About

About the Series, its origin and how we got to where we are

There are quite a lot of people asking for the source material for the series. The series first made its appearance on a certain story usenet group (think email based forums, where you've to download all the topics that opens like an email) back in 1999, when the Ragnarok Online made quite the splash. It's not wrong to say that the series drew some inspiration from it. It got its start as people trying to improve their writing for whatever reason and tried out various games. If you are familiar with forum games, think about that game where you write 3 words, and another person write 3 words, etc... until a story is written (except instead of 3 words, replace it with entire chapters).

Back then, there were various different type of "games", EC just came about as another "game". Just before its official start, there was a project that was "people vote on ideas, and the writer will write it out", usually this didn't amount to more than a few dozen votes, sometimes barely reaching a dozen. (The group only had a few hundred people, and the requirement for an Eastern language pack for windows 95 to even VIEW the content probably prevented a lot of people from even joining).

The next step was of course, let people make a continuous story (what we used to call story blogs). The bunch of us voted on a premise, characters and settings (Sliders was rapidly coming to its end, there was a little dip in HK kungfu films, The Outer Limits influenced us greatly and Slayers would be ending soon after as well, The Matrix came about, the RO alpha popped up -I think I recall needing a SSIS or whatever that korean ID number thing was- and Scrapped Princess started not too long ago, all of us love the slapstick from Master Q, and probably some other things I've left out, all of which influenced our decisions), then had one of the more active writer write the opening scenario (what you now see as the prologue). Chapter 1 was written by someone else that read the prologue and then continued where it left off. There was no rule about who can write when, but there were some ground rules on characters and their personalities and everything must be logical and follow best science (psuedo-science is acceptable as long as it doesn't change the setting too much and is consistent).

I was following the story from the beginning, and I'll be honest, it was intriguing, as far as amateur writing goes. You've the "accidentally getting some awesome stuff cause of luck" from typical kungfu stories. You've the usual wiener jokes and physical slapstick. You've the sword+sorcery with an odd sci-fi bent. There were a lot of stuff that tickled my fancy. I joined the duo that were actively doing it somewhere down the line. Soon after, the usenet group died and we moved to another site. We sent all our physical written manuscripts to someone to scan it all and print them out, so we have physical copies just in case. The story got pretty far, but real life interrupted us and the project was abandoned. We enjoyed it and thought that was the end of it, none of us were seriously thinking to become a writer (we were just doing it to improve our writings -in different languages, two of us used it to practice our nip while the nip used it to better his kanji + chinese idioms- in general and for some laughs and "what if" scientific scenarios among other things). We expected that no one else would enjoy the story as much since it was an odd mix of themes and genres, it's highly experimental since the pacing and wording would seem "off" since it isn't just one author working on it. Also, we thought that novels were dying, so we shelved it and never looked back.

What was fun was that a single sentence in an earlier chapter would be expanded on and become entire chapters or even arcs of their own (I've since been notified that it's called Chekhov's Gun, this series is is chalk full of it apparently). We were actively out to "screw" with each other while keeping the story as intact as possible. But you know, we gave it up and all that.

Then not too long ago a spring cleaning came about. I rediscovered the booklet I made out of the manuscripts. Someone I know happened to stumbled on it and kept bugging me to translate what certain phrases and words meant as they kept trying to read it. Yeah, novels didn't die like we expected (but the english sci-fi community was effective co-opted and controlled by SJWs/3rd Wave Feminists until a group of writers start doing shit on their own), and japanese LNs are receiving recognition lately and can even be said to be popular. So I tried to contact the others involved to see if I can translate the work into english for the next generation of readers. This was around the end of last year, it took a while for them to get back to me, been planning it out and talking to them on and off since then.

The end result was, the two of them don't really care about what I do with the series. If people find them enjoyable, great! If not, meh. I was given all the rights for the english version (and any other versions to be exact), everyone will be credited as the original authors (it's just for the sake of keeping it nice and legal should someone try to claim the work as theirs, having 3 different authors that can explain the story without a hitch is hella hard to discredit should someone actually do try and monetize the work without our permissions, we have our share of hatred for things like narutofan/tazmo/plagarizers). They don't care about the series aside from the fact that they are happy someone is enjoying their work (that's why you see me thanking everyone that read and enjoy it, because that's what they'd said.) and I get to do with it as I see fit.

Re:Monster came along after we established our agreement, I got dragged into it. I did initially like the series a lot, and I can always improve my J->E translation skills (have been rusty since the scanlations days). So I went full throttle on TLing with others over the summer, spending the majority of my free time on it. Then the abuse came, the same abuse that a lot of scanlators had to, and still have to, deal with. I started to drift away from r:m until I got ready to do EC. I got EC rolling during the middle-late part of summer, and r:m starts to slow down cause of burn out, irl obligation and what not. And then I got hate mails, yep, that's right, readers from r:m starts demanding that I work on r:m instead. It eventually got to the point that I told rei that one more idiot and I'm washing my hands of r:m. And that's where we are now.

The series' revival can be attributed to one curious bugger that just HAD to read the bloody thing and bug me for translations non-stop. If you want want the source, you'll have to either find it from a dead newsgroup (I'm 100% sure someone has an archive of it somewhere, good luck finding it though), pry it from our hands or someone find someone that silently followed the project and made backups. As for the authors, we opted to stay behind pennames (and that we can't remember what our exact handles were xP).

Warning: The writing style is a little ancient and messy (since there's more than one author), if there's confusion, it might be intentional (yes, it was a thing back then) or things will get explained several chapters later (yes, that was a thing too).

The authors are: - -, Sumguy and 鳳石生

For the sake of simplicity, I think I'll just credit the series to Otori Ishinei.

Also, I won't be releasing the RAWs since people tends to be asses and spoil, no exceptions.