User:HailThePasta1314

Thanks for Playing It was a fairly normal Saturday in Katy, Texas. I was at the mall with some friends, Abigail, Alyssa, and Kendal. We’re all dorks in some form or fashion, so the first store we stop at is GameStop. At first we didn’t notice what was going on, because the mall is really loud during the day. Abigail was the first one to notice. There was a man at the counter. He was probably in his late twenties or early thirties, and he was tall. He seemed pretty angry at the guy working the register. I started to listen to the conversation, casually making my way to the counter while looking at the Xbox games. “I’m sorry sir,” The cashier sighed. He must’ve been dealing with this guy for a while, “but I just can’t take this game. It looks like an illegal copy. My boss would kill me if I bought a virus.” “Th-This is no damn virus! I NEED to get rid of it!” The man exclaimed. I’m not usually one to stick my nose in other people’s business, but I was intrigued, so I walked over and asked what the game was. The cashier handed over the disk, looking rather relieved to make it someone else’s problem. I studied the disk. It was a copy of DmC: Devil May Cry. I was a huge Devil May Cry fan, and I had all the games, so I could tell right off the bat that this was bootlegged. The original disk was black with the white graffiti style DmC written on it and Dante standing off to the side holding out his gun. This disk was black, yea, but the DmC logo was written in white sharpie. Poorly written at that. I asked where the man got it from. It was indeed an illegal copy from Mexico. I bought it off the guy for ten bucks just to give the guy at the register some relief. When I got home a couple hours later I opened my closet and pulled out an old desktop I had been working on. I didn’t want to use my good laptop to run the game in fear of infecting it. After making a couple adjustments I hooked up the computer and popped the disk into the tray. I had to pray that it would run on the old Windows XP operating system. It took an hour to complete the installation process, and once it was done the normal DmC menu popped up. I expected there to be something hidden in the menu, after all this was an illegal copy. Everything was pretty normal at start. No extremely unusual or noticeable glitches. I was getting extremely into the game, when the lights in my house flickered. There was a storm raging outside, nothing really out of the ordinary for a town that was so close to Galveston. I thought nothing of it, but decided to find a good save point since my house’s power was prone to going out and staying out for a while. I had just gotten past the Home Truths mission and decided this was a perfect spot to stop the game at. Just in time too, because a minute after I shut down the computer my house went dark. After about twenty minutes I heard a low cracking sound, and looked out my window. A tree had cracked in half and toppled over a power line. I knew I was going to be in the shadows for a while, so I decided the best thing to do was to take a nap. I heard voices in my sleep, but I figured it was part of my dream. I wasn’t sure because I was still conscious enough to think, but I wouldn’t let it bother me. When I awoke my power was back on, so I started up my desktop and played DmC. I got to mission 5- Virility, when I noticed something was up. I thought I could hear whispering. It got louder as I got closer to a hidden room in Limbo. I didn’t remember the room being there (I knew where all the collectables were after having played through the 360 version twice) so I took a look. Maybe this was the special Bootleg DLC I had been waiting to find. I had to use Arbiter to slash a path, then I walked in… and my game crashed. I had been so psyched to see what odd add-on had been concocted by the people who reproduced this that I didn’t think the game would crash if I looked into it. I nearly threw my headset when a popup box appeared on my screen telling me my game had stopped. How helpful. After several attempts to restart the game I got frustrated and decided to just go through the files themselves to see what the room was. I must’ve gone through every file before coming to the right one. The file was simply titled ROOM and had a single .txt document. I opened the document, expecting some odd HELP ME message or something stupid like that. Instead I found lines of what looked like code. I took pictures of the coding and sent it to my brother in law. He responded several minutes later. “That’s the kind of coding used in viruses”. My face went pale and I stared blankly at the text. I hadn’t actually expected a virus in the game, just a stupid prank to scare people. Maybe that’s what it was, so I attempted to start the game again. I exited out of the game file explorer and clicked the game icon on the screen. It wasn’t responding. I tried again. Still no luck. I went through every file in my computer again, and the game files weren’t there anymore. There was something out of place. It was a word document. I opened it and found a single line of text that made me feel like a complete idiot. Thanks for playing. I knew right away that whatever hacker that had reproduced the game now had unlimited access to my computer and whatever personal files I put on it. There wasn’t much but… My laptop powered on. The usual Gateway symbol popped up along with the windows 8 login screen. Someone was typing in the password and it wasn’t me. How had the virus managed to spread to my laptop? How did this hacker have access to my laptop now? I admit I broke down crying. I couldn’t control either computers now. This guy had full reign. I remembered the dream I had the night before. Voices. Men coming into my room and messing with my laptop, and putting a disk in. It wasn’t a dream. Whenever the hacker finally made it past the login screen I watched as what looked like the DmC menu appeared. Instead of options like load game, save game, or continue, the words thanks for playing overwhelmed my vision. I felt dizzy and everything was getting blurry. Then something happened that really pushed me over the edge. A video started up off to the side of my monitor. The man from GameStop was sitting on a chair in a large room filled with computers and monitors, staring at a camera. Staring at me. “Thanks for playing, Hailey”