Earthbound: I See You

Please help me! I'm posting this because I'm desperate. A friend of mine named Paula disappeared last week and the only clue I have is her laptop, found out of batteries in the bathroom by her parents who are also completely desperate.

As always we were very good friends, I had her Facebook password and figured it was the in her computer and I was lucky enough to be right. So I turned it on to see if there was any clue, anything. Everything was normal, but one thing: The desktop, which was always full of games, had only one image file called "I see you" and an incomplete text file:

My name is Paula, I'm 21 years old and I consider myself a gamer. I'm writing this text so that someone can help me somehow, I'm desperate. I'll tell you what happened to me in the last months. Well, I always liked Nintendo consoles and two months ago, on my birthday, a very close friend of mine decided to present me with a game that I really liked: Earthbound.

Everything okay until then, I was happy because I loved the game and had finished it once. As I had the whole weekend free I'd split my time between hanging out with my friends and playing Earthbound to remember my childhood, but strange things started happening since then.

The first day, I took my dusty SNES from the closet and smiled, I felt nostalgia overtaking me, I blew the cartridge just to feel again the excitement of starting a game, then I put it in the console. All normal so far, the game ran perfectly.

As I kept playing, I grew more and more addicted. Soon I was spending all my free time playing, sometimes skipping college and locking myself in my room. My mom started bugging me a lot, saying that I was playing to much and that my behavior had changed. Then I started arguing with her, but now I see how I've changed.

The first week was great, I had no difficulties as I still remembered well all the aspects of the game. In the second week it started to freeze, sometimes I had to turn off the game and blow the cartridge several times. And with the freezes came the nightmares.

They were nightmares that I never had before, I was in some kind of stretcher, it had wires and pipes everywhere, I'd feel something cold crawling around my neck and something piercing in my hand. I'd wake up with holes in the back of my hand and on my wrists. I thought nothing of it, the holes were small and seemed to be insect bites.

In the next weeks I started hearing whispers everywhere, not only when I was sleeping. They seemed to call my name, that gave me an insane fear, a strange paranoia. I had not linked that to the game at first because it was still normal, but soon I began to relate things when I was getting near the end.

The game had some scenes that I had not remembered, such as appearances of Paula (my namesake) in places she normally does not appear in the game, and she would just there stand there, doing nothing, you could not interact to her. In other scenes she'd just say: "I see you".

It was time to for the battle against Giygas, according to many, one of the most disturbing bosses in gaming history, for me it was just a regular boss. I decided to do something different, I set my DVD player to record the fight. When I climbed the organic path toward Giygas, awaiting the appearance of Porky, I was surprised when I saw Paula there, just she appeared elsewhere in the game. There was no way to pass that part of the game, I was almost giving up when Paula decided to speak, but it was a real voice, and it came out of my head.

"I see you".

The game jumped straight into the battle against Giygas. Everything seemed normal, but I was shaking with fear and thinking of turning everything off, but something kept me there, pressing the buttons, something moved me to defeat Giygas. I noticed that some options disappeared from the battle each turn, and then reappeared, but this usually happened when the game started glitching, so I ignored it. I was losing a lot of HP, pretty sure that I was not going to beat him. I was getting nervous, scared, getting up to turn off the TV but hesitated, I started to sweat. One of the options in the fight against Giygas was "Pray", and this option only started appearing when I was about to lose, I clicked on it and started to actually pray for everything to end so I could have my normal life back, I became increasingly dizzy, something strange seemed to be in my veins, the whispers returned, I fell asleep.

I do not know how long I slept, but I had nightmares that left me disturbed, there were walls with blood everywhere, I heard noises of knifes cutting flesh. I woke up and quickly looked at the game screen, it scared me and I almost let out a scream. Paula was there, all bloody, seeming to look at me, despite the low resolution graphics in the game, you could see that she was crying. I started crying too, that was not normal, everything seemed like a dream.

The game turned off by itself and then I saw a light in the ceiling, seeming to pull me, I panicked and ran into the living room. Despite not knowing what it was, my mind was thinking all the time: "It's them, they came to get you." I could not stop crying, my mother had not arrived from work yet and I felt I could be abducted at any moment, my first reaction was to try to call someone, my phone didn't work, so I ran with my laptop to the bathroom to write this message, I need h

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