Post by Styx on Sept 25, 2013 22:34:46 GMT -8
((As it has been requested by a few people, I'm posting the background for Tiberius; In his original incarnation he was named Morgan Stern, and I never went back and changed his name in the history, so when it mentions Morgan it's referring to Tiberius. There is also an Origin story for Tiberius, which I will post if people want to read it, which goes into much greater detail about his history.))
Morgan Stern was born September 2nd, 1666, the day of the Great Fire of London. A mid-wife delivered him at roughly the same time that the Fire erupted. Both his parents presumably died in the blaze, and he survived because the mid-wife escaped with him in her arms. She left him at an orphanage later on, with wild stories of how his birth had been unnatural. He had an extremely rough childhood and was constantly told that he was the Devil's child, that his birth had been the cause of the fire. Eventually, he not only grew to believe it, but to accept it. And when he did, he discovered that, as others grew more afraid of him, he enjoyed their fear more and more. Not just their fear, but their suffering.
Through his teen years, he always felt that some larger force, something dark and forbidding, was guiding him through his life. Believing as he did that he was a child of the Devil or even the Devil himself, he found this comforting and threw himself into the study of the occult, and of the most arcane artifacts, legends, and powers he could learn of. He began travelling, seeking more and more knowledge and power wherever he went, and he would do whatever he felt was the bidding of his dark 'masters'.
In the summer of 1688, when Morgan was 22, he heard of the legends of Black Shuck, a ghostly black hound said to have once haunted a church in Bungay, a small town in Suffolk, East Anglia, England. He travelled there to seek out the hound, but upon learning that an exorcism had taken place and apparently destroyed the hound, he grew enraged. Before he left the town, he set a few fires that succeeded in destroying most of Bungay.
On April 9th 1691, Morgan was a visitor to the Palace of Whitehall. After viewing some of the art pieces that were currently on display, he decided to steal one of them, Michelangelo's 'Cupid', and he set the fire that destroyed much of the palace and the art in order to conceal the fact that he had stolen. His plan worked perfectly, as history records that 'Cupid' was also destroyed in the fire.
Morgan was present in Salem on March 1st, 1692, when the Salem Witch trials began. He faked being one of the Inquisitors in order to speak privately to the women on trial, and gleaned knowledge from them about the Worshippers of Lilith. He also learned of the existence of a pagan idol that was said to hold the powers of Darkness. The Idol was supposedly in Jamaica, so he left Salem for it's distant shores.
on June 7th, 1692, Morgan, who had arrived in Port Royal, Jamaica several weeks prior, discovered the idol he was seeking. Communicating with the evil inside, he agreed to do it's bidding and performed a sacrifice of two young virginal girls. Released by Morgan's ritual, the force inside caused a massive earthquake and 3 resultant tidal waves, destroying Port Royal and submerging a major part of it. Morgan was left unscathed, and in awe of what he had witnessed.
In 1696, Morgan discovered a famine spirit bound to a stone jar while travelling across Finland. He was able to free the spirit, and subsequently almost one third of Finland's population was destroyed by a famine, which also destroyed one fifth of Estonia's population.
It was during this trip that he discovered the existence of vampires, and hired a handful of men to help him capture the vampire he was interested in. The capture resulted in the death of all but one of the men beside Morgan, but by employing methods of torture, as well as beign a masterful liar, he was able to glean information from the vampire on what it was. Promising to release it if it shared it's power with him, Morgan enabled his own self-embrace, but once the act was completed and he was made vampire he killed the remaining man and diablerized his own sire.
In May of 1697, Morgan made a trip to Stockholm to investigate the rumours of a rare occult manuscript that was supposedly being kept in the library of the "Tre Kronor" castle. He found the rumours to be true, and tried unsuccessfully to purchase the manuscript from it's owner. May 7th, 1697, a fire mysteriously burned the castle to the ground, destroying a large portion of the library as well. The manuscript was "lost" in the blaze, and Morgan left immediately after that.
In 1698, while he was visiting the Palace of Whitehall, Morgan had an argument with Lord Dunnemoore, a guest of the Monarchs who resided at the Palace. Dunnemoore physically assaulted Morgan after the argument, over Catholicism, became heated. January 4th, 1698, the Palace was destroyed by a fire, to hide the fact that Morgan had murdered Dunnemoore in his sleep. Morgan immediately left the country.
January 26th, 1700; Morgan was travelling the coast of northern California. He discovered an occult artifact, and did the bidding of a spirit, taking it by boat out to sea and throwing it into the dark waters. A massive earthquake , the Cascadia, ruptured the subduction zone offshore from Vancouver Island to Northern California and created a tsunami in Japan.
May 23rd, 1701. Morgan was in London, present for the execution of Captain William Kidd. Before Kidd's body was buried, Morgan removed one of his hands, and took it with him. He later sold the hand to an interested Giovanni party, for a tip on where to find another occult manuscript.
In October of 1703, Morgan travelled to Ethiopia, seeking the manuscript the Giovanni had mentioned. He found it in the tower of Gan Takal in the city of Gondar. When local authorities tried to stop him from taking it, a whirlwind blew down the tower, killing 30 people. Morgan left unscathed.
During the year of 1708, Morgan travelled to Masuria, an area in Northeastern Poland.Originally conquered by Teutonic Knights, the area had a legend of a war demon, which intrigued Morgan. He suspected the Knights had left something of occult significance behind, and he started his own private archeological expedition. The locals became unnerved by him and suspected his motives, so they drove him away. At some point later in the year, not long after this, one third of the population died in a horrific plague.
December 24th, 1717: Morgan passed along the North Sea coast between the Netherlands and Denmark; A disastrous flood hit the coast and killed thousands, also destroying many homes.
September 8th, 1727: Morgan showed up in the village of Burwell, Cambs (UK). He discovered that one of the puppets being used in a puppet show was a prison for a spirit of violence. He managed to contact the spirit, and offered to help the spirit regain it's freedom. The puppet show took place in a barn during a birthday party for a child, and there were many children as guests. Morgan locked the barn up tight as the puppet show was commencing, and set fire to the barn. 78 people died in the blaze, most of them children.
Morgan left the UK to pursue a rumour of an archeological dig in Persia that had gone wrong, with many of the team found horribly massacred. He arrived in Tazriz, Persia on November 12th, 1727. After investigating the dig site and speaking with some of the survivors, Morgan discovered that a small group of Setites had invaded the site. Determined not to let them find anything before he did, he was able to 'convince' several important members of the community that some interlopers had stirred up the anger of the yazats, and organized a mob to ferret out the source of the lesser god's anger. After turning the mob to hunting down the Setites, Morgan went back to the archeological dig, and removed what he surmised to be a powerful stone statuette. On November 18th, 1727, a massive earthquake hit Tazriz, killing 77,000 people.
October 20th, 1728 Morgan arrived in Copenhagen, seeking a manuscript which supposedly had a ritual for making contact with an immensely powerful entity. At nearly the same time that Morgan was in the city, the Copenhagen Fire of 1728 began. It is at this time that Morgan first started to question whether or not it was his mere presence that caused disasters to happen, as he did not knowingly cause any fire. He made it out of the city unscathed, but had only a portion of the manuscript.
In the fall of 1729, Morgan, quite by accident, happened on the trail of one of the owners of a portion of the manuscript from Copenhagen. He traced the owner to Istanbul, and attempted to force the man to give him the manuscript piece. A struggle ensued, and during the fight a lamp was broken and caught a house on fire. Morgan's hand was burned, but he escaped with the manuscript piece, snapping the other man's neck and leaving his body in the blaze. The fire eventually destroyed 12,000 homes and killed 7,000 people.
On July 30th, 1733, Morgan, after taking a break from his travels and devoting time and money into a promising 'new' religion, helped to open the first Freemason lodge in what eventually became the United States.
October 7th, 1737: Morgan, under the guise of a book and spice merchant, visited Bengal, India, looking for some occult literature on some of India's dark gods. A tropical cyclone hit Bengal during this time, and killed approximately 300,000 people.
During the year of 1740, Morgan discovered more of the manuscript that he had been seeking, enough to figure out that a massive sacrifice of life could summon forth a malevolent entity called Rr'Hy'Bosh. The manuscript indicated that if someone were to bring the entity into their world, they could become as a god, gaining power and favor with it. Chaos, disorder, loss of life; all of that was attractive to the entity, which fed off the misery and carnage and suffering of such things. Morgan began planning ways to cause widespread disasters..
In April of 1741, Morgan was in New York City, encouraging a massive slave uprising that would torch the entire city. Unfortunately for him, the Slave's plans were discovered before they could be put into effect, and the Insurrection was stopped before it caused any harm.
On March 28th, 1748, Morgan set a fire in London that caused over a million pounds worth of damage, but it failed to yield the widespread loss of lives that he was hoping for. Morgan began paying attention to the reports of wars being fought; the thought of so many people dying in battle at once was a very appealing idea on how to get Rr'Hy'Bosh's attention.
In 1770, Morgan began seeing the way things were turning between American and British relations. When the Boston massacre happened, Morgan knew it was time to begin working on fomenting a war that would serve his best interests, and would cause as many deaths as possible.
On December 16th, 1773, Morgan participated in the Boston Tea Party, calculating that it would have much longer-running effects.
April 19th, 1775; Morgan was involved in the altercation that escalated into the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which ignited the American Revolution. Some time in July of that year, Morgan met Benjamin Franklin, who was elected as Postmaster General, and Morgan began running special mail deliveries to the Patriot Forces. Morgan hoped to be present during any widespread slaughters, and several times attempted to dedicate the deaths to Rr'Hy'Bosh, but without any substantial success. After Independence was declared in 1776, Morgan departed with James Cook for the Pacific Ocean.
On February 14th, 1779, James Cook and most of his men were slaughtered fighting Haiwaiians
on the Sandwhich Islands. Morgan led the natives to believe that they had stabbed him to death, and then escaped unnoticed after they had left the bodies.
In October of 1780, Morgan arrived by boat onto the island of Barbados; he spent almost a week researching several rumours of Carib legends, before he was reprimanded by a small mob who felt that he was a "hand of Evil"; Amused by this, Morgan flat-out boasted that he was a god of Darkness. Driven by fear, the mob caught him and attempted to execute him by fire. October 10th, while the natives attempted to kill Morgan, the Great Hurricane came out of nowhere, flattening the islands of Barbados, Martinique, and St. Eustatius. 22,000 people died. During the storm, until his struggles released him from his bonds, Morgan chanted dark praises and beckonings into the winds, seemingly encouraging the storm to more and more wrathful acts.
November 29th, 1781: Morgan, obeying the dictates of a dark spirit, took passage aboard a slaver ship, the Zong; as the rest of the crew began suffering from a disease, Morgan convinced Captain Collingwood that he could make a lot of money off the insurance if he were to throw the slaves overboard, still alive. Morgan also made sure that Collingwood felt that there was not enough water onboard to get everyone to safety. As the slaves were tossed alive into the ocean, Morgan comemmorated their deaths as a sacrifice to the dark spirit who had led him to the ship, and felt satisfied that he had served it's desires well. Morgan left the ship after arriving in Jamaica on December 22nd. Captain Collingwood had succumbed to disease before the voyage ended.
Morgan arrived in Calabria, Italy, on February 4th, 1783. His arrival coincided with a severe earthquake in the region, which killed 50,000 people. He then travelled across the lands, pursuing rumours and legends here and there, until he learned of a supposedly cursed Idol that was kept in a temple on the volcano Laki, in Iceland. He made his way there, and attempted to purchase the idol. When he was denied possession of it by the native population, he warned them that they would regret their decision. On June 8th, 1783, Laki erupted; the eruption lasted 8 months, and killed 9350 people before it was over. The eruption also started a 7-year famine, causing the deaths of livestock that ate contaminated grasses, and widespread crop failure.
May 1st, 1786: Morgan was present for the premiere of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" in Vienna, Italy.
April 7th, 1788: During one of his travels , in the region of Wairarapa, New Zealand , Morgan was discovered to be a "creature of Darkness" by a band of Inquisition hunters. The hunters nearly caught up with him as he fled across some rocky terrain, but during the chase, an earthquake hit, rending the ground beneath the prey and his pursuers. Morgan was swallowed by the earth, as were two of the hunters, and the rubble erased any trace of them.
January 23, 1855: The region of Wairarapa, New Zealand, was hit by the strongest earthquake ever recorded in New Zealand, which reached Magnitude 8.1 on the Richter Scale. There were five deaths. In the process, the earth regurgitated Morgan, who had been in a voluntary Torpor. The Morning Star had returned.
In March of 1855, Morgan returned to England. He travelled in poverty, as much of his wealth had been lost due to his extensive period of Torpor, and when he reached his destination he immediately set about regaining his wealth. Using his aptitude for getting what he wanted from people, he became aware of a plot by two men to rob a Gold delivery. He was able to help strategize a plan with the two men, Edward Agar and William Pierce, and used Dominate to convince them that he had never existed to them once his plan was set in motion. On the night of May 15th, 1855, the two men robbed the Gold being transported by train from London Bridge Station to Paris via the South Eastern Railway. Once they succeeded, they delivered the gold to Morgan, who modified their memories so that they believed everything he wanted them to. With the money he received from selling the gold, he was able to re-acquire many of his lost books, and he spent the next year travelling the world, visiting each country that he'd formerly had a home on in order to regain his possessions.
In May of 1856, Morgan returned to what was now the United States, only to find the country in a state of Pre-Civil War. On May 21st, 1856, Morgan was nearly killed when the city of Lawrence, Kansas, was captured and burned by pro-slavery forces. As the fighting grew more intense, Morgan realized that he needed to find a way to capitalize on the rampant carnage, but he also needed to stay out of harm's way. As Kansas was a hotbed of conflict, Morgan left as quickly as he could, though not without a sense of loss at having to leave such atrocity behind.
September, 1857, Morgan was travelling through the Mountain Meadows area of Utah, when he started hearing rumours about the Fancher-Baker emigrant train. Morgan, sensing that something terrible could be gleaned from this opportunity, began fomenting the rumours, adding more and more malicious acts to the list of false claims about the emigrants. He whipped the Mormons into a frenzy, until they were convinced that the emigrants were their deadly enemies and were there to wipe the Mormons out as a people. Then Morgan sat back and enjoyed the show. When the emigrants surrendered, Morgan was pleased to find that he needed to only slightly encourage the militiamen to slaughter the emigrants as a whole, man woman and child. Approximately 120 people were executed. Morgan enjoyed the carnage immensely, but realized that there would have to be much, much more, to please the Dark Gods.
On August 27th, 1859, Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well near Titus, Pennsylvania. Morgan, who had the foresight to realize that it would not only be a profitable venture, but would help the process of depleting the earth's resources, had already invested a large some of money into Drake's oil find. As the money started rolling in, Morgan began investing in yet more oil fields. After losing everything he had before, he wanted to make sure he was well prepared for the future. Morgan set up a financing company that could continue to funnel funds through to whatever institution he needed, and he made himself CEO. He also began looking for more products to invest in.
On May 1st, 1860, a meteorite fell to earth in Muskingum County, Ohio, near the town of New Conchord. Hearing of this, Morgan made his way to Ohio to try and find the meteorite, which he suspected might be some sort of vessel for a otherworldly entity.
On May 18th, 1860, Morgan heard from a town crier that Abraham Lincoln had been chosen as the Presidential candidate for the Republican Party. Morgan had a feeling that Lincoln was someone to watch, and he kept up on every scrap of news he could locate about anything Lincoln was involved in. He also made a bet with a fellow Kindred as to who would win the election.
November 6th, 1860: Abraham Lincoln was elected as the 16th President of the United States. Morgan won the bet, and gained a sizable sum of money and two rare occult books from the deal. He had a feeling that something was going to happen soon, some shift in the world's stage, and he waited expectantly. When the American Civil War started, he got involved on both sides, playing one against the other, arranging as much conflict as possible. During the next two years, until mid-1862, Morgan was involved in as much chaos as possible. He was shot several times, stabbed with a bayonet, and even hung once by Confederate soldiers. Even as a vampire, he knew that eventually someone would get lucky and succeed in killing him, so at the end of September, after the Battle of Antietam, Morgan left America for Germany. He kept tabs on what was happening in the United States, however, so that he would know when it was safe to return. He also started formulating a plan for mass death and trauma, having witnessed some of the horrors of the Civil War first-hand (Antietam being the bloodiest day in U.S History, with over 22,000 casualties).
From Germany, Morgan again began wandering Europe, and eventually the Asias. He took up residence at a Monastery on the cusp of Northern Italy, and for many years he used that as his base of operations. It was quiet, out of the way, and he easily bent the few monks there to his will. The locals eventually started rumours about it, calling it the Black Abbey, but he paid them very little mind. Eventually, though, he felt the pull of the world, and made arrangements to pack up the paraphernalia he'd collected over the years. It would be sent to him wherever he called from. Morgan followed his intuition to Corsica, planning to charter a boat there.
January 2nd, 1890, as Morgan arrived, the steamship Persia wrecked off the coast, killing 130 people. Taking it as a good omen, he took the very next ship out.
Morgan went back to the States, and settled in New Orleans, making it his home for the next 30 years. He made very little fuss and bother, largely avoiding Kindred whenever possible, and the few times he had contact with Sabbat, they left each other in an amiable condition. He studied Voudan, being open-minded about anything of a dark nature, and invested quite a bit of money in real estate in the surrounding areas such as the French Quarter.
On January 16th, 1920, Prohibition came screaming into the States. Morgan was quick to buy up all the liquor he could find, as well as invest in several 'moonshine' operations, and he began running illegal liquor operations, using unsuspecting mortals as pawns. No one ever touched him because no one could ever remember him even existing.
On February 24th, 1920, Adolf Hitler presented his National Socialist program in Munich. Morgan became very interested in Hitler's philosophies, and the potential for something catastrophic, and he left for Germany soon after. It was around this time that he began devising a solid plan for completely redefining a person's moral heirarchy.
In 1926, Morgan had taken a job as a psychiatrist employed at a mental institution in Salzburg. It was there that he met Karl Maria Wiligut, who had been transferred there after he was declared mentally incompetent by a court of law. Morgan delved deep into Wiligut's mind, learning of his delusions and schizophrenia, and Morgan shaped Wiligut's ideals into something he could control. He helped Wiligut devise the beliefs about Irminism that Wiligut later spread through the SS, and was instrumental in getting Wiligut released in 1927. Morgan then followed Wiligut, keeping in constant contact, and became a trusted advisor to Wiligut.
Morgan was subtle enough that history doesn't even have a record of him being connected to Wiligut. Many of Wiligut's suggestions to Himmler actually came from Morgan. Morgan was responsible for the "Black Sun" symbol in the Wewelsburg Castle, and arranged for it to be placed there himself. The Black Sun was to be used as the focal point for the summoning of Rr'Hy'Bosh. Morgan influenced Wiligut and Himmler to create many of the rituals that the SS followed, as well as a significant amount of the writings that Wiligut eventually set down as his own beliefs.
When the Holocaust was conceived at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, Morgan was right there urging it on. While he could never claim to be solely responsible, he had as much interest in it's creation as many of the SS' well known officers. The difference, of course, was that he wasn't even known to exist.
During WWII, Morgan prepared Wewelsburg to be the summoning point for Rr'Hy'Bosh, the "birthplace" of the 'New God'. When Wiligut's earlier internment in the mental institution was uncovered, and Wiligut 'retired', Morgan fought to retain as much control over Wewelsburg as he'd had previously. Morgan toured many of the concentration camps, dedicating the deaths of the prisoners to Rr'Hy'Bosh, and collected small amounts of blood or skin from thousands of victims, to use as a catalyst.
But on March 31st, 1945, when the "Final Victory" failed to happen, Himmler ordered Heinz Macher and fifteen of his men to destroy the castle, only two days before the US Third Infantry division seized the grounds. Morgan tried to command the men to stop, but found that they were under some sort of control that was not his own. He had nearly finished the summons to Rr'Hy'Bosh, and in a panic tried to hurry up the ceremony; but the Germans were too quick in placing explosives and tank mines around at the various structure points, and they detonated in the midst of the summons. The Castle was set on fire, and Morgan was buried underneath rubble.
In 1949, the Castle was restored, and in the process of clearing away the rubble, Morgan's body was found, along with some of the valuable art. Greed entered the hearts of the men who had found Morgan, as they began fighting over some of the jewelry on his possession, and in the process blood was shed. One of the men overpowered the other two, beating both of their heads in with a mallet, and the body fell in such a way across Morgan's body that blood streamed into his throat. Morgan awakened as the murderer was looting, and in a rage made short work of him.
Morgan then began learning of what had passed in the world since his torpor. He was disappointed to have missed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and marveled at the destructive forces that such a science could produce. He began travelling again, and his disappointment and anger grew with every new piece of info he'd learned about the world that was after the War. His plot having failed, he retired for a time from the modern world, keeping to Germany, Austria, and several Third-World countries.
In the mid-50's, he began watching the relations between the Soviet Union and the United States grow cold. He traveled back to the States, resuming his occupation in New Orleans, and used a sizable portion of his accumulated finances to invest in the development of civilian air travel. From the 60's, into the 70's, he travelled as much as he was safely able to do so, still seeking occult paraphernalia, but he also occupied a large amount of his time with his psychology practice. The Cold War didn't take the expected turns he was thinking it would, and neither did Vietnam. Though it was definitely another cause of misery and human suffering, it wasn't something he could get involved in as easily. Several times he wondered if the increasing occurrences of violence could be attributed to even the partial success of his venture at the Wewelsburg Castle.
In 1968, Morgan went to see a film called Rosemary's Baby, by Roman Polanski.
In March of 1982, Morgan learned that the Wewelsburg Castle had been restored, and was being made a war monument. Intrigued, he made a trip to Germany. On March 20th, 1982, The monument opened, and Morgan took a night tour of the place. But reliving his past almost got him killed; unknown to him, several survivors of the Neiderhagen concentration camp were present, and one of them, Karl Hueser, nearly had a heart attack when he saw Morgan. He remembered the man's face, and those eyes, from his nightmares of decades past. Karl alerted the police that there was a Nazi war criminal in the tour, and Morgan barely escaped with his unlife.
In 1998, Morgan was travelling through Paris on a search for a reportedly cursed set of gemstones, when he happened to run into Roman Polanski in a bar. Morgan had been waiting for his informant to show, and noticed that Mr. Polanski was sitting at a table across the room from him. He decided to take the chance and went over to Roman, introducing himself. As they began to chat, Morgan found himself with an unexpected desire to really talk. He was surprised to find out that Polanski's mother had died in a concentration camp, though it wasn't one of the camps that Morgan had visited. Morgan just started talking, then, just opened up about who he was, the things he'd seen in his life. He knew he could always make Mr. Polanski forget later.
He told Roman about his hobby, travelling across the world pursuing occult manuscripts and artifacts, and mentioned his current search for the book "De Umbrus Idearum" (The Shadows of Ideas) and Roman was quite taken with it. When Morgan was done, he made Roman forget most of their conversation, but Mr. Polanski remembered a good deal about the search for the occult.
Certainly, enough to have interest in directing a movie about an occult book collector.
In the last 10 years, Morgan has kept his counseling practice, and he goes by both Morgan Stern and Tiberius Harkness. Though he still looks for any chance to serve the Dark Powers, he has gone from grandiose ideas to the more frequent night-to-night opportunities to cause misery and suffering. Now, his calling cards are not mass death or suffering, but more subtle events; a troubled youth shooting classmates in a school, or a disturbed mother driving her children off a bridge into a river, or a nurse stealing a baby from a hospital and tossing it into traffic. There are things like these in the papers every day, and while Morgan is not responsible for all of them, he certainly does his fair share. And he wonders who does the rest.
**has the only copies of some of Maria Anna Mozart's musical works, which are thought to be lost forever**
Morgan Stern was born September 2nd, 1666, the day of the Great Fire of London. A mid-wife delivered him at roughly the same time that the Fire erupted. Both his parents presumably died in the blaze, and he survived because the mid-wife escaped with him in her arms. She left him at an orphanage later on, with wild stories of how his birth had been unnatural. He had an extremely rough childhood and was constantly told that he was the Devil's child, that his birth had been the cause of the fire. Eventually, he not only grew to believe it, but to accept it. And when he did, he discovered that, as others grew more afraid of him, he enjoyed their fear more and more. Not just their fear, but their suffering.
Through his teen years, he always felt that some larger force, something dark and forbidding, was guiding him through his life. Believing as he did that he was a child of the Devil or even the Devil himself, he found this comforting and threw himself into the study of the occult, and of the most arcane artifacts, legends, and powers he could learn of. He began travelling, seeking more and more knowledge and power wherever he went, and he would do whatever he felt was the bidding of his dark 'masters'.
In the summer of 1688, when Morgan was 22, he heard of the legends of Black Shuck, a ghostly black hound said to have once haunted a church in Bungay, a small town in Suffolk, East Anglia, England. He travelled there to seek out the hound, but upon learning that an exorcism had taken place and apparently destroyed the hound, he grew enraged. Before he left the town, he set a few fires that succeeded in destroying most of Bungay.
On April 9th 1691, Morgan was a visitor to the Palace of Whitehall. After viewing some of the art pieces that were currently on display, he decided to steal one of them, Michelangelo's 'Cupid', and he set the fire that destroyed much of the palace and the art in order to conceal the fact that he had stolen. His plan worked perfectly, as history records that 'Cupid' was also destroyed in the fire.
Morgan was present in Salem on March 1st, 1692, when the Salem Witch trials began. He faked being one of the Inquisitors in order to speak privately to the women on trial, and gleaned knowledge from them about the Worshippers of Lilith. He also learned of the existence of a pagan idol that was said to hold the powers of Darkness. The Idol was supposedly in Jamaica, so he left Salem for it's distant shores.
on June 7th, 1692, Morgan, who had arrived in Port Royal, Jamaica several weeks prior, discovered the idol he was seeking. Communicating with the evil inside, he agreed to do it's bidding and performed a sacrifice of two young virginal girls. Released by Morgan's ritual, the force inside caused a massive earthquake and 3 resultant tidal waves, destroying Port Royal and submerging a major part of it. Morgan was left unscathed, and in awe of what he had witnessed.
In 1696, Morgan discovered a famine spirit bound to a stone jar while travelling across Finland. He was able to free the spirit, and subsequently almost one third of Finland's population was destroyed by a famine, which also destroyed one fifth of Estonia's population.
It was during this trip that he discovered the existence of vampires, and hired a handful of men to help him capture the vampire he was interested in. The capture resulted in the death of all but one of the men beside Morgan, but by employing methods of torture, as well as beign a masterful liar, he was able to glean information from the vampire on what it was. Promising to release it if it shared it's power with him, Morgan enabled his own self-embrace, but once the act was completed and he was made vampire he killed the remaining man and diablerized his own sire.
In May of 1697, Morgan made a trip to Stockholm to investigate the rumours of a rare occult manuscript that was supposedly being kept in the library of the "Tre Kronor" castle. He found the rumours to be true, and tried unsuccessfully to purchase the manuscript from it's owner. May 7th, 1697, a fire mysteriously burned the castle to the ground, destroying a large portion of the library as well. The manuscript was "lost" in the blaze, and Morgan left immediately after that.
In 1698, while he was visiting the Palace of Whitehall, Morgan had an argument with Lord Dunnemoore, a guest of the Monarchs who resided at the Palace. Dunnemoore physically assaulted Morgan after the argument, over Catholicism, became heated. January 4th, 1698, the Palace was destroyed by a fire, to hide the fact that Morgan had murdered Dunnemoore in his sleep. Morgan immediately left the country.
January 26th, 1700; Morgan was travelling the coast of northern California. He discovered an occult artifact, and did the bidding of a spirit, taking it by boat out to sea and throwing it into the dark waters. A massive earthquake , the Cascadia, ruptured the subduction zone offshore from Vancouver Island to Northern California and created a tsunami in Japan.
May 23rd, 1701. Morgan was in London, present for the execution of Captain William Kidd. Before Kidd's body was buried, Morgan removed one of his hands, and took it with him. He later sold the hand to an interested Giovanni party, for a tip on where to find another occult manuscript.
In October of 1703, Morgan travelled to Ethiopia, seeking the manuscript the Giovanni had mentioned. He found it in the tower of Gan Takal in the city of Gondar. When local authorities tried to stop him from taking it, a whirlwind blew down the tower, killing 30 people. Morgan left unscathed.
During the year of 1708, Morgan travelled to Masuria, an area in Northeastern Poland.Originally conquered by Teutonic Knights, the area had a legend of a war demon, which intrigued Morgan. He suspected the Knights had left something of occult significance behind, and he started his own private archeological expedition. The locals became unnerved by him and suspected his motives, so they drove him away. At some point later in the year, not long after this, one third of the population died in a horrific plague.
December 24th, 1717: Morgan passed along the North Sea coast between the Netherlands and Denmark; A disastrous flood hit the coast and killed thousands, also destroying many homes.
September 8th, 1727: Morgan showed up in the village of Burwell, Cambs (UK). He discovered that one of the puppets being used in a puppet show was a prison for a spirit of violence. He managed to contact the spirit, and offered to help the spirit regain it's freedom. The puppet show took place in a barn during a birthday party for a child, and there were many children as guests. Morgan locked the barn up tight as the puppet show was commencing, and set fire to the barn. 78 people died in the blaze, most of them children.
Morgan left the UK to pursue a rumour of an archeological dig in Persia that had gone wrong, with many of the team found horribly massacred. He arrived in Tazriz, Persia on November 12th, 1727. After investigating the dig site and speaking with some of the survivors, Morgan discovered that a small group of Setites had invaded the site. Determined not to let them find anything before he did, he was able to 'convince' several important members of the community that some interlopers had stirred up the anger of the yazats, and organized a mob to ferret out the source of the lesser god's anger. After turning the mob to hunting down the Setites, Morgan went back to the archeological dig, and removed what he surmised to be a powerful stone statuette. On November 18th, 1727, a massive earthquake hit Tazriz, killing 77,000 people.
October 20th, 1728 Morgan arrived in Copenhagen, seeking a manuscript which supposedly had a ritual for making contact with an immensely powerful entity. At nearly the same time that Morgan was in the city, the Copenhagen Fire of 1728 began. It is at this time that Morgan first started to question whether or not it was his mere presence that caused disasters to happen, as he did not knowingly cause any fire. He made it out of the city unscathed, but had only a portion of the manuscript.
In the fall of 1729, Morgan, quite by accident, happened on the trail of one of the owners of a portion of the manuscript from Copenhagen. He traced the owner to Istanbul, and attempted to force the man to give him the manuscript piece. A struggle ensued, and during the fight a lamp was broken and caught a house on fire. Morgan's hand was burned, but he escaped with the manuscript piece, snapping the other man's neck and leaving his body in the blaze. The fire eventually destroyed 12,000 homes and killed 7,000 people.
On July 30th, 1733, Morgan, after taking a break from his travels and devoting time and money into a promising 'new' religion, helped to open the first Freemason lodge in what eventually became the United States.
October 7th, 1737: Morgan, under the guise of a book and spice merchant, visited Bengal, India, looking for some occult literature on some of India's dark gods. A tropical cyclone hit Bengal during this time, and killed approximately 300,000 people.
During the year of 1740, Morgan discovered more of the manuscript that he had been seeking, enough to figure out that a massive sacrifice of life could summon forth a malevolent entity called Rr'Hy'Bosh. The manuscript indicated that if someone were to bring the entity into their world, they could become as a god, gaining power and favor with it. Chaos, disorder, loss of life; all of that was attractive to the entity, which fed off the misery and carnage and suffering of such things. Morgan began planning ways to cause widespread disasters..
In April of 1741, Morgan was in New York City, encouraging a massive slave uprising that would torch the entire city. Unfortunately for him, the Slave's plans were discovered before they could be put into effect, and the Insurrection was stopped before it caused any harm.
On March 28th, 1748, Morgan set a fire in London that caused over a million pounds worth of damage, but it failed to yield the widespread loss of lives that he was hoping for. Morgan began paying attention to the reports of wars being fought; the thought of so many people dying in battle at once was a very appealing idea on how to get Rr'Hy'Bosh's attention.
In 1770, Morgan began seeing the way things were turning between American and British relations. When the Boston massacre happened, Morgan knew it was time to begin working on fomenting a war that would serve his best interests, and would cause as many deaths as possible.
On December 16th, 1773, Morgan participated in the Boston Tea Party, calculating that it would have much longer-running effects.
April 19th, 1775; Morgan was involved in the altercation that escalated into the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which ignited the American Revolution. Some time in July of that year, Morgan met Benjamin Franklin, who was elected as Postmaster General, and Morgan began running special mail deliveries to the Patriot Forces. Morgan hoped to be present during any widespread slaughters, and several times attempted to dedicate the deaths to Rr'Hy'Bosh, but without any substantial success. After Independence was declared in 1776, Morgan departed with James Cook for the Pacific Ocean.
On February 14th, 1779, James Cook and most of his men were slaughtered fighting Haiwaiians
on the Sandwhich Islands. Morgan led the natives to believe that they had stabbed him to death, and then escaped unnoticed after they had left the bodies.
In October of 1780, Morgan arrived by boat onto the island of Barbados; he spent almost a week researching several rumours of Carib legends, before he was reprimanded by a small mob who felt that he was a "hand of Evil"; Amused by this, Morgan flat-out boasted that he was a god of Darkness. Driven by fear, the mob caught him and attempted to execute him by fire. October 10th, while the natives attempted to kill Morgan, the Great Hurricane came out of nowhere, flattening the islands of Barbados, Martinique, and St. Eustatius. 22,000 people died. During the storm, until his struggles released him from his bonds, Morgan chanted dark praises and beckonings into the winds, seemingly encouraging the storm to more and more wrathful acts.
November 29th, 1781: Morgan, obeying the dictates of a dark spirit, took passage aboard a slaver ship, the Zong; as the rest of the crew began suffering from a disease, Morgan convinced Captain Collingwood that he could make a lot of money off the insurance if he were to throw the slaves overboard, still alive. Morgan also made sure that Collingwood felt that there was not enough water onboard to get everyone to safety. As the slaves were tossed alive into the ocean, Morgan comemmorated their deaths as a sacrifice to the dark spirit who had led him to the ship, and felt satisfied that he had served it's desires well. Morgan left the ship after arriving in Jamaica on December 22nd. Captain Collingwood had succumbed to disease before the voyage ended.
Morgan arrived in Calabria, Italy, on February 4th, 1783. His arrival coincided with a severe earthquake in the region, which killed 50,000 people. He then travelled across the lands, pursuing rumours and legends here and there, until he learned of a supposedly cursed Idol that was kept in a temple on the volcano Laki, in Iceland. He made his way there, and attempted to purchase the idol. When he was denied possession of it by the native population, he warned them that they would regret their decision. On June 8th, 1783, Laki erupted; the eruption lasted 8 months, and killed 9350 people before it was over. The eruption also started a 7-year famine, causing the deaths of livestock that ate contaminated grasses, and widespread crop failure.
May 1st, 1786: Morgan was present for the premiere of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" in Vienna, Italy.
April 7th, 1788: During one of his travels , in the region of Wairarapa, New Zealand , Morgan was discovered to be a "creature of Darkness" by a band of Inquisition hunters. The hunters nearly caught up with him as he fled across some rocky terrain, but during the chase, an earthquake hit, rending the ground beneath the prey and his pursuers. Morgan was swallowed by the earth, as were two of the hunters, and the rubble erased any trace of them.
January 23, 1855: The region of Wairarapa, New Zealand, was hit by the strongest earthquake ever recorded in New Zealand, which reached Magnitude 8.1 on the Richter Scale. There were five deaths. In the process, the earth regurgitated Morgan, who had been in a voluntary Torpor. The Morning Star had returned.
In March of 1855, Morgan returned to England. He travelled in poverty, as much of his wealth had been lost due to his extensive period of Torpor, and when he reached his destination he immediately set about regaining his wealth. Using his aptitude for getting what he wanted from people, he became aware of a plot by two men to rob a Gold delivery. He was able to help strategize a plan with the two men, Edward Agar and William Pierce, and used Dominate to convince them that he had never existed to them once his plan was set in motion. On the night of May 15th, 1855, the two men robbed the Gold being transported by train from London Bridge Station to Paris via the South Eastern Railway. Once they succeeded, they delivered the gold to Morgan, who modified their memories so that they believed everything he wanted them to. With the money he received from selling the gold, he was able to re-acquire many of his lost books, and he spent the next year travelling the world, visiting each country that he'd formerly had a home on in order to regain his possessions.
In May of 1856, Morgan returned to what was now the United States, only to find the country in a state of Pre-Civil War. On May 21st, 1856, Morgan was nearly killed when the city of Lawrence, Kansas, was captured and burned by pro-slavery forces. As the fighting grew more intense, Morgan realized that he needed to find a way to capitalize on the rampant carnage, but he also needed to stay out of harm's way. As Kansas was a hotbed of conflict, Morgan left as quickly as he could, though not without a sense of loss at having to leave such atrocity behind.
September, 1857, Morgan was travelling through the Mountain Meadows area of Utah, when he started hearing rumours about the Fancher-Baker emigrant train. Morgan, sensing that something terrible could be gleaned from this opportunity, began fomenting the rumours, adding more and more malicious acts to the list of false claims about the emigrants. He whipped the Mormons into a frenzy, until they were convinced that the emigrants were their deadly enemies and were there to wipe the Mormons out as a people. Then Morgan sat back and enjoyed the show. When the emigrants surrendered, Morgan was pleased to find that he needed to only slightly encourage the militiamen to slaughter the emigrants as a whole, man woman and child. Approximately 120 people were executed. Morgan enjoyed the carnage immensely, but realized that there would have to be much, much more, to please the Dark Gods.
On August 27th, 1859, Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well near Titus, Pennsylvania. Morgan, who had the foresight to realize that it would not only be a profitable venture, but would help the process of depleting the earth's resources, had already invested a large some of money into Drake's oil find. As the money started rolling in, Morgan began investing in yet more oil fields. After losing everything he had before, he wanted to make sure he was well prepared for the future. Morgan set up a financing company that could continue to funnel funds through to whatever institution he needed, and he made himself CEO. He also began looking for more products to invest in.
On May 1st, 1860, a meteorite fell to earth in Muskingum County, Ohio, near the town of New Conchord. Hearing of this, Morgan made his way to Ohio to try and find the meteorite, which he suspected might be some sort of vessel for a otherworldly entity.
On May 18th, 1860, Morgan heard from a town crier that Abraham Lincoln had been chosen as the Presidential candidate for the Republican Party. Morgan had a feeling that Lincoln was someone to watch, and he kept up on every scrap of news he could locate about anything Lincoln was involved in. He also made a bet with a fellow Kindred as to who would win the election.
November 6th, 1860: Abraham Lincoln was elected as the 16th President of the United States. Morgan won the bet, and gained a sizable sum of money and two rare occult books from the deal. He had a feeling that something was going to happen soon, some shift in the world's stage, and he waited expectantly. When the American Civil War started, he got involved on both sides, playing one against the other, arranging as much conflict as possible. During the next two years, until mid-1862, Morgan was involved in as much chaos as possible. He was shot several times, stabbed with a bayonet, and even hung once by Confederate soldiers. Even as a vampire, he knew that eventually someone would get lucky and succeed in killing him, so at the end of September, after the Battle of Antietam, Morgan left America for Germany. He kept tabs on what was happening in the United States, however, so that he would know when it was safe to return. He also started formulating a plan for mass death and trauma, having witnessed some of the horrors of the Civil War first-hand (Antietam being the bloodiest day in U.S History, with over 22,000 casualties).
From Germany, Morgan again began wandering Europe, and eventually the Asias. He took up residence at a Monastery on the cusp of Northern Italy, and for many years he used that as his base of operations. It was quiet, out of the way, and he easily bent the few monks there to his will. The locals eventually started rumours about it, calling it the Black Abbey, but he paid them very little mind. Eventually, though, he felt the pull of the world, and made arrangements to pack up the paraphernalia he'd collected over the years. It would be sent to him wherever he called from. Morgan followed his intuition to Corsica, planning to charter a boat there.
January 2nd, 1890, as Morgan arrived, the steamship Persia wrecked off the coast, killing 130 people. Taking it as a good omen, he took the very next ship out.
Morgan went back to the States, and settled in New Orleans, making it his home for the next 30 years. He made very little fuss and bother, largely avoiding Kindred whenever possible, and the few times he had contact with Sabbat, they left each other in an amiable condition. He studied Voudan, being open-minded about anything of a dark nature, and invested quite a bit of money in real estate in the surrounding areas such as the French Quarter.
On January 16th, 1920, Prohibition came screaming into the States. Morgan was quick to buy up all the liquor he could find, as well as invest in several 'moonshine' operations, and he began running illegal liquor operations, using unsuspecting mortals as pawns. No one ever touched him because no one could ever remember him even existing.
On February 24th, 1920, Adolf Hitler presented his National Socialist program in Munich. Morgan became very interested in Hitler's philosophies, and the potential for something catastrophic, and he left for Germany soon after. It was around this time that he began devising a solid plan for completely redefining a person's moral heirarchy.
In 1926, Morgan had taken a job as a psychiatrist employed at a mental institution in Salzburg. It was there that he met Karl Maria Wiligut, who had been transferred there after he was declared mentally incompetent by a court of law. Morgan delved deep into Wiligut's mind, learning of his delusions and schizophrenia, and Morgan shaped Wiligut's ideals into something he could control. He helped Wiligut devise the beliefs about Irminism that Wiligut later spread through the SS, and was instrumental in getting Wiligut released in 1927. Morgan then followed Wiligut, keeping in constant contact, and became a trusted advisor to Wiligut.
Morgan was subtle enough that history doesn't even have a record of him being connected to Wiligut. Many of Wiligut's suggestions to Himmler actually came from Morgan. Morgan was responsible for the "Black Sun" symbol in the Wewelsburg Castle, and arranged for it to be placed there himself. The Black Sun was to be used as the focal point for the summoning of Rr'Hy'Bosh. Morgan influenced Wiligut and Himmler to create many of the rituals that the SS followed, as well as a significant amount of the writings that Wiligut eventually set down as his own beliefs.
When the Holocaust was conceived at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, Morgan was right there urging it on. While he could never claim to be solely responsible, he had as much interest in it's creation as many of the SS' well known officers. The difference, of course, was that he wasn't even known to exist.
During WWII, Morgan prepared Wewelsburg to be the summoning point for Rr'Hy'Bosh, the "birthplace" of the 'New God'. When Wiligut's earlier internment in the mental institution was uncovered, and Wiligut 'retired', Morgan fought to retain as much control over Wewelsburg as he'd had previously. Morgan toured many of the concentration camps, dedicating the deaths of the prisoners to Rr'Hy'Bosh, and collected small amounts of blood or skin from thousands of victims, to use as a catalyst.
But on March 31st, 1945, when the "Final Victory" failed to happen, Himmler ordered Heinz Macher and fifteen of his men to destroy the castle, only two days before the US Third Infantry division seized the grounds. Morgan tried to command the men to stop, but found that they were under some sort of control that was not his own. He had nearly finished the summons to Rr'Hy'Bosh, and in a panic tried to hurry up the ceremony; but the Germans were too quick in placing explosives and tank mines around at the various structure points, and they detonated in the midst of the summons. The Castle was set on fire, and Morgan was buried underneath rubble.
In 1949, the Castle was restored, and in the process of clearing away the rubble, Morgan's body was found, along with some of the valuable art. Greed entered the hearts of the men who had found Morgan, as they began fighting over some of the jewelry on his possession, and in the process blood was shed. One of the men overpowered the other two, beating both of their heads in with a mallet, and the body fell in such a way across Morgan's body that blood streamed into his throat. Morgan awakened as the murderer was looting, and in a rage made short work of him.
Morgan then began learning of what had passed in the world since his torpor. He was disappointed to have missed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and marveled at the destructive forces that such a science could produce. He began travelling again, and his disappointment and anger grew with every new piece of info he'd learned about the world that was after the War. His plot having failed, he retired for a time from the modern world, keeping to Germany, Austria, and several Third-World countries.
In the mid-50's, he began watching the relations between the Soviet Union and the United States grow cold. He traveled back to the States, resuming his occupation in New Orleans, and used a sizable portion of his accumulated finances to invest in the development of civilian air travel. From the 60's, into the 70's, he travelled as much as he was safely able to do so, still seeking occult paraphernalia, but he also occupied a large amount of his time with his psychology practice. The Cold War didn't take the expected turns he was thinking it would, and neither did Vietnam. Though it was definitely another cause of misery and human suffering, it wasn't something he could get involved in as easily. Several times he wondered if the increasing occurrences of violence could be attributed to even the partial success of his venture at the Wewelsburg Castle.
In 1968, Morgan went to see a film called Rosemary's Baby, by Roman Polanski.
In March of 1982, Morgan learned that the Wewelsburg Castle had been restored, and was being made a war monument. Intrigued, he made a trip to Germany. On March 20th, 1982, The monument opened, and Morgan took a night tour of the place. But reliving his past almost got him killed; unknown to him, several survivors of the Neiderhagen concentration camp were present, and one of them, Karl Hueser, nearly had a heart attack when he saw Morgan. He remembered the man's face, and those eyes, from his nightmares of decades past. Karl alerted the police that there was a Nazi war criminal in the tour, and Morgan barely escaped with his unlife.
In 1998, Morgan was travelling through Paris on a search for a reportedly cursed set of gemstones, when he happened to run into Roman Polanski in a bar. Morgan had been waiting for his informant to show, and noticed that Mr. Polanski was sitting at a table across the room from him. He decided to take the chance and went over to Roman, introducing himself. As they began to chat, Morgan found himself with an unexpected desire to really talk. He was surprised to find out that Polanski's mother had died in a concentration camp, though it wasn't one of the camps that Morgan had visited. Morgan just started talking, then, just opened up about who he was, the things he'd seen in his life. He knew he could always make Mr. Polanski forget later.
He told Roman about his hobby, travelling across the world pursuing occult manuscripts and artifacts, and mentioned his current search for the book "De Umbrus Idearum" (The Shadows of Ideas) and Roman was quite taken with it. When Morgan was done, he made Roman forget most of their conversation, but Mr. Polanski remembered a good deal about the search for the occult.
Certainly, enough to have interest in directing a movie about an occult book collector.
In the last 10 years, Morgan has kept his counseling practice, and he goes by both Morgan Stern and Tiberius Harkness. Though he still looks for any chance to serve the Dark Powers, he has gone from grandiose ideas to the more frequent night-to-night opportunities to cause misery and suffering. Now, his calling cards are not mass death or suffering, but more subtle events; a troubled youth shooting classmates in a school, or a disturbed mother driving her children off a bridge into a river, or a nurse stealing a baby from a hospital and tossing it into traffic. There are things like these in the papers every day, and while Morgan is not responsible for all of them, he certainly does his fair share. And he wonders who does the rest.
**has the only copies of some of Maria Anna Mozart's musical works, which are thought to be lost forever**
