A person needs a little madness...

Morgan Drew Hurlitz

Litz

16 January 1942

21

Lou Taylor Pucci

X-Men: First Class

Post-film, late January of 1963, having fallen asleep on his way to the Academy

He doesn't really have canon but you could tell him that there are probably alts of him just like there are of...every Marvel character. He'd really have very little trouble believing you, to be honest.

Well-meaning is a good way of describing Morgan, to a certain extent, and beyond that extent is where people often just think of it as his not knowing any better and not meaning to cause any trouble. He's a relatively friendly sort, holding no particular grudges and seeing no point in making any assumptions about a person simply based upon their physical, mental, biological, chosen, or psychic disposition. This has not always proven to be his most self-preservative instinct but what can you do? He has yet to wind up dead, perhaps because his apparent optimism in regards to that cliche thought of all people being inherently good is simply too pathetic for anyone to ever take seriously or perhaps just because the world isn't quite done with him yet. The optimism, you see, is only an act. In truth, Morgan knows with a personal certainty that, while no one is born evil, there are some who simply have no good left in them or otherwise consciously suppress what good they do have. What terrifies him is that he knows this because there is, somewhere inside of him, not too far from the surface, a very real part of his psyche which fits that very description.

Schizophrenic and obsessive-compulsive, amongst other things, Morgan is probably (definitely) certifiably insane. He's never really tested that theory, of course, but he figures that he has enough issues within his own head that he won't be able to pass it off as eccentricity forever. Already it can be quite the issue, as he talks to himself and, occasionally, inanimate objects. Sometimes he's more subdued, sometimes very in-your-face, but something always seems to excuse whatever behavior he displays. What most people don't know, however, is that some of his inconsistent behavior is to be blamed on a voice in his head that has become, for lack of a better description, its very own entity.

Litz, his second self, is basically the Hyde to Morgan's Jekyll. The product of Morgan's various levels of fear and guilt, Litz is the name of both that niggling voice in the back of Morgan's head and a potentially very dangerous, dissosiative state. Very much Morgan's opposite, he's viciously manipulative and enjoys using all of the aspects of Morgan's powers that his host tries so hard to suppress. With a regular regament of alcohol and questionable substances, Morgan mostly manages to keep Litz confined to his own mind (and a...rubber ducky). Brought into the modern world, it would probably be in everyone's best interest if someone suggests he look into, say, proper medication instead.

Morgan is a pictomancer, meaning that he has the ability to bring images to life. The image must be of something that could, hypothetically, step out of the canvas of its own accord - so basically he could bring a picture of a dragon to life but he couldn't pull a gun out of his sketchbook - and are easiest to bring out when he creates them himself. In essence, he is temporarily imbuing a picture with a portion of his own life force, so his own drawings already have a sort of head start. The living images are what he calls his "golems," named for the Golem of Jewish folklore, "a figure artificially constructed in the form of a human being and endowed with life." Morgan's golems don't have to be humanoid, just resembling something that could be alive, and are beings of limited intelligence and limited lifespan. Their dimensions in life are based upon the dimensions of their original image and said dimensions also affect how long they can survive off of their medium of origin. The larger the golem, the more energy it takes to bring to life and the shorter that life is going to be. For instance, he could draw a monster on the ground as large as himself and bring it to life but its size and the energy necessary would render it useless for much more than a quick fix - like a one-shot berserker or maybe a mount to take someone to relative safety - while a gremlin the size of a teacup, given the maximum amount of energy he could fit into it, might easily be released to torment people for at least a week.

Morgan also has limited control over the actions of his golems but, again, their size can play a factor in exactly how much control he can exhibit. The more energy he has to put into bringing a thing to life, the less he has left to focus on telling it what it can and cannot do, hence why larger creatures tend to be very direct and single-purpose. Smaller creatures, being easier to give life, will often follow directions almost perfectly, offering little to no resistance to any given orders. An advantage to this ease and strength of command is that a golem can be sent back to its original medium before its lifespan runs down, allowing Morgan to use the same creature repeatedly and develop a sort of relationship with it. Again, the call and control gets easier the more often the same golem is used.

Morgan Drew Hurlitz was born to Joseph and May Hurlitz on the 16th of January, 1942, and primarily grew up in Quantico, Virginia, amongst the other military children left fatherless during the Second World War. He wasn't born there but, being a military child and Quantico being where he spent most of his early years, it was the first home that he could remember and therefore the place to which he became most attached. Always the socially awkward child, that attachment was the only reason that the constant moving after his father's return from service bothered him. His friends were few and far between and were more often the sort of acquaintances one makes amongst similarly awkward individuals, thereby turning out to be less friendships and more desperate, mutual attempts to look like less of a target for teasing. In new places, he missed the places that he knew and the relative safety of that knowing.

Social issues and spacial anxiety aside, Morgan had a rather happy, lower middle-class life until the age of twelve, when his father died of a heart attack, leaving a traumatized widow and a very trouble child behind. For the next four years, he and his mother struggled through, moving to May's hometown of Bangor, Maine, even as they both fell deeper and deeper into their own mental hells. For Morgan, it was at least a little bit easier, having discovered a vein of real talent for the visual arts. That was how he kept himself relatively together and out of any long-term doctors' care while he continued his self-appointed task of caring for his mother until, finally, she simply cracked and there was nothing left for him to do. With his mother institutionalized and no living relatives, Morgan found himself dropped into the foster care system with nothing to hold on to save for his love of art and what little contact he was allowed with his mother. It was only a year in that he realized his foster family was beginning to recognize the fact he was probably just as crazy as his mom, just in different ways. Oh, if they'd only known the half of it.

It had started when he was twelve, right after the death of his father, but it had only come in spurts then. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly lonely or exhausted from trying to hold his mother together, the pictures in his books or scribbled on scraps of paper would come to life. They were only little things, then, sometimes not even capable of pulling themselves from the paper, and they never lasted for long, like any childhood flights of fancy. As he grew older, however, what he came to term his "golems" grew stronger and lived longer, even as he struggled to keep himself from following in his mother's footsteps, and suddenly his ownly outlet became a new form of torment.

So, in early spring of 1959, when the neighbors' daughter, Angelique, the only "true friend" he felt he had ever even begun to make, suggested they run away from home, he didn't need a whole lot of convincing. She had her own reasons and he had his, so they struck out on their own, headed in no particular direction and with little on their minds save for staying out of trouble. Angelique, unfortunately, was not terribly good at staying out of anything. Getting mixed up with all the wrong people in every little town or big city they passed through, she was a quick pick for a drug habit and regularly invited the worst kinds of people to travel with them, forcing Morgan to join her in sneaking away into the dark on a fairly regular basis. The only upside to this was that the only person to actually spend any great deal of time around him was in no state to actually notice that his artwork really did have a habit of coming to life.

Then, in early February of 1962, everything finally went to hell. It was one of Angelique's horrendous hook-ups that did it, becoming an exercise in terrible violence. Morgan doesn't particularly remember the evening after the explosion of a fist against the side of his head when he got in the way of his best friend's abuser. In fact, all he does remember is waking up in a mess, Angelique's boyfriend looking as if he had been mauled by wild animals, formly tattoo-riddled skin almost entirely devoid of any ink. Angelique herself was nowhere to be found and Morgan simply prayed that she'd run away without anything terrible following too closely behind. He was not about to go looking for her with that much blood quite literally on his hands.

Luckily, for both him and those around him, however, he didn't have to go looking for anyone to avoid being alone for too long. It was just short of one year later that someone else came looking for him instead. Squatting in an abandoned building in rural Virginia and wading into the slurring depression of alcoholism, Morgan found himself being rousted out not by the police, for once, but by a messenger sent from Xavier's Academy, a school built to help and teach, they said, people just like him. Willing to try pretty much anything at this point, even if this turned out to be some sort of...government Thing where he was turned into a lab rat (his hopes, so high), Morgan packed what little he had and headed off. Unfortunately, he also fell asleep on the way and, instead, ended up in...Delaware?

Wings buzz in Morgan's ear as the tiny, pixie-like creature that had emerged from his sketchbook earlier in the day watches him splash paint across the canvas, as well as the wall, the floor, the creature and himself. Tiny, taloned feet and hands clutch at his shoulder, little head tilting back and forth, buggy eyes blinking, motion rapid and attention rapt. Morgan lets the droning of its insect movement drown out the noise inside of his head.

His self-medication muffles it, booze and whatever other depressants he can get his hands on make it all sound far away, but he can always still hear. There are snide remarks, vicious commentary, suggestions and terrible facts that he never would have thought could be contained within his own mind. He wants to draw them out, make the voice behind his eyes stop by transferring all of its words to lines on paper, but he can't and he knowa that, not with this power, not with the potential consequences. The pixie is harmless, an adorably ugly, little, hook-nosed thing with spindly limbs and dragonfly wings, the sort of thing he doodles on the edge of a napkin or scribbles in the margins of newspapers because the worst trouble it might cause would be pulling someone's hair. But the voice in his head conjures nightmare creatures, snarling beasts and things better off dead. Those are the horrors he keeps locked away, unexpressed, for fear that he might have an accident, that he might lose control and, for however short a time, give life to something that should never have existed, not even in the darkest corners of his own imagination.

From one shoulder to the other, the pixie thing flutters around him, tired and fading away as his creations always do. It's a reminder that, soon enough, that bottle of whiskey will be doing the same. The noises inside will grow closer and closer. The voice will take on a singularity that he recognizes with a pang of fear. And he just hopes that, by then, he's passed out on the rat-eaten, oversized moth-ball of a sofa in this squatter's paradise he's found. Then, when he wakes, he'll take two aspirin and buy another handle to get him through another day.