10 Myths and Legends in Videogames

Myths and Legends

Myths and Legends

In honor of Halloween and every fairy tale, wives tale, horror story, and urban legend in our hometowns, here is a collection of 10 unique tales from the virtual. Urban Legends in video games are actually pretty rare given that they are the product of closed systems randomly doing something they were meant to do; but they are always entertaining. 

Traditionally, these legends usually originate in a forum post or are the product of our reliance on wikis – especially in games that cross between languages and cultures. Creepy Pasta is one place that stories like these originate though I have only chosen 2 that have. Check the site out when you feel like feeling creeped out. I recommend you be very drunk or very sick. 

This collection of urban legends are either in the process of being formed or have never really travelled outside the community they appeared in. They are ordered according to how fantastic they seem to be. I have tried to collect 10 legends that have actual game origins. In certain cases, this is not true but I will leave that to you to discern.

10. Pokemon Legends

Pokemon

So, Pokemon is a popular franchise aimed at younger kids and so, the legends that surround some parts of it are pretty intense. It is somewhat surprising that there aren’t more legends about how to get Mew or Mewtoo but no, this is about creepy urban legends. In particular, this entry is about two different stories that both most likely originate on Creepy Pasta. 

The first is Pokemon Black (hilariously, Nintendo released Pokemon Black later). This was a story about a random cart that someone “found” or “acquired.” In this game, players would encounter a ghost that would literally kill pokemon. This ghost would cast curse and eventually the pokemon, and the trainer’s pokeball, would disappear. The entire story of this game can be found here. However, this part of it is what got me: 

“The game changed quite a bit after defeating the Elite Four. After viewing the Hall of Fame, which consisted of Ghost and a couple of very under leveled Pokémon, the screen cut to black. A box appeared with the words “Many years later…” It then cut to Lavender Tower. An old man was standing, looking at tombstones. You then realized this man was your character.

The man moved at only half of your normal walking speed. You no longer had any Pokémon with you, not even Ghost, who up to this point had been impossible to remove from your party through depositing in the PC. The overworld was entirely empty — there were no people at all. There were still the tombstones of the trainers that you used Curse on, however.”

And everything that happens next. I really wish that this legend was true.

Also, there is a game made in game maker to emulate something similar called Pokemon: Lost Silver. In this game, the maker attempts to emulate something similar to Pokemon Black. It achieves a sufficient level of creepiness. This game can be downloaded here. 

http://youtu.be/GKnCBwsa-bU 

So, legends and myths in video games are something that have been slowly growing thanks to the internet’s ability to spread them. 

9. Irisu Syndrome

Irisu

So, this is a simple, freeware puzzle game from Japan. It features cutesy girls and a pretty boring story. There is nothing to see here so I won’t offer you any explanation or discussion. 

However, I will offer you a Download of the game: here and an English patch for the game: here. Give it a go, it is a simple game. Try for the best score you can get!

Keep in mind that as you do better in the game that text files will begin to appear in the game folder. Why don’t you read them?

Ok, well, the game is frustrating and you just don’t have time to finish it. Check out this video then: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMeBF07DOJE 

Alternatively, you could also spoil this entire game by going here.

8. The Diablo Chat Gem

Diablo Chat Gem

In the Battle.net chat, there used to be a blue gem that adorned the area below  the center of the chat window. This gem seems to have been meant to be nothing more than a fancy decoration but the curious thing was that it was clickable and it often gave messages like “Gem Activated” or Gem Deactived” or “Perfect Gem Activated.” Blizzard never revealed what the gem did and so this lead to a tremendous amount of myths and legends about the gem. 

First, before we get into those, the Blizzard “Multiplayer FAQ” said this about the gem: 

Q: What is the functionality of the Gem in the Diablo II Battle.net Chat room?

A: While we cannot reveal the purpose or function of the Gem in the Diablo II Battle.net Chat room, we can say that it is working correctly and has more than exceeded our expectations. Also, Blizzard employees cannot confirm or deny any rumors regarding this Gem.

These comments ran a whole gamut of possibilities. For example, some players attributed clicking the jewel and activating it perfectly to finding gems or gem shrines. Another player swore it said, “Moooooo!” when they clicked on it 286 times and then found a gem shrine. 

Other players believed that it was a means to activate chat filters for curse words. Other people (testers for Diablo 2) speculated that the gem was a way to open up a trade window. Still others swore they heard from blizzard employees that the gem didn’t do anything. 

Eventually, Blizzard added this to their multiplayer FAQ: 

Q: I want to know what the Gem does in the Diablo II Battle.net chat room, and don't tell me you can't say -- just tell me what it does!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A: After a solid year of silence, we just can't keep the secret anymore. The long awaited answer to one of the most burning questions about Diablo II is simple: It does what it does. When you click on the Gem, it works perfectly every time, and that is what we have always said. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, "Sometimes a Gem is just a Gem"!

7. Polybius

PolybiusPolybius is one of those legends that has been proven and disproven so many times that people aren’t sure what to believe anymore. At its heart, Polybius was a video game that was produced in the early 1980s that appeared in a few arcades in Portland, Oregon (SOURCE). This game reportedly caused players to become incredibly addicted to playing it but also caused insomnia, suicidal tendencies, frightening visions, and (to make it suspicious to all urban legend debunkers) amnesia.

Because of the amnesia, the fact that no one had ever seen a Polybius machine or even a Rom, many people felt that this really was the work of fiction. However, in 2007, GameSpot published a brief discussion of the game from one of the supposed creators – Stephen Roach. In this article, Stephen outlines that he and 3 other programmers formed a game company called Sinneschlossen in 1978. They developed an arcade game with a puzzle element and tried to encapsulate the need to keep gamers attention since the arcade boom was going full strength at the time. 

Their first test market was in Portland, Oregan and the game was testing well until a 13 year old boy apparently had an epileptic fit while playing the game. This forced the distributors and funders to pull the game out of the market and dissolve the project. Roach finally concludes that there were 7 cabinets produced for the game and that none of them look like the shots that float around for the video game. There also has not been any sort of ROM released since their project was scrapped so quickly. 

Of course, this story comes with an adequate amount of skepticism. 

The full interview can be read via the Way Back Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20080507174244/http://bitparade.co.uk/modules/articles/article.php?id=21

6. Pa-Pa-Paper, Please! 

paper please

When I was younger, I watched the movie The Ghoulies. I think I was 10 or 11 and had a pretty intense fever. In this movie, there is a scene where someone is trying to go to the bathroom. Unbeknownst to them, there is a monster in there. Well, I think you can imagine what happens next.

So, in the Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of the Ages, and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, there is a very strange monster. In the first two games, it is a hand that is desperately trying to find a roll of paper. Obviously, this hand is searching for toilet paper and is desperately trying to avoid an embarrassing scene. In Majora’s Mask, this hand comes out of a toilet on the first floor of the Stock Pot Inn in East Clock Town. When it is clicked on, it moans before asking for the paper near its hand, “Pa-Pa-Paper, Please!” The player can then give any of the pieces of paper that they have collected at that moment and receive a piece of heart that was dropped in the toilet. Interestingly, giving some pieces of paper will ultimately force link to have to do certain parts of the game. 

In Oracle of Ages, the hand is searching for paper in Lynna Village in the past. In reward for Pa-Pa-Paper, Link receives a Stink Bag that will clear the sinuses of an NPC. The player can also drop items down into the hole and antagonize the poor hand. Hot seeds or Ember Seeds will make the hand say, “Ooo…hot!” whereas if the player pushes the chamber pot into the hole, the hand will shout, “Noooooo!”

In Skyward Sword, the hand was replaced with an actual interaction that was sort of unique. At the Bazaar, some NPCs mention that they hear strange sounds coming from the bathroom at night. If Link goes there, he meets a character named Phoeni (phoney?) who needs paper. The next morning after this encounter, Link is given a letter for a character named Karane. Link can choose to give the letter to Karane or Phoeni. If Link gives the letter to Phoeni, the ghost leaves the bathroom and can be seen caressing the sleeping writer of the letter. The ghost then produces 5 gratitude crystals (out of the 80 possible). 

These strange moments in the Zelda games were explained in an Entertainment Weekly interview with Miyamoto in February of 2012. Miyamoto expalained, 

“In the original Legend of Zelda game, a gigantic hand appears and grabs you at the entrance to a dungeon. Actually, that has nothing to do with Skyward Sword. [Laughs] It’s actually something from a Japanese ghost story. Not a specific ghost story. There are some ghost stories in Japan where — when you are sitting in the bathroom in the traditional style of the Japanese toilet — a hand is actually starting to grab you from beneath. It’s a very scary story.” (SOURCE). 

While most times a game generates a story, Miyamoto was putting urban legends from Japan into a game that non-Japanese gamers would play and creeping us all out. I always wondered what that hand was.

5. The Ghosts of Halo

Halo has been around for over a decade now. In the countless matches that have been played, there are bound to have been a few glitches here and there. I look for a lot of glitched out gaming moments so, one night when I had a pretty nasty fever, I found this page and was pretty creeped out. 

So, the story goes that a variety of different glitches need to happen in some sort of order for “ghosts” to appear. There are reports of these ghosts appearing in Halo 2, 3, and Halo: Reach and have been reported to display some of the following behaviors: 

  • They do not show up on the scoreboard.

  • Their kills are often credited to The Guardians.

  • They always stay facing in the direction they were when they spawned. When they fire or melee at players, they "snap" to aim at the victim, rather than turning smoothly like normal players; they sometimes "snap" when throwing grenades. 

  • They tend to only face the cardinal directions.

  • They have omnidirectional vision, and do not need to look up or down. 

  • They can throw unlimited grenades at any angle—including backwards, allowing them to stick a player standing behind them. 

  • On some locations, they can jump up very high.

  • Sometimes they can make very loud, piercing sounds. 

And other creepy things. Really, bots were already creepy in games like Unreal Tournament or Halo but unwelcome, unexpected bots just take the cake.

One explanation for the appearance of ghost-like behavior may be found in this video but this doesn’t account for computer controlled bots, just invisible players due to a loss of vram to draw character models: 

4. Fazasher Death Weapon

Slide 4

I will admit that I have a bit of a bias for Final Fantasy 11 but this legendary monster story was one that I always found fascinating. So, Final Fantasy 11 was released in America around 2002 in japan and in America in 2004. Most information about the game was translated from Japanese websites. The story I have heard was that several Japanese guilds, angry that Square hadn’t warned Japanese players that they would be playing with English speaking Americans, began putting fake data on their site for monsters that didn’t exist. It took quite some time for this particular monster to be debunked: 

According to FFXIclopedia, Fazasher Death Weapon was supposed to spawn once every 168 days, 180 days, or 150 days Earth time (depending on account). At the time, it was reported to be defeatable by an alliance of 18 players at LV70 (the level cap was not raised to LV75 until December 2003). When American groups began to have access to this part of the game (the zone was end game at the time) Fazasher Death Weapon, camped because his drops included an incredible, one of a kind shield, was still not seen. This was when it gained more credence in that a few groups claimed that it spawned invisible. This would explain why people wouldn’t see it while wandering the zone. It was even invisible to Rangers, who could see a list of monsters inside the zone. Eventually, "Fazasher Death Weapon" got debunked when no such mob turned up in the .dat files for Ro'Maeve, nor any of its supposed drops.”

In a surprise move, Square implemented an actual Notorious monster in the same area that spawned invisible and would only become visible once it aggressed someone. This monster, named Shikigami Weapon, spawns every 21 hours on the dot. Sadly, the incredible shield it was reported to drop was replaced by a Gi for Final Fantasy’s Summoner job.

3. Lake Rathetear

Slide 3

Lake Rathetear separates the Mountains of Rathe from the Southern Plains of Karana. However, this zone hosts a glut of legends. It is said that at the very bottom of the lake resides a Kraken. This Kraken was reported to be extremely large but also extremely high level. There are reports still of people being nervous as they rode boats through the zone because they didn’t want to have to try and track down their body at the bottom of the lake as it was very difficult to see under water. 

Like Fazasher Death Weapon, a giant sea monster was eventually placed in game. This monster was actually a giant Shark named Ancient Megalodon but was not as high of level as was expected. 

2. Galleon 

Galleon

Mists of Panderia was released last month and has done a lot to bring World of Warcraft fans a breath of fresh air. One aspect of MoP was the re-integration of open world bosses. These monsters are unique in that they have tons of hit points, require a raid to bring down, and drop amazing loot. These two monsters are Sha of Anger – who spawns every 2 hours – and Galleon, a legend in the making. 

Any amount of time spent in the Valley of the Four Winds will include untold amounts of, “Galleon’s up!” Or, “whisper (player name) for an invite to Galleon.” Groups have killed this Boss but the spawn conditions have not been verified. Reports state that the monster could spawn as quickly as 17 minutes or as long as 7 days. The picture above includes people who have been camping the monster for well over 90 hours. 

1. jvk1166z.dll

For the last slide, we'll just copy and paste the creepypasta below (via the Creepypasta Wiki) : 

Some people might recall some momentary buzz caused a couple of years ago by a particularly odd Morrowind mod. The file name was jvk1166z.esp. It was never posted on any of the larger Elder Scrolls communities, usually just smaller boards and role-playing groups. I know in a few cases rather than being posted it was sent via PM or email to a ‘chosen few.’ It was only up for a few days, to the best of my knowledge.

It caused a buzz because it was a virus, or seemed to be. If you tried to load the game with the mod active, it would hang at the initial load screen for a full hour and then crash to the desktop. If you let it get that far, your install of Morrowind, along with any save files you had, would become completely corrupted. Nobody could figure out what the mod was trying to do, since it couldn’t be opened in the Construction Set. Eventually, warning were distributed not to use it if you found it, and things died down.

About a year later, in a mod board I used to frequent, someone popped up with the mod again. He said he was PMed by a lurker who deleted his account immediately after sending. He also said that the person advised him to try playing the mod through DOSbox. For some reason, this worked…sort of. The game was a bit laggy, and you couldn’t get into Options, Load Game, the console, or really anything else, other than the game itself. The QuickSave and QuickLoad hotbuttons worked, but that was it. And the QuickSave file seemed to be just part of the game file, so you couldn’t get at it anymore. Some speculated that the changed game used an older graphics renderer, making DOSbox necessary, but it didn’t LOOK any different.

This part I can speak about from personal experience. When you start a new game in JVK (as the board came to call it), once you left the starting bit in the Census Office and came into the game proper, the  first thing you notice is that the ‘prophecy has been severed’ box pops up. This is because every single NPC having to do with the main quest is dead, with the sole exception of Yagrum Bagarn, the last of the Dwemer. Their corpses never despawn, so you can go check on all of them. In effect, you begin in a world that is domed to start with.

The second thing you notice is that you’re losing health. It’s only a bit, but it keeps happening, a little bit at a time. The longer you stay in one place, the quicker it seems to occur. If you let this loss kill you, you’ll find the cause: a figure we came to call the Assassin, because he seems to wear a retextured version of the Dark Brotherhood armor from Tribunal, even though the expansions don’t work in JVK. It’s all black, completely untextured, like he’s just a hole in space. The way he moves…he gave me quite a start, the first time I saw him scuttling around my dead body. He crawls inhumanly on his hands and feet, his arms and legs splayed out like a spider. You’d usually only see him after death, crawling around and over your body just before the reload box popped up. Occasionally, you could catch a glimpse of him darting around a corner or crawling on a wall or ceiling. It made the game very difficult to play at night!

Other than that, the only noticeable difference is that at night, at random intervals, every NPC in the game will go outside for a few minutes. During this time, the only thing they will say when hailed is, “Watch the sky.” Once they return to their normal behavior they act as normal, though.

After a while, a player on the board discovered a new NPC named Tieras, a male Dunmer in the temple at Ghostgate. Two things are notable about this NPC: first is his robe, a unique article of clothing that was lovingly rendered with twinkling stars all across it, looking like a torn-off chunk of the night sky. The second is that all of his dialogue, in addition to showing up in the dialogue box, is voiced. You can skip it if you wish, but it all sounds like it’s in the default male Dunmer voice. Some people said that they thought the voice was “slightly” different, but it was a very, very good imitation.

I won’t go into the details, but the questline he sends you on has to do with a dungeon referred to simply as ‘The Citadel.’ At least, to the point I reached, the quests were all of a fairly generic ‘discover the secrets of the ancients’ bent. the entrance to this dungeon is on a small island far to the west of Morrowind proper. I eventually discovered that if you used a Scroll of Icarian Flight at the westernmost point on the main landmass and jump directly west, you’d end up almost exactly at the island.

Even though the dungeon is called The Citadel, it goes straight down. It dwarfs any other dungeon, both in size and difficulty. From a natural cave area you’ll proceed down into an ancestral tomb looking area, then Daedric ruin area, and then a Dwemer ruin area. I made it down to the Dwemer Ruins before I quit. The creatures here were strong enough that a level 20 character would have to take care, and since you can’t use the console in JVK, level 20 take a while to get. Since QuickSave and QuickLoad are your only options, it’s all too easy to get yourself into an impossible situation, too. I did, and I just didn’t have the energy to start over.

Now what I’m telling you is based on what those few who went further reported. Past the Dwemer Ruins you find yourself in a level like the Dwemer Ruins, but darker. Rather than the usual bronze, all the surfaces, including those of the creatures, are black. The sounds of machinery are loud here, and grow louder still randomly. There’s also steam or fog everywhree, limiting your vision to about ten in-game feet or so. If you can make it through all this, you will reach a hall that those who found it called it the Portrait Room.

Like the fire in torches or other effects from early 3D games, this room has picture frames that always face directly at you, no matter how you look at them. The images in the frames were always randomly chosen images from your My Pictures folder. On the board, the ones who got there had some fun posting screenshots of the Portrait Room with various pictures in the frames (Usually porn, of course).

At the end of the hall was a locked door. After admitting defeat and returning to Tieras, everyone just found him saying, “Watch the sky,” in his gravelly voice. What’s more, nobody else in the game would say ANYTHING. There was just a completely blank dialogue box with no options at all. They wouldn’t even rattle off the usual canned audible greetings. The only exception was at night; whenever they’d go out for a few minutes, they’d still repeat it. “Watch the sky.” At this point, one of the players - a friend of mine from the board - noticed (and the few others who got this far agreed) that the night sky was no longer the usual night sky of Tamriel; it had changed to a depiction of a real night sky. And it moved.

From this point on, everything is based on what this one person reported. Eventually, he got himself kicked from the board, but I kept in contact with him for as long as he responded. According to him, based on the constellations and planets, the sky started around February 2005. if you died, loaded, or went back into the Citadel, it would start over. When the usual day sky graphics took over, the movement would be suspended until the stars appeared again. In the space of a single night, everything would move about two months worth. Since the timescale of JVK was more or less that of the standard game, that meant that a bit less than an hour was a 24-hour period.

He became convinced that the door would open based on some kind of celestial event. Of course, waiting for that meant leaving the game running. Of course, THAT meant that the game couldn’t be left unattended, thanks to our old friend, the Assassin. My friend decided he’s hang out for a whole day, just to see if anything happened. That would be about a year’s worth of movement. Here’s the post he made at the end of this experiment:

“I loaded in Seyda neen, where it all starts. It wasn’t too bad, just had to check in now and then to move around and heal to make sure I wasn’t dying. But check it out! 24 hours exactly in, and the Assassin learned a new trick! HE SCREAMS!!!! I was reading and all of a sudden, this crazy loud shriek just about makes me crap myself. It’s like something out of a horror movie! I look up, and there he is, just crouched down right in front of me. Of course, the second I moved my character, he ran off. When I went back down to the Portrait Room, the door was still locked. Damn it, damn it, damn it!”

A bit later, he came to the decision that he needed to wait three days - three years. The PM advising us to try DOSbox showed up in February of 2008 was his reasoning, anyway.

“After the first shriek, the Assassin stops hitting you out of nowhere. Now he’ll shriek, and if you don’t move for a few seconds after that he hits you. I think whoever made the mod was trying to help. At night, I’ve got my headphones on and I was just kind of dozing off…when he wakes me up with a shriek; I jiggle the mouse, and I’m good!”

That post was two days in, from his laptop. Once it was over…

“FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUCK! So FUCKING done. So, I wait, the three days, right, and right after the FUCKING Assassin made me jiggle the mouse, he shrieks again. So, I look, and everyone in town is outside. They’re all saying, “Watch the sky.” I don’t see anything, though. But then the game starts getting dark…like REALLY dark. I turn up the brightness all the way on my monitor, and I can still barely see. I can see other people in the game, little figures running around in the distance, just running back and forth. If I try to get close, they run off. Now, I was trying to sleep, so the lights are off, and this is kind of creepy. I don’t want to get up to turn on my light because I don’t want to miss anything, but NOTHING fucking happens. Eventually I go back to The Citadel…it’s still dark, and I gotta swim, and the whole time I can see all these guys swimming all around me, just barely there. I make it to the Citadel, and it’s normal light inside, and I get worried. Sure enough, the Portrait Door is STILL FUCKING CLOSED. I go outside and it’s ALL STARTING OVER. So that’s it. I’m fucking going to bed, and I’m fucking done. The end.”

After that, two things happen. first, another of the people who got to the Portrait Room claimed that the Assassin was showing up in his regular Morrowind game. (Quick explanation. If you reinstalled Morrowind to a different fold, you could have a normal Morrowind install along with JVK.) He himself chalked it up to an overactive imagination at first, but he reported a couple of really big scares with the black figure crawling right at him, or seeing it waiting for him just around a corner before scuttling off. Another of those who reached the Portrait Room started a regular Morrowind game, but never for sure saw him; it was just a couple of maybes, late at night, and always at a distance.

The second is that my friend started getting really abusive and short-tempered on the board, though he stopped talking about JVK entirely. It got so back that he was soon kicked off. I didn’t hear anything from him for a couple of weeks after that, so I sent him an email. This was part of his reply:

“I know I shouldn’t, but with classes out I’ve got some time, so I started JVK up again. It’s almost 2011…and I think I’ve got the sleep madness! But stuff is happening! It’s still dark…once it gets dark, it never gets any lighter. It stays like that. The people moved a few months ago…everyone in Seyda neen just went to that little bandit cave and moved in. They killed the bandits inside, and now they’re just standing around inside. They don’t say anything anymore; they don’t do anything when you click on them. I quicksaved and killed one, and he just stood there until he died without fighting back!

And it’s like that everywhere. You have to walk, since the quick travel people are all in caves now, too, but all the cities and towns are just deserted; all the people are in caves and tombs. Everyone in Vivec is down in the sewers. I’m going to Ghostgate next…I want to see if Tieras is still there. I’ll tell you what he says when I get there!”

i replied and said i wanted to see what he said, too, and waited a day. When I didn’t get a reply, I mailed him again, and a couple of hours later he sent back:

“Sorry, I totally forgot. So it’s 2014 now…since it’s always night, the stars are always moving. The whole screen is dark, but you can still see the brightest stars moving around. Tieras was gone…everyone in Ghostgate was gone. i don’t know where they went. They’re not in any of the nearby caves. But there’s new stuff…people still don’t say anything, but their eyes are bleeding. it’s so dark that even with a light spell you have to get right up against them to see, but there they are, little dark streaks coming down from their eyes. I think I gotta be getting close. I know this is stupid, and there’s no way the pay off is going to be worth it, but I just want to be able to say I stuck it out!”

I got that one during the day. Later that night, I got a follow up email:

“Some of the planets aren’t moving right. It’s pissing me off…if this keeps up, I won’t be able to keep track anymore. It’s almost 2015 now, I think. Fuck. You know, I just now noticed that there aren’t any monsters anymore, either. I’m completely alone outside now. The main quest peoples’ bodies are still laying around, though. i went to check on them.

I don’t need headphones anymore, so I just leave them off. When he shrieks, it’s like he’s screaming right into my ear. I think I even kind of anticipate it. He’s around a lot more now, a lot closer. He’s different from the other people who started showing up, remember? They keep running around, just where i can barely see them. I have to admit, it’s kind of creepy at night. Sometimes, when I go to the bathroom or whatever, I swear I can see something out of the corner of my eye. I’m keeping all the lights on now.”

I sent him a letter, jokingly telling him to get some real sleep, and left it at that. Two mornings later, I found this in my email. It was the last thing I got from him. After this, he stopped responding completely:

“I just got up from a fucked up dream, I think. The Assassin shrieked at me, and when I opened my eyes, he was right there, crouching over me. His arms and legs were longer, more like a spider’s. I tried to push him away, but when I touched him my hands just went inside and I couldn’t get them loose again, like he was made of tar or something.

Then I woke up, I thought. he was gone, but when I looked at the monitor I wasn’t where I was. I was in the Corprusarium, with Yagrum. For once, the light was okay, and I could see him all bloated on those mechanical spider legs. I sat down at the computer and he started talking to me. Not in a box, but really talking to me,in Tieras’ voice. He knew things about me. He told me things that I never told anyone, some things I totally forgot about. He told me that almost nobody had made it this far, and that the door would open up soon. I just had to hang on a little while longer. He said I’d know when it was time. He said I might be the first one to see what was inside.

And then I woke up for real, but I was at the computer. I still wasn’t where i was. I’m swimming out to The Citadel Island. And I can hear this tapping. It’s at my window. It’s over on the left, so I’m sending you this, because I left my laptop by my bed, to the right. Just a little taptaptaptap…like he’s knocking his finger against the glass. I might still be dreaming now.”

So, I guess that’s the end of the story. I know there’s a few other stories floating around about the mod, but this is the only I know as true, as far as it goes. I deleted my JVK copy of the game pretty much right after I gave up, but I’d like to get the mod again, if anyone still has a copy of the file. I’d like to see some of this for myself.