Ghast in the Machine! (Minecraft Woodsword Chronicles #4) Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  © 2020 Mojang AB and Mojang Synergies AB. MINECRAFT and MOJANG are trademarks or registered trademarks of Mojang Synergies AB. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019, and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  rhcbooks.com

  minecraft.net

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Eliopulos, Nick, author. | Flowers, Luke, cover illustrator. | Batson, Alan, interior illustrator.

  Title: Ghast in the Machine! / by Nick Eliopulos ; cover illustrated by Luke Flowers ; interior illustrated by Alan Batson.

  Description: New York : Random House, [2020] | Series: Woodsword Chronicles ; book 4

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019032758 (print) | LCCN 2019032759 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-9848-5062-1 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-9848-5063-8 (library binding) | ISBN 978-1-9848-5064-5 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PZ7.E417 Gh 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.E417 (ebook) |

  DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781984850645

  Cover design by Diane Choi

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Meet the Players!

  Prologue: Who’s Honking Now?!

  Chapter 1: Stay in School! Unless It’s Full of Wither Skeletons. Then You Can Leave.

  Chapter 2: Desert Before Dinner! Its Time Has Come!

  Chapter 3: The Robot Janitor Ate My Homework!

  Chapter 4: You Say “Potato.” I Say “Duck!”

  Chapter 5: Buried Secrets! (But Just So You Know, One of the Secrets Is Spiders.)

  Chapter 6: We All Scream for Screen Time…or Because the Halls Are Filled with Hostile Mobs!

  Chapter 7: Looking for Group! Finding Trouble!

  Chapter 8: Maybe Bending the Rules Is Less Messy Than Breaking Them.

  Chapter 9: Overworld Tour! Don’t Forget to Pack Snacks. Also Torches, Potions, Wood, Ore, Tools, and Pork Chops.

  Chapter 10: I Spy with My Little Eye…a List of Suspects.

  Chapter 11: Give Me an A ! Give Me an I ! What Does It Spell?

  Chapter 12: Surprise! the Evoker King Is…a Llama? Wait, That Can’t Be Right.

  Chapter 13: Home, Sweet Home! Except There’s Nothing Particularly Sweet About a Haunted Mansion.

  Chapter 14: Answers, at Last! And Let That Be a Lesson: When in Doubt, Ask a Librarian.

  Chapter 15: You Can Blow Out the Candles, but Don’t Close Your Eyes!

  About Minecraft

  About the Author

  A figure stood in a darkening forest.

  She was all alone. At first, that had been exciting. But as the sunlight faded, the woods grew more sinister.

  There were noises in the distance: Sounds of shuffling. A strange, deep-throated honk. She didn’t know what was making those sounds, and she didn’t care to find out.

  She needed to leave. And that meant finding the portal. It was nearby, somewhere among the trees.

  But all the trees looked the same.

  She’d gotten turned around.

  Those noises were coming closer. The woods were getting darker.

  And she knew with utter certainty that she was no longer alone.

  Jodi Mercado’s mouth hung open with amazement. She was walking the hallways of Woodsword Middle School, just as she did on most days. She saw the bench where she drank her milk every morning. She saw the trophy case in the lobby and the colorful bulletin board just outside of Doc Culpepper’s classroom.

  It was all so familiar. But Jodi wasn’t at Woodsword Middle School. Not really.

  She was inside a copy. A fake. It was a life-size re-creation of her school. Somebody had built it in Minecraft, brick by brick, faithful in every element down to the placement of the chairs in each classroom.

  “I’ll say this about the Evoker King,” she said. “He has an excellent eye for detail.”

  Her friend Po Chen nodded in agreement. Today he was dressed in an astronaut skin. “The Evoker King is also super talented at creeping me out,” he said. “Because right now? I’m fully creeped out. Like, all the way.”

  “It certainly is eerie,” Ash Kapoor agreed.

  “But why would he do this?” Harper Houston asked. “Why go to all this effort? There must be a reason.”

  “I know why: he’s messing with us,” said Jodi’s older brother, Morgan. “He’s probably watching us right now and laughing.”

  The five friends had been playing Minecraft for years. Recently, however, they’d started connecting to the game through experimental VR goggles. The goggles made the game utterly real. They could feel the blocks beneath their feet and the tools in their hands. When they were attacked by hostile mobs, they even felt pain.

  What was more, ever since donning those goggles, they had encountered all sorts of strange anomalies—and outright strangeness—in the game. And at the heart of that strangeness was the mysterious figure known as the Evoker King.

  They didn’t know who he was or what he wanted. But he seemed able to twist the rules of the game. Many of Minecraft’s well-known rules simply didn’t work the same here. And since they were inside the game, living it—that made him very dangerous indeed.

  Some kids might run away from dangerous mysteries, but not Jodi. She ran toward them—sometimes she even skipped and jumped toward them. She loved solving a good mystery. It was lucky for her that Morgan, Ash, Harper, and Po all wanted answers, too.

  “Huh, that’s weird,” Po said. He was leading them through a set of doors and into the gym.

  “This whole thing is weird,” Jodi reminded him.

  “Well, yeah,” said Po. “But look. Certain things, like the gym, are only half done.”

  Jodi looked at the far end of the large, boxy room. Po was right. The Evoker King had filled the space with bleachers and basketball hoops, but there was no back wall. Instead, the gym opened on a view of the Nether.

  Jodi shivered at the sight. The Nether was a spooky place, with flowing lava and floating bricks. In the distance, creatures moved across the red sky.

  “Maybe he ran out of materials?” Harper guessed.

  “Or maybe he wanted a giant doorway for a giant creature to step through,” Ash said. “There are plenty of hostile mobs in the Nether. And some of them are big.”

  “Just when you thought gym class couldn’t get any scarier,” Morgan said.

  Jodi patted his shoulder reassuringly. She knew her brother had never managed to do a pull-up.

  “Let’s keep looking around,” said Po.

  They left the gym, went up a flight of stairs, and walked slowly down the hallway. Morgan peered through every window they passed. All the doors in the school had a little built-in window.

  Well, not all of them. The bathroom doors had no windows. They stood closed. Jodi had the sudden realization that anyt
hing might be lurking behind them.

  “Should we check in there?” she asked.

  Po nodded. “I am curious to see what Minecraft toilets look like,” he said.

  “As long as they don’t smell too realistic,” Jodi said.

  Morgan pulled open the door. There was nothing on the other side. Just a wall of brick blocks.

  “I guess this toilet’s out of service,” Po joked.

  “It’s the same thing here,” Morgan said. He’d opened the next door to reveal another wall of bricks. “This is supposed to be a supply closet.”

  “Doors to nowhere,” Harper said. “Interesting.”

  “Did you guys hear something?” Ash asked.

  “Is it the morning announcements?” Po rubbed his hands together. “I hope it’s Taco Tuesday here!”

  “Shhh!” Ash said. Then she whispered, “I’m serious. I heard something.”

  Jodi pressed her ear to the brick. “I don’t hear any—”

  At that moment, the classroom door across the hallway shattered into digital pieces.

  They all screamed, whirling to see a creature emerge from the shadowed doorway. It was a skeleton, but its bones were black. It held a stone sword in its bony hand.

  And it swung that sword right at Jodi.

  She flinched. But before the blade could touch her, Morgan stepped in front of her. He held up his shield and knocked the skeleton’s sword aside.

  “Thanks, big brother,” Jodi said.

  “Thank me later,” Morgan said. “For now, just run!”

  As they ran down the hallway, classroom doors burst open all around them. Skeletons stepped from the doorways, each one black as night and armed with a sword or a bow.

  “They’re wither skeletons!” Ash cried. “Don’t let their swords cut you or you’ll fall under a wither effect.”

  “That sounds bad,” said Jodi.

  “It is bad,” said Morgan. He kept his shield raised as he ran. “The wither effect is like poison. It slowly drains your health.”

  “Avoid the swords,” Jodi said. “Got it.”

  A flaming arrow soared past Jodi’s head. Another struck the floor near Harper’s feet.

  “We should avoid the fire arrows, too,” Po said. “That’s just a guess!”

  “They aren’t supposed to have those,” Morgan complained.

  “Just keep moving!” said Harper and Ash in unison.

  “We can worry about the Evoker King’s upgrades to mobs after we get away from them,” Jodi added.

  They all hurried down the stairs, through the lobby, and out the main doors. Jodi almost expected to see the schoolyard’s flagpole, bushes, and fountain. Instead, there was the fire and darkness of the Nether.

  And in the distance…a cool purple light.

  “I see the portal!” she said. “We can make it!”

  But wither skeletons were pouring out of the building like kids on the last day of school. They launched dozens of flaming arrows into the air.

  Jodi jumped for the portal. Her vision blurred as she was enveloped in purple light.

  When her feet touched down on the other side, her friends were right behind her. “That was close,” said Po as he appeared.

  A flaming arrow soared through the glowing portal. It nearly struck the visor of his astronaut helmet. “Too close!” he cried.

  Ash took a pickaxe to the portal. She knocked away a piece of the obsidian frame, and the purple light was extinguished. “There,” she said. “Nothing can follow us now.”

  “Uh, friends?” said Harper. “Anyone know what happened to our excellent undersea fort?”

  Jodi gasped. She’d been too distracted to realize it, but Harper was right. The portal from the Nether should have led them back to the underwater monument they’d been using as a base.

  Instead, it had dropped them in an immense, barren desert.

  Po let out a long, low whistle. All else was quiet and still.

  A vast expanse of sand stretched out before them. Morgan’s head swam--if that was the right word when one was standing in a desert biome. The voices of his friends filled his ears with questions.

  “How is this possible?” asked Ash.

  “Maybe we went through a different portal?” Harper suggested. “We might have gotten turned around in our rush.”

  “No way,” Po answered. “We scoped that whole area out. If there had been more than one portal, we would have noticed.”

  “We all know how this happened,” Jodi said. “It’s the Evoker King. It has to be.”

  A moment of silence stretched among them. Finally, Morgan sighed.

  “Redirecting portals?” he said. “That is some madcap modding.”

  Ash nodded. “If he can do that, then he can go anywhere in the Overworld at any time. He can secure any resource. Move mobs around. There may be no stopping him.”

  “So why come here?” asked Harper. “If there’s logic to his actions, I’m not seeing it yet.”

  They stared at one another as they each contemplated the question. When no answers came, Po said, “Let’s look around.”

  After being in the enclosed walls of the fake school, the desert felt huge. There were some low, rocky mountains in the distance. Everything else was sand and cacti. The square Minecraft sun was high above them. Morgan was grateful they didn’t feel heat here or need fresh water. In the desert, they were more likely to find lava than water.

  “Watch your step,” he said. “No one walk in any lava.”

  “Lava?!” Jodi froze, scanning the sand around her feet. “Okay. What else do we need to know?” As a fan of Minecraft’s Creative mode, she was often surprised by details of Survival mode. Many of the surprises were unwelcome ones—at least to her.

  “Well,” Morgan began, “you won’t see many animals out here. Maybe some rabbits. Hostile mobs, on the other hand, spawn like crazy at night. We’ll want shelter before the sun gets low.”

  “The good news is you can really see the mobs coming,” Ash said. “There aren’t many places for them to hide in all this flat, open land.”

  “Or for us to hide,” Po said. “I’m guessing we’ll be building a burrow tonight.”

  “Like the rabbits.” Jodi laughed. “You need a bunny outfit, Major Po.”

  Ash was still peering into the distance. “Is that…?”

  She gasped, then gripped Morgan’s arm. “Everyone take cover,” she hissed, and she pulled him behind a cactus.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What did you see?”

  “Something that doesn’t belong here,” she answered. “Do you see those mountains? Do you see what’s right in front of them?”

  Morgan looked where Ash was pointing. At ground level, there was a cave in the mountains. It looked like an entrance to a mineshaft. And in front of it…

  “Are those vexes?” he asked.

  Vexes were small, flying, ghostlike mobs. And Ash was right. They did not spawn in the desert.

  “Three of them,” Ash said. “It almost looks like they’re guarding that cave. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  “I think we left normal behind a few weeks ago,” Morgan said. “And if they’re guarding the cave, that must mean there’s something worth guarding.”

  Ash grinned. “Then we should find out what that something is.”

  “Agreed,” Morgan said. He looked up at the sinking sun. “Although it might have to wait. We should dig our burrow, set up our beds, and disconnect for the night. Then we can pick up back here tomorrow. Deal?”

  Ash nodded, keeping her eyes on the distant vexes. “Deal.”

  The real Woodsword Middle School didn’t have any skeletons lurking in its classrooms. But that didn’t mean there weren’t problems.

  It was early the n
ext morning when Po realized something strange was happening at the school. It started as minor annoyances. The automatic doors didn’t open for him at the top of the wheelchair ramp. The lights in the lobby’s trophy case were flickering. There was a low hiss coming out of the PA system’s speakers, like faraway static.

  He ran into Jodi, Ash, and Harper in the hallway. “Have you two noticed anything weird this morning?” he asked.

  As soon as he asked the question, the static was replaced by the sounds of a chicken clucking.

  “I was about to say no,” Harper said. “But now that you mention it…”

  Ash shrugged. “It’s probably just someone’s idea of a prank.”

  Po looked around suspiciously at their fellow students. “Speaking of pranks,” he said, “do you have any guesses who the Evoker King might be? It has to be someone at Woodsword, right?”

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve been looking into that,” said Jodi. She pulled a notebook from her backpack. When she opened it, Po saw that it was filled with the names of their classmates. Beside each name, Jodi had written an observation.

  “I noticed Missy Richenbacher spent ten minutes on her phone this morning,” said Jodi. “But we all know her parents limit her screen time on weekdays. So what is she up to?” She flipped to another page. “And Josh Berkoff is wearing a purple shirt and a black jacket today. He looks like a walking Nether portal! Is that a coincidence, or is he toying with us? Also, a jacket in this weather?”

  “Jodi!” said Ash. “Are you spying on our classmates?”

  “I’m spying on our suspects,” said Jodi. “And, Ash…everyone at Woodsword is a suspect!”