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Copyright © 2015 by Danica Davidson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Brian Peterson
Cover artwork by Lordwhitebear
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0276-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0277-6
CHAPTER 1
“I WANT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING REALLY SCARY,” Maison said.
My heart started pounding immediately. We were sitting in her room—in her world—and I knew from her voice it had to be something really bad. I’d only known Maison for a couple of months, but it had been enough time for us to become best friends, and for me to learn Maison didn’t scare easily.
Maison and I were from two different worlds. My home was in the Overworld, where I lived with my dad, Steve, and our cat, Ossie. I was named Stevie after my dad, but sometimes it felt as if we couldn’t be more different. My dad was always in-charge and knew about everything, and it felt like I was always messing up in one way or another. It wasn’t all that long ago I was so caught up in trying to make a tree house that I wasn’t paying attention to my safety and I was attacked by a creeper and some zombies.
I was getting better at building and fighting, though sometimes I still struggled in those areas. Dad taught me how to plant, and farm, and mine for emeralds, and fight off monsters, which were also known as mobs. This was our life.
Maison lived in … well, I don’t know what this world was named. But things came in all different shapes, and her mom worked as an architect instead of a farmer or miner, and they traded green stuff known as “money” at stores instead of making their own things. Maison went to a place each day called school; instead of going to school, I mainly worked with Dad and learned from life experiences.
Our worlds also had different things to do for fun. I liked to ride on pigs, using carrots to make them run. Maison liked to play baseball, a game she was trying to teach me. But I just can’t get the hang of using sticks to hit balls instead of using sticks to build other things, like swords.
I didn’t know her world even existed until I found a portal out to it. She’d known about my world, but she thought it was all a make-believe place on a game called Minecraft. She’d made a special portal in the Overworld while playing the game, and when I was attacked by a giant spider, I’d had no choice but to jump through the strange portal. I’d stepped out of her computer screen and into her world, changing both our lives forever.
It had all been pretty amazing at first, finding this world with different shapes and different people. They even had things on their hands called fingers, which I secretly thought looked like little squid tentacles. Don’t tell Maison I said that, because she got offended the last time I mentioned it.
But things got scary fast, because the portal allowed zombies, giant spiders and a creeper to get out as well. They attacked the school. Maison and I fought them back, and then built a protective house around the portal in the Overworld so the mobs couldn’t get to Maison’s world again. Even though Maison had never seen real zombies or giant spiders before, she hadn’t panicked. She’d stepped right up to the battle, and together, we saved the school.
So I knew Maison was pretty brave. That meant that if she was scared about something, I was scared about something.
“What is it?” I asked her now.
“Here,” she said. “It’d just be easier to show you.”
She took me to her computer, which was just sitting there looking like any other computer in her world. We were the only ones who knew it was also a portal to the Overworld.
“Did you open another portal?” I wondered. Maybe she’d accidentally opened a portal to the Nether, which was a pretty scary place. Or maybe she’d found an even scarier world neither one of us knew about! Anything was possible.
“No, nothing like that,” she said, her squid tentacles … er, I mean fingers … typing quickly. The screen changed, and I knew this was some kind of a website she was showing me. Besides teaching me a lot of new words, Maison had also told me about things she had in her world, like websites.
In the Overworld, we had things like walking skeletons and Endermen and baby zombies that rode on chickens. In Maison’s world, there wasn’t anything like that, but they did have computers, where you could find out anything with a few clicks of a button. You could even watch a “video” (another word I’d learned from Maison) that showed you real things that had happened, even after they had happened.
There was a video on top of this webpage. A single page on a website was called a webpage, which I guess made sense. When the video started to play, it showed a grown woman holding a microphone and talking to Maison, who looked a little awkward.
“Welcome back to our nightly news program,” the woman was saying. “I’m here interviewing Maison, an eleven-year-old local hero who saved her middle school. Now, Maison, has it been solved why all those zombies and spiders attacked your school?”
“Um, no,” Maison said, not wanting to admit what was really going on. Maison and I had agreed it would be safer for both our worlds if other people didn’t know about the computer portal.
“No one has ever seen anything like it,” the woman said. “An unprotected middle school full of children suddenly under the onslaught of vicious monsters wanting nothing more than your utter destruction.”
“She’s kind of dramatic-sounding,” I whispered now.
“Shhh,” Maison whispered back to me.
“Yet, in the midst of your panic, you took charge,” the woman on the video continued. “How did you find the courage?”
“Sometimes life doesn’t really give you a choice,” Maison said in the video. “Sometimes you just have to do the right thing.”
“Profound words from someone so young!” the woman gushed in response. “There was also a young boy who was there, helping you. Witnesses said he looked like a Minecraft character, and they said that you introduced him earlier as your cousin, Stevie. Some other witnesses reported that you said in the auditorium that he really wasn’t your cousin, but someone who came out of Minecraft. Which, of course, is impossible. And when I talked to your mother, Maison, she said you don’t have a cousin named Stevie. Can you clear this up for us?”
Now Maison really looked uncomfortable in the video. I felt bad for her. “Well, I think there was just some misunderstanding,” she said to the woman. “Things were pretty crazy with the school under attack and all that, and sometimes people get their details mixed up when big, stressful things happen.”
The interview went on for a couple more minutes, with the woman insisting over and over that Maison was a hero and Maison looking like she was enjoying this and embarrassed
by it at the same time. Then the video ended.
“So what’s so scary about that?” I asked after a moment.
“Well, being on camera was kind of scary,” Maison said. “It was a live interview, which means it was playing on TV right when I was talking to her. But that’s not what I want to show you. Look.”
She scrolled down lower on the page and my eyes widened.
“It’s called a message board,” Maison was explaining. “Someone put the video on top of the message board for people to talk about. Look at what they wrote.”
But I was already reading it.
DestinyIsChoice123: Maison thinks she’s so hot. She makes me sick. She’s no hero. She’s not even that good at baseball.
TheVampireDragon555: Just a misunderstanding?! Wow, that Maison’s stupid. Can’t believe that stupid newscaster bought it, too. They’re both stupid.
Frankie_the_Squidking: You guys shouldn’t be saying bad things about Maison. I’m a sixth grader at her school and I know her personally. She’s the real deal. She helped my friends Jeremy, Dalton, Tobias and me fight off the zombies. We couldn’t have done that without her.
TheVampireDragon555: @Frankie_the_Squidking: You’re stupid. I know Maison’s hiding something, and I’m going to prove it. In fact, I hope she’s reading this right now. Hey, MAISON! We’re coming for you. We know where you live.
DestinyIsChoice123: She’s not going to think she’s hot stuff for much longer, is she?
TheVampireDragon555: When we’re through with her, she’s going to regret ever getting out of bed in the morning. Hear that, Maison? Tick-tock, count the clock: we’ll see you soon.
I scratched my head. “I’m confused. Why do they have names like DestinyIsChoice123 or TheVampireDragon555?”
“Those aren’t their real names,” Maison said. “They’re made-up names, so they can post anonymously. That means you don’t know who they really are.”
“So they could be anybody typing this anywhere in your world?” I asked.
“Well, yeah,” she said. “But they said they know where I live!”
“Don’t you want people to know where you live?” I asked. “Everyone around us knows where my dad and I live. That’s how you get friends.”
Well, that might have been a little much on my part. The truth was, Maison really was my only good friend. Sometimes I played with the other kids in the village when Dad and I went to visit, but I never really felt welcomed by them.
Maison sounded pretty upset now. “No, Stevie,” she said. “Don’t you get it? Two people are threatening me online!”
“Well … have they shown up?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But I’m scared they’re going to.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s so scary about this?”
Then I thought I understood. “One of them really is a dragon!” I exclaimed, thinking of the Ender Dragon. Of course I’d never seen the Ender Dragon, but Dad had told me tons of stories. “So this message board is proof that a dragon got out of the portal and is trying to contact you!”
I could see why Maison would be scared of that. I was scared of that. I’d never dealt with a dragon before. “What’s a Vampire?”I asked, because that part was still confusing me. “Is that some kind of mob in your world?”
I really was trying to be helpful, but Maison was looking at me as if I couldn’t be more clueless, and it seemed to bother her. Even after knowing each other for a couple months, sometimes we still got mixed up on something that was normal in one of our worlds but not in the other.
For instance, she couldn’t understand why I loved mushroom soup so much—she said it tasted nasty and a cheeseburger was better. And I couldn’t understand why so many people in her world were scared of spiders. The spiders they had were so tiny! I’d fought against giant spiders from the Overworld, so the little spiders in Maison’s world made me want to laugh.
“It’s not a dragon,” she said. “And vampires are monsters that suck blood in old stories. But stuff like that isn’t real. It’s a person threatening me.”
“People aren’t dangerous like dragons or … uh, vampires,” I said. “What’s a person going to do?” People couldn’t turn you into a zombie. They weren’t going to suck your blood, either, like that vampire mob from the stories in her world.
“It’s called ‘cyberbullying,’” Maison said. “It’s like bullying, but it’s done online. My mom gave me a talk about cyberbullying awhile ago, and she told me cyberbullies were just sad kids trying to get a rise out of me. She said I should ignore them. I haven’t told her about this, but now I’m starting to wonder if I should.”
“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,” I said.
We’d run into some tough kids at Maison’s middle school. They were mean, but they never physically hurt us or anything. And after Maison saved their lives during the mob attack, they’d stopped being bullies. Plus, it seemed to me those bullies were much more threatening than anyone typing on a computer.
“Zombies, giant spiders … those are scary,” I went on. “And you showed you could take care of them.”
“It’s not just this message board, though,” Maison said. “Any time there’s an article about me, I find them writing comments underneath. DestinyIsChoice123 and TheVampireDragon555. They’re following me online. And there’s something else. Did you see how DestinyIsChoice123 said that I wasn’t that good at baseball?”
“You’re great at baseball,” I said.
“That’s not the thing,” Maison said. “How do they know I even play baseball? It doesn’t say that in any of the news reports. It’s not information I have online. If they know I play baseball … they must have seen me play at the school or at the park. I think they really do know where I live.”
I didn’t have an answer to that. But I said, “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. How about we go to our tree house in the Overworld and build some things?”
CHAPTER 2
BUILDING WAS MY WAY OF TRYING TO CHEER MAISON up. Maison was an amazing builder, and she always liked making something. Since my original tree house had been destroyed by a creeper, she and I had built a new one that was even better. We had a balcony and everything. We’d even made all the furniture inside so it felt homey, though we just used it as a place to hang out, not to live.
Now we sat up in the tree house, enjoying the sunshine, making ourselves stone swords. A stone sword took one stick and two pieces of cobblestone, and we used our newly-created crafting table to do the work.
Making the swords distracted Maison a little, but not that much. There was another reason why I wanted to hang out in the tree house and make swords: it kept me from studying my potions.
After the mob attack on Maison’s school, Dad decided he needed to ramp up my studying. He said that since I was eleven now, it was time I really knew how to take care of myself if danger reared its head. He’d taught me how to build different things and how to sword fight, but I didn’t know potions so well.
Why? Because potions were boring.
Maybe they would have been fun if I got to make them, but all Dad wanted me to do was memorize the ingredients that went into each potion. Dad was constantly quizzing me at the breakfast table or at the dinner table about different potions.
“Stevie,” he’d say. “How do you make a Potion of Weakness? How do you make a Potion of Swiftness?”
But the more I tried to memorize them, the more they all got mixed up in my head. And that would just get Dad frustrated, which made me more frustrated. I really was trying to memorize them. Really.
“I think making potions sounds fun,” Maison said now, after I told her about Dad’s potion tirade. “I make potions sometimes when I play Minecraft.”
“Yeah, you get to make them,” I said. “But all I get to do is list off what’s in them. And we could make a whole bunch of potions if he let me, because my dad has a ton of supplies in his shed.”
That was Dad
for you: he had to be ready for everything. He’d made his special diamond sword when he was only twelve, and that was just the beginning for what was to come. Now Dad had built multiple houses, kept a shed full of supplies, and had recorded every potion known in the Overworld into a series of books he kept in the den. It was exhausting trying to follow in Dad’s footsteps. Around here, he was known as “The Steve” because of all his accomplishments.
“Mmm,” Maison said absentmindedly. I could tell her mind was still on the “cyberbullies.”
I glanced over at her. It was funny how we both looked so similar and so different. We both had black hair and brown, olive-toned skin, but while I was a blocky shape like the other people in the Overworld, Maison had all different proportions. Her face was oval like an emerald, her hair was wispy like spiderwebs in the mines and—I’d only learned this recently—she also had another pair of smaller squid tentacles on her feet. But instead of calling them feet-fingers, they were called toes. I discovered them when she wore a pair of “sandals,” and she’d told me to quit staring.
“So, I don’t get it,” I said. “In your world, you have computers. With them, you can find any book, learn about any topic, and unearth any kind of knowledge. In the Overworld, we don’t have anything like that. So with all those options you have, why do people just use it to be mean to others?”
Maison shrugged. “My mom said it’s because some people feel small. They feel safer attacking a person behind a computer. Besides, people use computers for other things, too.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Well,” Maison said, “we look at videos of cute animals, take surveys on which Disney character we’d be, and upload pictures of our breakfast.”
I just stared at her. Sometimes her world made no sense at all.
“Oh,” she said, “we also like to upload videos of the buildings we make in Minecraft.”
I lightened up. “That sounds fun,” I said. Or maybe not. What if these people were building incredible things on their computers or gaming systems, much better things than I could make with my own two hands? I’d gotten much better at building since meeting Maison, though I still wasn’t that good. However, I was even worse when it came to those annoying potions.
Attack on the Overworld Page 1