Editing NorthStar Through the Ages (section)

== The Hidden Age: Social Lore ==
FirstClass was used from the very beginning of NSA’s history, when it was founded in 1998. However, that part of NSA’s history remains largely a mystery, since there are no records from that time. According to Mr. Horneck, NSA’s former data analyst, current records on student numbers and interaction don’t begin until 2010, when NorthStar had six-hundred and seventy-five students. 

The year 2010 is actually known as the beginning of the “Golden Age,” generally accepted to be the most fruitful and organized period of student interaction and government in FirstClass. This is when most of the ancient NSA lore was rolled out, as well as being the most prosperous time of the Noble and Ancient Thread (NaAT), the Mages Guild, and other organizations. The NaAT (Noble and Ancient Thread) and Mages Guild were two very important role-playing threads in FirstClass. I don’t really know how the NaAT got started, I wasn’t around back then. By the time I got there, it was a fully established system of knights. Most of the knights were juniors or seniors, and they had squires. The bottom of the barrel were the Pages, and you became a Page the moment you joined the thread. The NaAT was called that because it was a very huge thread back in the day, I think it got about eighty-something-thousand messages, which is legendary by FirstClass standards. The NaAT, having defeated Zer0, the arch-enemy of NSA and very powerful cybervillain, mainly just went around questing and looking for the famed NSA Diamonds. The Mages Guild was very closely affiliated with the NaAT. It is what it sounds like, a guild for those with magical powers. First, you were tested to see what you had an affinity for (aquamancy, pyromancy, creation magic, life, null, etc) and then you were mentored by another mage with the same affinity. It’s a lot more complex than that, but it would take me far too long to explain everything. The Mages and Knights of the two threads (more often than not, they were mages and knights) would sometimes create portals and work together on their threads. However, they worked alone often enough to be separate organizations. There are a few things about the NaAT I never really understood or discovered because we switched from FirstClass to soon, but here are some things I sort of vaguely saw: knights had dragons, people could switch their role in the roleplay from knight to villain if they wanted, sometimes knights would die and then come back to life or get kidnapped if they had to leave in real life, and of course, the ever-tantalizing NSA Diamonds. These and many more secrets are locked in the minds of the people who worked and lived in the threads - we can discover some things in the Wiki, but without talking to an actual knight, we can’t know for sure.

Since the students were so quickly prosperous, according to the records, it is reasonably safe to assume that the groundwork for this Golden Age was laid before 2010, indicating that student interaction probably began before that. This reveals to us the possibility of a “hidden age” of FirstClass, a time when no records were kept and no student interaction was documented in the form of thread, Google Docs, or Microsoft Word. The only record is in the memory of the students who were there at the time - most likely, we will never know.