Article 11: Misa
Oh, my. This request for an article is about...me. That's incredibly flattering, and there's not really any way that I can turn it down, as I'm paid for this, so, here goes...
Like many of the students here, I was born on one of many planets within the Golden Alliance, about thirty years ago, specifically Jenkerra, a relatively unremarkable planet with a fairly high demi-human population. I was a Human male, and I had just finished my schooling when I began to notice connections that I hadn't seen before. Events happening within certain ranges of probability that seemed tied to a person's level of experience, race, and disposition. Though my education was primarily in historical information, even that seemed to be littered with these same ranges, and even when I took a job as a teacher's assistant, I became obsessed with discovering and understanding these numbers and how one could take advantage of them. For the next couple of years, I began cataloguing the inherent abilities and statistics of the various species of sentients I encountered on a datapad that I was supposed to be using for my duties at the university. Though I normally kept it on a separate data chip when it was time for me to have my work on it analyzed by the school, by chance one time I neglected to remove it and was chastised by the school for keeping games on school property.
This was, of course, confusing to me. I had never considered the work I had been doing as part of a game, but when I looked over it again, it seemed that all I needed to do was introduce a narrative in which to create characters and a mechanic for using these stats, and it would indeed be a game. What came as even more of a surprise to me was that the setting that would use all these varied species as well as historical figures that I had come to study came very naturally to me shortly after, and I wrote what I believed to be an original setting of an interdimensional school where students are taken from across both time and space to learn how to use a variety of magical powers, artifact weapons, and scientific devices to battle whatever evil resides throughout the normal galaxy. I hoped that I could sell books based on this setting to pay for a certain magical spell that I felt I needed since shortly after I hit puberty to correct a specific condition which, while accepted through most of the galaxy, is expensive to cure. My family was only barely able to afford my education and I didn't want to burden them with further costs.
Unfortunately, this never came to pass, as the works I'd created for it seemed to go completely unnoticed despite multiple attempts to sell it to various publishers and games companies. Despite all that, I found myself unable to let go of the world I believed I had created, as I'd grown attached to the characters populating it and the atmosphere of freedom and potential around the school and its surrounding city. It was quite some time before I realized that there was one thing I had never done for the setting, and that was create a character for myself. Idealizing myself as a Female Domestic Usagi named Misa, I described my own personality and the goals I would set for myself were I to be a student at MSF High. As I put the final stroke on the character record sheet I had designed, the page burst into magical flames and a swirling vortex of magical energy formed above where it had been. Because of what I had written, I knew exactly what would happen were I to step into it, and I did so eagerly.
Just as I had hoped, I arrived at the school as the character I had created for myself. Since then, I've continued my research, though I quickly learned a few things that I likely wouldn't have had I not shown up here. Primary among them was the fact that the setting I had "created" was real, a notion that I had considered a couple of times after writing that Wraith wished to let others in on the secret of MSF High, but never took seriously until I saw the portal that led me there. Instead, I was one of a handful of "Inspired", people who are able to see the universe in terms of numbers and statistics as almost a sort of grand unified field theory, and therefore somehow linked with the first of our number to make it to the school. Though the library has an entire shelf filled with his books, I decided that it would be one of my own accomplishments to add to his writings, and in writing shorter articles about a variety of subjects, I was offered a column in the school paper. This, along with my willing acceptance of a FenrisCo salesgirl position, has given me the funds I need to indulge in my non-writing hobbies and properly equip myself while leaving enough free time to continue working on my own copy of the book that arrived with me. Perhaps someday I will have my own shelf in the library, but even if I don't, I'll be happy if others find the information I give them useful, and the fact that in the past few months students have begun to submit specific requests for research topics leads me to believe that that is the case.
On that note, if anyone wishes to relate their own personal story of how they ended up at MSF High to me, I would love to hear them. While it's possible to have mail personally delivered to me, it's much easier to submit your stories to the school newspaper by handing your submission off to whoever's working in the school library at the time. They'll make sure it gets to me.
