Criminals all over the world had been dropping dead from heart attacks. The heart attacks always occurred after Japanese schools had dismissed, which caused L to believe that the attacker was a student.
L was a top secret agent. No one knew what he looked like, not even his assistant, Watari. He was brought in for the unsolvable cases, because L was a prodigy. He was one of the smartest minds in the world.
Yagami Light lived in the Kanto area of Japan. He was a straight-A student, and he hated it.
"Life is so boring!" he cried, exasperated, one day at school. Light wanted something exciting to happen. He always wished for something to happen one day, something to make his life mean something. He stared out of the window. He saw something out of the corner of his eye.
"A notebook…" he thought. He looked at it for a while, until he finally got back to work.
At the end of the day, he left the school and grabbed the notebook.
"DeathNote, and how to use it," he read. It was a notebook that, supposedly, you write names in it and the people that those names represented would die.
"It's probably a prank," he muttered, but took it home anyway.
Later that night, he saw a report on the news about a criminal that had taken some people hostage. Light, curious about the DeathNote, wrote the criminal's name in the book. The criminal suddenly had a heart attack, and the hostages escaped.
This proved it. It was more than a prank.
At a G8 Summit, L was explaining his hypothesis through a laptop computer. He was expounding on his theory that the attacker, codenamed KIRA, was a student when his speech was interrupted.
The L's voice faded away, and was replaced by a taunting, harsh voice with a sharp English accent, and a K replaced the L on the laptop's screen.
"Hello, gents!" the voice said, thundering throughout the auditorium where the members of the G8 were located.
"Well, I suppose your impenetrable security system isn't so impenetrable, is it?"
"Now, see here!" a member of the G8 started to say, but K cut him off.
"KIRA is nothing compared to me! He is a simple murderer. I am so much more… Goodbye, gents!"
K gave an evil laugh that echoed horribly around the auditorium, and signed off. The G8 sat there in stunned silence.