Hi, I've just got to get this off my chest. I wasn't sure if I should tell anyone about it when it first happened, but I've decided to anyway.
I'd been playing Roblox since 2010-ish, but I started playing Royale High in 2019 during the Easter event. I met my close online friends there that I still am friends with today, and we played all the time. The game's developer team as well as the community got too toxic after a while, so we just kind of fell off of playing it and moved on. Recently though, at the beginning of August 2023, the much awaited Campus 3 had been released after literal years of delays. We decided to check it out again, maybe rekindle that roleplay cringe flame again lol. It's pretty cool; new mechanics, minigames, quests, all that good stuff. The devs were releasing the new school in stages, and the second stage was the main office where you'd "register as a student." The front desk attendant Poppy is voiced by @bethyvah on Twitter (or X, whatever it's Twitter), which is neat because Poppy is the first NPC with a voice actor in RH.
Anyway, I was switching between games for a bit before I decided to check to see if the second phase had come out. It takes me a while to load in, but I do see that the main office is now accessible, so I check it out. There's a long greeting sequence and tutorial from Poppy as she registers you and whatnot, and a kinda wacky part where she smells your student ID card lol. After all that I explored that section for a bit before trying to see if there were any diamonds (currency) around to collect. My game started lagging and my character started walking in place and I just kind of sighed in annoyance as the "Please check your internet connection and try again" pop up appeared. No big deal, happens all the time for me, just rejoin my private server and give it another go.
I teleport to the main office, but as I'm waiting on the loading screen, I noticed that there was no audio playing. I check my volume settings both in the settings and on my phone, but it says the sound is on in both places. When I load in to the actual game, my character is just a blank R16 figure which isn't unusual, just loading in. I take the time to see if the game's volume was off, but it was set to on, so that's kinda weird. I start moving around in a circle as my surroundings load in, just cause I'm waiting, but my avatar isn't changing. It's stuck as a solid gray R16 avatar with no face or anything. I clicked "Dress Up" to see if I had items on there, but there was nothing except the red scar facial decal I put on that went with my outfit. I don't need an outfit to look for diamonds and explore so I just went on, but I stopped when I saw Poppy. She was her normal avatar, but with no face. I tried interacting with her, but nothing would happen. Not gonna lie, the lack of music and sound plus the weird avatar glitches was kinda starting to weird me out at this point. I tried one last time to interact with her, and this time it worked. Her avatar came up and the text box did too, but it was absolutely wrong.
Her eyes were completely white, and the textbox was blank with no lack of response selections beside it, and her movement animations were stopped to where her arm was up in a wave. Her name was also "Hollow Poppy" instead of the normal "Upperclassman Poppy." I tried clicking to see if anything happened even though I was freaked the hell out at this point, but nothing worked. Only when I tried clicking on a random response option did something happen. She started to talk, but there was no voice actor, just text, and it read "Are you well?" Internally I was noping the hell out, but the text continued.
"Are you well?"
"I have your ID card."
"I have it."
"I have it."
"Are you well?"
I was straight up about to close the game, until the animation that happened when I first got my student ID card showed up on screen. Instead of my Roblox avatar in the star frame, it was a pure black star with a new ID number of 0.
"Are you well?"
The text box said again, the animation completing and leaving me to stare at the blank-eyed Poppy again. There were suddenly three visible answers in the once empty response boxes; "Yes", "No", and "Hollow." I was too curious to back out now. What if this was like super rare or something and I got it? Or a prank by the devs? Or even someone hacking? I decided to click "Hollow" because it was so random, the text disappeared, and everything went still. I jumped and yelled as Poppy's head and face covered the screen, her eyes in the middle of it just staring and freaking me out. The text box came back again and said "I keep the dead ones in the basement. They still smell good. Don't tell anyone." In all caps. The image stayed on screen for a few more seconds before I disconnected with the internet error again. My heart was absolutely racing and I swear I thought I was gonna have a heart attack.
I had a god awful nightmare that night, and I'm certain that cursed server was to blame. I've since canceled that private server and made a new one, even if that's drastic. I'm a superstitious person, which is the reason I was so hesitant to tell anyone about this. The campus is on stage 6 of the release now as I'm writing this. If this is some sort of bug or prank or something, it got me forsure... And if I'm cursed? Well.. I think I'll just play Dragon Adventures from now on.