My Friend Jon

== Author's Introduction (Before You Read) ==
(1) This pasta is fake. I have no friend named Jon.
(2) I have discontinued working on this pasta. Please submit your name in the comments if you want to continue it.
the entirety of Part Two. However, this pasta contains both parts.
Also, before you read this long-a** pasta, this isn't everyone's type of pasta. It's not necessarily an entity pasta, but it's a... well... different kind of pasta. This is mostly for people looking for something different from everything else. Feel free to give me feedback. But I'm not forcing you. Get cozy and enjoy the creepypasta!
== PART ONE: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF JON BYERS ==
== Part One Introduction (Chapter Zero) ==
I once had a friend in high school named Jon. I'm still close with his family because my father used to be a partner with his dad. A few weeks ago when I visited his house, his parents almost sold his PC when I told them that I could make use of it. So, it was arranged that they would drop off Jon's dusty old PC to my house. I was about to go to college, so I decided to make the most out of the days before my first day in college. If you have time to read, then I'll tell you the big story of what made this month before college so special.
== Chapter One==
2 months ago, Jon was reported missing after one day we were sneaking around behind the high school and vaulting over everything we could find. That one day, he and I were sitting next to a well and he said that he decided to apply for a college in a few days. We talked a bit, and we finally started talking about when we could play Minecraft with each other once again. I mean, that was the most we could do. The rest of the day was spent talking about school and other random stuff that made us laugh. At night, Jon snuck into my house and we pulled an all-nighter playing Minecraft. Plus, it was a Friday night.
I swear, Jon back then had an awesome PC with a great NVidia card that I normally kept in my house, saying it was for school, and he only rarely had framerate dips. Me, on the other hand, bottlenecked my own PC with a somewhat good graphics card and a piece of crap processor. It gave me 30 FPS at most, so the constant frame dips that night was normal to me.
It wasn't normal for Jon's PC, though.
At 11:00, Jon started rambling about how lonely he felt in singleplayer Minecraft. We got iron and built an awesome house but every fifteen minutes or so he would look at a cave and get creeped out. I asked him a lot of times, but he just said it was becuase he was playing a lot of horror games lately. One time, he ran into the dark cave I found with two stacks of torches, full diamond armour and a diamond sword. Before I could stop him, however, he reported the stuff he saw while I was grinding my XP. Eventually, he said the cave led to a ravine. A second later, a death message showed up saying that he fell and died. He insisted that he didn't even fall. I laughed at him and said that he couldn't see properly in the darkness. I asked him why he didn't set a torch there. Just then, he peered out the window and sweated profusely. Then he went back to his PC and ran to our house and blocked the doorway with two layers of obsidian. I was really angry at him for wasting the obsidian we got for the Nether portal, but he insisted that the server wasn't private.
I logged off for a second, and was very surprised, because it was actually not private. Even more so, there was a third player in the playerlist. Now, don't hit me with the "paranormal entity joined your server" bullsh*t. This guy had a legitimately normal username, and I thought some general rando joined our server. He started asking for stuff, and we played with him for a bit. Then the third player, after more than an hour, said in the chat that he really needed to go. We let him leave, and after ten minutes of exploring, Jon left the game and silently climed down from the window. I went to bed as well after sutting down my PC.
I was really content with Friday night, and after waking up in a Saturday morning, my parents praised my for my good grades and I ate breakfast happily. Then my parents told me the bad news. Jon wasn't seen in his house this morning and his parents were very upset. There was a whole search party looking for him and it was in the morning paper as well. I got really worried and started retracing Jon's steps.
So off I went to school, trying to keep my mind off of Jon's disappearance. The schoolday went pretty fast. When I came home, I spent a lot of time writing all the essays and doing my homework, and after more than 5 hours, I jumped onto my seat and turned on Minecraft. I played for a while in a random SMP server and kept getting reminded about Jon and all the memories we made together. 30 minutes later, I logged onto the old server I played with Jon in the day before he went missing. One single thing almost made me p*ss my pants: that rando that joined the server that one night was still there. I was really interested and asked him why he was still on this server. Then, that guy admitted it: he said that he was close to Jon. But he didn't tell me more. I thought it was someone from school, but he had this way of writing that I never saw in my school, because I help my teacher grade the homework. This guy wrote like he was a 25-year-old pervert that terrorized high-schoolers. But I managed to coax him into continuing the conversation.
This "rando" was no normal rando: he said again and again that he knew Jon well, but Jon wouldn't hide anything about who he's friends with unless under specific circumstances. I managed to get a screenshot and captured his username: TheMegalomat. What a weird name.
Next day, I dug deeper. I turned on my friend's PC and it brought back so many memories... back before he was reported missing, his PC had login problems and I was his go-to troubleshooter. After all the times of troubleshooting and logging in for him, I memorized his password and logging in was a hitch.
One of the weird things I noticed was that there were 5 tabs of GMail opened up. They were all speaking with the same guy: SuperMegalomat. They were surprisingly intimate conversations, too intimate for a random person he met on the Internet. Some of them made me guilty to read, because it looked like Jon was pouring out his feelings to this guy as if SuperMegalomat was his therapist. One of the other things open was a Google 404 error tab. What I think I gathered till this point was that Jon met this SuperMegalomat guy on Minecraft, he got Jon to talk with him on GMail, sent him a link and it 404'd.
I opened the Minecraft launcher and Minecraft's loading times were surprisingly fast (because I kinda had a PC resembling a potato and I had never seen such fast loading times). Jon always preferred Bedrock over Java because it technically had a lot of players because the player count is mobile and PC combined. When I checked his worlds, three of them were corrupted. I decided to rejoin our old server, and believe it or not, Megalomat was there.
"Why didn't you meet me at the server? 49 66 20 79 6f 75 20 64 6f 6e 2019 74 20 63 6f 6f 70 65 72 61 74 65 2c 20 74 68 69 73 20 69 73 6e 2019 74 20 67 6f 69 6e 67 20 74 6f 20 77 6f 72 6b 20 6f 75 74 2e" was what appeared in the chat.
"4a 6f 6e 2c 20 49 2019 6d 20 67 69 76 69 6e 67 20 79 6f 75 20 6f 6e 65 20 6c 61 73 74 20 63 68 61 6e 63 65 2e 20 4f 62 65 79 20 61 6e 64 20 79 6f 75 20 77 69 6c 6c 20 62 65 20 72 65 77 61 72 64 65 64 2e 20 52 65 6d 65 6d 62 65 72 20 77 68 61 74 [77 65 20 61 67 72|20 77 65 20 61 67 72] 65 65 64 20 74 6f 3f 20 59 6f 75 20 6e 65 65 64 20 74 6f [67 69 76 65 20|20 67 69 76 65 20] 6d 65 20 79 6f 75 72 20 6c 6f [61 74 69|63 61 74 69] 6f 6e [41 53 41 50 20 73|20 41 53 41 50 20 73] 6f [74 68 61 74 20 77|20 74 68 61 74 20 77 20 63 61|65 20 63 61 6e 20 63 6f 6e 74 69 6e 75 65 2e 20 4e 6f 20 6d 6f 72 65 20 6f 66 20 79 6f [72 20 65 78 63 75|75 72 20 65 78 63 75 65 73 20 61|73 65 73 20 61 6e 20 73 68 65|64 20 73 68 65 6e 61 6e 69 67 61 6e 73 2e"
It was obviously encrypted, but I didn't want to spend 10 hours decrypting messages. After 2 minutes of no reply, I decided to log out, call it a day, do something else, and deal with it tomorrow.
== Chapter Two ==
The next day, I was down with a fever and was absent from the class. I didn't necessarily spend the whole day playing Minecraft, but I was feeling weird. Even when I was watching a light-hearted sitcom on Netflix, I just couldn't stop thinking about Jon being in on something fishy. I recognized that encryption, it was unmodified hexadecimal, minus the random times Fandom detected it as phone numbers. That day, I didn't even want to research more. I didn't want to keep going on, because it would most probably end in an invitation to a cult or something, but for some reason, it made me sick when I thought about it.
Eventually, I weighed my options and decided to keep going out of sheer curiosity. I converted the hexadecimals. I first converted "66 20 79|49 66 20 79 6f 75 20 64 6f 6e 74 20 63|2019 74 20 63 6f 6f 65 72 61 74 65|70 65 72 61 74 65 2c 74 68 69 73 20 69|20 74 68 69 73 20 69 73 6e 74 20 67|2019 74 20 67 6f 69 6e 67 20 74 6f 20 77 6f 72 6b 20 6f 75 74 2e". It came up with a sentence with random letters in between, but I managed to get something out of it: "If you don't cooperate, then this isn't going to work out". 
Next, the large wall of hexadecimal was to be converted. It still looked like something a drunk person would type, but I got the following out of it: "Jon, I'm giving you one last chance. Obey and you will be rewarded. Remember what we agreed on? You need to give me your location ASAP." I was both intrigued and mortified. How could Jon be involved in something like this? Megalomat desperately wanted Jon's location and this whole thing looked like they were making a plan or something.
I joined his server for the third time (you might be thinking now that I was obsessed with this thing) and it was empty. No one else was there. Not even Megalomat, who I thought was just as interested in the server as me. I explored for a while and saw a lot of things that Jon and I never did. I ruled them out as stuff done by Megalomat, because it was obvious there was nothing paranormal happening. Right? The whole server was filled with these huts made out of bricks, and when I entered them, there were signs everywhere. They looked like their interior was made entirely out of text. There was one sign in a hut close to spawn that aroused me: it was talking about hiding from "them". A sign next to it, written by Jon, told Megalomat to "stop with all this paranormal bullsh*it". It was relieving to see that Jon at least tried to resist. But then how did he get in on this? Was he bribed? Blackmailed? Scammed? It was all so unknown.
This server was still public, and I used an external software to see a recorded history of who joined this server. Belive it or not, 5 different people with names in garbled Zalgo text (how did they even set that as their names?) and "edgy" skins. This solved the question of who "they" were. Now, I could understand that Jon thought that Megalomat was telling him how to hide from fake creepypasta creatures and Jon told him to cut it out, but later he found out the hard way that "they" were actually real players. Now the only question left was why Jon and Megalomat had to hide from "them". Now, I couldn't find any more mention of "them" anywhere else, other than Megalomat insisting that "they" weren't mere creepypasta creatures. I was getting tired, so I had a quick snack and went off to sleep.
I meditate sometimes, so I know the perfect way to clear your mind of the things that annoy you. I got some good sleep, not thinking about all of the stuff above. The problem was, the way your mind works is that if you think about something for a second, your whole mind will be full of thoughts about your stuff. That happened for the last 5 minutes before I thought that I rested long enough and woke up, did my homework, and did something else for a change.
My brain urged me again and again to check it out. It urged me to open the Minecraft launcher, and, well, dig deeper. I don't want to fill up half of this creepypasta with descriptions of how I took a break and then started playing again, but I logged on to Minecraft again. My mouse seemed to move itself to the server-joining button. For the second time in a row, I was the only person in the server. I was reading more of the signs in the brick huts when Jon joined.
Okay, okay, you might be thinking about what in the holy hell I'm talking about. Well, along with his PC, Jon installed a Minecraft client on his school laptop. When he was away from home and didn't have time to set up a Discord call, he would join on his school laptop. I was, of course, very confused and shocked. I stopped in my tracks and saw what Jon was typing. He was lagging a lot, which explained that he was on his laptop. The chat said:
"No time"
"He wont let me"
"Quickly"
"im in room"
"help"
"go now"
"before he comes"
"PLS"
"LEAVE NOW"
God, I was so scared. I was sobbing, lying on my bed and calling me a jerk for joining the server in the first place. I felt confused, worried, and depressed at the same time. Was Jon kidnapped? If I didn't join the server, he would have seen no one there and immediately left... and might even had time to escape. I heard a notification and saw that Megalomat just emailed me. I was scared shitless, I thought that I was done for. I didn't even know Jon's kidnapper, but I thought it was Megalomat.
== Chapter Three ==
I closed the GMail tabs that were open so that Megalomat could see that I was offline. But he didn't stop there. He emailed me again and again, spammed the enter button, and I think I would have gone deaf if I didn't shut down his PC right then and there. I booted it up again and blocked Megalomat. But this guy, this Megalomat guy, he somehow bypassed my block and I still kept getting emails from him. If he was a 'him'. Anyway, Megalomat asked me why I was so obesessed with joining Jon's old server. I replied with a nice, calm "Why in the f*ck are you so interested in Jon's server?". This seemed to anger him. My fear turned to curiosity when he sent me an IP to a server after asking me 50 times to p*ss off. The IP to the server was garbled Zalgo text saying "WHAT HAPPENED". I wouldn't have known that it was an IP if he didn't tell me to "join this and find out" 
The server was full of command blocks, and by what I know there must have been a mechanism to teleport me somewhere, but it wasn't working properly. I could see a clear path in front of me, so naturally, I followed it. This path went on what seemed like forever, and each command block had different commands in them. What mechanism could need so many command blocks? The render distance (which was at max) wasn't enough to see the end. Eventually, I saw a sign saying "Go on if your name is Jon". I didn't want to give away my real name to a rando, so of course I went on. I kept going on and on and on... when I saw a doorway. It was a spruce door surrounded by special white command blocks. I had never seen these things before, and it was definitely a mod. But if Jon hadn't downloaded it, it would have been a purple and black error block. I could faintly see through the holes where there weren't command blocks that the room I was about to into was, indeed, made of more command blocks. I could see it was really big and it was made solely out of purple command blocks (I'm not really a redstone or command block expert). 
Just as I finished examining the doorway, Megalomat joined. This was not the first red flag. That 30-year-old pervert was in the same server as I, and I almost slammed the leave button but didn't because he typed something. 
"Listen, I know that your name is Max Smith. You must be scared shitless right now, but don't leave and let me explain. What you saw the other day in Jon's old server was not what you think." 
And I said: 
"HOW DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH MY FRIEND?" 
Megalomat replied: 
"LISTEN TO ME. To ensure the safety of both of you, I had to teach Jon how to hide." 
I retorted: 
"I read the things you were talking about. Who are "they"? Who are you two hiding from? Did Jon get kidnapped?" 
Megalomat finally said: 
"Just follow me through, and all your questions will be answered." 
I didn't want to follow someone like him, but I had no other choice. What if Megalomat was telling the truth? What if he wasn't the villain? He used a command to TP to the doorway and he led me inside the room. There were 3 more doors in the front, and he took the middle. I can't even describe how many pathways this one room branched out into. Eventually, after what I can recollect was 5 whole minutes of walking, he led me to a specific room that was full of custom pictures representing pixelated people strapped to seats inside a room. In the chat, this was our conversation: 
"The things you saw about 'them' didn't mean anything bad. There's a long story behind who 'they' are." 
"For 4 years, I was stalked on the Internet by these guys with random usernames in Zalgo text. They gave me death threats, knew my IP address, location in the world, Minecraft account password, and almost knew my bank account details just because I showed them some art I made in DeviantArt. I don't know how 'they' do this, but they're master hackers and I'd say they could leak classified government documents easily." 
"One day, I was animating, when 'they' appeared on my front door. They had theater masks on and were wearing shirts with Zalgo text everywhere. One of them even had a pistol. 'They' introduced themselves as The Zalgo Team and said it was they worked for an anonymous person they codenamed "The Westershire Operator". They told me all this information because they offered me to become a member of the Zalgo Team. They also said that they would pay me handsomely. At first, I accepted just for the cash, but soon I logged on to their database and saw they exploited, stole and maybe even blacklisted more than 50,000 people from all the websites they were logged in to. From then on, I wanted to spread the word and help people like your friend Jon from being affected by them." 
"Later on, it was not only Jon's accounts I was trying to save, it was his life. In my first days as a Zalgo Team member, I saw that one of Zalgo Team's targets was Jon Weathers, who I assume to be your friend." 
I was surprised. All this time, Megalomat was trying to help Jon? It was so relieving. It was a flood of information, too much for my brain to handle at the time, so I asked if I could leave. Megalomat understood, because finding out that your best friend is being hunted by a group of hackers (or even murderers) would be a tad too much for you at that moment. Also, other than finding out what happened to Jon, I also wanted to stop The Westershire Operator from continuing what he was doing then. I was too deep into this to just stop. If I told my parents, there would be two possibilities: One, they would tell me to take my medication and stay off the computer for a while, and two, they would tell this to the nearest detective to figure it out himself, who I'm absolutely positive he will fail at. Now was the time to strike back against the Zalgo Team, and I told myself to use it wisely. But I had to get some more information first before I could start my big crusade. 
== Chapter Four ==
The next day, I lied that I had a headache and was able to get the day off scot-free. I first googled what "The Zalgo Team" is. I actually felt like an idiot for thinking that people like The Zalgo Team would have stuff like Wikipedia pages, but I actually got a link to something related in the eleventh page. There was a link to a Thai spa ad (maybe to deter people off the platform) but after a lot of clicking and believing that the site froze, I got a bit of text giving a link to a download of "Onion Browser". The text also said that this would help me a lot.
Onion Browser, as I soon found out, was no ordinary browser. It has indirect access to the Deep Web and certain scripts evidently being used in favour of the Zalgo Team. After I used some of my white-hat-hacking knowledge to gain access to the Deep Web, the browser urged me to search Zexcrol Epthicalmic Andersetrific Lancelotiono Opthalmic Tabnasco (I got that from a screenshot). I had no idea what that meant, but I searched it. And voila, the first link was to the official Zalgo Team webstite.
The Zalgo Team website needed quite some hacking to get in successfully, and I think I broke 50% of the website, because all the tabs were in Times New Roman with literally no editing. I clicked on "Rules" and I saw the rules were as follows:
OFFICIAL ZALGO TEAM RULES
(1) No Zalgo member is to allow non-members into this platform.
(2) All Zalgo members are to work together and not start a feud between each other.
(3) Any type of aiding blacklisted members, or non-members will not be permitted.
(4) Non-members are not permitted on this platform.
(5) All members should work towards finishing the list of targets.
There were a lot more rules, but they were encrypted by Morse code that translated to heavily modified hexadecimal. Holy crap, these guys were paranoid. Also, when I checked the list of their targets, there were more than 300 different pages of targets. What was more, Jon was the first one. When I clicked on the list of members, the whole page got encrypted again in a mix of binary and hexadecimal. It was like a defence mechanism. Since Megalomat and I were on the same side, it wouldn't hurt to ask him some more questions. I mean, the Zalgo Team wouldn't be brought to its knees without some knowledge --- or without any help.
I rejoined the "Command Block Server", as I called it, and Megalomat led the way to the room with the paintings of the people strapped to their seats. He typed faster than usual, and since I'm good at Psychology, I could tell he was frantic. Before I asked my questions, he wanted me to join his Discord and that he would set up a Discord call. I was reluctant, but I thought we would get closer if we knew how old each of us were. I joined his Discord, whose address I wish to remain secret, and joined the call.
I heard Megalomat's voice immediately. "Ah. You're finally here," he said. He has a raspy, young voice, which I noticed in that call, and I could identify by his voice that he was about my age, around 18, and he sounded like a freshman. Gone was my feeling that he was a 30-year-old pervert. He soon explained that he a tech-savvy guy who liked animation as a hobby and was in a technological college. "I noticed right away that Jon doesn't know that much about these things. He could easily be trapped in the Westershire Operator's scheme and wouldn't be able to get out," he said. I also, after weighing my options, replied that I wanted to both save Jon and destroy the Zalgo team. The best thing was that Megalomat didn't call me an idiot. Instead, he understood why I felt like that. He said that he and his friends formed a league aimed at completely eradicating the Zalgo Team. They called it "Project Quicksilver". There were three spots left, namely the hacker, the navigator, and the mole. And I knew just the right guys for rhe job.
First, Timberlake (real name Tim Jackelope), who's awesome at planning and navigating. Then, Bad-snap (real name Sam Sanchez), who's an excellent liar who'd work wonderfully as a mole, and finally me, Max Smith, who's really good at hacking. Then, it was set that Timberlake, Bad-snap and I, Mr. Maxor (as my friends call me) would be members of Project Quicksilver, starting tomorrow. 
I was ready for the whole thing. I was ready for taking down the Zalgo Team, as confident as you can ever be, and what's more, my friends would definitely help me with this type of thing. In fact, they would purposefully suspend themselves from school to do this thing. I don't know why, though, but a little part of my brain thought that Megalomat was still kind of fishy. Even if his fishiness was slight, it was still faintly evident to that part of my mind. I mean, an 18-year-old who has a few friends trying to take down an entire team of hackers? I was teetering on the edge of thinking that Megalomat and his friends weren't enough to do this. But I kept hoping for the best and thought that this would be my one and only chance. I was positive that the Zalgo Team was holding Jon hostage. Project Quicksilver would be Jon's saving grace. And I was and am pround I was a part of that. 
 END OF PART ONE
 TO BE CONCLUDED...
== PART TWO: ATTACK ON THE ZALGO TEAM ==
== Introduction: An Article from Minecraft.Net ==
MOJANG CENTRAL NEWS 
---- VOLUME 13 | ISSUE 10 | FRIDAY, 31 OCTOBER, 2016
----
<- [Back to home page]
MYSTERIOUS HACKER TEAM REPORTED BY VETERAN MINECRAFT PLAYER "MrMaxor"
A veteran Minecraft player, MrMaxor (real name Max Smith) reported to us a hacker team at noon which is called "The Zalgo Team". We would have ruled it off as a strange rumor, but as we found out, it was much more than a rumor. MrMaxor sent us multiple screencaps that were checked 4 times for Photoshop usage, but it seems that there was no editing involved in these images sent to us. Said player gave us an explanation about how he managed to get into their database, and we don't think we have any choice other than to believe him. It can be presumed that this "Zalgo Team" has reinforced their database defenses as of now, but we are grateful to MrMaxor for telling us about this.
MrMaxor filed a missing case for his close friend Jon a few months ago and has also been reporting that Jon regularly logs on to their private server and briefly explains where he is. According to law, if we can find another person who has affected by "The Zalgo Team", we can legally allow other news sources to spread the word. We cannot do anything about it at the moment other than put it on this news platform. We are currently requesting MrMaxor to explain more. 
We have some additional things to say before we finish this article, and they are that MrMaxor, an unknown person named TheMegalomat, Timberlake, Badsnap, and a number of other talented people are reportedly teaming up, forming "Project Quicksilver", as they call it, to take down The Zalgo Team. They have launched a funding page on Kickstarter to make Project Quicksilver take off. We give the best of luck to MrMaxor and the others in Project Quicksilver. 
One final thing before we finish this off: if any other readers have been affected by The Zalgo Team, contact us at MOJANGCENTRALNEWS@MINECRAFT.NET. 
----
== Chapter One (not released yet) ==
[WIP] 
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Category:Development hell
Category:Long Pastas
Category:Hackers