1 1-PILOT

The beautiful, sunny, hot, mediterannean summer. Its june, the school has just ended and you know that means closing down the curtains, blocking all that good, healthy sun and start watching some anime. This was the typical day of our "hero". Coming home from school, doing nothing productive and watching anime. He liked playing video games too but -although he was 13- he did not have any friends so he would rather just stick with watching anime. His grades weren't necessarily bad but this video games thing was starting to take a heavy toll on his grades. He didn't have to think about grades for a while though, because it was summer. He watched anime all night. In the morning after breakfast he wanted to play the game he had bought earlier that week. He couldn't play the game before because of school but now that it was over he could play the game without any chestpain. So he started playing game. The game wasn't "brand new" it was kind of old but It had looked fun and It was called "Soul and Blade".It was an MMORPG and he quickly got really good at the game. One thing still bothered him though. He had no one to play with. He knew some people from school who played the game but they were jerks so he decided to find people online. He wanted friends who watched the same animes as him, played the same games and most importantly he needed friends who weren't jerks. He was kind of sensitive, fragile. Not having different interests or more responsibilites than an average schoolboy, he wasn't emotionally or physicially stronger than an average schoolboy. He was quite the average. So he started looking for internet sites that he could meet people on. He immediately thought of "friend making sites" but he quickly scrapped that idea because it wasn't the logic but rather the "you know it" part of one's body that had made the desicion. Then he tought of facebook. After all, in facebook you could form a group with a certain title so people similar to you would join. That wasn't the first thing he had on mind though, first he started looking for groups that other people, potential friends, (He was super excited) had created. Starting to look for groups he did. At first he searched for "Soul and Blade" since he was quite good at the game and in these groups the first impression you leave on people is usually your grasp of the game. He was quick to find some people with an anime character as a profile picture and had sent then friend requests. He waited, and he waited. Only to find out that this group had been dead for a long time by now and all the people in the group had either stopped playing the game or they had stopped using facebook. Now that he thought again facebook was a dumb idea. "Teenagers like myself don't use facebook anymore" he thought. Facebook had done him one favour thought. Groups in facebook usually added external links to their profiles in other websites. Through facebook he learned about the land of wonders "Reddit". Reddit was amazing. He would type anything and there was a subreddit for it. (For those of you who don't know reddit has a system called subreddits, subreddits are basicially groups with a fitting name and people could subscribe that subreddit to be alerted about the feed or to find other reddit users interested in the topic of the subreddit) He quickly searched for "Blade and Soul" but nothing came up. Then he thought

"Ah, silly me its 'Soul and Blade' not 'Blade and Soul'" After he fixed his mistake, there it was, the Soul and Blade subreddit. He subscribed to the subreddit. He was a little sad when he saw that the subreddit only had about 1300 subscribers though because he had invested so much into the game and he was sad to see that not many players were actively playing the game. INTERMISSION And now after having referred to our "hero" as "he" from the beginning and since you beautiful person has read this far and proven yourself worthy, the name of our hero is "Glory"

directly translated from the original language but since it sounds a bit "not like a name" I will be referring to him as George. Well anyways, After the day he found out about reddit and quickly subscribed to the subreddit, every he would open his computer, log on to reddit and start looking for people, despite the anime on the next tab of the browser calling him, he would keep searching. After all the hard work of searching for people for 30 minutes a day for 3 days he managed to find 2 people, both male, Akil and Nathan. Nathan liked playing the game from time to time but he was actually more of a sports guy. Akil however, he was a total otaku. He had bookshelves full of manga, always had 3-4 different anime opened on the tabs of the browser he was using and he liked playing a plethora of different MMORPG's. Both Akil and Nathan probably weren't the people he would have picked but when desperate, extremes doesn't look that bad. With Nathan and Akil, (But mostly with Akil) he spent his entire summer playing the game, before he was good at the game but now he was godlike. He had done everything that could have been done in the game, so he started swaying towards other MMORPG's. Nathan starting high school didn't help with the strenght of the threads connecting him and the game either so he started checking out other games Akil was telling him about while Akil was in Egypt for vacation. But on the 17th of September, the day just before school started, Akil wasn't online. George thought maybe it was because of the school, maybe because his mom had told him to remove the computer or worse maybe she did the removing herself with a fight between the two. And now the school had started, he hadn't studied in the summer at all, and he had lost both of the friends he spent the first week of the summer trying to find. His grades had also went down. Not only because he hadn't studied but also because he had played so much. So basicially his life wasn't going as good. He started 8th grade too so he had his high school exam coming up at the end of the year. Then he thought. All summer he had played a game only to end up dropping out of and with people whom he ended up losing. He knew what to do now. He stopped playing video games, he stopped watching anime (Not completely of course that's not possible) And he started studying for the exam. With his daily routine of "Waking up, having breakfast, going to school, coming home, studying and sleeping" not changing much the year passed fastly. In the blink of an eye, a whole year had passed. The exam was not super good but it was enough to surprise his family and go to a -slightly above decent- high school. It was summer again, but he had changed. He still liked playing games but not as much as he had because he wasn't a child anymore. In the meantime he never heard of Akil or Nathan and he wasn't expecting to either. You see, good grades had given him more confidence, he wasn't as fragile as he was before when he had nothing to protect him from the misery his life was headed. Now, he couldn't understand why meeting 2 people on the internet took him so long. Now he was confident that he would find people easily. In the exam year he hadn't watched a lot of anime and he hadn't played a lot of games. What had kept him going in the exam year was tumblr. Tumblr had made him feel special, he would browse for funny photos or "memes" on tumblr. It wasn't as attaching as a video game or an anime so browsing memes weren't as much of a distraction for him. But most importantly, on Tumblr he had found a "Gaming Group" on which he had found links for a skype group. He was using skype already with Akil and Nathan so he was familiar with the concept. The people in the group were quite accepting so he felt just like home. Well he actually was, home, his pc was in his room so, yeah. George had met 4 new people

David, Michael, Jonathan and Olivia. Yes shocker a female gamer. George told them about Soul and Blade but they were playing this hot new game called "Tree of Savior" so he downloaded the game and got playing. In a long time again he was happy. And that's where our story begins.