Mogen

Mogen facts

 * Used cart saleswoman
 * Not into: weak ale, religion, men
 * Speaks Ignan well enough to be understood by an air elemental
 * Choose your weapon: kukri, gun, or the wheels of steel
 * Favorite breakfast is crab blintzes

Appearance
Mogen is 5'2" when standing to her full height, but is usually seen either hunched over a tower shield that has been modified into a wheeled crutch or seated in her awesome wheelchair that she designed herself. The chair has four wheels and looks kind of like a Mars rover, but has a chassis that can rotate to balance on two wheels when she wants to take the stairs or just look some sweaty-faced dipshit in the eye and say "you sure 'bout that, pal?" She has olivine-specked hazel eyes and a swarthy complexion (is that racist?? I mean "Italian-American") and she wears her silver-streaked black hair back in a greased pompadour. Her thick, dark sideburns come down just past her shoulders in two messy Dwarven braids. Mogen typically eschews formal clothes for the practical comfort of oil-stained overalls and work boots, but she has been known to wear a tailored suit now and again.

Backstory
Mogen was born in Sharn to Dogen Dower and Hurik Glain, the middle of at least three children. Her childhood was comfortable and complete with the privileges of middle class: Mogen received a private education in Khorvaire's largest city, and with her brains and curiosity was poised for a successful career as a public servant, banker, lawyer... Instead, Mogen blew off class constantly, preferring to spend her time in a dingy warehouse with a group of artists and artisans from all around the city calling themselves the Makers Coop, creating Rube Goldberg machines and disassembling magical items. She fought with her parents constantly. They were grooming her to be a woman of letters, but Mogen saw the city and knew that she lived in a world of things! Things that moved! Things that were made of parts! Things that quite often exploded in her face! As her grades tanked, Mogen and her friends tinkered, learning through experimentation generalizable principles of energy exchange, matter manipulation and chemical reactions, and realizing that knowledge wasn't something you kept locked up in books and bestowed on the blessed few, but rather something you wrested from the rocky soil of iterative failure and successive approximation.

Mogen was kicked out of her elite private school for failing to show up to her final exams. Her parents were predictably furious. How could such a bright girl, with so much promise, having been given such a head start, with the sacrifices they had made, blah blah blah... Mogen tried to reason with them: couldn't they enroll her in a trade school? This made them even more furious. Trade school? A Glain, rubbing greasy elbows with the scions of piss-alley blacksmiths and hobgoblin cobblers, and well I never, and no daughter of mine, and so Mogen decided to leave home. It was to be the first of many such departures. At first, Mogen shacked up at her fellow Makers' homes, but she did not want to overextend her welcome. She spent a couple nights in the warehouse, but found it drafty and unsafe. So, she left Sharn.

Mogen had become convinced that the problem with her parents was that they had lost touch with their Dwarven roots. Dwarves are makers, not middle managers! Her parents had spent so much time internalizing the bullshit the humans heaped on them that they had begun to develop a taste for it. And Sharn, a city defined by literal stratification... Mogen had to go somewhere completely different, somewhere where people sought riches deep in the earth, not up in the clouds. And so she set a course for the Mror holds, the ancestral lands of her people, on a quest to discover who she truly was.

And, of course, the Mror Holds being on the other side of Khorvaire and across several active conflict zones in the middle of the greatest armed conflict in the recorded history of the continent, so... yeah. She made it as far as Wroat and spent several months getting wasted and sleeping around before returning to Sharn.

Determined to make something, and to make something of herself, Mogen tried apprenticing for several established artisans in the city, including a cobbler, a cooper, and wainwright, but found the work dull and monotonous, while each of her would-be masters found her irregular hours and eclectic modifications impossible to work with. Mogen couldn't hold down a job, and so couldn't afford rent in Sharn, and so returned to the Glain homestead, where her parents welcomed her with open arms.

For a time, Mogen was settled. She found a job tending bar at a dive in Menthis, and spent her free time at the Coop. She was happy, but she soon began to get restless again. The war, long finished in Sharn, dragged on in Cyre, and every day piled onto the endless list of dead. Whether it was out of a sense of moral obligation or boredom, Mogen made the decision to enlist in the First Royal Infantry Corps. As long as men were dying on the battlefield, Mogen reasoned, she could not live a comfortable life safe behind the city walls.

When she told her parents what she had done, they forbade Mogen from leaving the house, but this made Mogen even more determined to go. Hurik, himself a veteran who had stopped talking about the war before Mogen was born, pulled every favor he had and handed Mogen an official invitation to study at the Officer Training Academy in Wroat. "The war is all but over, Mogen," he pleaded, "Don't throw yourself at the meat grinder for nothing!" But Mogen was intractable, and snuck out at first light one morning to boot camp.

Mogen never got to see the front. To prepare for an obstacle course involving climbing up a vertical wall, Mogen created a pair of alchemically enhanced boots to try to increase her jump height and traction. She had taken more time than she expected in acquiring the parts, so she only had a couple hours the morning before the obstacle course to test and fine-tune the boots. The right boot worked fine, but a mana resistor on the inside of the left boot shorted just as the evocators were firing, and the resulting blast crippled her leg instantly, rendering it completely immobile. Because of the weird magical nature of the accident, none of the combat clerics at the camp were able to restore limb function, and the crucial time window closed quickly before anything could be done to save Mogen's leg. Mogen was reassigned and would spend the remainder of the war on an assembly line, attaching warforged knees.

The war's end brought little comfort to Mogen. She returned home in shame to rebuild her life. Mogen found a job as an office clerk at a warehouse in Fishgut, and eventually earned enough to afford rent in Lower Menthis. And nothing interesting would ever happen to Mogen again...

Related Materials

 * Letter to Mogen - Letter from Yanger to Mogen, written during midsummer 998 YK.