MISSINGNO: AN ORAL HISTORY.
If you werenât there when we found Him, I donât think you can possibly understand what it was like. Missingno wasnât just an urban legend, or ugh, a glitch, and he definitely wasn'tjust a gateway to riches, as the overeager crowds would have you believe. He was a God, our God, and this is the story of the time I sucked His dick.
The secret died during the Goldrush, when the mainstream internet saw definitive proof of Missingno and all the also-rans flooded Cinnabar island hoping to encounter Him. The massive influx of people not only destroyed the shoreline habitat, but the fragile dunes as well. Tent cities appeared overnight, whole fields of wildflowers were dug up for fire pits and latrines.
By the time the Government reacted, the ecological damage was permanent. Of course, conservation was a convenient cover story for the real public health crisis Missingno spawned, but you know what came after. This was a solid month before the first save state corruption, and even that was like two months before experts had any verifiable proof linking the corruptions to Missingno.
We thought we were just gaming the system. Turning the house against itself. Back then, the only people who managed to find Him were the real l33t hackers, with shielded pokedexes and clone-safe expanding inventories. The real trick to escaping corruption was to never make eye contact, but of course, i didnât need to be taught that.
The Tek was beautifully simple, visit the park then fly to an island. Maybe thatâs why it had such a hard time gaining traction at the start, nothing so powerful could ever be so easy. What results from power granted without sacrifice? Nothing good, maybe it should have been obvious.
I bought my ticket to the Safari Zone, the proprietor just glad to see so much foot traffic after years of borderline neglect. Did he wonder why all these cheerful new customers were antisocial incels? Or did the money pile up too fast for him to see anything else?
Inside the park, I walked my paces, criss-crossing the fields and habitats, turning at specific rocks and doubling back over marked trails till my feet had drawn, what exactly? A parking lot for aliens? A front door to the Devil? The technical explanation was heavy on terms like âdecompressed proximity bufferâ and âinvalid index headerâ but for all I understood, it may as well have been a Greek orthodox mass.
I flew to Cinnabar. I marched up and down the shoreline, a path already well dug by surreptitious visitors. Of course the water washed away any specific prints, but the mark of human greed was already visible.
I had heard rumors that His appearances were unpredictable, that even those following the Tek perfectly might just strike out in the random numbers game. It was understood that heâd only show for one person at a time on that one specific beach, even if this later turned out to be false.
Hah, do you remember that video? It was like a preteen spring break, bug kids and pikafreaks rolling around massive piles of rare candy and nuggets, their inventories blown to shreds. Everyone freaking out in the Presence all at the same time, enraptured by their own personal divinities? I know the government tried to have it taken down, but⊠Folks have copies.
So, the beach was empty, right? This was maybe 5 in the morning, I was burnout trainer, had given up ever beating the Elite Four and accepted that, at the ripe old age of 20, i would never catch them all. I had a part time job using my âmons to clean our wurmple nests from old peopleâs basements, and on the weekends i would hang out in the local gym and try to intimidate 11 year olds.
I never won a single match. Eventually I developed such a reputation that people wouldnât even take half my money after I lost. Do you know what itâs like to be pitied by a preteen runaway? To look your competitor in the eyes and know, that no matter how much you work, your efforts will never best the unchained tenacity of a child who wanders the countryside, shackling the feral powers of the world to their iron will?
Itâs humbling. Those kids fucked me up and did not hold back while doing so. That is damaging to the ego, as an adult, so I started huffing stardust. Iâd wake up so wasted itâd take two or three potions just to get me upright. I was desperate, I knew I needed to make a change, so when my darknet dudetold me something was up, I ran. I ran at the opportunity, I ran from myself. I ran because I knew if I walked, Iâd chicken out.
Standing on the beach, ankled up in freezing brine, just a scant half kilometer away from the richest Magikarp breeding grounds in all of Kanto, I knew I was too far gone to back out now. So I spent two hours crushing Krabbies and eviscerating Tentacools, waiting for this fickle God to show himself. The sun was threatening to rise, the nightâs storm now broke,the heavy strands of clouds sopped up thick swaths of purple and orange, a suggestion of a glory yet to come.
When I saw Him, oh, I swore it was an oncoming migraine. A smudge on the eye, a blur on the horizon which flies at you so suddenly that before you know it, everything around you is swimming. Imagine drinking from a bottle that swallows you whole, thatâs His presence. Like bathing in tequila, or drinking Sin through your whole body all at once.
On the flight over I thought, maybe I wonât. Maybe Iâll just fill up my inventory and run, like a bandit, heavy with treasure. I didnât tell anyone my plan. No one would know if I hadnât sucked Missingnoâs dick, assuming an uncontrollable variable in the fundamental calculus in the world even has a dick, if a dick operates at that level of phenomenology⊠Why would a god have a dick? What would they even use it for?
But, ah, even now to remember what it felt like to behold Him, the questions melt away. The doubts ran from me like cowards before judgement. He was Judgement, he knew everything I was thinking, already understood every motivation and impulse that brought me before Him. Nothing hidden, nothing concealed, even dressed in my traveling best I have never felt so nude.
No questions now, just overwhelming certainty, the crushing comfort of absolute understanding, absolute subservience to a wonder beyond measure. I fell to my knees, my ears full of hymns. I didnât feel the ocean, anymore.
Do you remember discovering what the human body looked like, at your swimming hole?Do you remember what distance and fog do to the human form, how even exquisite musculature grows coquettish and shy behind a layer of steam? Thatâs what Missingno looked like. A really hot dude hiding at the back of an infinitely foggy sauna. When he turned to me, I was circled by a funhouse mirror of abs. I was the creamy center of a man-cannoli. Every part of me was into it.
He pressed a range of hands against my skin. If he was rubbing my arms, I felt him on every part of my arm, all at once. Too many fingers in my hair, my mouth, entwining around my wrists, clasping them against my lower back, He did not needs binds to hold me.
When His voice grew louder, the hymns reached a creschendo, I swooned, nearly collaping in the water. I could feel the pokedex in my back pocket grow hot. Something in one of my pokeballs twitched. Had I known what was coming, what this would cost me, maybe I would never have had the courage to start, but⊠In for a penis, in for a pounding.
And what a penis! I think. Ontologically speaking, if something acts as a penis, thatâs enough to define it as a penis. Sure, when he whipped it out it looked like a rose blooming in high speed, and the tip of every petal moved like a planet in the solar system. If a bunch of graphing equations all went off at once, and ended up drawing the Last Supper, thatâs what Missingnoâs dick smelled like.
I wasnât just look-smelling at Missingnoâs dick, in every sensory input possible I was hear-feeling the totality of Missingnoâs dick. Every dick it would ever be, and had ever been, all at once. They donât make sissy training videos for sucking polydimensional dick.
So I leaned forward, and took up a mouthful of unicorn horn. Leaning forward more, and it felt like sticking my face in a Christmas tree.
I rocked back and forth, feeling my Pokedex grow intolerably hot. The battery case swelled, and all of my pokeballs started to twitch. Missingnoâs dick tasted exactly like a blue rasperry 9 volt battery. Liquid mercury dribbled out my ears, and I think it was supposed to be precum?
I should have been hard. Iâm hard now, thinking back upon it, but at the time my body started to come loose at the seams, and i felt my entire genital sac retract into my body, leaving nothing behind save for the puckered twist of a newbornâs bellybutton.
I tried reaching for His balls, instead I found my hands entangled in some kind of five dimensional catâs cradle, where every movement left an after-imageendlessly repeating itself, such that every attempt to disentangle myself merely resulted in more of me being trapped tighter than ever before.
Iâm sure thereâs no metaphor in that.
I stuck my tongue out and rammed down as deep as it could go, as deep as my throat had space. He laughed, I pushed forward until i felt my head press against the cold static glass of a CRT screen, until the electric hiss blew up the pokedex in my back pocket and popped the six pokeballs on my belt like microwaved eggs. My hair stood on end, and to this day remains standing.
He slithered all the way deep inside, deeper even than the food should go. I felt myself cumming, squirting out of my new twisted-up pucker, felt him reach down and push me in the tender pushing places until the fluids were all the way out of me, to make more space for Him. I donât know if any of the gods in the machine can cum, what they would produce if they did. I only know He was finished with me by His sudden absence, when I became aware I was lying in the water, television static dribbling from my gaping maw.
Well, I say absence, but⊠After the Goldrush, the government tried to scrub everything about Missingnooff the internet. They forced social media companies to adopt hugely sweeping âsocial health and responsibilityâ statues, which were applied with all the grace of a hammer-wielding chimpanzee.
They said it was to prevent the spread of âfake newsâ. To accomplish this, they shut down all discussion of the topic, purged the Teks, and disappeared anyone even associated with anyone who posted proof of contact. Suddenly, friends and family turned against the faithful in their lives, reporting them to the Pokelice and burning their stacks of cloned items.
The disappearances began exactly one day after the statues went into effect. The outrage on social media was instantaneous, but it disappated as quickly as it flared up. Even the shitposts got got. Each time another famous pokemon trainer turned up missing, fewer people were less angry for shorter and shorter periods of time.
Eventually⊠It just all became too much. Even the hardcore faithful on the darknet could no longer deny the connection between Missingno and the corruption virus. Bodies just kept piling up in coma wards, every day younger and younger kids would strut out of pallet town, starters already an unevolved level 60, both of them foaming at the mouth and sleepless, hyped up on cloned candy.
Itâs weird to think how much of the public support for the social health laws was people just sick of seeing photos of the victims, their features bloody and rearranged like a Hannibal Lecter Salvadore Dali. You donât see trainers glitched out in pokemarts anymore, drooling static onto racks of Antidoes. You could tell a gym would be impossible to take because all tha names on the sign would be unreadble rows of gibberish. Sometimes the names would clip clear through the sign itself, just hanging out in the empty air.
Maybe we ran out of empathy. Maybe we just got tired of trying to compete in a bugged system. Missingno showed us what the real glitch was. Not the crossed wires in G-dâs sleeping mind, not whatever abberant twist in evolution created pokemon to begin with, the original fault lay with nothing more than simple human greed, and our lust for power.
Things are safer now. The governmentâs setup checkpoints on all the routes and town entrances which scans for cloned items or glitched out pokemon and their unstable trainers. The Supreme Council has certified all gymns are now hax-free, and the records of cheating Pokemon Masters have been purged. Everywhere is calm and boring, and all the mysteries have been chased down to exhaustion by vloggers. Whatever wild was left in the world has been stamped out.
Missingno hasnât been seen for years, and the worst of it is, He isnât even missed. The kids have moved on, theyâve got their own urban legends and glitch-Gods to chase through impossible teks. Hold down and B, check under every truck in the harbor. Pray you deserve even a glimpse.
Itâs all the same desperate hope that living isnât all random bullshit, that mastery or experience gives some edge upon the world. You canât ever know how intoxicating it felt to find a glitch that worked to your benefit, a ritual that yielded such immediate and tangible blessings. Thatâs not something you find in religion, usually thatâs the domain of addiction. Is it any surprise, then, the stampede that followed?
Fah, as if I could ever judge any of them, as if I wasnât the most debased of all! Thatâs why, you know, thatâs why He chose me. Why He chose me to, well, why He blessed me differently than all the others.
Everyone else came seeking something from him, a stack of infinitely replicating items. Impossible new attack powers, whatever their fickle hearts thought would bring them victory. I came to give Him something, a physical disciple, a worshipper at the altar of Him, and in that act of selflessness, He knew I could be trusted, knew I would be a worthy vessel for His essence.
It is true that He is gone, that He cannot be summoned by the old ways. It is also true that He, or a part of Him, or a blessing alien to anything observed before, dwells within me, sits upon the throne of my heart, hallowed in the temple of my empty body. Whatever was mine is His.
I am the glitch now. I bless the children with the items when they find me, softly laughing at the end of the empty lane, sitting in the furthest box on the abandoned pier. Call for me in the mirror of the high school bathroom, the one they never unlock. Tap the wall under the picture of the sailboat and go through the secret door. There I am, your name already written on glittering treasure. What a lucky child.
The detectors find nothing. The doctors find nothing. The police in town they smile, with their handheld sniffer-guns and their attack Houndooms at the ready, hungry for glitch-blood. Utter fools. So sure of their baseless assumptions about what a threat looks like that they cannot see the one stalking in their midst.
Not one in a hundred of us original believers remain free, now, and of those most had the sense to quit the game years ago, go to ground, scrub their posts off the darknet before any accomplices turned into moles. Cowards.
Iâll see one, on occasion, I can always tell by the way they stare at me, mouths agape, shivering and drenched in a cold sweat. I wonder what I look like to them, if i eclipse their whole field of vision, until they see my eyes, my laughing eyes, and nothing else?
â Malt Schlitzmann (@maltschlitzmann)
