“Tomorrow,” Liam said. “Same time. I’ll write down the relay key.”

“No way,” she breathed. “It worked.”

The fluorescent lights of the school library hummed a low, steady note, a stark contrast to the frantic tapping of Liam’s keyboard. He hunched over the cracked Chromebook, the glow of the screen reflecting in his wide eyes. Around him, the after-school crowd was thinning out—kids heading to sports, detention, or the bus loop. But Liam, Maya, and their friend Jordan had a different destination in mind.

“That’s where the trick comes in,” Liam said, opening a new tab. He typed about:blank to hide his tracks, then navigated to a site he’d memorized: a WebRTC signaling server test page. “We’re not opening a normal LAN. We’re creating a virtual network over the browser itself.”

He explained quickly: Eaglercraft 1.8.8 had a hidden feature. If you opened a single-player world, then used the “Open to LAN” option, the game generated a local port. But that only worked for people on the same Wi-Fi. The library Wi-Fi, however, was locked down—students couldn’t see each other’s devices.

When the librarian announced fifteen minutes until closing, Liam saved the world and closed the laptop. The server dissolved like a dream, the relay address going silent.