Recovered Files

Introduction: Part 0
I will not reveal myself for the story I will tell as I do not want anyone tracking me down on the story I am about to tell, but you may call me by my first name "Alexander" to refer to me. Anyways I am telling a story of my experiences regarding a mod a friend of mine (I'll call him "Reed" as to referring to him in this story and investigative journal over time in the future) was trying to make for Sonic Adventure 2:Battle on the PC. We used to mainly message each other mostly on Steam in the past on brainstorming ideas and what I will be play testing for the mod that he was working on alone.

We would eventually start communicating over on discord due to that platform being a lot more better then the Steam messaging platform, but here are some logs regarding the early stages of developing this mod. All of this is important in the future for what I will go over in the future, I just need you all to read these logs in-order to have some info regarding the mod.

The following logs I'll be showing you now and will be showing in the near future will have all mentions of full names of particular people and real first names of other people censored I chose to assign as a nickname when referring to them in my story and investigative posts that I'll write more about over time, for now, read this first log

Archived Steam Chat Log #1
[Sunday November 13, 2015]

burgerman13:hey how's that mod doing so far my pal?

XRFEAR:added quite a few little new adjustments, and new stuff to SA2 so far, and planning on re-adding some old stuff from the SA2:Battle PC Port that was still left in the files by never used, I plan on this mod being more of a.. game remastering mod? or something like that? I plan on adding a little more unique stuff to it to make the game more interesting, maybe adding some new levels, recreating a new open world mode for the game that is better then that one open world mod done by someone in the SA2 modding community? maybe... but still trying to brainstorm on what this mod will be... i mean this is gonna be a REALLY BIG MOD for SA2:Battle that i am working on and might need to find some more people to help me out but idk. you?

burgerman13:eh idk reed.. all i can say it's probably gonna take you along time on getting that mod done, but i'll try to get some friends of mine and see if they might be interested in helping you out man..

XRFEAR: I was mainly asking on how you were doing but ok, and yeah you don't have to remind me of that, i know how long this may take me on making this but can we talk about this later? i need to focus more on making this mod please dude? after some hard work on this i promise i'll play gmod with you tonight

burgerman13:aight dude..

[END OF CHAT LOG 1]

I know that this chat log may not be important, and I used to think so too, but trust me, as I go further into more detail of my times helping my pal Reed on making this mod, you'll see more on why this first log is important. Anyways I shall now get into my story since i am now finished with this simple introduction..

Part 1
As I explained before... my story is about all of my experiences regarding a currently still not released mod for Sonic Adventure 2:Battle, and I already know for a fact that most of you most likely know nothing of the small modding community that surrounds SA2, but that is not important, what is important to me right now is trying to at least warn anyone who might happen upon the same unreleased mod randomly on the internet... for now I will say it is a virus.

And if people IRL asked me about this mod, I would simply say that it is actually just a virus that no one should install, however that is only a small warning behind the real truth behind this mod....

cause you see... this "mod that turned into a virus" is really alot more complicated then people think and some people would even think I am crazy or that I am lying or making up a story if I told them the truth about this mod and it's recovered files.. but first things first I will say before I go into detail if you ever see a weird file called "r234end.lst" or named "SonicAdventure2Plus.lst" over on some random place on the internet or someone just happens to share it on the SONIC RETRO forums, with a download link to it, DON'T DOWNLOAD IT!

Take this story as a warning to never download this "mod" as this mod is really not as it used to be when it under development by Reed, and only Reed himself...

Anyways development for the mod all started back in high school, when me and my pal Reed who we of course later became super close friends after sharing the same interests of the sonic adventure games, from it's dreamcast versions to it's newest ports Sonic Adventure:DX and Sonic Adventure 2:Battle, one day while hanging out with Reed and some of his friends (who eventually wind up helping us out on the mod later on December before next year, before we meant "Him") Sam, Joshua, and Francisco.

my friend Reed later came up with an idea for a mod for Sonic Adventure 2:Battle, only that it will possibly add in some new playable characters, new stories, levels, campaigns and the such, he dreamed on making the biggest mod for SA2:Battle to increase the fun factor for SA2 and sort of make it sort of similar to that of a fanmade continuation of the sonic adventure games.

Skipping forward a little more later when I decided to be a play tester for my friend's mod while Reed worked on it, he created, for the first update and stuff he added to the mod he allowed me to go ahead and tested it out for the first time.

I had to get rid of mods I already had installed for SA2 in-order to get the mod to work for testing, which means I gonna have to remove "Chao World Extended" along with other mods out of my SA2 mod folder generated by SA2ModLoader, in-order to get the "classic vanilla mod experience" as Reed explained it and in-order to get the mod to work as the mod is currently not compatible with other mods for SA2.and so I got the files out of my SA2 mod folder and added the mod, which at the time the folder was simply titled "XRFEAR's mod" as a placeholder name before Reed could come up with a official name for the mod, as he was currently focusing on making features for the mod first before he got to coming up with a name for it with Same when he joined the modding team.Once I added the folder of the mod into my SA2 mod folder I then opened up SA2ModManager activated the mod and save and started up SA2:Battle, while the mod itself did kind of caused a few bugs to SA2 (screenshots seen here), with the intro being slightly buggy and in the first stage the sky was flashing green and black constantly due to a sky graphical error in the stage "City Escape", in the Hero Garden I would be suddenly be instantly pushed off the map and float in the skybox, and in one part of the "City Escape" stage this weird glitch also happened which seems like a train structure or whatever it is being over sonic and the railing and stairs, the mod did add a decent amount of new and cool stuff to the game, especially with a new character the mod featured, which was "Chaos" from SA1 (who was already playable in SA2:Battle's multiplayer mode).

Seems Reed decided to re-add Chaos as a playable character players can be in the main story, with a new story campaign called "Other Story", the campaign was still very experimental, and didn't have it's stages appear on the stage select yet, however the campaign was still playable through story select, I then test the "Other Story" campaign for my friend Reed over on call with him on Steam Voice Chat with him in a voice channel on our new ""Reed's Mod" Modding Team" Steam group chat.

As I began the custom campaign it was pretty well made though had a few glitches here and there, as I fought against a bunch of different G.U.N. Robots, traversing through a old ancient ruins-like stage simply named "Ruins Escape", heh "original", though it was a placeholder name for the stage anyways, so I didn't "judge the book by it's cover" and even though I originally had lower standards for Reed's mod, I really liked the custom stage he made for his currently in-development mod, he reveals to me that this mod is really not his first mod he has ever made as he has been working on many other mods since, over on other games like: Garry's Mod, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and etc. (because I was too blind to even see that he had workshop items on his steam profile that he made of his own)

He claims to me that this mod he was making was his first time ever making a mod for SA2, as he has been practicing on a little bit of modding for Sonic Adventure:DX before he moved onto working on making this massive mod for SA2:Battle.

After play testing his mod for him for the night we just chatted for a bit and played Gmod before I went to bed after feeling pretty tired from the play testing.

I have much more to tell but this is what I will be telling for now till tomorrow as I need to get some sleep after writing all this down on my experiences I had so far in the past, god how I wished things just stayed normal like how they were when I first play tested the mod I'll tell you all about the "him" I mentioned earlier in my next parts for this journal tomorrow..

Part 2
Hey everyone, I am now awake, it's been a while since I woke up, I slept longer then usual, I should get back to my story,before I continue on I found this weird 4chan post when I was about to write more on my story..

it was a weird 4chan post of who I assume to be "him" who posted this weird 4chan post with a weird black and white pic of a water fountain pouring blood.. except the blood was the only thing not black and white.

The file was just simply called "bloodfountain.png" it was very strange and it had a download link allowing people to download the same file... however I don't know why would someone would make a random 4chan post giving people a download to a strange pic mentioning my name... unless they are referring to a different Alexander, but the fact they mention SA2 in the 4chan post doesn't make it a coincidence, unless it is some weird troll trying to mess with me or other people reading my journal online..

anyways thought that was interesting to message here's the post:https://boards.4channel.org/v/thread/524479287

Anyways as I left off with my story, on how I did my first play test of the mod Reed was working on, skipping to December 8th of 2015, my pal Reed then got his friends: Francisco, Sam, and Joshua on helping him out on making his mod, meanwhile Sam then also invited another friend of his to join the modding Team on helping Reed on make the mod, someone named "Jeremy".

Jeremy was a pretty nice guy, the younger brother of this guy named "Chet" (who is the guy I was constantly referring to as "him")

meanwhile the mods finally had a semi-official name, thanks to the help of Sam, and that Sam and Reed would officially decide that the mod would be called "Sonic Adventure 2+" since it would make sense for the mod to be called that as it focused on adding more new playable characters and custom campaigns and etc.

One day while all five of them were busy brainstorming some new ideas for the mod and new codes and features for the mods, Jeremy asked if his older brother "Chet" (who he described of being sort of a "semi-weirdo" and huge nerd for the horror genre) could join in the modding team to help out, while Sam was a bit worried and concern about this idea considering his first impression with Chet when visiting Jeremy, when he first met Chet.

according to Jeremy, Chet has recently been into making mods and rom hacks ever since Jeremy turned 14 years old on his 14th birthday many years ago.

Jeremy has said that the only public mods and rom hacks he had made were: "Pokemon: Sunrise", a unknown GTA 4 mod, one weird Super Mario World rom hack called "Super Mario World: God Complex" and a weird Gmod Nextbot mod called "Sickness" which was removed off the Garry's Mod Steam Workshop after having complaints about the mod being a bit..... off... though according to Jeremy, his big brother Chet told him it was actually removed off the Gmod Steam Workshop after Steam removed it off the Workshop for being "too graphic for the Garry's Mod Workshop Community".

Knowing all of this I didn't like the vibes I was getting from Chet, but at first I thought it was just me, despite Sam also not liking the vibes Chet gave off.

Reed while hosting the Modding Team group chat on steam then told everyone that he'll take a while and think about on whether or not on adding Chet to the team as he had some dishes to clean among other stuff IRL.

Part 3
While Reed was busy, Sam and Jeremy found a weird secret feature in the Steam folder for SA2:Battle when adding new features and stuff to the mod and modifying the game, they did not messed with it or let their curiosity get the best of them, since the folder the old feature was in was a folder for old buggy features for SA2:Battle that didn't work and the folder literally had "(DO NOT MESS WITH)" on the name of the folder, so Sam and Jeremy left it and other buggy old removed features alone.

when Reed came back, Reed then finally decided to add Chet to the Modding Team for his mod to help out, after having to meet Chet for the first time at the time, Chet seemed like a pretty normal guy, I really don't know what was Sam was worried and concerned about Chet joining the Modding Team.

But besides that since Chet was now apart of the Modding Team, he had some unique ideas that actually helped with the development of the mod, and even helped fix alot of bugs on the game that were caused by the mod at the time, after a while of some bug fixing for the mod, I was ready for play testing the mod again for my 13th time, to see what other features Jeremy, Reed, Joshua, Sam, Francisco and our newest member Chet could add and bring into mod Reed was making.

While Chet did certainly had a huge interest into the Horror Genre, he was very much interested in helping Reed and others on developing this mod, like I said he did made a few suggestions of many unique ideas for the mod, one of his suggestions however had something to do with adding a few more darker stuff to the mod and maybe having the mod have a more darker theme but Reed rejected that idea.

When they were all finished doing a new update with tons of more features to the mod for SA2:Battle, I was then ready to start play testing the mod again.I started up SA2:Battle, after downloading and installing and activating the new version of the mod with SA2ModManager again, and then clicked "Save and Play".As I then started the game, things seem normal now that the intro was no longer buggy anymore, but I will say that interestingly enough they brought back the old SA2 game title screen, but changed the title on the title screen from "Sonic Adventure 2" to "Sonic Adventure 2+", I really liked the old Sonic Adventure 2 Dreamcast title screen so it was nice they brought back that old title screen with the mod, knowing my pal Reed and how we both are huge fans of the original Sonic Adventure games.

however after I started the game and tried to start up the Dark Story campaign on Story Select, it would just show a new bug that Reed and the others have claimed to have found after adding some more new features to the game, they claimed that Chet will take care of it after my play test.what the bug basically did was start up the first stage for the Dark Story, and then just spawn shadow in a blank black void falling eternally, it was a weird glitch, but of course again I thought nothing of it since glitches are just one of the most normal things you would find in a game or a modded game for this instance.As I then pause the game and moved on and decided to do the Hero Story, for some reason I couldn't do the Hero Story either cause of another weird glitch, this time, it was of sonic... well specifically sonic with no pupils in his eyes staring at the sky directly at the screen on one of the later stages of SA2:Battle, with the screen frozen and showing the phrase "Now go...and squash that blue hedgehog, Sonic!", while the glitch was pretty slightly creepy, I also thought nothing of it figuring it was another bug, since this froze my game, I figured I could just close the crashed game and start it up again.

However for some reason... it would not work at all... like there was something wrong with the game and almost like the mod itself had fucked up game.

I told the others of my play testing experience, luckily I wasn't the only one play testing it and Jeremy was play testing it too, however for Jeremy, he seemed very off and kind of unnerved with his experience play testing the mod, and simply didn't say anything about his experience... like he saw something he wasn't supposed to see or something like that.

Whatever it was I thought that it was just a freaky glitch or was pranked by his brother Chet or something like that, even though at that time I was so so wrong about that in so many ways, after I told the rest of the modding team about my experience they all decide to try and figure out ways on how to fix these bugs, Chet on the other hand was... oddly expressionless on how Jeremy was doing after play testing the mod along with me, unlike everyone else who was worried about Jeremy, Chet also joked about how the glitches were the works of a "spooky ghost" just to cheer up everyone on the situation it even slightly helped calmed down Jeremy, so I thought nothing of it at first.

The modding team would then discover that the mod somehow, created a file called "r234end.lst" everyone figured Chet made it as a joke, though Chet responded on how he did not made it at all, and that it just appeared there or something, though everyone had a hard time believing if he did that and laughed, but Chet would continue to say that he did not made that file, everyone just looked at him thinking that Chet was trying to start a silly internet urban legend or whatever just to scare us of something but I believed he didn't made that file now, that he said that in the past.

This was only the beginning for what was to come next after this particular incident happened.

Part 4
The incident as I mentioned before was one of the many slipups that started to slowly confirm to everyone that something was off after having Chet in the modding team.

As things went on in life with me and Reed, me and Reed for one time decide to take a type of break from working on the mod, just hanging out IRL, and planning out a youtube channel where me and him could do videos of any kind we would like to make together.

One day while me and Reed were on our break, while I was visiting him at his house to play a Dreamcast copy of Sonic Adventure 2 on a Dreamcast at his house (both he got from ordering it off of Ebay, funny), things were normal for the two of us while we we're taking a break from working on the "Sonic Adventure 2+" mod. But then I would get a phone call from Joshua (after me and him eventually became friends).....

Joshua seemed unusually unnerved and terrified from the sound of his voice on call. He then tells me that.... well.. Jeremy, and Sam are suddenly missing, and just disappeared just tonight....

He is at Jeremy and Chet's house with Sam, hanging out with them, then Jeremy claimed he heard something outside of his house..... after that Jeremy began running into his backyard at night and into the forest behind his backyard, Sam tried to go after him and bring him back in his house, but both never came back from the woods and just disappeared into the wilderness, currently Jeremy's Mother is currently calling 911 on what just happened and is trying to get the police to investigate where did Sam and Jeremy go into the woods..

Asked if Chet went after Sam and Jeremy to bring them back inside into their house as well, but surprisingly Chet was not at the house when Joshua came. He said that Chet and Jeremy's mother told him that Chet was simply at his "job", even though Chet certainly did not looked like he had a job, and looked more like his job was simply just making rom hacks and mods on the internet.

That is when Joshua told me his job IS making mods and rom hacks on the internet, BUT with a group of friends of his which they had already had setup a PayPal for people who liked the mods and rom hacks they made to donate money to them for them to get paid for all the hard work and effort they put into their mods and rom hacks, so it seems our pal "Chet" here has a hobby as his occupation.

Enough of info regarding Chet, after I told Reed about the incident that just happened tonight, we both begin booking it to his truck (me and him were 18 at the time to own a car), and Reed starts driving as fast as he could to Jeremy's house.

We soon make it to Jeremy's House, where we find that many police officers have already arrived at the scene before me and Reed did, there were multiple police cruisers next or near the house with their sirens going off, with it's red and blue lights flashing all over the place, we found Joshua outside of the front lawn of the house, just sitting on the sidewalk.

Joshua of course was very unnerved by the situation that happened, and was confused to why Jeremy just said he "heard something" and then started running into the woods in his backyard.

The Police were of course unable to find Jeremy, and Sam, Reed was kind of upset about what happened to his friend Sam, but also unnerved on how him and Jeremy just both went missing completely. after Joshua was questioned by the police on what happened in the incident, me, Reed and Joshua then started heading back to Reed's house after that whole situation had happen..

When we made it back to Reed's house we would continue where we left off on Sonic Adventure 2 on the Dreamcast to calm down while we chat over about the whole situation that had happen with Joshua.

Joshua would say that they were all just playing Super Mario Party while Jeremy would just say that "he heard something" and then go start heading into the woods in his backyard after saying that, while Sam would go after him and try to bring him back inside his house.

And apparently that was it... however there was one more extra thing to it, apparently while at Jeremy's house before the incident happened... he found a weird disk with with the words "Watch Me" written in marker on the disk in Chet's room upstairs.

We didn't know much about this weird disk Joshua had found but he gave it to us, for us to check it out.

We would then plan on checking out the disk tomorrow, after christmas just to check what was inside the disk, As I would soon spend the night at Reed's house and sleep with Joshua and Reed for tomorrow.

Part 5
After sleeping at Reed's house me and Reed along with Joshua then decide to check out what was on the disk.

on the disk was a strange video named "WATCH.mp4" of what seems to be a screen recording of Chet's Computer. The footage showed who we assumed to be Chet doing the screen recording and then writing a message on a text file with notepad in-order to speak on the video cause Chet had no mic for his computer.

On the video where he was writing on the .txt file to speak, he typed in the following:

"If you have found this video in my room, then I expected for at least one of you to be either my brother, Sam, or Joshua. if you are neither of those three then heheheh... I suggest you end the video now.

''I am making this video as a message for some... well.. stuff I needed to get out of my life before it drives me insane... this "stuff" I will be showing you however... will be not something you expected to be, It's rather something I really needed to get off my chest and back in-order to finally sleep normally again... this thing has been bothering me for quite a while now, and I needed to put it in something where it could no longer be in my life anymore..''

''what I am talking about is a particular file... a file that was recovered from one of my dead relatives... It haunted me for quite a while.. while there were a collection of other files recovered from one of my dead relatives's old computers. this one in particular... was haunting me the most.. I constantly been trying to put away most of the files I have recovered from this certain dead relative into mods and rom hacks I have made. that Gmod "Sickness" Nextbot mod being one of them, but wasn't so successful getting rid of those two last files too easily..''

Ever since I had those two files on my computer, causing strange stuff to happen on my computer like making some weird new files on my computer and weird error message windows, like it was some sort of computer virus, though my anti-virus software and any kind of new anti-virus software I got didn't detect the files as viruses.

''Now I will say for a fact that these files HAVE been haunting me for a while now... for some reason ever since i had those files I have been getting recurring nightmares, each much more worse then the last... another thing to note is that, the files seemed to make the strange happenings on my computer more and more worse as time went on... and it started to make me hear things too... hear things that you must never know... that NO ONE should know...''

Chet recording the screen recording then closes out of notepad and shows what seems to be a weird folder on his computer simply called "images from recovered files" inside the folder showed a bunch of.... very awful and weird and gruesome images all named with "victim" and a certain number after the word "victim" Chet opened the first image "victim1.png" and it showed a gruesome photo of a little 13 year old girl with her eyes gouged out of her sockets and hanging on a noose, the entire image was tinted with a red filter.. Joshua instant ran out of the room both grossed out and terrified and ran into the nearest bathroom to vomit as he was extremely squeamish, me and Reed on the other hand were very disturbed by what we saw, but not disgusted by it as we played alot of gorey games on the pc and consoles and seen actual pictures of organs and stuff before in our biology classes back in high school.

Chet would then close and open up the next image "victim2.png" which was of a even more horrid and fucked up scene of 20 year old man's head with also no eyes in his sockets on a long sharp pike over the pile of bloody mush that we assumed used to be his dead body.. Chet opened up Notepad again and typed in "this was my uncle..".

Me and Reed then close the video and questioned ourselves about the possibility that maybe Chet added these two files or one of then off of his computer into our mod in-order to finally get the file that was haunting Chet off his back...

Reed then went away on steam and checked the "Sonic Adventure 2+ Mod Modding Team" chat room on steam and started messaging in it about what happened to Jeremy, and Sam, right when Reed was typing in his message however... a message from Chet's Steam account was then sent into the chat..

snakeeggs9: Back so soon?

We at first thought it was Chet himself, but then the account sent in a updated version of the Sonic Adventure 2+ mod Reed was working on, even though Reed himself and others hadn't gotten back into updating the mod again.

I then decide to check out this new updated version of the mod when I get back home for now me and Reed along with Joshua are gonna hang out for a bit and talk more on what is happening before I get home.

Part 6
As I was back at my house with Joshua being dropped off to his house by Reed.

I was finally back at my house on checking out the new updated version of the mod.

I then added it to my SA2 mod folder, I then opened up SA2ModManager and activated the mod. and clicked "Save and Play" once again.

As the game started there were no bugs whatsoever everything seemed fine, As I then went to the stage select and played some stages on Sonic Adventure 2:Battle, everything still seemed pretty fine, for a sec I thought there was nothing wrong with the mod, or maybe Chet added something hidden in the mods for me to find, but I then decide to mess on Chao World to check if there were anything different about the Chao World before I leave and exit the game.

After having hatched a chao from one chao egg, the chao was pretty normal, and so was the rest of the Chao World..... Until I reached the "Chao Kindergarten" as when brought one of the chao I hatched to the Chao Kindergarten, and gave it a random name "Charon" I decided to check the classroom area, and place Charon in it.... when I reached the classroom however... there was a weird glitch that showed a rather large space in the "Lesson in progress" hud. I thought it was a normal bug and added Charon to the classroom...

This is when things start to get very weird as once I added Charon to the classroom... The game crashes and was playing a eternal beep.

I then closed out of the game after it crashed, and re-open the game.

When I re-opened the game things seem normal, but I could hear a odd faint whisper in the background of the menu on SA2:Battle.

The whisper was so faint I couldn't even tell what it was saying in the background of the game, while still thinking Chet was behind this. As I then went on stage select and try to test out city escape, it instead put me on the SA2 test stage, as I was in the test stage, I could hear the strange whispers in the game again. but this time a little more clearly..

Here's what I could get from them:

"They're coming"

"It speaks, they speak.."

"I keep dreaming but it won't stop"

"who is Maria?"

"Do you know Maria?"

Still believing that Chet was behind these whispers, thinking that they were "custom voice clips" Chet added in. that's until weird text appeared on the screen...

"I am not Chet"

At this point I was very weirded out, this message appeared on screen right when I was thinking in my mind those whispers were done by Chet... While very skeptical about what happened right now I figured it was a timed message Chet added into the game.

Of course I continued to explore the test stage till some weird E-1000 enemies spawned into the stage randomly, while I was destroying them they spawned, soon the newer ones that spawned have a pretty weird new texture to them, being blue instead of red, like all stereotypical Eggman robot enemies, and their eyes being red like they are angry or something.

As I killed more and more of them, my game would suddenly showed a weird and pretty glitched cutscene that was combined with multiple other cutscenes in SA2:Battle, after showing that cutscene the game crashed with extremely glitched and loud audio coming from the game, and weird glitched text over the screen saying: "You will find out more soon" appeared on screen after my game crashed.

Of course I lowered down my volume on my pc cause of how loud the glitched audio was, and closed out of the game after it crashed...

But I was atleast able to archive the weird glitched cutscene by finding it again in my documents folder... I don't know how it got there, I scanned if I had any viruses on my computer and my anti-virus said I had no viruses on my pc.

At this point I was very confused on what was happening. and whatever happened on my game with the mod. All I know is that whatever just happened right now was most likely something Chet added to the mod, probably that "file" he mentioned in that fucked up video he made.

Original Pasta by "Sacktroop248" from the spinpasta wikia, will be continued soon