"C'mon, Maggie!" Alex said, twirling her garrotte. "It'll be fun."

I groaned. "Fun? The last time we tried that, we ended up in the Boston Harbor. You can't exactly call that fun."

"Well, yeah," Alex admitted, nudging the flappy thing of the recycling chute with a pink-laced hiking boot. "Still, it's better than Soccer to the Death."

"That was an utter fiasco," I agreed. "But can't we just…I dunno, stay in our rooms and have some more safe fun?"

"I'm bored," Alex said with a shameless shrug. "Fine. Let's go do Pottery to the Death."

"Tyr's tush!" I exclaimed. "Never mind, I'll take the chute."

Alex smiled. "Thank you for your cooperation. Now get in."

Grimacing, I stepped into the chute. It didn't stink nearly as much as I remembered, but that didn't mean it smelled good. "Um…"

"Just do it," Alex said, practically kicking me down the chute. I didn't even have time to take a deep breath before I began falling. I could hear her behind me, banging into various pieces of half-recycled gunk.

I landed on a solid floor of stone, which was pretty unusual. I was about to haul myself up, but Alex chose that moment to fall from the sky, knocking me back onto the ground.

"Cool!" Alex shouted, having got onto her feet. "I never knew there were ravines in Boston!"

I stood up gingerly. "Ravines?"

We were at the edge of a gigantic canyon. And I mean all-caps GIGANTIC. So gigantic that I started getting vertigo just by looking at it.

"I don't think this is Boston," I said.

"Obviously, Maggie," Alex replied, rolling her eyes. "We must've ended up in Jotunheim or something."

"Seriously?" Jotunheim, the realm of Jotuns/giants, was basically this giant frozen wasteland. It seemed to have two standard modes: winter, and Jotun-infested winter.

"Yeah, it might be spring there. You never know."

I sighed and pulled my pendant/sword from my neck. "Jack, are we in Midgard or Jotunheim?"

"Never gonna give you—um…" Jack, having elongated into his true form, started to glow a shade of purple. "We're in Midgard. I guess."

His uncertain tone surprised me. "What do you mean, you guess?"

Jack started shuffling around. (Can you shuffle around in midair?) "I just can't really sense the inner workings of this place. Like in Midgard, I sense you mortals eating pizza and doing homework and whatnot. In Muspell, I can sense those fire giants having a disco from fifty miles away."

"Disco?" I imagined Surt, my favourite killer/spare-time bridge destroyer, lounging in a ballroom, drinking from a twenty-foot-long flamethrower. "Never mind. Can you transport us back to Valhalla?"

Silence.

"Jack?"

"Gahhh!"

I whirled around, just in time to see a stranger in a pig mask—which looked absolutely terrifying, as if they wanted us to think "Oh my god pigs are creepy and I would never eat pork again"—flip Alex onto the ground. Jack had already floated up and started dueling the stranger.

"Wilbur!" the pig guy shouted, swinging his axe so forcefully Jack had to do a somersault to avoid it. "There's intruders!"

Alex sprang forwards, cracking her—no, his—garrotte like a whip. He managed to cut off part of the guy's mask, revealing steely gray eyes and a very irritated scowl. Now that pig guy was dueling two people (if Jack counted as a separate person), he was finding it a lot harder to return their attacks. Still, he attacked with such force and skill that I wondered if he was an einherjar. Few einherjar were allowed to roam freely in the Nine Worlds, but we couldn't be the only exceptions.

"Magnus!" Alex was shouting. "Do your summery glow thing!"

It took me a second to comprehend that she meant the Peace of Frey. See, my dad's this super peaceful nature god dude, so when I'm caught up in a fight, I can deprive everyone around me of their weapons. Pretty cool, though I need a pretty long recharge time.

I took a deep breath and thought of that hiking trip to the Blue Hills. Its details had grown dull with use over the years, but the memory achieved its effect. I shouted until my lungs began to throb, energy forming a sphere of light around us. Alex's snapped garrotte and the pig guy's axe went flying into the ravine.

"Thanks a lot, Maggie," Alex said cheerfully, pulling his backup garrotte—the golden one made of Sifhair—from his sweater/kilt and pointing it at his enemy. "Surrender?"

"Surrender," pig guy, smart enough to acknowledge that Alex could kill him faster than he could kill Alex back, said with a nod. "That was kind of cool." He directed the last sentence at me.

I nodded in acknowledgement. "Your axe skills are pretty good."

"Thanks. Necessary for survival. Is your sword floating or is that someone in an invisibility potion?"

"Invisibility potion?" Alex asked, quirking an eyebrow.

"Yeah. Never heard of that before? Where are you two from? You don't look very Manberg, but new members never really do. Boomerville?"

We gave him the universal "We have no idea what you're talking about" stare.

"Dry Waters? Unaligned? C'mon, you must have a faction. Everyone has a faction."

"Um…we're from Valhalla?"

Alex shot me an annoyed look.

"Valhalla?" pig guy mused. "That's interesting. Never heard of it though. Did you two found it?"

"Found Valhalla? Holy Frigg, are you insane? Valhalla existed millennia before we even showed up!" Alex exclaimed.

"Millennia? Are you two, like, immortal? Phil's immortal too. He's got these gray wings. He used to fly around a lot when he was younger. Bashed headfirst into a tree once."

Alex and I traded looks. The guy was clearly not an Einherji—which Einherji hasn't heard of about Valhalla?—but I couldn't think of anything else he might be. Normal mortals don't walk around with axes. He was too friendly for a Jotun, too annoying to be a god, and too obviously humanoid for a fire/frost giant. I wondered if he was my old friend, Utgard-Loki in disguise.

"First of all, where are we?" Alex asked. "Who are you, and what was all that talk about factions?"

"Uh…you're in the Dream SMP. Basically just this pot of chaos, according to Tommy. I'm Technoblade. And—"

He was interrupted by a young man dashing towards us. He looked maybe four or five years older than me, though he looked much older with his nerdy glasses and ratty trench coat.

"Techno!" he yelled. "Techno! They're having this festival thingy."

"What?" Techno yelled back. "Where?"

"Manberg! Tommy dashed off and told me to get you." The man glanced curiously at us, his gaze lingering on Jack, who was humming a Taylor Swift tune to himself. "Who are those people?"

"Um, new friends." He turned towards us, a mischievous glint in his eyes. "What are your names?"

"Magnus Chase, Alex Fierro," I said, sticking out a hand mock-formally. "That sword who's singing 'Speak Now' is Jack."

"Okay," Techno said, grinning. "Ready to do some party crashing?"