ROI’s History

Well this is the first update I'm doing for my story, Moonlight Sonata. Let me just start it off by explaining where the story came from.

My group of friends and I created Team ROI, a "Clamp"-like group of females who are interested in manga and comics. Yes, we seriously have been compared to Clamp because we are all girls, and for the sneaky sexual innuendos that manage to enter our art.

The whole concept for our collaboration, which we holistically call Reflections of Immortality, started out on a high school RP site at the first There were literally hundreds of people online at one time, so there was no basic storyline - therefore we ended up creating one ourselves. The plotline and characters started off with Katie, Al, and Adrianne, who, being pioneering originals, created Vince, Hide, and Souji, respectively. It was only one or two months later that Britt and I also joined in, creating Vin and Ken, respectively. We were also joined by other RPers (who will remain unmentioned, but remembered) who came from the high school RP, but were not part of the original roleplay.

Our roleplay activities grew to more than just regular high school RPs where the teacher and student fall in love (that didn't even happen in our RPs!). We expanded our ideas to create extraordinary people who were not necessarily in high school, though most of them were. We expanded the narrow backgrounds that our characters initially had, creating our first vampire/preternatural RP. All of us ended up having multiple characters - usually a boy and a girl each, with other characters coming along the way later on.

Chris: Ken Keisuke, Shugotenshi Yume Kei Akagawa, Tomoe Hibou
Adrianne: Souji Miyazaki, Natsumi Yamamoto Sylvia Winters
Al: Hidehito Takarai, Kaori Akagawa Sho Senketsu
Katie: Vince Stutner, Lilac Vernada Ryu
Britt: Vin Hornbuckle, Ichida Hikido

After inititally creating the 3 organizations and the very basic, fundamental conflicts between them, we decided to create our own RPG called Reflections of Immortality, or ROI for short (credit goes to Katie for coming up with the name). We started our own site on the first in the summer between sophomore and junior years of high school... and if you think about the fact that we are all freshmen college students right now, you can do the math and find our relative ages.

The RPG thrived for a pretty long time - almost a year - before school caught up to the rest of us, and we had to abandon RPing for ROI. While we did, however, we were some of the most active admins on any Avidgamer site, and over the course of the site's life, we gained more than 200 members. Granted, some of them are actually the same person, or people become inactive, but that still totals to at least 150 members who were, at one point or another, active on the site and helping develop the plot.

Our initial, very basic plot was based on the organizations we created: HQ or Headquarters, WPA or World Purification Alliance (also called the Shadow), and the IS or Inner Sanctum. HQ were the good guys, led by Vince, Souji, Hide, and Lilac, who protected the human world from the world of the immortals, and vice versa. The WPA were the bad guys, led by Ken, Vin, and Shu, who worked to dominate and integrate both worlds. The IS was a coalition of vampires, both pure and bitten, led by Hide and Sho, who worked for an as-yet-unknown purpose (this purpose is, for all intents and purposes, still unknown). The real conflicts in the story were between the lead characters and the relationships that once existed or would exist between them. These relationships will not be mentioned at this point, because they are spoilers for the story that I'm writing.

When the RPG died out, we turned our attentions to the comic that we had started in the middle of created the RPG, called Reflections of Immortality. Yes, we know it's the same name, and we wouldn't have it any other way. The comic is, to this day, in development, though the beginning pages are posted on Keenspace - you can find them on my profile here at Fictionpress. The project is headed by Adrianne (the artist of the strip), with the rest of Team ROI working collaboratively as inspiration bunnies. With the current slump that the comic is experiencing due to our crazy schedules and schoolwork, some of us have turned more towards working by ourselves in separate ROI projects.

Adrianne's project is still the comic (along with her other personal comics), and a few of the others (as far as I know) are working on art for ROI. Being the incompetent traditional artist that I am, I have shied away from drawing as a medium, and turned to writing.

Right now, let me say that I absolutely encourage everyone to start writing either originals or fan-fiction. This will greatly improve your writing by helping you expand your voice and style, as well as work on your organization and how well you can walk the reader through the plotline. I know this sounds like it's just for creative writing, but it'll do wonders for your essay writing too. This is the only thing that really helped me while I was in high school.

That said, the story I'm working on is based on the original RPG that we as Team ROI created. Since then, we have expanded the storyline (all of us together) to span across generations and eras, but that is a different storyline than mine. I am integrating some parts of that storyline (like relationships and character conflicts), but mostly the events stem from the RP threads that we, with other participating RP players, wrote all those years ago. I have also inserted new characters that are mine, even though they are influenced by unnamed RP players. The original characters are credited to their original creator.

My story starts not too long before modern times: something like 500-1000 years ago. Considering how the characters are mostly at least 100-200 years old, the time span isn't too bad. Its groundwork already has the major characters that Team ROI made, including Ken, Hide, Souji, Vince, and others, but the story also introduces one of my minor characters, Tomoe Hibou, and another minor character, Eiji Kamui. Eiji is mine, but he is based off an RPer at the original RPG named Tsuteto, whose owner is named Tim (or so he says). The race for Eiji is also based of Tsuteto's race - Tim calls him a "Drakin", and I call mine a "Dracmanus". What's the difference? Aside from the name and the fact that they are both half dragon, half human, I expanded Eiji's history to include family, as well as gave him a more likeable, honest personality. The original, Tsuteto, was hard as a rock both literally and figuratively, and I knew I didn't want someone whom I couldn't manipulate on some emotional level.

So that's what kind of happens in the first few chapters - a lot of introduction and some conflict, but they're basically laying the foundation for the rest of the story. So please read and review! Let me know what you think, as a reader, or a Team ROI fan, or whatever. Thanks a lot.

-Chris

Credits and Notes

Moonlight Sonata is dedicated to Team ROI and the long-gone RPers from Reflections of Immortality.

Thanks so much to all of the great RPers at the original RPG on You all have been such an inspiration, for your creativity and willingness to go along with whatever plot twist we dished out.

Thanks to the rest of Team ROI... you guys help tear me down along with the rest of reality, but you are one of the few who help build me up. Much 3

ROI Reflections of Immortality is owned by Team ROI (Dee, Chris, Al, Britt, and Katie), (c)2003-2006. All rights reserved. ROI is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Want more ROI?

Well this thing won't let me put in hyperlinks, so I'll put up more ROI links in my profile. Click and visit us!