Morgana Wordeni

The Never Ending Quest - Episode 7829

The hooded female figure looks around at the curious gathering of Star Fleet officers, and nods.

"Let me guess," Rugen, her husband, says with a chuckle in his voice. "Never saw an elf before?"

Mute nods show this to be true. Some look like they'd like to wake up now...or be told that this is all a joke. After all, this is a universe without magic in it, right? RIGHT?!

Actually it is, but unlike Terra Prime's version of elves, she and Rugen were two species of elves (actually an entirely different set of races that only shared the same name) that didn't need magic in order to survive.

Morganna pauses, remembering this morning what had happened......


On a distant parallel world, in 179's jurisdiction, an elfin lady is reflecting on how she came to be here.....

She smiled at the middle aged historian, Erin Tarn. The lady had been eager to see Morganna, and Morganna had been eager to meet the learned lady. After a pleasant conversation, the topic had drifted to her origins.

So, Morganna complied:

Just another day of life. Another day needed to adapt to new things.

However, I will be the last elf to complain about how things change, considering how much I had to change....to adapt.

Adaptation is a dirty word in many of my peers minds, sad to say. They fear it. They want the endless, unaltered rhyme they enjoyed before the appearance of the New race. The race of elf always had a slightly condescending view on the other races, but no real.....dare I say it.....fear of them. Human are different. They are short lived, but they are VERY energetic and aggressive. They have gone out and settled lands that we elves had called impossible to settle. And let's not mention the alarming rise in the threat they pose......

But then again, if one doesn't adapt, one is doomed to be left behind....to fade.

My mother gave me that, and I consider her wise indeed. Much wiser and more intelligent....more far sighted than many of mothers of elfin children. This is ironic, for my mother was of the very race that elves called the most short sighted race of the land! You see, my mother was human...and died a human well before I matured (by elven standards) at around 100 years.

I and my father grieved, though we knew it had to happen. The average human just lives a fraction of life compared to elves.

Ah, but you wonder how it is that I, an elf, could be of "pure blood" if my mother was human? Well, when my mother met my father, a mage with a fondness for exotic pets/servants had captured my mother, and used the spell called "Polymorph other" to change her into an elf. My father came along and bested the mage in the most honored of elfin thieves methods. He stabbed him in the back.

Now, admittedly that would horrify a paladin what my father did.....but my father was no paladin. When one goes up against a powerful.....and dangerous opponent.....one without much in the way of morals (else my mother would not have bee slated to become his newest pet....an elven pet)......one doesn't fight fair (unless one wishes to die....or worse). There was nothing he could do for the other, heartbroken servants. The course of the magical spell had ran too long, and the very mentality of the altered creatures had become that of the forms they now wore. In other words, they had forgotten the form they had been born to....believing instead to have always been thus....even if they couldn't remember anything before becoming their new....selves.

When my father came across my mother, chained to a wall and naked, he inadvertently found out after freeing her that the wizard had placed a very POWERFUL infatuation spell....a love spell....on my mother. To make a rather......er.....touchy story clean, let us just leave it that my mother was very persuasive with my father. Thus, I was conceived.

Soon, my mother gained enough sense to beg father to transform her back to human. Father, aghast at the truth, knowing what would happen eventually if the spell upon my mother ran it's course was able to pull out a magic scroll he'd saved for special magical obstacles. A "Dispell Magic" spell does wonders on certain magical traps, and it also was the proscribed remedy to the spell upon my mother.....as the lore that my father diligently forced me to learn in later years. It didn't cure my mother of her infatuation, nor did it cure her of ME. The transformation should have aborted my existence then and there, but I survived....much to my parents surprised.

They had been expecting a half elf when I entered the world, screaming my little lungs out!

That was a sign of things to come. My life always had been different, and continues to be so. I was more aggressive by far than my elfin counterparts, and hey found that I didn't handle slights very well. Many a lad or lass found themselves bloody and bruised after slighting my mother or father.....or me. I was something of what is now known as a "Tomboy" and it grew out of that that I should combine the calling of my father, a thief, with the calling of my mother, a warrior.

"I....see....." Tarn says slowly....trying not to fidget....to check her belongings.

I chuckle and shake my head.

"I don't steal from those who are my guest....nor did I ever do that to those who didn't deserve it," I smile. "see, back in the time I was still new to the art....there were plenty of targets who deserved to be taken.....for their gold to be distributed back to those who they squeezed. Thus it was for me....my father....and his mother before that! See, we only steel from the rich, and give to the poor....and a little something for ourselves because we always needed to make end and all that....."

"An elfin Robin Hood?" Erin asks, eyes lighting up at the image. It would go with what she had heard of this unusual elfin lady....

"If you wish....though I was.....asleep when and if that ever really happened," Morganna says.

I soon joined a local Thieves guild in a prosperous town in what I now know as Scandinavia, for the thief without a guild is a rogue awaiting a knife in the back. There I plied my trade, earning a few comments about my odd habit's but nothing I found insufferable. Considering that I'd earned my mother's short temper, that was a good thing!

A few years into my trade, I crossed paths with a rather unusual group of adventurers that needed my talents....though they had a rogue in the party much more skilled than I at the time. They needed an extra person good with a sword....and good with lockpicks. They were on a quest to return some type of holy item to a sacred sight or such, but as fate would have it, we soon received the unwanted attention of a tin plated godling with nothing better to do than bully us into a mission HE wanted us to do! I know not of what the ohters were to do, but I found myself quested to retrieve some type of sacred book from a sight with the Negative Plane, a dimension of vampires and other evil undead....a place that was adverse to all living creatures. Only a family heirloom, Pi, powered by special magical substances called Black Crystals, would protect me. With a large supply of that...along with a Dark Beast summoned to be my mount.....I was sent to retrieve the book. However, I fell victim to a malfunction of my item, and instead was put into a state of suspended animation, buried under fifty feet of earth in a land that would one day become Richard Scabower Air Force Base, a small military base in the now vanished state of Missouri. In what was the United States of America.

"Don't you mean the American Empire?" Tarn asks, intrigued.

"They never called themselves that," Morganna corrected Tarin gently, shaking her head slightly inside the folds of her cloaked head. "In fact, few actual empires existed at the time of the coming of the Rifts....I wasn't there, but I know of somebody that was....He can tell you all about the Time of Man, if you don't mind us going off on a tangent like this?"

Erin's eyes grow wide at the thought. Modest and generous though she was....she felt a stab of what could only be described as desire hit her. A desire that all Rogue Scholars shared. With the coming of the Rifts, so much information of the past had been lost.

There had been a Golden Age before the coming of the Rifts. Mankind, somewhere in the 21rst century.....

The answer is written all over Erin's face. The elfin lady smiled and pulled out something.....

Morgana pulls out something that looks like an old fashioned toaster, and begins....to speak to it! Erin Tarn suddenly wonders if the elf has lost her mind! Then.......

"Archie, you awake in there?" Morganna asks in a sweet, mocking voice.

"Of course, Morganna," Archie 3, prototype AI with frustrated desires for world conquest sighs.

  1. "Please....let's start with a....timeline?" Erin whispers, hardly able to keep the excitement within.
  2. To cut to the chase, however, click here.....

Add New Option

Go Back

View Forward Story Tree
View Back Story Tree

Display All 2 Links to this Episode


MSG

2/26/2000 6:49:31 PM

Linking Enabled

Extending Enabled

The Never Ending Quest Home

Extend-A-Story Home

21321458 episodes viewed since 9/30/2002 1:22:06 PM.

Do not click me.