Into The Badlands

Chapter 1
Night had fallen on the Animal Jam Wiki. Most of the users were asleep at their computers, but a few still typed groggily. Music played from a few of their computers.

At the end of one row, Silver typed quietly on his computer. The quiet harmonica of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska played around him. On one side, Gray, bureaucrat of the Animal Jam Wiki, slept, head on his keyboard. Technically, bureaucrats had their own individual quarters, but Gray had steadfastly refused to use his, and lived in the quarters with the rest of the users.

Silver leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. Without effort nor thought, he entered that state where one is not entirely asleep, but they are not conscious of their surroundings. It's a state we all know.

In his eyes, no sooner had he closed them than he was jolted back to full consciousness by a clamoring and screaming.

A metallic rod had appeared in the center of the table, fully five feet long and two feet wide, slightly tapered until it reached a pyramid at the top. It was square in build, similarly to...

"The Washington Monument!" Gray blurted out. He was one of those "I-talk-before-thinking" people we've all met one time or another.

A ragged circle had formed around the table where the obelisk stood, with the righted users farther in, protecting the rest. Silver and two other users, Basil Karlo and Agent Spy, joined them.

Slowly, cautiously, Gray stepped forward and touched the obelisk. It did nothing. He poked it with a pencil. It did nothing.

"Whaddya want me to do, tap-dance around it?" he muttered. Light glowed feebly, and then was extinguished. It was aqua blue, the color of a tropical sea. Illuminating the scared faces of the users, just for a moment, it prompted Gray to take off his hat, bow to the obelisk, and tap his sneakers on the wooden floor a few times. The light glew brighter.

Gray announced, "It appears to want us to tap-dance. I can't. Can anyone else?"

Basil stepped forward, his face flushed in the dim light of the stars outside. "I can," he said in the smallest voice imaginable. When no one heard, he raised his voice a little. "I'll do it!"

Putting a few feet in front of the other, Basil Karlo tap-danced magnificently. Silver half-heartedly clapped a few times, and then stopped as the blue light glew blinding.

When the light dimmed to a manageable level again, Gray and one of two other bureaucrats, Uni, were both wearing identical pairs of black sunglasses.

Gray took them off, blinked a few times, put them back on, and said in a Morpheus voice, "What if I told you that these sunglasses don't work?" He was interrupted when the surface of the obelisk began to move.

Gray, Uni, and the third bureaucrat, Chief, crouched and watched as words materialized, a lighter blue, highlighted against the sea-blue light.

''Wikia is littered with dead wikis, abandoned by their creators, who cared naught for helping them, but just wanted to feel powerful creating something. Most are pointless wrecks, poked at once in a while, but mostly left to suffocate and die on their own. Your wiki is near the center of Wikia. But mine is far, far from it. An age of dusty, hot dirt has accumulated between us two. There are dangers many, and you must face them. Pick your group. Fifteen, and fifteen only. If you pick more, they will not make it here. Fifteen. Come to me, at the edge of where the stars flee forever. And save me. For your survival depends on it.''

There was utter, stone-hard silence for three perfect seconds, and then Gray spoke. "I'll get to packing, then."