Blame for the rise of Microsoft and the Personal Computer lies entirely with a single piece of equipment …

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s typewriter.

The author’s bid for the place of the Storyteller failed (his last heart attack brought on by the unnatural stress of a local adept’s attack again him), but his works nonetheless resonated so well with the post-WWI world that energies funneled back into aspects of his life. Varied effects and responses followed in this wake, such as the curious deaths of his wife and the “coincidental” death of fellow author and admirer Nathaniel West, who was primed to take up his path.

However, most of the mystical influence was deliberately channeled into Fitzgerald’s typewriter thanks to rituals he had prepared for just such a contingency. The resulting artifact gained the ability to report on the plans and actions of the current Storyteller and his godwalker by seemingly random mistypings during normal use (what determines “normal use” remains uncertain). Such an artifact would frighten even an archetype badly enough but the rituals involved created a mystical “backwash” of influence that may have affected every typewriter on the planet, albeit with more cryptic results. The Storyteller has spent no little time attending to the rise of word processing software and the phasing out of mechanical writing ever since. Whether the rise of the Blogosphere, collaborative writing, and interactive fiction further this plan or actually weaken the old archetype remains to be seen.