Board Thread:Literature/@comment-24235314-20150707212820

John was a humble coder and respected PopCap employee. When he was tasked with the challenge of creating the now scrapped mushroom “Evil Shroom”, he started right away on creating the art and sounds for it. The art for this Evil-shroom was (un)fortunately lost, but these sounds stayed in the coding till this day.



One day, a frat boy hacker named Drew was looking through the code for Plants vs. Zombies 2. While illegally snooping in the masses of garbled language, he uncovered some strange files. He decided to load these strange files into his game. As soon as he tried to load his emulator, the game immediately started to act funny.



The loading screen was not its usual screen, instead it was the old one. (You know the one, right?) Drew wondered if this was an old placeholder loading screen that he had accidentally loaded, but something seemed un-PvZ-ish. The eyes of the zombies were nonexistent. In fact, he could see some red in the sockets. Every plant was gone, except for a mystery mushroom with a black cap.



Drew immediately knew that this was not normal. Was someone playing a joke on him? Did somebody edit the textures while he was in the bathroom? After all, he did live in a dormitory. Has one of his roommates played a prank on him, mocking his love for the game?



Drew tried to forget the unfortunate possibilities as he hit the Play button. Immediately, the game froze and a high-pitched sound exploded from his speakers. “Aaaagh!" cried Drew. He knew this was no prank. Was this a bootleg .obb that he got off of the chat? He threw his headphones on the ground. One more try, he closed his emulator and opened it back up. Surely it was just an error, he thought. Surely.



This time, the title screen was normal and only froze for a split second when he hit Play. Something was still off, however. When he scrolled to the worlds, he noticed that only he had only worlds Ancient Egypt - Dark Ages. No Frostbite Caves, no Lost City, or even Big Wave Beach. Drew thought this was only a minor setback: he hadn't even completed Dark Ages anyway! When he loaded Dark Ages, only level 1 was playable.



Level 1 and Arthur's Challenge.



“That sorta makes sense.” he thought. “You complete one level to get to the other.” But Arthur's Challenge? That was a bit weird. Drew decided to play Arthur's Challenge. However, there was no card selection screen. When the seed selection screen loaded, he picked the plants available: Peashooter, Sunflower, Wall-nut, and Evil-shroom.



<p style="margin-bottom:0in">“What's Evil-shroom?” he thought. “Wasn't that a beta mushroom?” Drew hit the "Let's Rock!" button and was taken to Arthur's Challenge level 1. However, there were potions scattered all over the ground, with only the first four columns uncovered by potions and - potion liquid? That was odd. He should notify the wiki about this discovery! Maybe give the users in chat some pictures and go from there. Though, he didn't want to be called a faker. He decided not to.

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<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Drew started the level as usual: planting Sunflowers in the far back and planting Peashooters and Wall-nuts where there were zombies. The Evil-shroom costed six-hundred sixty-six sun. He selected the seed packet and placed it on the lawn. The Evil-shroom started looking around menacingly. The Peashooter behind the Evil-shroom winced and hid behind the Wall-nut.

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<p style="margin-bottom:0in">This was not usual. Plants don't usually move on their own.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in">As Evil-shroom looked around, he spotted the purple potion in front of him. The Evil-shroom headbutted it and made a nasty shattering sound, leaving a puddle of purple on the ground. "Does that mean you can plant plants on that space now and get potion effects?" Drew wondered.

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<p style="margin-bottom:0in">He selected the Sunflower seed packet and dragged it over to the puddle. The Sunflower immediately grew a little bigger and started flashing red. Drew knew that the purple potion gave zombies a 25% health boost, so that Sunflower now had 5 health. "This is amazing!" he said. Maybe hacking in premium plants for free and making Puff-shrooms shoot plant-fooded citron balls at a rapid rate and never dissipate was a good thing.

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<p style="margin-bottom:0in">However, there was a little problem. The Evil-shroom spotted the Sunflower and got a strange look in its eyes.

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<p style="margin-bottom:0in">"Why is this thing targeting plants?" Drew wondered. Perhaps it was meant to happen? Perhaps it was a bug? Drew was very confused, so he didn't notice the Conehead Peasant 3 squares away from the Evil-shroom.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in">'''More soon. Okay? Okay.''' <ac_metadata title="[WIP] A PvZ2 Creepypasta: Evil-shroom"> </ac_metadata>