Zero

What's life to you? A sense of peace? Belonging? To you...well, maybe it exists. Not me. I suppose I could only wish for something like that.

To begin, from whatever manner this roots, we seem to always start with our name in our biographies. My name is Helios. I will take this opportunity to tell you my story, and you can listen if you find any sort of wish to do so.

I suppose we can take the somewhat normal route and begin with my family. It's Cliché, but it gets it out of the way.

My father was a kind man, scary when he wanted to be tough. Very. I suppose it's because of...no. I'll tell you that later. If I tell you now, it'll ruin the surprise, and you'll see more than a few during your time reading this biography. A half-hearted one, but one at that.

Anyway, I generally believe my father wanted me to be kind, caring, and a scholar of sorts, possibly working as a curator for an accomplished university or organization, but that's rather boring, and near impossible for the average person to achieve in this timeline.

Most of my teenage years ended up being ruled by criminal activities and fight clubs while hiding it with doctored report cards and class awards from school. The plus of knowing people. In these fight clubs and such, I got my ass kicked more than I kicked the ass of my opponents, but that's beside the point..

Now, the reason why I was saying that my father was scary at times was because he would drown himself in alcohol, almost daily. Of course, that takes effect on your offspring. In turn, it took effect on me, and it led to me becoming a delinquent at such a young age. It's better to start early than late in my mind. Some people prefer to not start at all, as least in my profession. Likely due to why there's such a high rate of homicides around youth these days.

Joining that societal rank, it brought me to the world of underground fight clubs, crime, and drugs, although I personally never delved into drug use. That was mostly people around me. Not friends though, I made sure to force them away from that shit.

Enough backstory.

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6:00AM: Tuesday, 4 October.

The first thing I do every morning? Either I go back to sleep or I use the energy to get myself a coffee.

Wow, a kid who loves punching and getting punched living a generally simple life in private? You must be surprised. I certainly am not. I love fighting, but can I at least take some time for myself?

I usually think I can have that time, but I get a knock at my door every morning right about....now.

Right on cue, you hear the knocking on your door. The groan that escapes you has 20 different shades of annoyance underlying the want to not answer it, but you must. Your trusty pack of cigarettes hidden in your back pocket usually comes in handy in this situation.

Before opening the door, you make sure to light one, breathe in the smoke, open the door, and....blow it out straight into Killian's face. Secondhand smoke, a leading cause of cancer-

That wasn't Killian. Oh god oh fuck-

"I have a delivery- Oh fuck- Why is that smell so strong....what do you put your poor lungs through.." says the poor delivery man, clearly not appreciating the sentiment. To be introduced to someone by taking in a mouthful of cigarette smoke isn't exactly the best way to put yourself on a good rapport with that person.

"You should be more careful, Helios," says a condescending male voice in your head. The feeling afterward for a split second is in comparison to a migraine. After a moment of collecting your composure, you respond.

"Oh shit, I'm sorry man, I thought it was my friend at the door!" you exclaim, a little embarrassed. It feels like you don't feel that way as often as you might expect.

"Why would you even think about doing that to your friend dude, thats fucked!" exclaims the delivery man, taking the wet rag you brought him to wipe off his face and eyes.

Well to be fair, you and Killian have a rather interesting friendship. How you even managed to meet the guy was a little unbelievable.

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8 October, 2013.

2013 was when your life took a big turn towards fighting. The main reasoning behind that was due to a parent divorce. Of course, that took effect on you pretty badly as a child. It would be to any child that experienced that.

To deal with those emotions, you joined a gang. It was pretty half-hearted, and no one in it had the balls to break a law, but you did scuffle a lot. Scuffles led to trips to the hospital and trips to the hospital led to falling grades. You knew enough people to where you could hide those trips from your father, who would have "ripped you a new one" as some people name it.

To further hide it, you began doctoring your report cards. This is where Killian comes into play. He had his family buy out the portion of school staff that deals with writing and creating student report cards. You're unsure if it's different in other schools around the US, but your school has a dedicated group that creates report cards, and without needing to report it to the principal, it was mainly luck.

So your school delved into corruption while the principal was unknowing of the entire situation. Your report cards ended up being reported as B's and A's through the help of Killian. Why B's? Well, you had to make it believable. It's rather uncommon to see a student getting straight A's in Middle School.

Killian ended up going from the strategist of report card doctoring to helping you create a Middle School Fight Club, then moving that over to a High School Fight Club when you and the rest of your class moved up a couple more grades. It would be held twice a week in the High School basement at 7:00 PM.

This was financially successful. You had a $3.50 Entry fee for the people who wanted to watch the fight, then $5.00 for those who wanted to fight.

Here, I'll even do the math for you. You can skip it if you want to.

In LA, there are 36 weeks in the school year, from 180 days. When we do the fights twice a week, multiply 36 by 2 to get 72. This being happenings of fights. The audience amount is never a constant, but we had our count averaged to about 143.4, obviously rounded to 143 since you can't have .4 of a person.

We would have 6 fights per night, so 12 fighters, twice a week.

With 143 people or so at every event, multiply that by 3.50 for the buy-in to get 500.50, then multiply that by 72 for the 72 happenings. $36,036 in 72 weeks.

But that's just the audience. Count the fighters, too. 12 * 72 is 864, times 5.00 is $4,320. We would make a little over $39,000 every year, give or take the audience.

Killian took a 50/50 split. I decided to pull out of the scene though once the cops started taking notice. Killian laid low for a few years before we reconnected and decided to never do that again. A couple of years back, after graduating High School, we decided to delve back into the gang and fighting scene by joining a gang, a sketchy one at that, but it was good enough, and fight wins allowed each of us to pay for rent while just scraping by.

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Oh...that's right, I forgot. We're starting my story on the day that I first joined the gang.

I think I was 20 at this time. Something like that. This gets interesting, I promise. Just hold on with me for a while.

Anyway, this delivery man is more important than you might expect. This is the start of how I met Mitch. I could rhyme that with a certain word, but trust me, this dude was never that.

What surprised me was when he said this...

The Delivery Man looks at you weirdly for a moment before stepping back slightly.

"Helios?" he says with a nervous tone, clearly underlying a sense of confusion.

How does he know my name? I suppose I should entertain a little more until I can find an answer to that.

"I am. Did you read that off my delivery or something?" you ask with a tilt of your head.

"No, you set up the twice-weekly fights at the High and Middle Schools years ago.."

Oh...well, here we go.