For newcomers, some weird stuff has been happening ever since I picked up a copy of Petz3 from someone on Craigslist. Last time I updated, my cat Shelley had gone missing and my laptop was doing some strange shit like turning itself on in the middle of the night. Neighbors have been hearing loud scratching at my front door at night, and their kids say they saw an animal on my doorstep.
On the advice of a redditor, I checked out the front door today on my way to work. Sure enough, there are some sizable scratch marks - way off the ground, too - like at about the same height as the doorknob. Which I guess rules out Shelley as the culprit. Still no sign of him, by the way.
Before I left this morning Byron (my other cat) was acting weird, too. After last night's head-butting-the-windows-and-doors episode, I wasn't all that eager to leave him out in the house today, so I set him up to hang out in the bedroom while I was at work. While I was getting ready he was behaving very strangely. I captured a couple of clips on video, which I've uploaded to my new instagram account. I'll try to upload any pictures or other evidence I find to that account, so feel free to follow if you want updates.
Before y'all get on my back about checking out the boarded up dog house, I promise, I'm nutting up and heading out there tonight. I was going to go straight after work, but I wanted to drop by the house first to check on a few things - mostly to see if Shelley had come back. But also to check on a couple of things to do with the game and to install the Petza add-on that /u/honkerlove suggested. Petza is an add-on that hacks/cracks the program, allowing you to grow up babies/puppies faster and breed without having to go through the whole treat/perfume/love potion malarky. This should mean I don't have to use the clock skip trick anymore. Which is good, since I was getting a bit freaked out with people's theories that the clock skip was affecting how time moved inside my house.
While I was downloading Petza, I browsed a couple of Petz forums - most of them pretty old (I think the last updates I found were in 2011, but most of the forums dated back to the early 00s). These places are gold mines of information; as I've said before, part of what made Petz such a cool game was how customizable and complex it was - for a kids game, at least. As other users have mentioned, knowledgeable Petz geeks often made their own breeds and types of animals using hex editors, which is how you end up with winged catz, horned hyenas that walk on two legs, and whatever the fuck these are. All of these hexed breed(z) are available to download if you know where to look, but it's worth noting that none of them can be created just by breeding in-game with the original default breeds. Generally, the game doesn't produce any spectacular mutants all by itself.
While trawling through forum posts, I found some tips and tricks on how to locate a petz file that's been corrupted. I figured this may be what happened to Heck (the father of the 'mutant dog' that's been sitting in the middle of my screen, staring into space). So I went into My computer > C-drive > Program Files > Ubi soft > PF Magic > Petz 3 > Adopted Petz to see what was up.
Sure enough, Heck's file was there, ruling out my theory that the game had somehow deleted him. There he was, right under bork.dog (the Petz file extensions correspond to their species). Without really thinking about it, I double clicked heck.dog. And immediately wished I hadn't.
Here's what should happen when you double click a .dog file out of game: nothing. The program isn't open, and the file isn't executable by any other software. So the computer doesn't know what to do with it. If anything (say, if you choose to open the file with notepad), you might get a string of meaningless code. But when I clicked heck.dog, I got a hell of a lot more than that.
At first, heck.dog seemed to have crashed my computer. The screen went black, and the hard drive whirred and growled for a couple of seconds as if struggling to recover. I was about to start panicking (I have years worth of writing on this computer - good reminder to back up, I guess) when the screen swam back into view again. And immediately opened about 25 pop-ups.
I'm going to try and explain what I saw as best I can, but a lot of these pop-ups were opening and closing, flickering so fast I couldn't really make out what was going on. At least a couple of them were notepad documents, like I mentioned before. Only it didn't look like ordinary code - there were bizarre characters interspersed with the regular numbers and letters, symbols that looked kinda like the old Windows wingdings font maybe. Then there were a couple of pop-ups with what looked like screenshots of the Petz3 environments - the adoption center, the living room, the backyard - but all of them were grainy and in black and white, and I swear, a couple of them looked like old photographs rather than animated computer graphics.
Then there were the other photos. These moved too quickly for me to make out much - a bent limb, a burst of fur and sickly, sinew-torn skin. Maws that had been snapped open, teeth exposed and tongue lolling. And a flash of red and purple and brown, wet and messy and almost seeming to move.
And then abruptly, the pop-ups closed. Every single one of them, apart from a small .bmp file that had opened up in Microsoft paint. Hesitantly, I clicked to zoom in. The picture wasn't small at all, and the more I zoomed, the more clear it became.
It was a picture of Heck, the animated little black Chihuahua I'd adopted about eleven days previously. Or...it was whatever was left of heck. The picture was a screenshot of the kitchen environment. There were thick bursts of pixelated blood across the tiled floor, like someone had taking the spraycan tool and done a crude illustration of a murder scene. The doors below the sink were half open, and the back end of a small dog was hanging out - almost like he'd gotten curious and climbed half inside. In fact, that's what I would have thought, had the refrigerator door not been open.
Inside the cartoon refrigerator was Heck's head, dark red pixels of blood dripping from his severed neck. And his eyes. His eyes, which had been wide and blue, had been plucked out, leaving only empty black sockets staring out at me from the laptop screen.
I x'ed out of Paint as quickly as I could, my heart pounding in my chest. My laptop was behaving perfectly normally now - no pop-ups, no weird noises. It had restored itself to the > Adopted Petz folder. heck.dog, I noticed, was no longer visible.
But there was something else. Something that made my blood run cold. Just above spook.dog was another file I hadn't seen before.
shelley.cat.
It's later than I'd like, but I'm heading over to the house in Lakeview now. I'm seriously worried now, and if the person who gave me the game knows anything - anything it all - the trip will be worth it. It's a safe neighborhood, and I'm taking my pepper spray and knife (yes, I carry a knife - it's New Orleans. Everyone carries a knife) just in case. I did look up the owner of the house on the parish assessor's website, but it didn't turn up much - just the website of a property management company run out of Texas. Not surprising; most of the places in that area are rentals. I guess if I want to find out who lives in the house, and who gave me the game, I'm just going to have to go right up to the front door and ask. I've checked on Byron, cleaned out his litter box and given him fresh food and water. I am NOT letting him out of the bedroom. He still seems distressed, pacing back and forth across the room and mewling incessantly. I'm gonna pick him up some tuna on the way home.
Don't panic if I don't update for a while. I'll try to pop in when I get home and at least let y'all know I'm okay. I've got a busy few days at work coming up, but as always, I'll keep you in the loop if I find out anything important.
In the mean time, I STRONGLY caution you not to download and play this game. It's almost impossible to find a good, working version anyway, but at this stage I have no idea how this is spreading or what's going on. I want y'all to stay safe. Your pets, too.
Update: I'm home safe and about to go to work. A LOT has happened - I'll let you folks know about it later. I originally posted this update around 9pm last night, but something glitched and it wasn't visible to a lot of people. My laptop has been acting weird ever since I installed that game. Honestly, I'm getting to the point where I think it might be best to delete it.
Submitted June 01, 2016 at 06:09PM by aliceink http://ift.tt/1TXxZF1 nosleep
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