Morgan - eo ✦✦✦✦

Instructions

⇢ ˗ˏˋ bio ࿐ྂ Name: Morgan Gender: Female [she/her] Species: Animated Quilt Cat [sapient] Physical Design Notes: The blue patterns, "socks" and pink side are stitched on. The eyes are glass. Physical Age: 1 Mental Age: 6 [when she was created she was 5] Story: [TW loss/death/spookish stuff] Morgan lives with her mother in a cottage deep in the woods. Mother knows all the animals and how to trade with them. She trades vegetables to the deer for milk and seeds to the birds for eggs and spare feathers. She has a garden with flowers and herbs of every type. She cooks and mushes and mixes them into bottles. "Each can serve a different purpose," Mother explains, "this one will heal you if you are sick, this one will darken your hair, this one will take grass stains out of cloth." Every once in a while, Mother goes away. She packs up her bottles and jars and some metal coins into a small wagon she keeps by the house and goes out into the forest. She never tells Morgan where she's going, she just says to stay at home and wait. Mother returns in two nights. She brings back coins and flour and yeast and sugar, sometimes tools or thread or other things that will be helpful. Sometimes she brings back something new for Morgan to play with. Soon Morgan figures out that Mother is trading, just like she does with the animals in the forest. She trades with sick creatures, creatures who want darker hair or cleaner clothes; creatures who want shiny metal coins. Morgan thinks she wants to meet these creatures, but Mother always tells her to stay home. Ever since Morgan was first brought to life, she noticed that the house was built for someone else. Why were there two chairs in the kitchen, and two wardrobes in Mother's room? That second chair wasn't built for a cat, it was built for another Mother. Morgan began to fear that she was made the wrong way. That she was supposed to be another creature like Mother instead of a cat. Was that why she wasn't allowed to meet the creatures deep in the forest that Mother traded with? Mother used to have a picture on the table by her bed. It was a picture of her and another girl, a second Mother-creature. Morgan asked about it, but Mother only said she's "somewhere else". Mother seemed upset, so Morgan stopped asking about Mother-creatures after that. The picture is gone now, too, although Morgan knows it was just moved inside a drawer. One day Morgan is walking in the clearing around the house and sees a bird. It's lying still, a cold stone in the grass. She calls over Mother. Mother sighs sadly as she sees the bird. "It's dead," she says, "it got too sick or too hurt or too old, and its body stopped working for it. Now its spirit has gone somewhere else." "That's sad." "Yes. But now other animals can eat it, and the plants here will grow better. The forest couldn't live if things didn't die. That's the trade-off." Morgan turns around and goes back into the house. She climbs the stairs and slithers through the door to Mother's room and jumps onto the bed. She opens the drawer with the picture in it. The girl in the picture must have died too. That's why Mother made Morgan: to replace her. But something had gone wrong. Now the second chair in the kitchen is never pulled away from the table and the second wardrobe in the bedroom is never opened, and when Morgan curls up to sleep next to Mother the bed is almost half empty. Morgan is a cat. She wasn't supposed to be a cat.