Velma

The world has changed and if we don't change with it, there's no way we can save it. The Wyrm will win, Gaia will die and not in the way that a great many of us think. Her heart and soul will die long before her body ever will. We will have lost the war and future generations will keep on fighting a meaningless battle over her corpse. So on that grim note, let's shift our focus inward some and get a closer eye on yours truly. My name is Velma Dryden, known to my fellow tribemates as Hotfix. If you have to wonder which tribe that is after finding this video on the Glass Walker network, time to give the computer to someone else and go talk to a Red Talon or something. What I've got to say doesn't begin with me, though I feel like it does with how little I've heard about it. It's happening out there, day in and day out, in a lot of little ways. It's very subtle, and very evil. I'm here to talk to you about the Wyrm and how it's winning, unless we smarten up.

To tell you that story, I first have to tell you this one.

So we'll begin with me, even though there's not much to say about my early life. I was a bit of a tomboy and I loved television and movies, sci fi and fantasy and video games. I was a typical normal latch-key kid. The gangly young girl I was turned into a gangly almost teenager who was a bit of a weirdo, a geek and a loner. I made some friends with other loner types and we bonded over horror movies, video games and pizza. Mom was concerned but she generally let me live my life, it was like she knew at some point I wouldn't have control. Go figure huh? She did talk to me about my future and that there were certain things to expect when I came of age. I thought she was just being metaphorical about the Big Change I'd be going through during puberty. It didn't quite happen like that though.

It happened to me when I was on my 26th straight hour of World of Magecraft, an MMORPG where you play as a mage with powers. It's a pretty violent game over all. Me and my other friends we had a cabal in the game. At the time I thought it was the best game ever, and it was free to play! Sure you could pay money and get stronger, but you didn't have to. We were on something like our fifteenth straight try of a raid dungeon and having no luck in killing the boss. We tried new tactics, new approaches, anything we could think of. Then he came out of nowhere and used an AoE piece of bullshit spell he'd never used before. According to our research he didn't have access to it. But boom he used it and wiped us out in one hit. I lost it and ragequit. Literally. That was when I changed, destroyed my computer, my room, half the fucking house and was about to start on the other half when I calmed down.

I had changed a bit early, I was only thirteen, and it took me a few years to figure out why, but I'll come back around to that. Mom had heard me freak out upstairs and she went outside and called up my uncle. He got there with some friends and they all waited until I had calmed down before they came in and set down the rules, along with a metric fuck ton of exposition as to what and how all that just happened. I had to move, me and Mom, to a new city where they had a bit more influence. Why wasn't I there to begin with, well because you don't put all your eggs in one basket, that's why. Anyways we moved there and I was put to work learning, training, working, etc. Just imagine I've inserted a training montage here and I look badass and awesome in it and that'll cover it. I was fifteen going on sixteen when I underwent my Rite of Passage. Part of why it took a couple years was because I had shifted a bit earlier than a lot of Garou did and the elders wanted to be sure I was mature enough to handle and understand the importance of the test.

Picture an office building. Now gut the inside and rebuild it from the ground up as an obstacle course envisioned by a psychopath and built by a serial killer who is also a wizard. Now fill it with traps and nasty angry spirits. Finally give it a whole other reality just on the other side of a mirror's edge. That is The Gauntlet, not to be confused with the spiritual Gauntlet, and me and 4 others had to run it as a team. We had to run it as a team, against two other teams also of five Garou. It was a test of all of us. Our mission was to get in, get our flag and get out to the extraction point. I'll skip the boring details because I don't want to listen to TL;DL comments. Team Alpha dominated the board getting in and out in record time. Team Beta, my team, we go in and managed a good distance before we got pinned down by a guardian spirit. We were trapped and stuck. Couldn't go back, couldn't go forward and since we were safely behind cover our lives weren't in danger so the rescue team wasn't coming to get us. None of us had been prepared to deal with that kind of spirit.

Because of the way the course was laid out it was easy to keep track of the other teams. Team Gamma was ahead of us in the course but also at an impasse in getting through a locked door. I knew our team could handle that door no problem. I managed to get around the whole communication issue and get a message to them, brokered a deal. They back tracked and took out our problem spirit from behind and we repaid the favor at the door, cracking that beast in under a minute. In fact, our cooperation worked so well we ran the rest of the course together as one big team, got both our flags and got out. We didn't win the time trial, but the lot of us were commended for showing wisdom and excellent tactical judgement in the face of adversity. Poor Team Alpha did not get praised for their selfish attitude. You should not leave Garou behind if you can help it. Because I was growing into my girlish figure and because I had helped fix the situation, they all started calling me Hotfix.

It worked for me. Still does.

So there I was, newly minted Garou and ready to get on with the big war, but Gaia had other plans for me. Months later, doing some internet grunt work for a big shot I found a news article from my home town, dated a couple weeks back about a school shooting. They were blaming it on a violent video game, one I knew well. World of Magecraft. The kids responsible were the ones I had been friends with, had a cabal with. The ones I had lost touch with after my change. It didn't seem real, but it was. I went back home as fast as I could and asked around, talked to people. Two of my friends had died in the assault but one was still alive and in prison awaiting his trial. I paid him a visit, I had to because I had to ask him why. Why did he do it?

He asked me why, instead. He asked me why I had left them, abandoned them, and betrayed the cabal? I looked into his eyes and what I saw there wasn't human. It wasn't human at all. It took me a year of digging and long talks with other Theurges before I knew the truth. A lot of people think video games can make you do violent things and that's usually not true at all. Unless they are conduits for banes. The night I changed my friends got infected by the Wyrm. Maybe I got lucky and was behind a Glass Walker firewall, or maybe my change and my rage burned the bane out of my before it could take root. I don't know but either way it was a hard lesson learned for me. So that's why I'm here to talk to you about the Wyrm and the ways it takes hold without you even knowing.

It's not just video games. It's television, music, books, magazines, advertising. The dangers of the Wyrm are out there in fomori and pollution and all the visible ways it attacks. But the world has changed so much in the past couple hundreds of years. Technology had advanced so fast humanity is still struggling to catch up to it. A couple of hundred years ago the world was smaller and people knew, instinctively, where they fit in the world. They had a job, a purpose, a role that was clearly defined. They were the town blacksmith or the baker or the innkeeper. They fit and they knew they fit and that sense of knowledge of their own belonging was a bulwark against the Wyrm. Today the world is so huge and so vast that people don't know any more what their purpose is. We Garou do and kinfolk often do, but what about the rest? And before you dismiss the rest because they aren't Garou or kinfolk, you might want to rethink that. There's so many of them, the rest of the world and they are spending so much of their lives as a tiny cog in a massive machine and they can't see the big picture. They don't know how they matter, or if they matter.

Is it any wonder that suicide rates have gone up overall? Is it any wonder that people will choose to lose themselves in video games, where the void of their purpose can be filled? To devote their time to television and books and movies that speak to their subconscious mind and tell them that everything is going to be alright. The good guys always win, and so on. Is it any wonder that entertainment has become such a vast industry in the world today, when humanity are all but begging to be entertained, to be distracted from the world around them. Humanity has an empty hole in its heart and soul and if we aren't careful and start fighting that battle, the hole is going to be filled with the Wyrm. I hope I've managed to convince some of you because what comes next is a bit of a breakdown of certain games and television shows and how they are Wyrm corrupt and we need to deal with them.

Are you ready? Then let's begin with World of Magecraft...