HOW IT ALL
STARTED

It started in 2020, not aboard a carrier, inside a Pentagon briefing room, or as part of some classified weapons program, but with a group of friends sitting behind computers and flying combat aircraft in Digital Combat Simulator. They called themselves the Wet Boys, and there was no grand plan behind it. They were military veterans, aviators, operators, and friends who came together because they loved military aviation, competition, and the particular brand of chaos that happens when talented people stop taking themselves too seriously. What began as nights flying missions together quickly developed its own culture. Callsigns appeared. Squadrons formed. Patches were designed. Aircraft received custom liveries. Missions became increasingly elaborate. Inside jokes became traditions, traditions became history, and somewhere along the way the Wet Boys stopped feeling like a group of people playing a flight simulator and started feeling like an air wing that simply happened not to exist.

As the group grew, so did the world around it. There needed to be a reason an F-16 was flying beside an F/A-18, an A-10 was operating from the same force as an F-14, and a collection of pilots from completely different military backgrounds had somehow ended up fighting together. Every ridiculous question demanded an increasingly serious answer. That exercise in explaining the impossible eventually produced Carrier Air Wing Zero, CVW-0, the fictional first carrier air wing placed under operational control of Joint Special Operations Command. The Wet Boys became its founding pilots. Their real personalities, friendships, callsigns, arguments, humor, and experiences became the raw material for characters and stories. The aircraft they loved became squadrons. The patches they designed became unit heraldry. The missions they flew for fun became inspiration for operations inside a much larger fictional universe. Then came the USS Leviathan, CVN-00, because an air wing this absurd needed an equally impossible place to call home.

What nobody expected was for that universe to escape the simulator. The jokes became artwork. The artwork became lore. The lore became stories, music, patches, videos, missions, websites, and eventually the novel Deep Scythe. A group of friends flying DCS in 2020 had accidentally created the foundation for a fictional military universe where almost everything has a connection back to something real, whether that is a person, a callsign, a friendship, a deployment story, or one particularly stupid night flying airplanes together online. That is still the heart of the Wet Boys today. CVW-0 may be fictional. The USS Leviathan may not exist. But the Wet Boys absolutely do. Everything else grew from there.