Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24779263-20140409155104

Hi there!

Recently I started my first writing project, wich happens to be a video-game creepypasta. I have made a previous post with the first draft of that story.

After some advice from GraydonL, I made some changes to my pasta with the new advice in mind. Again I'm asking people to read and please comment on what I wrote. I'm hoping the version I'm posting below will be "upload worthy" after minor tweaks.

WARNING! Going for some sympathy points now: I'm from The Netherlands, so English is not my first language. nor do I have any training/education in writing whatsoever.

I hope you will enjoy reading the psta nontheless.

The White Waypoint

Like many other nights a week I was slaying demons and all matter of unholy hellspawn left and right with my friends in Sancturay, Diablo III.

As always we maintained a Skype connection to communicate some basic form of tactics to make the demon slaying go as smooth as we could.

Usually within seconds after engaging a challenging battle, the tactics flew out the window and chaos ensued.

Tonight though, we had a special purpose beside our usual demon slaying.

Tonight was kind of a special night for us, seeing as one of our friends managed to find a moment of free time in his busy life to be online for a few hours.

When all four of us were online we took the opportunity to summon and slay special bosses for legendary crafting materials, as the keys to build the summoning machines were quite time-consuming to gather.

After valiantly defeating all the bosses we could summon and using up all of our summoning machines in the process, we had some time to spare and decided to try and gather more keys for the next time all four of us had a chance to be online.

We searched out the Keywardens moving from act to act, one by one slaying them all in the hope to see that orange key drop from their corpses.

After a little while one of my friend had to go back to the town of New Tristram to sell the loot he picked up.

“''Guys! The freakiest shit is happening. I teleported to the New Tristram waypoint and ended up on a glitched-up piece of map''”

My other two friends responded with: “''Cool! I’m teleporting to you!''”

I can’t tell you why, but somehow whenever I encounter a glitch in a game I get a mixed reaction.

The things that give us uneasy feelings, are usually the same things that intrigue us.

Hesitantly I right-clicked the character portrait of my friend and selected: “Teleport to player”.

Cruz, the Crusader, started casting and *poof* he disappeared and the loading screen appeared on my monitor.

Landing on a waypoint I saw my friends running around in an empty area of the map.

The area looked like The Weeping Hollow, the area you enter when you take the north-west exit out of New Tristram.

It looked like the map had been sliced off after a few feet, displaying nothing but a vast, white, empty, abyss.

A soft melody could be faintly heard in the background behind the sound effects of my friends auto-attacking the abyss.

The thought of some form of limbo always freaked me the hell out, so I immediately clicked on a random waypoint and teleported out of there.

None of us had said a word after landing on that waypoint, but after a short moment following my exit I could hear my friends starting to speak again:

“''It’s kinda cool, because it’s broken. Other than that.. it mostly sucks. Too bad it wasn’t a infinite legendary glitch or something.''”

“Probably has something to do with the expansion that came out a week ago”.

“Yeah, we all remember the base game launch all to well”.

“Error 37”.

“31”.

“Don’t forget good old Error 36”.

We laughed as much as we could about L-day and everyone teleported out of there.

After finishing our key runs, we said goodnight and logged off.

---

The following weeks most of us were playing Diablo almost every night with nothing like the waypoint glitch happening in the many, many hours we played.

We sometimes talked about the chopped off glitch area, how it was “weird” but that was it.

Still, the chopped off piece of map stayed with me in the back of my mind every time I played the game.

Eventually I even started to regret teleporting out of there so fast.

---

One night after everyone had logged off I decided to keep playing solo.

After an hour of adventuring and bounty collecting I got bored and decided to quit for the night.

As I teleported to New Tristram to sell my items before I logged off the thought of the “White Waypoint”, as I started to call it in my mind, popped into my head.

Seeing as some of the maps are randomly generated when you start a game, I wondered if I could make the glitch happen if I kept restarting games after teleporting to New Tristram. This went on for more than an hour: start game, teleport, leave game, start..

After basically getting bored with the substitute for my boredom and not even getting a glimpse of the glitch, I decided to give up and log off.

---

Late some night I was watching a movie when I got a message:

“''LoL! Back in the Tristram glitch!''”.

In a flash I pressed alt+F4 to dismiss the movie and booted up Diablo.

After joining my friends game I quickly teleported to his location and there I was, back at The White Waypoint.

This time the area gave me a welcoming feeling instead of the suffocating ‘limbo feeling’ I got the previous time I was there.

In party chat my friend asked me to join him on Skype.

I read his text, but ignored it.

Not speaking or moveing whilst I was staring into the white abyss at the edge of the world, I listened to that faint music in the background.

Preferring sound effects over background music, I had to change my audio settings to make the music more audible.

It was.. beautiful and serene, matching perfectly with the white abyss.

The white glow coming from the nothingness combined with the music gave the area a heavenly feel.

This place was getting a hold over me, slowly demanding more and more of my attention

The hands on my friends character started glowing and *poof* he teleported to a non-glitched town in a different act.

“Y''o! Did your game crash? If you’re reading this: I’m going to sleep! Goodnig...zzzzzZZZZ''”

I saw the text out of the corner of my eye but ignored it again.

“Your friend has gone offline”.

I’m all alone now.

After some time of being entranced by the white abyss on my monitor and listening to that perfect heavenly music coming from the speakers, I slowly started to regain my senses.

At least enough for me to grab my phone to take a picture and walk around the area a bit.

After a only few steps a text-box appeared in the bottom of my screen as if there was an unknown NPC was speaking to me.

“Why are you here?”

Usually each text-box has a character portrait on the left side of it, to indicate who is speaking.

This one did not have a portrait.

In it’s place a white glowing light where in the middle you could almost make out the shape of a sphere, if you squinted your eyes.

Confused I stared at the text for a few seconds an pressed space to dismiss it.

Immediately the same text-box popped up:

“Why are you here?”

This time I saw the same sentence in bright pink personal message color on the bottom left side of my screen.

Immediately I pressed esc and checked my friends icon on the opposite side of the screen: “0 friends online”.

My heart started racing and my vision got blurry, a wave of panic started building up.

“Calm down” I said to myself, must be a moderator trying to ask me how I got into this glitch.

I pressed R on my keyboard and started explaining how it was by accident my friend discovered this area and that I was more than happy to leave this place.

“'You were not supposed to be here! No one is supposed to be here!'”

Getting the impression the moderator got agitated, I told him we were sorry for not reporting the glitch and asked him not to ban any of us.

“'We were here in the beginning.. We are here now.. We will be here till the end of time!'”

“'The White Waypoint.. as you call it.. is.. no mistake!'”

My heart was racing once again, my body started trembling and sweating, everything turned blurry in front of my eyes except for a few words: “The White Waypoint”.

“''Impossible, right? Did I tell anyone this? I thought I only called it that in my head?''”

I needed to get away from this place. Now.

Spamming T or M on my keyboard did nothing to get me out of there.

My teleportation disabled, the waypoint light was shining a white light instead of it’s usual blue and did not respond, I was stuck here.

A new text-box appeared on the bottom of the screen:

“'We will corrupt! We will consume! We are eternal!'”

A bright white flash expanded from my monitor.

The heavenly music slowly built up it’s volume making my body twitch, heart race and vision blurred in the same increasing build-up as the music’s volume.

Then I noticed it through all the blurriness that my monitor and everything around it had become, the white abyss was expanding, swallowing up the little piece of map that was left.

Ramming several random keys due to the twitching and panic that were getting worse by the second, I failed hitting ALT+F4.

Getting weaker as the music got louder and the abyss closer, I thought to myself “this is it”. I gave up..

The abyss having swallowed al but a few inches of map, my vision went out and I twitched off my chair onto the floor next to my pc tower.

Then suddenly, nothing.

The music stopped and with it my heart slowed down, the twitching ceased an my vision returned slightly.

Lying on the ground trying to wrap my head around what had happened, I heard a beautiful sound coming from my speakers..

the windows boot-up sound.

---

A few weeks went by without me even touching a video-game, no matter the platform.

Of course I missed the games and kept an addicts urge to play them every day.

Still the terror of that night overruled the urge hands down.

There are still moments of weakness though.

See, most nights I would have no problems sleeping.

It almost seems as if my encounter with The White Waypoint made my sleep dreamless most of the time, except for one particular dream.

On some nights I dream about nothing but a white, boarder less room with a serene melody barely audible in the background.

No matter what direction I look or walk in, it’s all the same, everywhere.

Strangely nothing ever seems to happens when I’m in the dream, I’m just stuck there till I wake up exhausted the next morning.

For reasons I cannot explain, the day after the dream I have trouble remembering the horror that happened to me at The White Waypoint.

So the next day I really struggle to keep reminding myself why I can not, must not return to that place.

---

Although I stopped playing video games, my friends and I did meet up in person from time to time over some beers.

When we did, they would constantly ask me when i would be online again.

Every time I made up some kind of excuse, everything to not have to tell them about the night that scarred me.

“Not wanting to game anymore because I believed it all really happened would make me crazy, right?”

But still, the whole encounter felt off and thanks to my recurring dream I did not want to return to any form of virtual gaming.

So I kept making every lame excuse in the book.

---

The beer night I finally ran out of made up reasons not to join them in a game had came.

My friends called me out on my bullshit and demanded I told them what was going on with me.

And so I reluctantly told them about the second time I encountered The White Waypoint.

As expected, they all started laughing and joking, laughing harder between each joke.

“''I know you like your jokes, but weeks of not gaming? Kudos for sticking with it”''

“Haha, almost sounds like real demons hid inside a fictional game about a fictional battle between demons and angels, to corrupt real people to win their real battle”

“Awesome movie idea right there!”

“Next thing you’re going to tell me is that people who supposedly died behind their games because they forgot to eat or drink were secretly killed by demons!?”mail

“Don’t forget to include all the spree- and serial killers who claimed games made them do it, maybe the games really did subconsciously tell them to do it” 

''“So, demons nest in random popular games around the world, subliminally corrupting the souls of those already trying to escape reality. Marinade to devour, as you will”''

''“Hmm.. If I were a demon I’d go for the currently hyped app game, bet you guys I’d be demon of the month within one day for most souls corrupted” ''

''“But seriously man! We’ve been there too, seen the light, heard the music, nothing happened to us and we’re still all right”''

As the music in the bar skipped to the next track, familiar tones came from the speakers.

A beautiful, serene, heavenly melody.

 

The laughing stopped.  

--

So, that was it. Again, I hope you enjoyed reading it and are willing to comment why you did or did not.

For those wondering: Yes, I have the photo and it will be uploaded with the finial version of "The White Waypoint" (if and when it comes to that)

Thanks in advance,

AB

 