NOTE: For personal reasons, I decided to write this away from ScrewAttack. For the record, I’m totally fine. Also, don’t speak as I’m the only one in this, because to be completely honest, I’m barely qualified to talk about this in the first place, as I’m just a spectator around a small crew. I don’t need sympathy, though I do appreciate it – what we need is to continue to do what we do best: be ourselves.
For most of you guys, the sole thought of losing a dear friend is something truly serious. For me, however, it meant something a bit different.
It’s not so much about these two peculiar friends as simply being close to me – quite the contrary. They have never quite managed to be as close to me as they did to my best friend, Ravenstyles, who is currently in a devastated mood. However, it’s their personalities and the things they did 5 years ago that gave me a purpose in life.
It was around September, when Raven and Darkhand – good friends of mine since high school – invited me to Anicardios. It was a barebones site with almost nobody around to talk with, with a few minor exceptions. I then learn that it’s meant to be a secret site for personal projects between people with an equal mind-set. It was evident that I was being slowly accepted by the small group, getting along with the likes of the “don’t give a crap” Raven and the antics of funny-guy Holy. Soon, however, things took a turn to the unexpected, when two more friends joined the crowd: Holy’s eccentric sister, Veronica, and the love-freak Cosmic. The way they wrote their witty stuff and made me go nuts was something like falling in love with someone in first sight. it was certainly weird, in retrospect, but thinking back, I was just a teenager starting to learn what the internet is all about. That is, when I learned the truth: they were actually people who lived close to me.
I remember it like it was yesterday: Raven told me about how his friends would be around town at some point. Sadly, this was a time when I still didn’t have a driver’s license and not much liberty to run amok, so I was very exited by the fact that I was finally going to be able to hang out with Raven’s intriguing friends. Holy – a charismatic, jester-like dude who always seem to have a joke at the right moment; Veronica – a creepy goth girl who tends to press the patience of those who dare get close to her; and Cosmic – a sweet girl-next-door who was also an avid otaku and has some kind of obsession towards chibis for some reason. The reason why I was so amazed by them wasn’t so much about their personalities – I would’ve figured the world had millions of their own kind scattered around the globe. But rather, it’s because they existed right where I lived in – for once, I thought, I would never feel alone. For the first time, I felt that I fitted in a crowd.
That’s how much Anicardios means to me, to the point that I still remember everyone who joined in the forums and had a blast with all of us. Amaya – a motherly figure with a mischievous roleplaying skill; the Rose Twins – one being a self-contained whacko, the other a shy girl with real otaku issues; Darkhand – a childish teenager who had a hard time establishing his identity; and Luvly – a woman who has more roleplaying characters and usernames than we could ever shake off in any indefinite time. The crew went on to be called as the Anicardios Crew Alliance, or AcA for short, and I had the privilege to be one of their key graphic designers – so much, in fact, that Raven wears it proudly on his clothes wherever he goes.
Sadly, I never did have the chance to meet most of them in person. That fateful day only ended in failure, with me leaving downtown only to hear Raven from my phone that they were just a couple of meters away from me after I turned my back. Only a select few of them keep in contact with me after all these years. That said, I still heard from them, and I was overwhelmed with happiness when I finally got Veronica’s approval of our friendship after years of bad communication and Imaginer shenanigans. To think she and her brother would be gone by now is just unheard of.
This is why Anicardios is mourning the death of these two people (Holy and Veronica), and perhaps most importantly, it drives me to keep pushing towards my ultimate dream: one day, we will all gather in one place at a single time, doing what we do best: doing stuff together.
