*** - Jealousy lives inside all of us... it can't be in pixels of Pokemon... right?
I had started to get interested in the circulating creepy-pastas surrounding Pokémon quite a bit recently, setting a tumblr dedicated to them to my permanent tabs so I could read any new ones as soon as I could. I loved reading about all of the possibly hacked, haunted, or bugged games that other people came across (or, of course, just made up), especially knowing how it would never happen to me even if I tried. After all, they were all just ghost stories; creepy tales to tell around a campfire. Usually, instead of scaring me it just made me nostalgic and left me yearning to find and play another Pokémon game. So, after reading one pasta pertaining to a “haunted” Fire Red cartridge, I decided to quickly download a boring ‘ol Fire Red rom off of my favorite rom site to pop into my phone. I rarely use my phone’s Game Boy Advance emulator since it tends to lag a bit and take up a bit more battery juice, however since I didn’t tend to have much issue with Pokémon games I figured it wouldn’t be to bad. So, I booted it up and played as normal; picked up a Charmander, restarted it from a save file in front of the Professor again with intent to farm a female, and in my second try succeeded.
Momentarily pleased, I was halted at the nicknaming process. I’m usually very picky, but this time decided to just go by names I use for other things. In the end I decided on a name I used for a character in a different game, a rogue named Étain, minus the accent of course. Now, the reason I had named my rogue “Étain” was because it derived from an old Irish word for Jealousy, which I thought suited a pickpocketing backstabber. If only I knew that it should have simply stayed with my other game.
I played the Fire Red emulator for a bit, though before too long the cell phone induced lag started up, and I got frustrated, especially when the ADD hit. Bored again, I saved it through the emulator save file and closed it out, closing my phone and popping back up to the laptop screen to read some more Pasta goodness. Before too long, I read one referring to a Nuzlocke challenge, which I hadn’t heard of before. With a quick browse through Bulbapedia, my curiosity was piqued. It added a whole new aspect to my “Pokémans” game. A new challenge. Something just NEW all together. Digging through my DS case I pulled out an old Emerald cartridge, nothing out of the norm… Just old. Popping it in I started a new file, button spamming through the naming process— Saitemi for me, of course—while I opened up my notepad widgit on my phone so I could more easily keep track of my catches in each area. I was giddy when on my first try I got a female starter, naming it something earthy (I forget what exactly) and going on my way. I got a decent ways through, popping in which pokémon I caught where into my “notepad” so I would know which areas I could and couldn’t catch from. After about three catches, though, I opened up my phone again to catalogue my latest when I noticed something I hadn’t typed.
“WHY”.
Dismissing it as my short attention span starting to ask a question to myself and getting sidetracked, I erased it and typed what I had to, moving along. The next Pokémon I caught I popped open my phone again, notepad still opened, and frowned. Now I know I hadn’t written this.
“How could you leave me for them? Was I not good enough?”
Knowing my Boyfriend knew about my ADD and current Pokémon obsession, I jokingly smacked him, ”Hey, knock it off jerk. Leave me and my Pokémans alone.” It was always a silly joke between us, calling it Pokémans. I guess we we’re just a bit easily amused. He scowled up from his 360 game, pausing it, ”’The heck are you talking about? I didn’t touch your Pokémans. You know I leave you to your little obsession, I think it’s cute.”
Glaring, I frowned, not convinced. I know he liked picking on me, and this was more than likely just another one of his little pranks. Shrugging it off, I left my phone on my stomach so he couldn’t get to it anymore and went right back to my game. Another area, another Pokémon, another thing to catalogue. Upon opening my phone again, my blood went cold. “What…?”
“You bitch.
I cant believe youd do this to mw.
Go ahead and play with them.
se if i t geys yoou farr.”
The spelling and grammer was atrocious, as if they couldn’t type with the small buttons on my phone keyboard or touchpad, or something. I knew my boyfriend couldn’t’ve done it, and yet I was still in disbelief. Maybe for some reason I had copied it from another site, and bumped buttons while it was in my lap, pasting it into my notepad.
Quickly deleting the new addition to my notes, I added my pokémon and closed my phone in a rush, not even adding in the nickname for my new poké like I usually would. Unnerved, I went back to my game, drowning myself in it and quickly forgetting about the odd copy-paste ordeal. Then, I went to the next area. New pokémon. New catalogue. Opening it up again, my heart stopped. I would swear in the half second it was booting up I saw a drawing of a furious Charmander, surrounded in flames and grinning impossibly wide. It was gone before I could really look though, and I was left staring at my notepad. Of course, another message, and this time there was no chance for it to be another copy-paste.
“So, yood still rathere stay wiht them a nd leave em here? Fine. I’ll just play with yor little toy.
We’ll see if you lik it stop playing with you like you stopped playing with me.
Yoo nammed me Jealousy after all.
See what you made me?”
Alright, there were no more excuses. I couldn’t blame this on anything else anymore. Looking through my notepad, it had all been deleted except my “Nuzlocke Challenge Notes” with all of the things that had popped up there and deleted back, and my own notes themselves gone. I could tell as, goodness it sounds crazy typing this out, Étain wrote her way around the keyboard got better. It still hurt to read, but not as horribly as it was. Backing out of the notepad, I noticed my wallpaper had changed from an Ökami picture to a small Charmander, back towards the screen, looking at an out of control fire. I was thoroughly goosebumped as I slowly went to my third screen, the one with my games and emulator, pulling it up. I know I should’ve let sleeping dogs lie, I should’ve just tossed my phone at my boyfriend and said, “Here, reboot it.” I was curious though. I wanted to know what the hacker had put into the rom to screw with my phone so much, how they made it so it knew what I meant by having a Nuzlocke Challange as a saved notepad document and what to say into it. Even better yet, how they knew what Étain even meant. Hell, I didn’t even know until I hopped on Behindthename.com to look up game character names. It still had to be a hack, though, right? There’s no such thing as ghosts, least of all on the Internet. It was just childish to think that there was. I booted up the emulator, and it seemed to take no time at all, instantly bringing up the Fire Red as opposed to the other games I had, and even auto-loading my save file. Eyes glued to my phone, I watched as Viridian Forest popped up, my Étain in front of my character. Biting down on my lip, hard, I watched as the trees around her and my character seemed to burn, two-frame movement of flames. The female Charmander turned to face me, even it’s little overworld sprite seeming dark and gruesome. She moved a bit in a way that made me think she was laughing, and a chat box popped up.
”Oh, so now you want to come back and play with me? After I threatened to take your bitty toy away from me? No. It’s beyond late now.
Shame, really. You were so concerned with getting me, a female Charmander, and yet you cast me away like spoiled milk. Well, I’ll show you who’s spoiled. See this little piece of bread you got for your birthday?” I noticed the chat boxes seemed to be getting discolored, but I didn’t think that much of it with as focused as I was on the game. It was terrifying yet exciting at the same time. Nothing like this had even kind of happened to me before, and between you me scarily creepy stories like this always enthralled me.
After all, it’s not like it was going to actually hurt me. It was just in my phone. What could a silly virus do to a real person?
”Goodbye then, Bryanna. Let’s see if your next toy takes being abandoned like I was as easily.” She moved again like before when she was “laughing”, and I jumped a foot in the air when I heard my phones speakers erupt in a chopped part of the Growl action playing, mimicking a cruel laughter. Suddenly I jumped, my hands feeling like they were on fire. No, not quite. The phone itself was seeming to melt, all of a sudden so extremely hot I screamed, the plastic somehow stuck to my hands and still hot even though I dropped the majority of the leftover phone onto my bed-cover. My boyfriend turned in a millisecond, tossing his 360 controller aside. That was the last I remembered, before I passed out.
A few hours later I woke up, a cold towel wrapped around my hands and my bed-cover and sheets balled up in a corner. Jumping up I winced, looking at my boyfriend in a stupor. The dull pain on my hands made my hopes of it being a freaky dream disappear, and I frowned. My boyfriend looked more than relieved, sitting next to me. ”What in the world happened? Why the heck did your phone just… just melt? Phones don’t just melt, Bry!” He was rushing through his words, panicked. Wincing, I frowned, ”Yea, my hands don’t feel to bad, thanks for asking. How bad did they look?”
He started a bit, looking guilty that he forgot to ask, ”Oh, shit, I’m sorry. They surprisingly didn’t look too bad, just really really red, like the times you’ve hit your hands on the inside of the stove cooking, just… on more of your hands… It didn’t look bad enough to go out to the hospital, but if you want—”
We spoke for a bit after that, me trying to explain what happened and not sounding crazy. He seemed sceptical but believed me, especially since I had the melted phone and slightly burnt hands to prove it. The next day we went to the local mall to see if our provider could do anything about my phone, since it was still under warranty for another week, when my birthday came around again.
However, after that I deleted every emulator and every rom I had, Pokémon related or not. Call me paranoid, but…
Phones don’t just melt.
