Pokemon Creepypastas A.K.A scary stories

Tarnished Silver

A few years back, whilst feeling nostalgic, I dug out my old Silver game. Tragically, the battery had died, thus my save data was all missing, and I was unable to start a new save. Oddly, this has been the first time in all of my 20+ years of playing video games that a battery has died in one of my cartridges.

This left me understandably disappointed, as I had lived and breathed that cartridge when it was new. I was rarely without it within arm's length, no matter where I was, had accumulated at least one dozen each of Shinies and Level 100s, and worst yet - I had traded my best Pokémon from my first game, Blue, to it, including a Level 100 Squirtle that I had outfitted with strong physical attacks and named "Ninja".

While I was thoroughly sad in regards to this event, it was not something that debilitated me in any way. For the next few years, I, on the whole, forgot about my little Silver cartridge, and went on with life.

Every summer my family goes to the local Swap Meet. It's been tradition for as long as I can recall and continued even after I moved away from my parents; last summer was no exception. The Swap Meet, especially recently, has had the quality of its selection decreased by far, but a few gems can be found to the careful observer; for example, five years ago, I had nabbed a pirated English Pokémon Green version for $10, that, although it is just a title screen hack of the English Blue release in a green cartridge, is one of my prized possessions.

In any case, last year, I came across an elderly gentleman with a slew of old games for various Nintendo systems. Most of these cartridges were either games I already owned, or had no interest in, such as the stacks of every Madden release for the SNES that were so high that they threatened to topple every time someone approached the table.

Skimming through the GameBoy games he had for sale, I came across a copy of Pokémon Silver. Strangely, although the little labels affixed for prices on the cartridges read $5-15 on each GameBoy cartridge, Silver was only noted as $1. Nostalgia came flooding back to me, and not wishing to curse my luck, I decided not to inquire the price and jumped on the chance to purchase the game.

I had become sidetracked upon arriving home that night, so the game went untouched until the following afternoon. Rummaging through my bounty of the previous day, I came across the Silver cartridge and decided to give it a go.

I popped the cartridge into my GameBoy Advance and booted up the game. A save file was already present, and like anyone would be, I was a tad curious as to what had gone on in the previous owner's game. I smiled as I chose "Continue", hoping to receive a little insight on a stranger's psyche.

Immediately after the game started, I realized that I hadn't seen the name assigned to the player character; using the start menu to check, I found it was labeled as "The S".

I cocked my eyebrow in surprise. Surely, there was no way anyone else would use this moniker in his or her game - in all of my years, the only people I've encountered using it have been deliberate impostors - hardly someone that would use it in a game of Pokémon.

I shrugged this off for a few mere seconds, when I had found that the player's team also mirrored mine at the last time I had seen it - Ninja, Venom Jr. (Beedrill), Mewtwo, Lugia, Letherhed (Feraligatr), and Slashclaw (Scyther). I couldn't tell whether I was more creeped out or jubilant. Eventually, even though I failed to comprehend exactly how this turn of events came to be, I was just so excited to see my old team again that I continued to press on.

Everything in the game mirrored my previous Silver adventure, right down to other Pokémon I had caught, rival's name, and more. Despite still feeling a little uneasy over my game being duplicated, I kept playing, as nothing else seemed amiss, and it was like I had never lost my initial game.