Mackenzie Marjorie Mihangle was born in 1981 into a loving family in Indianapolis, IN. She was the younger of two siblings, having Griffin Owain as an older brother. She was extremely close to her brother and her father, but at the same time she never quite had the ‘tomboy’ lifestyle. She enjoyed climbing trees and camping, every now and again, but she also enjoyed baking and playing dress up. It started with princess dresses from Toys R’ Us and an easy bake oven, and graduated into girl scouts. As she aged, she became quite close to her brother. Often she would cling to his legs when she was younger, in her pretty ‘Made In China’ dresses, and look up to him. Daddy built her a treehouse, and she would drag her big brother up there to have tea parties with imaginary tea and cookies that she and her mother would make.
Holidays were always Marjorie’s favorite time. She loved scary little things, like ghosts and spiders. Halloween was always a joy - not for the candy but for the decorations and the spooky stories. Her brother or father would read The Headless Horseman to her by Washington Irving as soon as the first leaves started to change. And after that came Thanksgiving, when the men of the family would sit around and smoke and watch football and talk and laugh while the women would gossip and gaggle in the kitchen all day. Marjorie loved her place there, helping to stir at first but growing into the role of cooking as she grew older. And Christmas? Forget it, with those smells and the decorations. She loved putting up the tree and the lights and making little gingerbread men cookies. Yes, Marjorie was an old-timey type of girl, even from a young age.
At the age of 7, Marjorie ran around, telling everyone that her name wasn’t Mackenzie, that was a man’s name. She was Marjorie, her middle name. It sounded like a pretty girl’s name, not a little boy’s name. Most of her family laughed at her at first, then grudgingly obliged, if just to shut her up. But she never asked for it to change, and ever since then she’s introduced herself as Marjorie. Only her family tends to fall back to their old ways and her old name.
As she grew older, Marjorie came to enjoy school. It didn’t start that way - all of Kindergarden and 1st Grade her father had to scootch her out the door, because she wanted to stay home and make crafts or cookies or the like.
She was a popular enough girl in school, never really fitting into any specific social group, but instead moving from one to the other. Her grades were steady enough, although maths and sciences never seemed to do so well as her history and english grades. However, as the second child, she was always competing with the first - the competition may not have been intentional, but it was something that could not be avoided. While her grades were steady, they never really measured up to Griffin’s. She played soccer, but was never the athlete that her brother had been. None the less, it never really bothered her. She was content in her life with her father and brother and occasionally her mother, who Marjorie was not as close with. As for Griffin’s longtime girlfriend, Cindy always made Marjorie a little uncomfortable, her being in that popular crowd that was just a little too cliquey to allow a younger social-hopper into her life. But she was happy, and she always looked up to her brother.
When Griffin started high school and music, little Marjorie wanted to be just like him. She picked up piano lessons, and found that she had a real talent for it. That was where she met her first crush, Michael. He was a few years older and he played cello. He was a gentle soul and a polite boy, and the first time he held her hand, she got goosebumps. Griffin never particularly cared for Michael and gave him a difficult time of it every now and again. But the boy stayed with Marjorie for quite awhile.
By the time she was in high school, Marjorie was emulating both Michael and Griffin, studying piano and cello and running track. Her brother and herself drifted apart a little, as it happens when one moves away to college. She built her own life - with her own circle of friends and her own life. Still, the siblings talked almost daily.
Marjorie began to grow up. She became fond of bright red lipstick, and dresses that were circa 1940s and 1950s. She never really got on the coffee train, but she drank a great deal of tea. Every Friday she’d bake sweets for her class, and having cooked and baked her whole life with her family, she was very good at it. A regular Betty home-maker. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone - it was as though she were growing into the bright red pumps that she had always been wearing.
She lost her virginity at 16 after the junior prom to Michael. It was the first thing that she ever avoided telling her brother, who was now married to Cindy and living his own life nearby. IT was a fact of life that Griffin would never have approved of his sister knowing about. She enjoyed it, of course. There were no ill-feelings toward the experience afterward. And she was always very, very careful not to get pregnant.
She got a job after schools working at a cupcake shop, which were just starting to come into fad around that time. She learned how to make a cupcake every which way from sunday. She loved it - it required all of her culinary skills. Her favorite? Nutella cupcakes, which were chocolate cupcakes, with nutella baked inside. They would be topped with a creamy hazelnut icing, with shreds of godiva and hazelnut powder drizzled over them.
The two stayed together through high school. Marjorie graduated happily enough, in a cap and gown for all her family to see. However, college had no appeal to her, and she stayed at home and instead decided to work full-time at the cupcake shop. Michael, however, had a calling as a lawyer, and he went off to a large east-coast school. They tried to stay together, but after the first year the distance became too much, and Marjorie let her first fade into the distance. There was a little sadness, but she understood that Michael was a part of her old life, and life goes on and on.
After all, Cindy was pregnant by then, and soon she’d have a little nephew to love enough. She was smart enough not to want a kid of her own.
As a year passed of working in the cupcake shop - she had become the manager of the little mom-and-pop location in her years of working there - Cindy became pregnant. The baby was born, and for the first month or so Marjorie was happy enough to spend time over there, helping care for the baby. She always thought that Cindy seemed a little cold and distant to the child, and as it came to be noticed, her husband as well. After a whole month of almost living in Griffin and Cindy’s house, the tension got to be too much for her to bear, and she came less and less until she came not at all. That was just in time for Griffin to murder his wife.
Ironically enough, her ability did not manifest itself during this time, but this was by far the biggest change in her life. Griffin apparently ripped apart his wife with his bare hands and confessed to everything, going to jail and being held there. But Marjorie would never see him there - within a day, he was taken to a ‘government facility’ and was lost for all intents and purposes. Marjorie could never understand how it would happen - he wouldn’t, and he didn’t have the strength. But her distrust of the government was born and festered in the disappearance of her brother. Never again would she trust ‘big brother’. Never again would she trust the legal system, a system that would have proved her brother incapable of the crimes he had been arrested for - never mind that he testified. Something was fishy, and Uncle Sam was at fault. Else why would they have taken away her brother? Why would they have left little Owain, only 5 months old at the time, an orphan?
Marjorie continued to work every day, using her evenings to call different agencies and cops, trying to find her brother. However, her time was quickly usurped - within a few months, the strain of the event broke her family. Her mother wanted to destroy Griffin’s name from the family, let him be gone and never return again. Marjorie and her father were on Griffin’s side, however, saying that it was impossible that he did this and that he should come home, because he would be welcomed. Within a year, the pair split, leaving Marjorie holding the bag - and the baby.
The mom and pop cupcake shop, realizing that Marjorie was in a pickle, gave her a raise and let her live in the small apartment above their shop. They were a good pair, those two. From then on, her clothes and hair always smelled sweet, and the baby got a little pudgy on nummies. She found herself, at 20, a single mother of an orphaned child that she raised as her own. It was hard, but she managed, painting his room and giving him what toys she could. She found much more joy in making things for him. She made his play dough, she made some of his shirts and sweaters. She had always enjoyed crafts, and the fact that the owners of the cupcake shop were so good to her made it easier - she never had to get a sitter. Owain was always with her. He was her world - everything she did, she did for him. She had always been a support role in the household, and she took to that role quite actively in Owain. However, it wasn’t until he was two that she finally developed her own ability.
One day, he was outside on the street playing with a basketball when the ball rolled into the street. He knew better than to go and get it himself, but this time he did. Marjorie, lucky enough to see him do this from the shop window, immediately ran outside. But it was too late. A small four door was going right for the boy with no time to stop and no time for anyone to intervene. But Marjorie managed anyway. She lifted her hand and reached out, as though her hand alone could stop what was about to happen. But, as it happened, her hand could stop what was about to happen. Both palms glowed a yellowish color, and the car hit a wall - an invisible (or almost invisible) wall around the boy in the street. It messed up the front end something horrible, but Owain was safe. She had raised a force field to protect him. The driver couldn’t tell you what happened, except that he didn’t run over a kid. No one really asked any questions.
It didn’t take Marjorie long to figure out what had happened to her brother. She could do this ‘magic’, so too must he. No wonder the government took him away! She vowed that she would never disappear as her brother had, and that she would protect Owain if it became necessary.
Owain finally went off to school, and Marjorie had just enough time to pick up a hobby. She dated once or twice, but a young woman with a child is not the most appetizing for young men. Instead, she picked up candle-making - the perfect hobby. It takes about an hour of work and 15 hours of setting, so that she could use her hour and the rest of the time could be spent at the cupcake shop, or raising the child. Like all other home-maker crafts, she seemed to do very well with it. It was about this time when news of the evolved broke the cable channels. Marjorie wasn’t stunned - she was afraid. She was terrified. The government was going to take control, they were going to make people disappear again. Or worse. She clung to Owain physically and metaphorically. He never rode the bus - she walked him home every day. Sometimes she would call the school, just to make sure he was still there. They took his father - what was stopping them from taking him to? He was her child now, he called her mama, and she wasn’t going to lose him. Why else would she be able to shield things from harm if not to protect her son?
But things were changing, and rapidly. By the time Owain was 10, registration for Evos and non-Evos was required. Marjorie was torn. If she had been on her own, she’d have run. She’d never let them test her, or register her. But she had Owain to think about, and he needed a life beyond running. So she registered herself and him. To her worst fears, Owain turned out to be Evolved, though he was not yet manifested, so there was no way to know what would happen. She, too, was Evolved, and admitted it freely. They were registered, and she sat up all night beside Owain’s bed, terrified about what might happen if she fell asleep.
All of this brought rushing back the fear and uncertainty over the brother she had not seen in 10 years. While picking up Owain from school one day, she could have sworn she saw him in a crowd…but it was probably her imagination. (In truth, he had started to sneak back to watch his son at recess.) But she decided that she had been foolish not to try harder to find him. She hired a PI, who took all the information she could give, including a picture. It was luck that the PI apparently saw Griffin at the school, and followed him to New York.
She followed. Owain and Marjorie picked up and moved to New York. She would have liked to just fly out and see Griffin herself, but she was a mother, and to be honest moving away from the place where Griffin had been stolen from amidst all the Registration made her feel a little easier. So to New York she went. She set up her boy in school, started selling her candles online and taught piano to those in this economy who could still afford it. And when Owain was good and comfortable here, she went out after Griffin.
