I Woke Up In The Nether

Matthew Doyle is eleven, and he has read every page there is about the Nether. At 4 AM on a laggy server he steps into a portal and falls asleep at his keyboard during the four-second warp — and the transition never finishes. The frame on the other side is four blocks short at the top. No purple. No link. No way back. He works this out in his first hour, and it buys him nothing, because nothing here is broken. There is no glitch, no curse, nobody who did this to him. Every mechanic behaves exactly the way the pages say it does, and a correct Nether with a real body in it is already hell: no sky, only bedrock. Water evaporates. Compasses spin. Beds explode, so he is never going to sleep again. Then he meets Toby, who has been down here long enough to stop counting and has never played Minecraft in his life — a kid who calls the ghasts the crying ones, whose names come from watching instead of reading, and whose names keep winning.