“Ugh! Not again!” Jonah Louise screamed as he slammed his fist on the desk. It was the tenth time that he had lost to the UFO Monster in Space Marines. “I will never be able to beat this game! Ever!!!!” His younger sister Simone came barging into the room. She was chubby with dark brown hair and braces. She also couldn’t beat the UFO Monster. “Not now, sis,” he grunted. “I’m busy.” “Well, me too,” she yelled, “I can’t beat the UFO Monster!!!” “Me neither,” Jonah said wearily, “I guess we could help each other.” So the two sat in front of their computers, their fingers busily working away at the controls. After three hours of futile attempts, they sat back, exhausted. “This is impossible,” Simone moaned. “I couldn’t agree more,” Jonah shot back. But while they were staring at their computer screens, thinking, Simone suddenly saw something. “Jonah!” “What?” he yawned. “Look, see that button in the upper left hand corner?” “Yes,” he replied. “It says Help!” Simone said excitedly. “So?” Jonah asked, wondering what his sister was on to. “That’s how we pass the level! Using the Help Button!” Simone announced “Oh yes!” Jonah cried. “That’s it, sis!” And then he pressed the Help Button. A couple of things started to happen at that precise moment. First of all, the house started to rumble and shake. The ground cracked in half and the two found themselves staring at a dark hole of emptiness. Jonah got butterflies in his stomach, and Simone was just plain scared out of her wits. Instantaneously, the siblings were plunged into that hole of emptiness. It felt as if they were on a roller coaster with no seatbelts. Jonah and Simone were falling down, deeper and deeper and deeper. They were too overcome with shock and surprise to utter even a sound. Finally, there was a huge thump, and they found themselves on flat ground once more. But Simone and Jonah were not in Jonah’s room. They didn’t even know where they were! The place they were in was a strange one. It was chilly, and dark. Only a dim glow emanated from where the two were standing. They were moving, too. Going around in circles. Jonah commented, “This place looks oddly familiar….almost as if I’ve been here before. The two were silent before Jonah yelled, “Yes! I know where we are. We somehow landed in our video game Space Marines!” Simone looked around in awe, realizing that her older brother was right. “Wow!” she said. “This must have happened when I pressed the help button!” A frightening moment of panic passed between the two of them. “Oh no, but how do we get out?” Simone cried. “That’s what I’m wondering too,” Jonah said thoughtfully. “HOW DO WE GET OUT OF THIS PLACE!!!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. At that instant, a mysterious voice spoke out of nowhere. “You must beat the game, and only then you will be able to go back home.” And then all was silent, until a loud buzz went off. All at once, they shot up like a rocket and UFO’s were flying at them from all sides.

Meanwhile, back at the Louise’s house, Mrs. Louise answered one phone call after another. She was a full-time caterer at the restaurant Corner Bakery since her husband, Mr. Louise, recently passed away due to skin cancer. She was very stressed out as she had to raise, support and feed her two video game addicted children. It was an extremely busy day for some reason, and she was on the phone organizing deals with customers for so long that she didn’t realize it was almost 7 at night. Oh my, the kids must be starving, she thought, I can’t believe they haven’t come down and said anything to me! She went upstairs to Jonah’s room. Nobody, just open computer screens. Then she went to Simone’s room. Nobody as well. Then Mrs. Louise started to panic. She frantically ran around the house, searching left and right, up and down, until she was exhausted. Mrs. Louise was a very easy to panic person. About an hour later, there were cops surrounding the house looking for evidence of the kids’ disappearance and had over one hundred missing signs posted in their neighborhood. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the police chief Jones remarked, “No trail of evidence, nothing. We’ve searched every crevice, examined all the fingerprints. The newest fingerprints they had were touching their computer keys. We will keep searching, miss, and we will find them.” It was not going to be a pleasant night for Mrs. Louise, as she was so overcome with worry that she couldn’t sleep a wink.

Back inside the video game Space Marines, Jonah shouted over the noise, “Hey, Simone, it’s the UFO Monster!” “Except this is real! We could get killed!” she shouted back. Huge flaming UFO’s whizzed around them. The two were focused on surviving now, with thoughts of getting home safely in mind. Their thoughts became smaller as they soon realized they were tiring of continuously leaping over objects thrown by a machine that could last forever. Jonah yelled, “We need a strategy, Simone, otherwise we will lose! I know, I’ll distract it while you get an object and throw it at him!” “Done!” Simone yelled back. “Ahhhh!!! Hey monster! Come and get me!” Jonah taunted. The UFO Monster turned around and stared at him coldly. The UFO Monster was intimidating and frightening at the same time. With its steel hard stare, long arms and massive round frame over 15 feet tall, it could kill someone by merely looking at it. Jonah, however, was not afraid. He was used to seeing it on his computer screen. The UFO Monster took out 5 flaming UFO’s in one hand and was about to throw it when it suddenly fell with a loud groan. “Nailed it!” Simone smiled triumphantly. “Great job, sis, it worked out perfectly!” There was the UFO Monster, lying on his back with a flaming object stuck in it. Then the mysterious voice from out of nowhere spoke again, “You have passed the first level. Pass this next level and you will be able to go back home.” Jonah and Simone shot up again, this time landing on the planet Mars. It was completely red and dusty, very hard to breathe in. It was windy as well, but dry. But only moments later did the sudden mob of aliens start to attack. Jonah and Simone panicked, running anywhere there weren’t aliens. Soon there was nowhere to go and they were surrounded by them. “Vat are thy names?” a large alien with a gold crown, probably the king, asked. “J…J…Jonah and Simone,” Jonah coughed out. It was more in fear that he stuttered, not the fact that he was staring at little green people with misshapen faces. “You are vezy lucky,” the king alien said, “for we have only one more room in our jail. So it will either be zhe boy or zhe girl. Vhich von, fellow aliens?” Some language that sounded like nonsense to Jonah followed for a couple minutes. Then the king alien said, “we aliens have decided to take zhe girl. Aliens, take her away!” About a hundred buff looking aliens picked up Simone and carried her into a circular vehicle that looked like a space ship. It was very small, and Simone barely squeezed in. But before the king alien left, he turned around and said, “I vill wait one minute for you to decide: zoo you want to get demoted a level and save thy sister or go on wizout her. I vill begin now.” So a minute passed, and with one second to go, Jonah peeped, “Okay, okay, I will take Simone and get demoted a level.” “Vell, zoo made zor choice,” the king alien said. His aliens took her out of their spaceship and put her on the ground. “So long zen,” the king alien waved, and his spaceship zoomed off into space. The mysterious voice spoke once more. “Being demoted back to the first level,” it announced. The two went flying down, and landed once more near the volcano where the UFO Monster lived. But Jonah noticed something queer as soon as they landed. He picked up a dusty, parched yellow map that led to the core of the game, where it could be shut down forever. “Oh my,” Jonah cried out loud, “this is the map to shut down the entire game! We must get rid of this!” He was about to throw it in to the flaming volcano. “No!” Simone shouted as she yanked it from his grasp. “We must use this to shut down the game! Don’t you see! This is an addictive trap! We must shut down the game!” There was a loud whirring sound as the UFO Monster came to life. It hurled a few UFO’s at the two, who avoided them with ease. “Let’s go!” Simone cried. The two ran as fast as they could. Leaping on one molten rock after another, they used the UFO’s like launch pads. They crossed the Ocean of Death, with mighty sharks jumping and attacking. Simone nearly fell into the ocean! Then the two arrived at the core, the Space Control Center, sweating and exhausted from their run across the video game. The Space Control Center was a massive building with bright lights, kind of like the Coliseum in Rome except made of steel. There were many guards posted outside and inside, where they saw the Evil Magician, who manipulated young minds by creating the game. All at once, the guards attacked, and Simone and Jonah found it to be crazy. Jonah would attack, then run, and Simone would do the same. It was a good strategy, though, since the guards were human and not robots. They soon had them all down and entered the Control Center. They walked up two flights of gold-embroidered steps and arrived at the Command Room. Jonah and Simone then found themselves facing the Evil Magician. He had a pale white face and wore a dark, black cape. He had blood red fangs for teeth, and wore a type of coat that looked like Dracula’s. He was bald, and he had no nose besides the two holes on his face. The Evil Magician spoke, in a deep, raspy voice, “Get out of here!” “No!” Simone stepped forward and faced the magician. Jonah’s mouth dropped. He had never seen Simone stand up to someone like that before. At school, Simone always got bullied by kids and do whatever they told her to do. “We have come to shut down your precious mind-manipulating game!” she exclaimed fiercely. “Never!” the magician attacked. Taking out a diamond-encrusted wand, it sent a jet of water shooting at them. Jonah dived out of the way and made for the shut down button, but the magician was quick. He sent him sprawling on the floor with a quick wave of his wand. Meanwhile Simone had taken a pencil and was using it to deflect all his shots back at him. He was so busy doing this that the Evil Magician didn’t notice when Jonah crept up behind him and was almost at the shut down button. “Get away from there!” the Magician held Jonah up in a choke hold. The life was slowly draining from him. Time seemed to slow down. As Simone debated what to do, she could see the color draining from Jonah’s face. From red, to pink, to now white, with his face getting whiter by the second. That was enough for Simone. A mad anger drove her to jump on the magician and tackle him with all she was worth. He fell down with a loud grunt and Simone triumphantly pressed the shut down button. The button glowed, and then died back down. Suddenly the two shot up into the air, through the clouds, and then started falling again. Deeper and deeper, until plop! The two found themselves back in their chairs, in front of their computers. “Yeah,” Jonah said, “I think I’m done with computer games,” and he closed it. “Yeah, me too,” Simone said as she closed hers. Their mom came rushing upstairs soon afterwards. “Oh, my, it’s you two! Where have you been this whole time?” she asked frantically. “Mom,” Jonah and Simone said together, “it’s a long story.” Then the two walked outside, holding hands, and played soccer together. Jonah and Simone know that they will never, ever touch a single video game again.