Trapped in a Video Game: Book Three
Page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
In Case You Missed It
CHAPTER ONE Mayhem
CHAPTER TWO Robot Girl
CHAPTER THREE Suits
CHAPTER FOUR Level One
CHAPTER FIVE Super Bot World
CHAPTER SIX Minecart Madness
CHAPTER SEVEN Diggin' Season
CHAPTER EIGHT Lefty Loosey
CHAPTER NINE The Pit of Despair
CHAPTER TEN Blast Number Three
CHAPTER ELEVEN Glug
CHAPTER TWELVE Pringles and Piranhas
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Impossible Mode
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Scrambled Eggs
CHAPTER FIFTEEN BillyBotBoy
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Lavers Hill
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Kiddie Park
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Goliatron
CHAPTER NINETEEN The Rocket
CHAPTER TWENTY 3, 2, 1...
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Mark Day II
Author's Note
Other Books by Dustin Brady
About the Author
Trapped in a Video Game: Book Three
Dustin Brady
Copyright © 2016 Dustin Brady
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1541224698
ISBN-13: 978-1541224698
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Jesse Brady for the cover and interior illustrations. You can check out more of Jesse’s sweet artwork on Instagram: @jessnetic.
In Case You Missed It
Stop.
Do not read another word of this book until you’ve finished the first two Trapped in a Video Game books. Seriously. Don’t do it. Throw this book into a trash can if the temptation gets too strong.
“But what if I can’t get those books?!” you might be saying. Great question. And if you were as good at using Amazon.com as you are at asking questions, then you’d have all three Trapped in a Video Game books by now. “But I’m on a submarine, and Amazon doesn’t yet deliver to submarines. Am I sunk?” You are not sunk. Also, great pun. Your best bet is to request a transfer to a submarine equipped with all three Trapped in a Video Game books. In the highly, HIGHLY unlikely event that your request gets denied, you may read the following summary of the first two books. Again, this summary is only for submarine-bound readers who’ve already submitted a transfer request and preferably two appeals. If that’s not you — trash can.
The Trapped in a Video Game series tells the story of Jesse Rigsby a sixth-grader who gets — you’ll never believe this — trapped in video games. His first adventure takes place inside a shooter called Full Blast, where he joins his friend Eric Conrad to battle man-sized praying mantises, angry sand monsters and a super-creepy alien known as the Hindenburg. Halfway through the game, they run into Mark Whitman, a kid from their class who’s been missing from the real world for nearly a month. Turns out, he’s been trapped inside of Full Blast the whole time. Mark helps the duo escape by sacrificing himself and staying behind.
In Trapped in a Video Game 2, Jesse gets a chance to rescue Mark by sneaking into the video game company Bionosoft through Go Wild, a mobile game kind of like Pokemon Go. After surviving attacks by a Bigfoot, a velociraptor and a few hundred vicious furballs, Jesse learns that Bionosoft is trapping kids like Mark in their games on purpose to test some scary new technology. With the help of Eric and former Bionosoft employee Mr. Gregory, Jesse fights his way to the company’s basement, where Mark is being held inside of a computer. The good news is that they’re able to pull Mark out of his video game before it’s too late. The bad news is that they have to break the system to do so, which releases everything else from Bionosoft’s computers into the real world. That includes kids, weapons and thousands upon thousands of video game bad guys.
OK, that’s it. You’re all caught up now. Happy submarining.
CHAPTER ONE
Mayhem
EEEEEEEEEEEEEE
The vibrating in my chest grew as the sound got louder.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEE
It almost felt like a volcano could erupt from my chest at any second. Do you know that feeling? It’s not a good feeling.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Of course, the noise wasn’t even the problem. The problem was the cause of the noise — hundreds of six-foot-tall computer towers all malfunctioning at the same time, spitting out video game bad guys at an alarming rate.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Human-sized praying mantis aliens. Dinosaurs. Slime blobs. What looked like a flame-throwing robot dragon.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEE
All of them seemed a little confused and a lot angry about getting transported from the comfort of their fake video game worlds to the very real, very loud basement of an evil video game corporation. I covered my ears, backed against a computer and yelled for the only person who could do something. “MR. GREGORY! DO SOMETHING!”
Mr. Gregory kind of caused this whole mess in the first place by inventing a way to put people into video games, then breaking everything to get our friend Mark out of one. An arm cannon hit me in the chest just as a praying mantis noticed me.
“Here!” Mr. Gregory said without looking up from his laptop. “Hold them off while I try to turn off the power!”
Before I could remind Mr. Gregory about my poor aiming skills, the praying mantis screeched and leaped at me. I jammed my arm into the cannon, fell backward and blasted up in the air.
“SCREECH!”
The mantis disappeared in a flash of light. I sat up and looked around me. Mayhem. Absolute mayhem. After getting over the initial shock of transporting into the real world, the video game characters started doing what they do best — destroying everything in sight. To my right, a rhino with a long sword horn was impaling computer towers over and over. To my left, two slimy swamp things fought each other. And straight ahead, five oversized cockroaches were circling something. The circle parted just long enough for me to see what they’d trapped.
“ERIC!” I yelled. My best friend Eric Conrad was huddled on the ground, kicking his legs wildly. I got up and blasted five times, missing horribly each time. “HEY!” I blasted again and finally hit one. They all turned at once. I blasted again. That may have been a mistake, because as soon as I did, they all flew directly at me.
“AHHHH!” BLAST BLAST BLAST “AHHHH!” BLAST BLAST —
One of the cockroaches batted away my blaster, and then they all started circling and chattering. I tried raising my arms and yelling like you’re supposed to do when you see a bear, but all that did was make them close in tighter and chatter angrier because cockroaches are not bears. One of them began feeling me with its long, creepy antennae. This was it — I was going to be eaten alive by a giant cockroach in the basement of a video game company. My parents would be so confused.
ZAP!
The cockroach feeling me with its antennae suddenly disappeared. All of the others looked up. Before they could do anything — ZAP! ZAP! ZAP! — they all disappeared too. Eric stood in front of me, holding what looked like the scepter thing Loki has in The Avengers — only it was super high-tech, so maybe if Loki was a robot, I guess?
“This just popped out of that computer over there!” Eric yelled. “I’m gonna take it home!”
“Where’s Mark?!” I asked.
“What?!”
I got right in Eric’s ear. “WHERE’S MARK?!” The EEEEE sound had gotten so loud that it was almost impossible to hear anything that wasn’t shouted directly into your ear.
Eric shrugged. Then his eyes got real big, and he pointed over my shoulder.
There was Mark, underneath a pile of fu
rballs from Go Wild. For every one he threw off, two more would jump on. Eric aimed his scepter and started zapping furballs off the pile. After four or five, Mark was able to squirm out and take off. Eric and I ran after him. “We’re coming!” I shouted.
Mark turned around and yelled something, but I couldn’t make it out because of all the noise. He put his head down and sprinted as hard as he could through the computer towers. After 20 seconds of sprinting, Eric had fallen behind, but the furballs and I were gaining on Mark. Suddenly, Mark threw a small metal ball over his shoulder. I slowed down. What was —
BOOM!
All of the furballs disappeared in a blinding flash, and I fell onto my back so hard that the wind got knocked out of me. For a second, everything was quiet. Then the ringing started. Mark ran to me and started talking, but I couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in my ears. Finally, he leaned in real close and screamed, “SUPER GRENADE! I’M SO SORRY!”
I nodded to let Mark know I was OK, then gasped. Behind Mark was a group of 10 kids who’d also been trapped in video games. They were gathered in a semi-circle to watch a battle between Eric and a giant, walking robot. Eric kept trying to zap the robot with his scepter, and the robot kept rolling away. After the third unsuccessful zap, the robot smacked the scepter out of Eric’s hand and picked him up.
“NO!” I ran to help my friend. Right before I could pick up the scepter, the robot snatched me too. It lifted both of us up to its face, looked us over for a second, then rolled back its helmet to reveal a girl with a blonde ponytail at the controls.
“STOP TRYING TO KILL ME!” she yelled in a British-ish accent. Eric and I just stared with our mouths open. She could see that we were scared, so she tried a different approach.
“I’m Sam,” she said.
“Eric.”
“Jesse.”
“Now please stop trying to kill me.”
Eric gave her a thumbs up, and she set us down. As soon as we touched the ground, Mark motioned us over to help a group of kids cornered by a pack of Starmanders. Eric grabbed his scepter and ran over.
“Hey!” I said before Sam lowered her helmet again. “Can you help us clear a path to the exit?”
Sam grinned, excited about her new job. “No worries!”
POW!
Before Sam could put her helmet back down, a sand monster the size of a house appeared behind her, wound up and punched her robot as hard as it could. She went flying across the room.
“ROOOAARRRRRRR!”
The sand monster beat its chest like King Kong and started walking toward the Starmander battle. I frantically looked around for something to stop it. There, behind a nearby computer tower, lay another Full Blast arm cannon. I rolled over, clipped it onto my left arm and started charging.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I said. I felt the THUD-THUD-THUD of the sand monster’s lumbering and peeked out from behind the tower just in time to see him grab a particularly small kid. I looked back to see that my cannon was glowing white, telling me it’d reached full blast. Without hesitating, I rolled out from behind the computer and blasted a hole right through the sand monster’s chest.
The monster looked down at the hole, then at the kid in his hand, then finally at me. It growled and flexed. The hole started closing up. The monster kept growling and flexing until it had totally healed itself. Then it threw aside the kid and started running at me.
CHAPTER TWO
Robot Girl
POW!
Right before the sand monster could reach me, Sam’s robot knocked it into next week with its giant fist.
Sam opened the helmet. “Get out of here!”
I scrambled away as the sand monster came back, angrier than ever. It wound up and took a swing at the robot that could have knocked down a building. Sam somehow dodged the punch and countered with a blow to the monster’s stomach. The hit made the monster stumble backward a little bit, but it also swallowed up the fist in sand. Sam tried to pull the robot’s fist back out, but all that did was topple the sand monster over on top of her. As the two wrestled on the ground, I ran back to Mr. Gregory, who was still sweating and typing on his laptop.
“Mr. Gregory, how can we help her?!”
He shook his head. “At least she’s got robot armor to protect her,” he said. “Look.” He pointed to his screen. Hundreds, maybe thousands of red dots had begun surrounding pockets of green dots. “These green dots are kids, and they don’t have any protection. I need you and Eric to keep them safe until I can shut off the power and get the door open. Use anything you can get your hands on.”
I nodded, blasted a cockroach that was sneaking up on the left and jumped onto a floating snowboard-looking thing that had just popped out of a computer. “How about thi… Whoa! WHOA!”
The board took off on its own. The only other time I’d ever stepped onto a snowboard was when Eric’s cousin Evan had brought one to our sledding hill two years ago. “Hop on,” Evan had said. “It’s easy.” Snowboarding down the hill, I discovered, was surprisingly easy. Stopping was not. When I reached roughly the speed of a bullet train, I panicked, toppled over and used my face as a brake. I hadn’t approached a snowboard since.
I flailed as I picked up steam. “ERIC!” I yelled as I passed him. “HELP!”
“Whoa!” Eric said. “Where did you get that?!”
“JUST HELP BEFORE I CRASH!” I circled again, doing my best to dodge bad guys and computer towers.
Eric tossed me something. “Use this!”
A jetpack. Great, so now instead of an out-of-control torpedo, I was about to become an out-of-control flying torpedo. I strapped on the jetpack and lifted off. Once I made it above the maze of computers, I could see that the bad guys had begun forming mobs with other creatures they knew. To my right were the aliens from Full Blast. The Go Wild creatures had teamed up on the left. Up ahead were robots and go-kart races and ghosts — and towering over everything, still trading punches, were Sam and the sand monster.
“Sam!” I yelled as I zoomed toward the battle. By now, Sam’s robot had parts hanging off of it and wobbled when it walked. I zoomed in just as the sand monster raised both of its fists to deliver one final blow. “HEY!” I yelled while flying under the monster’s armpits. The monster roared and turned its attention to me. I flew around and around while the monster swatted. As I circled the monster, I heard a crackling sound and smelled something burning. I looked down to see that I was flying so close that I was cooking him with the flame from my jetpack. The sand around his chest had turned black, and he was having trouble moving. Then, just as I was feeling pretty good about myself —
SMACK!
I ran right into one of the sand monster’s hands. It closed around me and pulled me toward its mouth. I flailed and screamed until —
POW!
Sam’s robot punched the sand monster in its brittle, jetpack-baked chest, which was enough to finally disintegrate it. The monster fell backward and dropped me into a pile of sand.
“Thanks heaps!” Sam said.
“No, thank YOU!”
That’s when we heard a chorus of screams to our left. “Got it,” Sam said.
Just then, another voice called out to our right. “HELP!”
“Got it,” I said.
Sam nodded, grabbed me with her robot hand and tossed me toward the scream. I flew across the battlefield until I found the source of the noise — a kid surrounded by a river of tiny robot ants. I turned off the jetpack and rode toward the kid on my hoverboard. “Hop on!” I yelled.
He grabbed me and swung onto the board just as the robot ants started climbing his pant leg. “Thank you!” he said as he brushed off the pests. I wanted to tell him that maybe he should hold off on his thanks because he might have been safer with the ants than with the world’s wobbliest hoverboard operator, but I chose to nod instead. It took all my concentration to stay upright as I looked for a safe place to stop, which is why I never even saw the blast that ZIIINGed right by my fac
e.
“WHOA!” ZIIING! Another blast fired past me on the left side. I looked up to see that I was staring down the barrel of a robot turret machine gun. I pulled back and fell down in the middle of the aisle right on top of the kid I’d saved.
RATATATATAT
The turret continued blasting away, but we were protected by the hoverboard still strapped to my feet. Since I’d fallen straight back, the hoverboard stuck up in the air like a shield. During a pause in the RATATAT, I leaned left and took a shot with my arm cannon. Miss. RATATATATAT. Pause. Another blast. Another miss. That’s when the hoverboard disappeared and reappeared.
Uh oh.
Based on previous experience with jetpacks, I knew that the hoverboard would blink a few more times before disappearing for good.
RATATATATAT
This would probably be my last shot. I charged up the arm cannon while counting one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi to time the next blink. When I got to three-Mississippi, I fired straight ahead. As soon as the shot left my blaster, the hoverboard disappeared, giving the blast a straight line to the turret. The shot hit its target, and the turret fizzled, popped and pooped out.
“That was awesome!” the kid behind me said while holding up his hand for a high five. I didn’t have time to return the high five because I heard another voice.
“HELP!”
It was a familiar voice. “JESSE! MARK! ROBOT GIRL! ANYONE, HELP!”
It was Eric.
I lifted off with the jetpack and took off toward the voice. “I’m coming, Eric!”
After a few seconds in the air, the jetpack started blinking. Nononono. “Eric! Where are you?!”
“OVER HERE!”
He sounded close. Come on, just a few more seconds. Blink. Blink. Blink. Gone. The jetpack disappeared for good, and I tumbled to the ground. “Eric!” I yelled. “I’m com…”
Right then, something ran into my back, pushing me to the ground and knocking the wind out of me. I turned over with an “oof” to see glowing red robot eyes staring back at me. Then another pair of eyes joined it. And a third. A scary drone thing with a claw for one hand and a drill for another started lowering toward my face.