The computer was originally bought to be a homework tool. Many teachers were preferring typed reports to the hand-written variety. Plus typing would be a handy skill to have whatever career we pursued.

At least that was Mom’s reason for the pricey investment that Dad only found out about after the fact.

So the monstrous white desktop took over the whole top of an old bureau inherited from some great aunt whose name I have forgotten. My siblings and I would diligently type out school reports on planets, required books, and occasionally foreign countries. Mom discovered Soltaire and found something else to do when her insomnia struck. Dad just complained about the overpriced typewriter taking up valuable space in his living room.

Change comes slowly to Mississippi. We often lag behind the rest of the country in terms of fashion, technology, or even civil rights. So I was in high school before our family even had a dial-up Internet connection.

Now my siblings and I had more than an ancient set of encyclopedias to reference for our never-ending school reports. Mom could email her old friends and research recipes at 2 am when sleep eluded her. Dad just sighed and said that at least now he could do his continuing medical education credits from something other than the same old family practice medical journals.

I soon discovered that the Internet was more than just for homework, or for email, or for even continuing medical education credits.

Using Yahoo, I spent some extra computer time looking up a character called Hotaru Tomoe, a mysterious character I had only seen once in my watching of Sailor Moon. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by pages and pages of character profiles. And many pages featured more than just pictures and random facts. They had stories with characters from the show in plotlines that I knew were different from the episodes I had watched.

Site after site had these stories. Many were labeled fan fiction, a term I quickly learned meant stories that fans wrote using the characters from the show in the writer‘s own plots. Links led me to stories from other fandoms such as Dragonball Z and cartoons from the 80s.

There was even fan fiction from Voltron, the mecha anime I had watched avidly as a child. I had loved the adventures of the four guys and the token girl princess named Allura who piloted lion-shaped ships to protect the planet Arus from the cruel King Zarkon, his son Lotor, and their evil forces. I began to read every story I could come across with each bringing back a memory of the show I had loved so much.

If my family noticed the increase in my computer usage, they chalked up to the workload of the accelerated and advanced placement classes I was now taking. My siblings began demanding more time on the computer, too. Mom began to complain about having to referee the computer. Dad just got tired of missing calls from the hospital and bought a second phone line.

Computers began to make their way into school more and more. I was now being grading on more than my typing ability. I had to demonstrate proficiency in word processing, databases, and email. One teacher decided to teach a whole module on communication with the final project being our own personal webpages.

My partner and I found the registration for Tripod, the free service we would be using to build our pages. As the entire class tried to access the same site, the server sputtered and gasped. We decided to go to Yahoo instead and begin setting up our now required email accounts.

My partner quickly had a name and set up his email account. I tried every variation of my name with no success. Everything had been taken. With my partner growing frustrated since everyone was now happily building their webpages, I typed in allura99.

I blinked as the alias was accepted. I really hadn’t meant it. Where was the delete on this thing?

“Allura?” my partner asked, noticing that I finally had an accepted name. “Was that the name of the baby in that freaky movie Willow?”

“Um, yeah, sure,” I murmured. “I think.”

“Cool,” he replied. “Let’s get started on the webpages.” I tried not to snicker as mr_willie_10 built his webpage.

So allura99 was not the identity I had originally wanted. It was something born out of necessity for a stupid school assignment. But when I tried my hand at fan fiction a few months later, I was the name I used and have used ever since.

I still have the email and the webpage, too.