Episode I

It was a cool spring Monday morning in Mammoth City. The sun struggled to shine on the massive skyscrapers and the people rushing to work, but only managed to pierce the thick cloud of pollution in a feeble sort of way. Business executives drove to their office buildings, children rode yellow buses to school, police officers sat down to their morning coffee and doughnuts, while gang members made sure their illegal weapons were in order before beginning the day's illegal activities.

At Mammoth State University, students with eight o'clock classes rose blearily from bed, dragging their way to the classrooms where they could sleep in the nice comfortable desks. A small minority of the students, known as geeks, had obtained sufficient amounts of sleep the previous night and were alert enough to take notes.

One particular geek was named Dennis Brown. He was an average MSU freshman, a computer science major with sixteen units of mostly gen ed classes. As he sat in his eight o'clock English Composition class, automatically transcribing the professor's lecture, his mind wandered to the meeting he had attended the previous Saturday. It was a gathering of peaceful-minded citizens who wanted to make organized effort to clean up the ubiquitous graffiti in their corner of the city. The meeting had been broken up by a group of gang members throwing rocks, who scattered when the police arrived. Only one of them was arrested, and as a minor he would likely be released unpunished. The graffiti was a way that the gangs marked their territory, and they didn't appreciate interference.

If only I could do something to really make a difference, Dennis thought. But what can I do? I'm just a college student. Even the police can't stop these gangs. Then he realized that his English professor was asking him a question, and postponed these dreary thoughts for another time.