One dark night, I was browsing through Youtube. I was logged onto my main account, Bethdacat TFM, and basically staying up all night just to watch videos.
Now, I gotta say, I'm a huge fan of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. I even made fan characters and stories about them before. They weren't really developed and well-designed, but who cared? All I cared about was that they existed for me.
So, anyways, while I was on Youtube, I received a strange notification in my Gmail account. Curiously, I checked the warning.
It was... a "sweepstakes"... that I supposedly won. I never even entered it. Why then was it sending this to me? And how did it know my email?
I skimmed through the details. The email address that the message came from was "superstarsweepstakes.com" and it was marked as Spam. The subject read: "You won!!!" Won what? I read the message, confused as to what was even going on.
And it said this:
"Dear Bethdacat TFM, Please download this prize! It is for You!! Thank you!!! -SSS.com"

And then a link to a MediaFire page. I scoffed. "This is probably garbage," I said to myself, so I deleted the email and went back to Youtube.

A quarter hour later, the notification showed up again. Really? I paused a Sonic.exe theory video and checked it. Once again, SSS.com, You Won, yada yada yada. Except... did the message look darker?
"It's not darker," I thought, "it's probably my computer screen." So, I turned up the brightness and deleted the spam mail once again.

A half hour later, the same notification. What was going on? I skimmed through the mail furiously. Same thing. Except the message got darker and now the lettering was bright red. My eyes strained from the color, squinting.
"This dude's crazy," I told myself. I deleted it once again. Hopefully he'd never message me back ever again. Third time's the charm, right?

An hour later, another notification, but this one was different. Being the curious gamer that I was, I clicked on it.
This one gave me the chills...

[Grrr I had to retype this >:C]

The email address was "thereisnohope.here" and the subject said "PLEASE DO IT." The message read: "Bethdacat, please, there's no time, download this before he finds you!" And then the same MediaFire link.
"Grr... fine..." I muttered. "I'll download this just so they'll leave me alone..."
I clicked on the link, and surely right after, a little bar popped up at the bottom, saying "Downloading 'Beth.chr'..." Strange, a character file? Oh well. I was really furious about how they tricked me with a stupid CHR file! I decided to delete it. But, suddenly, I remembered: Beth? That was one of my character's names!
"Maybe it's a shortened version of my username..." I thought. "After all, everyone online calls me Beth."
After I said this, the file was done downloading.

I woke up to the sounds of birds chirping at my window. I looked across the bed towards my computer, which was darkened. I sighed. Maybe this whole "prize" thing had been a dream. I went to check

After a painful startup, I went to check my files. Surely, at the top was the character file.
"Aw man..."
I clicked on it. A little Notepad window popped up and it said this: "To get the full experience of this file, go to the link below!" I looked closely at it. Another MediaFire page. So it was going to be one of THOSE files.
I went onto Chrome and copy-pasted the link. After that, the download bar showed up again, this time downloading... "beth.exe"? What?
"Probably some sort of fangame," I thought. The process of patiently waiting was extremely brutal. Finally, after about an hour, the download was finished.
"Yes, finally!" I moaned, faceplanted into the desk. I lifted my head and managed to get the mouse to click the "Open" option. I batted off the warning that followed and clicked "Run."
A fullscreen window enveloped my entire screen into darkness. Huh. And then, the game started.
The graphics and quality in the title were stunningly amazing for a supposed 16-bit game.

The hills were great, the ocean was pretty, the music was excellent... and then she showed up.
"Oh my goodness, it's lil' Beth!" I gushed. She gave a little cute wave to her audience and blushed a bit. They really captured her well and made her seem cute!
Suddenly, the music froze in place and so did the title. A crash?! I prepared myself for the Blue Screen of Death, but it never happened. The blackness and silence ensued again. Okay, this was weird...
And then the zone start up screen was shown: "Starlit Clouds, Act 1." Seemed fair enough. When I got a peek at the level design, it was so high-quality, like someone from Sonic Mania created this. The sprite of my playable character, Beth, was also accurate, polished and overall great.
I couldn't control her for a second, but then I understood: this was supposedly a cutscene.
A pink cloud with blue and purple eyes fell from the sky until it was right in front of the sprite. A text box appeared and said the following...

"Oh, hello! You must be Beth. You can call me Kumoyume, the Dream Cloud! Anyways, you're in the land of dreams, also known as Starlit Clouds. The main purpose of this is to test you on your abilities. If you die, don't worry! You can respawn an infinite amount of times here! But make sure you actually get to the end, alright? Now, you don't need a tutorial, I'll just let you go now. See ya soon!" Then both it and the cloud vanished.
"What was that all about?" I asked. I had not expected a cutscene. I pressed the right key, and learned that the cutscene was over, and that I could control my character now.
I played through the level (and died a bunch of times). What I noticed was that whenever I jumped on the enemies, I died, and Beth was moving slower than in normal Sonic games. This was understandable and canon: both of these attributed to her abilities.
When I finally reached the goal sign, it abruptly stopped, the music and game freezing again. "A glitch," I thought.

---
TBC for now, I'm too tired
---

Would you like to RP today? I'll be available.

Yeah, after school, on that old RP painting we had?

S P O O P Y