Hello again! I got this idea while watching Tamashii's video on Gen. 2 Glitches, so thanks! Written while listening to: "iNsAnItY - Frost Mix" by Circus-P, "Fodder for the Elder Gods" by Creature Feature, "Darkness Descends" by Midnight Syndicate, "Fate Worse Than Death" by Creature Feature, and "The Ones" by Aesthetic Perfection.
Gosh, I know what route it is that appears later in the story, but I just can't remember what the city it's connected to is!
"Ahhh! That was a fierce battle!" Red breathed a sigh of relief. "But my Pokémon and I are unstoppable! Right, guys?" He imagined the agreeing growls and grunts from them.
He smiled and looked around for the Pokémon center in Viridian City.
Shoudn't be that hard to find; this is a tiny town.
He located it and started to walk towards the familiar building with the red roof, but someone stepped up to him. It was a young man, holding a single Pokéball in his hand. His long hair was a dirty, off-white mess; it shaded his mysterious red eyes.
Red stopped walking and shook his head at the haggard trainer.
"Sorry, but if wanna battle me, you'll have to wait until I heal my Pokémon. They're about to faint, and a battle where only one person has healed Pokémon isn't fair."
The man didn't say anything. He just looked up slightly and smirked, his eyes seeming to gleam. He shook his head slowly and pulled back his hand to throw his ball.
"Hey! Didn't you hear what I said?"
The man ignored him, and his Pokémon went flying. Blue energy began to form into some kind of Pokémon, but Red turned away before he could see it. He released his Charizard and commanded it to fly him to Cinnabar Island.
"I'm getting outta here. . . ."
The man and his Pokémon were left in the dust as Red dashed away.
"Thanks!" He landed on the hard, dirt ground and called to his Pokémon as he captured it again. "Whoa, that guy sure was rude."
He turned and walked up to the center, but noticed something strange with the ground. He ground his white-soled foot into it.
That's strange. It feels kind of . . . sharp. But there aren't any rocks around, so what's wrong? He shrugged. There must just be pebbles in my shoe or something.
"Hi, Nurse Joy!" he greeted as he opened the door to the Cinnabar Pokémon center.
"Oh, hi Red!" she greeted, and Red handed her his Pokémon. "Don't worry; I'll fix them up in a jiffy!" the pink-haired women chirped in her usual cheery manner.
But then something strange happened.
When Nurse Joy handed back his Pokéballs, her voice suddenly went extremely high-pitched for a second. "Come AGAIN!"
Red started at the sudden screaming-like noise. It freaked him out greatly, and he stared worriedly at Nurse Joy as he gently took his friends back. He quickly attached them to his belt and nodded.
"Um, yeah. S-see you around . . . Nurse Joy."
He turned and walked swiftly out of the area.
"That was so creepy! And why would that happen? Does she have a problem with her voice? Or is everyone just being a jerk today?" Red shook his head. "No, Nurse Joy wouldn't do something like that on purpose; it's mean and creepy."
He ran a hand through his jet-black hair and sighed. "Welp, let's just go back to a route or something. Get back to normal, ya know."
He flew to Cerulean City and ran onto the familiar route, looking up at the trainers waiting to battle him. They've already been beaten, so they wouldn't do anything more than wave now.
In fact, Red wasn't quite sure why they all just . . . stood there, like statues. It was a little unnerving to walk by them, but he'd grown used to it.
Don't they have jobs? he wondered.
He waved at the people, but they took a very long time to wave back at him. It was like they were stuck in slow motion, and the place where their hands touched became rippled and distorted. The familiar sky-blue area was replaced by a floating black letter, and they didn't seem to have any kind of rhyme or rhythm to how they appeared.
"What the heck?" Red's feet halted, and he dared to drift closer to the strange people. "Are you okay?" He spoke to the nearest person, a fisherman perched over the little lake, like always.
The fisherman opened his mouth and screamed a whole bunch of random numbers and letters.
Red himself screamed and scrambled back, holding his ears. The noise continued at an impossibly high pitch, morphing into random Pokémon cries.
"S-stop!" Red cursed and ran away with all of his leg power, hands still over his ears.
The red-clad boy finally settled in the middle of a small wood, sitting down on a fallen tree trunk to catch his breath.
"Everyone's going insane today. . . ," he muttered, and released his trusty Pikachu.
"Pika!" it shouted, and looked around for its opponent.
"Sorry, I just wanted you to make me feel safer," Red explained sheepishly.
The electric rodent tilted its head in confusion.
"There's a lot of weird things happening today, and it all started when I flew away from that rude trainer before he could start the battle. . . ." Red dropped his head into his hands and sighed before pushing himself up.
"All right, let's go and see if anyone else is—" He cut off into a gasp as he stepped forward and tripped. His foot had fallen right through the ground.
"What? That ground looks stable, like ground." He moved his foot around, but it made his foot seem like it was moving through tar.
Whatever it was sucked at his foot, and he yanked it out of the false ground when his foot started to go numb.
"Okay, I guess we're getting out of here by air."
A short trip to Route 1 later, he started to leap over the ledges, praying the whole time that landed on solid ground. His Charizard followed him, sure to catch his caring trainer if he fell.
Red finally reached the last ledge. He could see the opening to his home town.
"Been a while since I've been here, actually," he muttered as he stepped into Pallet Town.
He immediately knew something was dreadfully wrong.
The birds weren't chirping. The sun seemed to shine less. And everything was dead quiet.
He shivered, though it wasn't cold, and spotted that girl that milled around Pallet Town in her free time. She'd never told him her name, for some unexplained reason.
"H-hey." His pathetic excuse for a yell hit the ground without reaching its destination. "Hey!" he called, much louder.
The girl turned to him and walked towards him. Her footsteps destroyed the ground, replacing it with various numbers, letters, and things like flowers or water. Red begin to back up, but the girl walked faster, ruining the ground in an impossible fashion.
The glitches spread up, like a stain on paper, to attack Red's feet.
He turned and ran away again, heading straight for his house. He wasn't sure what the wave would do if it hit him, but from what it had done to the ground, he had an idea. He definitely didn't want to find out if his thesis was correct.
Charizard was quick to pick him up, saving him from a glitchy fate. More of that terrifying scrambled screeching sounded from behind him, and Red screamed and grabbed onto his Charizard's neck.
"Go! T-to my house! Please let Mom be okay!"
Red was so terrified he was honestly at the point of crying, but he wasn't about to be struck down in such a pathetic way.
No, if Red was going to go down, he was going to go fighting.
Red leaped off of Charizard and landed on his porch, slamming open the door and racing inside. The red dragon followed him into the living room.
"Mom! Are you okay! Mom!" Red yelled out as he neared the area where his mother usually dwelled.
Suddenly, a ripple went through him, causing him to go a little numb.
"W-what now? Agh!" His knees buckled below him, his arms weekly holding him up.
He raised his head only for his eyes to meet a monster's.
His foot went completely numb as he stared at a . . . thing.
It was blue, white, and black, in an "L" shape. It was made up of parts of Pokémon, but Red couldn't stand to look at it for long. His vision would begin to blur, and he didn't want to find out what would happen if he analyzed it for any longer.
Red's eyes flickered back to his foot, and they widened as he saw what had happened to it.
Letters, numbers, blocks . . . they flickered and replaced his shoe.
It's just like the girl's weird feet! he thought in horror.
"Wha-what do you want with me!" he yelled at the thing, which didn't react. "Stop it!"
"You disobedient boy," the thing screeched in its unbearably high-pitched voice.
Red couldn't muster the strength to cover his ears. He just ground his teeth together, and tears pricked his vision.
He grew red with shame. Go down fighting? Yeah, sure.
He gulped. "Charizard!" A distorted roar greeted him. "U-use Flamethrower!"
Red watched helplessly as his Charizard struggled to take in a breath. The dragon became more and more blurry and glitched by the second. He shimmered and disappeared from existence with a screech.
Red began to cry, struggling to lift his head.
"You didn't follow the program correctly! You broke everything," the monster screeched. "You did this. You deserve this end for your meddling, Red.
Red screamed as his whole body began to grow numb. Ringing, screeching, screaming grew in his ears, the world was shifting in and out of focus, and someone was crying. He felt like he was breaking, being shattered, destroyed, being—
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