They Were Never Imaginary

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As a kid, one of my favorite shows of all time was Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends. I’d love to watch it every day after school with my friends. My favorite characters were always Mac and Bloo. I liked Bloo’s hijinks while Mac played the straight guy even though he was a kid. It made me very sad when the series was finished, though I was able to frequent forums with people that loved the series as much as I did, giving a great amount of art and concepts for the series. One of my favorites was the idea that Frankie was an imaginary friend, while not true, it was still just a cool thing to think about.
Around late 2018 on this forum, we started talking about a game called “Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion”, it was pretty unanimously agreed upon that it was bad. Though, we all talked about how we enjoyed Mac and Bloo being in the game as representation for Fosters. During the conversation, the following was said:
Anon5802: “Man I wish Mac & Bloo could work. I just can’t play them.”
Anon9301: “Yeah they’re an underwhelming pair.”
Anon1052: “They do have the strongest PTE in the game.”
Anon9731: “They’re way too slow though.”
Anon6712: “Felt like my game was possessed by playing it.”
Anon5802: “Huh?’
Anon9731: “Wut?”
Anon6712: “So while playing I was just playing with Eduardo on the Dexter stage, and the screen just started flickering like crazy. A bunch of images popped up like crazy, it was really weird.”
Anon1249: “Probably a disc issue.”
Anon8912: “Yeah, it can cause weird things to happen to the memory RAM.”
Anon6712: “Well the weird part is, I was playing it on an emulator.”
Anon4213: “You likely downloaded a bad one from then.”
Anon6712: “Yeah, I have a feeling someone’s messed with it, if anyone wants to try it out themselves I can send it in DMs.”
I was intrigued by this conversation and decided to directly message him.
“Hey, can I get that ROM? I was in the mood to play a bad game with the bros anyways.”
“Sure, just make sure it isn’t any weird malware, if someone messed with that you never know what’s in it.”
“Yeah, thanks again!”
I received the file and scanned it. It was fully clean so I proceeded to download it.
After a while of waiting, I got my dolphin running and started up the game. I was on a discord call with five other friends and decided to use parsec to play with some of them. Four of us were unmuted, and another two were muted. The game was just as I remembered it too from a playthrough, bad. Though the fanservice was at least nice. I played a couple of games with my friends and we all had a good time making fun of the game. After a while, though, I decided to be funny.
“Hey, remember those edgy black and white skins?” Everyone nodded in response and laughed at it. “Let me play a round with them.” As I chose them, my friend replied by choosing Flapjack. The stage was Dexter’s laboratory. During the match, the screen started flickering and got worse as the match went on. We were able to see the various icons up close now, it showed the skull icon that appears when one dies in the game, the blue orb that can be seen at the back of Dexter’s stage, the heart icon for their stocks, the percentage, and finally Mac and Bloo’s portrait.
“What the hell is going on?” One of my friends asked, now roaring with laughter.
“No clue, I think the ROMs glitched,” I replied. The guy did say earlier that a bunch of images spawned, so it must’ve been done by choosing that skin. “Alright, this is hurting my eyes.” I turned off the game.
“Check the readme files, maybe there’s something there.”
“Good idea… Wow, what the heck is this?”
“What does it say?”
“It says “they were not imaginary” The entire voice chat started laughing hard. After a couple of minutes, I added on. “It links to this video.” We all watched the video, it was the same stage with Mac & Bloo along with Flapjack and flickering images. All my friends went quiet for a moment. This was the video:
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“So basically this game is edited by whoever made that readme to glitch on that stage.” One of my friends stated another one unmuted their mic.
“Most likely, it’s weird how they have the same characters and situation.”
“Well, that dude on the forum did say he played this stage too. I think it’s just a coincidence honestly.” We all agreed on this just being a coincidence. “Guess this dude just wanted to make a kid shit his pants.” The others laughed. We continued to talk amongst ourselves and occasionally brought it up during the chat.
After the voice chat ended, I recollected the events. It being a hack was obvious and it being something made just to scare a kid was a very clear case. I laughed it off and went on to firefox, though whatever I searched up gave it the yahoo redirect trojan virus. I thought that was weird since I thought I scanned it clearly, but thinking about it, I only scanned the rom and not the other files like the readme. Upon scanning the readme I found out it had various viruses in it. “Wow, this goes further than we thought. This asshole likely did this just to spread a virus around.” I deleted the read me and game files from my computer.
When I went back to the forum to direct message Anon6712 about it, he didn’t respond. The asshole was most likely the creator of this rom. There’s no way to find him and my computer is having a hard time fixing these viruses. I was massively pissed off.
About a week passed and I got a random direct message from Anon6712 where he said “Hey, thanks for downloading it, I didn’t think it’d be this easy. Btw, the video was a dox link. I hope you have fun whenever you hear the knocking.” I stared at the message for a bit and realized something… in the video me and my friends watched there was a loud knock in it. He finished off the message with “they were never imaginary :)”. It was here when I realized “they were not imaginary” possibly wasn’t about Mac & Bloo, but it could mean that the threats of viruses I was messaged with were not imaginary. I was tricked this entire time, now I have no clue whether or not he has my info or not.
At present time, I’ve never had any other issues, so I’m just assuming it was all a hoax. I moved just to be safe. Though every time I hear a knock, I don’t know if it’s my mind messing with me from that day, but it sounds so similar to the knock in the video. It makes it hard to sleep at night, wondering if one day that knock will be him or not. Always stay away from the weirdos.
|-|Perspective 2=
Greetings to all who have either shown interest on this certain topic or happened to come across this particular story by chance. Whatever the case may be, I welcome you to this rather eerie twist of a mediocre game about classic cartoon characters engaging in slapstick combat. I must say, I am still rather baffled by what I witnessed as I document these sudden events; to this day, I am reminded of those… Flashes of empty black and white images with incomprehensible meanings, they continue to play within the vast ugly space of a head that I contain. Now, you may have encountered an entirely different perspective of this experience, which was completed by a friend of mine who had witnessed everything amongst other users. Well, as you may have guessed, I am here to provide my own thoughts on this matter and how it made me feel on the inside. Enjoy as we have, or perhaps, come to your own conclusions on these ominous imagery…
Growing up as a hyperactive young child, Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends captivated me with its colorful cast of characters in its literal meaning; they were all quirky, hilarious, and fun to watch them interact with each other and get into all kinds of weird shenanigans. Out of everyone, my favorite character would have to be Bloo for his cool, lazy yet energetic demeanor (also because the color blue is my absolute favorite). The theme song alone invoked a certain creative side to me I had never thought possible in my wildest dreams. And to see it all get erased at the end brought great sorrow to me, as I would not want to let go of a brilliant cartoon that I’ve watched ever since childhood. But as they say, all great things must come to an end at some point. Moving along, about a week ago, I was in a group call with a couple of my best friends. At one point, I decided to stream a certain little 4-Player 3-D platform fighter attempting to replicate Smash Bros. It was all but a dedication to Cartoon Network characters obviously. Punch Time Explosion, yes… Quite the game that is for sure. I actually owned copies on 3DS and Xbox 360, however in this case, I decided to emulate the game for Wii using Dolphin Emulator. 
Streaming the game with everyone watching and a buddy of mine named “GeoZ” acting as Player 2, I opened it up and noticed the intro displaying the teams behind this game were rather visually buggy and noticeably scattered, however, I paid no mind to it and continued onward as if it never even happened to begin with. From what I recall, everything else was decent up until the fighter select screen. With all the great classic cartoon network characters, I obviously had to select my favorite duo, Mac and Bloo, while Geo would choose Flapjack. Moreover, I felt a bit spiteful that night and decided to select their darker, more evil skin that indicated their corruption within the game's own narrative. I thought it would be funny to be edgy, nevertheless, it would seem that foolish thought process turned out to be my undoing, as continous flashes of monochrome images going by at a rapid pace encompassed my computer screen, with everyone being able to see it all, there were rushes of maniacal laughter, confusion, and painful headaches. The form of those images were nearly inexplicable! It was hard to make them out… Although, looking over it now, they appear to be random images taken from the game itself, including: a heart, a skull, loading screen emblem, percentage sign, an exclamation point, and more importantly, Mac and Bloo’s character portrait, all black and white. Why or how are not what popped to my mind initially, instead, a burst of laughter. Perhaps it was out of fear of the circumstances and the fact that I was alone in my room during dark hours at the time. Regardless, all the others were either dead silent or crying of laughter by what they had just seen. In Geo’s case, he felt sick, as did I after these events. We could not bear to view anymore of this madness, and thus, we had to shut the game off immediately, but not before capturing a portion of the battle that me and Geo had during the time in spite of the poor interruptions. 
Moments later, I was sitting alone on my desk chair, with my laptop closed, I had my hands up to my head, completely appalled by what had occurred. I did not know what to make of it. My body was paralyzed with the internal fear rapidly building up, I was shivering by how cold the room was. To make matters worse, I was all alone, right next to a TV, fearing that it would randomly come on with the same bizarre flashes of images that were displayed on the game. As I was in my own thoughts, complemented by the darkness, my friends kept saying something, “They were not imaginary…” What could that possibly mean? That Mac all along was schizophrenic? Was it all an illusion? No, that was nothing more but an absurd idea that these maniacs came along to agree with based on these misfortune series of events. I was still sane however, but those strobes of lights really had me going. 
Eventually, after the situation had calmed down a bit, I sent the video over to my friend, wherein he would muster the courage to share all that we have seen on YouTube. Looking it over, I noticed a very significant detail added on that was not there before. Music had accompanied the footage, and a disturbing one at that, that would later turn everything to a distorted silhouette of Mac and Bloo’s portrait during the end. That fear I had felt before only intensified even more, with my heart rate skyrocketing to 150 BPM. I asked all of my friends if they had modified the video, and they all had no idea as to what I was going on about. In fact, they reassured me that everything was normal. “Normal my ass…” I silently told myself. All logic and reasoning were thrown out the window, nothing had made sense and this world had succumbed to darkness as I laid down in bed. In my head, I heard a loud knocking that progressively got worse. 
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What was there to think about anymore? I’m so sorry. Drifting away, I said calmly, “They were not imaginary”. 
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Category:Appealed Stories
Category:Computers and Internet
Category:Video Games