Prologue

Have you heard of Kira? Of course you haven't, it's top secret information, but of course I'm ignoring that fact. Who am I, you may ask? I'm nobody important, but I am the whole reason we started this investigation. People have been dying. Not because of any illness, but people have been killed unexpectedly over a few months. That's when I was drawn out from hiding and put into the middle of this entire predicament. Did I want to do it? No. Did anyone care? Of course not. Nobody really cares about what I do or about me at all. You could say, I'm like a shadow when the sun isn't visible. You can't see me, but you know I'm there. But, like they say, don't judge a book by its cover. I'm not some weak freak that sits behind a computer all day eating food. I'm actually pretty skinny, but I'm tough when it comes to fights. Be it in an alleyway or a deserted lot, the people I quarrel with always end up wishing they hadn't met me. So, you're probably wondering how you got pulled into this. Well, from the moment you started reading, you were trapped, not being able to escape once you read the first words. Creepy? I would think so.
Kira first made himself noticeable a few months ago, before the killings began. Speaking clearly, but yet menacingly to the world, he demanded power and plenty of money, like any other person would if they were trying to gain the top. But, one thing that Kira did, changed his appearance to us. If he should not get what he wanted in thirteen days, he would write down the name of someone, important or not, in a notebook. He disguised and chose his words so well that to anyone, they could've sounded like a saying or poem. But I, I could see through his words. I knew what he meant by that notebook. I knew it all too well. This notebook isn't like others, and I don't mean that by appearance. It was old and tattered, yet it still held together and surprisingly, none of the pages had fallen out. It was your typical black leathered book with yellowing pages of parchment inside and the smell of age and death, if that was a smell. I wouldn't be surprised by how old it was, or that it smelled that way because it was said that that book once belonged to the devil himself. He would write down the names of mortals, and take them into his domain, down beneath the earth and keep them there for all eternity. Despite its old age, it was strange that the pages of the book had nothing written in them, nothing at all. Except on this one page in the very back of the book and on the cover. On both, two words were written in coarse letters that read:

Death Note

Nobody knew what this meant. They would flip through the pages and try desperately to write something down on the blank ones, but hard as they tried, nothing would show, not even the faintest mark of a pencil. Somehow, this book got into Kira's hands, the only person that actually seemed to know how to use the notebook. However, people didn't know what was going on. Nobody today knew about the tattered piece of history. Nobody seemed to care either. What fools they are, not knowing that one of the most powerful things known to man was in the hands of a killer. They paid the price.

It was October 9th, 1989 when the President of Japan dropped dead because, of what others thought, was a heart attack. I, of course, wasn't going to allow myself to believe such a simple lie. Since I knew that the notebook was in Kira's hands, I knew what had happened. Though the people all across Japan settled on this as an excuse to hide the real cause of the death. Kira, I could see, was furious. The killings went from three times a week to seven, and soon slowly increasing to thirteen. The new president of Japan, Yumi Hiraki, knew that he was quickly losing people and needed desperate help from anyone. Being only a man of twenty, the young ruler sought out the help of Watari Quillsh, an old English detective from Winchester, England and also the best known detective around the world. He's been from Japan to Switzerland and from Switzerland to Rome. You name it, he's been there. Anyways, he was called from England to Japan to come and help with the case at hand. How do I know all this? Well, I was with him. Yes, me. The person that everyone looked through. You see, back in England, Watari had a little orphanage named 'Wammy's House' which only took in gifted children. I, as you already would've guessed, was one of the children there. It's a long story, and I wouldn't want to swerve off from the current one so I'm going to leave it at that. But, I will tell you how I got to work with Watari himself. You see, I was the only one that people didn't want as a child. I was proven to be strange and odd, with no friend at all. By the time I was thirteen, everyone neglected me and teased me, even some of the people that would've been small, timid kindergarteners. At age sixteen, I was completely forgotten. My days were spent in a quiet corner of my dorm, hunched over and sitting on my toes with my knees bunched up into my chest, thinking about the humble things in life. Watari, that kind fellow, was like a father to me, and he knew when something was wrong, and he would help me with the problem no matter how big or small. Anyways, Watari had gotten a call from Japan about the killings and so forth, and he, knowing that I was probably miserable, offered me to come join him. And so, three days later we were working on this case.

We managed to hunt down and bring Kira down once and for all, taking only seven months to complete the case. But, to our horror, the notebook hadn't been destroyed in the mass explosion we, or should I say I, managed to cause and before we knew it, new Kiras were popping up from everywhere around the globe. France, Brazil, San Francisco, everywhere in every continent seemed to have a new Kira case to solve for us right when we had just solved the current one. For many years, the team of Watari and I traveled across the world, stopping the new Kira that would pop up randomly. Soon Watari retired and I was put in charge. For five years, I ran cases and solved every single one. By 1990, I was known as the best of the best. But, eventually, after I had hoped that the notebook had been destroyed, before I could blink, another Kira appeared in Japan again. Of course, as I told you in the beginning, I was pushed out of hiding to solve the mystery of who it was and how to stop them. This brings us to today. But before you go and read about this, I must tell you my name. Not my real name but what I prefer people to call me. And that is, Ryuzaki, or as I am called by the government, L.