Spotlight on the Morgan Sisters

Courtesy of Bjorn



Mort Morgan had a dream: set up a thriving potion workshop in a big city, become rich, pass on the business to his sons. Unfortunately, he was a terrible artificer, so he had to set up shop in Dog Leg (killing the first two goals in one sweep), and his wife died giving birth to a daughter, Bayve, so over his misogynistic impulses he started training her early to take over the family business. When Bayve was about ten, Mort vanished for a couple of weeks while out gathering potion ingredients. When he came back, he had a child. He never explained where the child came from, or even gave her a name, so she was only known as the Foundling Morgan.

Some kids might resent the sudden appearance of a younger sibling, but Bayve could see the big picture: it was somebody else to take over her dad's damn shop. When it became clear that all the supernatural death and corruption that seemed to follow Foundling around also meant she was actually pretty good at magic, Bayve saw her way clear to follow her dream: get the hell out of Dog Leg and never look back.

The obvious path to glory/escape for someone with no real plans was to enlist in a battle against the Pirate Kingdoms. The recruiting sergeant, faced with a puny example of a filthy half-breed race, chose the obvious option and assigned her to a front-line unit with expected 80% casualties. It was during that battle that Bayve figured out how to smash someone's face in telekinetically, and so to everyone's surprise she was a) the most effective soldier in the battle and b) not dead at the end of it. In the eyes of high command, she'd gone from being a freak to being a DOUBLE freak with potential use, so they put her in yet another spearhead unit. This started off a cycle in which Bayve would get attached to a unit, that unit would be wiped out, but Bayve would survive. The only difference between Morgan and a crow, the rank and file muttered, was that Morgan showed up early for the slaughter.

When the war finally ended, Crow needed a new career that involved never having to move back to Dog Leg, so she decided to become a travel writer, and not stop until she'd seen the whole world. Unfortunately, a certain direct mindset, violent tendencies, and a bit of bad luck means her carefully kept notes tend to consist of "Nice trees, weather unpleasant, smashed some bastard's face in for summoning ghouls," which hasn't received great critical appeal. Still, she did a good job of the travelling and becoming a hard bastard.

In contrast to Crow's more free-wheeling approach, Foundling's goal in life has been pretty simple: get overwhelming magical power. She would nod through the days as her father explained how to make a potion of healing using grapefruit juice, and then spend the nights summoning fey spirits and making bargains for power. This was a starting point, but Foundling had quickly realized that the key to power wasn't making bargains to borrow part of someone's magic; you had to steal everything from them instead. To carry out this, she needed money, and hiring herself out as mad wizard to Chops et al was the easiest way to go about it.

Since getting back from the East, Foundling has been locked away in her father's old lab (she kicked him out), doing something to get power not dependent on magic items or infernal favours -- whatever it is, it's led to every house within five hundred yards being abandoned. The first person to see her in person since Foundling got back to Dog Leg was Crow, who having finally used up all her money on her travels, had come to ask her sister for some help. The sisters get on fairly well, being cut out of the same kill-you-if-you're-in-my-way cloth, so Foundling wrote a letter of introduction to Chops, reconsidered, then enchanted it with Magic Mouth.