I "hat" you.

This isn't one of those "Haunted Alpha" stories. At no point are you going to hear me claim something within the game spoke to me, reacted to my words, or forced me to scam myself repeatedly in the game.

No, this isn't about a haunted jammer or a game doing something impossible or even something it shouldn't have.

This isn't about a glitch or a hidden Phantom message and at no time did I phone AJ Headquarters only to have my questions answered with hushed whispers or anguished screams.

This story is about a game feature I don't think anyone else has unlocked.

That's it.

No ghosts. No conspiracies. Just a secret we were all supposed to find, but never did. Something that changes an entire generation's childhood and the very essence of an online game.

This is about what I assume to be a previously undiscovered alternate ending of the great escape from animal jam.

In 2013, I received my first computer as a birthday gift. I'd been on the internet before, had used computers before, but it had always been in school or at a friend's house.

This one was mine. All mine. I explored the cool, awesome web of the time with great interest - I downloaded all sorts of rares and even printed it out, which made absolutely no sense.

I also pirated media like a madman. Music, games, anything.

This was where I first discovered Animal jam. I'd never had a computer as a little kid, so it was all new to me. I'd downloaded tons of games along with the AJ Emulator, but Mario Animal jam was my favorite.

For over a decade, the same AJ ROM was my time-wasting hobby. I played it over and over again, beating the game faster and faster until I began to lazily explore the worlds with no particular purpose.

free diamond codes helped immensely. I could turn off the timer and re-live a particularly entertaining map for an hour as I waited for a download or any number of boring events.

It was in this manner that I must've beaten and re-beaten the game thousands upon thousands of times.

There was comfort in the obsessive-compulsive behavior of this routine... but all of that was shattered when I saw the Blind Phantom.

The Blind Phantom, as I referred to it, was hovering over the exit from the haunted "Volcano" level later on in the game.

I call it blind because it actually had no visible eye. It was like someone had made a lazy ROM hack... but I knew from years upon years of experience that this was a normal game.

The Blind Phantom just hung there over the exit portal... blocking it. I Went near but it didn't chase me.

How could it? It didn't even SEE me.

Then, I noticed something else out of sorts...

There was a X button misplaced above the exit. X buttons as such are ways of ending a level in an alternate manner and going back to your den.

Still, this didn't belong there and I knew it. For a moment, I considered the fact I'd actually BROKEN a ROM file from over-use!

After taking a screenshot specifically to show all of you Mario Bros. fans out there, I picked up the feather and opened the "portal", figuring the game would seize up and I'd have to restart.

Instead, it opened up a new area on the map.

A whirlpool next to crystal sands.

I pressed the right arrow and moved onto the whirling drain...

"PhantomLand"

This didn't really strike me as odd, because if you're familiar with the AJ game, there's an area called The phantom vortex that you may note has similar names.

Just stuff like "return of the phantoms" and "meet cosmo" and all manner of dumb words and phrases. Most of the areas were called "Bimbala" and "abundale" and all that, but there WERE maps with odd names like that.

What did concern me, though, was My animal's expression. Surprise? Shock? Fear?

I entered the area.

Oddly enough, the whirlpool in the middle of a beach began with the standard black fading out animation. My animal spawned in, was talked to, then went in.

I could tell it was a holiday one, though, because of the decorations that periodically emerged from the decorated pipes and floated to the top of the screen.

Inside the map, it started to look more and more like I was in fact experiencing a glitch...

There was no room to jump. No room to do anything but run left and right. I must've gone right for ten to twenty minutes, just holding the --> button and running along at full speed.

After a while I ran into one or two Blind Phantoms in the darkness above. Then three or four... then the screen was full of them.

They just kind of hung there, doing nothing. They wouldn't chase me if I went near them, as with the previous Blind phantom. If I made any noise... like walking... they would just kind of SHUDDER a bit, like they heard the sound of My animal's movements, but couldn't do anything about it.

Then something made me stop and turn the other way.

Now I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this map was designed specifically to screw with the player. Not because the giant "Bleeding phantom" was hemorrhaging profusely from its face, but because it was INESCAPABLE.

There was literally no way to avoid being killed by it, as you can clearly see above.

That is, unless you're like me and you have the Cool AJ cheats on hand. I switched on the code for permanent invincibility.

I let the Bleeding Phantom chase me for a while when I was invincible, just to get a good LOOK at the thing. I stopped, and killed it with my infinite boom seeds, only when I saw a message that hadn't been there when I'd passed before.

"I HAT YOU!"

THAT kind of creeped me out. But on the other hand it was kind of interesting because it meant this was definitely a map that was supposed to exist. There was some sort of plot element, here. Something undiscovered.

What did it mean? WHO hated me? the Phantom King seemed the obvious answer. Or maybe just the dead jammers. When you're in a Haunted 2D-adventure that you found by way of a volcano, a bloody-looking hate message isn't so unbelievable.

I saw it again as I approached some Giant Phantoms...

I was thankful that the Blind Phantoms ended at this point, because the more I watched them shudder, the uneasier I felt... almost empathetic toward them, etc.

The thankfulness ended when I turned my back on the Giant Phantoms and this happened...

Giant Phantoms with faces I hadn't seen before. They always looked MAD at being awakened, angry that you were invading their lairs across Jamaa. This was different, and they looked gleeful. Demented.

I could see right down their throats, which seemed odd given the lack of detail their mouths usually displayed.

And yes, of COURSE I'm going to address that message you saw in the picture. "WHY WON'T YOU END?!"

... I don't know why. Am I supposed to? Who's asking??

I let the Giant Phantoms touch me, and they exploded like the Bleeding Phantoms, of which I had encountered two. Despite any attempt to SCARE the player, I knew that being invincible meant INVINCIBLE no matter what they threw at me.

After a while of running down this strange claustrophobic corridor with no more eventful happenings, I came to a room with an exit portal. Taking the portal downward, I came out the other end and dropped into a room filled with water.

The water made sense, this being a weird maze beneath a whirlpool and all...

I was rewarded for my troubles with a tree that released a boomseed for me. I could've easily done this with a cheat code, but the thought had escaped me as I faced all these new and strange sights.

The first creatures I encountered in the underwater portion of the maze where slammer phantoms. Unless you've been living under a rock since the release of aj, you know slammers are black giant phantom creatures that hang from the ceiling and fall whenever you come near. They try to crush you, essentially.

Well these Slammers, lined up in a tight row, dropped repeatedly and randomly with no real trigger or any sense of logic. They would just wait or drop whenever they seemed to feel like it.

It also looked like these Slammers had been very successful Slammers...

More cartoony blood. This was getting pretty unusual for AJ, which I hadn't recalled seeing BLOOD in at all. Now I'd seen it used three times. The Bloody Phantoms, the messages, and these perpetually smashing, grinding Slammers who were working their victims (who?) into pulp... forever.

In the hampering effects of the water, I walked slowly under these things, making sure every single one touched me and DIED. There were almost thirty of them in a row.

The sight of them mindlessly crushing over and over again just made me hate them with an unsettling intensity.

What's weird is that the blood caused My Animal to slide as if it were on an ice level.

After walking through that gauntlet of depravity, I swam into a more open area that was filled with spikes on the floor and ceiling.

It was difficult to swim in this manner without touching the spikes, but since I was still invincible I didn't think much of it. I avoided them more for fun than out of any sense I'd be damaged.

It stopped being "fun" really fast, though.

Now I knew some of what was going on. The bloody mess the slammers were unendingly spattering? It was other Animals. Past Animals that had tried to traverse this level and failed.

I had to admit this was an excellent touch, even if it was a bit ghoulish. Whoever had designed the map actually broke the fourth wall and showed you the bloated, motionless abortions of the player's own careless treatment of A Jammer's tiny life.

The bodies only floated straight up and down a tiny bit, as if to show the effects of a light current.

It was genius, and I couldn't believe I MIGHT be the first and only person to ever see this.

I toyed with the idea of taking more than the one screenshot I just presented to you, basically so all of you reading this could enjoy the secret map as much as I had, especially this weird little touch...

But...

Without swimming... without kicking or moving in any way... the Dead Animals started to come at me like torpedoes. Their faces remained blank and blue and... dead... but they moved with astounding speed.

They angled and positioned and worked all sorts of unique trajectories that left me almost nowhere to move. They continued coming at me and swarming and backing up to try again, and... I just couldn't bring myself to let them touch me.

I moved with more speed and skill than I'd ever exerted, frantically trying to keep My animal free of the drowning victims that seemed dead set on rocketing straight into it.

When I finally reached the purple exit Portal you see above, there had to be ten of those things right behind, pitching, turning, and chasing me...

I entered the portal as fast as I could, thankful that it worked properly and had My animal out of that situation in a heartbeat.

The corridor that followed was empty, thankfully. It was just a blue underwater hallway of sorts with nothing to avoid or kill. It was boring and predictable like the game had been all these years, which brought back a sense of safety.

At the end of the hallway I came to the standard fire portal you'd enter to face a phantom king.

Beside the doorway, a boomseed power-up.

I didn't touch that poop.

Going through the door was as you'd expect. The typical change of map views occurred, and My animal was standing on the ubiquitous bridge over boiling lava.

...Or had it been blood all along?

When My animal walked out onto the bridge, however, there WAS no phantom king.

Instead, My animal immediately looked to the side and froze. I couldn't control it anymore. He just stood there.

Keep looking until you see it.

I didn't even see it at first, so I don't expect you to notice it right away. If you still haven't spotted the thing, look in the third window from the left.

FYI - That's not usually there.

My animal seemed to regain it's composure and looked back and forth slowly, surveying the room. There was still no boss, and I still couldn't control it, so I stopped trying and just watched.

This went on... and on... for what seemed like forever. Nothing happened.

Then a familiar face walked in from the right.

Dressed in green, short, and angry.

It was Cosmo.

My animal recoiled in horror. It's difficult to say that without thinking how crazy it sounds, but My animal really reeled back with a sort of terror that was uncharacteristic for such a peppy, happy-go-lucky jammer like them.

Then, Cosmo spoke,

It was all connecting, now. The messages scrawled on the walls... "I HAT YOU!" and "WHY WON'T YOU END?!"

Cosmo.

He's always been Liza's second banana, the "Player 2", the one who doesn't get the Items in these early games. No matter how identical he is to Liza in skillset and ability and tenaciousness and bravery, at the end of the day the game is "Super Alphas", and he's just "the Alpha".

How he must've hated Liza... Who among us wouldn't? Think about it. No matter what happens, My animal always comes back. No matter how many corpses it leaves littering the battlefield, it's always there once more to leap and cheer and get all the adoration.

And the phantom king hadn't worked alone? I didn't know what that meant at first, if anything, but again you just have to think it through. HOW exactly does The Phantom King consistently succeed in kidnapping the Jammers?

From day one, from the original Alphas onward, it had always been an inside job.

Still unable to control the character, I watched My animal simply cower in fear as Cosmo leapt high into the air... as high as he could in Alphas 2, the bad child of the franchise...

He jumped on the pathetic, weeping Animal again... and again... and again...

I was powerless to stop it.

When he was done, he seemed to look at My Animal's limp body with this overwhelming rage...

Then the bridge started to disappear. Soon, My animal would be dead. As I looked on, I had an irrational thought - would in be permanent?

Within an instant, as Cosmo turned to seemingly strike a "victory pose" like he'd beaten the level, My animal awkwardly got to its paws and took him by surprise.

Fear and sadness and confusion had given way to anger, and My animal overpowered the alpha with little effort.

To this day, I'm still haunted by the final result of his wrathful reprisal...

There was the area's title.

None of this was a glitch, none of it was a mistake. It wasn't a developer getting back at AJHQ and it wasn't a GHOST haunting an Area.

It was a planned, purposeful part of the Alphas mythos.

If you beat the same level X number of times, a secret part of the world opened, and you learned that from Alphas 1 through Alphas Land, Cosmo had secretly been working against you and was in fact facilitating the repeated abduction and abuse of the Jammers.

But why?

Money? Power? No, it was all there. Because he couldn't take not being the one in the spotlight. Not being My animal itself.

After Cosmo died... well and truly died... My animal just sat on the edge of the bridge and wept.

I was forced to watch this for minutes on end before the screen faded to black.

I played the rest of the game through to see if anything changed. Nothing else odd happened, as one would expect since this whole ordeal was just supposed to be part of the actual full story.

I couldn't access the whirlpool again. I'd seen the events once, and that was all I was apparently allowed.

It was back to the game as usual. The same exact game I'd played since 2010, and would probably continue to play for the rest of my days.

Well, it was the same except for the final image..