Tower Battles 3

CHAPTER 1: A WARM WELCOME BACK
I've got a confession to make. Back in 2019, I bashed out a story about me and my friends and our spooky Tower Battles experience. My confession? None of it was real; as a matter of fact, I'm not sure how people thought it was. It was poorly written slop created by a kid who wanted him and his friends to star in some spooky Roblox story. I bring it up now, older and wiser and not a fan of Tower Battles anymore, because it's re-entered my life in a way I never thought possible. The things I've written, the terrible story I made up to make my friends laugh, all that and more have crawled back out of the depths of my mind and nestled deep in the one platform I still use consistently.

The people behind xXSeenoevilXx, ChickenSoupe and I'mNotTheMan (actually spelled ImNotTheMan, Roblox doesn't allow apostrophes) were real people, and it's funny to think they're still my friends. xXSeenoevilXx changed their name to "primrosepasture" and delved into the inane world of Roblox café games; they're a relatively high-ranker in some generic copy and paste virtual boba shop that I never bothered to visit. ChickenSoupe didn't change his name and went on to get into military roleplay games, which I wasn't too keen on either. It was ImNotTheMan, who also opted not to change his name, that I was and still am the closest with. He kept his stupid perfect grammar shtick up in every single conversation we had, and he was the guy tying the whole friend group together.

So it was him I came to first when Tower Battles 2, the stupid story I had written for them, clawed and tore it's way back out come New Years 2024 as it leaped out of my mind and burrowed itself into Roblox. It started as game recommendations, sandwiching itself between shlocky "raise a pet" games and whatever content creators were blabbing about that week. It was always named "Tower Battles 2", with the all-too familiar default Roblox thumbnail and a player count of zero, popping up inexplicably in whatever category it pleases. It was infrequent at first, though soon began popping up more and more, it's player count slowly rising. Going from a dozen players to the triple digits, it felt like it was slowly evolving, seeming like it took up more and more of the bar it was in. It had been almost five years since I had wrote that nonsense story and, while the name tickled something in the back of my brain, I could never place what it was.

Soon, though, I noticed something was seriously off with this game once the people playing it started reaching six digits. On a whim, I searched up "Tower Battles 2", hoping to find some kind of description of what this game was. A page on the Roblox wiki, or maybe a video trailer. But the only thing it hit me with was my very own story, still preserved in it's original, terrible glory on the site I had hosted it on. The memories of what I had written came flooding back; I understandably cringed at what I had wrote then, and couldn't stop myself from laughing at all the gullible kids who had believed the testimony I had typed up. But this all soon subsided to confusion; what was this game, why was it so popular, and why was it named after my story? Before I even dared to step foot in the game myself, I knew I had to bring together the old crew, the stars of the story I had written so long ago.

I invited them all into a group chat and started up a call, with both xXSeenoevilXx (still never getting used to "primrosepasture") and ImNotTheMan joining up - if I recalled correctly, ChickenSoupe was ingame doing some stupid military training thing. His loyalty to a fictional army not bothering me much, me and the rest chatted for a bit about life in general before I eventually brought up the concern gnawing at me. Both of them, as was the case for me, needed some reminding as to what I was talking about, but a quick link to the original story jogged their minds well enough. The four of us hadn't touched Tower Battles in a long time, and as far as we knew, the game was struggling to keep up with the newer and much more profitable tower defense games on Roblox today. As far as we knew, there was no big sequel announced to the game, so we ended up with more questions than answers. We finally agreed to all play the game once ChickenSoupe got out of his stupid training thing and left the call.

Later in the evening, after I had polished off some chicken strips worthy of a king, we all reconvened to discuss our findings with ChickenSoupe and to coordinate an expedition into the mysterious Tower Battles 2. The weirdness started before we had even joined the game; Tower Battles 2, with it's player count now in the millions, took up significantly more space in the recommendations feature than any other game beside it. It dwarfed every over game beside it in both player count and sheer size on the screen, with it's thumbnail nearly double the size of anything we'd seen before. This wasn't some strange hallucination of mine, either - the three others noted on it's size too, though a search online revealed that we were the only ones seeing this. Prowling through all manner of social media, nobody seemed to be commenting on it at all; as a matter of fact, activity in any Roblox-related social media had seemed to stagnate. Even the front-page cashgrabs we were so used to seeing struggled to reach the six digits mark, but the people playing Tower Battles 2 just kept growing.

It was pretty widely accepted among us now that something was seriously wrong. Whatever this Tower Battles 2 game was, it's reach was beginning to creep past the Roblox platform, evidenced by the activity on every other platform grinding to a sudden halt. The connotations of only us four being able to see the game named after the fake story we starred in wasn't lost; ImNotTheMan joked about how he hoped he didn't end up murdered on the news like the cliché end to my story, but our laughter quickly subsided to grim contemplation. What if this did have something to do with the story? It only made sense we all joined it, then, seeing as we were the stars of the show.

Finally clicking on the game for the first time, we saw a glimpse as to what this strange game had in store for us. The slideshow of images present on the page for every Roblox game displayed a series of abstract, eyebleed shapes melting into eachother like some sort of bad trip gone worse. The listed creator of the game fluctuated rapidly and wildly, displaying either complete gibberish or some kind of generic group name I could never recognize. The description was completely blank which, in comparison to the rest of the page, was remarkably normal. The gamepass section was filled to the absolute brim with wildly expensive, nonsense gamepasses with images that featured the same nonsense neon images that made up the thumbnails. Even stranger was how they seemed to multiply every time I tried to slow down; I had to click off of it to prevent it from slowing down my computer. Finally, the player list was similarly crammed full of information, namely thousand-player servers filled with all sorts of different people and avatars. All of them were full and the maximum players changed with each server, ranging from one person to five thousand.

The rest of my merry band of friends soon discovered all this for themselves, and were understandably as shocked as I was. It wasn't how Roblox was intended to be run at all, and we were convinced something downright supernatural was happening. Trying to regain control of this strange situation, I proposed a pact: whatever happened ingame, whatever twisted and confusing contents we found, we would keep playing together. ImNotTheMan agreed with me, and the two others did as well, with a bit of hesitation from ChickenSoupe (he had mentioned he had to help his mom with something earlier in the call). With the pact sealed, though with no guarantee any of us would follow through with it, we agreed to all join at the same time.

The all too familiar loading screen appeared before us, only of the few things about this game that still remained the same. Notably, it took a lot longer to load than any other game, and it wasn't long before we found out why.

CHAPTER 2: THE GAME
Our avatars loaded into the unfamiliar world of Tower Battles 2; my remarkably retro-looking avatar, ImNotTheMan's generic attire and prized limited hat, primrosepasture's flowery pastel wear and ChickenSoupe's serious military clothes. If we weren't together, you wouldn't think we were friends, which just showed how close we were despite it all. What we saw ingame was just as confusing and nonsensical as the page for the game itself, and with the sheer amount of players moving around, it was a miracle my gaming laptop didn't crap out immediately upon joining. As a matter of fact, the thing seemed to run perfectly fine, and it was a point of note amongst the four of us that this thing ran surprisingly smooth giving what was in it.

What we saw was a hodgepodge of different games smashed together in a collage of blocky architecture. Modern, cartoonish pet simulator games clashed with ancient tycoons which, in turn, clashed with a default Roblox "experience". These cluttered visuals, combined with the unpleasant background noise of hundreds of players walking and jumping at the same time, created a sensory experience I wanted to get out of as soon as possible. But the pact still held strong as we struggled to climb out of the horde of people, furiously mashing space in an attempt to crawl out of the jumbled mass of players and trying to coordinate just where in this mess we were. It wasn't long before we managed to brutalize our space keys to the point where we managed to squeeze through the others, emerging at the top and struggling to stay afloat the ocean of people jumping and walking below us. The chat was impossible to read with thousands of messages flying through by the second, making it all the more relieving that we were on call.

The audiovisual nightmare didn't stop there; some twisted god had enabled voice chat on this people nightmare, and those with access to it made their thoughts clear as they screamed nonsense and shouted slurs I'm not allowed to repeat incessantly. Even with Roblox's ingame volume slider cranked down to zero, I still had to boot up my computer's audio mixer and turn Roblox down to hear my friends on call clearly. It gave me a little comfort to know my friends were going through the same torture I was in terms of sound, and I could hear ChickenSoupe physically recoil in his chair after he chanced turning his audio up only to be blasted with the cacophony of dozens of people talking over eachother.

Internally questioning what on earth this had to do with Tower Battles, the bigger question was what we were going to do to get away from the sea of users all fighting to get to the top. We eventually met up with one another and stuck together as close as we could, mashing our poor space buttons furiously and moving in any direction where it looked like there was less people. Monoliths torn from various places towered over the crowds, usually skyscrapers or mountains from various games we never recognized. Some lucky few managed to climb atop floating islands of the roofs of said towers, jumping up and down and gloating about their place at the top. It was clear to us that these people weren't created by the game; they were other people, just like us, thrashing and jumping to try and climb to the top.

It was hard to keep track of one another, but we eventually managed to grab onto a truss belonging to an old looking castle tower, climbing to the top alongside a few other people who had spotted it as well. We could finally make out what at least one other person was saying, and what they said gave us some pretty valuable information.

This user, display named "macabre", regaled us with the story of how they came across Tower Battles 2. To them, it wasn't called Tower Battles 2 at all. To them, it appeared as "TRAYBLOX TYCOON", a game they had made over 6 years ago (and they weren't too proud of it, either). Like us, this "macabre" person had tried looking around for information about the game, but to no use. Looking out at the crowd, we sat in silent reflection, remarking on how all of these people were probably in it like we were in it. Led here by something from their past, plunged into the sea of people fighting to stay on top. Macabre set off, but not before shooting us a friend request. We wished them safe travels, and they walked off, leaping into the crowd and hopping off to lands unknown.

CHAPTER 3: SOMETHING IN THE MIST
With this new information in tow, we put our rudimentary obby skills to good use as we platformed between floating bricks and piles of people that managed to spill up from the crowd like geysers. After a bit of fooling around with our keyboards to see what did which, we found something game changing via pressing the 1 key; a building tool function. The tool's GUI was messy and clearly hand-drawn with little in the way of options, though it still offered us a way to modify the world in a way other people couldn't. We threw down blocks and resized them a bit to give people some kind of platform to jump on, and it was clear we weren't the only people who had discovered it, as people forged large platforms, towers and vulgar shapes with the invisible tool. Clearly, there weren't any moderators here to stop this behavior, so we simply pressed on and tried avoiding the people blocking swathes of people off.

But our struggles weren't done yet: as a matter of fact, the chaotic peace of the place was beginning to fracture. Over the horizon, cutting over the screaming over voice chat and endless people walking over one another, we could hear a low rumbling. A deep bassy tone, the telltale clicks of audio peaking started in my headphones as the rumbling grew louder, and a dark shape rose over the masses.

Black, geometric fragments appeared on the edges of the mass as it rose above the ocean of people, thin tendrils branching off it and thrashing around far more fluidly than I'd ever seen something in Roblox move before. Pieces of avatars flew outward as the tendrils whipped and lashed at those around it, and it was clear this wasn't at all natural. My friends, stunned, muttered hurriedly into the call about what we should do, and xXSeenoevilXx decided the best course of action was to run as far away as we could. Building bridges as wide as we could giving the limitations of the building tool, we ran for our virtual lives, occasionally glancing back at the beast continuing to ravage the landscape far away from us. We all knew this was a game, that it couldn't actually hurt us, but the supernatural connotations of what we had saw thus far made this feel much more real. If these people saw this game, in different forms, all drawn in to play it by something that knew what they had made before, then what was this enormous worm-thing supposed to be? What would it do to us if we got within it's reach?

Not sticking around to find this out for ourselves, we continued to run for the hills, exasperated and confused, chat bubbles still flying by us a million miles per second. I felt the prickle of sweat against my forehead and, against my better judgement, I was scared of what this game could throw at us. We had long since lost the beast within render distance, and the rumbling was growing quieter. Still, we felt like we hadn't left that thing completely behind, and there was no doubt more in store for us later. But the pact still held strong, and we continued on, traversing this demented game with a renewed vigor to find out just what was happening here.

It wasn't long before we came across something much more organized than what was happening below. We had happened to start building upward when, just out of view of anyone in the sea of people, what looked to be some kind of settlement came into view. It was built on the side of a poorly rendered skyscraper, no doubt from the background of some city game, and the settlement itself had been built exclusively out of the gray bricks the building tool produced. Though the encounter with the enormous worm-thing was still fresh in our minds, we ventured towards the settlement on the building, hoping to see just what it was all about.

It was mercifully populated with no less than around fifty people, all standing around and discussing the game with one another. Someone had found out how to insert images with some other tool we weren't aware of, though these images were mostly just the kind of psychedelic garbage featured in the thumbnail and gamepass section. It was around then that the game was messing with our computers itself, distressing me quite a bit by fullscreening itself, and we couldn't tab back to the Discord app we were using to call. While the menu to leave was still available to us, we figured locking in and solving this game would be our best solution, despite how immature it might seem in hindsight. Talking to the people of the settlement, we solidified our theory that they had all arrived in the same conditions we were - lured in by an unnaturally large game page that took the name of something embarrassing or close to them (one person said that it had taken the name of their dead grandfather), and all of them had heard the rumbling in the distance.

Clear to us now was that we needed to find out what was causing this game to begin with. The option to reset had long since been disabled, so we couldn't simply die and respawn somewhere else, and the experience we'd had with the worm-thing meant we weren't keen on dying any time soon. None of the people in the settlement seemed to motivated to go out and figure out what was wrong with the place, but we did leave with some words of encouragement from the newly named city of "Weinerville". You can cram people into a supernatural Roblox game, but you can't change the Roblox community, I guess.

Setting back out into the wild and insane world of Tower Battles 2, I reflected on what I had written in 2019. It was supposed to be a short, "scary" story about an event in a game that never happened. It felt like eons ago that I was a bumbling kid who thought the scariest thing in the world was creepy Roblox stories. I remember having these vivid, sporadic nightmares about cursed Roblox games, continuing even into my teenage years. Forced into isolation by things out of my control, Roblox became less of a past time and more of a part of my life, and now it's been twisted into the nightmarish landscape I thought only my head could be capable of creating. Life does funny things like that, sometimes. I just wish it hadn't happened to me.

CHAPTER 4: DREAMS IN WAKING HOURS
TBD