| abstract | - Team Fortress 2, possibly one of the most popular FPS games at the moment, is a game I personally have never been interested in. It's fine, but I've never personally found anything special about it, other than its witty humor and unique graphics. Well, recently my friends have bugged me enough to download TF2 again because they really wanted to convince me that it was a great game. I knew it wasn't going to work, but seeing as how there was nothing to do that night I decided to play along. My friends and I decided to play around 11 PM, which was a good thing because really, TF2 is a pretty large game to download. I came back from school, went on Steam, and downloaded the game immediately. Two hours. One hour. Thirty minutes. Ten minutes. A few seconds, and it was downloaded. I still had quite a few hours till our "play date" actually started, so I figured why not play a few rounds to familiarize myself with the game? And I did just that, I played against the bot. The game asked me if I wanted a coach or something with me, and after my abysmal display of sucking, I thought it might have been cool to have a little coach along. I checked the option, and just played as normal. Then, a person appeared along with me. The person's username was El Titere, which is actually a pretty sweet name. "El Titere", which means The Puppet in Spanish. I wanted to kid around with the guy, make an online friend of sorts. So I said hey. He said nothing. He was playing as the Spy at first and just ran around disguised as an Engineer. And when I say run around, I mean it as literally as possible. He just ran around, and around, and around. Same place, at the spawn point, doing nothing. I figured this guy was just a troll or something, not too familiar with the whole coach thing, but I'm sure lots of trolls just show up and grieve the entire game. The game was starting to bore me though, as I predicted, so I decided to check up on him again. Turns out he changed his class without me noticing because now he was just a Scout banging the floor with his melee weapon. I asked him, "Having fun there?" Nothing. I thought it was hysterical honestly, so I just joined him in "grieving" by banging the floor with my bat too. While crouching to the beat of the bat, sorta like dancing to it all. After about a dozen seconds of just screwing around, he stopped banging the floor. I noticed immediately and asked: "Aww, is it over?" This time, he responded. Well, about as much of a response as I was gonna get out of him. For a split second, his username popped up on the bottom right corner of the screen, as if he was going to talk with his mic. Then about a few seconds later, he left the game. "Well, that was weird," I thought to myself. It was around the time where my friends and I were going to play TF2. I left the bot matches and started a game with my friends. We played a few rounds of capture the briefcase, or intelligence, or whatever. Everybody was an asshole, as expected, so to an extent, everything was going fine. El Titere has joined the game. Perhaps it's strange to say, but when I saw this guy come into the same game my friends and I were playing on, I got pretty creeped out. I don't know why, but that weird encounter with him was just bizarre. Funny, but bizarre. Well, he didn't act differently this time around. El Titere did his thing, and his thing was, you guessed it, grieving around. This time he was a Pyro, running back and forth, pointing towards the sky and just shooting flames. He did this till he died, obviously, where he would quickly just run back and grieve again. I just stopped to watch him grieving, and eventually our team and even the opposite team was getting sick of it, and we were threatening to kick him from the game. He stopped. Dead in his tracks, right in the middle of setting the sky on fire. His name flashed again, as if he was trying to communicate again. Then some sniper shot him right in the head. His name appeared again, and he started "talking". It was possibly the weirdest thing he's done, because he wasn't really talking at all, he was just saying nonsensical gibberish. It was erratic, ranging from soft whispering gibberish, to loud, almost harsh screaming gibberish. He wasn't holding down the mic either, he kept pressing the mic button, so it made it seem much crazier than it already was. It was all just an incoherent mess, and lasted up to a minute till everyone just kept telling him to shut up, in which he would just be louder and much more vicious, as if he was just messing with them just to spite them. This had to be a troll right? It wasn't anything paranormal, just a guy messing around with us. However, the strangest part was what happened after he was kicked from the server. Once he was kicked out of the server, everyone in the game sighed in relief, finally! We were rid of that obnoxious little troll. A few minutes into the game and all of the players seemed to have forgotten he was ever here. It just seemed like another minor annoyance. Things were going just as usual, until: Everyone froze. Mid animation, while in the air, during a shot, everybody just froze. Either my game crashed or I was facing some severe lagging problems, so I asked if I was the only one experiencing the problem. Everyone said they were dealing with the same issues. El Titere has joined the game Just as soon as he entered the game, everyone vanished, and it was just me. Alone. At least, that's what the server said. It was a short moment of silence when suddenly El Titere started screaming words in Spanish, mostly profanity, and when strung together, it still felt like he was talking gibberish. Only with bad words in another language. I was still "alone" in the game back at the spawn point. I wasn't really alone, because I could still see players trying to talk with their mics, but whatever they were saying was just blocked out by the unbearable screams of El Titere. Just then, everyone, and I mean everyone from both teams spawned in the same exact room I was in. Making the entire game lag fiercely as people frantically shot their rockets, flamethrowers, shotguns, etc. The lag was so bad, and the screaming just kept going and going, the entire game just became virtually unplayable at this point. So I just decided to abandon the entire game, and exited the game. As soon as I was about to hit the "Quit Game" option, the scream suddenly stopped and white noise played loudly through my speakers. Don't know how long that lasted for, because I just immediately left. What happened after I left I wondered? Seeing as how my friends were still in the game when I left, I asked them what happened afterwards. They said that once the white noise was playing, a five or nine note song played about three times over the noise, and then the server just crashed immediately afterwards.
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