“Make George jump, Jack! Come on, jump! Come on! You’re so lame! Now we can start all over again…” Gerry was terribly angry with his brother. They were about to do the most difficult level ever in the Purple Line game, the third time they had started, but Jack kept missing something.
“Game Over. Again! I can’t believe it! What’s so hard? All you have to do is press that button!”
“But I did, Gerry! I pressed it!”
Jack was on the verge of tears. As if it wasn’t bad enough that once again it was his fault that the whole thing had been lost, he wouldn’t get his homework done for the next day either, and all because Gerry wanted to start over and over again until they got to the next level. It was always like this.
“I wish I could play this stupid game alone! I would have finished all the challenges by now!” Fumed Gerry.
“I’m sorry… How about we swap now? Let’s see if that goes better. I’ll be the underground train driver and you’ll be Pop.”
“Okay, at least I can jump. Now, come on, get a grip!”” ““Game over. We will never complete this level!” said Gerry, as he threw the console into the corner and stormed out of the room. Jack was really crying now. It was always his fault.
The Purple Line game was a huge hit at school, and almost every morning the kids would start by comparing how many points they had scored the day before, and who had finished which level. A purple metro carriage was used to get around, and the object of the game was to get the little character named Pop to school. But it wasn’t that easy, since a big guy in a leather jacket called George was doing everything, he could to make sure it didn’t happen!
Only two players were allowed to play the game: one player controlled the underground train conductor and the other controlled Pop.
There was a practice track, but you could not score points on that: which was what Jack turned to know. Homework or not, he had to master the tricky jump to get over George’s sneaky obstacle.” “The next morning, Gerry still wasn’t speaking to him. They stood on the underground train platform like two strangers. Jack knew he would have nothing to brag about when they got to school.
“Wow!” His brother’s cry made Jack turns his head.
“Wow! A new underground train carriage! Wow, it looks great!”
“Just like the one in Purple Line! Completely purple!” Said Jack, shocked.
“Cool! Come on, let’s get on!” Gerry suggested, after the doors of the underground train opened with a soft hiss. ‘Stone the crows! It even looks the same on the inside!
“Shall we go through the carriages? I wonder if they are all the same!” said Jack, enthusiastically. His brother seemed to have forgotten all about sulking.
“Sure, come on!” The carriage left the station, and the two boys walked from handrail to handrail towards the door between the two carriages. But it was closed.
“Too bad, I wanted to look at the others, too.” Gerry said in a resigned voice.
“Gerry… take a look in the other carriage… that guy sitting there… he looks familiar, doesn’t he?”
Gerry followed Jack’s gaze, and his blood almost ran cold. From the other subway carriage, a large figure in a leather jacket grinned at them.” ““Something’s very wrong here,” Jack said.
“Didn’t you notice that we haven’t stopped anywhere for about five minutes now?” Gerry was also beginning to lose his usual courage.
Meanwhile, the man in the leather jacket in the other subway carriage got up from his seat and approached the door.
“Relax, Jack, if we couldn’t get across, he won’t be able to either…”
“Or maybe he can!” cried Jack, and alas: George had just punched in a code door, which then opened. The two brothers started running towards the back end of the carriage. George chased after them.
“Woah!” Jack exclaimed, as he fell onto his stomach when the train came to a sudden stop. George caught up with him and grabbed his schoolbag.
“You certainly won’t be needing this!” He laughed, and he jumped out of the underground train door with the bag in his hand, which had opened in the meantime.
“Jack! We can’t let him take your bag, let’s go after him!” Gerry shouted, and lunged after George. Jack just managed to squeeze through the door as it shut and the underground train left the station.
They found themselves at a completely unfamiliar stop, and George had disappeared.” ““What the hell is going on?” panted Gerry.
“It’s like… we’re inside the game now. There’s the clock, and the big blue poster on the other side with a tunnel behind it, just like in the game. Everything is exactly as it was on Level 13.”
The brothers looked around in horror. They were right at the stop on the very level from which they had been unable to progress in Purple Line for days.
“But Jack, that’s absolutely impossible! It can’t be real, it’s just a dream!”
“Oh yeah! Then where did my bag go? Who took that? One of Santa’s elves?”
“But what do we do now then?” Gerry was no longer the tough, dominant guy who had yelled so angrily at his brother the day before. He was also scared.
“I don’t know… in the game, you have to go into the tunnel behind the poster for this part. I’d try… well, maybe that’s what we have to do here too.”
The blue poster was indeed very easy to push to one side, and behind it was a dark, narrow and really scary tunnel.
“This should lead to the other station… and if it’s the same as in Purple Line, George will be at the ticket counter with my bag” Jack didn’t hesitate, he was already climbing through the hole.
“What’s the matter, aren’t you coming? It’s just a tunnel!”