Dwelling Too Deep

(Hello! So uhh.. This is my first try at these kinda things. I mean, I'm used to making creepy stuff but I've never made anything spooky really related to roblox sooo.... I dunno, I'll shut up now. I hope you enjoy this!! ..If you don't, that's fine tooo.... hahaaaaa ok bye)

Well, I guess I'll have to introduce myself.

For now, just call me Cipher. That was the name of my old Roblox account. It's going to be kind of hard to start this story because there's a lot to unpack, so how about we just start from the very beginning?

I like looking at those abandoned places in Roblox that nobody acknowledges. They're either super cool and underrated or just a bunch of presets slapped together, but I like taking those risks. The ones I really enjoy are the ones with the meshes ripped from other games like Half-Life, though they're really buggy they look like a whole other game! Sometimes the most obscure ones are the games titled in a different language.

One day I played a game that was just a showcase called "The Lake" and it was very nice. The lighting was beautiful, the water looked realistic, and the music fit perfectly. I was probably there for a long while, looking for Easter eggs and whatnot, when I heard the message notification tone go off. It completely snapped me out of my 5-10 minute search and I tabbed out of the game. I took a quick look at who messaged me and it was an old Roblox friend of mine. This kind of shocked me, we haven't spoken since I used to play RP games and unironically used "XD"..

"Hey Cipher, u shuld check dis game outt.. I saw ur favez I think you'll like dis.. XD"

Alrighty then. Sure thing, friend I haven't spoken to in about two years! I'll give it a shot. The game title was in Japanese, but with a quick trip to Google Translate I found out it said something along the lines of "Card Game". The thumbnail just showed a bar with cards laid out on a pool table. It had more Japanese words, but I was too lazy to translate it. The description, though, roughly translates to this:

"Those lonely Saturday nights are sad. When a rabbit digs too deep, it could suffocate. Play POKER!!"

Ominous, but I'll give it a go. I like to give horror games a try.

I can hear the judgement through the screen now, but let me clear some things up. No "hyper realistic blood" poured from my computer screen as I feared for my life, no creepy avatar followed me around and gave me death threats, and nobody found my house location. The best way I could explain this experience was.. Mildly unsettling. Nothing too absurd to be true.

When I joined the game, the first thing I noticed were the strange textures. The rust texture was practically used for every block in this game with an exception of the NPCs and the table that was seen in the thumbnail. The decals were picture frames with JPEG'ed eyes and hands, the usual for a game trying to be scary. There was no music in this room, but the faint sound of a lovey-dovey jazz song echoed from another that I couldn't get into. When I interacted with the NPCs, low and behold, they spoke English!

"Hello [Username]. Are you ready to play?"

I clicked yes.

"Great. Guess my numbers."

The next three interactions were sets of random numbers, and I had to guess the right one. I was almost there, 2 out of 3, but still didn't win the game. Not like I had a chance to retry anyways, when I finished randomly guessing numbers from the list I was teleported to another place.

"Untitled 36"

It was empty, just a baseplate and a skybox that switched between black skies and a red one. The only thing I could make out with the red fog was a tall block. Naturally, I went towards it..... And it crashed!

I was brought back to my browser with about 5 new messages from my mysterious old friend.

"Hey"

"Hey"

"U like it?"

"Ohhhh u got it wronngg.."

"Okok, watch dis ok?? XDD"

For every "XD" I get from this person, I question more and more if they're even REAL. But I got a link to a video. It was unlisted and, oddly enough, had no title. It showed another game. A field, looked like the one from Portal 2 but with lower saturation.. So low it was almost black and white. It looped the same character walking forwards to a tree and getting teleported back to spawn for about one hour. Of course, I didn't have time to look at every nook and cranny of this 1 hour loop video, but I skipped to the end and found something.

Code. Not just any code, Morse code. An odd choice, but if that's what you wanna do, go for it.

5 minutes of typing dots, dashes, and slashes, I finally cracked the code and it was the most confusing thing out of this entire experience.

"Joker. Try again."

I figured this might be about the first game, so I tried to go back. Yeah it let me in, but then it just teleported me to the second game. A few attempts with alternate accounts later, I gave up. I finally decided to ask my friend what the hell was going on.

"Ohhhh.. Nothinngg XDD"

"Just,.., ((((((((((( u kno XDD"

"if u got it right u shuld pass it, u get a cool prize XDDDD"

"&&^&^&^&^&^&^&^^^^^^^^^^^"

My suspicions started to become more relevant as my "friend" started typing like they were having a stroke. It went to the point where they were just typing those "unknown" squares of characters your computer can't see. Then, it gave me this.

"You're dwelling too deep. I've seen you before. I've seen you many, many, MANY times before. They don't show me on the list, huh? Every place you think you're alone, I'm there. The deeper you go into the ocean, the blinder you'll get."

"Okkkk? XD"

..Yeah, I was done. I closed the tab and went to sleep. It was 2am at this point and not even the sleep tea I made helped me this time.

(To Be Continued.. Maybe.)