Tales From Parawatch: Welcome to the Internet, Have a Look Around

Link to article: Tales From Parawatch: Welcome to the Internet, Have a Look Around.

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|comments=An open Parawatch collaboration. Concept by Nykacolaquantum, with starting contributions from Fishish, Dr0shadow, and LORDXVNV.]]

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Miscellaneous 'Net Spookums
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[[span class="title"]]Forum[[/span]] » [[span class="title"]]Tales from the Internet[[/span]] » Miscellaneous 'Net Spookums

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##white|**Rook**## ♖ #00000001

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Hey there, folks. You might be wondering why this thread has been added, and pinned, to this subforum.

This is an experimental "gigathread" of sorts for people to post their stories. Maybe it's one you're nervous about making your own thread for, for one reason or another. Maybe it's a story that's too short for the minimum OP length we set for creation. Maybe you're in a hurry. Or maybe you're just not that great at writing long form prose (And that's okay!).

This is a place for you to be able to share your tales, regardless. Now, in addition to the overall site rules, there are some extra ones specifically for this, which will be adjusted for any further gigathreads staff creates.

# All posts herein must focus mainly on this sub-forum's topic, that being spooky, mysterious or just bizarre internet culture. Whether it's forgotten Web 1.0 relics, a figment of a memory of a strange Flash movie you saw on Newgrounds, or even a video from the Weird Part of Youtube you can't find anymore.
# No self-promotion or attempts to start Alternate Reality Games in this thread. //Talking// about ARGs is perfectly fine, but if it's deemed you're posting here to give traffic to your interactive analog horror series or something, we're giving you the boot.
# No witch-hunting. There are no exceptions; don't be a rules lawyering smartass.

That's it; have fun, everyone.
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##green|**kenneth2332**## #79122145

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Guess I'll start.

In the late 2000s, I was a fan of this internet horror site called "the Handlers." Not sure if you've heard of it – it was kind of popular, but very niche. It wasn't a big community of writers, so we kind of all knew each other.

The premise of "the Handlers" was that there were eight thousand humans who all personified—"handled"—a concept, which gave them certain powers. There were a few simple rules all Handlers faced. One, if you challenged a Handler to a game, and you won, you became the new Handler, but if you lost, you suffered a horrible fate. Two, when two Handlers met, they had to play the game with each other, and the winner would consume the loser's Handle. Three, when there was only one Handler left, they would become the Handler of All Things. Basically, God. Think of them as a cross between Yu-Gi-Oh and Highlander.

Most of the articles described what the Handler handled, and the game they would play. The games were creepy and surreal – metaphorical chess involving people in your life, ping pong where every missed swing destroyed a possible future, Pokemon where your mons were every pet you'd ever mourned.

The scary thing about the handlers is that they could be //anyone//. That busker playing chess in the park, the 14 year old shooting hoops in the basketball court, the ten year old shit-talking you on Call of Duty – any of them could be a Handler. If you challenged them to a friendly casual game or rose to their taunts, you could get sucked into a dark metaphor or your worst nightmare. And it wouldn't be easy to beat them. They would almost always win.

It sounds cheesy, but I was actually so afraid of running into a Handler in real life. I guess that's why I never bothered writing for the Handlers.

The community just sort of died off. Weirdly enough it was after someone proposed a ranking bot, something to track who the best authors were and how many handlers they'd written. You'd think that would have helped it rise – it works really well for Reddit – and everyone seemed really excited about it, but people just sort of… stopped. The community just faded away.

I haven't checked that site in a really long time, but the last Handler I read—the only thing posted in like a year— is something that I still remember. It was written by the same guy who proposed the rating bot, the last big author on the site:

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"The Handler of the Ladder"

Wherever there might be a challenge, wherever there might be a hierarchy, the Handler of the Ladder plays his games. He will offer a ladder to climb, a destiny to attain – but he will always be there at the top. He will tempt you to chase him, and you will give away your soul upon the ladder that he creates – but it is an illusion. He sits at the top of the ladder, and always will.
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##orange|**FishTruther**## #72442724

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Thought I’d share this here so more people can take a look.

About a week ago I was going on a YouTube binge when this weird ad popped up. It was around 7 minutes long //and// unskippable, which just made me think whoever posted it must really misunderstand how ads work. I decided to let it play for a bit (Busy day, I know.) to see what the ad’s deal was, but I got nothing. The ad was just a blank screen, with the number 724 appearing in comic sans //maybe// once around the 2-minute mark? idrk, I only got through about 4 minutes before skipping it. I didn’t catch the name of the channel that made it, which, looking back, was a bad move on my part. The weirdest thing started happening after I saw the ad though.

For some reason, the number won’t stop showing up in my everyday life: I’ll go to the store across the street and pay $7.24 for my things, drive to work and get stuck in traffic behind a car with 724 in its license plate, and wake up at 7:24 every morning.

At first I thought I was just being paranoid, I’d seen the number in a weird setting and every time I saw it now I’d remember it more easily, right? But I can’t keep ignoring it. I’ve always celebrated my birthday in December, but my birth certificate now states that I was born on February 7. A few days ago I woke up in a different apartment, only to find that I now lived in apartment 72, on the fourth floor.

The number is everywhere and in everything. I’ve surrendered to the all-encompassing 724.

Won’t you?

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##blue|**aqout**## #86730021

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Ooo okay hmm

I swear I saw a few weeks ago this thumbnail for a classic Nostalgia Critic video about something called "//Ron’s Gone Wrong//", like that new animated film that came out. It only shared the name from what I saw though. It had the critic character with an arm around this red-haired fellow and the other hand sticking a finger up the ginger’s nose (you know how the earlier thumbnails were). At the time I vaguely recalled a move that was like //Dumb and Dumber// or the //Ernest// franchise, with this really annoying character named Ron. Think he was a genetic experiment or something. Anyhow at the time I thought "huh so they’re remaking it in name only?", then moved on.

About a week after that when the film came out (haven't watched it, though my cousin loved it, unsure what that's says as-to its quality) I got curious and looked up the film on Wikipedia. What a twist, it didn’t exist. I think what happened was that my memory mutated and combined the images of a few of the classic era thumbnails, specifically //A Troll in Central Park// and //Drop Dead Fred//, but I swear it was it’s own video.

Not much to it beyond that but hey that's what's this thread is for.
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##White|**UnterUns**## #36478628

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When I was a kid, maybe like sixth grade or so, I had a friend named Jerrod whose family were really poor. I remember having to give Jerrod my lunch a couple of times that year, or maybe the previous year cause we might have gone to the same elementary school. But I remember it was like two months before the end of sixth grade and Jerrod came to school with a new lunchbox and it had a really nice sandwich, I think it might have been salami on a baguette or something, and fancy Trader Joe's cookies and some new Pokemon cards he immediately started trading.

I asked him how he got the cards and he got very excited and also very quiet, and he leaned in and told me his family weren't poor anymore because his dad invented a website called slombo.com and they were making lots of money, more money than they had seen in their lifetime. That day I think I went to look at this website because I didn't believe him. I'm not sure what I imagined, that he stole the sandwich or something? I must have gone and looked at it. This was like around just after the Dotcom boom or so, like early 2000s, so I didn't have a home computer I could use. But, the school did have a computer lab and so I guess I visited slombo.com there.

I don't remember very much of what was there now, but I remember this deep navy blue color to the site with these purple tabs. There were stories you could read, a shop you could visit, and a page of videos to download. I clicked on one of the stories first because that was what was on the homepage, and I read a little bit about a boy my age who was obsessed with very muscly men, like superheroes and wrestlers and stuff. I vividly remember being upset by it in a way. I guess it was fiction, like it was written like a short story with this odd dense writing I didn't really understand. In the shop section I also distinctly remember seeing Jerrod's exact lunchbox, and sandwich, and cookies, and Pokemon cards, and thinking that was weird, like you could buy the salami sandwich on the internet or something. I don't remember the videos, but I do remember unplugging the computer and being terrified I would be caught. I wasn't the most computer-savvy kid at that time, but there were some friends who were older and bragged about downloading files of gore videos and porn and that frightened me a lot as well, so it must have been something like that but I don't know. The only thing I can piece together about the video was that I asked Jerrod about it later and he told me very seriously that that was the one with "the trunt" (???) and he didn't like watching it. I don't know what that means.

I'm not sure of how much of this is real and how much I fabricated after the fact. I was kind of a sheltered kid, I had parents who wouldn't let me watch NickToons because they were "too cynical" and I was warned a lot about scary movies that I wouldn't like and of course my imagination always made them worse in my head than they were. I had nightmares easily, but after the slombo.com visit I kept having this recurring dream where I would be driving home at night with my family and we'd be pulling up to our house, but our front door would open and a black squiggly man would bolt out and drip slime behind him as he ran away. And the car radio would play this ominous tone that would boom out and I'd feel bone-deep terror but the car wouldn't stop and then I'd wake up. I had what I eventually called the "slombo dream" every couple of nights for like two years after that. The only reason I remember it well was because my mom took me to a youth psychologist when I was like 14 and she encouraged me to keep a dream journal, which I found recently.

I don't know if I ever told my parents about slombo.com, I think they thought me calling it the "slombo dream" was a reference to something that happened in it? But they must have been aware of slombo.com because they were friends with Jerrod's parents (it was one of the reasons we hung out so much) and so they were over at their house a lot. I remember they'd have these parties with champagne and the psychologist was there too, maybe for me? But when those parties happened Jerrod went to his room and didn't talk to anybody. I tried to look up slombo.com but the URL had decayed and it's not on the Internet Archive. I guess it must have been popular because one night we went over to Jerrod's new house and it was like a mansion, but I can't find anything today that refers to it?

Has anyone ever heard of slombo.com? What was it? Some kind of obscure fetish homepage? That's the only answer I can think of, but it doesn't really feel right.
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##green|**fordunfocused**## #73019926
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When I was about 20, I worked at a place called “Liminal Space”. It was a company that cleaned, more specifically, cleaned corridors. It was weird. But then one guy happened to want a corridor cleaned.

Of course, I had to do the job. It was a church, but like a really fancy one. It looked clean. It was all white and, from what I could tell, was Protestant? Like there was no fancy decorations like stained glass windows but was //modern//. It didn’t look like a church. But it had all this chambers that led to each other. Some were horizontal. Most were diagonal. Some were even vertical (don’t know how they built them.

I also remember the doors. Doors were everywhere. I got curious and opened a few up, but they all just led empty rooms. Some doors were on the ceiling. I opened one and saw the same empty room.

But I opened another door on the ceiling.

It was a bigger room. Like, as big as my house. I saw a chair in the corner of the room. I got curious.

I climbed up.

I quickly realised chairs were all over the room, facing away from the door. Some ceiling were on the walls or ceiling. One chair, one on the wall, had a person in it. A blue person. I went out of the room and ran as fast as possible. But then I saw the blue man was running after me, crying for help. I closed doors behind me, which slowed it down.

I never heard of Liminal Space again.

We had a website (https://liminalspace.co.uk) but it got taken down. And all I can remember is our mascot. Come to think of it, I can’t exactly remember what the mascot was, but I’ll update when (if) I remember
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##green|**fordunfocused**## #73019926
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IT WAS A BLUE PERSON
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|author=Dr0shadow, Fishish, Lord XVNV and newnykacolaquantum]]

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