#morganposting

🖌️Morgan grabs her stim toy—

♦️It's not a toy.

🖌️Suuure.

Act 1 - very early game

Morgan knew something was off about Astarion from the beginning. All of the other tadpoled brains in their party had minds that she could skim surface thoughts and feelings from to determine threats to herself. But her magic bounced off of him with no impressions...unless she uses her tadpole. But she's still getting used to being connected to a hivemind with all the others and can't go digging in his head with the finesse she is accustomed to; it's all clumsy and obvious and they can tell right away when the tadpole is being forcibly used to read into the other's mind. (And everyone gets mad when she tries)

Even without doing it deliberately they do still get impressions of the other’s thoughts and feelings over the mind link. And his seem normal to her considering their situation, except that she cannot use detect thoughts on him and it pisses her off.

When she caught him at her neck the third night, she forcibly used her tadpole on him because she thought she was about to be attacked. She saw and felt echos of what he felt, the pain of a never ending hunger, the disgusting slide of coagulated vermin blood down his throat and the barest amount of satiety it brought. The entire conversation he made himself as small and pathetic as he could and it worked on her; she pitied him.

To Astarion's delight, she knew nothing of vampires other than what she'd read in tawdry publications. She believed him when he said he would only need a little of her blood. He wasn't anything monstrous that she could see, just had peculiar diet needs. Now she understood he had a condition that prevented her from reading his mind and she was able to relax around him. The vampire thirsting for her blood.

(Shadowheart eventually has the vampire talk with her)

Astarion at this point thought Morgan was a naive idiot. For willingly offering her neck like the fools who showed up at Cazador’s front door begging for his dark gift, and while she didn’t go out of her way to help others, she could be swayed by the occasional sob story and then waylay them for days off on some unprofitable venture she swore would only be a trifle to deal with. He resented having to tag along to all of it, especially once they knew they had to stay in range of the artifact to keep their minds. He had to stay with this group because he’d lose himself either to the Absolute or to Cazador if he left on his own. And he had to get her on his side (in love with him would be even better).

He didn’t find her looks particularly attractive (he has elvish beauty ideals and also Cazador’s twisted beauty standards in his brain, he’s a dumb idiot bastard man) but her naiveté towards what he was was too enticing for him. And useful. She had experience being pursued by random men for sex and was stone faced to his usual sweet talk. But she still responded to his flirtations anyways and was eager to see if he lived up to his boasts about his sexual prowess, and then was pleasantly surprised to see that he did indeed. It was a welcome reprieve from the constant threat of death they faced each day, and he was nicer to her and bitched less about her decisions, at least to her face.

No one caught feelings yet, this was just depraved carnal lust as far as both are concerned, or at least what Morgan assumes is the case for him as well. She doesn’t know or pick up on his ulterior motives because she assumes his motivations are sex and blood. This early in the game he is still vague about his slavery and Morgan does not stop to really think about it; she assumes he was in some kind of shitty servitude arrangement; not a continuous, torturous hell he had no escape from.

She won’t really comprehend that until much later into Act 2 dealing with his scars.