Chapter 2

Chapter 2 Thinking Outside the Box Is Easy! Most Things Are Outside of Boxes. Unless You're Moving Far Away, of Course. A sh's merit badge sash was full. She'd been in the Wildling Scouts for years, but in the last year, she'd earned more patches than ever before. They were arranged in rows down the front and back: patches for sailing boats, training dogs, selling cupcakes, hiking, cleaning nature trails, lighting campfires, tap dancing, reciting one hundred numbers of pi, playing the bugle, reading, saying French expressions of surprise, and more.

"Sacré bleu!" Ash cried. She hated the idea of ever putting her sash into a cardboard box. When she joined the scouts, she never dreamed she'd fill the whole thing. This sash had seen her through two different scout troops, and now she was moving again. Three times in less than three years. She was with this school and this troop for the shortest time yet. Looking at the sash made her feel proud but a little sad. She decided to keep it on.

Brrrrrip! She unrolled tape across the top of the box and sealed it. With a squeaky marker she wrote scout stuff, then picked up the box and looked around the room for the perfect place to stack it. She was treating her moving boxes like Minecraft blocks: she'd made a tiny house, a little bridge, a simple tower—this lighter box would be the perfect top to a big, blocky chair. She reached up on her tiptoes to set it down carefully, then plopped onto her cardboard seat. Not as good as it would be in Minecraft, but not too bad. Speaking of Minecraft…shouldn't her friends be out of school by now? They needed to log in quickly if they were going to stay on track.

Back when Ash was a student at Woodsword, their science teacher, Doc Culpepper, had introduced them to a version of Minecraft with some unique features. Strangest among them was the existence of the Evoker King, a dangerous artificial intelligence who would have taken over all of Minecraft if they hadn't stopped his plan. Ash and her friends helped the Evoker King see the error of his ways. But his feelings were too big for his programming, and he broke into several pieces of code. When the team finally recombined his data, he didn't come back to life: he was reborn as a new being. An Evoker Kid that they nicknamed Eek. Now Eek was in danger: he was trapped inside the game! The server they had brought over from Woodsword was damaged in the big storm. Doc Culpepper had carefully brought it to Ironsword, but the server couldn't move around safely anymore. To make matters worse, Principal Ferris was not a fan of storm-damaged experiments, and

he was going to throw it away at the end of the week. The team believed Eek would be able to leave the server after they got to the End and defeated the Ender Dragon. On Monday, they'd made it all the way to the Nether. It was Tuesday now, which meant they only had four more afternoons to make it through one of Minecraft's hardest challenges. Ash's new school didn't start until next week, but it was dangerous to adventure alone. When Morgan's, Harper's, and Theo's avatars were defeated, they couldn't log back in. She, Jodi, and Po were the only players left. Sticking with a group was the safe way forward. But the group was late. Ash checked her phone: no messages, nothing. She knew they wouldn't just forget about Eek, which meant something was wrong. But there was nothing she could do if they weren't talking to her.

At the very least, she could log in and check on him. She moved to her desk and put on her headset and microphone. She typed in her username and password so that she could connect to the server remotely.