Chapter 20

     “Ooof! …Ow…”
     “Drew, get off me.”
     “Where are we?” Heather asked, standing up with the rest of them. They were in a field of thigh-high (or in Heather’s case, waist-high) grass were giant daisies and dandelions littered the tops of the stems. “Strufis, is this somewhere near the woods we were at in your world?”
     He shook his head. “Not that I know of…”
     Anastasia sighed. “Aww, so it didn’t transport the car along with it.”
     “What happened with the translator?” Strufis asked, stepping towards Phillip. “Did you change the settings at all?”      Phillip grimaced. “Tried not to, but when the car rushed out, Drew smashed into me and it went haywire from there I guess.”
     “Hey, sorry, but I can’t help the laws of momentum!”
     Heather glanced around. “Did they follow us? Aren’t they here? I wonder if they realized that all Strufis had was Phillip’s graphing calculator…”
     Then, they spotted a few people in black suits, and some in green tunics, getting up out of the grass in the distance.
     Drew sighed. “Well, at least we got them away from the school…With so many things that went wrong, it’s a shock something went as planned.”
     “They’re coming this way!” Phillip exclaimed.
     “Quick, give it here!” Strufis took the translator from Phillip and attempted to recalibrate it. “Huh? Why won’t it switch settings…?”
     Their surroundings wavered…

     “Great. Where is this, now?”
     “You don’t know?”
     “It did this on its own…”
     They were all on top of a hill in a small wood. The sky was slightly hazy but it was a comfortable morning. Drew spotted the men in black they had spotted a few moments ago running in haphazard directions down the hill.
     “All right, kids. Be good and put that device down before you hurt anyone.”
     The Naturals apparently had wasted no time in positioning themselves around the five, presumably from the abundance of foliage that was their element.
     “No thanks. Change channels, please!” Anastasia said, pushing some random buttons on the translator.
     “Wait, it’s—”

     “—still jammed…” Strufis looked at it strangely. “Okay, was that us, or is it still acting up?”
     Now they were all standing in a seemingly abandoned desert city with earthy-toned buildings all around them. The sky was blue, clear of clouds.
     “Wait, this place looks really familiar…” Drew said warily.
     Phillip looked at him. “How so?”
     The Naturals and Mr. Templehill’s unit were within sight in-between the buildings, but whenever either group did catch a glimpse of them they seemed too bewildered to gather themselves together.
     “It seems like all of this warping is throwing them off…” Heather noted.
     “I guess it’s a good thing all five of us warp together,” Anastasia said, noting that they were all next to each other. “Otherwise the rest of us would be just as thrown off…”
     Drew looked at the ditch across from them that stretched down the street out of sight. In a flash, he dashed over to Strufis, shouting, “Guys! Warp out of here, now!”
     “What?” Strufis said bewilderedly. “Why—”
     “If we don’t get out of here fast, we’re all dead!”
     The other four’s eyes widened.
     “Okay, explanations later,” Strufis said as he pressed a button on the translator.

     Drew looked around. “Holy crap. Strufis, you’re awesome.”
     Strufis blinked. “Huh?”
     “This is freakin’ Mario Land!!” He began marveling at everything around them – the strange colored cubes floating around in mid-air, the arrowhead shaped brown creatures and red and green shelled turtles ambling about.
     “But what…what was up with the ‘we’re going to be dead’ part before…?” Strufis wondered.
     “Recognized a scene from an anime I know,” Drew answered, somehow still able to listen while poking around.
     Anastasia gazed out at the field, where most of both sides could be seen, but almost all of whom were too disoriented to see where they were going, much less where the five were. “Ooh, some of them are bumping into each other, now…”
     Phillip looked at Strufis. “So, what do we do now?”
     “I’ve got to figure out how to fix this thing. Right now it’s going to totally random coordinates if I touch anything. At this rate to get back to your world or my world we’d have to cycle through until we happen upon them—”
     “—which could be years or decades or eternity,” Heather groaned.
     “I know,” Strufis grimaced. “So I need to try different things and see what works…”
     “Did you try rebooting it?”
     “Reboot? No, not yet…” The voice behind Strufis sounded strangely familiar, and the five looked behind him.
     “Professor Enstrite?!”