Chapter 6

Chapter 6 WE ALL SCREAM FOR SCREEN TIME... OR BECAUSE THE HALLS ARE FILLED WITH HOSTILE MOBS! Woodsword Middle School had gone low-tech. Doc still hadn't solved the glitch in the system. Until she did, devices throughout the school were unplugged and powered down. "At least the lights work," Po said at the end of their morning class. "Imagine if we had to do math and reading by candlelight!" Harper nodded in agreement. But her mind was back in the Minecraft desert. Between Jodi's broken gear and Po's poisoning, they'd had to disconnect before going through the portal. If they'd even

decided to go through the portal. Harper half suspected the whole thing was a trap. They had used dirt to wall off a little corner of the mineshaft. Then they'd set up their beds. That way, when they returned to the game, they'd be right by the portal and they could decide what to do about how to continue their hunt for the Evoker King. Ms. Minerva had wheeled in an old chalkboard for their morning lesson. As she wiped it clean with a tattered black eraser, Harper sneezed. She had never seen so much chalk dust in her life! Over by the window, Baron Sweetcheeks sneezed, too. "Well, that was adorable," Jodi said. "Harper! Take a video with your phone." Harper sniffled. "Okay," she said. She put her notebook into her backpack and pulled out her phone. She was the first of them to get a smartphone, so she'd become the group's unofficial videographer. The phone was an ancient hand-me-down, however. She'd had to tinker with it to make it run more smoothly.

She opened the camera app and held the phone up toward the hamster's cage. Ms. Minerva had already replaced the treadmill with the old-fashioned hamster wheel. "Come on, little guy," Jodi said. "Achoo! Achoo!" Harper pressed the record button with her thumb. She held her hand as steady as possible. She was ready to capture the moment Baron Sweetcheeks sneezed again. She was not ready for what she actually saw. "Um. Guys," she said. "You've got to look at this." While her other classmates filed out of the room, Harper's friends crowded around her. By their gasps of disbelief, she knew they could see what she saw. She felt a small sense of relief to know she wasn't imagining things. But only a small one. Because there, on the tiny screen of her phone, was the real-life Baron Sweetcheeks…next to a blocky Minecraft rabbit.

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"Is that a new filter?" asked Morgan. "No," said Harper, starting to get over her surprise. "I…I think it's really there!" "No way," said Jodi. She went over to the hamster cage. She waved her hands around. "You're passing right through it," Ash told her. "I don't feel anything!" Jodi said. On Harper's screen, the rabbit twitched its nose and hopped idly across the room. "Follow that rabbit!" said Po. They all grabbed their backpacks and scrambled out of the classroom. The hallway was crowded with students. Harper had to hold her phone up to catch glimpses of the rabbit as it hopped between kids' feet. "This way," she said, and the others followed. But she lost sight of it as it rounded a corner. "It couldn't have gone far," she said, and she waved her phone around. Its screen showed the familiar hallway, packed with the students… and with Minecraft zombies.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that is too weird." "Can they see us?" Jodi asked. "Can they hear us?" Po whispered. "I don't think so," Harper said. "They're just shambling around. Anyway, how could they get us even if they wanted to?" "Is this only happening in the school?" asked Ash. "Let's look outside." They passed through the lobby and held the phone outside the main doors. On its screen, Harper could see the schoolyard. There was the flagpole…there were the bushes…and there was a huge ghast floating inches above the lawn. "It's like a window into another dimension," Morgan said. "A window into the game!"