May 2010. It was almost midnight.
Alone in his room, a young man was sitting on his single-sized bed as he was busily typing and clicking on his glistening silver laptop. Apparently, he was doing something so important for school – high school – that he had to stay up this late in the evening facing a machine that practically served as the only light source in his rather dimly-lit room.
Only, there was a glowing green stick – a high-speed Wi-Fi modem – attached to the right side of his laptop, and such a highly-powerful device isn't necessary for something as light as an essay paper in the first two months of a school term. This being especially true for the city, which has gaming-class Wi-Fi signals installed in the public.
It wasn't a school project or anything at all that he was doing in the first place.
It was the freshly-released multiplayer online role-playing game, or MORPG.
It was Terminal Wars Online.
With determined eyes staring at the screen – particularly at the on-screen swarm of insectoid enemies (the Inverz, as they are called in the promotional posters scattered all over Japan) – the teen was furiously clicking his mouse, directing his on-screen avatar (a holy paladin) to attack the Inverz rush. His three online teammates (a priestess, an archer, and a warrior) were tightly clustered near him to provide each other support. Thank you, guys, he thought as he continued playing intently—
The laptop screen's colors reversed – black to white and white to black, with the other colors doing the same. What the heck! Certainly, this isn't part of the gameplay? Promptly, the screen display dissolved into grainy grey static.
The young man budged his computer, hoping the static would go away. Dammit, I didn't scrimp on my daily allowance for this crap—
A glistening black insect-like claw shot out from the screen and grabbed the stunned gamer by the neck. "Help… me…" he barely muttered as he grabbed onto this strange appendage, hoping to free himself to no avail as the latter tightened its grasp.
The insect arm – and the gamer – shot into the laptop's static screen, and in that same instant, Terminal Wars Online resumed running, with the words GAME OVER, in black and purple, in prominent display.