Trapped in a Video Game: The Invisible Invasion copyright © 2018 Dustin Brady. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
Andrews McMeel Publishing a division of Andrews McMeel Universal 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106
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ISBN: 978-1-4494-9612-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932210
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Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Jesse Brady for the cover and interior illustrations. You can check out more of Jesse’s sweet artwork at jessebradyart.com.
Other Books by Dustin Brady
Trapped in a Video Game
Superhero for a Day: The Magic Magic Eight Ball
Who Stole Mr. T?: Leila and Nugget Mystery #1
The Case with No Clues: Leila and Nugget Mystery #2
Bark at the Park: Leila and Nugget Mystery #3
Contents
1. The Ghost
2. Aug-whatever Reality
3. Garbage Truck
4. Elsa
5. Slip ’N Slide
6. Got Him
7. Upside Down Flamezoid
8. The Leash
9. Ice Bazooka
10. Vinnie
11. Ground Control
12. Mad Scientist
13. The Experiment
14. Pirate!
15. The Horde
16. Black Box
17. Game Over
18. For Real This Time
19. Cook the CPU
20. Chain Reaction
About the Author
More to Explore
chapter 1
The Ghost
What did you do last night? Sleep? Hmm, you don’t say.
Want to know what I did? I talked to an army guy. Not like someone from the real army trying to recruit me (I’m 12. It would have been a short conversation). The army guy I talked to happened to be six inches tall and made of plastic.
I don’t make a habit of talking to toys—I’m not crazy—but I had a good excuse. This one talked to me first. See, I met this particular toy when he wasn’t a toy but a real sergeant in the game Full Blast. Two weeks ago, I got sucked into Full Blast with my friend Eric Conrad. We flew around with jet packs and rode the Statue of Liberty like a rocket ship and almost got trapped inside the game for good by an alien who said our names in the creepiest way possible. It’s a long story. You should read it sometime.
Anyways, in Full Blast, we met Mark Whitman—another kid from our class who had gotten sucked into the same game. Mark stayed behind so Eric and I could escape. Now, this army guy was telling me that I could go back into the video game to save Mark, but I had to “go back now.”
Of course I wanted to go back. I’d do anything for Mark. The sergeant asked me if I was sure. Yes, I was sure—let’s go! I stared at the army guy, waiting for him to—I don’t know, click his heels or open a portal in my closet or something. Instead, he stared at me motionless, kind of like a toy would. That’s when I started feeling stupid.
“Hey, I said ‘yes.’” I poked the sergeant. He continued staring with his blank toy expression. “Do I need to press some sort of button?” I picked him up and turned him over in my hand. No button.
At this point, you might be thinking that maybe the whole talking toy thing was a dream. And I would normally agree with you, except for one very important detail: The sergeant had actually woken me up from a dream. Now have you ever woken up from a dream only to find yourself in another dream? You have not. That has never once happened in real life—only in movies. The talking sergeant was not a dream because this is not a movie, and also I am not crazy.
I spent the next several minutes talking to and poking at the army guy. Then I got up and checked all the places where he might have hidden some sort of portal to the video game (TV, toilet, wardrobe, etc.). Nothing. I crawled back into bed and spent much of the rest of the night convincing myself I wasn’t crazy, and then I think I fell asleep.
“Jesse! Breakfast!”
My eyes popped open. Sunlight streamed through the window. Monday morning.
“Jesse!” my mom yelled up the stairs again.
“Mmmf,” I replied. I stumbled out of bed and plop-plop-plopped down the stairs. I took my seat at the table and waited for my dad to grab the cereal from the top shelf. “What kind do you want, hon?” he asked.
“Blueberry crunch,” my mom replied as she finished packing her lunch.
“I’ll try that new chocolate one,” I said.
My dad grabbed the blueberry only. “Can I try the chocolate one?” I repeated a little louder. My dad set my mom’s cereal box on the table and grabbed his bowl from the freezer. (“Freeze the bowl first. It will change your life,” he tells everyone who will listen. Not true. From personal experience, I can tell you that the only thing freezing the cereal bowl will do is turn the milk so cold that it hurts your teeth.)
I sighed and reached for my mom’s gross organic blueberry cereal. I knew the promise of chocolate for breakfast was too good to be true.
“Did you call Jesse?” my dad asked as he grabbed the cereal box before I could.
I squinted at him and waved right in front of his face. “Yeah, Dad, I’m right here.”
My mom sighed. “I’ll call him again.” She walked to the stairs. “Jesse! Jesse Daniel Rigsby! Get down here now! You’re going to be late for school!”
I threw my hands into the air. “Dad. Dad! DAD!”
My dad finished pouring his cereal and reached across the table for the milk like I wasn’t there. I jumped up and grabbed the milk before he could to get his attention. That didn’t stop him, so I pulled the milk toward me. Or at least I tried to pull it toward me. When I did, my hands went right through the jug.
“WHAT IS GOING ON?!” I grabbed the cereal box. Same thing—I could touch and feel the box, but when I tried to move it, my hand went right through.
“AHHHHH!” I ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, desperate to see my terrified face. Instead, all I got was the empty bathtub behind me. I looked down at my hands. Real as could be. But when I waved them in front of the mirror—nothing.
I was a ghost.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. As I tried to figure out what to do next (What do ghosts eat? Do they go to the bathroom? What about school? Is there a special ghost school?), I heard a snort behind me. I looked into the mirror. Nothing. Another snort.
I slowly turned around. Behind me, sitting patiently in the tub as real as could be, was an eight-foot-tall, bright-blue Bigfoot.
chapter 2
Aug-whatever Reality
I ran out of the bathroom as fast as my little ghost legs would take me. As I passed through the kitchen, I screamed a warning to my parents. “MONSTER! MONSTER IN THE BATHROOM! DON’T GO IN!” My mom continued packing her lunch, and my dad continued eating his freezing-cold cereal as if there weren’t a GIANT BLUE MONSTER IN THEIR BATHTUB!
If I didn’t get some fresh air soon, I was going to pass out. I ran for the front door, grabbed the knob, twisted, and, of course, nothing happened because I was twisting with my invisible ghost hand. I took a deep breath, lowered my shoulder, and pushed into the door. There was a moment of resistance before—pop!—I stumbled right through solid oak.
Outside looked like a scene from Monsters, Inc. A herd of giant purple Ninja Turtle things strolled past my house. A fluffy, polka-dotted bird poked its head out of the tree on our front lawn and squawked. I looked down to see a pile of fur the size of a soccer ball checking out my shoelaces. When I moved my foot, it tripped over itself trying to run away.
I started breathing faster. This is not OK. THIS IS NOT OK!
“Psst.”
I looked around. That “psst” sounded a lot more human than monster.
“Psst,” the voice whispered again. “Jesse. Bushes.”
I looked at the bushes next to the porch and noticed a cell phone pointed at me. I squinted and lowered my head. There was a guy in there. I kicked away the ball of fur that had regained the courage to battle my shoelaces again and approached the bush.
As I walked closer, I noticed the crazy hair. “Mr. Gregory?”
Mr. Gregory is the dad of Charlie Gregory, one of the kids in my class, and he works at Bionosoft, the video game company that made Full Blast. He promised to help me and Eric find Mark and then disappeared two weeks ago. At that moment, he was curled up in the azalea bush, which is something that would get him in pretty big trouble if my mom saw.
“Hi,” he whispered, still pointing the phone at me. “You OK?”
“I’m invisible,” I hissed. “So no, I am not OK!”
“You don’t have to whisper,” he said. “No one can hear you.”
“No kidding.” I kicked the ball of fur away again. “Wait, you can hear me though, right?”
“Those things have really sharp teeth and a lot of angry friends,” Mr. Gregory said. “I wouldn’t make him mad.”
I stopped kicking.
“But right,” he continued. “Of course I can hear you. Anyone playing the game can hear you.”
“What game?”
Mr. Gregory looked at me like I was crazy. “Go Wild.”
“Okayyyyy.”
He continued with the weird look. “You knew you were in Go Wild, right? I thought the sergeant was pretty clear.”
“Pretend I have no idea what Go Wild even is.”
“You serious?”
“I don’t play video games.”
“I mean, most people who enjoy Go Wild don’t usually play video games. The core market includes . . .”
“Can you just tell me what it is?”
“Oh right, well, it’s augmented reality,” he said like “aug-whatever reality” is a thing people say all the time.
“Listen,” I said. “I am having a real hard time right now understanding why I’m a ghost in a world of monsters, so it would be helpful if you could explain things to me in a way that a sixth-grader who is pretty new to the whole ghost thing can understand.”
“First of all, you’re not a ghost because you’re not dead,” Mr. Gregory said.
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“You’re just in a video game. This one is like Pokémon Go. Do you know Pokémon Go?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“It’s a game that’s going on all the time in the real world. You just can’t see it unless you’re looking at the world through your phone. See, look.”
I bent down and looked at his phone, which was pointed at my neighbor’s rosebushes. On the screen, I could see the bushes as if the phone were in camera mode.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at,” I said.
He tapped his phone a few times until a big cartoon pear appeared on the screen. Then he flicked his finger, which threw the pear toward the rosebushes. I looked up just in time to see the pear fly through the air and land right next to the bushes in real life.
“Whoa, how did you do that?!”
“That pear is part of the game. It’s not real. Nobody can see it unless they’re looking at it through their phone.”
“Or unless they’re in the game,” I said.
“Right.”
Just then a skinny snake with a gigantic head and goofy eyes emerged from the rosebushes. It examined the pear.
I jumped back. “Whoa!”
“Again, that’s invisible to anyone who’s not looking at it through the game on their phone,” Mr. Gregory said. “Watch this.”
He tapped and swiped a few more times on his screen. All of a sudden, a purple gecko thing with a long neck popped out of his phone. In a matter of two seconds, it grew a REALLY long neck to half the size of my house. It locked eyes with the snake and got angry.
“You might want to take a step back,” Mr. Gregory said.
I took five steps back.
The gecko screeched. The snake hissed. The sun dimmed, and intense battle music started playing out of nowhere. The snake’s eyes began glowing red. After three seconds of brighter and brighter glowing, the eyes shot two fireballs toward the gecko. As the fireballs were in midair, the gecko turned from purple to red. It absorbed the blast into its red body and grew twice as big. It then grabbed the snake by the tail, threw it into its mouth, and swallowed it in one gulp. With that, the gecko disappeared back into Mr. Gregory’s phone, the lights came back on, and the music stopped.
Mr. Gregory turned to me. “You can’t let that happen to you.”