COAN

Before I begin, let me start out by saying that this isn’t one of those “I found a weird game and a monster came out of the computer and my face blew up” kind of story. This is just a story of a weird ass guy with a weird ass friend. That’s it, no bullshit. Basically, I had this friend who moved into our neighborhood 3 years ago. I’m not going to use his real name, but let’s call him 13, because if his age. So when 13 moved in I was very happy because here are no other kids my age in the neighborhood and I didn’t have many friends. We used to hang out a lot and play yugioh. When we came to middle school I made lots of new friends, but I still talked to 13. Me and my other friends would talk about the usual stuff like who’s dating who, who drew penises on the bathroom wall, who stole from the cafeteria and so on. But we would really talk about video games. We knew EVERYTHING about every game. We would get on Skype and talk all day long, play horror games and watch people play weird ass games. Anyways, half way through the year me and my friends become pretty popular, but 13 was always behind everyone. He never fit into our group no matter how much he tried. But one day, me and my friends were talking about slender and 13 shows up. ”hey guys!” he says. “Have you guys heard about COAN?” “What the fuck is that?” I asked. “It’s the coolest game EVER!!!” he says. He told us about COAN, it was some exploration action kind of game. He explained it like it was better than every game combined, but to us it sounded like a piece of shit. “Cool” I said. I didn’t think it was cool but when he was done me and my friends made sure we got as far away as we can from him. When I got home, I got on Skype and talked to my friends. We basically made fun of 13 and COAN the whole time. I searched it up and it didn’t even exist. The next day I told 13 I couldn’t find COAN online. “That’s weird” he said and that was the last 13 talked about COAN for the year.

Next year in seventh grade I was really popular and 13 was annoying as hell. The year went on normally until one day 13 came up to me while I was talking to my friends. “Dude COAN is so fun” he said. My friends started laughing and 13 looked at us like we were idiots. “Shut up about COAN!” One of my friends said. 13 just walked off and we stared making fun of COAN almost every time 13 wasn’t around. Everyday 13 would get even more addicted to COAN. Talking about it more and more. In art he would draw pictures of the game, at lunch he would go to the library and write fan fictions about the game and he even went to the point where he made a custom shirt that said I <3 COAN. I’m not making this shit up. One time me and my friends were going to the bathroom when we saw 13’s stuff outside it. We opened it up and it was filled with fanfics and drawings. One of my friends took pictures of all the pages (I wish I took some too, but I didn’t. I lost contact with him now). He was so addicted to COAN, he committed suicide after we told him how gay COAN sounded. I’m not kidding. He didn’t know about our Skype chats or anything, but he killed himself just because we told him we hate his game. His funeral was held in his backyard. When I was there, his mom told me to go get something in their kitchen. I ran upstairs and got what she needed, a tissue box, but I didn’t go back down. I ran up to 13’s room and opened up his laptop. I watched him put his password in a million times so I got in and his desktop only had one folder in the middle, COAN. I took out the flash drive I brought and started copying the file. While it was loading, I looked around the room and found his flash drive. On it, it said COAN. I stole it. The file finished copying and I ejected it and ran downstairs. After the funeral, i opened up my laptop and put in 13’s flash drive. I copied COAN to my laptop and opened it up. It was a unity file, so I opened it up with unity and adjusted it to work. Beside my criticism I was pretty excited. I hit play and… it was just the unity bootcamp demo. I downloaded it a while back when I tried to make a 3d version of bio menace. There were no enemies or anything, just an army guy running around. I did the only mission and that was it. I walked around until I hit a boundary. It was a small map too. I then realized I could just pause the game and move myself with the unity editing place. I fell through the world. It made me laugh a bit, but I just edited my way back up. This time I put myself on top of the broken house. Jumping across the gaps in the ceiling was pretty fun, even though it sounds lame, but I went on to find what was so good that made 13 kill himself for. Every day I played it to keep exploring the game. The more I played, the more I got addicted. I made sure I didn’t tell my friends though, I didn’t want to end up like 13. 2 weeks pass and I eventually got bored of COAN. I put myself past some mountains, and he jest fell straight through. I got pissed. Was this the game he played for a whole year? Did he delete everything? Did he add something that I missed every time? I honestly stopped caring at that point. I went to hang out with my friends.

When I came back I realized I left the game on, and the soldier wasn’t falling. He was on land. So it turns out there was land deep under the land I started on. I looked around to find a player model of 13 behind me. He didn’t start talking. He didn’t come out of the computer. My computer didn’t delete itself. It was just a player model. I shot him and he disappeared, leaving a white square. When I walked over it, it opened up a txt file titled suicide note. From what I remember it read: “Dear whoever found this, I have decided to end my life today because someone I know has insulted something I love. The thing I loved was COAN. COAN wasn’t just a game, it was the answer to everything. How to achieve world peace, how to cure cancer how to be immortal, how to have fun and so on. What you just played was not COAN, but a test to find someone worthy of the world of COAN, which is you. Before I die, I will secure the world of COAN from invaders. Only you can find it. Open my computer up with a screw driver. There will be another flash drive in there with the world of COAN installed on it. DO NOT COPY IT, THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE. Just open it up and you will fix this broken world. No more school, no more war, no more death. The possibilities are endless.”

When I read this I didn’t know what to do, so I hid the flash drive for safe keeping. In a week I forget about it. 1 month later I found the flash drive and decided to find the flash drive of COAN. Our school told us to sell cookie dough to pay for our field trip. I told my mom that I wanted to sell some to 13’s mom. “Don’t you know she moved out on Monday?” wow. I had one chance and I fucked it up. One chance to please the last wishes of my now dead friend, and fucked it up by 4 days. I took his flash drive and strung a rope through the small keychain hole to make a necklace. I swam with it and fell on it, I probably broke it, but I knew I was never going to use it ever again, I just wore it to remember 13. It’s been a while since the whole COAN thing but every day, I have the same exact question as I did the first day 13 told us about it. What the fuck is COAN?