UnderPaint.zip

Author's Note: This pasta was based on a nightmare I had years ago. I thought it would be interesting to turn into a story so... here you go! It's probably not my best since I wrote this in the late evening, but eh, gotta get through writer's block somehow.
I'm sure by now you've probably heard of the game Undertale. The game that basically took the entire internet by storm and became one of the most popular indie games during its heyday. Whether you're a newcomer to the game or a "veteran", you probably have seen mentions of Papyrus, Toriel, or even the more obscure characters every once in a while. You don't really need me to tell you about the various fan-made content surrounding it, whether it's music, animations, and whatever you can really think of. If you were like me during that time, you would know that a lot of said content tended to slip under the cracks.
One I found was... interesting, to say the least.
For context, this was right around 2018, right when I started to get into the game after the initial hype surrounding it began to die down. I was looking for other stuff to play or really get into besides the main game, and I decided to scour the various forums, servers, and whatever I could find to see if there was anything that seemed, at the very least, worth my time. After a few minutes of scrolling through what seemed to be nothing of interest, I was about to give up and just simply move on. However, one mention of something caught my attention:
"UnderPaint.zip".This got me curious, namely for how it stood out compared to the rest of the various "Swap" and "Fell" content as well as being, well, different compared to the usual new players asking for help on certain sections or how to make fangames themselves. I checked out the thread. The thread itself was pretty barebones, which made sense given the fact it was made very recently. The first post was made by someone named "underbound_41" and had a fairly basic profile consisting of a sprite of Sans. The first post was simply a link to a zip file with the same name as the post title and a description of "enjoy :)". Against my better judgement, I downloaded the zip file.
The file itself contained only one item, which was the executable. Seeing how there wasn't really anything else within the zip file, I opened the executable.
Needless to say, I wasn't entirely expecting... this.
As can be seen from the screenshot, the program wasn't much. It had various tools found in other drawing programs, and an image of Sans in the middle of the screen, with a crude speech bubble indicating that clicking on Sans would "make him talk". Clicking on him made him "say" one of three phrases, which I wrote down.
"* heya, the name's sans. sans the skeleton." 
"* don't you know how to greet a new pal?" 
"* you got nothin' else to do, huh?"
The program itself also constantly played "Your Best Friend" as part of the music in an endless loop, which got annoying after a while. Other than that, I didn't really expect anything else out of the ordinary.
I wish that was the case. 
I decided to use the eraser tool and tried to erase part of Sans' face out of boredom, when the program suddenly created a pop-up window, which simply read "No." and disappeared after a few seconds. I again tried to use the eraser tool on the Sans sprite, and another pop-up appeared, this time reading "Enough". When the second pop-up closed, I noticed that the Sans sprite now had completely black eyes with a much wider smile. The music began to distort as this happened, playing at a much slower speed and sounding more muffled as each pop-up opened. Alongside this, the various tools that were present in the toolbar were now gone, with the only thing remaining being the eraser tool. At that point, I decided that I had enough, and tried to close down the program.
To my surprise, clicking on the red X only played the Windows error sound, but otherwise didn't do anything. The same happened when I attempted to open Task Manager. At this point, the only choice I had was using the eraser tool. As I dragged the eraser tool over to Sans' sprite, the sprite suddenly switched to a now faceless Sans followed by the sounds of someone screaming in the background, which caused my computer to horribly lag. Shortly after this, various error messages popped up on my computer, reading "STOP" repeatedly.
After what felt like forever, the computer finally blue-screened and shut off. When I turned the computer back on, I was relieved to find that nothing in it was affected by what I now realized was a virus of some kind. After double-checking, I realized that the zip file was completely deleted off of the computer. I would say that it was terrible cause I didn't have any proof aside from the screenshots, but I was more relieved that it couldn't do any more damage than it already has.
I guess the main thing to take away from all this is: don't download random zip files from people you don't know. You never know how dangerous they can be.
Category:Undertale
Category:Dreams