JoshuaCole374
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Chapter 57: Under Construction
🕑 Added 2023-10-31 12:00:05 +0000 UTCI took a last sip of my Coke and set it back into the drink holder, grabbed the last of my fries and scarfed them down, and unbelted.
I said, “I still think this is really dumb.”
“Noted.” Donica tapped something on her phone and the trunk of the Yukon swung open behind us. Did they call it a trunk on an SUV? Since I didn’t know, I defaulted to yes. She got out of the vehicle and walked around to the yawning back gate.
By the time I joined her there, she’d unzipped a duffel bag and pulled out a pair of hardhats.
I took the one she offered. “Slightly less dumb now.”
“Safer,” she said, fastening hers over her swept-back blonde hair, “and a passable disguise.”
“I don’t think either of us are going to pass for construction workers.”
“Someone who came to inspect the site would wear safety gear, too,” she said.
I shrugged. If we got in trouble for this, she had a lot more to lose than I did.
“Step back.” She pushed something else on her phone before I had time to obey, and I scrambled out from under the back gate of the Yukon just before it put my new hardhat to the test.
I noticed that there were two more hats in her duffel bag. “Who else were you going to invite? Erin?”
“I think you know him by the handle CannibalHalfling?” She rolled her eyes. “A D&D thing, I hope.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘know,’” I said. “He doesn’t talk much in the wiki team’s Discord.”
CannibalHalfling had responded to Erin’s initial welcome and posted a couple of times since Lena and I signed up, but apart from VisibleFromSpace, he was easily the least active member of the server. I hadn’t even realized he was one of the locals.
“Nor does he respond to my DM’s.” Donica brushed the air. “His loss.”
She aimed her phone at the building and strode toward it.
I got my first glimpse of her Third Eye avatar. Seemed to be the default model, like mine, rendering her winter gear as a long white cloak, blue-gray tunic, and tan padded leggings. It looked great, like most Third Eye outfits, but the only thing that set it apart from others I’d seen were the clasps, chips of rough-hewn quartz set in wire-thin silver.
An affinity for Crystal, maybe? I wondered if this site was close enough to her place to have been seeded for her. Assuming objects really were seeded for specific players.
Only one way to find out.
I followed, dirt and gravel crunching beneath my boots.
Donica paused at the door, focused her camera on the carpet beyond it, and said, “Do you have your XP for this?”
“Let me check.” I tapped to the Third Eye app, noted my XP, back to the camera, focused on the carpet, back to Third Eye. “Looks like I got it when you had me check the place out.”
“Good.” She crouched and touched the carpet.
We both braced, expecting the usual flash of light.
Nothing.
In the real world, her fingers had left streaks on the dusty concrete. In Third Eye, the carpet remained.
“Well,” Donica said, “that sucks.”
“If we can’t collect anything here,” I said, “and if we don’t get any XP –”
“Then what are we even doing here?”
I shook my head. “Then this is something we haven’t seen in Third Eye before. That’s way more interesting.”
“You don’t think... a player built all this?”
“You’d have to have at least Earth and Water,” I said. “Probably Air, too, and an entire building’s worth of Materials. Not to mention a whole lot of time on your hands. And for what?”
“I suppose if you really, really wished this place had been finished,” she said. “For some reason.”
We stood there for a moment, staring half through our phones at the cheery interior, which looked about like I imagined the architect and designer’s sketches for this place would have, and half at the bare, unfinished reality.
If you had the power to build anything, would you really choose to build a pretty prosaic arcology? You could move across the street to a functional version.
It made more sense to me that the devs had seeded this place. Somehow, for some reason.
My adrenaline spiked. If Third Eye was dangerous, this place was probably going to be more so.
On the other hand, if it was fascinating – spoiler alert, it was – I really wanted to know what this place was about. Could it be some kind of ARG clue, on a massive scale? Maybe something important enough that an individual player wasn’t supposed to be able to claim it and remove it from community view?
If so, and if it was placed intentionally rather than by some algorithm that we couldn’t understand yet, they should have picked a safer location for it. Not to mention a more legal-to-explore one.
I looked around. The traffic rolled past on Broadway, and I didn’t notice anyone so much as glancing at us. With our hardhats on, we were just part of the background. “Let’s try inside, I guess?”
Donica pushed on the door. It swung open with a creak loud enough to make me wince.
She hesitated. Her eyes narrowed.
Then she strode inside like she owned the place.
I squared my shoulders and tried to put a saunter in my step. We belonged here! If you saw us going in from the street, you wouldn’t think twice! That’s what my walk should’ve said.
I wouldn’t bet on my having pulled it off.
The lobby was richly appointed. Brass fixtures and subtle, classy wall lamps that I thought were in an Art Deco style. Nice design. Maybe a player really had seen the plans for this place and decided they needed a finished version.
I tried touching the wall. Nothing.
Donica checked one of the lamps, standing on tiptoes to reach it. Nothing.
There were a couple of wooden chairs facing the two elevator doors. I ambled over to one and gave it a poke.
A flash.
I hadn’t braced for it, and it left spots in my eyes. When my vision cleared, I switched to the Third Eye app and confirmed I’d obtained five units of Wood and 100 XP.
“Finally, something we can grab.” Donica swept her phone along the line of chairs, focusing on each one in turn to collect her 10 XP.
“You realize,” I said, “this makes the place even weirder?”
“How so?”
“It didn’t really make sense for someone to spend all their Materials building it, but it was at least an explanation that fit with things we’ve already seen from the game. If the background elements can’t be interacted with, but objects like these chairs can, then it has to be something the devs put here. Something new.”
“Good.” She looked away from her phone and grabbed a chair. Another flash. “It will be useful, and maybe we can learn something on top of it.”
She wasn’t wrong.
As long as you approached Third Eye as just a game, this place rocked. We’d seen a few other freestanding objects in the rooms the lobby opened onto. A huge windfall of Materials and XP. All that plus potential clues to some larger mystery? Hell yes.
If, on the other hand, you thought Third Eye was messing with your head, it was doing a whole lot of messing here.
And if you thought it was magic –
“How do you want to divvy these up?” Donica asked.
“Even split,” I said. “Any time there’s an odd number, you take the extra. You found the place and drove us over here.”
“I like that arrangement.” The lobby had started with five chairs. Donica collected two more, then strode past me toward the first adjoining room.
I’d hesitated to bring up my worries about Third Eye’s nature with Erin. Hell. I still hadn’t even told Lena. I sure wasn’t going to start opening up to Donica.
If I did, I suspected she would cut our scouting expedition short.
Not because I’d successfully worried her about Third Eye, but because she wouldn’t want to explore a construction site with a lunatic.
I swallowed a sigh and took the last chair.
“I want to add an extra rule,” Donica called.
I joined her in the doorway. “What?”
“If you dawdle, I’m not going to wait for you to scan everything before I collect my half.”
I chuckled. “Guess I’ll pick up the pace.”
The room she’d entered looked like a restaurant to me. Maybe a pub? It had a bar, a gorgeous, polished wood surface that curved almost the entire length of a room bigger than my and Lena’s apartment. It also had a bunch of booths. The decor in here, and the lighting (in Third Eye) looked darker and richer than out in the lobby, probably the design sensibility of whoever owned this establishment, rather than the arcology itself.
Or rather, of whoever would have owned it, if it had existed.
I focused on each of the stools at the bar and each of the booths, as well as the lamps and chandeliers.
“Let’s get the bad news.” Donica touched the bar. Nothing. If it had been collectible, I wondered how much Wood it would have provided? We hadn’t found any consistent relationship between the volume of an object and how much Material it gave us, but bigger generally meant better.
I checked a booth. Nothing. I pressed my hand down.
Solid.
I felt a flash of panic.
I turned on my phone’s light.
Outside of Third Eye, the wood – but not the upholstery – for the booths and the bar were in place.
“Don’t do that while we have enough outside light to see by,” Donica said. “No one will challenge us, but I don’t want to give them the chance to prove me wrong.”
“Sure. Good call.” I switched the phone’s light off. Without it, I could just make out the shape of the booth beneath my hand. “Why would somebody put these in when the room wasn’t finished?”
“Testing the layout?” Her frown deepened. “I agree, it’s bizarre. It doesn’t look like the stools are physically present, though. Let’s see if we can get them.”
We could. Eleven flashes later and we were each flush with Wood. Freestanding lamps at either end of the bar gave us Iron and Glass, two apiece.
“Forget the Third Eye aspect,” I said. “This place is weird just as a construction site.”
“If they were being this inefficient with it, maybe it explains where all the money for construction went: noodling around with details instead of finishing the big picture work.”
“Let’s see if it’s just this restaurant,” I said.
It wasn’t. Across the lobby, we entered some kind of little store. No telling what it was supposed to have sold. Groceries, maybe? There were a bunch of plain metal shelves, all empty, and a counter where a cash register would’ve gone.
The shelving units were still empty in Third Eye, but they had nice detailing, lacquered wooden slats to display items on, and signs on each aisle.
The signs didn’t tell us much, because they were written in runic script.
“This is so weird,” Donica muttered.
I nodded, which wasn’t very useful since she wasn’t looking at me and we barely had enough outside light to see where we were walking.
The best prizes here were the racks, the spinning kind you get sunglasses and gift cards off of. Seven of them in the open part of the room. Six Iron for me, eight for Donica.
She got more from the cash register. “Huh. I got Wood from that as well. Didn’t look like there was any on the fittings.”
“It must’ve had money in it,” I said.
“So paper also turns into Wood? I hadn’t seen that yet.”
“It’s all on the wiki.”
“Mm,” she said. “I admire what you all do with the wiki, but I don’t have time to study it in detail. I barely have time to play. If Erin hadn’t been so excited, I probably would’ve ended up like your friend Miguel, kicked before I even signed up.”
Erin must have told her about Miguel ending up in the bottom 1%.
“What’s the deal with you and Erin, anyway?” I asked. “If you don’t mind my asking?”
“Since you put it that way, I guess I don’t have to answer.” She waited a moment and when I didn’t deflate, she chuckled. “I really thought I’d get you with that one.”
“Once in a while,” I said, “I catch when people are joking.”
“I’ve known Erin since she was a kid,” Donica said. “A younger kid. She always used to be underfoot at her dad’s agency, and by underfoot, I mean, she could tell you more about the players than any of us agents.”
“So she’s always been a stathead, huh?”
“The best I know.” Donica smiled, briefly. “She ended up treating me like something of an older sister. I suppose she latched onto me because mine was the only female perspective she had.”
I almost said, “No Mom?” But I realized as my mouth opened how stupid it would sound. Clearly not.
“When she had some troubles, she ended up leaning on me more than I would’ve liked,” Donica said. “It’s not like I could turn her away, you know? Your boss’s kid asks you for help, you help.”
“Your job description doesn’t sound like it includes being somebody’s big sis,” I said. “Her dad really would’ve been that mad at you?”
“I didn’t see any reason to find out. And you –” She brushed past me into the lobby. “– are dawdling again.”
