CHAPTER 11

(PLANET AMIGO’S) GOD IS ON MY SIDE

CLAUDIA

Akash Gupta is Planet Amigo’s admin, which means he not only created the whole planet, but he can do whatever he wants on it.

So if you want to kill hundreds of soldiers and burn down somebody’s giant castle even though you’re so clueless you can’t figure out which button activates your sword, Akash is a very good person to know.

AKASH GUPTA, admin/god of Planet Amigo

It’s called Planet Amigo because me, Dave, and Kwame started planning it in Spanish class last year. Once the younger kids found out about it, the whole thing kind of exploded. Half the people on there now don’t even go to Culvert.

Some of them are from Finland, which makes no sense at all. I mean, how did they even find out about it?

But it’s a real hassle to be admin of a planet that big—like, I’m constantly getting messages from sixth graders accusing each other of griefing, so I have to ban them. And once a sixth grader’s mom called me because I’d banned her kid for griefing everybody, and I had to be, like, “Look, lady, your son is deranged.”

CLAUDIA

Let me guess: James Mantolini?

AKASH

Yeah. There’s something wrong with that kid.

Anyway, the crazy thing is, I hardly ever go on Planet Amigo myself anymore. I’m really into BluntForce now, so mostly I hang out on the multiplayer there. MetaWorld seems kind of babyish, to be honest.

But it’s still my planet, so I have to admin it. Which means I’m stuck putting all this time into being the god of a place where I don’t even hang out. It’s pretty annoying.

CLAUDIA

Akash is not only my friend Parvati’s older brother, but he’s also on Student Government with me. He’s the eighth grade class treasurer, and we worked together last year to get Culvert to do a fund-raiser for flood victims in Indonesia. Ever since then, we’ve been political allies. We’re basically as close as a sixth and eighth grader of the opposite sex can be without dating each other.

PARVATI

Ohmygosh, I thought you WERE starting to date for a minute there. That one day after school, you were, like, sitting in the cafeteria together for HOURS.

CLAUDIA

It was a very complicated negotiation. First, I had to convince Akash to help me. He was a little uncomfortable with the idea of abusing his power.

AKASH

I’m a fair god. I don’t like to mess with people just because I can. I mean, if one of the Planet Amigo regulars asked me to help him cheat, there’s no way I’d do it.

CLAUDIA

Fortunately for me, though, Akash had seen “The Vest Song” on ClickChat.

AKASH

Posting that was way harsh. I could see how you’d want to kick somebody’s butt over it. Also, even though I think your brother’s pretty cool, I really hate that Xander kid. He’s a punk. So I decided it was okay to help you, as long as you were just messing with those two.

CLAUDIA

What I really wanted was to kill all of Reese’s and Xander’s soldiers, burn down their castles, and make them respawn in the middle of nowhere with no goldz. But Akash wouldn’t go for it.

AKASH

It was just way too cruel. I mean, when I looked at how big Reese and Xander’s castles had gotten, I was pretty shocked. They must have spent, like, hundreds of hours of their lives on deathmatches to earn enough goldz to build those things.

CLAUDIA

Exactly. So it would have been a very important lesson in why you SHOULDN’T waste your life playing deathmatches.

AKASH

That’s a parenting thing. It’s not my job to punish a kid for wasting his life.

Like I said, I’m a fair god.

But I was willing to let you mess with them in the deathmatches. As long as you weren’t too obvious about it.

CLAUDIA

So I asked Akash to give me some kind of shield that’d make me impossible to kill. And lasers to shoot out of my eyes.

He wouldn’t go for either one of those.

AKASH

The thing is, if I made you impossible to kill, every kid in the deathmatch would see it and message-bomb me with complaints.

Plus, lasers in the eyes would have taken me, like, a hundred hours of coding to create. And no offense—I mean, I like you, but I don’t “hundred hours of coding” like you.

CLAUDIA

I totally got that. And I didn’t want to cause you any trouble. I just wanted to anonymously murder Reese and Xander a couple of hundred times.

AKASH

Basically, you wanted to be invisible.

CLAUDIA

Exactly. And when you suggested that, it made total sense.

AKASH

Invisibility was easy. I didn’t even have to code it myself. I found a mod online and installed it in, like, five minutes.

But then I had to spend a couple hours teaching you how to kill people in deathmatches. Even when you were invisible, you were pretty hopeless.

CLAUDIA

I know. I basically suck at video games. Thank you for being so patient! And for making me invisible. I REALLY appreciate it. Seriously, you are a god.

AKASH

Yes, I am. And you’re welcome.