Thanks for taking my call. What happened to me and my friends, you know what I mean? You are not going to believe it... But it happened. This was summer of 1998. July. I was seventeen, and five of us decided to go camping in the Pyrenees. We drove up to this area near Ribes de Freser, it's in Catalonia, maybe two hours north of Barcelona. Beautiful country up there. Dense forests, mountain streams, the kind of place where you can really get away from everything. We weren't experienced campers or anything. Just teenagers wanting an adventure before university started. My friend Carlos had been up there with his father before, so he knew a good spot off one of the trails. Said it was private, quiet. Perfect for what we wanted.
We hiked in maybe three kilometers from where we parked the car. Found this clearing Carlos remembered, nice and flat, surrounded by beech trees and pines. There was a small stream running about twenty meters away. We set up our tents, got a fire going. It was perfect, you know? Warm evening, stars starting to come out. We were cooking sausages, drinking beer we'd snuck from someone's parents, just being kids. There were five of us total. Me, Carlos, my friend Sofia, and two guys from school, Marc and Jordi. We stayed up pretty late that first night, telling stupid stories, trying to scare each other. The usual camping stuff. Eventually we all went to our tents around two in the morning. Nothing strange happened that night. We woke up the next morning, made breakfast, went swimming in a pool we found downstream. Just a normal day. It wasn't until that second night that things got weird.
We'd let the fire die down to coals. It was probably around eleven, maybe midnight. Still warm enough that we were just sitting around in t-shirts. The moon wasn't out, completely dark except for the firelight. I remember because Sofia had wanted to go for a walk and we told her she was crazy, you couldn't see anything out there. I was the one who noticed it first. I was facing away from the fire, looking into the trees, and I saw this... shape. At first I thought it was just a leaf or something caught in the firelight. But it was moving. Not like a leaf in the wind, deliberately. Rotating. I didn't say anything at first. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. But then Carlos said, 'Do you guys see that?' And I knew I wasn't imagining it. We all turned to look. This thing was standing, if you can call it standing, maybe ten meters from our camp, at the edge of the clearing.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]