversation, but the whole team seemed content to hang me out to dry. “You came to the park just to see us?”

Idiotic. She’d just said as much.

Neither of them seemed to notice how stupid my question had been. Jim said, “We had our fingers crossed. You been shooting episodes in parks and this one is the biggest around for miles.”

Which was, I thought, exactly the message we’d wanted to send, albeit only to Mask. We’d debated explicitly announcing our next destination at the end of each video, and we might yet have to, but that might seem like too obvious of a trap. Better by far if he could convince himself he’d tracked us down.

“‘Course,” Britt said, “even if we hadn’t got to meet you, we’d still have been following your advice by scouting here.”

She frowned.

They tilted toward each other.

Jim smiled, but with a tightness in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.

I struggled to follow their conversation. They seemed to bounce from topic to topic, mood to mood. A few seconds respite would’ve let me parse what was bothering them, I was sure, but none seemed forthcoming.

Lena came to my rescue.

Rather, The Magnificent Ashbird did.

She danced around me, and I gave her room to. She didn’t twirl or take a bow – we didn’t have that much room – but her body language alone told me she’d slipped fully into streamer mode. She stood up straighter and moved with a grace that looked unconscious, quite in contrast to how forced I knew it was.

Like the way she offered her hands, something Lena would almost never have done for a couple of strangers if she was being herself.

Britt and Jim brightened as each of them clasped one of Lena’s hands. Brightened, hell. They practically glowed.

“It’s awesome that you guys could make it,” Lena said. Those clear, confident tones made her fans grin even more. I did the same. “It’s a total honor for us, too. Would you believe this is only the second time we’ve gotten to meet our fans?”

I knew the first time she had in mind was our first meeting with Albie. Lena had declared Albie our number one fan, a title the little dev seemed to delight in.

“That can’t be right,” Jim said. “You’ve played with other folks up in Denver, yeah? I’m sure everybody playing this game is a fan of yours.”

“Nope!” Lena flicked a curl away from her forehead. She leaned forward and, in a stage whisper, confided, “Some people are jealous.”

Jim chuckled.

Britt, on the other hand, shook with high, wheezing laughs. “Oh my God. You’re just as funny IRL.”

Lena spread her hands and soaked up the praise. Then she crouched and extended her palms to the little girl. “Zealia, right? How about you? Are you a fan, too?”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Zealia looked to each of her parents in turn. Her dad put a hand on her back.

She shook her head.

Even in full streamer mode, Lena couldn’t quite hide the way her shoulders slumped. She recovered instantly, though. “Well, I promise to work extra hard until you are!”

“How come?” Zealia mumbled.

Lena cocked her head.

Britt knelt next to her daughter. “What’s wrong, darlin’? I thought you liked Ashbird’s videos.”

“How come,” Zealia asked her mom, “her hair’s not on fire?”

“Oh, right,” Jim said. He knelt on the other side of his daughter and held his phone up for her. “Have a look.”

Zealia’s eyes widened. Her mouth formed a perfect ‘o,’ and her own phone almost slipped from her hands. She caught it and pressed it to her chest.

From where I stood, I couldn’t see the glow of Lena’s smile, so I had to imagine it from how it was reflected in Britt and Jim’s.

“You’re not a Third Eye player, Zealia?” Lena asked.

The little girl didn’t answer, but her mom said, “She was just a glimmer in her daddy’s eye when the Kickstarter ran.”

Jim snorted a laugh.

“Well,” Lena said, “I can’t get you into the beta, but if it’s okay with your mom and dad, I can let you see how cool they look.”

“Mommy and daddy showed me.” Zealia’s voice dropped to a whisper. “You look cooler.”

“Well yeah,” Lena said. “I don’t mean they’d have to show you, though. You could look for yourself.”

She reached out and held her fingers over Zealia’s phone, not quite touching it but letting the little girl push it forward into her hand.

Lena looked up at her parents. “Is that cool with you?”

I wasn’t sure she’d explained what she was offering very well, so I said, “Our editor has a version of the camera filter that works for every phone, not just ones with Third Eye installed. We could get it running on Zealia’s phone if you like.”

“That would be amazing,” Britt said. “I don’t know how to thank you!”

“The only thanks we need are your smiles,” Lena said. She tapped her finger on her lower lip. “Well, and your likes. And a comment or two wouldn’t hurt...”

“Oh,” Britt said, “we comment on every video.”

Lena beamed up at me. “Our fans are the best, right, Cam?”

“You know it,” I said. “We’re the ones who should be thanking you.”

Britt hugged her daughter. “It’s nothing much.”

“Zhizhi,” I called. “Can you help us out here?”

“I heard,” she said.

“Here’s the real secret weapon of our channel.” Lena stood and presented Zhizhi to our fans like a magician pulling her cape from the big reveal. “If you ever wondered why our production values went through the roof, you’re looking at her.”

“Oh, I know,” Britt said. “Editors are so, so important. It’s great you give yours credit. When I see a channel where they don’t put credits up, I always think, isn’t that the most selfish thing? Terrible. But you make sure to thank everybody.”

“It’s all true,” Zhizhi said. “Of course, I am the one who attaches the credits to the videos...”

As far as I was concerned, she had a better deadpan than me. I couldn’t help but imagine a version of Lena’s videos where she and Zhizhi shared the screen. Too bad the latter wasn’t a player.

Lena and I laughed, and so, after a moment, did Britt and Jim. I thought their laughter sounded a little nervous. Still wondering if there was some kind of “drama” with the channel, maybe.

Lena reached out to Zealia’s phone again. “Will you let Zhizhi work her magic on your phone, Zealia? You’ll get to see your mom and dad looking cool whenever they play, and me and Cam, too.”

Zealia nodded as she pressed the phone into Lena’s hands.

Lena bounced on her heels and presented it to Zhizhi. “Take good care of it.”

Zhizhi arched her eyebrows. Solemnly, she said, “I’ll treat it like a precious relic.”

“Mmhm!” Lena turned back to fuss over Zealia while Zhizhi tapped at the screen, I supposed to connect to Miguel’s server and install the camera app.

“I hadn’t heard about a filter for non-players,” Jim said. “Where’d you get a thing like that?”

“A friend of ours put it together,” I said. “We work pretty closely with the wiki team, and some of them are into software development.”

He scratched the back of his neck. “God. Makes me realize how we’ve just been playing around with this.”

“Well,” I said, “it is a game.”

“I suppose so!” He grinned easily.

Which I thought was a pretty interesting reaction.

I’d dropped out of most of the conversations on the official Discord and the subreddit. Too many other plates to juggle. Hell. I’d exchanged more words with a developer than I had with any ordinary player outside the wiki team’s circle.

Britt and Jim weren’t just fans of Lena’s channel. They were normal gamers, still playing Third Eye as a normal game. If I got the chance to pick their brains, to get a sense of how most people were playing, I should take it.

I got the chance.

While Zealia danced around, pointing her phone at her parents, Lena, me, and the impossible objects in the distance, Jim nodded to one of the pickups parked near the railing. “Minute of your time?”

“Sure,” I said.

He ambled over.

I gave a quick glance to the rest of our team, who had deployed Donica’s wheelchair and were standing near the trailhead. At this rate, Zealia or her parents would see them and we’d have to make introductions. Not exactly a problem, except that I wasn’t sure how to ask Britt and Jim not to gossip online without scaring them.

Jim said, “I’ve got no right to ask you this.”

I turned back to him. “Hm?”

“It’s just...” He looked out over the railing. “Me and Britt, we’re down from Amarillo. This is the closest big park to us. We hoped we’d get to meet you, sure. We also hoped we’d get to scout this stuff.”

“Ah.” I swept my phone over the canyon. Was I close enough for my XP to tick up? I didn’t check. “That’s fair. It’s pretty much in your backyard and we’re coming in from out of state.”

He nodded, but his frown deepened. “You’re doing stuff for the whole playerbase, though.”

“Not big into PVP, I guess?” I asked.

“I’d love to give it a try, being honest. You and Ashbird make it look damned cool.” He kicked at a railing. “I wouldn’t want it to just crop up anywhere, though, especially when I’m out with my family.”

He didn’t know the half of it.

“And the scouting,” he continued. “We got what we could in town and we didn’t think to look anywhere we couldn’t catch something in Pokemon. You got us out here in the first place. Only fair you collect what you can, huh?”

He looked sweatier than the weather justified and he couldn’t meet my eyes. His hands kneaded the rail.

I tried to think of what an equivalent conversation would be for me. Nothing, not for a long time. Before Third Eye, I hadn’t done anything that had famous participants.

Asking one of my favorite authors to bow out of a competition so I’d have a shot, back when I’d imagined I’d have a writing career beyond websites and ad copy?

“Jim,” I said.

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

I smiled. “If you want us to leave the canyon to you, we will. Even if I wanted to be a dick about it, Lena would insist to put a smile on your daughter’s face.”

“Lots of the folks Britt and I watch, I like to watch them but I probably wouldn’t like to meet them.” He turned to where Lena was demonstrating something to his wife and daughter. It was hard to say which of the three had a broader smile. “She’s good people, Ashbird.”

“Agreed.” I swallowed the frog that threatened to occupy my throat.

Jim folded his arms. “I can’t ask you to do that, OldCampaigner. Cam. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Let’s make it fair, then,” I said.

He turned fully to me for the first time since we’d stepped aside. “How?”

I looked past him, past his family and Lena and Zhizhi, past the parked Yukon. Erin was studying something in the canyon. Donica must have wanted an eye on our scene, though, because she’d made Michelle tilt the wheelchair toward us, so both were looking our way.

I tried to smile at them but it probably looked queasy. I was getting too used to the feeling that something I was about to say could blow up in my face.

I turned back to Jim and said it anyway. “You did mention wanting to try PVP.”