PROLOGUE
~ Pandora's Box for the 21st Century ~
The Internet.
It allows its users to communicate almost instantly with any other computer on the planet, and provides them with nearly-endless amounts of information on just about any topic that one could imagine. It is, perhaps, the single greatest advancement of the 20th century.
But like all other advancements, the Internet brought new problems along with its benefits. Instantaneous communication allowed terrorist groups and criminals to organize their activities faster and more efficiently. The wealth of information quickly expanded to include all types of pornography, recipes for drugs and poisons, instructions for making bombs, classified information stolen from government archives... and some things simply too horrible to describe. Things that no sane person should ever have to see.
In the early years, those things were confined to the virtual "world" that the Internet had quickly become. But not anymore.
The first wave of them appeared in the mid-nineties--seemingly-normal teenage girls would suddenly withdraw from their usual activities in order to spend more and more time on their computers. For days on end, no sound came from their rooms but the incessant clacking of fingers against the keyboard and the clicking of the mouse. After several weeks, the girls would suddenly run out of energy and fall asleep, with their faces landing flat on their keyboards as they collapsed in their chairs.
After that, the process could no longer be reversed. The transformation into a Fangirl was complete. When the girls awakened from their day-long sleep in front of their computer, they were no longer themselves--they had become part of the Fangirl hivemind which had somehow come into existence throughout the Internet. Their bodies had transformed, as well--their facial features were gone, replaced by strings of symbols used to represent faces on the Internet. Their height and weight shifted, usually toward being shorter and thinner.
And finally--perhaps worst of all--they gained bizarre powers that allowed them to wreak havoc on the world around them. Some gained the power to reverse aging, transforming old men into twenty-somethings and younger people into children. Others became able to change even more about their victims--causing heterosexual men to suddenly become gay, drastically reducing people's strength or intelligence, turning regular people into evil, sadistic murderers. The most dangerous of all altered reality itself, causing fictional characters to suddenly spring into existence or trapping people in illusionary worlds.
But the world is not defenseless against the Fangirl onslaught.
Twelve years ago, six people who had encountered the Fangirls firsthand came together to study these monsters in hopes of figuring out how to stop them. After two years of in-depth Fangirl research, the six formed a group dedicated to fighting off dangerous Fangirl infestations and working toward a cure for Fangirlism--or, if that proved to be impossible, total Fangirl extermination.
Today, this group has expanded far beyond its six original members, recruiting dozens of people who had been attacked by Fangirls and managed to survive with their sanity intact. Their study of Fangirls has expanded as well, to the point where computers can detect the presence of Fangirls all over the world and scientists can spot the earliest warning signs in girls who have not yet completed their transformation.
They are the world's only hope against the Fangirl menace.
They are... Organization XIII.
