Sonic.exe : Retold

Find him, Thomas.

At this point, I was very confused. I needed to find out who was in control of the game I threw out, who sent me the letter, and whoever the hell Sarah was. But in order for me to get the answers to those questions..I'm gonna have to go back to the game. I went outside to the front of my house to go and get it, it was covered in mud and rain, so I had to wash it before I put it into the slot, and surprisingly, there went any scratches on the disk either. I went upstairs and started up my pc, and put the game into the slot, and loaded it up. When I had booted it up..nothing. There wasn't anything there, it was just darkness and nothing else. "Shit," I thought, "am I gonna have to clean it a second time?". But then, the game booted me to a level, no start screen, no resetting progress, nothing. It was exactly like I had decided to continue playing as if nothing happened. The level was called, "Hide and Seek" and this time, I was playing as a red echidna, named knuckles, yet..he wasn't introduced in this game either, he was introduced in the third game. I saw that the game was keeping its habit of constantly making me confused without any explanation of anything. The level took place in this strange void, there wasn't anything in it, not even a floor by the looks of it. The physics this time felt a lot more janky and had more weight to it, as if it was built on scratch or some shit. I moved around a couple of places, only for me to get nowhere. But then I realised something..the level went further than the previous level if you went the opposite direction. Now this, THIS intrigued me, as the level before this didn't let me explore what hid behind the other part of the screen, so this made me think that the game wanted me to go here, so I went there instead. For a couple of seconds, I thought it was just nothing again, but the further I went, the faster knuckles got, so I continued, and he got faster, and faster, and FASTER. He got so fast to the point where I couldn't even see him on the screen anymore, but then..my game was cut off by static again, however, it was a lot shorter than 30 seconds. The screen cut back, but it wasn't to the game, instead it was sonic, except he looked more like how he should have looked on the title screen..he was banging on my screen, begging for help. "THOMAS! YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE GETTING INTO!" He screamed, "DON'T LET HIM TAKE YOU TOO! PLEASE!" Now I knew that it wasn't just Sarah that fell a victim towards this game, there were other people involved. As far as I know, they could've been dead. It could've been ten, it could've been more, and that thought alone sent chills down my spine. "DESTROY THE DISC, THOMAS!" He shouted once more, before breaking down into tears, forming a puddle on the floor. The tears slowly turning from blue..to black. Sonics face then turned towards me, and started laughing, getting louder and louder. Then, with no further warning, my computer started flashing lights, with an image of someone's head pierced onto a stick, their mouth being stretched open and their teeth carved into their eye sockets. Once again, I felt like I wanted to be sick, that's TWO dead people I've seen in this game, "COME ON, JOIN US! JOIN SARAH AND FREDRICK!" I heard, it sounded more and more like chanting the more I heard the voices. After that, the screen cut to black..I needed to breath. I was starting to get uneasy just by looking at it, I felt like I was being forced to play the game at this point..I didn't want to, but if I wanted to get further answers as to what all of this is trying to tell me..I have to further progress and I can't do anything about it. After the flashing lights ended, the screen cut to black once more, opening me to the final level. "???" It was called, the game has confused itself to the point where it doesn't even know what it's trying to say at this point. In this level, I played as the main antagonist of sonic, Dr Robotnik. The game is now really easy to break, I can jump more times than I'm supposed to, I can make robotniks animations glitch whilst walking, etc. The game would lead me to these stairs that were going down, and the further I got down, the more I noticed the change in robotniks sprites, going from confident looking to worried, as if he knows what he can see down there, and he doesn't want us to progress further. The more I persisted, the harder it got for me to control him. "No! Stop it!" He yelled, every time I tried to get him to walk. Now, he was just refusing to do anything that I told him to do, he wouldn't walk, jump, or even go back, he wasn't responding. And then, as you probably would've expected, sonic showed up, the worst case scenario. He didn't really do much for the first 5 seconds he appeared, however, he did turn his head towards me, but what I wasn't expecting was for his head to GROW, closing up his face to my screen, and the animation for when he did that was..uncanilly smooth, I could tell how messy the frames were. Then, unexpectedly, this version of sonic TALKED to me. "Thomas. Don't believe what they are saying to you. Nothing happened to Fredrick and Sarah. They're one of us. They want you to join us. Come join Fredrick, Josh and Sarah." The animations for when he was talking to me was janky, his bottom teeth sometimes going over or underneath his top teeth, I also now know there's a JOSH now, so that's something. Then, that's when I came to a strange realisation. Three characters..Three victims...holy shit. The characters RESEMBLED the victims. Sarah was Tails, Fredrick was knuckles, and josh was Robotnik. I then knew I only had to say one thing to him, knowing that if he knows who I am..he must know what I'm saying. "You are lying." I told him. Silence, he didn't say anything, "most likely, he didn't hear me." I thought to myself. For the last time in the whole game, it cut to static for five seconds, and after that, Sonic screamed in pure rage, "I AM GOD" like he was in death grips or something, the screen flashing from red to black constantly. Sonic was showing all the organs piled up in his mouth, showing all the gruesome deaths the victims had to go through. Sarah has gotten stabbed to death, Fredrick got pierced to a stick, and josh had gotten his eyes gauged and his teeth ripped out, his skull being smashed to death with a baseball bat, and pieces of his brain being ripped apart. my game automatically closed, with a note in my folders. The game was gone, somehow. The note was from someone called Austin. "Thomas, I know what you've just experienced. Come find me, I can help you." Below the text, there was a picture of a house, presumably where I was supposed to find Austin. I decided that I was confident enough to do it, I was 16 then, so I should have the balls to go out on my own for the first time.

It was final, I was gonna go find him.