Percival had always been smart-- too smart. He excelled at most everything he did throughout his childhood. He aced tests left and right; made high honor roll throughout every year of school; made (local) headlines as the top mathlete in the region; and found himself completely bored with the academics his mother forced him to suffer through.

And then Aeternia changed his life.

He joined the open beta, initially out of skepticism, and quickly found himself drawn into the game. Here was a world where he was not great at everything he did. Sure, he learned the mechanics fairly quickly, but there was so much more to it than that. He had to fight; he had to process situations on the fly rather than study them on paper. It was exhilarating.

The game swallowed his life. He all but devoted himself to it, and as the years passed, he began fooling around with cheats and hacks, until he eventually became known as something of an infamous cheater and found himself on a first name basis with several of the mods.

Eventually, though, things began to sour. Players began forgetting, and Persiio was recruited into a group of hackers determined to get to the bottom of things; to cleanse the world of whatever corruption was causing it. And, for better or worse, that happened to involve teaming up with a stick in the mud and a virus.