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A Champions Online Creepypasta (VB Apocalypse spoilers)
keikomyst
Posts: 626 Arc User
I'm a longtime Champions Online player. I've enjoyed the PvE content of the game, I've enjoyed PvP before On Alert, I've enjoyed the lairs, I've enjoyed Zombie Apocalypse, and most of all I've enjoyed the costume creator.
However, the game has grown a little bit stale. You can only play it through so many times before it gets old, you can only make so many amazing characters, you can only attempt to PvP so much without giving up due to frustration, with both the queue system and the general Hero Games attitude.
I decided, however, to give it one last go. I decided to start up an Invincible archetype. Power armored tanks that are just all around fantastic. I named her Crash, and she was a lizard woman underneath the armor, gave her some silly story about being a VIPER experiment that escaped. A pretty cliche story, but who reads bios anymore these days, anyway?
So I played through the game, balancing missions and Alerts, and it was fun. I soon arrived at Vibora Bay Apocalypse within a few days, and I went on with it. Kinetik was the sacrificial lamb in the first mission where a Champion dies. I'd seen it so many times I really stopped caring. However, something different happened in this cutscene before he died.
He looked right at me. Even behind those goggles he wears, I could sense his anger at me. The mission continued as normal, but Defender stopped my character on the way out. "Kinetik was a good man," he tells me. "He didn't deserve this, and he didn't deserve it the other times this has happened." His portrait in the message background's eyes briefly flickered, from white to black, but it was too fast so I couldn't screenshot it.
Later, in the mission where Ironclad and Defender were supposed to die, Therakiel didn't show up after Valerian Scarlet called him. Defender and Ironclad were still standing after the cutscene. Was this it? Had I averted the apocalypse?
"You are a coward." Ironclad's message box appears as I reach the doors. "Therefore you shall be punished like one." Suddenly, a loading screen appeared. The tooltip read "NoT all IS as iT sEEmsssssss", and the comic picture was a black box with three sets of red eyes looking at me...
Crash appeared in a black void, with Kinetik's body on the ground. Going in for a closer look, his body rose and he looked like a zombie version of himself, sprouting red Nephilim wings before attacking! He had his full Superspeed powers, and I'm confident that if I were playing as any other Archetype it would have been a losing battle, but I came out on top. After that, there was nothing. I tried to demorecord it, but it said "ERROR: THIS IS ONLY MEANT FOR YOUR EYES"
I hit Alt-F4. I clicked the red X. I tried to log out. It refused to close. All while the chat box printed "COWARD" over and over and over again... so I decided to try queueing for PvP here. Thankfully the queue popped, and I thought it would be over.
It wasn't. The loading screen came up, but instead of displaying "Stronghold" and the relevant loading screen, it displayed "MURDERER", with a blank tooltip. I did, however, appear in Stronghold. Alone. There wasn't a single turret nor a single NPC. Well, not until Defender stepped out after I made my way to the central area of the map on the Heroes side. He pointed at me and hit me with a Tactical Missile, which did a surprising amount of damage. The fight was on. Power Armor VS Power Armor.
Once again, if it weren't for the Invincible being so damn tough I'd have lost, and I felt like the stakes of the fight were extremely high, as if I would really die if I lost. After the battle, there was a cutscene where the walls of Stronghold faded to blackness, and I appeared in the Champions building, standing over Defender's body. The other Champions came over and began to weep.
I began to realize what had happened, and my character did too, using a strange animation never seen before to take her helmet off (I had made a helmet and no helmet costume for this character) and she fell to her knees and began to cry too. After that, I was booted from the game, and when I tried logging in again, my character was still available, but rather than her armor she was wearing a hospital gown. Upon choosing her, I found I was inside Mercy Hospital. A cutscene explained everything.
"Therakiel found a way into your heart through the lack of guilt you felt when you saw Kinetik die. He clouded your mind and used you as a puppet so that you were to one to kill Defender in this timeline, not him... however, we have already sent someone to stop you from being turned into a puppet, and to prevent this timeline from ever happening."
There was a sudden scream, and Crash fell to the ground, the camera panning away from her body, though I could plainly see that a hole had been blown through her chest suddenly... and I was logged out once more.
When I chose Crash again, she was normal. I was back at the start of Vibora Bay Apocalypse, and when Kinetik died this time, I paid him his due final respects, for it would be my last time going through Vibora Bay.
After that, everything progressed as normal, though when Therakiel was killing Ironclad and Defender, I spotted another person in the background wielding a massive rifle of some sort, but they did not attack. Crash's assassin making sure everything goes right this time, perhaps?
I filed a bug report at the end, only to receive an immediate response. "Sorry."
Oh well. That's customer service for you.
However, the game has grown a little bit stale. You can only play it through so many times before it gets old, you can only make so many amazing characters, you can only attempt to PvP so much without giving up due to frustration, with both the queue system and the general Hero Games attitude.
I decided, however, to give it one last go. I decided to start up an Invincible archetype. Power armored tanks that are just all around fantastic. I named her Crash, and she was a lizard woman underneath the armor, gave her some silly story about being a VIPER experiment that escaped. A pretty cliche story, but who reads bios anymore these days, anyway?
So I played through the game, balancing missions and Alerts, and it was fun. I soon arrived at Vibora Bay Apocalypse within a few days, and I went on with it. Kinetik was the sacrificial lamb in the first mission where a Champion dies. I'd seen it so many times I really stopped caring. However, something different happened in this cutscene before he died.
He looked right at me. Even behind those goggles he wears, I could sense his anger at me. The mission continued as normal, but Defender stopped my character on the way out. "Kinetik was a good man," he tells me. "He didn't deserve this, and he didn't deserve it the other times this has happened." His portrait in the message background's eyes briefly flickered, from white to black, but it was too fast so I couldn't screenshot it.
Later, in the mission where Ironclad and Defender were supposed to die, Therakiel didn't show up after Valerian Scarlet called him. Defender and Ironclad were still standing after the cutscene. Was this it? Had I averted the apocalypse?
"You are a coward." Ironclad's message box appears as I reach the doors. "Therefore you shall be punished like one." Suddenly, a loading screen appeared. The tooltip read "NoT all IS as iT sEEmsssssss", and the comic picture was a black box with three sets of red eyes looking at me...
Crash appeared in a black void, with Kinetik's body on the ground. Going in for a closer look, his body rose and he looked like a zombie version of himself, sprouting red Nephilim wings before attacking! He had his full Superspeed powers, and I'm confident that if I were playing as any other Archetype it would have been a losing battle, but I came out on top. After that, there was nothing. I tried to demorecord it, but it said "ERROR: THIS IS ONLY MEANT FOR YOUR EYES"
I hit Alt-F4. I clicked the red X. I tried to log out. It refused to close. All while the chat box printed "COWARD" over and over and over again... so I decided to try queueing for PvP here. Thankfully the queue popped, and I thought it would be over.
It wasn't. The loading screen came up, but instead of displaying "Stronghold" and the relevant loading screen, it displayed "MURDERER", with a blank tooltip. I did, however, appear in Stronghold. Alone. There wasn't a single turret nor a single NPC. Well, not until Defender stepped out after I made my way to the central area of the map on the Heroes side. He pointed at me and hit me with a Tactical Missile, which did a surprising amount of damage. The fight was on. Power Armor VS Power Armor.
Once again, if it weren't for the Invincible being so damn tough I'd have lost, and I felt like the stakes of the fight were extremely high, as if I would really die if I lost. After the battle, there was a cutscene where the walls of Stronghold faded to blackness, and I appeared in the Champions building, standing over Defender's body. The other Champions came over and began to weep.
I began to realize what had happened, and my character did too, using a strange animation never seen before to take her helmet off (I had made a helmet and no helmet costume for this character) and she fell to her knees and began to cry too. After that, I was booted from the game, and when I tried logging in again, my character was still available, but rather than her armor she was wearing a hospital gown. Upon choosing her, I found I was inside Mercy Hospital. A cutscene explained everything.
"Therakiel found a way into your heart through the lack of guilt you felt when you saw Kinetik die. He clouded your mind and used you as a puppet so that you were to one to kill Defender in this timeline, not him... however, we have already sent someone to stop you from being turned into a puppet, and to prevent this timeline from ever happening."
There was a sudden scream, and Crash fell to the ground, the camera panning away from her body, though I could plainly see that a hole had been blown through her chest suddenly... and I was logged out once more.
When I chose Crash again, she was normal. I was back at the start of Vibora Bay Apocalypse, and when Kinetik died this time, I paid him his due final respects, for it would be my last time going through Vibora Bay.
After that, everything progressed as normal, though when Therakiel was killing Ironclad and Defender, I spotted another person in the background wielding a massive rifle of some sort, but they did not attack. Crash's assassin making sure everything goes right this time, perhaps?
I filed a bug report at the end, only to receive an immediate response. "Sorry."
Oh well. That's customer service for you.
Post edited by keikomyst on
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2spooky4me
Real Soviet Damage PRIMUS Page | Soviet Might Build | Artwork of my Characters | I wrote a book called "The Ring of Void"
One day, however, I got email from Phil. The message, typed sloppily and rife with misspellings, had a ZIP file attached and had the subject line of "SAVE". It read:
"I NEED HELP PLEASE I AM STUCK INSIDE THE GAME ANDAS NEED OUTSIDE FORCE TO DDSETROY UIT. DONT EVELN LOOK AT THE CONTENTS DESTROY THE EMAIL< COMPUTER< AND DEVERYTHING INVOLVING IT"
This was very unusual. How was I supposed to destroy an MMORPG? In fact, the whole thing was fishy, considering that my friend usually was quite calm with how he handled tough times. Nonetheless, I decided to open the ZIP and followed the instructions to install the game.
After checking that I had enough hard-drive space, I proceeded to run the EXE file. Oddly enough, there didn't seem to be any process to log in, and it automatically began patching itself. It also patched quite quickly, which was nice. As soon as the bar topped itself off, I decided to click on the inviting "Play" button.
Then, for a split second, the patcher window graphics changed. The blue background flashed to black, and the various comic panels on the screen suddenly closed. All I read behind it was "SURRENDER", in a gaunt typeface, stretched out in the middle of the black background in shiny, blood red letters. I assumed it had just loaded the wrong image momentarily, and was perhaps a glitch.
When the game loaded up, I was surprised to see that the game already had 3 characters ready for me - a 'blade' character named "Odihsub", a 'Glacier' called "Noerf", and a 'freeform' character, clad in black and blue armor, named "Namnori". For whatever reason, the latter two characters were locked out from being played, so I chose the first one - Odihsub. A short, friendly looking man with a sword strapped to his back and wearing a blue tunic with white pants. The character select screen said he was in a map named "Millennium City Crisis".
I immediately regretted this. Having now opened up the game proper, I now see the horrors that Phil was subjected to, and once I am complete with playing this twisted mockery of a game, I will embrace the sweet kiss of death, knowing it will be better than subjecting myself to this again.
What I was immediately greeted to was a twisted visage of a city. The buildings, tall and gnarled, looked like rotting trees, both in rough shape, and in their texture. The sky was black, coated with a swirling, dark grey spiral that spun at extreme speeds, giving the illusion of being stuck in a massive tilt-a-whirl. The ground was even worse - the sidewalks were blood red, and the streets themselves paved in black stone, that (somehow) perfectly and hyper-realistically reflected everything off of them.
The civillians were fleeing - like shambling zombies - away from a massive, bony insect flying machine - its wings looking like a ribcage, bent apart from the center into an arching canopy. Its abdomen and body were constructed out of unusual sockets, and its head appearing as a mouthless skull, with hyper-realistic blood pouring out of the sockets. As it made its way towards me, a soft static noise began to play. This abomination was about to make a victim of me!
Taking a few seconds to get used to the controls, I was able to fight off the freakish insect, leaping into the air with one of my 'lunge' abilities and striking the foe with my blade. The blade made the bony creature bleed, streams of near-black blood flowing off of the ivory creature and down to the street. As the streets filled with blood, I began to find my character slowing down in the muck. I continuously struck at the creature, avoiding the unusual, ghostly wisps it shot forth at me. The wisps visibly left huge craters in the ground, but I was too swift - my travel power, named "Super Bloody Speed", kept me out of harms way. As the fight continued, I noticed that Odihsub had a smug grin on his face, which kept getting wider as he got closer and closer to defeating his foe. I felt myself sharing his enjoyment as I continued as well!
After 11 minutes of whacking at the creature and avoiding its assault, it finally gave way, its carapace shattering. This was only the beginning of my problems, as this let loose a cascade of blood down into the street below, visibly flooding the entire area. Instead of walking, I was now swimming in the ocean of hemoglobin. And then it happened:
The static from before faded, and instead, was replaced with a quiet ditty - it sounded like that one song from "The Neverhood", but played twice as fast and in reverse. Then, hands erupted from the jet red blood below - hands that began striking at Odihsub! His past expression of joy made way for unsettlement - then fear, as they got a firm grasp on him! I attempted to move away, only to find myself slowed to a crawl, and then to a halt. I struggled, mashing my keys in an attempt to get free. Odihsub was now wide eyed with panic. There was no escape, as the ebon hands dragged him beneath the surface. Then I was disconnected.
After getting kicked back to the login screen, I was a bit surprised and unnerved to find that the name and password fields were already filled in - The username read "phillipx", likely the name of my friend's account. But most unusual, was the password field - instead of stars, it visibly read "let's play again."
I pressed enter - and beheld the fruits of my struggle. Odihsub had turned from his happy self into a twisted, battered mockery of his previous form - His skin was flayed off, staining his tunic and pants with blood. His eyes and teeth were removed, leaving a pitted void of a face in the place of his previously gleaming eyes. An almost completely realistic stream of reflectiveness ran down the sockets in his face, implying tears - I began to almost well up from the sight of this young warrior, now reduced to a husk. I was unable to log in as him.
I needed to take a break from this - I see now what Phil was worrying about, and perhaps ponder about his current fate. I shall return later to see what my ventures into this copy of Champions Online yield.
It's been a couple of days, and I've had nightmares in my sleep. I've been trying to go about my daily life, but all I've been able to think about is Odihsub, and his mangled body. In my slumber, all I can see is that bloodied, eyeless gaze, crying at me, as if to ask me "Why?"... In the downtime, I had ample time to think about it all, and what Phil had sent me and instructed me to do - Something had consumed the essence of Odihsub, and perhaps even Phil himself.
Finally, I knew what to do. I had to trek on and continue fighting - to get to the bottom of this abomination and prevent any more ruin coming to these characters and my friend. I started up Champions again.
This time, the login screen looked odd - the cloudy sky was darker now, stained a deep orange-red by an apparently setting sun. The hovering heroes that once flew in the background were now completely gone, and the cityscape seemed to be more chaotic, the buildings skewed at odd angles. Once again, I could only choose one character - this time, it was Noerf, the Glacier. He was a tall but built man, clad in green plates. His helmet was a large glass dome, with an aloof, mature face in the center. The login screen said he was inside "Champions HQ."
I logged in, and the loading screen showed up - normally, a background history comic would have appeared here, but instead, the screen was a strange, unreadable garble of letters, with a helmeted figure to the right. As the loading bar filled, these glitchy figures shifted around the screen, until the bar filled to the top - they settled in a large grid arrangement, visibly spelling out a familiar word: "SURRENDER."
The game loaded up, and I was inside the soft blue, arched halls of the Champions HQ. This was apparently the version of this map featured in the game's tutorial, as it was currently under attack by goofy bug creatures. I headed in deeper, fighting off the insectoid assailants, only to find Defender fighting off bugs on his own. We joined forces, fighting off the bugs with our impressive ranged weapons, which was nice. After the battle, Defender ran to the door and commended me on my bravery.
Instead of being able to talk to him, though, he went straight through the door into the inner halls. I followed him, only to discover that he was running faster... Faster and faster. Instead of a normal hall, the passage that laid behind the door was a seemingly endless expanse, as if a bottomless pit had been turned on its side. The hallway stretched into the distance, getting dark the further it trailed on. Giving follow (which was difficult, since I did not have any travel power abilities), I tried to keep up with the rushing Defender for about 3 minutes and 15 seconds - to no avail. Soon, I had lost track of the iconic hero.
I continued my course of action, going down the endless, dark hall. Out of nowhere, though, I hear a deep, distorted cackle - as if someone had taken that Soda Popinski laugh from Mike Tyson's Punch-Out and lowered it 1.3 octaves. The sound seemed to originate from behind me, so I turned Noerf around...
I was greeted by a solid wall of corpses - Thousands of grey, muscled bodies fused together -each with one arm free, carrying a massive gladius. Some of the corpses wore partial armor, with helmets and pauldrons. Several of them moaned, others cackled, but in whole, the entire wall seemed to murmur "SURRENDER". I attempted to fight against this abomination, only to find that it was immune to my frigid attacks.
I began running, the wall of corpses slowly trailing behind Noerf. After a stressful chase down the hall, which lasted 5 minutes or so, I came to another door at the end of the hallway. Opening the door was slow, and the wall was rapidly gaining. In the nick of time, though, it finally opened, only to reveal the mangled body of Odihsub, armed with his blade, and a deluge of hyper-realistic blood. Noerf was caught between two dark forces.
For the first time, Noerf's face changed in expression - a wide-eyed grimace as he realized that he was cornered. I attempted to have him escape by moving him to one of the walls, but it was no use. Whether it was a cutscene or some kind of bug, Noerf was apparently resigned to his fate. The corrupted corpse of Odihsub screamed, stabbing his katana through Noerf's armor, and then the screen faded to black as it was flooded by corpses, still murmuring "SURRENDER." Once again, I became disconnected.
Once again, the login screen had the information automatically filled out - the password, however, was different, saying "He can't win." Whether it was referring to me, the characters, or whatever dark force I was up against, it sure wasn't reassuring.
Logging in once again, I now found Noerf also corrupted by his unfortunate fate - his armor was chipped, leaving jagged edges - some of them misplaced and stabbed straight into his corpse. This was not nearly the most gruesome thing about his wounds, though - his head was entirely decapitated, leaving a scared, motionless face rolling around in a shattered glass dome as I turned the character's model.
The login screen's sky was now white, and the buildings in the background had an eerie, green light cast upon their lower edges. There was only one more character to play as - Namnori, a female character who was fully clad in armor. Her specialty apparently was power armor attacks. Her location was marked as "-"
AND SO BEGINS MY QUEST TO MAKE THE STUPIDEST CHAMPIONS ONLINE CREEPYPASTA IN HISTORY.
Glorious. I screamed and my laptop is full of tears.
RIP Caine
Today I decided to log in to CO again for the first time in a week, just to see how things are holding up around here. Strangely, after I entered my login info and went to the character select screen, I noticed that all of my characters had their backs turned on me. I could still use my mouse to rotate them as normal, but their default positions seemed to have turned 180 degrees. Cautiously, I selected my main and hit the play button.
While the game was loading, one of the usual loading screens talking about mods popped up. Everything seemed fine, until I noticed the tooltip at the bottom of the screen. It read: "Where have you been?". Unsettled, I rubbed my eyes for a moment and tried to read it again, but the loading screen had already vanished and I was inside the game now.
And from there things only got weirder and weirder. My character was performing the cry emote, over and over again. I rotated the camera to take a look at her face, but she turned it away from me. No matter how I moved the camera, she moved her head around so I couldn't look directly into her eyes.
I was getting really creeped out at this point and decided to play some content in order to relax a bit. I clicked an alert, and despite the fact that it said there were no other players waiting, the queue popped immediately. Four out of the five checkboxes at the top of the screen were already checked. I clicked "ready" and quickly stared at the next loading screen.
My eyes shifted immediately to the tooltip at the bottom. Now it read: "Do you still love me?". The screen disappeared as quickly as it loaded up and I was in the alert now. But this wasn't the radiation rumble I had selected. My character was standing in front of City Hall. There was no cutscene and no enemies appeared. Instead, there were seven characters standing in front of me on the white stairs. They were:
Talisman
Redsnake
Armadillo
Ironclad
Teleios
Ogre
Redstone
It didn't take long for me to realize what the first letter in their names spelled out. As soon as I did though, I hit my Escape button and tried to log out. But intead of the usual text at the final confirmation screen before exiting the game, the message now read: "Are you sure you want to leave me?".
I panicked and hit Cancel. As I'm typing this the game is still running and I'm too afraid of what will happen if I log out.
Someone please help me, I'm getting desperate at this point.