A Tale of a Slowpoke

Most other Pokémon creepy pastas tell such stories about how they magically find a ROM in a flea market, eBay, friends etc. but my story has a much more modest start, back in say late 2008 little teenage me was scrolling from the gbatemps forums looking for a pokémon crystal ROMS not knowing about ROM sites yet. Were I found this to be frank average looking file it had the same file size and there was no reason to be suspicious but it's name was Pokémon Crystal edition Slowpoke; I didn't really think much about it as the author of the post was called SlowpokeTailCollector.

No reason to think about this Iloaded my emulator launched the ROM (in full screen) and away I was never really thinking twice about it what-so-ever. The game launched as normal no reason for me to freak out or anything. Everything was the same and there was nothing out of the ordinary; that was until I got to azalea town, this is when things started to get weird! You walk up to the Slowpokes and interact with him just like in Pokémon yellow a box came up with a picture of a Pokémon it was not a happy Pikachu but a depressed sad looking slowpoke that dopey little face we all love was empty from all emotion: eyes lifeless, mouth closed (almost frowning),a lot paler than the normal shade of pink (a lot more washed out), I can't describe the cry but it sounded somewhat slower and deeper and a lot sadder sounding like it was whimpering.

obviously the limited capabilities of the Gameboy meant that it was not in much detail, either-way it sure was a shocker and slightly depressing; because of this I decide to take a break as I was going to see my friends that evening and I did not want to put a downer on the mood. so i saved went out of full-screen and tried to turn my computer off. but it would not go off; and on my task bar I noticed the AVG icon was up and I had a virus, downloading the ROM must have infected my computer with viruses that effects the shutdown.exe, so I figured OK lets shut the program off that wouldn't closed the gameboy emulator. So I figured might as well carry on playing whilst my antivirus continues doing a full scan.

At this point I was in the game I just went in the well, and Kurt tumbles down the well and this is were thigns to me get creepy, I tried communicating with Kurt and all the text says is "...". He died from the massive fall into the well; which is obviously weird. The layout of the well was also way off, instead of water to the side there was slowpokes... All tailless, music at this point was replaced with the depressed slowpoke cries. There was literally not one tile of ground, all slowpokes. I carried up the cave and saw nothing but darkness like when you don't use flash in gen 1 darkness. Creepy as the entrance was well lit. I walked fro what seemed like 10 minuted but as around 2 minutes in reality my woofer pounding with the sound of 8-bit pokémon cry's for help getting louder and louder.

I was now in the main chamber there was five things that I spotted immidietly: pile of discarded slowpoke tails to the left, floor of the chamber splattered in bright red obviously representing blood, dead slowpokes indicated with anime style crosses through eyes, and hundreds of tailless slowpokes. At this point the speakers where basically a giant distorted mess somewhat resembling slowpoke cry it was painful to the ears;  and in the center of a 10x1 path there was a man he just looked like a regular rocket grunt but when i entered a battle animation he had a soulless look in his eyes, pure white pupils, and in his hand a katana blood droplets at the end in poor quality as if someone has rushed the job. He had six pokémon all slowpokes, level 15 slowpokes with one move. Struggle, they were trying to kill themselves to get away from the pain of having there tails removed via machete. The winning victory was you murdered innocent slowpokes how do you feel?

I looked at my part and all my Pokémon are level 15 slowpokes 0/0 health with the status condition dead. closing the menus confuses. Then I noticed the other player in the room inching towards me till he was next to me, he then said "You haven't got any more Pokémon to defend you? Oh dear time for me to cut off your tail!" At this point I was way to frightened to watch the rest of this I ran to the plug socket switched off the switch and needless to say I did not go out that night and have not played crystal ever again. The user who put up the file was banned and I could not track down another copy and my anti virus deleted the file as it detected it as a virus afwter doing a full virus scan. Take it from me i'm glad I can't find the copy.