Scary and Horrible story on Mt silver

Easter Egg: Snow on Mt Silver

His character was Blake, with a mostly filled Pokédex … but the time was odd. 999:99. I KNEW he couldn’t have been playing that long… I had barely logged 50 hours on my own game and I was at the E4… and I was playing slowly. Probably the result of his cheating crashed up his file, I thought. Well, whatever then… The game started up, and the first thing I noticed was the prolonged black screen. It took almost a minute for anything to change… and there was no sound at all. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up already, but it was too late to turn back.

Finally, a very dim sort of map came onto the screen… but it looked like static. What was going on? I squinted down and realized with a fearsome pang that it was actually the Mt. Silver map… but what I thought was static was heavy-falling snow. So this was where he had last saved his game. I checked his party… a very normal team for someone who’d been using a GameShark: Typhlosion, Feraligatr, Meganium, Pidgeot, Tyranitar, Lugia, all level 100 with modded moves… typical for him. Something about the sprites was… strange, though. They seemed sullen, in a way. Their colors seemed washed-out, and their expressions lacked the usual vigor they normally had. I chalked this up to missing pixels or something, also due to the cheating…

The map had brightened up just a smidgeon when I closed out of the start menu. Indeed, snow was somehow falling very heavily; pixels danced across the screen so fast it was hard to see the little sprite that was my brother’s character. Something was off about him, too. When I checked the information, it was the same as the Pokémon sprites; the colors were dull. In fact, now that I thought about it, he almost looked frostbitten.

My stomach tightened, and I turned and tried to move back down the mountain. As I hit the bottom of the screen, words popped up, and there was finally a sound – my sprite hitting an invisible wall.

“I can’t turn back now.”

That was… unsettling. I went into my Pokémon and tried to use Pidgeot’s ‘Fly’ ability.

“I can’t fly in this!” obviously referring to the snow.

‘Forget this,’ I thought, going into his bag. There was an escape rope. I tried using it.

“I can’t go back anymore.”

What was going on? Once again, I tried to walk back down the mountain, and to my horror the words changed with every attempt.

“I can’t run away.”

“I can’t go back down.”

“I can never go back.”

This last one sent a frigid feeling through my heart. There was no way down the mountain. I had to climb. Turning the little sprite around, I moved him forward.

No resistance at all, though my walking speed was oddly slow. What was truly weird was the lack of grass, of trainers, of anything at all but that white snow, which still blew across the screen and made it almost impossible to see. As I moved further “up” the mountain, his walking speed became slower, and slower. The static curtain of pixels grew thicker, so that I could barely make out the features of the map… but it seemed like the only way to move was straight ahead anyway. I reached what looked like a set of stairs at the very top edge of the screen. I didn’t remember this being there before. As I tried to move up, the little sprite paused.

“I’m cold.”

By now even I was getting goosebumps. His walking speed had become painfully slow, as if somehow he was being impeded. Up the little staircase…

More text on the screen.

“Meganium has died.”

What the balls, I thought. Pokémon don’t die in these games. I checked in my party, and was frightened and confused by what I saw.

Meganium’s sprite had been replaced by a red X. All of my other Pokémon sported varying degrees of damage, though I hadn’t battled once. I went into my bag and found a single revive, and tried to use it.

“It’s too late,” it said. What kind of easter egg was this?

There wasn’t much else I could do… trying to turn around yielded the same messages as before. So I kept moving.

“Pidgeot has died.”

I checked again… sure enough, there was the little red X. This time I selected it and looked at the Pokémon itself, trying to figure out what was wrong… I wished I hadn’t.

The sprite was mangled; pieces of it were missing. What was left was splotched with a sickish blue-grey color, and its eye was a solid black pit. I flipped down to Meganium- same deal, a leg missing, a chunk of its neck, most of its head, save that pitch-black, dead eye.

Morbid curiosity urged me onward, and the path never deviated from the straight upward road I’d traveled the entire time. Along the way, every now and then, another party Pokémon would ‘die’ and examination of its sprite would show it was in the same condition as the others. Until all that was left was Typhlosion. One more stair case was up ahead. I climbed it, braced for whatever horror awaited me.

I hit the summit.

It was deserted – Red was nowhere to be found.

The snow had stopped falling.

In the very center of the map was something sticking out of the snow. It looked like a Pokéball. Okay, maybe all this creepy shit lead up to some climactic, final battle using whatever was in THERE. If I picked it up, maybe Red would come out of hiding. I walked over and examined it, and there was a burst of static noise from my game that made me jump.

What appeared on the screen was a battle animation, my trainer sprite appearing, his skin tinged blue… against another mangled Pokémon sprite.

It was Celebi.