We don't belong here. Freelancer wasn't supposed to live this long. It died a long time ago.
I'm proud to call myself a Freelancer veteran. I've been playing since the week of release, drifting from server to server until I found Discovery in the middle of .84 and never looked back. I've established a small empire for myself, joined and quit a dozen factions and flown under every flag thats been sewn. I've currently settled into my roll as a smuggler, shipping illegal artifacts from Crete to Manhattan a half dozen times a day, and enjoying the company of players along the way. My final route was nothing out of the ordinary until I hit California, where a ship with hostile IFF appeared on sensors just as I reached Mojave. I took the same precautions I did every time I wanted to stay out of trouble. Target the ship, make a hard turn in any direction away from it while firing up the cruise engine and making sure countermeasures were on. This took all of three seconds, after which I examined the player more closely. 'leaveusbe' was his simple name, with no IFF tag other then the obvious red to signify enemy. Without an IFF the ship should have just read as neutral, but as .86 had just been released a number of glitches were to be expected. Regardless of his affiliation it was obvious he was chasing after me. I wrote him off as a police or mercenary ship and plotted a course for the Texas jump hole. Worst case scenario I could make a run for the New York hole from Texas and dock at Buffalo for the night, then finish my run in the morning.
I tried roleplaying with him as I entered Texas. “What do ye coppers want with me? The Profiteer's just an innocent food transport, I don't got no beef with Liberty!” I played my usual part, a smuggler trying to feign innocence. It never worked of course, but role playing was all good fun. He never said a word in response. “Liberty got some new policy against manners?” Nothing.
Five clicks from the jump hole, he broke off. The moment before he left sensor range, he sent a message in local chat saying “God help you for what you have become.” Alright, he's a wierdo. I half-considered posting a message on the Discovery forums about him when I was thrown into the New York jumphole. I hadn't given the command yet, and was still too far away to even begin the docking animation, what the hell? The loading bar appeared, reading “there is no saving you.” I am now officially confused. Igiss must have been trolling the entire community hard.
As the jumphole spat me out in the usual Badlands, something seemed strangely peculiar. It had always been one of the most ominous environments of the game, dark and foreboding, with creepy sounds and rocks thrown in for added effect. I had grown intimately familiar with the place over the past 8 years though, and knew every landmark by heart. The sounds were different, longer and deeper. They must have added a new sound file, It wouldn't be the first change they had made to vanilla Freelancer. I plotted a course for Buffalo, deciding on posting my experience online before finishing my run. So great was my confidence in myself I didn't even open up the navmap, just started up the engines and flew in it's general direction.
Time past and no sign of the station. That's odd, but maybe I just hit a rock or something and hadn't noticed. I open up my navmap to find a message reading 'Map not available,' the same kind you'd read when visiting one of the story line systems in the vanilla game. What the hell? I check my docking list tab, nothing. I decided to open up the chat log to ask if anybody else was having glitches, but there was no player listing. Not that it was saying zero players, the list and number that normally gave information on the server simply wasn't there. The chat log was empty too – no recent messages, not even the one the strange player had sent. I realized that I hadn't even seen any red messages indicating a player had logged on or off, or console messages, or any kind of player communication since entering New York. There should be almost two hundred people in-game, but nothing! Frustrated I broke my rule about talking out of roleplay and sent a message in system chat asking if anybody was out there. My message didn't show up after I hit enter.
The developers had screwed up this mod release hardcore. This went beyond small technical glitches, they had broken the entire damn game. How the hell did you screw up New York, nobody ever touched the code for the place! I could still get my bearing by facing the star and flying towards it until I cleared the badlands. Except... the star wasn't there either. No matter which way I faced, more unending darkness. For the first time since my first visit to the Badlands I felt a tinge of genuine fear. I tried to leave the server, but the F1 key did nothing. I tried to minimize, then the task manager, then just hard reset the whole computer, but Freelancer would not close out. I wanted to just get up and leave, but I couldn't. My legs wouldn't move. I tried system chat again, this time sending a distress call.
“Mayday! This is the Profiteer, something is very, very wrong. Please, to any Liberty patrols, help us! Mercenary, Pirate, please come in anybody!”
Again it didn't even show up. The game was leaving me no choice. I had only one option, which was to press forward and see where I ended up.
Ten minutes past, twenty. I should have left the Badlands long ago, but after I couldn't exit the game I slowly began to realize that the Badlands probably weren't going to be ending anytime soon. That tinge of fear had grown and was now screaming inside my head. I wanted to cry. The sounds of the nebula grew more distorted, the perversion of familiar sounds tormenting me. Then, I finally reached a clearing. Nebula throughout the game often had these, around planets and stations. This one contained neither. It was a graveyard, holding dozens of wrecks. I halted my ship to get a look at them. The first thing I noticed was that they were of all sizes and factions. I noted Bretonian Fighters, Rheinland gunboats, Corsair cruisers... then I noticed some were stranger. I saw star destroyer models, what Discovery used as a Corsair battleship before getting its own model. The old Liberty Battlecruiser was also there, both the old burrowed model and the old one from .85. These models shouldn't even be in the game, they had been removed. I clicked on the wrecks, they were named after players. Many I knew, people who flew with me long ago in those very ships that represented them. Others were more recent. As I kept going through the list of wrecks, I noted that the number that normally showed the distance from target had been replaced. It was showing dates now. And the description tags all read the same thing: RIP. I clicked the last of the wrecks, a border worlds transport.
It was marked Profiteer.
I hit cruise and ran away. Tears were flowing down my face. I wanted this hell to end, to end now. Why was this happening, who would do this! I flew for another half hour. Screw leaving the badlands, I should have hit the invisible death barrier every system had to stop players from going too far out. Before my mental collapse was complete, I saw something. 14K away, 12K, 9K... Thank whatever deity exists, It shows green IFF!
Not only friendly IFF, but marked with the beautiful tag, [LN]. Normally I would be running full speed from the Liberty Navy, but now they were the single greatest thing life had to offer. [LN]-James.Armstrong was his full player name. He was flying towards me, I hastily sent out a message in local chat.
“Navy! Stop! Just tell me you can hear me please god stop just tell me you are there.”
It wasn't a game anymore. That guy on the other end, if it was still a real person, wasn't any better then any other player. But it felt real. The aura of the Liberty Navy filled me with hope, that maybe Liberty knew what was going on, maybe this had been happening to convoys all over the place, and this was one of the patrols tasked with bringing them back. I was safe!
“Navy to Profiteer, what the hell is going on?”
We were still in character. Why were we still treating this like we were in the game's universe?
“I.. I don't know, we were running from somebody and then... then the game went to hell. I don't know how long I've been here, I don't know the way out. I just past... I don't know what it was, I just... dead ships. Not just dead ships, people. Real people.”
“Calm down, just stay calm, ok? Our patrol was following a rogue ship into the Badlands, some player ran by and FUBAR'd our ships the moment we hit the nebula. My patrol dropped off sensors. We were all on Skype, the call just stopped that same moment.”
We talked in some hybrid of in-character and out. I knew he was stranded here like I was, had the same thing happened to him? He spoke again:
“I have a pocket watch on my desk. I've been here for three hours. I'm going to get into formation with your ship... just keep flying ok?”
We past by another graveyard 15 minutes later. His wingmen were in it. So were ships from completely different mods. It was comforting having a single Guardian fighter escorting me, even if we were both near death with fear.
This place isn't the Badlands anymore. It's Freelancer. It's the history of Freelancer, all in one place. Remnants of every server, artifacts from every player. Something was gathering it all and bringing it here. They eventually became more then ships. Stations in disrepair, planets marked with familiar names either dead or burning. We saw Freeport 9 awhile back, it's biodomes destroyed and docking ports crushed.
Something appeared in front of us. It was both a ship and a planet, and it started pulling us in. I could hear my ally in my head, not a chat message or over speakers, I could hear him scream in his mind.
His Guardian fired a Sunslayer at the thing. Liberty fighters almost never carried torpedoes but that thought was just at the back of my head. The thing actually recoiled to our astonishment.
SHOOT
We both opened fire, I was a mere transport but I still had teeth. The thing swatted his ship out of space. His scream was cut short.
Darkness again. I was alone. I pressed forward.
I found a jumpgate, a real, honest-to-god jump gate! Through all the choas not one gate or hole was among the ruins of Freelancer. It was completely unmarked. I tried to dock.
Access denied
Acess denied.
No! This was it! I was free! I screamed, begged, pleaded for help or mercy, sent message after message to system chat, begged for forgiveness from the Liberty ship that had died, really died saving me.
I broke down, drained, and slowly passed out.
Then I woke up, I didn't know how much time had past. The gate read simply, “New York-Magellan.”
I know that gate. I know that gate! I check my map, it gave my proper sector and showed the nearest Trade Lane. I checked the comm menu. 163 logged in. I didn't bother talking to one, I quit the game immediately.
I scrambled onto Discoverygc.com, begging to see everything normal. The main page news read:
Discovery will shut down effective immediately.
This forum will be shut down effective this time in 7 days.
I will not take any questions. I am erasing all of my accounts connected to this website and Freelancer. Anybody attempting to restart the Discovery server does so at their own peril. For your own good, stay away from this game.
Goodbye.
-The Discovery Team.
There were no comments. They didn't even lock the thread. They didn't need to.
I destroyed all of my Freelancer CD's the next morning.
I absolutely love creepy pastas about games and cartoon movies and this, well i don't know if it's perfect, but it's certainly not bad.
I feel that the ship-planet hybrid thingy with teeth is bit out of place though.
I absolutely love creepy pastas about games and cartoon movies and this, well i don't know if it's perfect, but it's certainly not bad.
I feel that the ship-planet hybrid thingy with teeth is bit out of place though.
Thank you all!:DMaybe I can change the ship-planet thing to something else, thank you for the feedback!
This is the result of reading creepy stories for hours and not being able to sleep.
This thing scared me! I won't be entering the Badlands for a while.
Thanks!!
It was based incredibly loosely off this dream I had many years ago, of being initiated into an Admin clan for a server, suddenly appearing in the badlands, then being pulled toward Planet Manhattan which had appeared in the badlands. Manhattan was covered with mushrooms in my dream.
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