Scratch

Yup. I started reading them, got obsessed with 'em, started writing 'em.

Here's one I recently wrote. It may not seem all that creepy to, but it does to me.

THIS DID NOT REALLY HAPPEN TO ME. Although it would be extremely freaky if it did.

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Revenge

I was recently in my attic, digging around old dusty boxes, taking a trip to Nostalgialand, when I saw a small little box in the corner. I opened and found my old Game Boy Color, and a Pokemon Crystal cartridge.

I put the cartridge in the system and turned it on. Surprisingly, it started up immediately, since I expected the batteries in the GBC to be dead, but I just took my mind off it.

I found a “continue” option in the start up menu, so I checked it out. I started out in a place with many caves, trees and lakes that I didn't recognize, and I checked my trainer card. My trainer name was simply the letter H, and I had received all eight badges. I checked my Pokemon party and found only six.

The first one was a Level 15 Cyndaquil, named “LEAVE.”

The second was a Level 11 Rattata named “BEFORE.”

The third was a Level 13 Pidgey named “IT'S.”

The fourth was a Level 12 Sandshrew named “TOO.”

The fifth was a Level 9 Nidoran named “LATE.”

Leave before it's too late.

And the sixth was a Level 2 Weedle without a nickname.

I found a stairway that led to a lake. I went down it and went into the water. As I went even more in, my trainer began to slowly fade away, until my trainer spun several times like it does when you use the Escape Rope to get out of a cave, and the screen cut to black.

The screen stayed black for a while before a loud cry of a Weedle was audible. Then I was thrown into a hollow, gray room, blood splattered on the floor, with no way out. There was nothing in it but a sleeping old man covered in blood in one corner and a blood-slick sign in another. The sign read: CONFINEMENT.

I tried to talk to the man, but he wouldn't talk...

I went to my Pokemon party. The Weedle was gone. All of the other Pokemon had each went two levels higher than they were before.

And they had different nicknames too.

This time, the Cyndaquil had evolved into a level 17 Quilava named “DO.” The Rattata was now level 13 and was named “WHAT.”The Pidgey was now level 15 and was named “YOU'RE.” The Sandshrew was now level 14 and was named “TOLD” with a period at the end. The Nidoran was now level 11 and was named “LEAVE.”

Do what you're told. Leave.

I could not understand what the Pokemon were trying to tell me to do. I tried using my escape rope to get out of the Confinement room, and sure enough, it worked. But this time, there was a smaller room, just like the Confinement room. It had the same features: blood-splattered floor, blood-soaked sign at the corner. And the old man.

I tried to talk to him again, and he still wouldn't talk.

A few seconds later, I saw a transparent figure enter the room. He looked just like the old man. He stopped in front of my trainer. He said: “Remember the message. Leave before it's too late. Do what you're told. Leave...” He disappeared.

I thought he meant to use my escape rope by “leave”, so I checked my item pack to get it out.

It was gone.

The screen turned to black.

Then it came back to the same room, but it was even smaller. The old man was still there, and still asleep.

I read the sign. It still read CONFINEMENT.

I checked my Pokemon. They now had different nicknames.

The Quilava was named “WE'RE.”

The Rattata was named “COMING.”

The Pidgey was named “FOR.”

The Sandshrew was named “YOU.”

The Nidoran was named “NOW.”

We're coming for you now.

Then all five Pokemon came into the room and closed in on me. Then the Quilava said, “You abandoned us.”

That was strange. Pokemon couldn't talk...

The Sandshrew said, “Now you will pay.”

And the screen cut to black.

A message popped up, saying “70 YEARS LATER...”

The screen cut back to the room. My trainer was gone. The old man was still there, sleeping at the corner.

Then the Pokemon came in closed in on the old man. The Quilava said, “You got what you deserved.”

And the screen cut to black again.

I tried to play the game again countless times, but it didn't work. I didn't know what to do with the cartridge. But after a few months, I was able to sort out the meaning...

My Pokemon were mad that I “abandoned” them. I stopped playing the game many years ago, and they were lonely. They were angry with me. They depended on me.

It seemed that they had organized a plan to get revenge on me. So when I played the game, they led me to a place where I couldn't escape. Where they'd have me trapped. They tried sending me a message, saying to leave if I want to live. But I could not understand why they wanted me to leave, if they didn't want me to leave? It was probably a challenge, to tempt me to not listen to them and fall right into their trap...

I now understand what was the deal with that room. The Pokemon sent me into the lake and down into the room. It turns out that they had sent me to the future, and that old man was my future self. They wanted me to try and figure out my fate, but before I could, my Pokemon killed me and left my body in that room forever. It turns out that old man wasn't sleeping.

The old man was dead.

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UNNAMED

I used to be a hardcore person at Pokemon. On every version, I always trained my Pokemon to at least level 50. I was also very selective about what Pokemon I caught. I only caught ones that had some or a lot of potential.

Shortly before the release of Diamond and Pearl, I wanted to play my old Pokemon Red cartridge on my old Game Boy Pocket, just for the fun of it, just to relive the good ol' days of my childhood. So just a day before Diamond and Pearl came out, I played Red. And what happened was not what was supposed to happen.

The Game Freak logo came up regularly, followed by a short cutscene of a battle between a Nidoran and a Jigglypuff. I skipped to the regular menu, but at the bottom, there was a box that read: THE FILE DATA HAS BEEN DESTROYED!

Well, that kind of sucked for me, because I was really hoping to check out how far I was in the game, since I hadn't played Blue in a very long time, and I couldn't remember where I was. So I simply selected NEW GAME and skipped through Professor Oak yakking on about stuff that I'm clearly already aware of. When the option to choose my trainer name came up, I made it “Ryu,” and I named my rival “Blanka,” since I was also an extreme Street Fighter fan at the time.

After more of Prof. Oak blabbering on, I finally got to play the game for real. I went to the tall grass where Oak would come out and warn me about how wild Pokemon live in the grass and I need my own Pokemon for my own protection, and yadda yadda yadda. But surprisingly, Prof. Oak did not come, so I checked my Pokemon.

There was only one. A level 5 Zubat.

How was that even possible? I checked its stats, and it only had one attack: Leech Life.

I went out of the Pokemon menu and checked my Pokedex data. And there were all 150 Pokemon there. Again, how was that even possible?

I went to my trainer card. There were all eight badges there. What?

I navigated away from the trainer card and went back to the actual game. I moved one pace forward and was immediately attacked by a level 2 Rattata.

I ordered my Zubat to use Leech Life, since it was the only attack it had learned. The box at the bottom said: ZUBAT used LEECH LIFE!

Then something strange beyond belief happen. At the bottom, the box said: ZUBAT: Join with me. Give me your lifeforce. Help me reach my goal...

Then the Rattata dissolved into pixels as all of its health was taken away. While it was happening, the Rattata gave out a high-pitched cry. And then complete silence. At the bottom, there was no message saying “RATTATA has fainted!”.

The battle ended and I was back in the tall grass. I went out of it and saw a lady, simply staring ahead. I tried to talk to her, and she responded: “Release your Zubat now, young trainer. Leave it and let it die. Do it now before it is too late!”

Then at the bottom, the message box came, saying “ZUBAT used LEECH LIFE!”. And the woman slowly faded away.

I tried to get to Viridian City as fast as I could, but kept running into more and more wild Pokemon. I tried to run from the battles, but the message box said, “ZUBAT will not allow you to leave!”

I mostly ran into Pidgeys, each level 2's or 4's, and my Zubat kept using Leech Life. Every time it did that, the same thing happened to the Pidgeys as it did to the Rattata: it dissolved into pixels.

During the end of each battle, I noticed that my Zubat kept growing in 2 or 4 levels. Before it was only level 5, and now it was 16.

After five battles, I finally reached Viridian City. I went to the Pokemon Center and went to the PC to release my Zubat like the woman had asked me to, but when I selected “release Zubat”, it quickly navigated away from the PC menu, and the message box appeared again, reading “ZUBAT used LEECH LIFE!”

Then my trainer slowly started to fade away...

After a few seconds the screen cut to black. Then it cut to a big room, with no escape. At the corner was the same lady that had told me to release the Zubat. I tried to talk to her, and she replied: “The Zubat is too strong. The more it uses Leech Life, the stronger it gets!”

And then the the room shook. The cry of a Zubat was audible.

The woman continued, “I shouldn't have said that! Me discussing the Zubat has only angered it!”

And the woman was suddenly pulled right out of the room.

The screen cut to black. After ten seconds, the screen cut to a graveyard. The Zubat came into view and flew toward one tombstone. The message box appeared, reading “ZUBAT: Thank you, master. You've been a great help...”

And the screen cut to black once more.

To this day, the cartridge lies in an old box in my basement. I still played the game, but I abandoned the old cartridge and bought a new one off of eBay. The weirdest part is, however, that when I played that new cartridge of Red, the same thing happened. Every time I played it, the same thing happened. Every time I played any Red cartridge, the same thing happened.

The Zubat's true motives was to suck away the lifeforce of all of the Pokemon he ever faced. By doing this, he becomes stronger. He wanted to not only haunt me for the rest of my life, but to be the best.

But why did he have to do it to me and me only?

It turns out that when I was a kid, I used to say that Zubats were terrible. Some of the suckiest Pokemon ever. The Zubat was apparently offended. The Zubat wanted revenge. He wanted to show me that I was wrong.

Sometimes, when go to sleep, I hear faint voices in my head. It quietly whispers, “I am the best. I am the best...”

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The Unown Mystery

I still remember those good old days, when I used to always play Pokemon. I remember those good old days when the principal used to confiscate my Game Boy Color all the time but just give it back to me at the end of the week. Good times. Good times...

Now I live as a simple college freshman. I've grown apart from Pokemon and moved on to Call of Duty. Although, nostalgia really slugged me in the gut, egging me to relive the glory days return to the past. However, I had lost my copy of Pokemon Crystal, so I only have my Game Boy Color. I didn't really want to play Crystal on an emulator, since it would give me a warmer feeling if I played it on the actual console, so I ended up buying an old cartridge of the game off of eBay.

It subsequently came in the mail about a week later, so during a weekend I opened it and started playing it. The Game Freak logo came normally, followed by a lengthy intro animation which I found quite annoying, but it didn't skip when I tried to make it.

At the end of the intro animation, instead of the Suicune running-cycle animation at the bottom of the menu, there were several Unowns. They kept appearing and disappearing, but I made out the letters to spell “PLZLEAVE”.

I just continued on to the menu without thinking about it and selected “continue” to see where the previous owner was in the game just out of curiosity. The trainer name was just the letter “K”. Amazingly, in his Pokedex were all of the Pokemon in existence (at least in the first and second generations), but he didn't seem to have any Pokemon in his party but one, which was a level 12 Totodile. He was inside a cave at the Ruins of Alph where the Unowns were, right in front of the wall with the cryptic Unown message. But the strange part was that there were no NPCs in sight. I read the wall.

Instead of saying “ESCAPE”, the wall read “LEAVE US ALONE,” and the eyes of the letters were red.

I noticed there were three other walls with messages too. The first one said “LEAVE,” the second one said “US,” the third one said “ALONE,” the fourth one said “OR,” the fifth one said “FACE,” the sixth one said “DIRE,” and the seventh said “CONSEQUENCES.”

Leave us alone or face dire consequences.

It quickly became evident that this was obviously a hack created by the previous owner just to freak out the person who bought the cartridge, but before I had time to really think about it, a hole appeared in the ground just below my trainer, and he fell down it.

The screen cut to black, and then to another room with Unown patterns on the walls, but this one was much darker with many NPCs, lying on the ground, seemingly asleep. The Unown music tune was playing in the background. My trainer sprite came into view. I tried to talk to them and wake them up, but they wouldn't respond. The only one that would was an old man at the top right corner of the cave. I found only one wall. It read: YOU ASKED FOR IT.

I walked over to the NPC and talked to it. The message box appeared saying: “OLD MAN: The Unowns are unhappy when humans visit their ruins. They try to make you leave, but if you disobey, you'll be trapped underground for the rest of your life. It seems you just got here. I've been here for quite a while. I forget how long. Maybe forty years? Nevertheless, I've been able to stay alive by finding resources in the ground.”

He stopped talking, and I tried to talk to him again. He gave me some new information: “Oh, who are those other people? Those are people who faced a similar fate as my own, but unfortunately they were chosen by destiny to be killed by the Unowns that live in this cave. The Unowns decide who they will have to sacrifice to make room for new residents. People constantly come into the Unown cave and land down here. Oh well. I guess I have you for company, at least.”

There was nothing that I could do here. No wild Pokemon to battle. No trainers to battle. Just simply...nothing. After thirty seconds, the screen cut to black. The message box appeared, saying “50 YEARS LATER.”

The screen cut back to the cave. The man at the corner was now lying down, and I figured him to have been chosen to die by the Unowns. My trainer was now elderly. I paced the room several times before the message box said “SACRIFICE TIME!”

The game immediately cut to the battle screen, with an H-shaped level 100 Unown with a red eye. At the bottom, it said “UNOWN used KILL!”

Unowns couldn't use the attack “kill”--and that attack didn't even exist.

Or did it?

Before I could think, the screen flashed white several times and then cut to black again. Then, there was a short animation of an old man slowly crumpling before falling on the ground.

The screen was black a final time.

Then a few Unowns came from either side of the screen and met in the middle forming one word.

RIP.

And whenever I played that cartridge of Pokemon Crystal, the same thing always happened whenever I entered the cave with the mysterious Unown hieroglyphics. Usually when I play it, I just don't bother to ever even go into the Unown cave at the Ruins of Alph My current theory of why it happened was because the previous owner was either a really good programmer or hacker and he altered the game to make that happen, or it was just some demonic force with one sole purpose—to give me a sense of fear. I even have a feeling that it will come again, in some other area in the game.

To be continued...

(Yes, that's right. The Unown Mystery will have a sequel, and it will be coming soon.)

Last edited by banana500 (2011-01-18 17:57:21)