The Unseen Route

I never thought I'd be able to bring myself to tell my story. But I've realised that I must warn people before they go through the same nightmare, so, here it is...

That very day
The day started off as any other day, I woke up, ate, showered and went about my daily routine. I was only 15 at the time so I was limited on things to do, and since I grew up in an area where everyone was either a douche or a pot-head, I had to find a different way to spend my time. Like any other teenage boy I went straight to video gaming, one of my favorites has always been Pokemon, I was a hardcore nerd for it, I learned the entire Unown alphabet by heart and had every single game.

My favorite game has always been Pokemon Crystal, I played it religiously, aiming to (of course) catch 'em all. I played through the game at least 10 times and never felt challenged, I knew every trick in the book. I know what you're thinking, if I knew everything about the game, how would I not grow bored of it? Well, that eventually happened, so I started to hack the game, infinite master balls, noclip and more. The one I'm going to focus on is the Noclip, that's what lead to what I'm about to write...

The Unseen Route
I was noclipping around the radio tower, heading in random directions to see what I could find, I never really found anything besides invisible walls when I went too far, but there was one thing out of the ordinary, I was walking around the border looking for some shortcut to another area or something like that when the screen started to actually moving, at this point I was thinking "Maybe I'm taking some way to Route 31 or something".

I was wrong, terribly wrong.

I kept going for what seemed like ages until finally the little area box came up telling me where I am, it read "Route ???", I was thinking it might be some route that never made it into the game. I kept walking, (keep in mind, there was just trees everywhere, like any other noclipped area would be), and started seeing random NPC's placed in fairly convenient spots like any other Route would have them setup, I kept going and started to get bored, since this area wasn't developed, it had no music, so I started up the radio and noticed that it was playing the tune from Lavender Town, only it was a bit distorted and backwards. I thought nothing of it, it was a glitched area after all, so I just let that play and kept going since well, it's better then not having music.

I kept heading in a single direction until I walked into a tall tower. When I entered it it read "Tower of ???". I knew I had hit the jackpot with this, and I took a sec to look up both the route and the tower and came across nothing. I believed I had been the first to find this area. I continued to play through and noticed something slightly wrong- the tower was dark, and whenever I tried to use Flash it came up with "The darkness stays...". I was getting really freaked by this- no tower nor cave has ever done that in any game in the Pokemon series. I walked around looking for a ladder or something when I came up with a battle, it was a weedle, only instead of the regular weedle it was sideways, it's call was played backwards at a lower pitch, and it's name read "LEAVE", I threw out my Suicune and tried to attack it, it was only Level 1 and whenever I tried a move it always came out with "It missed!", my Suicune was Level 95 so I knew something was wrong, I kept trying to attack it until it finally depleted Suicune's HP, I tried to run, but whenever I hit the run command it came up with "You're too late to run!", so I just sat there and fought, I threw out every Pokemon in my party until they all fainted, but instead of returning me to the nearest PokeCenter, it showed my Trainer's sprite fighting, it only had 1 attack which was "Punch", but it kept missing, eventually it killed my trainer, but after he died it said "Not even death can save you", the battle screen faded and I was back in the tower, when I moved the trainer moved slowly, almost as if he was limping, what's even worst is that his sprite wasn't normal, it was covered in blood and looked terribly beaten. With every step my character took it came up with a chat box that said "Help... me...", I tried to find a way out but it was impossible, almost like he was just running through a dark endless abyss. I turned the game off and restarted it to try to make a new game but it kept freezing on startup, I took out the game to try and blow away any dust that was in the cartridge but I noticed something, the cartridge sticker was different, it had the weedle replacing the Pokemon title and the suicune on the front looked terribly beaten and covered in blood. I panicked and ripped off the sticker and replaced it with a new one that I had just made, reading "Strange Crystal, DO NOT PLAY". I took the game and packed it away with my others, I haven't played it since then...