Cp cloak

i'm an amature tf2 player. i'm not gibusvision-levels bad, but i certainly have a hard time rocket jumping, trickstabbing, etc. but, contrary to some popular tf2 youtuber's opinions, i LOVE casual. when im bored, what do i do? i simply check the casual box and search for a match. honestly, you never know what you'll find.

so one day, i decided to open up tf2 and search for casual. not more than 10 seconds later, my queue had found me a good game of, you guessed it, 2fort. everything was normal, for tf2 standards, until i noticed someone talking about a map in the chat called "cp_cloak". now, if you have 1000+ hours on tf2, like me, you would be thuroughly confused. and yes, there is no cp_cloak map that you can access through matchmaking. along with everyone else, i was confused. honestly, we all thought he confused community servers with valve matchmaking servers. but, when that round ended, completely ignoring the near 100% of votes for 2fort, the game said that the next map was cp_cloak.

from what i could pick up from the small little thumbnail of the map, the room it showed was.... interesting. the walls used the default "grid-paper" design, but were colored a vibrant red. what were persumably the respawn rooms used the same design, but was different depending on which team it was used by. each of the 4 respawn rooms were spread out into each corner. there was one control point, elevated on a platform that oddly used the texture for wood, in contrast with everything else. there were 4 wooden planks that lead up to the control point, using the same wooden pallete.

but the weirdest thing about the map was definitely the windows. more specifically, what was on the outside.

from what i could see, about half of the effort put into the middle chokepoint was put into the outside, if not less. simply to put, it looked like someone went into blender, placed randomly sized cubes in random places and called it a day. of course, these cubes also used the grid paper texture.

oddly, when the loading screen had 2 bars loaded, the game made a loud beep followed by a short hiss, which then crashed the game. admitedly, this did suprise me a little, even making me flinch slightly. however, i was more interested than scared. as child-like wonder filled inside me, i thought "is this not a glitch, but rather a never-before seen map?  would i be the first to ever explore the mysterious lands that made up 'cp_cloak'?" as i thought of this, i decided to search up this curious map on the internet. alas, this map hadn't yet been documented anywhere. i decided to use the "map" command in the tf2 console. so i typed in "map cp_cloak".

eureka! there was just one map that corresponded to my result, and its name was... well, cp_cloak. after an abnormal loading time of about a minute and 15 seconds, the map had loaded. i picked the spy, because since the map was called cp_cloak and spy's ability was cloaking, i thought the map might be centered around spy. i made a few new observations about the map when i stepped out of spawn.

what i thought was the center control point was actually the whole map. the spawn rooms had the standard bench and wooden locker props, but it oddly lacked the usable ressuply locker. an enlarged version of the calander with a lady on it, something seen in a handful of other map's spawnrooms, on the wall. because there was only one control-point, i would think this is an extremely early koth map. but, i soon discovered this was infact a control point map, because as soon as i capped the point, the round ended. perhaps this was an even earlier map than i once thought, meant to test the control point gamemode. since the game's first version came with one control point map and one capture the flag map, cp_cloak was likely made before tf2 was even released. this would make sense because of the overused testing texture.

the next thing i did was spawn in bots and see how they worked. however, as soon as i tried to type in "tf_bot_add 10" in console, the game did the loud beep and the short hiss in response. after 5 retries, i gave up. so, in not-so-bitter defeat, i closed the console and looked up through the window.

eyeless. they had no eyes. all of the tf2 mercenaries were outside, looking at my player, or, look as best as they could without eyes. although it was an irrational thing to think, it felt as if there was something more than an animation loop behind these sinister-looking models. something that has a gaze that can cut every inch of your confidence into a sushi of raw fear. but that's when i spotted something in the bottom right corner. some text reading:

"one-man cheeseburger apocalypse has joined the game"

"finally", i thought, something other than me and these... things, on this server. when the bot spawned, it was a soldier, weilding only the melee shovel, on the opposite team. however, it did not cap the point. it merely and eerily followed me wherever i went. it was as if it was waiting for a greater fate. as if this bot had consciousness. maybe it was the same situation as something from doki doki literature club, and the soldier realised he was in a game, and became suicidal. or, mayhaps it was similar to the movie "bird box", where a virus was making everyone suicidal. nevertheless, i hit the soldier with my melee.

everything in the game was either pitch black or a dead red at that point. a steady, un-nerving tone, like the ones used on a lifeline. held up, almost silent, but still audible. the soldier's face was unrecognizable. it was mangled to the point where broken bones, misc. organs, and an abnormal amount of eyeballs, all were sticking up randomly. it looked like his face turned into a bone-and-flesh soup. although this was only a game, i was on the verge of vomiting, as i could hear the soldier slightly moaning in extreme pain. after about 12 seconds, i could hear a slight mumble come from the soldier's mouth;

"kill..... me......"

i obliged. i repeatedly hit the poor soldier with my melee. with each swipe, the soldier became even more malformed, and from the third to last hit, he became a pile of guts, blood, organs, eyes, teeth, bones, etc. with each hit the screen got darker and darker, and the silent lifeline tone got higher and louder, to the point where my ears could feel the vibrations, and started to hurt. on the last hit, i could practically feel the life fall out of the mangled body of the lovable mercenary, as it dissapeared with the loud beep and hiss routine.

looking up through the windows, all the mercenaries had dissapeared but one.

the spy.

the sky looked like the fires of hell had arisen, and the spy looked like something i couldn't even describe. his skin was a disgustingly vibrant red, his mask was covered in stains of red, and he was missing both his eyes. a smile stretched across from ear-to-ear, as he looked down at me. everything went silent in the game. with nothing left to do, i reluctantly walked over to the window.

the soldier's face flashed onto the screen, even more disgustingly demeshed than ever. a disgustingly, painfully loud soldier scream played over the haunting display in front of me. after a few seconds, my computer shut off. confused and, slightly terrified, i went to get my phone to tell my friends. although everything is alright now,

i could've sworn i felt a cold, bloody hand on my shoulders when i got up.