I got an email from my buddy Jay a few days ago.

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It was the last thing he sent me before he died. I’ve read over this whole thing a few times now and honestly… I can’t say for sure whether or not this is meant as some sort of suicide letter, or if it’s something else entirely. I know that Jay wasn’t exactly in the best headspace over the past few months. His girlfriend had dumped him back in August and he hadn’t exactly handled it that well. She’d actually filed a restraining order against him… I’ll get into that later…

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But over the past month or so, I could’ve sworn that he was getting better. He still wasn’t doing ‘great’ but he still seemed… Well… Normal. I figured that part of it was the new Pokemon games that came out.

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For anyone who doesn’t follow the franchise, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet came out on November 18th.

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Now, Jay was a hardcore Pokemon fan. Back before the pandemic had hit when we’d still been in the office together, he’d had a couple of pokemon plushes on his desk. The starters from the seventh generation games, specifically. Those were his favorites. Honestly, the fact that we both grew up with Pokemon was half the reason that we became friends. I knew he was looking forward to the new games, so when they came out, I suggested that he and I play together. Partially because I knew he hadn’t been doing too great since the breakup, but I also did genuinely want to play with him too. The games are supposed to have this feature where you can sort of hang out in each others versions of the game and everything. Since neither of us are the most social people and we don’t live close enough to meet up without an hour long commute, this seemed like a good way to hang out from the comfort of our own homes.

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He was better at the game than I was and got a little further along in it. Every now and then we’d try battling each other but he usually kicked my ass. That was fine. It was just fun to have somebody to play with.

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I didn’t hear from him too much in the days before I got the email from him. I didn’t read too much into it at the time, since I knew that we were both fairly busy with some end of the year projects and I knew he had some real asshole clients. We work in web design, so that’s to be expected. People just sort of send us shit without considering the technical implementation of it. It’s a whole thing and if you work in our field, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

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Anyways, I’d noticed that he’d been online less and less at work, which was a little concerning. He usually booked it in his calendar if he took time off. I figured that he might’ve gotten sick or something and I did send him a couple of messages over Discord to check in on him. But until I got the email, he’d never really responded to me. Then of course a couple of days ago he sent this to my personal email…

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I’ve read over this a few times now and I still don’t completely know what to make of it. I know that Jay’s dead, but I don’t know how he died. I’ve heard a couple of co-workers say suicide, but I can’t find any solid proof of that outside of this email and the email… Well. It’s not exactly what I’d call a suicide letter.

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I don’t know what the hell I’d call it.

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Maybe all of this is just the last ramblings of a man on the edge of sanity. Maybe there’s more to all of this. I don’t know. Like I said, Jay wasn’t exactly in the best headspace but I didn’t ever think that it could be this bad…

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Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. Honestly, I’m still just processing all of this and I’m half hoping that maybe posting what he sent me here might somehow help. Maybe somebody else can make sense of all of this.

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Maybe…

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The email that I got reads as follows.

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Hey Greg

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I don’t really know what you’re going to hear about me over the next little while. I don’t know how this is going to end for me. But I know it won’t end well. I’m scared man. I’m so, so, so fucking scared. Even now, even while I’m typing this she’s calling me. I can hear the ringing of my phone. I can see the unread emails. I know it’s coming. I just don’t know what it’s going to look like.

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I don’t know what I did wrong. I don’t know… I don’t know…

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I noticed it a few days ago. I was up kinda early, so I was playing some Pokemon and I was playing that challenge at the end of the game where you can fight a bunch of random trainers from the Academy. One of the ones I had to face was Nemona, you know, your rival that follows you throughout the game. I mean, that’s pretty normal. Nemona’s part of the normal roster. I’d never run into her before, but still whatever.

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Anyways, after I beat her, I got a cutscene afterward where she came up to me talking about how I’d given her a really good battle. It wasn’t that different from some of the other post battle cutscenes you get with Nemona, I mean, that’s just sort of her character, right? She’s obsessed with Pokemon battles.

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I didn’t think too much of it, even when she gave me the option to fight her again. Looking back on it, that was actually a little weird. I mean, I’d never really had the option to rebuttal anyone immediately after beating them, but it’s still pretty in line with her character in the game. Idk, man. I didn’t really think on it too much. I beat her, turned the game off, and started work. That’s about when I started noticing some weird shit…

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My switch is in my office, it’s hooked up to my TV. I’d switched to some youtube videos to play in the background while I was working.

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At around 2-ish, I was sorta taking a bit of a break when I noticed that the smaller handheld screen for the switch was on. I was actually kinda thinking that it wasn’t docked right and that the game was still running, but as far as I could tell it was docked just fine. I still picked up my switch to take a look at it.

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I was pretty sure I’d closed out of Pokemon Violet when I’d shut it down before work, but it looked to me like it had started again. My character was still at the Academy, and Nemona was still with them, which was more or less the way I’d left it. Only my character had just started another battle with Nemona. It wasn’t like, the end of the last battle. I’d beaten her. But the text on the screen read: You are challenged by Pokemon Trainer Nemona. This was a whole new battle, and when I reattached the controllers to the console and clicked through, I saw that she had a whole new fresh team of Pokemon. It was so weird!

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I didn’t really feel up to fighting her again, so I just clicked into the home menu and tried to close out the game. Although weirdly enough, I didn’t get the option to close it. I figured it was just some weird glitch, put my Switch back into sleep mode and put it back in the dock, before going for lunch.

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I didn’t really touch the game again until that evening, after I had dinner. The screen was on again, and remained on even after I docked my switch with my TV. I’ve never really had that happen before.

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I was still in the battle with Nemona, but I was able to beat her just as easily as before and once I beat her, I was able to play the game normally. I still turned my console off and on again just to be safe, before going back to playing normally. I figured that this whole Nemona thing was just some weird glitch, I mean, these games sorta have issues, right?

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Anyways, after I’d reset my console and everything, I’d gone down to that crater you get to explore in the postgame to train up some of the weaker members of my team a little. I ran around there for a couple of hours and that’s when I saw her.

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Nemona.

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Her character model was standing near one of the waterfalls in the top half of the crater.

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I don’t know if you’ve played that far yet, but Nemona only ever appears in the crater once, the first time you go down that crater and it’s during a pretty heavily scripted sequence too. I wondered if maybe this was just another glitch, where her model was showing up someplace it shouldn’t be. I had something kinda similar happen before where my Gengars model would just sort of appear randomly in buildings, like something out of an old creepypasta. I figured this was just the same kind of glitch.

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Only instead of just standing there like my glitched Gengar did, Nemona started running towards me and initiated dialogue. She said something like: “Hey Jay! I haven’t see you in a while! Up for a battle?”

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Now at this point, I’d started thinking that maybe this was some sort of random encounter I hadn’t seen yet. Like, maybe she just shows up in the crater to challenge you sometimes? Although this challenge was a little weird.

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Usually, whenever Nemona challenges you in the game, you get the option to say no, in case you need to stop and heal your team first. There was no option to say No this time. The battle just started and after she did her intro animation, the text read: ‘You are challenged by Pokemon Trainer Nemona.’

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She sent out her first pokemon, which was Lycanroc as per usual although it wasn’t the same level it had been earlier. Now it was the same level as my pokemon. The way she battled this time was also different than she had before. I don’t really know how to describe it other than more ‘strategic.’

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You know how when you play online and run into one of those guys who’s crazy good at online play? It was like playing against one of them. She just seemed to do everything in her power to wear me down.

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It took two pokemon to take down her Lycanroc, and instead of sending out her Goodra next like she was supposed to, she sent out Quaquaval who swept most of my team before I could KO it. I was down to one last Pokemon at this point, and I had no idea what she was going to send out next. I sure as hell didn’t expect her to send out a Garchomp! Nemona doesn’t have a Garchomp on any of her other teams, but I guess she just had one this time? My last Pokemon didn’t really stand a chance against it, so my character blacked out and wound up back at the last Pokemon centre I’d been to.

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I was pretty pissed off that the AI had taken such a sudden drastic step out of nowhere, so I called it a night. I made sure that I’d closed out of the game, turned my Switch off and put it on its docking station, then I watched some TV for a while before going to bed.

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When I woke up the next morning and went into the office, I found the screen of my Switch on again, and Pokemon Violet already running.

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I had about a half hour before work, so I figured I’d check and see what was going on. My character was still at the Pokemon Centre they’d ended up at after Nemona had beat them, but now Nemona was there too.

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At this point, all this Nemona shit was really starting to weird me out. Go figure, she was challenging me to another fucking Pokemon battle. I wasn’t playing this time. I went back to the home screen and tried to close out of the game. Just like before, I had no luck. So I resorted to some more drastic measures.

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I opened up the game port and took out the cartridge. The game on the screen started glitching out like it usually does when you just remove the cartridge mid game, and finally it closed out.

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Honestly, at this point I was just annoyed. I mean, I figured this was just a really serious glitch, either with the game or with the system. I should’ve been able to close out without any issues and the game shouldn’t have been booting up on its own! I’d never seen anything like this before, but I figured it was ultimately just a problem with either the game or the console itself. Hopefully just the former… I’d put my switch back on its dock and started setting up for work.

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It wasn’t quite 9 yet when I noticed the console’s screen was on again*.*

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At this point, I figured it had to be the console… Something was wrong with it and I figured it was just my fucking luck that my Switch would break now of all times. I’d picked it up again to look at it, only to see that somehow, Pokemon Violet had booted up again, despite the fact that the cartridge wasn’t even in the console.

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This was… Weird. Like, super weird.

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My character was still at the same Pokemon Centre, talking to Nemona just like they’d been before I’d taken out the cartridge. Only now the dialogue was different. In the text box on screen, were the words:

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“Don’t you want to battle with me?”

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I don’t really know why I bothered engaging with that stupid game at this point, but I clicked through her dialogue anyways.

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“Why are you trying to shut me out?”

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And then.

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“Are you mad at me?”

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This didn’t seem like the kind of text that would be part of the game… This shit was just too weird. I couldn’t go to the home menu anymore. When I tried to click the button, it wouldn’t work and the dialogue would just repeat. At this point, I was pretty goddamn freaked out and I didn’t know what else to do. So finally I just put my Switch down and left it. I figured I’d just let the battery die and that would be the end of it…

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I didn’t touch the game for a few days after that.

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I’m going to take a brief pause here to just sort of give my thoughts on this whole thing and maybe provide a little bit of context.

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See, up until this point, I kinda just figured that this whole email was some weird joke. I know that Jay’s always been something of a horror junkie… He’s actually the guy who turned me onto the NoSleep subreddit in the first place.

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I also know that he tried to get into writing his own posts, although they usually got removed. Reading all of this so far, I kinda just figured that this was some creative writing exercise or something like that. Jay had always liked the old classic Pokemon creepypastas. Buried Alive, Lavender Town Syndrome, that stuff. I figured that maybe he was trying to write something like that. I even scrolled up wondering if maybe I’d missed a paragraph where he’d given me some sort of context for this whole thing, although there was none.

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Everything that he sent me is what I’ve posted so far.

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Still, I wasn’t really buying into this whole thing and was just sort of waiting for the point where Nemona started bleeding from her hyper realistic eyes, or telling him the names of dead children, and shit like that. But that’s not really where this went…

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The rest of his email is as follows:

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Things were kinda quiet after that. I didn’t really forget about the weird shit that had happened with my game but like, I didn’t dwell on it either. I dunno, I sorta justified it by thinking that it was some weird glitch and all the weird shit I saw was just me sort of taking it all out of context. Like, I’d been pretty spooked, right? I played some other games on my Xbox and left my Switch and Pokemon alone for a while.

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Then, the other day I got my first email at work.

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It didn’t say who the sender was. That field was blank for some reason. But the subject and the body of the email weren’t.

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You are challenged by Pokemon Trainer Nemona.

Hola mi amigo! I haven’t seen you in a while! I hope you’re not still mad at me! Come on, let’s have a fruitful battle! It’s been too long!

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I forwarded most of the emails I got to you, so that you won’t think I’m crazy and you can see it for yourself… This was only the first. There have been so, so many more since…

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I honestly thought somebody was fucking with me at first… I’d never mentioned the glitches I’d had with the game to anybody, but maybe someone had found out somehow? Or maybe it was unrelated? I wasn’t entirely sure. I admittedly got it into my head that this was some sort of weirdly targeted phishing scam and reported it as potential spam anyways. Then I pinged Mike (Note: Mike is our manager.) about it.

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I didn’t respond to the first email. But by the end of the day, I’d gotten two more. All with the same subject.

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You are challenged by Pokemon Trainer Nemona.

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The messages were just follow ups to the first one, asking if I was going to battle… You’ll see them among the emails I forwarded to you. I told Mike about these too and tried to block the sender but it didn’t really work. Mike said the best thing to do would be to ignore them so… Yeah. That’s what I tried to do. But when I logged in the next day, there were seventeen more fucking emails… Each with the same subject line. Each one asking the same questions.

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Are you avoiding me?

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Did you want to shut me out?

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Why won’t you answer me?

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Why don’t you want to spend time with me????

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Hola???

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Where are you???

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These emails, I deleted. Most of them I didn’t even read. At this point, I was starting to get freaked out again. One or two emails made sense for a prank I guess, but this just seemed like too much.

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Then, midway through the day, I got a call on Teams. I don’t usually get a lot of calls unless they’re from you or Gwen and I almost answered assuming that it was one of you. But when I actually looked at the caller, I noticed that it was an unknown number.

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I’ve never actually gotten a call like that on Teams before. I declined it, obviously but didn’t immediately connect it to the emails. Not until it came again. I figured that since whoever it was, was calling twice, then maybe it was important. I mean, technically a client could call me through Teams. They normally wouldn’t, but they could, right?

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So I answered the call expecting it to be one of our clients. Instead, I got a black screen and a moment later… Fucking Pokemon came up. Pokemon Violet.

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I could see my character at the exact same Pokemon Center I’d been at when I’d let my Switch die a few days ago… And I could see Nemona, just sort of standing there doing her talking animation. A text box came and it read:

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You are challenged by Pokemon Trainer Nemona.

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Jesus Christ… I don’t…

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I still don’t know how the fuck somebody made that fucking Pokemon game run on Microsoft Teams! I had to shut down my computer and boot it back up. I was texting Mike the whole time, saying that I was pretty sure somebody hacked me.

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Naturally, when I rebooted my laptop, Pokemon came up and I spent the rest of my fucking day on the phone with support trying to figure out what the hell was going on! After about an hour or so, I just shut down my laptop completely and hoped to God I could reboot it normally later.

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I had to take the rest of the day off since there was no way I could work on account of the ‘hack’ and while I was in my living room, I started seeing texts from an unknown number. The first ones were deleted when I tried blocking the number. But that didn’t stop the messages. They just kept coming.

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You can’t keep avoiding me Jay!

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I’m not going to let you run away!

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Come and battle me.

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Come on! I’ve been waiting forever!

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I was just… I was freaked out at this point. I finally decided to turn my Switch on again and let Pokemon boot back up.

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Naturally, it was already open when the battery started charging and there was the same text box I’d seen before waiting for me.

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You are challenged by Pokemon Trainer Nemona.

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I clicked through it this time and the battle started. Nemona offered up some new dialogue this time.

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‘You’re here! Finalmente! Let’s have ourselves a fruitful battle!’

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This time I started to battle her, but she used the same strategies she had before. I didn’t last all that long. Partially because I didn’t even try. She KO’d my entire team with just her Lycanroc and I wondered if maybe that just might be the end of it. My character blacked out again and appeared at the same Pokemon Centre as before. Nemona was still there and now she had even more dialogue.

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‘Come on! Let’s go again! Do you want to change up your team first? I’ve been looking for a challenge!’

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It gave me the option to choose ‘Yes’ this time and I was hoping that might give me the option to walk around. But all it did was open up the Pokemon boxes so I could switch out my Pokemon. I didn’t bother. I just kept clicking through, hoping that at some point I could turn this stupid game off. It didn’t work.

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As soon as I’d clicked out, Nemona challenged me again and just like before, she wiped out my team.

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This time, when she beat me, the dialogue was different.

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“Didn’t you want to switch up your team? Come on! Put in some effort!”

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The Pokemon boxes came up again, but I didn’t bother selecting anything this time. I just put my Switch down and left it. I figured I’d just let the battery die again. Fuck it. I didn’t want to play this stupid game anymore! I went back to my living room and as I did, I could feel my phone vibrating in my pocket as I got more text messages from that unblockable, unknown number…

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‘Hey, you’re not leaving are you? But we were gonna battle! Vamos!’

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There was more than just that text. But the rest weren’t much different. Whoever was behind this, they knew I’d left my Switch… They knew I wasn’t playing the game. I didn’t want to play this stupid fucking game anymore!

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So… I didn’t…

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I went back to my Switch and I picked it up. When it wouldn’t turn off, I just cracked it along the edge of my desk. It took a few good whacks to break it in two but I managed…

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I broke it. Then I broke the game cartridge, just because. And I hoped that maybe then, I could finally get some goddamn silence.

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Instead, my phone just buzzed with another message.

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‘Did you just try to kill me?’

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As soon as I read that, then there came another text.

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‘I thought we were friends! Bastardo! How could you??? I’m not going to let you do this to me, I’m coming at you with everything I’ve got!’

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And then that was it… For a while.

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Yesterday, I tried to work. But I can’t use my laptop. The game is always running when I turn it on.

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I’ve had so many messages on my phone that I can’t read them all. As far as I can tell, most of them are just the word: ‘Bastardo.’ over and over again. Even my TV doesn’t seem to work right anymore. The game just sort of starts up… Always at the same Pokemon Centre. Always during the same fight and every time I try to fight back, I lose.

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I didn’t sleep last night. I ended up leaving the apartment and my phone behind. I haven’t seen or heard anything for the past couple of hours.

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I’m reaching out to you on a library computer. There’s so many emails in my inbox, all from the same unknown sender. And I can’t help but feel like things are only going to get worse from here. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or what you’re going to hear… But I need somebody to know the truth… She’s coming for me.

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That was where the email ended.

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Like I said, I don’t really know what to make of any of this. Jay said he’d forwarded me some other emails as proof of what was going on, but I didn’t get anything else from him. Just that one last email, and the next day my boss told us that he’d passed away. All I know for sure is that he died in some cheap motel room a few cities over. I suppose that it goes without saying that I’m not entirely sure that I take all of this at face value. I mean… A character from a video game hunting Jay down sounds a little far fetched.

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I’d be lying if I said that the contents of the email didn’t freak me out a little, but I can’t help but look for a slightly more logical explanation.

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I mentioned before that Jay hadn’t exactly been in the best place mentally over the past few months. His girlfriend, Anna had dumped him back in August and Jay had been sort of a wreck after that. Enough of a wreck that I can’t exactly defend the way he acted.

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See, when Anna had broken up with him, he’d spent the better part of the next two months more or less begging her to get back with him. He’d started showing up at her house and pounding on her door trying to talk to her. Obviously, this hadn’t won her over. He’d whined about it to me a few times while we were chatting on Discord outside of work, and I’d told him God only knows how many times that he needed to leave the poor girl alone, but he was convinced he could get her back.

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Then, once she filed the restraining order, he’d taken to just sort of moping around. He’d been late for work a few times, missed a few meetings, and generally just sort of thrown a tantrum about it.

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As I said, I can’t really defend the way he acted… Although I did try and be there for him. I’ve been through some rough breakups too. Never had my ex file a restraining order against me, but I know what it feels like to be miserable and I believe that everyone has low points in their life where they do stupid shit. But they can always clean up their life and get it all back on track. And honestly, Jay had seemed to be doing just that!

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It’s why I don’t know if I believe that he killed himself… But that said, considering his state of mind a couple of months ago, who’s to say?

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Maybe something triggered some sort of mental relapse… Maybe he was only faking getting better. I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible that this whole email he sent me was the result of some sort of delusional mental break. Maybe Jay had just… Snapped, over the past week or so. And maybe this email was his way of calling for help. In which case… I’m sorry that I couldn’t help him in time…

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I’m sorry. I’m just sort of speculating here… Trying to make sense of it all. Connect the dots and see if they make any sort of coherent picture so that I might be able to finally understand what happened to my friend.

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Maybe he went crazy. Maybe this was all some cruel, elaborate prank some unknown asshole played on him. Maybe it was just a really weird glitch in the game. Maybe it was all three… Maybe his death was just an accident. Unrelated to any of this. For now, I don’t know for sure.

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It’s funny, I wound up actually playing my copy of Pokemon Scarlet the other day. I just sorta needed to take my mind off of things and it was the game I had loaded into my Switch. I could’ve changed it I guess, but it felt… I don’t know… Appropriate to play it. I walked around with some of the Pokemon he’d traded me and I thought about Jay, and I let myself mourn him for a little while.

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I was sort of just goofing around in one of the towns when Nemona ran up to me and challenged me to a battle.

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It’s kinda funny. I didn’t think she could do that in the game.

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I beat her, and I haven’t seen her show up to challenge me since. But there’s still something that sort of bothers me.

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See, in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, Nemona’s outfit changes depending on the version you got. In my version, Scarlet. She’s wearing orange shorts and a matching tie, because those are the colors of the Academy she goes to in the game. But in Violet, the academy’s colors are violet, so she’s wearing a dark blue pair of shorts with a matching tie.

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But when Nemona challenged me the other day, she was wearing the Violet version of her outfit.

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It’s probably just another glitch, but…