DECAquaza

Pokemon Emerald.

A game many, like myself, seemed to love. With those old playground rumors and such about new pokemon no-one else had and the infamous green sky snake that we all come to love and fear in competitive gaming. There was..something else people seemed to really take interest in.

The glitch pokemon.

You know the usual, Decamark, bad EGG, B e An, etc etc. They were fun to mess around with, even if some of them killed off your save file, it was nice to bend a pokemon games code to your will, with some people taking a liking to decamark especially. I couldn’t really blame them, the fact that it had its own pokedex screen, the black-white target symbol it had..memorable. However..I remember back when I was younger, one of the pokemon emerald rumors going around on the playground was about decamark, a very special version of it that was left to rot in the games code due to it being a slapped together placeholder.

It was said to take the form of Rayquaza themself, although..slightly glitched and different.

Maybe it was sheer curiosity, maybe it was something else, but I was determined to find if that was true after all, even now I still think it was a stupid but fun rumor, but still..sometimes childlike curiosity can come back from the dead.

It was a warm sunny day when I got home from working retail at the local game shop, it was a mix of “dump yer games here!” and “buy yer games here!”, we had bins that were made for games that were dumped there, and one caught my eye.

A Pokemon Emerald cartridge, the cover slightly torn and worn down from age. The person who dumped it off had said that they didn’t really need it anymore-they were clearing out space in their house and found it neatly tucked away in a box. I had asked my boss if I could take it home, to rub in the “so the rumor was TRUE ALLLL ALONG!” to the people who didn’t believe those playground rumors back then.

Once I was given the go-ahead, I went home that day giddy, and pulled out my old GBA, blowing the dust off it and giving it a good clean. I plopped in the cartridge and started it up, there were..some off things about the intro, such as small glitches here and there alongside the colors being dulled, but I chalked it up due to age, after all, the dumper said they had it when it was the hot thing to get back then.

There was a save file already, saved during the whole Groudon Vs Kyogre stuff, the team was composed of a Mew, a Cradily, a (100% hacked) Deoxys, a shiny Swampert, a Raichu, and a Tyranitar. They all that nicknames, the Mew was named “Raspberry”, the Cradily “Rocky”, the Deoxys “Outer”, the Swampert “Buddy”, the Raichu “Zap-Zap”, and Tyranitar was of course, “Godzilla”.

I giggled at those names, reminded me alot of the silly nicknames I would give to my own pokemon as a kid. I exited out of the pause menu, and noticed some more glitches, some around the edges, colored either black with a white outline, or white with a black outline. I figured that once more, it was due to the cartridge being old and probably being messed with for fun.

I headed on to where you would awaken Rayquaza, and noticed something..odd, there was a glitched item in my bag simply titled “313H0==PN4S11AR”, gibberish that was one of those odd glitched items that had a name that reached out of the boundaries. I went to it, curious, and quickly remembered to save beforehand.

Once I simply clicked it, however, it vanished, a text box appeared, black with a white outline, stating…THIS:

“N JVFU UNF ORRA TENAGRQ. OR JNEARQ BS JUNG LBH UNIR JVFURQ HCBA, QRNE.”

…OK, now I was invested. I closed out of the textbox and out of the bag, and entered Sky Pillar. It didn’t really take that long to reach the top. What I found up there, however..made my blood run cold,

It was a badly-glitched sprite of what I could only assume to be Rayquaza, red peaking out beneath glitched black and white textures, all music grinding to just a few beeps as I hesitated to move onwards and..interact with this..Glitchyquaza.

I decided to just swallow my damn fears, and interacted with the thing.

After a heavily corrupted and pitch-lowered roar, I was thrown into battle, the screen flickering as the GBA emitted a sound that almost sounded like it and the game were struggling to load in..whatever this thing was. When I saw it, however..it was exactly like what the rumors told.

It was a Rayquaza with black-white-grey lines, the face being heavily glitched out into like that of the decamark glitch pokemon, its circle symbols having changed to decamarks aswell, with the sprite now laying low with its hands clawing deep into the ground.

The name was a glitched combination, but one I could easily make out.

DECA quaza.

I threw out my Mew, noticing the massive amount of HP that DECA quaza had, extending far beyond the screen almost like a gen-1 glitch pokemon’s hp. The same cry it had played once more, but now pitching up and down, with a few beeps here and there. The background was half glitched, half normal, the glitched part made out of grays and blacks, question marks appearing in the inky darkness.

Somehow, I felt a feeling of unease coming from this whole calamity.

Once I got over myself, I ordered Mew to use flamethrower, but instead of hitting, it just read “T HER E WAS NO TA RG T !”, the textbox being more corrupted than ever. Decaquaza moved next, using some kind of glitch move that COVERED the screen in black and white glitches, more and more question marks appearing before-

[ The save file was corrupted. Would you like to restart? ]