Melee of Shadows

Melee of Shadows

Demons
It was a normal day, about 12 years ago, and I was just returning to my dorm. My roommate, Charlotte was sitting on the couch playing a game on my GameCube. I sat down next to her and she handed my a controller.

"Here" she said "You would not BELIEVE what I found earlier!" She held up a copy of a game I'd been wanting since it came out-Super Smash Bros. Melee. The box was dusty, and the paper with the cover art on it was torn. I took the game from her hand and just stared.

"Where did you get this?" I asked.

"It came in the mail. Like somebody knew you wanted it." Charlotte answered.

I open the case to find the disc. But unlike the box itself, the disc was perfect. Not a scratch. I put the disc in the console and started it up. The opening cinematic played, and nothing seemed weird. We started playing a one-on-one match against each other, I played as Samus and she played as Peach, but with that recolor that makes her look like Daisy. When we started the match, a random third character showed up, but she wasn't on the character select screen. She was tall, thin, and had long black hair that flowed down her back. Neither one of us moved, and when she came near our characters, they instantly flew off the stage, but never respawned. I had played the original Smash on my Nintendo 64, and from what I remember, you're characters usually respawned after flying off the stage.

I tried to pause the game, but instead every character in the game appeared on screen, except Samus and Peach. But they weren't normal. They all looked... Corrupted... Like they'd been thrown in dark purple paint with only their eyes staying the same. They then began speaking.

You can't escape. You can't stop. Even if you try we will be here. Forever.

I was scared. I unplugged the console and nothing changed. I ejected the disc and the game still showed up. Even when I turned the TV off the horrifying screen was still there. I didn't know what to do, until a shadow creeped towards me. It was Charlotte.

"Alicia! Alicia! Help!" A dark purple dress seemed to be forming around her. I didn't know what to do.

"What am I supposed to do!" Just then I noticed dark purple forming around my own legs, but for me, in the shape of Samus's power suit. That's when it hit me. We were becoming the characters we were playing as. All those characters on screen were the people who had previously played this exact copy of the game. The strange woman was the only thing that I couldn't comprehend. Was she a glitch? A virus? A Hack? Was the game haunted by the first owner? Was it magic? I had no clue.

I looked back up a Charlotte, who had almost completed her transformation into a demonic Princess Peach. What was strange was that my transformation had stopped at my neck. I just wanted this to stop. I smashed the television as hard as possible, and all the demonic characters flew out of the screen, and then began to rapidly swap between their demonic forms and true forms.

They stopped on their true forms for a second, long enough for me to see who they were. Bowser was a teen boy, the ice climbers were two twin children, but the one that really caught my eye was Link. It was an old friend of mine who went missing when we were in 10th grade.

"Brandon?" I stared. He looked at me for a second before he turned back into his Link form, and jumped at me. That's when Peach jumped at me. This was it. Charlotte was gone, my dorm was a wreck, and I was about to turn into some kind of demon. I couldn't stop it. My transformation started again, and everything stopped.

Forever