Note: This creepy pasta has two parts, a letter to the mother and the mother looking for answers.
Story by: Jr637
Dear Mom,
I know it's not really the norm for people to send handwritten letters anymore since we have email, meeting face to face and the all-powerful cell phone, but I wanted to switch things up. Plus I had a few extra postage stamps and I figured that you'd be expecting a letter from me sooner or later.
So...I have a confession to make. I haven't been completely honest with you over the last couple of months. College has been great, but some very serious things have happened that have forced me to make some very grave choices.
Going back to the beginning, I was pretty angry with Kyle when he wouldn't let me take any of our game systems to college. It's not like we don't own every single Nintendo video game system they made. (Sans Virtual Boy, of course. I need my eyes to study.) If I wanted to blame him, I could. But I don't. Video games were such a huge part of our childhoods that I'm surprised he didn't get more violent when I tried to sneak our SNES out with me. In hindsight, that was a stupid decision anyway. I don't have a TV to play it on nor do I have the money to buy more games for it. What am I going to do, accept a copy of the game I'm looking for from some random old guy on the street for free? I'm WAY too familiar with some of the stories floating out there on the internet. (PS NEVER look these stories up unless you want to be truly disturbed.) So being the typical money deprived college student with no TV, I went online and downloaded ZSNES. If you're unfamiliar with ZSNES, it's an emulator that allows you to play video games on your computer, downloaded from the Internet, as though you were playing on the console. Pretty convenient for me.
Anyway, the game I loved more than any other, as I'm sure you're well aware from how much I used to play it, was Super Mario World – the reason I tried to sneak the SNES out at all. Being unfamiliar with ROM's, I asked one of my roommates experienced with emulators where I could find a decent ROM of Super Mario World and he guided me to ROMHustler. When I finally downloaded, unzipped and copied the ROM to a permanent folder, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the ROM came with a bunch of hacks a la carte. I was under the impression that you had to search these hacks out.
For a while, I tested out the first world of each hack, trying to determine which hacks were worth keeping and which hacks I should just delete. Some of the hacks only changed the first world and the rest of the game either didn't exist or was a carbon copy of the original. This went on normally for about a month, and then I found myself at one very strange hack simply called "RUN." Creeped out, I deleted it immediately. I had recently heard the story about Sonic.exe and I couldn't get the Kefka sound effect out of my head - I was NOT taking any chances. (Like I said before, forget I ever mentioned these stories.) Needing to clear my head, I left for the rec complex for an hour or two. When I came back, I went to the folder of hacks only to discover that RUN had somehow been restored. Confused, I went to check the Recycle Bin, only to find that RUN was still there, so it had somehow been copied back to the original folder.
THIS SHOULD HAVE SENT UP RED FLAGS.
Deciding that I might as well see what it was like, (But only the first level, I promised myself.) I started ZSNES up and loaded the hack. Shockingly, the first world was entirely normal. As in, the hack creator didn't change anything. 'OK,' I thought to myself, 'this might as well be my normal game.' Level after level turned out to be exactly the same as the original game. Being the completionist that I am, I had to get every single exit in the game. Oddly, I was able to get to Soda Lake before the last stage in Special World – something that I was never able to do before - so heading into to final stage, I was prepared for it to be similar to the original like the rest of the game. Wishful thinking on my part.
