Creatures Caves

Quinn remembered her childhood well. It was a pretty good one, all things considered. She had happy memories to look back on. This is what she did, as she sat in her apartment late at night, listening to the obnoxiously loud snores coming from her sleeping boyfriend.

One of her fondest memories was of a game called Docking Station. She would sit for hours, playing with a plethora of chichi norns. Then, when she was older, she learned about custom content. That surely enhanced her game experience. She was even a member of the community for a while. One person she remembered in particular: Ettinprince.

Ettinprince coded several different agents, each more adorable than the last. Aside from that, on the forum, he was a really nice guy. Quinn remembered him helping her and others out when they were newbies. She remembered the look of his website.
"Wait a minute!" she thought, "didn't he have a download for dockingstation on his website?"

That thought settled it. She opened up google chrome and searched. "Ettinprince's Terrarium". It took a lot of scrolling to find it. She was very upset at what she found. Instead of the cheerful site she used to know, there was a memorial to Ettinprince. Apparently he had died back in 2009. She felt a terrible knot in her stomach then. She couldn't believe that he was really gone. She decided to honor his memory by playing the game he loved so much again, and downloading his agents.

Clicking on the link to get to the original site made her sadder, however. She saw his last post: happily announcing that he had uploaded his agent for the CCSF to the site. Checking the adoptions section, she found a strange norn. Ettinprince said he appeared due to a glitch. He was uploaded in 2007, named June 9th 2009.

After downloading everything, Quinn decided to go to creaturescaves, on her old account, to find out what happened. A veteran player solemnly answered her question,
"It was horrible: a murder-suicide. On June 9th, He shot his wife and kids; then himself. It shocked the entire community. In his last days, he did act very strange. It all started when he said he was working on a better version of dockingstation. He claimed to be working with somebody else, but nobody here had any clue who that was. His posts then became cryptic and ominous. Before that horrible night, they were
utterly unintelligable. The mods weren't happy about it, but had to gag him. I wonder if it led to... you know"

Quinn decided not to ask any more questions. It was obvious that the veteran was upset. She began to install dockingstation, which didn't take long. As soon as she was in the game, she noticed a chichi norn, standing in the meso. Quinn found this odd. Didn't you normally get a pop-up asking whether you wanted to start the game with a pre-hatched norn? Then, it dawned on her. Maybe this was the beta for the so-called "better version of dockingstation". Now she was curious.

First things first, though, she went to name the chichi. Apparently, she had already been given one. October 5th 2013. Quinn found this very odd. it was the middle of September, 2012. She chalked the dodgy date up to bugs in the beta release. Quinn
found she couldn't rename the chichi. The norn information page was badly glitched.

Apparently this norn had a baby. Seeing as October was a baby herself, it seemed unlikely.
Clicking on the egg symbol, Quinn found that it was a red-tinted mix between a banshee grendel and a breed she couldn't recognize. The grendel didn't appear on the creature selection screen, but Quinn could watch him through his info screen. She saw
him terrorizing what looked like a wolfling run. A purple-tinted dream norn dropped dead, followed by a baby fairyfloss/magma norn. Unlike in most worlds she had seen, there was blood and realistic injury. Deep scratch marks ran along the baby norn's
contorted corpse. She thought this may have been because of some new addon, but wondered why it would be in such a cutesy world.

The murderous creature didn't appear to be in her world. His history said he had been warped away. Where was he? Quinn watched, wide-eyed as the grendel made his way, over piled norn-corpses, to the warp portal. It suddenly appeared in a strange area, full of storage vats. The walls were a deep red, covered in boils and oozing pus. On a table, beneath a terrifying looking machine was a hand. Its fingers were restrained, and it began to speak as hands do. In front of the grendel, text appeared,
"Help me! Please! Get me out of here!"
"Quinn, I know you're there. Please!"
Quinn was taken aback by this. How did this hand, in some other world, know her name?

Why was it chained to a table, calling for help? At that point, Quinn knew that couldn't have been normal gameplay.

Then, the banshee grendel thing looked her straight in the eye. She could see pure malice. Then, it pressed a button beside the table. The machinery began to move. Quinn watched in horror as it tore the hand to pieces. Sure, it was just several lines of coding and pixels that she watched die. But something seemed too real.

The Banshee grendel got on his knees as something else entered Quinn's line of sight. It looked like a shee; but its robes were blood-stained and it had scales and reptile eyes. This was surely a banshee. It just stared at her, while its neutral expression slowly turned into an insane, evil grin. It reached into its pockets and retrieved a portal machine. Both it and the grendel went through. The computer crashed.

As the blue screen appeared, Quinn decided that she wouldn't try creatures any more that night. Instead, she went to bed. She kissed her boyfriend on the cheek and snuggled next to him. He must have been deeply asleep, because he didn't acknowledge this. He had even stopped snoring. Quinn tossed and turned for a long time, and her dreams were not undisturbed that night. She dreamed of Banshee, committing horrible murders.

When Quinn woke up, she woke up to snoring. "Typical Johnny!" she thought. As she woke him up for class, he didn't respond. She gave a playful shove, shouting, "You need to wake up! You don't want to be late again. Don't make me dump cold water on you..."
He rolled right off the bed, unmoving. She screamed at the top of her lungs. She desperately searched for her previously misplaced cellphone. Her heart raced, and tears began to roll down her cheeks. Suddenly, though, she noticed the snoring.

Snoring! Where was that noise coming from?! She pin-pointed the sound to the closet. She nervously made her way towards the closet, terrified of what she might find. Flinging the doors open, she saw what she most dreaded. There was a banshee grendel.

She screamed louder than she had ever screamed before. The grendel woke up and jumped on her. His claws scratched her body as he fumbled for something. Quinn disappeared in a flash of blue light, and was never seen by a living human again.

What happened afterwards baffled police. Several people around the world disappeared, their families brutally murdered; some tortured. The only thing connecting them was a quirky, tiny online community. Then, in the summer of 2013, websites and pages began to disappear. It was as if all traces of Creatures was being destroyed. Then, on October 5th, the final site went down. Silence fell on the creatures community, and the rest of the world failed to notice this loss. It was gone.