Alex returns home.

Alex came to himself in the midst of darkness. It took him a moment to realise that he was back in his own bedroom, in the real world. He looked down, and saw that he was dressed in the same pyjamas he had worn when he left.

How long had he been gone? Spencer, Fridge and Bethany had told him that he had disappeared from his home for twenty years. But if two decades had gone by, why did his room look exactly like how it did in 1996 – posters, decorations and all? Did his parents care about him that much?

Anxiously, Alex hurried downstairs to check the calendar hanging in the living room. To his surprise, it showed the date of his disappearance: December 15, 1996. No time at all had passed since he got sucked into the game! He was home – back in his own place, and in his own time.

Alex gave a silent whoop of joy as he tiptoed back to his room and climbed gratefully back into bed. He had been wondering how he would explain his long disappearance to his parents, but now he didn't have to worry about that. Instead, the whole incident could simply be swept under the rug.

Alex paused. No, he did not want to sweep Jumanji under the rug! How could he? Two decades living alone in a jungle, going on the adventure of a lifetime? The things he'd experienced, the friends he'd made – was he simply to forget them?

Most of all, was he to forget Bethany? The girl from the future who had sacrificed a life for him? He wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for her! Every day he would live from now on was a gift from her, and Alex knew he would be an idiot not to honour her memory always.

The thought of Bethany suddenly made Alex realise something else. His new friends had come from twenty years in the future – his future. Even though he had been laughing and joking with them only a few minutes earlier (according to his reckoning), he now saw that he would need to wait two whole decades to meet them again. Worse still, even though his house was familiar to Spencer, Fridge, Martha and Bethany, he had no idea what they looked like in real life, and he doubted if they knew what he really looked like either. How would he recognize them twenty years from now?

Alex groaned. If he knew it was going to be like this, he wouldn't have shaken hands with Nigel so quickly. Instead, he would have exchanged a few more words with Bethany, asked the others where they lived, what their phone numbers were… Alex shook his head thinking of all the missed opportunities.

Eventually, he realized that he needed to preserve everything he remembered about Jumanji and his new friends before the details faded from his memory. He leapt out of bed, pulled out his notebook, turned on his desk lamp and began scribbling furiously. Spencer Gilpin. Fridge, the football player. Martha, the bad*ss girl. Bethany, supposedly a looker in real life. What would a 'phone' be twenty years from now? The names, appearances, strengths and weaknesses of their avatars. The levels they'd gone through and the various ways they'd lost their lives. Van Pelt and Nigel Billingsley. Alan Parrish and his lifesaving treehouse.

When it was all written down, Alex slumped back in his chair, exhausted. What else was he supposed to do now? he thought. His eyes wandered to his television set and his gaming console, with the Jumanji cartridge still plugged into it. Of course! he realised angrily. He needed to destroy the game so that no one could ever play it again!

Alex yanked the cartridge out of its socket. He was about to snap it in two and hurl the cursed thing into the trash, until he remembered the time-travel movies he had watched as a kid. In Back to the Future, Marty McFly's actions in the past significantly changed his life in the present. Terminator 2 explored what might happen if people tried to alter future history by destroying something important today. And most pertinently, the protagonists in The Final Countdown actually allowed the attack on Pearl Harbour to take place in order to return to their own time.

Could that be what he was meant to do? Alex wondered. His return to 1996 was, in a way, dependent upon Spencer and Co. joining the game in 2016. If he destroyed the game now, they would never find it and play it, thus potentially undoing the whole time loop.

Alex massaged his temples. Time-travel questions like these were enough to give him a headache, even more so in the middle of the night. He never dreamed that all this would happen as a result of his dad finding a stupid board game on the beach during one of his early morning jogs. Come to think of it, why was the game on the beach in the first place? Could a previous player have tried to dispose of it in the sea, only for it to be washed ashore later? Alex remembered Alan Parrish, the mysterious builder of his treehouse. Could he have been the one who did it? Perhaps he was a passenger on a cruise ship, or something.

Gradually, Alex began to see a way out. Supposing Alan had dumped the game into the sea to get rid of it, he had failed miserably. Somehow, the game had escaped destruction and managed to ensnare Alex, Spencer and their friends. If, however, Alex kept the game to himself, then perhaps he could have more control over it and actually prevent others from playing it.

Realising this, Alex gently placed the Jumanji cartridge back into the board game case where it had first materialized. He would guard this rectangular box and its contents carefully over the next twenty years. When the time was right, he would donate the console and cartridge to Brantford High School, where he knew four teenagers would be serving detention come 2016.

Alex looked out of his bedroom window and saw the first streaks of dawn begin to light the sky. It was a new day for him, in more ways than one. As he crawled back under the covers to catch up on lost sleep, he thought once more about Bethany. Man, did this remind him of that 1988 Tom Hanks movie called Big…