Chapter 5

Chapter 5 Where There's a Theo, There's a Way! Hmm…That Doesn't Sound Right. Maybe That's Someone Else. "I'm here!" Ash answered in Theo's headset. "So is Eek." "Hello, Theo! I have made you a boat." "He's made you a lot of boats." "Um, thanks!" Theo didn't waste any time trying to figure out what that meant; he dove right into the situation. "We got in trouble. We have to go clean the school—like detention. None of us can play till this big list is done—but I have an idea. Other people. When we were trying to

save the Evoker King, during the storm, we had a bunch of friends help us, right? I'm thinking we do the same thing here." "We're in the Nether. We need to get those blaze rods!" Harper had put on her headset, too. "And if other people can log in with us, getting Eek to the End will be way easier. Starting tomorrow, we could have a whole computer lab full of players!" "That sounds amazing!" Ash said. "I would love to meet more friends," Eek added. "Tell them to bring additional wood…for more boats." Theo could barely contain his excitement. "The game won't let me, Harper, or Morgan log in because our avatars died—and it wouldn't let us make new accounts, either. I think the server knows who we are, somehow. But if we can find someone to test it—"

Someone knocked on the edge of the computer lab door. "Hey! You need someone for a test?" It was Will! Po, who had been unusually quiet since the principal's office, finally spoke up. "What are you doing here?! Principal Ferris said—" "Aw, who cares?!" Will stuck out his tongue. "He's always mad about something. I wanted to make sure y'all were okay." Wow, Theo thought. Will is brave. Po frowned. "If you're sure."

"I'm sure. And come on, it's Minecraft! I'm not going to miss the chance to actually play with you. What's the test?" This was perfect! Will was a great subject for the test: he'd never played with them, but he loved Minecraft—and Morgan had told him the whole story of their strange server the day before. "We want to see if more players can log in to help Eek. If they can, the rest of this week will be easy. We can find some of our other Woodsword friends to play instead of us today, and then tomorrow—" "A whole crew!" Will was excited, too. "Of course I'll help. Let me see…" Their Minecraft server was a large cube at the center of a round table. With their teacher Doc Culpepper's help, Theo and Harper had connected several computers and monitors to it in a web of cables and keyboards—the junk Principal Ferris wanted to get rid of. Will sat down in front of one of the monitors. He opened Minecraft. He typed in his username, WKNIGHT, and his password. Theo couldn't see the

password, of course, because it showed up as asterisks:*********. "Here goes nothing!" Will clicked the button to log in. <ERROR>. Everybody groaned. "Noooo!" Jodi cried. "NOOOOO," Po added dramatically. "No!" Morgan croaked. Ash sighed. "Sounds like it didn't work."

"Maybe I typed my log-in wrong. Let me see…" Will tried again. WKNIGHT, *********. <ERROR>. Well, there goes that plan. Theo threw his headset off and was already pacing around the room. It didn't make sense! Keeping out players whose avatars were defeated was already confusing, but at least he could see some logic to it. The Evoker King wanted Eek to take the Minecraft world seriously and had added some rules to make sure the challenges and threats felt real.