When Saffie tried to leave the house nonchalantly, her mum stepped in front of her, blocking the passageway.

“Just where do you think you’re going, young lady?”

Saffie had been thinking of possible excuses for leaving the house since seeing the golden scroll icon on the map, and in the end, she’d settled on something she knew her mum would be unlikely to discourage her from doing.

“I’m going to… meet some of the girls from school,” she lied.

Her mum blinked a few times.

“What girls from school?”

“Oh, you know - Elizabeth Locke, Harriet Higgins… Beatrix Hawthorne.”

“After they made those pictures of you yesterday?” Holly said curiously.

“You said I needed to fit in, right?”

There was a moment of silence in which Saffie tried to hold her mum’s glare.

“What time will you be home?” Holly said, seemingly satisfied.

“In time for tea,” Saffie chirped happily, not quite believing her luck. Her mum was obviously so desperate for Saffie to be accepted that she didn’t dare question the situation any more.

With a smile on her face, Saffie trotted past her mum, Acorn bouncing behind her. There was no way she could tell her parents the truth. If they found out she was playing a video game, the same video game that had put Dax into his coma, she’d be locked up for the entire summer and Dax would be trapped in that state indefinitely.

As soon as Saffie stepped out onto the street, she stopped and opened her mouth in awe. Across the road there was a giant snail whose shell had six eyeballs embedded into it, each blinking separately, on one of the neighbour’s walls there was a striped lizard type creature that suddenly flared its gills at the sight of her, and going around in circles in the middle of the road was some kind of hedgehog, except instead of needles its back was covered with leaves.

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And those were just the ones at eye level. As Saffie tilted her head to the sky, she could see all sorts of strange flying creatures, some bright red with flames trailing them, others that looked liked winged cats with tails twice their length, and there was even a family of swooping manta rays that glided through the air as if underwater.

Suddenly Saffie had to step backwards as a floating medley of drainpipes, rusty nuts and bolts, and scraps of metal bobbed past her. As it clanked along, minding its own business, it left behind a trail of sludge.

This was no longer the London Saffie recognised.

As Saffie rode a hot and humid bus south through the boroughs of Camden and Paddington, she goggled at the colourful creatures on the other side of the glass, while Acorn seemed to have taken a liking to the perm of an elderly woman sat in the seat in front of them, not that the woman would have felt his prodding paws, thankfully.

When they arrived at Kensington Gardens, Saffie spotted a bulging red wasp the size of a seagull which had three stingers, but thankfully the area was, on the whole, a little quieter. She had no idea which beasts were hostile and which were harmless, so her best bet for staying safe while she claimed her advantage was staying as far away from them as possible.

Saffie took a breather when she reached the park’s Peter Pan statue, opening her map to see where she was in relation to her advantage. According to the little icon, her scroll awaited her just a few hundred yards to her right, inside a thicket of trees.

Saffie strode into the thicket, but grabbed a tree and hid behind it when it opened into a clearing.

In the centre of the clearing was a wide stump, and there, floating just an inch above the surface of it, was the golden scroll. Her advantage was there for the taking, aside from one small problem:

There was a boy hanging around.

He was about the same age as Saffie, with shaggy, chestnut brown hair and a denim/sheepskin combo jacket, which she thought was ridiculous given the current temperature. It looked like he was waiting for a date or something. The clearing certainly made for a romantic spot. Saffie hoped she didn’t have to watch someone’s awkward first kiss.

Saffie thought about ignoring him, but she could hardly just bust on in and grab an imaginary object from the stump. He’d think she was stark raving mad.

As she waited for the boy to leave, she noticed that there was a white hawk-like creature circling above the clearing. It had to be an Overworld creature, as it looked a little too exotic to be real. When it began descending, Saffie hoped it wasn’t coming to attack her in her hiding place.

But it had no interest in her.

Instead, it came swooping down in a steep dive and settled on the boy’s shoulder.

As Saffie peered closer, she realised there was a blade of some kind slotted into his belt on his right hip. Knife crime in London was rife, but this was no simple pocket knife - this was the kind of jewelled ceremonial blade only found in fantasy fiction or… video games.

He suddenly turned to face the scroll and reached for it.

This was no ordinary boy. This was another player.

And he was about to steal Dax’s gift.