Young Writers Society

It was a scrap of lined paper, seemingly torn out of a notebook. On it was scrawled,

System.out.println("Hello! My name is Robert.");

Sunny glanced at the rock skeptically. "So. Is your name Robert, or is there supposed to be some other human named Robert here?" She glanced around briefly, but her porch seemed to be devoid of beings named Robert.

Sunny considered the houses for a moment, then shrugged. Not all fantasy adventures had to take place in the Middle Ages.

Sunny had been expecting to learn to wield a sword, become a leader, and defeat some bad guys. Not figure out why code was breaking, or whatever was happening here.

"And then problem two is addition and subtraction, and the third one is division," Adelia sing-songed.

She started to dream about dancing semicolons and curly braces. But suddenly, streams of red text started floating in from all directions, entangling the punctuation and bringing the dance to a screeching halt. Sunny woke up just as the semicolons started screaming.

The room was dark, except for a red glow coming from the book Sunny had fallen asleep on. Sunny lifted her head as the book emitted a hissing sound, like air escaping a punctured tire, and ruffled its pages alarmingly.

Lines of red text burst out of the book and flew towards the window in front of Sunny. They slipped through a tiny crack between the window and the wall and floated into the night.

Sunny gasped. “The error descriptions!” She frantically grabbed at more lines of red text that were trying to escape, but they stung her fingers. Sunny gritted her teeth and tried to ignore the pain. But despite her efforts, the red letters kept slipping through, until at last the red glow dimmed to darkness again.

“Oh dear. At this rate, all information on errors will be gone within the month…" [Professor Polly] sighed. “Well, you’d better get started soon, then.”