I believe an explanation of each of the personalities is in order… The side panel, while useful, is very brief and does not do any of us justice. The first person I will start with is Morrigan Portalis, mostly because she has already written a post and also because I know the most about her personally. However, before I begin to write about Morrigan, I must explain the world in which she grew up.
In middle school, I had a small group of friends who were artistic and we hung out we would draw and write about characters that we would make up. Many of these characters were Anthropomorphic (or Anthro). The following picture is an example from my own art of what an Anthro is like. Basically, Anthros are animals given human qualities, such as anatomy.
As I developed the back stories of my characters, I realized I needed to make a world for them all to co-exist within, and so I made the world of Alter. The name Alter is short for "Alternate Reality," which isn't overly creative, but I couldn't find a name that suited it very well and so this name stuck. In the world of Alter, Anthros have existed as long as Humans and they have co-existed through all history. However, Anthros have been treated very poorly by Humans because of the large differences between Anthros and Humans. Anthros were more often than not treated worse than African slaves.
Today, Anthros are having a civil rights movement in the United States much like the civil rights movement in the 50-60's for Blacks. It's a very unstable and prejudiced time period for United State Anthros. I located all my characters in the United States because I knew the most about the United States and I wanted to keep my character's lives as realistic as possible. Since I did not know much about life outside the United States I did not place many of my characters outside the US.
Everything outside the fact that Anthros exist in Alter is the same there as it is here in True Reality. Places, histories, events, major people; it all exists in Alter.
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With that brief overview of Alter, I can now begin to introduce you, reader, to Morrigan Portalis.
I first met Morrigan when we were in middle school. I was angry at my dad, which wasn't an unusual thing back then, and I saw her in my mind's eye leaning against the corner of a wall desperately trying to reign in her own anger. When I saw it, I quickly sketched it down and I made a digital picture of it a day or so later. Shortly after meeting Morrigan, I began to find out about her story which is entangled with her twin, Jihan's, story.
Morrigan and Jihan's mother was an Israeli immigrant to England who met a American Navy man. Their mother became pregnant with Morrigan and Jihan, so the Navy married their mother and, when the twins were three years old, they moved them to Maine, USA. They were not living there long when the Navy man disappeared without a trace.Two years later, their father reappeared only to kidnap the twins. They were found a week and a half later in the woods of southern Maine barely alive. Morrigan could not remember what happened between being kidnapped and being found; Jihan refused to say. A few weeks later, Jihan used his father's gun to shoot and kill his mother as his father had instructed him. Though the authorities considered it an accident, Morrigan knew it was done intentionally.
Morrigan and Jihan bounced around in foster care for years afterward. Jihan's whole point to life seemed to be tormenting and terrorizing his sister. Well, that and getting her into large amounts of trouble. He was an expert at doing something and framing his sister. It was getting to the point that no one ever believed what Morrigan said because of "how much trouble" she seemed to cause. One of his favorite things to do would be to injure Morrigan and then tell the foster parents that Morrigan had gotten into another fight.
However, when they were sixteen, Morrigan met MacKenzie, a human in her grade that once caught Jihan at his shenanigans and then believed Morrigan at her word. From that moment, Morrigan and MacKenzie became great friends, though many disapproved. Needless to say, Jihan hated MacKenzie because he stole Morrigan. So Jihan waited for MacKenzie to slip up, to show himself to be an "unhealthy" friend for Morrigan.
Morrigan was heading over to MacKenzie's house on the way to ninjitsu practice, when she heard a gunshot from the direction she was going. She immediately knew that MacKenzie was in trouble and she ran full out.
Arriving at the house, Morrigan threw open the door to find Jihan standing over MacKenzie's body; a gun held loosely in his hand. Looking up, Jihan spotted his twin, "It's your fault, you know. If hadn't become his friend, this would never have happened… You should be punished." Reaching behind him, he pulled out his homemade cat-o-nine-tails and whipped Morrigan's back until the police arrested him. Jihan was charged with Murder in the First Degree and Battery. As Jihan was seventeen, he was tried and convicted as an adult and was sent to prison without parole.
Because of Morrigan's past offenses, she was considered a "lost cause" and authorities of the foster care were going to dismiss her from the program. However, the person who took on foster care cases that no one else wanted, Sierra Lime, heard of Morrigan's case and agreed to take Morrigan in.
Sierra Lime, also one of Erin's Alters, is a Feline shape-shifting Anthro that has devoted her life to helping out those that everyone has given up on. She developed a program to help teenagers receive their GED and learn to successfully live on their own. Morrigan began this program shortly after Jihan's trial was over. Morrigan decided that she wanted to learn to be a chef, so Sierra helped her find a job as a cook at a local restaurant. At eighteen, Morrigan received her GED and, after a year of working, she applied and began attending the Art Institute of Chicago for their culinary program.
Since middle school, Morrigan and I would keep in loose contact, catching up sometimes after a year or more. Her and I were not good friends; in fact, Morrigan hated me. It hasn't been until the past six months or so that she stopped hating me and, in the past three months she's learned to tolerate me. When it was confirmed that I had Multiple Personality Disorder, I told her that I thought she was an Alter, but she wouldn't have any of it. She insisted that both realities were real, or that my reality was false and hers was real. It took a while, but even she began to notice the difference between her reality and this Reality… How this Reality didn't have fuzzed out faces and sounds, how everything here is clear and distinct and very real feeling. And after speaking with Sierra, she became convinced that this Reality is the true one.
So, she stopped attending the Art Institute and began watching this Reality, trying to get used to it. I know that she mentions why she watches in her entry, "Maybe."
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This is a summery of Morrigan's history. This does not sum up who she is, but it is the beginning of understanding where she came from. If you understand her history, you can understand why she thinks the way she does.
As for her purpose as Erin's Alter, she catches the overflow of Yomi's negative emotions. Morrigan once described it as a bowl placed under a cup. The cup has water being poured into it, but, eventually, the cup is full, but the water is still being poured. So the bowl under the cup catches the overflow. She catches and keeps the overflow of my anger, hatred, disappointment, grief, depression, and any other negative emotion possible.
According to Jihan, Morrigan is my distrust and suspicion of people in order that I might trust and believe the people I meet every day. He also says that Morrigan is a secret-keeper. This has shown to be true recently, though it is less discovering secrets as it is revealing information about the Black Room.
Honestly, of all the personalities, Morrigan is one that I thoroughly enjoy talking and interacting with the most. She might be a bit rough and, more often than not, she's a complete jerk but for the most part we get along alright; I enjoy her company as she watches and comments on my life.
--Yomi
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Morrigan Marking Chart
