How I Came To Be

CHARACTER HISTORY:
This is the story of Arbitrum "Artie" Oliviera (Navigator / Arcane Engineer), his sister Lucretia "Lucy" Oliveira MacEvil (Charlatan Envoy / Disreputable Realtor / Financier), and her husband Martin "Marty" MacEvil (Surgeon / Arcane Healer).
 
ORIGINS:
From childhood, Artie worked in his parent's olive orchard near Porto in the valley of the Douro River in northern Portugal. He learned practical civil engineering to build modern irrigation, homes, and storage buildings. Soon after Crossing’s Fall, he studied and graduated with an Arcane Engineering degree under Archnavigator Paag Yorsteam at Oxford University in England.
 
Growing up, Artie's younger sister, Lucretia Oliveira MacEvil, saw her older brother get absorbed into the family business and swore to avoid that fate. She learned how to do so only when she met her future husband, Marty MacEvil.
 
The Scottish MacEvil family had pursued horse trading, loan sharking, and shady property deals since before the end of the feudal system made such things legal. However, Marty was one of the more morally upright members of the family, training in the most expensive medical schools in Europe and (after Crossing’s Fall) learning the medical uses of the Aetherwave. Studying in Spain and Portugal, he met Lucretia Oliveira (a woman much like his mother) and married her. He pointed out to Lucy how much wealth could be liquidated by selling her family land.
 
THE FOOLPROOF CUNNING SCHEME(tm):
Despite her best efforts, Lucy was unable to convince her parents to sell the ancestral property, but she did convince them to mortgage it (taking out a loan from a reputable lending business) to finance Artie's inventions and improvements which increased their crops quite profitably and raised the property's dollar value tremendously.
 
She felt certain that they would thank her at the conclusion of her Foolproof Cunning Scheme(tm) to force them out of the exhausting farm and live on their wealth as aristocrats in a large city. Mortgaging the family farm was just the first step. The second step was for Lucy to use the real-estate clout of the MacEvil clan to purchase the mortgage note under her husband's name.
 
The third step of the FCS was the most cunning. Lucy pressed Marty to use the least of his magic spells. Marty McEvil showed the contract to the Oliviera family. In front of them, he summoned the Etherwave Arcana in long snaky tendrils to transform some of the ink on the contract, adding another zero to the monthly rent. No farmer could pay that much when the harvest was still growing on the trees, but the Olivieras refused to sign over the deed to him. On that first try, Marty made enemies of his in-laws and failed to grant his wife's wish. But Lucy insisted that one more bit of drama would lead to success.
 
Lucy made Marty return after the Oliviera's missed a rent payment. He cast his ink-transformation spell again to shorten the days before foreclosure in the contract. This time, Artie was incensed. Knowing a little about the Etherwave Arcana, Artie leapt into the glowing magical tendrils, intent to protect his family from another fraud. He took hold of the tentacles of Arcana with both hands and wished with all his heart that Marty MacEvil would be transformed into a chicken, no matter what the price. Amazingly, the Arcana bent ... a little ... and then a little more. Marty had been attacked by magic spells before and threw his counterspell to try to reflect the poorly-formed spell back upon its caster, which completely unraveled the original spell (of transforming ink on a page) into a completely different transformation.
 
It all went sideways. And bright. Then dark.
 
Marty awoke first and saw the Oliviera parents had been transformed. Marty had had no intention of turning the couple into wild ducks (and to this day has no idea if the process can be reversed). Knowing how angry his wife would be, he grabbed the altered mortgage contract and ran, later taking a beating when he explained the unexpected twist of fate to her. Inevitably, Lucy took the contract to the City Offices to submit a foreclosure to claim the farm and to set up an auction to sell it to the highest bidder for a handsome profit. The plan concluded with Marty and Lucy making a great deal of money, but there was no joy, as the final step of The Scheme would have been to put up her parents in an opulent flat in Madrid where they would never have to work again, but that could now never happen.
 
Artie awoke in time to see Marty fleeing on his horse. And he found his parents, now wild Mallard ducks. And Artie found something else which would change his life just as much. It was a small black notebook, fallen on the ground, apparently entitled, "This Spellbook belongs to Marty MacEvil."
 
On the bright side, Artie's parents no longer needed any more than a fresh water lake for a home. They retained most if not all of their human intelligence and gained useful animal survival instincts.
 
NOWADAYS:
Nowadays Artie realizes that the bizarrely warped spell which transformed his parents into ducks freed them from material needs, which in turn freed him to travel the world in pursuit of more and more knowledge. He returned to Oxford and earned a post-graduate degree in Navigation. Someday he will be powerful enough to reverse the transformation, if his parents and siblings even want it at that point.
 
He has come to believe that that bizarre transformation spell was sent by a secret benefactor, his future self, to put him on the right track, gaining knowledge and power faster than any adversary, until he is the one and only Supreme Sorcerer, able to hold the whole together, Earth and the Otherworld in balance, able to protect his parents and everyone else who would be harmed if the magic ever disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived. Anytime he meets with apparent bad fortune, he looks for the "silver lining", certain it is just another push toward his destiny.
 
In the mean time, Artie feels obligated to always let his father know how to contact him, which usually means leaving a message which can only be read from the sky, indicating where he plans to sail next.
 
Nowadays Artie's parents migrate north and south, checking in on their son occasionally during their travels. And now in particular (at start of game play) Artie learns from his father that he has 14 newly hatched brothers and sisters who will be adults in about four months. In person, he can see them and talk to them as if they were human, but they appear as normal ducks to most people. Artie's father will occasionally fly in and sit on Artie's shoulder and quack to him about how his mother is doing raising the new ducklings. His father also knows a great deal of territory from the sky as necessary to migrating. And he remembers a lot about farming. He claims to be able to speak to other avians and shares various trivia he has heard.
 
Nowadays, Lucy continues making money in often-shady land deals, which continues to ingratiate her to her in-laws, the MacEvil family. But the parents she still truly cares about are away and barely speaking to her. At least she lives in luxury in Madrid, even if the rest of the family won't join her in it.
 
Artie used the ink transformation spell in Marty's spellbook to create a pair of "Entangled Journals". Each day he writes of his adventures in his volume, which is magically transcribed into the volume he gave his sister. She also enters her daily details (with perhaps more candor than a budding criminal mastermind should reveal). Artie and Lucy freely share information to help each other's enterprises, except when they don't. Deep down, each would love for the other to become their obedient sidekick.
 
On a related note, Artie has learned Marty's exploitable flaw: Marty loves to flaunt his knowledge. Whenever Artie asks Lucy an innocuous question (particularly about magic or medicine) in their shared journal, Marty (who apparently reads it on a regular basis) is unable to avoid mansplaining all the details he knows, writing in the margins on all sides if necessary.
 
Today, Marty is very embarrassed at his part of the plan which went so badly. He would like nothing better than to somehow make up for the harm he caused his in-laws, but it appears nothing could heal this wound. To this day, Lucy feels certain that her husband screwed up a simple spell. Her plan was perfect. He failed to execute it properly.