Aerie History

The Birth of Aerie

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Ghostcheese.

But everyone called her Chizu. She knew that her nickname really meant “map”, but her silly self thought that being called Map was rather cute!

Chizu was frolicking around #eternal_blue on irc one day, when she encountered a Lamb!

This lamb wasn’t timid at all, like you might expect a lamb to be. Instead, she was quite brave and bold! In fact, she was often rather…profane.

In any case! The Chizu and the Lamb soon became fast friends, and even began to call one another sisters. After a while, they made a place called #aerie their playground.

One day Chizu was reading a manga called Zettai Kareshi when *gasp!* she discovered that the group releasing it dropped the project when it only had three chapters left to be complete!

This made Chizu very sad. She wanted to know what the ending was!

“So close to the end, yet so far!” she cried out in despair.

But she knew that there must be another way to find out what happened. So she put her mind to it and searched, and searched, and searched.

And at last she found those three chapters in Chinese! She couldn’t read Chinese, of course. That was a bit of a problem…but at least she could look at the pictures.

Then along came the Lamb, who wondered what the girl was staring at so intently, so she looked over Chizu shoulder. And then she said, “I can translate those for you, you know. I know Chinese.”

Little Chizu was overjoyed. A chance to know what the characters in the pictures were saying! So the Lamb translated the chapters for her, and Chizu read the script while flipping through the pictures, and she was very happy to finally finish reading Zettai Kareshi.

But then Chizu and the Lamb decided that since they had scans and a script for a project that many, many people were anxiously awaiting, it would be a shame to keep it to themselves!

So an inexperienced Chizu removed the Chinese text, and haphazardly edited the text onto the pictures in paint. It looked awful! But it was much easier than reading along in a script to the raws.

While they prepared to announce the release to the world, they pondered what to call their tiny, two-person group. They decided to use Chizu’s playground’s name, and made Aerie Scans out of #aerie. The fact that “aerie” is a real word meaning the lofty nest of a bird of prey only made the name all the more fun!

So the girl and the lamb released the three chapters, and #aerie was flooded with new arrivals, all grateful and happy to finally be able to read the ending of the series. Chizu and Lamb looked at one another with huge smiles on their faces, because they were happy to have made someone else happy and to be appreciated for their hard work.

But just then, an evil harpy flew into #aerie!

“What the heck is this crap!?” the harpy screeched. “It looks awful! The image quality is atrocious!”

The girl and the lamb grew angry. It was their first time, of course it wasn’t perfect!

“We clearly marked the releases as low quality!” Chizu declared.

“And it was Chizu’s first time to edit, she did great for her first time!” pointed out Lamb, defending her sister.

“I don’t care if it was her-“

And the girl and the lamb promptly joined forces to toss the harpy out of #aerie and onto her ass, hopefully landing her in a filthy gutter somewhere.

But the harpy had had a point. The image quality wasn’t good at all. Chizu hadn’t known anything about editing or photoshop at the time. So the two went back to #eternal_blue and found their friend named vJoker.

vJoker was not only an experienced editor, she also knew Chinese!

So the two girls and a lamb joined forces. Ghostcheese handled proofreading, qualitychecking, and general organization. Lamb tended to the translators. vJoker worked with the editors.

Thus Aerie Scans and the Aerie Trinity was born!

More History

Following Aerie Scans’ birth, it took on more projects, and its staff grew, but most of the new “employees” were inexperienced. The group struggled for a while to meet the strict requirements that the trinity had, and a few chapters here and there fell short of the desired quality mark.

But soon Aerie settled into itself, and began releasing  high quality chapters of projects like Karekano, Gakuen Alice, and Chikyuu Kanri-nin.

Chizu learned to edit, and her obsessive compulsive desire for perfection made her a wonderful editor…and also caused her to terrorize her editors, making them fix stuff! She also began to take Japanese, and she began to help with things like soundeffects, names, and spotchecking.

The Lamb continued to lead the translators, as well as do some translating from Chinese herself. More recently, she learned to edit as well, and now she even knows Japanese!

The vJoker is now considered an endangered species. It is a very elusive creature that is spotted amongst the undergrowth several times a year, but it is extremely rare for anyone to successfully interact with one! It is usually long gone before you even realize it was there, gone again for months before its reappearance.

The Long Hiatus

In 2007, Aerie Scans was slowing down. Releases were getting more and more infrequent. Lamb was busy with school, and vJoker had gone missing, so Ghostcheese had to handle assigning translators, assigning editors, editing, proofreading, qualitychecking, translating sfx, etc on her own as well as attending college.

But it wasn’t that she was overloaded with work that turned out to be the problem. Her ear started ringing in the spring, and it went on for months. She was tired all the time, and frequently slept well over fourteen hours a day. She couldn’t concentrate on reading a paragraph at a time, let alone proofreading a chapter script. Flashes of light started to make their way into her vision. She stuttered when she tried to speak. It became obvious that something was wrong with Chizu.

In the fall of 2007, she began a series of fruitless and pointless doctor visits. He could never find anything wrong, but Chizu started feeling worse and worse. One Saturday, a headache unlike any she had ever had hit her like a sack of bricks. For an entire week, she lived and endured with constant, extreme pain that was so bad that even the slight pressure of a pillow against her head while laying down made it nearly impossible to sleep. The doctor knew nothing, and even the emergency room and a CT scan found nothing.

A few days later, Chizu noticed that her vision had become rather blurry. She dismissed it as a side effect of one of the many medicines the guessing doctors had her on. But the next day, her vision was worse, so she stopped taking the medicine hoping it would clear up. Two days later, her vision was even worse and had gone double, so she knew it was not related to the medicine.

Back to the doctor she went, and the fool man thought that Chizu was making everything up, and told her to see a psychiatrist! But Chizu was persistent and forced him to send her to an eye doctor that same day. There she finally found out what was causing her problems.

Chizu had increased fluid pressure in the brain, which was putting pressure on her optic nerves and making them swell. The eye doctor sent her off to a neurologist.

Her vision and the headaches worsened in the few days she waited for her neurologist appointment to come around, but Chizu was stubborn. She even went to class the day before her appointment, even though she had to listen for cars as she crossed the street since she couldn’t see them!

At the neurologist, she had an MRI in which they found a bloodclot in the back of her brain. Then they took a huge needle and pierced the base of Chizu’s spine to draw off excess fluid and to measure the pressure.  The pressure in Chizu’s brain was three times what it was supposed to be!

Then she visited an optic nerve specialist. By this time, Chizu was almost completely blind. Considering the bad shape of her eyes, the specialist and the neurologist decided that Chizu needed something called an LP shunt in the base of her spine.

So Chizu had emergency surgery to implant the shunt, which regulates the pressure in her brain. Gradually over several months, most of Chizu’s sight has returned, but 20% of her optic nerve fibers are lost forever. She has peripheral blindspots, a little overall bluriness, and color perception deficits.

Following this ordeal, Chizu still wasn’t herself. She had a relapse of pressure problems for several months. Spring of ’08 was her final semester of college, and she had to make up the classwork and finals from the previous semester when she got sick. Then she had to graduate. It wasn’t a good time to try scanlating again.

When Chizu did finally get some time, all Aerie’s staff had pretty much disappeared, so Ghostcheese decided to go on hiatus until further notice, though there was one release where Chizu tried unsuccessfully to get things up and running again.

The Revival

Ghostcheese was happily checking Baka-Updates for releases of her favorite projects one day in July of ’09 when she noticed a release by Aerie Scans! She knew she hadn’t released it. She didn’t even know about it, so she was extremely surprised!

She looked in #aerie to get to the bottom of the matter, and there was Lamb’s friend, a tomato named Toma! She had single-handedly translated and edited a chapter of Subaru. It was a wonderful surprise, and it renewed Chizu’s enthusiasm for scanlating, so she set her mind to reviving her beloved group.

And that brings us today. Several past staff members have rejoined us, the Toma and the vJoker helped out, and the prospect of the future looks great (providing that we can find a translator).

Please continue to support our group in the future, and we hope that you enjoyed reading a bit about our history.