BACKSTORY

Early Childhood

Margot Queensbury was born in Portland, Oregon on September 17, 1998 to Violet Sanchez, the sixteen-year-old child of Filipino immigrants. Violet had gotten pregnant with the child of a classmate, Derek Chang, and her family had kicked her out as a result. Derek wanted to help her, but his wealthy parents instead paid Violet a large sum of money to move away from San Francisco and never contact their family again. She took the money and moved to Portland, where she changed her name to Vivian Queensbury and gave birth to her daughter, Margot.

Vivian never particularly cared for Margot, seeing her as the cause of all her problems as well as a nuisance, and was very neglectful. By the time Margot was three, Vivian was addicted to heroin, the money she’d been given by the Changs had run out, and she worked the streets as a prostitute. One night, when one of her clients was dissatisfied with her performance and demanded his money back, Vivian instead offered him Margot, and he took her.

The man, Greg Walsh, sold Margot to the Clermont family at the age of three, forging adoption papers and greasing the right palms to make it seem legit. Rita and Thompson Clermont were both verbally and physically abusive towards Margot, treating her less like an adopted child and more like a servant. Their children, Zach and Maya, were also horrible towards her. When she was eight years old, Mrs. Clermont burned Margot’s back with an iron, the scar of which remains the only physical evidence of her abuse today. When Margot came to school the next day, the teacher sent her to the nurse’s office, and the nurse sent her to the hospital. Margot told the doctor that her “fake mom” had burned her for not doing laundry fast enough and that her “real mom” had given her away. The police and child services got involved, many people were arrested, and Margot was officially placed in the system at age eight.

Margot was placed in a group home in Portland with several other young, troubled children. While in the group home, Margot was sexually abused by a boy two years older than her named Davis Johnson. Davis was the group home director’s favorite, and due to that and her previous experiences with abusive or neglectful caregivers, Margot never told anyone about this abuse.

However, the group home did give Margot one good thing. They had enough money to allow each child one extracurricular, and Margot chose karate. She began to attend Sensei Tam’s karate dojo after school and quickly learned she had a talent for martial arts. Sensei Tam became a mentor figure in her life, and the two developed a strong bond.

When Margot was twelve, she was placed in a new foster home with the Reese family. The Reese family had two parents (Paul and Jane) and three young children aged five, three, and a few months old when she first arrived (Ella, Luke, and Wendy). The parents were overworked and expected her to take care of the children, but they would give her privileges and treat her as part of the family unless she'd done something wrong. She was often punished by being locked in a small closet in the basement or yelled at - they never physically abused her. Because of this, Margot believed them to be far better than any other home she was in and lied to Social Services about her treatment in order to remain there. However, strange things would happen while she was in the house, things moving without being touched, glass shattering at random, lights flickering, all connected to Margot's emotions.

After two years, the father of the family began coming home angry, yelling a lot more, slamming things, and threatening to hit his wife and children. When Margot was fourteen, he tried to hit one of his kids, and Margot got in the way and shoved him - she flung him into a glass cabinet with her telekinesis by accident, and he was hospitalized. Deeply disturbed by this, the family asked to have Margot removed, and the incident was chalked up as him tripping over the carpet.

Throughout her childhood, Margot was always seen as a troubled kid. Strange things seemed to happen around her, and she was constantly being moved from home to home. She got into fights at school and at home all the time, had trouble making friends, and disrespected authority figures. Until she began attending Sensei Tam's school, she was also struggling academically, despite many teachers recognizing her intellect.

Baba Yaga Incident

After the Reese household incident, Margot was placed in a new foster home meant for troubled teens. Margot wasn’t very excited about this move since she would be unable to attend lessons at the dojo anymore due to it being two hours away. The parents (Luisa and Bob Illman) weren’t amazing, but they weren’t horrible, and four other teens lived in the house with her – two sixteen-year-olds named Gavin and Lou, a fifteen-year-old named Jessie, and a thirteen-year-old named Sam.

The kids weren’t mean, but Gavin and Lou were obviously the ones in charge, and Margot didn’t care enough to argue with them. When she went out to explore the forest near their house, Jessie warned her that kids tended to go missing in the forest around here, and that there was a strict curfew for everyone under eighteen, but Margot didn’t care. She went out into the forest alone and met a small black cat with a patch of white on its chest, who she named Oliver. When she went deeper into the forest, she stumbled across an old mansion and, despite Oliver’s yowling, tried to explore it. However, all the doors and windows were locked and much stronger than they appeared, so Margot gave up trying to get in and went back home.

The next day, she convinced Gavin and Lou to come with her and see, and Jessie and Sam decided to come along too. Along the way, she introduced them to Oliver, who had reappeared, and Lou said that this cat was always hanging around near the forest, but since he was friendly, they let him tag along too. The five of them found the mansion again, and this time, the doors were open. When they went inside to explore, they found the mansion abandoned, but it seemed to be in better repair than it should be, no collapsing roofs or spider web-covered rooms, just creaky floors and old, dusty furniture. However, they could smell food cooking, and when they went to the kitchen, they found a strange old woman baking cookies and brownies.

The woman told them that they could call her Granny, and that this was her house; though she had a large family, they had all moved away long ago, leaving her alone with a house that was far too big to take care of on her own. She asked if they could tell her where they were from, and she offered them food. Though Margot warned against it, Lou and Sam ate some of the cookies while Gavin told the old women that they were foster children living in the Jefferson home.

Eventually, the kids left, and when they got back home, Lou and Sam went to bed immediately without having dinner. The next morning, they were very different – they acted and spoke strangely, they didn’t eat any food, and they almost didn’t look real.

Sam and Lou really wanted to go back to Granny’s house, but Jessie was scared and stayed at home. While the others were outside the room, she told Margot about an old story her mom used to tell her, about creatures in the woods that liked to take children, and that the only way to defeat them was to play a game and make a deal, as they were bound by deals. Margot and Gavin accompanied Sam and Lou back to the old woman's house. When they arrived, Granny offered them food again, but Margot and Gavin refused, and then Sam and Lou grabbed them. Once they touched her skin, Margot realized that the people holding them were just wax figurines made to look like Sam and Lou, and when she asked Granny what she’d done with the real Sam and Lou, she said she’d trapped them somewhere in the house. She needed their souls to fuel her magic house, after all – children worked so much better, but fewer and fewer children had been wandering into the forest lately, and she had to make do. Granny forced Gavin to eat some of her food, but Oliver scratched out Wax Sam’s eyes, and with his help, Margot was able to escape.

When she got to the house, she told her foster parents that something scary was in the woods and that it had taken Sam, Lou, and Gavin. Jessie was still too scared, so the parents let her stay at home while Margot led them and the police into the forest. When they got to the clearing, the mansion was gone, and Margot got in trouble for lying and making up a story about monsters. When they got home, Jessie was gone too.

When the kids didn’t return, the police said they must have run away and started looking for them, and Margot’s foster parents, believing Margot had been the one to organize all of this, sent for social services to have her removed. Margot, however, found wax by Jessie’s bed and knew she must’ve been taken back to the old woman’s mansion. When Oliver showed up, she told him that she had to save her friends and came up with a plan. The next night, the night before she was supposed to be taken back by social services, Margot snuck out of the house and went back into the woods with Oliver, prepared to save her friends.

The house was there when she returned, except this time it looked less like a mansion and more like a large witch hovel, and it was teetering on three chicken legs. When she went inside, she found the old woman cooking, surrounded by wax figures of her friends, and proposed a game. If she could find her four foster siblings, then the old woman would have to let them go. Granny replied that she had to free them as well, do it alone, and do all this before sunrise. In addition, the old woman demanded that if she lost, she would become bound to her forever and help her draw in more children. Margot agreed, despite Oliver’s meowing, and the deal was set.

Margot used a makeshift flamethrower (made of a lighter and a can of hairspray) to fend off the wax figures as Oliver ran outside, and then she went upstairs. There she found Jessie trapped in a spider web made by a giant mechanical spider. To defeat the spider, Margot goaded it, saying she doubted it could weave something like this, and showed it a Chinese Finger Trap. The spider wove itself into the trap, and Margot freed Jessie. Then she forced Jessie to climb out the window using her rope-ladder fire escape and told her to run back to the Jeffersons.

Next Margot went to the attic, where she found a large man surrounded by identical trunks. He said he’d locked one of her friends inside, and if she could guess which one he was in, he’d let them go, but if she guessed wrong, he’d lock her inside one too. Margot tried calling out and knocking on some of the chests, but the man said that he’d rendered the boy unconscious. When she tried lifting them, the man laughed and said he’d filled them all with rocks, so they were all the same exact weight. After lifting all the chests in the attic, Margot said her friend wasn’t in any of the chests and that he’d lied. Caught lying, the man screamed and disappeared in a poof, revealing Sam on the floor behind him, waking up in a stupor.

After getting him out of the house too, Margot went to the basement and found Lou trapped behind bars on one end of a room. The floor, however, was covered in tiles with letters on them, and the inscription “Spell out old Granny’s name, for one misstep your life will claim.” Margot struggled, trying to remember the name of an old lady with chicken leg house, but Lou remembered and said it was Baba Yaga, so Margot spelled it out and he was released. She got him out through the cellar door and told him to run home too.

Finally, she came back to the ground floor, where she found Gavin trapped in a static-ladden TV screen. A remote sat on the coffee table with two identical buttons, both with living faces that were smiling at her and sticking out their tongues. On the coffee table, it said, “One button frees your friend, one kills him. You may only ask one question to discern which is which. But one button always tells the truth, and one always lies.” After a moment, Margot asks one button, “What would the other button say if I asked it which one of you would free my friend?” After receiving the answer, Margot pressed the other button and freed Gavin, who she told to run back home.

However, before Margot could leave, Baba Yaga stopped her and said she cheated – she got help from Lou to remember Baba Yaga’s name for the third challenge. Margot said that wasn’t in the deal, but Baba Yaga said it was heavily implied with the “alone” phrase, and then the house began to move, and Baba Yaga said she was going to scoop her friends back up and bind her to her service anyway. Margot and Baba Yaga got into a fight, and Baba Yaga scratched Margo’s face and bound her with magic, but then Oliver jumped through the window and scratched out her eyes. Even blind, she was a force to be reckoned with, but Margot kicked her right into her own oven and shut it, forcing the old woman to burn alive. The house screamed, and Margot and Oliver managed to run out before it collapsed in on itself and was destroyed.

When she got back home, all her siblings were safe but very shaken, and they refused to talk about what had happened. Margot’s foster parents were terribly upset with her sneaking out and still believed this was all her doing, despite her siblings trying to protect her. When social services came later that morning, she was sent away again, wondering if it’d all been some hallucination, but after that, her strange abilities grew stronger. She began to have dreams that came true, began to sense the emotions of others in a way she’d never been able to before. And then, when Oliver showed up at her new home, the same sneaky cat as before, she knew it’d been true.

Teenage and College Years

After the Baba Yaga incident, Margot began investigating the strange, magical, and paranormal, hungry for more information on the world she'd stumbled into. She also wanted to learn more about her own strange psychic powers, but the powers were unpredictable and using them was difficult, so she decided to stick with her martial arts instead. She continued to bounce around foster homes, never staying in one place for long, occasionally getting into trouble due to her fascination with the paranormal.

When she was sixteen, Sensei Tam began to foster Margot, and she continued to learn karate, do well in school, and work at the dojo. She was even able to take on a few more extracurriculars, like science olympiad and tabletop club. She became a black belt in karate at seventeen, and soon after, Sensei Tam officially adopted her.

Unfortunately, the summer before Margot went to college, Sensei Tam had a heart attack (due to a preexisting condition) and passed away. He left her with a fairly decent amount of money in his will, but he was gone, and Margot was once again alone in the world. Thankfully, she had been awarded a full scholarship to Dartmouth College, and due to her position as a former foster student and a full-ride scholarship student, she was allowed to stay on campus year-round until graduation.

During sophomore year, she met Danny Rye in a nearby New Hampshire town, where they were both investigating paranormal occurrences. Despite their initial irritation with one another, the two would eventually become good friends, and she and Danny were the ones to come up with the idea for the Horner Paranormal Private Investigators. Margot graduated with honors from Dartmouth with a double major in English and Molecular Biology. After graduation, Margot used some of the money Sensei Tam left her to purchase the camper van that would become the mobile home of the Horner investigators.

CURRENT WHEREABOUTS

Margot is currently traveling around the country with the Horner Paranormal Private Investigators, solving paranormal mysteries.