The helicopter scene from Alex's perspective.
Alex was conflicted. He was in the Transportation Shed once again, this time with his new friends Spencer, Fridge, Martha and Bethany (who was stuck in a man's body despite being a gir - correction, woman).
Even though he had already told them that he wasn't a good pilot, the four newcomers seemed to be eagerly expecting him to know which vehicle to take; and worse still, to actually fly them to the Jaguar Statue!
Martha bounded into the room, full of excitement after having single-handedly defeated the NPC guards. The others rushed to congratulate her. Good for her, and good for them, Alex thought. Every one of them still had two lives apiece, and he wished he still had that luxury and their confidence, to boot.
However, Fridge did not seem as joyous as the others. Apparently, he had spotted the "motorcycle freaks" coming for them, and was telling everyone that they needed to leave right away. Alex knew what was coming next, and he wished he were anywhere else at that moment.
"Seaplane!" Fridge called him, pointing to the helicopter. "We need to fly, man!"
"Nope!" Alex replied dismissively. "I can't do it. I told you, I'm not a good pilot!" He looked about anxiously, and spotted another large vehicle nearby. "Maybe we should take the school bus!" he said, gesturing to it. Alex knew he was grasping at straws, but the last thing he wanted to do was to fly an aircraft again.
"But, we can't outrun no motorcycles with no d*mn bus!" cried Fridge indignantly.
"You picked the plane and the hot air balloon," Bethany interjected. "Maybe you were supposed to pick the helicopter!"
"No, I can't do it, okay?" Alex insisted. "I don't wanna die!"
There was a brief silence from the four newbies. They almost couldn't believe such lack of courage and confidence from their rescuer.
"I'm freaking out, a little bit," Alex fibbed. In reality, he was absolutely terrified.
"Fine!" barked Fridge drunkenly. "I'll do it. How hard could it be, it's a helicopter!" He then proceeded to give an overly-simplistic and totally inaccurate description of how to fly a helicopter; and Alex, having Seaplane's knowledge of flight, was fully aware of this. However, even the need to save the team from being killed by Fridge's horrendous piloting wasn't enough to coax the old aviator out of retirement.
"Alex," said Martha finally, "if I can fight those guys, you can fly this helicopter, I know you can. Come on!" Alex paused to look at her. She reminded him so much of his old gym teacher, who always used to encourage him in sports when he didn't feel like it.
"Alex," she said again, more persuasive this time; "this is where we need you."
"Remember, you're the missing piece," Bethany chimed in.
Alex looked at them for a long while, their words sinking in. This really was about them, he thought, not about him. He had been wrong. Up to this moment, he had been so self-absorbed, so concerned about his own safety that he had failed to take the needs of the other players into account. He had been playing Jumanji for twenty years, he now knew; but during all that time, he had never needed to look out for anyone but himself.
But he was no longer alone. Providence had sent him four new teammates, and he was a part of their team, rather than them being part of his. Which meant that it was his duty to put the needs and interests of the Team, first. And right now, the Team's greatest need was for a pilot to get behind the controls of a helicopter and fly them all to safety!
Slowly, Alex nodded in agreement, and broke into a smile for the first time in a quarter hour. "Seaplane McDonough, reporting for duty," he said, putting on a pair of cool shades. "Let's go, people!"
His four teammates cheered, and all the players trooped into the waiting helicopter together.
Alex climbed into the helicopter's cockpit, while the others filled the passengers' seats. Tapping into Seaplane's flight expertise, he skilfully ran a blitz pre-flight check and started up the engine. The shed rumbled and shook from the draft of the aircraft's whirling rotor blades.
Alex pushed the stick forward, and the helicopter burst out of the shed into the open air. Gunfire and rockets from the motorcycle mercenaries whizzed past them, but Alex did not care. He had to get his teammates safely to the other side of the canyon; he just had to!
Suddenly, he heard a clang somewhere above him, and the helicopter controls jammed in his hands. The aircraft began to lose altitude, and Alex started to worry. He took off his sunglasses and quickly tried to figure out what had happened.
"What's wrong?" Bethany asked him with concern.
"Something's broken!" he cried.
"What!" shouted Spencer.
"What do you mean?" cried Martha with horror.
"Hang on!" Alex told them, as the helicopter blades began to chew up the foliage around them. They were in serious trouble. Again.
The rotors made contact with a tall coconut tree, and the helicopter started spiraling out of control into the canyon. The passengers screamed. "Oh my God, we're about to die, we're about to DIEEE!" Fridge yelled in terror.
Alex barely heard any of it. He was strangely calm and in "the zone". All he could hear in his head was dialogue from the 1995 film 'Toy Story':
"Buzz! This is the part where we blow up!"
"Not today!"
Purely on instinct, hardly thinking, Alex pulled and wrestled with the controls. Pull up, he said inwardly as he willed the aircraft to rise, pull up!
Almost obediently, the helicopter began to stabilise and come out of its spin. Sure, they were still losing height rapidly, but at least they were roughly flying forwards again. Alex gave the controls a final mighty pull, and thankfully, the aircraft leveled out at a few feet above the bottom of the canyon.
"Oh my God!" Martha wailed in fear.
"It won't go up!" cried Alex desperately.
"What do you mean?" asked Martha frantically.
"The collective is busted!" Alex told them.
"What?" called Spencer.
"It controls a plate up there, which tilts the rotors and controls the pitch. It's how we go up and down," Alex explained quickly, drawing from Seaplane's comprehensive knowledge of aircraft.
Helplessly, the helicopter kept on flying a few feet above the canyon floor, unable to climb to a higher altitude. Suddenly, the dreaded Jumanji drums sounded again.
"Guys?" asked Bethany worriedly.
"That can't be good!" Martha declared.
"There's no way that's good news!" Fridge agreed.
The five heard loud thundering noises behind them, and Fridge was struck with horror when he saw what was causing it. "Albino rhinos!" he shouted. "They're indigenous to Jumanji. They're huge, white, scary and stupid and they eat people!"
"No!" Bethany moaned in despair.
At another time, the other four would have been amazed to listen to Fridge spout useful facts about jungle animals. But in a hairy situation like this, such information did little to comfort them.
Desperately, Alex tried his best to manoeuvre the helicopter around the tight bends of the canyon. He was so busy trying to make sure they did not crash, that he had little time to listen to what his passengers were saying.
"My stomach is starting to bother me a little bit," said Fridge drunkenly. "I think I had too many margaritas."
"Go up!" Martha cried. "I can't go up!" said Alex again.
"You guys, what are we gonna do?" asked Bethany fearfully.
"I'm gonna fix the helicopter!" said Spencer at last, with resolve in his voice.
"Yes!" Bethany rejoiced.
"Tell me what to do!" he told Alex.
"Okay," Alex replied. "You've gotta connect the flight control rod to the swashplate under the rotors!" he instructed.
"Flight control rod - swashplate - under the rotors," Spencer repeated to himself. "I'll be right back!" he told the others.
"What?" Martha asked in confused horror. "Spencer, where are you going?!" she cried as she watched Spencer climb out onto the side of the helicopter.
"Hurry up!" Fridge urged him.
"Be careful!" Martha pleaded anxiously.
"No, no!" contradicted Fridge. "Just hurry up!"
Alex tried to keep the helicopter flying on a straight and level path. This was by far the most intense situation he had ever been in, and it seemed to become more challenging with every passing minute. He tried not to think about the fact that he was on his last life, or that failure here would result in the deaths of not just himself, but of his teammates as well. Every fibre of his being was focused on keeping the helicopter in the air for another second more.
Meanwhile, Spencer was outside the aircraft, trying to fix the damage and help them ascend. Alex prayed that the Doctor would be able to restore the helicopter's flight capabilities quickly, for he was not sure how much longer he could keep the fancy flying up.
Suddenly, the helicopter jerked to the side. The rhinos had caught up to them! Alex struggled to keep the aircraft steady. He heard Fridge and Martha screaming behind him, and he increased their flight speed by a tiny fraction in an effort to outrun the rhinos.
The tactic seemed to work for a few seconds, but then a new problem literally appeared in front of them: A wall of rock lay a few hundred yards directly ahead, making the canyon a dead end.
"Spencer!" called Martha, desperately trying to alert him to the danger. "Hurry! Come on, fix it!"
With the dead end approaching fast, Alex had no choice but to slow the helicopter down in order to buy Spencer more time. This left the aircraft's tail at the mercy of the stampeding rhinos behind them, and the vicious beasts did not hesitate to butt the helicopter with their horns.
This was a crisis. Alex's piloting skills were being tested to their very limits, and he was close to the breaking point. The aircraft was being battered repeatedly from behind, a wall of doom up ahead was coming closer and closer towards them, his passengers were screaming in terror, and Spencer still hadn't fixed the damage to the helicopter!
This was it. It was now or never. They needed to pull up now or they would crash into the wall in a matter of seconds. "We're running out of time here, Spencer!" Alex cried out to his teammate frantically.
His prayer was answered. There was a *click* below the rotors, and Alex heard Spencer's voice call out, "Got it!" Without wasting a second, Alex pulled up on the controls, and miraculously, the helicopter responded perfectly this time. Before anyone knew it, they were going up, up, up and away from the rhinos, the canyon and that dreadful place.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. They were okay!
"We made it!" Bethany exclaimed joyfully. "You did it!" she said to Spencer. "I thought we were gonna die. Yes!" she whooped.
"Nice!" called Alex, with the biggest smile he had had in years.
"Thank you," gasped Spencer, as relieved as everyone else to be alive.
"That was scary!" laughed Martha.
"Whoops," said Fridge.
Everyone turned to the zoologist. "What?" asked Spencer.
"I dropped the jewel," Fridge admitted sheepishly.
"WHAT?!" cried Alex, Spencer, Bethany and Martha in unison.
"You dropped the jewel?!" Bethany screamed.
"I leaned over, thought I had to puke and I didn't, and it came out of my backpack," Fridge explained.
Martha facepalmed. Spencer and Alex groaned. "We need the freaking jewel!" Bethany shouted.
"I know," said Fridge lamely. "That's, that's, that's the crazy part and I know we need it, so now we're in a pickle, we're in a pickle."
"Alex, turn around; we gotta go back and get it," sighed Spencer.
"Yeah, let's just loop around," said Fridge. "Just look for it, guys! Everybody open your eyes. Let's all just look for it as a group."
Reluctantly, Alex turned the helicopter around and headed back down into the canyon. Everyone kept their eyes peeled for any sign of the green gem.
Bethany was the first to spot it. In reality, it wasn't that difficult to do, as the rhinos were all circumambulating the Eye as if it was a holy object. "What are they doing?" Martha asked.
"It's like they're protecting it, or something," Spencer remarked. Retrieving the gem from the midst of the rhinos would not be an easy task.
"Alright, how are we gonna do this?" asked Alex, as he lowered the helicopter to give everyone a closer look.
"I don't know," Spencer replied, a look of concern creasing his brow.
"We've gotta go get it, right, buddy?" Fridge asked him, with some chutzpah. "What do you need? Do you need your boomerang? Maybe...maybe some scissors? A pipe wrench? Some shoelaces? I'm your valet. Whatever you need, I can get it for you, okay? You just say you want it."
Spencer was giving Fridge a funny look. "What?" asked Fridge in puzzlement.
"I'm sorry, buddy!" said Spencer regretfully. "Sorry for what?" asked Fridge.
He didn't have time to say another word before Spencer hurled him out of the helicopter. Bethany gasped. But Alex understood; Spencer was using Fridge as bait in order to draw the rhinos' attention away from the jewel.
Sure enough, the rhinos soon abandoned the jewel and went stampeding after the poor zoologist. Alex flew over them to where the Eye was, and dropped Spencer off to collect it safely. Having retrieved the McGuffin, Spencer threw it to Martha and climbed back into the helicopter.
"Turn us around!" Spencer ordered, and Alex obliged. He flew the helicopter down the canyon in the same direction that the rhinos were travelling in. Of course, Fridge had been trampled to death by the beasts already, so Alex was wondering how exactly they were going to pick him up as he respawned.
Suddenly, Spencer said, "Alex, get ready to roll us to the side!"
"What?!" Alex asked. That was an odd move to make while flying in a helicopter. Just then, the chime of Fridge respawning sounded overhead, and Alex understood. They wouldn't need to land after all.
"When I tell you, roll 90 degrees to the right!" Spencer instructed. There was a brief pause, and then Spencer shouted, "Now!"
Alex rolled the helicopter onto its side, and Fridge fell straight down through its open left door. Spencer caught him on his way out, and the zoologist was left dangling by Spencer's arm out the helicopter's open right door.
"You pushed me out of the helicopter, jack*ss!" Fridge shouted angrily.
Nobody else was mad. They were all just too happy to have the jewel, a fully-functioning helicopter, and an open sky leading to freedom. Spencer returned Fridge to his seat, and Alex was free to pilot the aircraft leisurely at last.
Glancing out of the helicopter's side window, Alex suddenly spotted a particular feature of the aircraft that he hadn't noticed before. Recalling what had just happened to Fridge, as well as his special 'backpack power', Alex realised something that made him facepalm.
Why didn't we just shoot the rhinos?