We're just guessing here, but we suspect Jaxxyn Wood's parents aren't going to be telling him to put down his controller and go to sleep anytime soon.
The 12-year-old gamer is being hailed as a hero for saving his family from a fire in their Danville, Kentucky home last week.
Wood was pulling a marathon post-Christmas play session when he began to smell foul-smelling smoke sometime around 3:30 am on Thursday morning,
"I was on this kind of important mission and I smelled something really funky - and I thought it was me - but then it wasn't," he told Kentucky’s WKYT. "I went downstairs and I saw the ... smoke and I was like 'Oh crap! That's pretty much a fire.'"
When he went to investigate further, he found smoke in the hallway and saw that the kitchen's ice machine had caught fire. He made a brief effort to put the fire out, but quickly ran upstairs to wake his sisters and parents to evacuate the home.
The fire eventually spread to the kitchen and dining areas of the house before firefighters were able to contain it. The second and third floors suffered heavy smoke damage.
Nine people were in the house, but Jaxxyn, the youngest of 11 (!) siblings, was the only one awake, enjoying what must be some pretty rare quiet play time. And that, it turns out, might have been the only thing preventing this from becoming a tragedy. The home had no working smoke detectors, according to investigators.
Jaxxyn credits school for his quick thinking.
"A fireman came to our school and he said if there's ever a fire there's most likely gonna be smoke in the air,” he said. “So you want to duck down and ... get everyone you can and get out."
While we doubt most 12-year-olds will be able to convince their parents to let them stay up that late playing games as a precaution, we tip our hat to Jaxxyn, who not only saved his family, but kept a humble attitude about it in every subsequent interview.
house fires are never fun.
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