Chapter 11

Chapter 11 AC Inspector Here. No, I Don't Handle B. I Don't Know about D Through Z, Either. Just A and C for Me! Harper followed Principal Ferris's pointed finger to its target: Doc Culpepper, standing in her closet and holding a bouquet of wires.

"This must be your fault." Principal Ferris's scowl was even more dramatic with his heavy mustache making the same shape. "Connecting all this technology to our servers and computers. Causing bizarre errors. So fix it!" "I've tried!" Doc Culpepper answered. "I inspected the whole system and didn't find anything wrong with the machine itself. There's something wrong with the program controlling the temperature."

The vents blew hot air harder than ever. Harper wiped sweat from her forehead, but her arm was already sweaty so it didn't help. "We even tried using the administrator password, but—" "You WHAT? How did you get that?!" "Me." Will raised his hand. He was sitting next to Po, who was desperately trying to get his avatar to stop moving on its own. "I gave it to them."

Principal Ferris's eyes narrowed. "Go to my office. We'll talk about this later, William." Will wandered over to the door, looking disappointed. Oh no. Now Harper had gotten him in trouble. "He was only—" "Harper, one of the blazes has seen us!" Po said. "Jodi, can you—" Jodi was slamming keys on her keyboard. "My computer isn't responding at all! It's frozen!" "More like melted," Po said. "Eek, you need to—" "ERROR!" Eek yelled into her headset. "VARIABLE NOT FOUND!" "I can get this one," Ash said, "but there are more coming!" Principal Ferris cleared his throat. "I was talking to you. Holding side conversations is very rude. It's time we fix this problem." "What are we supposed to do?!" Harper asked. "We've tried everything!"

"If we can't break it temporarily," Doc Culpepper said, "then I don't know what we could possibly do to stop it." "My game's stopped working, too!" Po yelped. "Our avatars are just sitting right by the blaze spawner room! Ash and Eek are the only ones left!" "We never had a problem like this before all your Woodsword technology arrived. I suspect shutting the whole thing down will fix the problem." "Please, don't!" Morgan stepped away from the computer to beg Principal Ferris. "You promised we'd have until the end of the week!"

"You like the heat, right?" Theo asked. "Remember cheese? Extra cheese? Double pepperoni?" "Ah…what I wouldn't do for just one bite of Grandmama Ferris's perfect crust, toasted to perfection—No! This isn't heat. This is fire! The school is getting scorched, roasted, and absolutely burnt to a crisp. I was distracted by nostalgia— something that I should never have let happen in the first place—and was too lenient of this computer bug." Principal Ferris advanced toward their Minecraft server, and Harper felt glued to the ground. Her head felt all buzzy and confused, full of everyone's words and her own stress and exhaustion from not sleeping enough. The heat was clouding her thoughts, and all the little mistakes she made were clouding her feelings. This was why she liked science: things felt dependable and learnable and went according to plan. Nothing like her life today!