DC: This is the story of Hiotomi, my Ranger on PSO. If your character wants in, just let me know in the reviews. I'll need obvious things like age, and so on, but also what Section ID (Hiotomi's a Whitill) and what relation they have to Hiotomi's tale. (How they met and so on) There is quite an important slot for a ranger with the strange eye covering metal thing, but it's not a good guy role, just to warn you. This is my first PSO fic, so don't bite too hard…

And I don't own PSO as a concept, only as a game and an abstract sculpture composed of shoes.

The Saga of Hiotomi

Prologue

The class was loud, and disruptive, and verging on breaking out in a dozen small fights. Then again, it was the last day of the term before the Landing festival, when the inhabitants of the planet Ragol celebrated the day that Pioneer 2 landed on the surface and their home was secured. Mr Cray sighed. It was obvious that he wasn't going to get anywhere with them in anything constructive today. Then again…

 "Class? Pay attention, please." Bizarrely, they did. "As you all know, tomorrow is the first day of the Landing Festival –" A small cheer went up from the assembled class   "-And I suppose I should honour that. No, Thompson, I am not letting you go early, even if it is last period. But I'm going to tell you a Ranger's tale." That got their attention. "We can never forget that if it wasn't for the Hunters, Forces and Rangers, we'd have never managed to settle here. This is the tale of Hiotomi." He paused for a moment, revelling in the sense of having everyone paying him attention, a rare thing for a teacher. He reached for the book he kept under his desk, the historical document.

"Let me see, where to begin…"

Part one: My Genesis

Where to begin? There is so much to tell, so much that I want to write down so that what I have seen, and what I have done, does not fade away into the past to be forgotten. But I am, after all, only human, and what I write is subject to my own bias. This is not absolute truth, but it is as close as I can get to it.

I was 16 when Pioneer 2 left for our new home, but my story begins before even that.

I was born Hiotomi Cardion to a prosperous British family on a station in orbit around a planet. I can't even remember which one it was now, but I assume it was Earth, or the Moon, or perhaps Saturn. The next few years passed as is standard for small babies, Newman or Human, and as such need no explanation. My first steps play no particular part in this tale. The only relevant fact from those early years was the death of my mother, and my subsequent raising by my father. I never grieved my mother.

 Don't get me wrong, I'm sure she was a lovely person (In fact, I know so. My father was besotted with her, and he was not an easy man to please.), but those few memories I had of her were blurred, even then. The passage of time has made it harder still to recall her face, or her voice, or anything else. Strangely, I remember her hands with what appears to me to be astonishing clarity. She had slender, elegant hands, and I often wonder if my hands would have been that elegant if I had chosen another profession.

 As I mentioned before, my father was solely responsible for my upbringing, and it is largely due to his influence that I became a Ranger. He raised me as best he could, but he was no replacement for a mother. He had been a Ranger himself in his prime, but a run-in with a land mine had forced him into early retirement. He fed me and bathed me and all those things, but I was left with a different attitude than all the other girls I knew of my age (I think that I had reached my fifth year) – Where they were all content to wear dresses and play with dolls, I was with my father and his friends as they recounted stories of their past battles and quests. The other girls thought I was strange, and thought of me with contempt, and I thought that they were silly, and thought of them with disdain. As you can imagine, it wasn't a match made in heaven.

I was 8 when I knew I wanted to be a Ranger, for better or for worse, and that was when my training began in earnest. I had been playing with my father's old weapons for several years, but –

 Oh, don't worry. The photon charges had been removed.  Honestly….

 - but this would be genuine training with other potential Rangers with the Hunter's Guild. I remember the first day I went, my father looked so proud…

We trained under a grizzled old Ranger by the name of Cluff, who had a lot of energy for such an old man.

 I wonder if he's still alive.

That first day I arrived, we were split into two groups, male and female, (Essentially for sleeping purposes only; we all trained together)  and given our training uniform, which was like a low grade version of what we wear presently – the boys were given the shoulder units that mark them out from Hunters, and we were given our combat slacks, our boots, and all the rest. The next day, we started training.

TO BE CONTINUED

DC: As you may have guessed, this is by way of being a short introductory chapter...the next chapter will cover training to be a Ranger, and after that (Should all go to plan) the fun begins.....Later!