they talk about axel a bit, li li asks hilda if she has a thing for him. "[hilda accent] as a friend most of the time but then those times hit and i need his nerdy bookworm. how do you deal with it?" li li: "well you never told me how long you've been a worgen" {hilda glare} "*cough* but I'm pretty sure I've been pandaren my whole life. That being said, you never get used to the heat. It hits different every time." Li li pulls out a jade spirit that looks like a teardrop or an egg. Not like the brewery spirit she had smoked out of earlier. She mentions her friend Aya in gadgetzan gave it as a gift and attuned it to li li's mistweaving. Puts it in hilda (describe). Maybe tethered to a strand of silk so it doesnt get stuck. It also has a twist feature (like something magical) Hilda blurts out to li li what happened after she transformed into a worgen for the first time in stormwind. A priest caught her in a feral rage and brought her a group of night elf druids in the city's park to perform a ritual that cleared her head. Apparently the orphange has some sort of relationship with the druids for that very reason. got kicked out of stormwind >The Stormwind Guard have kept a blind eye to her obvious situation. >They can't just ignore her stealing food and trinkets anymore from passing adventurers and cityfolk. >The fact that she's Gilnean doesn't help at all either. >Despite the charm her barely hidden decorations give to the canals, the friendly guardsman she interacts with the most is charged to bring a stop to it all. After bailing on the orphange and living off of borrowed money for a couple years, you basically became wanted https://desuarchive.org/trash/thread/37962462/#37979109 =====QUESTION===== Ok so lore question. How deep does the Fall of Gilneas effect Hilda and Axel and what is their opinion on the Forsaken and undead in general. I'd imagine nerdy Axel being terrified of the Forsaken or be booksmart enough to know they are still people but hesitent to get to close knowing their history. =====ANSWER===== https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Northgate_Rebellion https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Invasion_of_Gilneas These pages pretty much cover everything. I wrote Hilda's exposition before the actual Battle for Gilneas happened. So that means before Deathwing reeeed everywhere, before the wall was breached, and before the undead fully broke the Geneva conventions. After Archmage Arugal lost control over the worgen, they kinda just roamed around everywhere killing both Gilneans and Undead. During this time, the city was also clouded by civil dissent/war. Hilda was terrified of the Undead because they've been the established enemy of both the Alliance and her people. But the worgen were new. And they were more of a boogyman that Hilda had heard rumors about while snooping in on political ramblings. It was only natural for her to know that the monsters were real because she's from a noble family. Her mom (an ambassador) and dad (navy guy) couldn't lie to their daughter about how bad things were going. After Hilda essentially lost contact with her parents, she bailed out on a convoy long before the Night Elves showed up to start handling other evacuations. Hilda's regret for leaving the city before everything came crashing down either saved her life or solidified her parental loss. I was going to write about how her first transformation into a worgen inside the Stormwind Cathedral was eventually managed by the orphanage. I imagine they have night elf contacts from the park that have access to the ritual water of Tal'doren which brought back her now-cursed sanity. But as you can tell from this post, the baseline for Gilneas's lore is already enough of a clusterfuck so I opted out. Since Hilda wasn't actually there to see the city's final downfall, she only has ideas of what could have happened to her previous life from retellings and books. Maybe her imagination isn't as bad as what actually happened once the undead breached. Or maybe those thoughts are what rattle the worgen/human balance in her rattled mind. It's been a super long time for her since any of this went down. Her opinion of worgen is skewed now that she knows only the feral ones are purely nutty. But her view of Undead is basically a `kill-them-all` mentality despite knowing the difference between the Forsaken and the Lich King's control. Her hate is only slightly mitigated by the implications of other horde races. I haven't put into any thought into what Axel's story with Gilneas could be. Maybe he's not connected at all and he got the curse directly from someone else as a "gift" in another part of the world, putting an aunt in a weird place to mentor him? Or maybe he stuck around with his family/aunt to see the cataclysmic destruction that Hilda missed. I'll leave that for others to figure out. Despite me hogging the plot, none of these are my characters are mine. But context is fun and I hope that getting this out of my head encourages other people to fill in intended ambiguity with research and imagination. From Dogyd: Hilda is just another war orphan from a rich family that ended up in Stormwind, she doesnt "hate" anyone, her dismay is that she was once rich and now isnt. Its less "I hate the forsaken" and more "I hate that I cant go home and all my fancy stuff is gone", she was a pampered posh girl before losing her family. Where she stands out from other orphans is that she was actually very good at being a stealthy rogue and just resorted to thievery as a lifestyle, she wants the riches and just takes them now, and considers herself something of a celebrity because she is wanted, when in reality she is just a minor nuisance within the city that the guards might pursue if they cared enough at the time I cant speak for Axel of course, I dont even know if the person that made them is around still. Try not to over think it, alot of the backstories are left to interpretation and speculation. me: btfo