You are a member of the Elite Fourum. Every day you visit the top site in the world for Pokémon card collectors. This is where the creme of the crop congregate.
Like all members of e4, you casually enjoy and partake in smpratte’s videos. You feel he is underappreciated and decide to throw him $50 a month on Patreon to support his work. How nice of you. Over time you interact and get to know smpratte (you call him Scott now) better and better. You Skype with him periodically. He begins to learn your face, who you are, your background, a little about your family and friends. He seems very interested in you. Perhaps too interested.
The conversations you have with Scott slowly become more frequent. He’s a nice guy and you can tell he’s really passionate about Pokémon. Since you’ve started supporting him on Patreon, you’ve reduced the amount you spend on your collection. You really only collect English cards but Scott is always trying to get you into the exclusive Japanese cards. Masaki promos, Natta Wake cards, old trophy cards; Scott tries to list all the cards he can at you to try and get you interested in some Japanese cards. You tell him you don’t want any of his Japanese exclusive cards because you can’t read the text.
Over time, Scott becomes more agressive about getting you to buy one of his Japanese cards. He screams at you during your Skype call and hangs up. A few minutes later he calls back. The video stream shows him with an eerily emotionless countenance. He offers you one of his Illustrator cards for $20. You are confused, but this is an offer no one should turn down. You send him the money through PayPal along with the shipping address and give him your thanks. Right before ending the call, you could swear he muttered something about how he was more thankful than you were.
The Illustrator is such a valuable card that you decide to fly straight to Scott’s place to pick it up in person. He’s told you where he lives during one of your conversations and you figured you could suprise him by meeting him face-to-face for the first time.
When you get to the door, you notice the front door of his house was ajar, as if someone was in a rush to leave. Odd. You slowly creak the door open and say “Hello?”. Seems like no one is home, so you decide to make yourself comfortable until Scott gets back. You don’t want someone else breaking in while the door is unlocked
You accidentally stumble into his room. He’s got a corner set up for his next video. Neat. You notice his computer has been left on. A QR code for an airplane boarding pass is on the screen. He also has hundreds of browser windows open, all in private browsing mode. Curiosity overtakes you and you click on one of the windows. It opens to an e4 thread “#smpratteyoloswagfamcuz”. You chuckle to yourself remembering how silly that thread was. Just as you were about to look away, you noticed a peculiarity. The page was signed in as the user “ray”.
You think it’s kind of unethical that Scott would take advantage of his admin privileges and sign into other users accounts. You click on another window. This one is signed in as Milhouse. Another as 'M. Another acebren, ssjc, MasonKampe. Fazool, sizzlinshibe, swolepoke, hypernova, xzini, stephneechan, fourthstartcg, e2d2, elftan… pretty much everyone. Except you. You step back from the monitor and feel a bit faint. You accidentally fall over and knock a folder sitting on the desk to the floor. Sheets of paper fly everyhere.
You pick up a page. It is covered with crude, hastily hand-written text. It reads:
“Profile: pokemonsyndicate
Traits: likes the sunglasses emoji, collects only BGS, confuses other users with made-up words in long blocks of text.
…”
Nine pages followed this one mapping various words such as “raritans” and words ending in “b” to real words.
You grab another page.
“Profile: cullers
Traits: is almost always correct but can often come off as blunt and harsh
…”
Another.
“Profile: PkmnFlyingMaster
Traits: periodically writes stupid long-winded dramas
…”
Flipping through the pages you notice that you are also missing a profile. You begin to feel sick. You start looking for the restroom and you accidentally enter a room where the walls are covered with paper. Each sheet contained what appeared to be a script. One page had a dialog between forum members about a fake 1st edition stamp Charizard. The last line read “finally, smpratte comes in and heroically locks the thread and calms the community”. Every page seemed to be a script for an e4 thread you have read.
You notice your name appears on some of the scripts… but every time you appear the rest of the script is crossed out, crinkled and splotted with large amounts of red ink. Is that ink? You feel uneasy. You want to go home now.
You are about to leave but you suddenly hear some muffling from the basement. You gather up whatever courage you have left and slowly creep down the dark set of stairs. When you get to the bottom, you see two people gagged and tied to chairs next to some empty buckets. The room reeks like rotting fish. You also notice two computers set up in the room. Both are playing Scott’s videos on an endless loop.
You recognize the two people as churlocker and DJGigabyte from Scott’s podcast. You untie their gags and they thank you profusely. They explain that Scott has kept them as prisoners and would only temporarily release them to read a script for the podcast. They have been surviving off buckets of fishheads for years. You tell them who you are and their eyes widen. “He’s coming for you. He wants you gone.”
Stricken with fear, you flee the basement leaving the two still tied to the chair. It all begins to click. Scott is ray. Scott is pokemonsyndicate. Scott is everyone. There is no elite group of Pokemon collectors. It’s just you and Scott. The forum was a giant role playing game for Scott and you kept fucking it up. He only sold you that Illustrator for your address and he was coming.
Breathing heavily, you finally get to the front door. A dark figure wielding a large knife is standing in the doorway.
The last words you hear are “hi everyone, this is s-m-pratte.”