The Team makes a new friend.

"Wake up, ma'am, God d*mn it, wake up!"

The teenagers heard a frantic male voice call out from somewhere near the kitchen. Rushing to investigate, they found a stranger bent over the comatose form of Spencer's mother Janice, trying desperately to rouse her.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" cried Spencer in indignation. "Step away from my mom, please!"

"Your mom?" asked the stranger, looking up at Spencer in disbelief, then back at Janice. "Really?" he asked incredulously.

Spencer mentally kicked himself. He'd forgotten that he was now in Dr Bravestone's body, which looked nothing like Janice Gilpin. He'd have to explain the situation as tactfully as possible.

"Look here, sir," said Spencer politely, "this is going to be hard for you to accept, but the truth is that I am Spencer Gilpin, the son of this wonderful woman right here. And as such, I'm gonna have to ask you to step aside and stop touching her."

The stranger seemed to accept this explanation, and promptly stepped away from Janice's body, holding both his hands up to show that they were empty.

"Thank you," said Spencer gratefully. "And if you don't mind us asking, who are you and what are you doing here?"

The stranger relaxed and broke into a smile. "My name's Jake Coulson," he introduced himself, "and I was called here by Janice Gilpin to fix her downstairs heater."

A lightbulb went on in Spencer's head. The repairman! Of course! he thought to himself. Now everything made sense.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr Coulson!" exclaimed Spencer, shaking the repairman's hand warmly. "We've been expecting you! How long have you been here?"

"For about twenty minutes," Jake replied. "Is there something I should know about this house?" he asked Spencer quizzically. "'Cause I've seen some crazy sh*t during that time."

"Sh*t like what?" asked Spencer suspiciously.

"Well, first of all," answered Jake slowly, "I used to be black!" He gestured to himself, who was now a Hispanic male dressed in a military uniform, wearing a white armband marked with a red cross. "Then I touched some freaky video game console down in the basement, and got turned into this!"

Hearing this, Bethany had to stifle a laugh. Now she knew how the animals had been unleashed into the real world, and understood exactly what had happened to the poor repairman.

Fridge had a grin on his face too. "Welcome to the jungle, man," he told Jake as he stepped forward and gave him a warm pat on the back. "You've just been transformed into a video game character."

"I've been transformed into what?" sputtered Jake in disbelief.

"Let us explain," said Martha, stepping forward herself. "That video game console you activated isn't like any other on the planet. This video game comes to life! You actually become an avatar and experience the gameplay in the flesh."

"Well… sh*t!" exclaimed Jake.

"No sh*t," interjected Fridge. "And that means that this game, called JUMANJI, is more dangerous than any you've ever played. If you die here, you die for real."

"No way!" gasped Jake, his mouth hanging open at the prospect.

"Fortunately, you have us around to protect you and show you the ropes!" said Bethany. "The four of us are pros at this game – we've beaten it twice already!"

"Who the h*ll are you people?!" asked Jake. These strange individuals who had suddenly shown up at his client's house seemed to understand everything that was going on and were treating it like the most normal thing in the world.

Spencer paused. They had forgotten to properly introduce themselves to their new friend.

"Our apologies," he told Jake. "We've forgotten our manners. My name is Spencer, and I'm Janice's teenage son. Inside the game, however, I play this big, buff guy you see right here, called Dr Smolder Bravestone. Spencer's the player, while Bravestone's the avatar."

Jake's eyes narrowed, as he tried to understand what Spencer was telling him.

"These three people are my closest friends," Spencer continued, gesturing to the others, "Fridge, Martha and Bethany. We're all regular teenagers in real life, but since you started a new game twenty minutes ago, we turned into the characters you find inside the game. Just like you! You're a black guy in real life, but inside the game, you're this whole different person!"

"I see now!" said Jake at last. "I turned into this dude because he's a character in the game!"

"Yes!" exclaimed Spencer in delight. He was getting it! "Do you have any ID on you which could help us learn who your character is?" he asked.

"And please tap the area around your left pec," instructed Martha.

Jake gladly complied, searching the various pockets on his outfit for a document of any kind. He eventually found a small card inside his left breast pocket and gave it to Spencer, who handed it over to Bethany.

"Dr Salvador Dias," she read the contents of the card aloud. "Jumanji Field Medic."

"Strengths: Healing, Fitness, Chemistry," said Spencer, doing the same for the brown character stats menu which had popped up over Jake's head. "Weakness: Electricity."

"Oh, so that explains it!" said Jake, slapping his head in a sudden epiphany.

"Explains what?" asked Martha warily.

"Well, you see," said Jake matter-of-factly, "after I got 'zapped', I figured I might as well continue fixing the basement heater as I was called here to do. The moment I touched the d*mn thing, however, I got zapped again and started falling out of the sky."

Bethany gasped in horror, while Fridge simply facepalmed.

"When I got back into the house," Jake continued, turning to Spencer, "I found your mother here lying comatose on the floor. I was just about to use this defibrillator on her when you guys arrived," he said, holding the paddles up for the others to see.

Fridge marched forward and quickly knocked the paddles out of the repairman's hands. "Put that God-d*mned thing down!" he shouted. "The h*ll, man! You almost got yourself killed a second time!"

"A second time?" asked Jake in confusion.

"Yes!" exclaimed Fridge. "Roll up your left sleeve!"

The repairman obeyed, and rolled up his left sleeve to reveal a wrist tattoo with two black bars on it.

"You see?" scowled Fridge in frustration. "Those little bars on your wrist represent your lives inside the game. We all start out with three," he explained, showing Jake his own tattoo with three bars. "Messing around with the heater just cost you a life, and using the defibrillator would have cost you another. Trust me – in a game like this, you're gonna need all the lives you can get!"

"I see," said Jake, a little embarrassed at his own ignorance. "Still, I thought dying would've hurt a little bit more."

"Oh, there's plenty of hurt to go around where we're going," replied Fridge ominously.

"That's right," said Martha. "As our medic, we need you alive for as long as possible."

"Your medic?" asked Jake suspiciously.

"Yes," Martha explained. "We're playing a real-life RPG now, and every member of the team is important. It's your job to help heal us whenever one of us gets close to death, (which happens quite a lot). Once we beat the game, everything goes back to normal and you'll be your old self again."

Jake's eyes lit up with understanding and nodded. As an experienced gamer, he knew exactly what Martha was talking about. All of a sudden, the events of the past half-hour were starting to make sense.

"So, this is a video game come to life," he concluded with some satisfaction. "What's the mission?"

"We have a magic jewel called the Monkey's Egg," Martha told him. "A powerful sorceress named Manjeet is hunting for it, and we've gotta make sure she doesn't get it. If she does, the whole world falls under her control."

"Got it," Jake replied.

"There are also more avatars in the game than the five of us," said Spencer. "We're gonna need to rally the others if we hope to stop Manjeet."

"Where do we start?" asked Jake.

"Well," said Bethany, "there's an old friend of ours who lives on the other side of town…"

As she said this, the doorbell rang. Fridge ran to open the door and was shocked at the sight that greeted him.

It was Alex Vreeke, drenched from head to toe, with his young daughter Bethany by his side.

"What the h*ll did you guys do?!" he demanded.

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