Shadowrun General > The Secret History

The Re-Introduction of HMHVV

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firebug:
So I was having a discussion with someone, and a point came up about when was the earliest in the SR timeline that someone could have been changed into a Vampire (not counting things like Red where they just mysteriously have existed blah blah).  HMHVV Strain 1 was isolated in 2034, but presumably it could have been around as early as the Awakening.  Which makes me wonder...

What was cause of the introduction/arrival of vampires, ghouls, and other Infected?  Basically, if HMHVV is a virus transmitted via the Infected, where did it come from?  Maybe some ancient vampires woke up and started feeding, transmitting it that way.  But what about other Infected that couldn't have just somehow gone into hibernation?  Ghouls especially, as they're the least magical and couldn't have just survived the 5th World without being able to repopulate.  How did the Sixth World get ghouls?  Did it start with only Strain 1, then it mutated into other strains, until it became the Kreiger strain?

I'm curious if there's any official answers or theories about this.  It's a bit of a "chicken or the egg" scenario.  "What infected the first Infected?"

DeathStrobe:
Red got turned in his young adult life if I recall from a vampire attack. He talks about it in Crimson.

I also have thought about this too. It's possible it's a genetic disease and once the mana levels became high enough people started to express as werewolves or vampires or whatever. Some of the strains, very specifically ghouls can still reproduce the old fashion way.

But I'd really like to think it was an archeologist that accidentally infected themselves while exploring ancient ruins where the virus has laid dormant for millenniums.

For vampires, it's possible they may have laid low like the immortal elves as well.

The Wyrm Ouroboros:
IIRC, HMHVV -- at least one strain, maybe more -- can be carried by a few very specific non-human vectors within which it is not active.  I can't point to a book just offhand in which it says this, but my SR-fu does have this as a memory of something being stated, probably in SR3.  (Drop bears, probably.  It's always drop bears, just like it's never lupus.)

firebug:
Vampires yeah, easy to say there were some vampires that were in hiding one way or another.  I'm mostly curious about ghouls.  Did they show up later, or at the same time as vampires were re-introduced during the Awakening?

Wyrm's point could make sense, if the Kreiger strain came from another paracritter, but of course that's still an egg/chicken thing.

The Wyrm Ouroboros:
Well, recently it's been suggested that there were vampires in their own little down-time nests - I think it's Red who says something about this in one of the recent books, or implies it at the very least.  The more powerful the vampire, the more s/he had to 'sleep', to cocoon up and try to survive 5K years off 'stored mana', as it were.

But I'm not sure why you're saying that even if there weren't pre-6W vampires that nonhuman carriers existing would be a chicken/egg thing.  I mean, clearly the virus came first; an Awakened virus that mutated so that when it infected a humanoid host, it made some vastly radical changes to the host in order to prolong the virus's existence -- some form of genetic immortality being the goal of every living thing that has genetics -- and suddenly you have the first vampire.  I mean, think of it instead as an inversion of ebola; ebola comes from somewhere, a viral infection that can be found in nonhuman hosts in deep dark Africa.  Once it hits a human, well, it burns through them ... but that virus which we call HMHVV changes them instead of slaying them.

Simply put, the first Infected would not necessarily need to have been 'transformed' by another of their kind; only susceptible to whatever origin-state elements were required.  And the various strains can then evolve from the first one.

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