Ant rounded a corner and spotted the chaser, hovering in a golden bandstand at the top of a hill. Hundreds of gamers were closing in on all sides. The counting-down clock appeared at the corner of his eye: he had just under a minute to reach the chaser. He realised it was trapped in the bandstand because a dolphin had caught it in a temporary lightning bolt, just to make everything weirder.
Ant put on a spurt. He did some parkour moves over Captain Scott of the Antartic and an entire woman’s football team and landed beside the dolphin with just four seconds to spare. He could see stats floating round the chaser’s head.
‘Hey, those were great moves,’ said the dolphin.
‘Thanks,’ Ant replied. ‘You’re a strong player, holding that enteo on your own.’
‘Level 25.’
‘Impressive.’
The clock turned red. Ant called out ‘Chaser!’ and placed his double fist over his heart. The crowd around him all did the same. Hundreds of different-coloured lightning bolts shot towards the chaser. It disappeared in a puff of smoke. The clock was replaced by the scoreboard, which whirred round, adding up the points earned by everyone: 1,582!
A message flashed up in the sky, announcing that in the previous five minutes, Westford Abbey had moved up to 589th position in the whole country.
‘Racer!’ someone shouted but, this time, not everyone ran off immediately. Ant had to stop to get his breath back and wait for his health to rebuild. The dolphin was doing the same.
‘Seriously, how do you get to be level 25?’ asked Ant. He didn’t mind flattering the dolphin in a friendly way.
‘By being the best,’ replied the dolphin, but the way she laughed told Ant she wasn’t taking herself too seriously. ‘No real sweat.’
‘I’d be shocked if a great player like you didn’t have that killer rareio,’ said Ant, playing along with her.
‘I’ve got at least a hundred in my cache,’ she replied.
‘Of course you have.’
‘By the way, I like your dragon,’ said the dolphin. She pointed at the fake Pradahl, who was standing beside him again.
Ant groaned.
‘Not too helpful, huh?’
‘Iron parachute helpful,’ he said. ‘It’s just a boring version of my real dragon from another game. In the real game, her name’s Pradahl and she really is impressive. You should see her.’
‘I wish I could. She sounds good,’ said the dolphin. ‘Personally, I prefer to travel alone. And now my health has rebuilt, it’s time to go.’
‘Okay, nice chatting with you,’ he said, meaning it. He watched as the dolphin swam off through the air. She’d seemed nice.
It took Ant a little longer to recover, then he and some other players spotted a racer disappearing into the forest and ran after it. The crowd gradually broke into smaller and smaller units until there were two or three players taking on each enteo. Every five minutes, a message flashed up saying where Westford Abbey stood in the league table. Sometimes it moved up in the rankings, usually it moved down. Westford Abbey was only a small town, after all.
9
Wanna Play?
Before leaving the house that morning, Griff checked his cache one final time. In his play-centre world, his low-level collectors were kept in a party room with tiny tables and chairs, balloons and streamers. Among them now sat the rareio he’d taken from his mum. It glared at Griff from behind the mask and snarled and rocked on its silly plastic chair which looked like it might collapse at any moment. The rareio’s picture appeared on a balloon tied to the back of the chair, which looked really silly. Griff felt embarrassed. He didn’t dare go anywhere near it. After each glitch, the rareio howled as if in terrible pain. When the pain stopped, it glared at him even more furiously. It was obvious that the rareio hated Griff more and more for corrupting it. Some stats had appeared at last around its head, but they were crackly and glitchy, not like they should be. As Griff headed off to the park, he wondered whether he could ever use the rareio in the game.
In Ray-Chay in the Park, since everyone was playing in the same place, instead of having to travel to your cache all the time you simply pressed a ‘C’ icon in the top left corner. For the first half hour after the game started, Griff didn’t need to do this, not having spotted any collectors or destroyers. But he still hoped he’d get the chance to try out the rareio. Even though he was scared of it, he wanted to impress Lyle and Boom. If he could use the rareio against a destroyer, he would be a legend. Word would spread around school and soon everyone would be in total awe of him. That’s why Griff insisted the three of them stick together all day. He didn’t want the other two to miss his triumph.
Normally, when someone else was playing in your Ray-Chay world, you would see them in a skin like your own. Today, for the first time, the three friends could see one another in their usual skins. Lyle’s character wore his soldier’s uniform while Boom’s was dressed in a tough boiler suit. Griff, on the other hand…
‘What’s that you’re wearing?’ asked Boom.
‘It’s a bit like a babygro,’ laughed Lyle.
‘It is NOT a babygro.’ Griff rounded on them. ‘It’s what astronauts wear in the space station. Don’t you know anything?’ He wasn’t sure if they believed him or not, but the next second, they spotted a chaser and were off again.
After catching the chaser in the forest, the scoreboard told them that Westford Abbey was currently in 918th place. ‘Oh man!’ said Griff. The three of them headed down towards a lake where, rounding a corner, they nearly collided
