Appearance:
Name: Morrigan Faye

Age: 17

Gender: Female

Personality: Morrigan in both her guises is a bit of a firebrand. While she has a kind heart her reaction to what she sees as cruelty and injustice often results in her going off half-cocked and starting a fight. Usually she wins, but especially in her student guise it tends to cause more trouble than it solves. She's developed a reputation as a hellraiser, a troublemaker. There's a lot of anger and pent-up aggression in her, and it's probably a good thing she has the Crusader to give her a means of releasing some of that rage. She's a tomboy and a loner, more inclined to go out for hockey than cheerleading, and more likely to go out for neither. Since taking up the guise of the Crusader her loner tendencies have increased.

Hero Appearance:

Hero name: Crusader

Powers: After performing her transformation ritual Morrigan becomes obscured by gold light. When it fades she is encased in a full suit of medieval-style gold armor from head to toe, including a massive visored helm (she also appears significantly older when the helm is off.) This armor is functional and incredibly resilient to attack, shielding her body from both physical and supernatural attack to an impressive degree. In addition her physical strength is greatly increased. While not outside the realm of normal for Humans she gains the kind of strength expected of a heavyweight boxer rather than the significantly smaller woman she is, and she has remarkable endurance as well. The armor is surprisingly light, resulting in her maintaining her natural speed and dexterity in it. The Sword is where her true power lies, though. In her hands she is empowered with the skill of the past wielder or wielders - she isn't quite sure - who were masters of the form in their time. In addition the blade bursts into red flames, and possesses supernatural abilities that grant it the ability to harm paranormal beings. It is especially hateful to the walking dead, demons, and other beings incarnated of evil.

A recent battle caused her to discover a new facet of her abilities. By thrusting The Sword into a pool of water she can summon a water spirit in the form of a horse, a creature that calls itself Kelpie, and allows her to ride it. Kelpie is extremely fast and very manueverable, although effectively useless in battle, and once she dismounts she must find a large enough body of water to re-summon Kelpie. A bathtub isn't enough, but even a small swimming pool is more than enough.

Transforming item: The Sword (name pending as soon as she thinks of a good one), a four foot, double-edged longsword (see above). To transform Morrigan kneels with her forehead against the pommel and the tip against the ground and says, "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Amen."

History: Morrigan Faye spent most of her childhood in and out of foster homes across the country. While good-hearted she had a pattern of causing trouble and of having trouble follow her, more than her prospective parents were willing to take, and so she bounced around within the system, home to home, orphanage to orphanage, until she finally landed with the Beckett family. The Becketts, an older couple whose children were already grown, accepted Morrigan for her chaotic behavior and poor luck and were able to tame the girl's nature to some extent. That was fortunate, because that was about when It happened.

It being her first encounter with Her. Morrigan has bad luck with names, and is even worse at making them up. Her being a strange, pale-skinned woman with dark hair, clad in a gray robe. She seemed to know Morrigan already, and somehow the girl trusted her. The woman led her to a lake before vanishing, and something about the lake called to Morrigan. As she waded in, curious, a hand rose up from the lake bearing a shining sword. Morrigan was naturally taken aback as the blade was pressed into her hands, and somehow seemed to stick there as though it was where it was supposed to be. The girl quickly beat a retreat, but as she returned to the home from her long, strange walk she noticed she still had the sword.

Fortunately the Becketts were out at the time, or she would have had the awkward task of explaining why it was she had a sword. She hid the weapon, but found herself studying it when she had the chance, drawing it from the hiding place in the rolls of blankets under her bed to look at it, then spending her days off walking with it, practicing with it in the woods where she had first encountered the woman, first found the blade.

The more she handled the blade the more strange things began to happen. The sword rapidly became familiar to her, like an extension of herself, and she found the weight easy to handle, almost second nature to control. Then, caught up in a fit of imagination and urged on by the strange will of the sword, she knelt, and whispered the words. That was when things started getting really strange as she transformed for the first time.