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Description

JLA Dossier

n. IWG - 637994 LBL

Civilian name

Margot Grey

Known aliases

Magpie (criminal codename; also her superhero identity)

Margret Gaterra

Margret Byrne

Cassandra Pye

Physical Info
Birthday: August 8th, 1967
Age: 35
Profession: professional thief
Marital status: single (in a relationship with Karon Walsh)
Birthplace: Gotham City (NJ)
Height: 175 cm (5’ 9”)
Weight: 65 kg (143 lbs.)
Eyes: Nordic blue (left), Celtic green (right)
Hair: brown-black
Blood type: A+
Shoe size: 9 US Female
Distinguishing features: heterochromia, retractable finger talons

Status in the Metahuman Community

- Ranks at #3 among the world’s professional thieves for total value of goods stolen throughout her career;

- Former member of the Sect of Shadows, reporting directly to the Sect official known as Lady Shiva;

- Leader of the revolt at the Belle Reve Prison which led to the only occurrence of a successful escape of a member of the Task Force X;

- Confirmed to have broken out from at least 5 maximum security facilities across the world;

- Has survived confrontations with several elite assassins, including Lady Vic, KGBeast and Tally Man;

- Acquired copies of the archives of the mercenary intelligence service known as MAZE, which she routinely exploits to blackmail the entire organisation into protecting her and her personal data.

Origins

1. Street Bird. To this day, no one, not even Ms. Grey herself, really knows who her biological parents are. We know for sure that she was abandoned by someone on a bench of Robinson Park when she was about two days old, but the identity of that someone (father? Mother? A completely unrelated person?) is unknown: no record of the birth of a baby with compatible physical data was ever found in any hospital or clinic in all of Kane County. The enigma surrounding her origins however has never bothered Margot all that much. As far as she’s concerned, the only mother she’s ever had is Cynthia Grey, the woman who adopted her about two months after she was found. Grey came from old Gotham money, which had been near-exhausted by her gambler father. She remained in her family’s dilapidated mansion house in Somerset, earning money as a high profile escort. Due to her profession, she was often forced to spend extended periods of time away from her house, which despite its size was totally devoid of staff. These two factors, combined with Margot being more afraid of that dusty, empty manor than of the streets of Gotham, even the ones from the most disreputable neighbourhoods, played a huge part in her upbringing. Young Margot received quite a lot of her education in the alleys and slums of Gotham City.

2. It Was a Dark and Bloody Night. Young Margot quickly found out all the main places the varied “Street People” of Gotham used to gather in those years, plus a couple that were the exclusive of some very territorial cliques. Whenever her foster mother was on one of her “business trips”, she used to spend most of her day hanging around these places, often forgetting entirely that she was supposed to attend school. She didn’t believe she was missing out on anything anyway. She could learn much more useful things in the “classes” held under the skytrains and the highways, in the most dilapidated areas of the city’s parks, in the deserted apartment buildings of Uptown and the back of the street shops of Chinatown, Little Tokyo and the Hill. She was barely a teen at the time and it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that she was perceived as a foreign body in such environments. But reality and the most reasonable course of events sometimes do not mix and Ms. Grey somehow found ways to blend with the collection of humanity populating that section of Gotham’s underworld and attract only as much attention as she wanted on herself. However, she was living on a razor’s edge and this blessed state of things could not last forever. She didn’t witness what exactly happened that sent Big Mahoney and his goons into a frenzy against Sandy C’s gang, but on that night she immediately realised that a lot of blood was going to be spilled in the old auditorium of Aparo Park. What she didn’t realise was how much of that blood she was going to spill. It’s very common for metahuman powers to manifest themselves during puberty, when their owner ends up in lethal danger. The combination of hormones and stress levels acts as a natural catalyst for the unlocking of their hidden potential. Margot was no exception. She only meant to scratch the face of the henchman who had grabbed her by the neck – instead, when she opened her eyes, she noticed that her assailant had lost both of his eyes and his nose, replaced by four deep, bloody slits. Looking at her right hand, seeing the bits of organic tissue still attached to her – suddenly 2 and a half inches long – fingernails, any doubts she might have had dissipated. Just in time to realise that she was still surrounded by people wielding handguns and heavy blunt objects and that she should have really left that place. Which she did by ploughing through other two people who were in her way, first by ripping open a belly and then by tearing up a throat until her talons reached the vertebrae. Finesse was not going to help her in that free-for-all. She ran and ran and ran with no clear destination in mind, as long as it was as far away from Aparo Park as possible. She collapsed, completely exhausted, in the northern reaches of Otisburg, in the territory of the 13 Stitches, Joe Braxton’s gang. She was found not long after by a member of said gang and immediately taken to the local crime boss. Rumours of the bloody events at Aparo Park had reached that neighbourhood and, since he had recognized her as the girl who often hung out with Sandy C’s crowd and she was covered in blood, she was likely to know something about it.

3. The 13 Stitches. The 13 Stitches were a small but fiercely territorial group, led by a man who, while ambitious, was smart enough not to overreach. The name of the gang came from a knife wound Braxton received when he overthrew the previous boss, Victor Zsasz, who of course hadn’t gone down without a fight. When a girl who couldn’t have been older than 14, covered in blood, clearly in a state of shock and looking like she could have collapsed on the floor at any moment, he didn’t immediately start giving her the third degree. He gave her time to rest and recover and all the water and food she needed. Margot was able to give a complete account of what had happened in Aparo Park, about halfway through the next morning. It was still early enough for the 13 Stitches to exploit the sudden power vacuum in western Uptown (while Margot hadn’t witnessed all of it, it was clear that the gang war of that night had severely weakened both players) and mount the offensive Braxton had dreamed of for years. Within three days, his mob annexed all of the territories previously controlled by the late Big Mahoney and the comatose Sandy C, becoming one of the main players north of the Sprang River in the process. The Stitches also grew in number, thanks to the desertions from their ex-rivals and the addition of a very special new member: Margot Grey. Braxton had quickly taken a liking to her, not least because of how efficiently she had employed her newly-awakened metahuman power. If there was something he needed were people who could keep their heads cool while not becoming complete psychos. Margot spent the next 4 years of her life as part of the gang, learning the extent and limits of her power, finding love and learning how to be a thief and a burglar, after she showed some real talent in that line of work. Everything changed on the night when Stitches robbed a truck belonging to one Oswald Cobblepot, the supreme overlord of the Downtown criminal underground. At the time, they didn’t know that, among what they had stolen, there was an item that an Emissary of the Sect of Shadows had bought at one of the auctions of stolen goods which were periodically organised by the Penguin. Their ignorance of course was not going to save them from “proper retribution”.

4. Jumping at Shadows. All the people with some degree of authority in the 13 Stitches had been assembled by Braxton in the gang’s HQ to discuss what to do with their newly-raided loot. The reunion was interrupted by the body of the lookout being thrown through the skylight, slamming into the wall of the room and falling to the ground in a mangled mess of broken limbs. With all the eyes in the room focused either on that horrible view or on the shattered skylight, no one noticed a small, old lady with almond eyes coming in from the room’s only entrance, which fatally happened to be opposite the place where the lookout’s corpse had hit the floor. No one except Margot, who had learned to recognize a distraction when she saw one. For a fraction of a second, the two women’s gazes met. Then, the old lady shut the door and switched off the lights. For a while, Ms. Grey couldn’t see anything – but she definitely heard lots of things, mostly screams of pain, grunts and death rattles. When the lights were turned on again, the intruder was cleaning the blade of a knife with a piece of fabric while all of her fellow Stitches were lying on the ground. Not all of them were dead (Braxton, for example, was definitely still alive), but the few who weren’t would have likely preferred to share their fallen comrades’ fate. Margot fell on her knees, thinking that she had been spared by that woman to be tortured in some horrific ways. Instead, she was simply asked if, by chance, she was the one who had broken the safe in the van open. Ms. Grey replied affirmatively. The old lady, a satisfied look on her deeply wrinkled face, extended her hand towards the much younger woman. She presented herself as Moldir – just Moldir – an official Emissary of the Sect of Shadows. She had come to Gotham to take possession of a ring that had once adorned the finger of Timur the Conqueror and which held great significance to the Presiding Committee of the Sect (she picked it up from the pile on the table while she was talking and slipped it into an internal pocket of her dress), but as a recruiter for her organisation she had also found something of great interest. The fact that she had been the only one in the room to react wisely to her diversion had piqued her interest. Finding out that she was also skilled enough to pick the locks of a Schuster A90-Y, a notoriously “difficult” model, even for professionals, without damaging its contents in the slightest, had proved that she was prime material for recruitment. Had she taken her hand right then and there, Margot would have taken the first step on the path to becoming a member of the Sect. Noticing that Moldir hadn’t even bothered explaining what would have happened if she hadn’t, she felt like that was an offer she couldn’t refuse. She took the outstretched hand and followed the Emissary out of the room. The last memory she has of the 13 Stitches is the garbled voice of her former boss begging for something she couldn’t quite catch.

Metahuman Powers

Her “Talons'' are a set of retractable, keratin-based claws that reside in place of regular fingernails. At will they can extend up to 5 inches, making for the perfect concealed weapon. During assassination missions she was known to dip her talons in toxins allowing for guaranteed death. Allegedly this was done to the point her talons carry a residual amount of these toxins, not enough to kill but can quickly disorent those (lacking in 3rd Level Toxin Resistance) cut by them. Magpie is also known to have used them as tools to aid in climbing, lockpicking and a myriad of other ways.

The slicing power of her talons is so high that she can cut through a 1-inch thick sheet of steel with a single movement. This technique is highly dependent on her ability to manipulate her own qi, boosting the strength of her arm and the cohesion of her soft tissues with her talons for the duration of the slicing motion. Without it, the sharpness and resilience of her mutated fingernails would never be enough to perform the same feat and she could incur in severe injuries in the process. She learned this technique as a young adult under the tutelage of Lady Shiva of the Sect of Shadows.

The earliest recorded use of her talons was at age 14 in a classical life-or-death situation (as related in the “Origins” section of this dossier), but since the only account of that event comes from Ms. Grey herself, hardly a reliable source considering how many times she has offered conflicting versions of the same event to muddy the waters of her own past, it’s unknown whether that was actually the first time her powers manifested. Due to this uncertainty, a geneticist who treated Magpie during her stay in Metropolis suggested that she was actually born with her powerset and that the first time she used her talons was inside her biological mother’s womb or during the delivery, killing her: a tragic incident which could explain why she would be abandoned shortly after. While a fascinating theory, the evidence produced by the geneticist is hardly conclusive.

Other Skills

- Fluid in French, Thai and Greek in addition to having an adept level in Cantonese and at least 3 slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian);

- Master of disguise. She can flawlessly replicate any accent given time and through use of make-up, posturing and qi can make herself unrecognisable;

- Trained by instructor officers of the Sect of Shadows and then by Lady Shiva herself after she she reached the level of seniority she needed to join a sub-organisation led by a member of the Outer Circle. Margot has a high degree of control over her own qi, which allows her to enhance her own senses to superhuman levels and control her perception of pain. Similarly to Dinah Lance, she can make a part of her body nigh-invulnerable to physical damage for a time, albeit that’s limited to is limited to her arms and shoulders;

- While not as physically strong as fellow student Terry Thielman or Dinah Lance, her base strength is about twice that of a woman with her physical stats;

- In place of strength her focus was applied to agility, she is able to jump 5 feet from a standing position, sprint 100m in 7 seconds flat and scale a 2-storey building in 5. Lady Shiva herself asserted that she was the nimblest out of all her disciples;

- Fifth Striped Ribbon in the Sect of Shadows nomenclature, which translates in the following recognized rankings across the spectrum of martial arts: 8th Dan in Judo, 5th Dan in Kendō, 7th Dan in Karate, 7th Dan in Taekwondo and 6th Degree Red Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

- She’s adept with many forms of technology, particularly those related to concealment and signal jamming. She is even skilled enough to create her own gadgets and near perfect replicas of items she’s stolen. All skills that we believed were gained during her period within MAZE.

Limitations

- Obsessive Personality. Margot has a bad habit of fixating on goals and developing tunnel vision;

- She suffers from kleptomania. At the beginning of her life of thievery she quickly discovered that her obsessive personality translated to this profession in the need to steal literally everything of value during a heist. This “all or nothing” mentality is understandably risky and has led to her capture more than once. It also adds to her reputation in the metacriminal community as one of the most thorough professionals in her line of work;

- Pathological liar, at least when it comes to her personal history. She feels compelled to lie about everything, even when she knows that her account is incompatible with that of eyewitnesses, if it means shielding aspects of her private life from other people, even professionals who’d just like to help her.

Sexuality

From a young age Margot knew she was a Lesbian, a fact she made no effort to hide from people in her life. Her adoptive mother, while coming from a more conservative background, quickly accepted her daughter’s sexual preferences though they rarely discussed them. Leaving aside short-lasting flings which had little impact on her life, these are the women who left the biggest mark on Ms. Grey:

Bethanie Ravencroft was the very first person Margot could call “a significant other”. She wasn’t just a fellow member of the 13 Stitches. She was the lynchpin of a large part of Braxton’s strategies, being the troubled daughter of then-GCPD Commissioner Jonathan Ravencroft. As such, her sway with “daddy” allowed her friends to get off with slaps on the wrist at her word. However Margot was able to see that, for all her talk, Beth was just a spoiled rich kid looking for thrills and a way to rebel against her dad. One night she confronted her on the fact that, for all that she thought that being a gangster was all fun and games, Bethanie had entered a world where “kill or be killed” was the norm rather than the exception. Emotions ran high during that confrontation, until Ravencroft surprised Margot by pushing her onto the bed of her studio apartment and starting to make love with her. Ms. Grey had always been attracted by her, but she had never guessed that she returned those feelings. Over the course of their relationship Margot would discover her dominant side to the delight of Bethanie, who added a stylish black leather choker to her everyday accessories as a hint at her status as her lover’s sub, as well as being able to indulge her long-known foot fetish;
Margot’s attraction to Sandra Wu-San, a.k.a. Lady Shiva, had been there since their first encounter. However, it would find its first expression during an early sparring session between the two of them. She had learned a lot from the Sect instructor officers who had taken care of her training right after being recruited by Moldir, advancing in a very short time almost to Striped Ribbon level. That had made her arrogant and she had stupidly told her new boss that she didn’t need to go easy on her. The Jiu-Jitsu lesson lasted a grand total of 11 seconds and at the end of it the side of Margot’s head found itself pinned to the ground by the foot of the world’s deadliest woman. The humiliation she felt in that moment awakened something in her and her long-neglected kink became overwhelming. Heedless of the possible consequences of such a perverse action, she stuck her tongue out and tried as hard as she could to lick the strong foot pressing against her head a scant few centimetres from the corner of her mouth. Luckily for every bone in Margot’s body, that (admittedly a little pathetic) scene didn’t make Lady Shiva snap. It amused her. She removed her foot, letting her newest underling roll on her back. Then she proceeded to sit down gently on her lap and brought both of her feet to Margot’s face. The latter immediately got to work. From that point on, the relationship between the two women only grew. It’s not hard to guess why in this particular instance, Margot never even attempted to pursue the dominant role. Rather, she viewed this as further mentoring from Shiva, who repeatedly reviewed her performance after each rendezvous. It was a very complicated relationship, but Ms. Grey seems very fond of talking about it and, at the centre of her usual labyrinth of lies which surrounds her past experiences, the feelings of passion and respect for her teacher/commander are still easily recognisable;
Neither Margot nor Terry Thielman would consider what they shared a proper relationship, though for different reasons. After Terry became Shiva’s official lover and submissive partner and before Magpie was sent back to the US on a mission to infiltrate the secret government operation known as Task Force X, Shiva would at times bring Margot into her private chambers to practise her skills as a Dom, ‘offering’ Terry as the Guinea Pig for such practice. Margot was a keen learner and often enjoyed lengthy sessions with the future Mrs. Thielman, always with their mistress somewhere in the picture. To this day, Ms. Grey is very proud of what she accomplished during those sessions. According to her, ‘working’ on a subject like the stern and even somewhat grim Terry until she was turned into a quivering wreck counts as one of her highest achievements. Of course, it wasn’t love, just pure sadism. On the other hand, Mrs. Thielman’s memories of those moments are filtered through the twin lenses of shame and anger. She hated Magpie from the bottom of her heart and went along with what she saw as prostituting herself only for Lady Shiva’s sake. And like in every proper abusive relationship, the latter never really appreciated this act of self-sacrifice;
Magpie met Soseh Mykros after her departure from the Shadows, during that weird period in her life where she was truly trying to change for the better and find a place in the world as a heroine, rather than a villainess. Without a doubt, Soseh, one of her teammates in Black Adam’s hero organisation which Margot had joined on the leader’s invitation, was of great help in that sense. Raised to become a soulless, implacable assassin, the only person she had killed in her whole life had been her horrible father, to the relief of many. Fighting criminals and exploiters as the heroine Nemesis, like the Greek goddess of retribution against the arrogant, Soseh was exactly the partner Ms. Grey was looking for at the time: a person with a firm moral centre, altruistic to a fault, wise beyond her years – plus gorgeous, filthy rich and a real wild cat in bed to boot. Had she been even a little bit interested in BDSM, she would have fought to the death anyone denying that she was the ideal woman. It was during those sunny afternoons spent in Ms. Mykros’s opulent villa on the Mediterranean Sea, lying on her side on a beach lounger next to her girlfriend, with their legs intertwining and looking into her eyes, that Margot truly felt complete for the first time in her life. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the tragic way their relationship ended, which rested exclusively on Margot’s shoulders, had severe psychological (and psychiatric) repercussions on the American woman;
Selina Kyle, a.k.a. Catwoman, was Magpie’s main rival upon her return to Gotham. It was an extremely cordial rivalry, though, since neither woman would have ever lifted a finger against each other after the superbly clever plan they had concocted together to avoid a tragic destiny at the hands of the Joker Gang. It was not a rare occurrence (to the point that it’s not unbelievable that they were doing it on purpose) for the two of them to find themselves competing for the same prize, thus developing a tradition of congratulating the victor in a very physical way. During such contests, it’s pretty much impossible to tell whether it was the desire for their quarry or for the role of dominant partner in the following “celebrations” which was the main drive. It wasn’t love they shared, but it’s undeniable that they were (and still are) extremely fond of each other. As women who both lived very eventful lives and went through experiences normal people can only picture in particularly vivid nightmares, having each other, either as a lover or friend, makes them feel a lot less lonely in this harsh world;
Ms. Kyle introduced Karon “Punkhead” Walsh, her fence and apprentice of her former fence, to Magpie after being recognized as heiress of Don Leo Calabrese and leaving her days as a thief behind. One for the few things she was really sorry about when she retired from being an active thief was the fact that she was leaving Magpie alone. Of course the two women have kept seeing each other from time to time, but the woman who runs the Italian Mafia of Gotham City will inevitably live in a different world than a “mere” professional thief. That’s why she ended up playing Cupid between Margot and Karon, who had recently broken up with Holly Robinson, Selina’s long-time protégé. The two women got along like a house on fire despite their very different personalities. The garrulous, thrill-seeking, unruly Margot craved an anchor of stability, while the contemplative, phlegmatic, focused Karon secretly longed for someone who could bring an element of uncertainty in her life. To this day they’re still an item, though Margot has had to turn down all of Ms. Walsh’s offers to move to her place. While she truly loves Karon and doesn’t mind adding a pinch of spice to her life, she’s made enemies over the years and she’d like to keep her beloved Punkhead as safe as possible from any potential reprisal against Magpie.
As it should be clear from this section so far, foot fetishism and being the dominant partner in a BDSM relationship are well-known paraphilias of Ms. Grey’s. Her style of domination can best be described as a pleasure overload. Margot delights in binding down her sub and then worshipping, massaging and teasing them to the edge before letting them cool off and resuming until their climax, leaving them totally drained. Due to her mother’s line of work and her upbringing, sex was something she had knowledge of since at least first grade. Her openness to discuss such topics casually is quite often shocking to people who have known her only for a little time.

Spirituality

She used to identify as an atheist and attribute it to her upbringing. At the time of her commitment to a mental institution, she once said to a psychiatrist following her case: “hard to believe there’s a Hell when you grow up in Gotham”. However, after her time in the Sect, the Suicide Squad and, most importantly, Black Adam’s Rightful Covenant, she prefers the term ‘irreligious’ to describe herself. In the aforementioned interview, she later added: “I once met this woman. She incurred the wrath of this Egyptian goddess – the one with the lioness head, you know which one I’m referring to, right? She’s spent the past 35 centuries locked in an endless cycle of suffering. Every time she’s reborn with the hope of a normal existence, but eventually the were-panther that is the goddess’s curse awakens and she spends the rest of her days destroying everything she loves and killing everyone she cares for. And then she dies in atrocious ways, unmourned and unloved, for the cycle to begin again. I know for sure that gods exist. Just like I know for sure that I’m never going to worship any one of them.”

Key Moments

- Braxton might have welcomed Margot with open arms in his criminal organisation, but the thought of working with a 14-year-old metahuman with a bodycount made a lot of her new “colleagues” uneasy. Who could guarantee that she wouldn’t have lost her mind and turned her talons against the other members of the 13 Stitches? Or that her powers hadn’t just partially awakened and she wasn’t suddenly going to change into some inhuman monster, all claws and fangs? After all, there were so many horrific stories about teens like Margot going about… The boss himself stepped in and settled things by sending her new underling to Metropolis, where specialists would have checked the actual extent of her powers. Of course, one can’t just simply phone to one of the research centres on metahumans in the City of Tomorrow and make an appointment, so Braxton had to consult with his contacts and find somebody who could ‘ship’ Margot inside the walls and fabricating all the documents she was going to need. According to several testimonies (none of which, unfortunately, can be used in court), that somebody ended up being Lex Luthor, at the time in his mid-twenties and looking for ways to expand the shipping company he had recently inherited from his father. Mr. Luthor apparently took Ms. Grey under his wing, creating a new identity for her, finding an apartment where she could stay, introducing her to some of the best specialists in the field of metahuman powers in the Western Hemisphere. In return, she took the occasional oddjob from him, exploiting the fact that, to his chagrin, in the City of Tomorrow metahuman teens paradoxically had more freedom of movement than many non-metahuman adult entrepreneurs. Once it was proved that Margot was not at risk of further mutations, she went back to Gotham City, now in full control of her talons and with a considerable amount of experience at not being conspicuous in places she shouldn’t have been. Luthor, on the other hand, would conduct several hostile takeovers in the following 6 months and Lexcorp monopolised shipping in and out of Metropolis before the end of the year;

- November 1994 was by far the most eventful month in all of Ms. Grey’s life. It started with the security breach in the Imaginary Number District of Metropolis, a crisis which required the intervention of Task Force X, which she had infiltrated under orders from the Presiding Committee of the Sect of Shadows. Six different life-or-death situations in the span of 48 hours later, she had her reunion with the man who had helped her get into Metropolis years before, Lex Luthor, and she asked for his assistance to get out of the Suicide Squad. Feeling like he owed a debt to Magpie, Mr. Luthor did indeed get to work on the technology of her neck implant and synthesised in a matter of minutes a substance which he promptly injected into her ‘good behaviour guarantee’’, rendering the flammable liquid in its micro-tank inert and atoxic. Still with her neck implant on, but without the threat it presented, she managed to organise the prison riot in Belle Reve which allowed her to escape from the maximum security complex. Then there was the frantic, high-altitude battle on the plane from Atlanta to Bangkok against Lady Vic, the British mercenary who had every reason to want Magpie dead for the way she had made her look like a fool in Kuala Lumpur two years before. A frantic, high-altitude battle ensued. It took a fall from 27,000 feet to make both women re-evaluate their priorities and find a way to survive. Then came two long weeks of trying to reach Bangkok and her old superior, Lady Shiva, with any means necessary. During that time, Margot was harassed non-stop by members of the League of Assassins and hit men sent by Amanda Waller, while being frustratingly unable to contact any member of the Sect she knew in that region. In the end she didn’t even make it to Thailand. She was in Karachi, Pakistan, and she was summoned in front of Monsoon, one of the Exarchs of the Sect, the highest-ranked members of the organisation a mere operative like her would ever have the chance to see. There, Margot’s world crumbled around her when Monsoon informed her that, because of her collaboration with Lex Luthor, persona non grata to the Shadows due to Lexcorp’s many deals with Talia Al-Ghul and the Wayne-Head Enterprises, the Presiding Committee had declared her a traitor to the Sect. And finally, after miraculously escaping from Karachi and the veritable army of Shadows that had been let loose by the Exarch, she first came in contact with Black Adam’s Covenant, while she was trying to lie low and go dark in Oman. She would have understandably preferred not to get involved in something as huge as taking down a H.I.V.E. facility developing WMD in the arid Omani hinterland, but as long-time associates of the Shadows, the local H.I.V.E. forces had successfully apprehended Ms. Grey after fortuitously recognizing her. Having escaped from her cell while Black Adam and his allies were beginning their attack, she had given her personal contribution to their operation by wreaking havoc inside the base while her ‘new best friends’ took care of the external defences. It was the very last day of the month when the Supreme Leader of Kahndaq replied to Magpie imploring for protection against the innumerable enemies she had all over the world by proposing her to turn over a new leaf and putting her considerable skills at the service of the Covenant – and therefore of the people they protected. A bit dumbfounded at the idea that anybody could ever see her as hero material, she nevertheless accepted Black Adam’s offer;

- The reasons which brought Margot Grey to throw her heroic career and a relationship with a woman she genuinely loved out of the window, all for the sake of two pounds of precious metals and jewels, will probably never be completely clear. The curtain of smoke and lies she put up around most meaningful events in her life is the thickest around that particular moment, reaching even the subconscious part of her mind. Inquiries about her thought processes in the crucial hours after the task force of the Covenant she was a part of prevented the tomb of King Shuttarna II from being desecrated and raided were attempted by inducing a hypnotic state in the subject – and they still ended up returning contradictory statements. But while Magpie’s motives are still indecipherable, we have at least complete reports of her actions, during and after the incident. Ms. Grey had been tasked with guarding the eastern wing of the tomb, where the treasure chamber was located. When reinforcements arrived to secure the archeological site, one of her teammates (who wishes to stay anonymous) noticed that a superbly-crafted ornamental necklace had been removed from the statue it adorned. When a thorough search of every person who had ever set foot in the complex was ordered, Margot panicked and rushed into a hopeless escape attempt, seriously injuring two members of the Covenant in the process. She was stopped in her tracks by her fiancée, Nemesis, who fought her to a standstill until the leader of the Covenant himself, Black Adam, stepped in and subdued his rebel ally in less than a second. She might have successfully begged for forgiveness, had she only stolen that necklace, but trying to escape and injuring her allies in the process were flagrant violations of the rules of the Covenant. She was forever expelled from the organisation, her heart was broken when her beloved Soseh dumped her with a letter, where she wrote that she could have forgiven her criminal actions but not how gratuitously she had thrown away her new life, and she was sentenced to prison in a maximum security facility in Lebanon, where most metahuman felons were sent from across the Middle East. One week after she started serving her sentence, she attempted suicide by slitting her own wrists. Saved by the prompt intervention of the prison guards, she was moved to the psychiatric ward of the same facility a few days later;

- Ms. Grey knew very well that moving back to her hometown, with its lively criminal scene, meant that it was only a matter of time before she got into a collision course with one of the major players in the city’s underworld. What she didn’t expect was that it would happen so soon after her arrival and that the major player would end up being the organisation still known as the Joker Gang, which hardly had a presence in the field of jewel theft. Unfortunately, it’s hard to predict when the luxury mansion you’re ransacking is going to be stormed by 30 armed thugs in clown makeup and masks, who also happen to be competent enough to capture you before you can vacate the place. That wasn’t the end of Magpie only because Selina Kyle, a.k.a. Catwoman, also happened to be a guest of the cells of the Joker Gang’s HQ because of an unrelated slight to the organisation and that gave Harley Quinn, de facto leader of the Gang, the idea of setting up a little show for her troops. “Birds vs. Cats: who will survive?” was the name of the event, starring a fight to the death between Margot and Selina. The former was stronger, younger and better trained than the latter. Magpie could have just gone along with it, knowing that she had good chances to come out on top and survive to see the next day. But neither professional thief felt like providing that kind of entertainment to their captors and together they hatched a risky plan to save both of their skins. The “fight” consisted of the two women entering the arena, circling each other for about two minutes, striking a single blow at the same time and being immediately knocked to the ground. While the audience was making their displeasure with the show (and the fact that the bookmakers refused to give a clear answer about the fate of their bets) by rioting, Magpie and Catwoman managed to exploit all that confusion and uproar to escape from the Joker Gang HQ. It was the start of a beautiful friendship (with benefits), which lasts to this day.

Outstanding Feats

- Despite not being the mind behind it or the only person involved, it’s undeniable that Ms. Grey was the MVP of the operation which in 1992 allowed the Sect of Shadows to take possession of the fabled treasure of the Indonesian guerrilla leader Singa (“lion” in Malay; no records of his birth name survive). Active during WW2, Singa amassed a fortune raiding both the Dutch and British colonial authorities and the invading Imperial Japanese Army before and after the outbreak of the second global conflict, hiding it in an undisclosed location in the Indonesian archipelago just before his untimely death in 1944. Margot was responsible for retrieving/stealing two of the three artefacts which Singa left to his lieutenants, which together would reveal the exact position of the hidden treasure (the trio never solved the riddle, being more interested in backstabbing each other than cooperating), and then successfully fended off many attempts by rival organisations to get to the guerrilla’s hidden fortune (incidentally, these were the circumstances behind her first encounter with Lady Vic). The Sect Emissaries dispatched by the Presiding Committee saw Magpie and the other members of the expedition triumphantly arrive piloting a WW2-era British S-Class submarine, full to the brim of money, jewels, ingots, weapons, relics and art objects. Classified Sect documents which were leaked in the aftermath of the crisis which shook the organisation in 1998 reveal that the experts which catalogued and sorted the treasure estimated its total value in 84 billion US$;

- In the Summer of 1993, with the Republic of South Africa well on its way towards the end of the apartheid regime and the local chapter of the Sect of Shadows in complete disarray (the Shadows had secretly sponsored minority-ruled South Africa for more than 3 decades), Magpie accompanied her superior and mentor, Lady Shiva, to that country. She and a few other members of the Outer Circle had been tasked with salvaging what they could of the once sprawling local section and eliminating the inefficiencies – physically, if necessary. With so many leading members of the Sect converging on the same place, far away from their strongholds, the League of Assassins (which had fought a secret war on the side of the Black majority throughout the Eighties and early Nineties) sent the Seven Men of Death, their most elite force, and around a hundred additional operatives in support roles on a mission to eliminate as many officers of the Sect they could find. Whip, a female member of the Seven, was the one who took upon herself to terminate Lady Shiva and her entourage and she might have succeeded after her main target was poisoned if it hadn’t been for Margot’s intervention. Despite Whip breaking her left arm a couple of seconds into their fight, Ms. Grey, using her massive amount of dirty tricks and exploiting the Assassin’s overconfidence, not only survived against her opponent much longer than it should have been possible, but even managed to kill her, piercing her heart with a sai Margot had fortuitously recovered during the fight. Lady Shiva fully recovered, but she was the only survivor among the original delegation of Outer Circle officers. All the other members of the Seven Men of Death successfully terminated their targets;

- An entire year had passed since Ms. Grey had relocated to Europe and started her career as a self-employed professional thief. Pretty, shiny and expensive things were of course her favourite targets, but her formative experiences in the underworld of secret organisations and cloak & dagger had taught her that a single piece of sensitive information was much easier to sell at the price it was actually worth than any pearl necklace or ruby bracelet. It had all begun with what should have been the most straightforward of jobs: following a woman who had been contacted by MAZE, the mercenary intelligence service, for a job interview at a desk job, so that she could learn something about the people sent by the organisation to conduct the interview. What Margot wasn’t expecting was that the woman would have a heart attack out of nowhere while she was driving across the French countryside. Being very good at improvising, Margot decided not to let that incident discourage her and put her disguise skills at work, becoming the woman she had been following before 10 minutes had passed and showing up at the job interview on schedule. Thanks to her exposure to the internal bureaucracy of the Sect of Shadows, she knew enough about the way paperwork was handled inside secret organisations and had no trouble getting her desk job. She spent three months as one of MAZE’s bookkeepers and came out of that experience with a veritable treasure trove of information. Not only she managed to acquire the complete, digitised archives of the organisation from 1971 to 1997, which she’s exploiting to this day as her ‘insurance policy’, having devised a system that would release them on the World Wide Web for everyone to read if she ever gets assassinated, but she also considerably expanded her horizons in the field of cutting-edge technology, thanks to a pretty young woman from the R&D section who proved to be very reactive to her flirting;

- Having lost all of naivety decades before, Ms. Grey was expecting some kind of retaliation from the Unicorns Triad after she had managed to steal the fabled Three-Lion Cup from the supposedly-impenetrable vault of the boss of that gang. However, thinking Gotham’s Chinatown a more insular community than it actually is, she was expecting a collection of brutish henchmen you could hear coming two blocks away. She wasn’t expecting to fall into a well-crafted trap devised by the Tally Man, the newest sensation in the crowded world of hired assassins on the US East Coast. Margot was shot point blank in the side and then twice in the back with the assassin’s signature .38 calibre revolver. It took all of her willpower not to lose her consciousness and that herculean effort didn’t go to waste. Before Tally Man could shoot his 4th bullet, Magpie got hold of his long, flowing robe and proceeded to sweep him off his feet. A frantic ground battle began to decide the ownership of the man’s robe, one which Margot had to win if she wanted to have a chance to live to see another day. And indeed, running on pure adrenaline, the thief managed to wrest control of Tally Man’s working clothes. The hit man himself struck the floor with the back of his head when his robe came off, which gave Margot the opening she needed. Still clinging to the clothes, she jumped out of an open window to her salvation: the roof of a skytrain station. And then to the roof of a skytrain which departed the station just a couple of seconds later. She got off the train (not entirely voluntarily) only once she had put more than a mile between her and the killer, deep in the district of Old Gotham, near the station of Moench Row. At the end of her tether, she just curled up on the roof of a small, abandoned building and closed her eyes, hoping for death or a miracle to come quickly. Instead there came Black Canary, alerted by her ally Oracle, who in her Watchtower received the feed of every CC camera in Old Gotham and had easily recognized the professional thief. Seeing Margot in that pitiful state, Dinah immediately brought her to the healing tank the Birds of Prey kept in 96 Gorfinkel Street. Once Magpie was floating in the regenerative fluid, Dinah could dedicate her attention to the black robe Ms. Grey was still clinging to when she found her, recognizing it as Tally Man’s. In a major stroke of luck, she found out an internal pocket where the hit man kept copies of all of his contracts and that the next debt/life he was going to collect would be that of Jason Bard, ‘guilty’ of having unveiled, back when he was an active private eye, some ‘youthful follies’ of a woman who had recently married the heir of one of the city’s Mafia families, which had caused a major scandal at the time. Margot was asleep throughout the entire battle between the Birds of Prey and Tally Man, but her vital contribution to saving Mr. Bard’s life was so undeniable that no member of the team, not even the usually rigid Oracle, felt like bringing her to the closest police station once she was pulled out of the tank.

Fun facts

- As a default she speaks with a formal Southern English accent despite never having spent any extended period of time in England. This is a consequence of being raised by her foster mother, who spoke with that accent due to spending her childhood at an English Boarding School;

- Her main alias also has an English origin, an old nursery rhyme about magpies told to her by Cynthia Grey: One for sorrow. Two for joy. Three for a girl. Four for a boy. Five for silver. Six for gold. Seven for a secret, never to be told. According to an old superstition (with roots in the ancient practice of ornithomancy), the number of magpies seen tells if one will have bad or good luck. She chose it as her official codename at the age of 16, when she was a member of the 13 Stitches and a bit on the edgy/poetic side like nearly all teenagers. Her reasoning was that, since she usually worked alone, seeing her while she was busy with a heist would inevitably bring great sorrow to the poor soul;

- Like every respectable criminal, she dislikes talking about what she does with her spare time whenever she’s not busy planning her next huge hit or carrying it out. However, it’s more or less an open secret that over the years she’s developed a major interest in the art of photography. Her first experiences with a camera happened during her reconnaissance training with the Shadows. Every time she finished developing the films, she felt that, while those pictures were more than adequate for the purposes of her training, she could have done much better with a different equipment and more time to ‘study’ the way the subject should have been framed. She bought her first professional camera when she was 22 and things started snowballing from that point onwards. A number of her pictures have even been displayed in galleries and publications over the years, in all cases under the alias Cassandra Pye;

- It wasn’t uncommon for friends/rivals Catwoman and Magpie to team up when it came to carry out high-risk burglaries (in such occurrences, it was the one who managed who actually managed to run away with the stolen goods after vacating the crime scene who got to enjoy the “special privileges” in the following victory party). Success was usually guaranteed, since two of America’s best professional thieves working together made them a force to be reckoned with no matter the odds, but their last job together ended up being a lesson in humility for both women. The duo had infiltrated the obscenely luxurious yacht of Mr. Julián Castillo, the notorious Chilean copper tycoon, thinking they knew every single square inch of it. Instead they had found out the hard way that Castillo had kept an entire set of security systems out of the official blueprints of his ship. Margot and Selina had found themselves trapped between twin steel walls which had come down the ceiling of the main hall on Bridge C, trapping them in a box. Before the former could slash her way out with her Talons, a powerful narcotic had been pumped into the box, putting them both to sleep in record time. They had woken up in a huge cargo hold barefoot, their costumes unzipped, their equipment and gadgets confiscated, their upper bodies immobilized by lots of expertly-knotted nylon rope and their ankles tied together by titanium cuffs, each pair connected by a length of chain to a massive iron ball. Mr. Castillo was right in front of them, wishing to congratulate the duo in a “so close, alas no cigar” way before disposing of them, which he did simply by pulling a lever. The floor opened right under the two women and they were rudely introduced to the waters of San Diego Bay. After nine fathoms of near free-fall, the iron balls touched the bottom of the bay. The situation was desperate. Magpie couldn’t even use her Talons to cut the ropes since her hands had been tied in a way that she would have grievously pierced her own hands had she taken them out, making her lose control of her fingers. It looked like that was the end of both of their careers when Magpie felt Selina’s lips on her own. But rather than it being a goodbye kiss, it ended up being both women’s salvation. In the span of a heartbeat, the two women dematerialised and re-materialised in Selina’s apartment, back in Gotham. After two hours spent getting rid of their restraints, Margot finally had the chance to ask her friend and colleague what exactly had happened. Selina replied by baring her right arm and showing her a scar shaped like a zero on her triceps. Magpie could have sworn that she had a ‘2’ tattooed in the same place until the day before. She explained that, eleven years before, when she was still little more than a rookie, she had been of great help to a magician, a former heroine that had embraced the ‘gray zone’ of the superpowered community, and she had paid her debt by giving Catwoman eight extra ‘lives’, which she could use to cheat death in whichever way she wished. She wasn’t sure if it would have worked for another person too, but she was extremely grateful that it did – and that, during the plunge, they hadn’t drifted far enough from each other that she wouldn’t have had a chance to find an answer to that question. While that was the unquestionable high point of Ms. Grey’s relationship with Ms. Kyle, it was also the thing that ruined it. The fact that Selina had used her last extra life to save her from certain death couldn’t not have an impact on Margot’s feelings for her. Post-heist sex and bondage were great, but in her heart she knew that she now wanted more than that kind of relationship, just like she knew that Catwoman was not the kind of person who could ever give it to her. Selina abandoning the life of the cat burglar to become head of Gotham’s Mafia a couple of months later was a blessing in disguise, since it forced their relationship to change and become more distant (though only in a physical sense), removing the Damocles’ Sword that had been hanging over Margot’s head ever since the incident on Castillo’s yacht;

- As she likes to tell anyone inquiring about her romantic life, right now Margot is married to her job, which makes Karon Walsh her lover and that explains why she would never betray her. The only thing she can’t stand about her current significant other is how obnoxiously professional she can be whenever Magpie brings up the matter of Punkhead – a real black swan in her line of job, since she doesn’t try to swindle everyone at all times – personal fence. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how much she complains about the way her current one (and the one before him, and the one before her…) treats her, or the horrible things she threatens to do / does to her during their moments of intimacy, Ms. Walsh is unwavering. Having a client who’s also her girlfriend is the biggest conflict of interest she can think of.

Confidential Info

- Thanks to the 2002 Transparency Agreement between the JLA and Prism, we’re now able to confirm that Ms. Grey’s escape from the mental hospital near Beirut she had been committed to was enabled by a third party. Taken into custody in the HQ of Prism in Malta in May 2001, exactly 4 years after the breakout, Lucie Chesneau, a.k.a. l’Ombre Grise, also a professional thief and Magpie’s partner in their escape from the maximum security wing of the institution, revealed during a questioning session that her presence in that mental hospital had been orchestrated by none other than Soseh Mykros, a.k.a. Nemesis. The Greek-Armenian vigilante might have been adamant about not wanting anything to do with her ex-girlfriend anymore, but deep down she still cared deeply for her and not just on a basic human level. Hearing about Margot’s attempted suicide was a real blow to the heart for her. She felt like she needed to do something for her but she couldn’t expose herself. She ultimately found a work around when she apprehended l’Ombre Grise while she was busy plundering a French billionaire’s villa near Sidon (Lebanon) during a pool party she had, by chance, been invited to. The police were not called and Nemesis struck a deal with Ms. Chesneau: she could guarantee that the Covenant would never inconvenience her in any way and that her latest theft would be forgotten if she accepted to follow all of Soseh’s instructions, wherever they would take her. Of course Lucie didn’t expect at the time that those instructions would involve her being committed to a psychiatric ward under a false identity, but throughout her confessions she’s quite clearly impressed by the efficiency Ms. Mykros displayed when it came to making all the parts of the plan come together, especially when it came to the deliveries (one piece at a time over several months) of the tools the two women would need to mount a successful breakout. On her part, Lucie displayed outstanding people skills, considering that she was capable of handling a person in a very delicate mental state pretty much flawlessly, in some ways helping her healing and rebuilding confidence more than either the doctors or the drugs. The JLA decided to follow Prism’s lead and not share the contents of the questioning session pertaining to Lucie’s association with Margot Grey with any member of the Covenant, due to the chance that such a course of action would expose the vigilante known as Nemesis to disproportionate retribution;

- To this day, it’s not clear what compelled Magpie to move back to Gotham City in mid-1999. The ‘official versions’ the JLA has been able to collect cannot be trusted. Her trying to put as much distance as possible from the stomping grounds of the Covenant assumes that she took 2 years, starting from her escape from that Lebanese psychiatric hospital, to realise the soundness of that course of action. 2 years which never saw a single incursion of the Covenant in France, where Grey had settled down. The idea that she had crossed the Atlantic Ocean because she had stepped on the toes of the thief syndicate known as CYCLOPS is equally hard to believe. For all of that organisation’s boasting, there’s never been a single occurrence of an attempt at the life of one of their enemies. A woman with Grey’s abilities and training, plus the protection granted by MAZE, should have nothing to fear from a threat of that level. It might have been a case of homesickness or a need to return to her old stomping grounds now that she was once again a professional thief, like she had been in her teenage years as a member of the 13 Stitches. On the other hand, part-time League member Ralph Dibny, a.k.a. Elongated Man, is certain that Magpie was invited to come back to the US and that there’s a connection between Grey and a number of other supervillains and wheeler-dealers of the criminal underworld who have moved to America starting in 1999. While Mr. Dibny has not yet produced anything more than circumstantial evidence in support of his theory, the JLA plenum granted him the resources and mandate to carry out a proper investigation in March 2003.

Testimonies

Terry Thielman: "Being pimped out to her because Shiva thought it made for a nice show was perhaps the first moment when I realized how toxic and hopeless that relationship was, so I should be thankful for that. Still, she gleefully participated in the action without remorse. I’ll never forgive her for that."

Barbara Gordon: “She’s an inveterate criminal, incapable of perceiving her actions as wrong unless they negatively affect her. But she has limits she won’t cross and she’s tough in a way people who believe that cruelty is the point seldom are. Make of that what you will.”

Pamela Isley: “I thought she was just the latest Suicide Squad rookie I could turn into my toy and pawn. Until the day she clocked me so hard it was a miracle my jaw stayed in one piece and ratted me out to the Wall. The day I kill her, first I’ll need to congratulate her for pulling one over on me, of all people.”

Black Adam: “I trusted that woman. When I found her, she had nothing and I gave her everything. Soseh, that noblest of warriors, even gave her her own heart. And she repaid us with betrayal. Her withered soul is rotten to the core. And you can’t reason with rot, only excise it.”

Selina Kyle: “It was a difficult time for me. Holly and I were butting heads more and more often and my body was starting to have trouble keeping up with my lifestyle. Meeting her kind of rekindled my flame. My last year as a pro thief was possibly the most fulfilling one thanks to our rivalry.”

Dinah Lance: "She isn't a bad person deep down, I’m sure of that. However, I can't stress enough that her learning only part of Sandra’s [Lady Shiva’s] techniques was a net positive."

{ The dossier was jointly written by me and and builds upon my 96 Gorfinkel Street series. The picture is a Christmas present for my co-author, but he gave me the permission to upload it and the accompanying text in my own gallery. The original Magpie is copyright of DC Entertainment. }

Description

JLA Dossier

n. IWG - 637994 LBL

Civilian name

Margot Grey

Known aliases

Magpie (criminal codename; also her superhero identity)

Margret Gaterra

Margret Byrne

Cassandra Pye

Physical Info
Birthday: August 8th, 1967
Age: 35
Profession: professional thief
Marital status: single (in a relationship with Karon Walsh)
Birthplace: Gotham City (NJ)
Height: 175 cm (5’ 9”)
Weight: 65 kg (143 lbs.)
Eyes: Nordic blue (left), Celtic green (right)
Hair: brown-black
Blood type: A+
Shoe size: 9 US Female
Distinguishing features: heterochromia, retractable finger talons

Status in the Metahuman Community

- Ranks at #3 among the world’s professional thieves for total value of goods stolen throughout her career;

- Former member of the Sect of Shadows, reporting directly to the Sect official known as Lady Shiva;

- Leader of the revolt at the Belle Reve Prison which led to the only occurrence of a successful escape of a member of the Task Force X;

- Confirmed to have broken out from at least 5 maximum security facilities across the world;

- Has survived confrontations with several elite assassins, including Lady Vic, KGBeast and Tally Man;

- Acquired copies of the archives of the mercenary intelligence service known as MAZE, which she routinely exploits to blackmail the entire organisation into protecting her and her personal data.

Origins

1. Street Bird. To this day, no one, not even Ms. Grey herself, really knows who her biological parents are. We know for sure that she was abandoned by someone on a bench of Robinson Park when she was about two days old, but the identity of that someone (father? Mother? A completely unrelated person?) is unknown: no record of the birth of a baby with compatible physical data was ever found in any hospital or clinic in all of Kane County. The enigma surrounding her origins however has never bothered Margot all that much. As far as she’s concerned, the only mother she’s ever had is Cynthia Grey, the woman who adopted her about two months after she was found. Grey came from old Gotham money, which had been near-exhausted by her gambler father. She remained in her family’s dilapidated mansion house in Somerset, earning money as a high profile escort. Due to her profession, she was often forced to spend extended periods of time away from her house, which despite its size was totally devoid of staff. These two factors, combined with Margot being more afraid of that dusty, empty manor than of the streets of Gotham, even the ones from the most disreputable neighbourhoods, played a huge part in her upbringing. Young Margot received quite a lot of her education in the alleys and slums of Gotham City.

2. It Was a Dark and Bloody Night. Young Margot quickly found out all the main places the varied “Street People” of Gotham used to gather in those years, plus a couple that were the exclusive of some very territorial cliques. Whenever her foster mother was on one of her “business trips”, she used to spend most of her day hanging around these places, often forgetting entirely that she was supposed to attend school. She didn’t believe she was missing out on anything anyway. She could learn much more useful things in the “classes” held under the skytrains and the highways, in the most dilapidated areas of the city’s parks, in the deserted apartment buildings of Uptown and the back of the street shops of Chinatown, Little Tokyo and the Hill. She was barely a teen at the time and it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that she was perceived as a foreign body in such environments. But reality and the most reasonable course of events sometimes do not mix and Ms. Grey somehow found ways to blend with the collection of humanity populating that section of Gotham’s underworld and attract only as much attention as she wanted on herself. However, she was living on a razor’s edge and this blessed state of things could not last forever. She didn’t witness what exactly happened that sent Big Mahoney and his goons into a frenzy against Sandy C’s gang, but on that night she immediately realised that a lot of blood was going to be spilled in the old auditorium of Aparo Park. What she didn’t realise was how much of that blood she was going to spill. It’s very common for metahuman powers to manifest themselves during puberty, when their owner ends up in lethal danger. The combination of hormones and stress levels acts as a natural catalyst for the unlocking of their hidden potential. Margot was no exception. She only meant to scratch the face of the henchman who had grabbed her by the neck – instead, when she opened her eyes, she noticed that her assailant had lost both of his eyes and his nose, replaced by four deep, bloody slits. Looking at her right hand, seeing the bits of organic tissue still attached to her – suddenly 2 and a half inches long – fingernails, any doubts she might have had dissipated. Just in time to realise that she was still surrounded by people wielding handguns and heavy blunt objects and that she should have really left that place. Which she did by ploughing through other two people who were in her way, first by ripping open a belly and then by tearing up a throat until her talons reached the vertebrae. Finesse was not going to help her in that free-for-all. She ran and ran and ran with no clear destination in mind, as long as it was as far away from Aparo Park as possible. She collapsed, completely exhausted, in the northern reaches of Otisburg, in the territory of the 13 Stitches, Joe Braxton’s gang. She was found not long after by a member of said gang and immediately taken to the local crime boss. Rumours of the bloody events at Aparo Park had reached that neighbourhood and, since he had recognized her as the girl who often hung out with Sandy C’s crowd and she was covered in blood, she was likely to know something about it.

3. The 13 Stitches. The 13 Stitches were a small but fiercely territorial group, led by a man who, while ambitious, was smart enough not to overreach. The name of the gang came from a knife wound Braxton received when he overthrew the previous boss, Victor Zsasz, who of course hadn’t gone down without a fight. When a girl who couldn’t have been older than 14, covered in blood, clearly in a state of shock and looking like she could have collapsed on the floor at any moment, he didn’t immediately start giving her the third degree. He gave her time to rest and recover and all the water and food she needed. Margot was able to give a complete account of what had happened in Aparo Park, about halfway through the next morning. It was still early enough for the 13 Stitches to exploit the sudden power vacuum in western Uptown (while Margot hadn’t witnessed all of it, it was clear that the gang war of that night had severely weakened both players) and mount the offensive Braxton had dreamed of for years. Within three days, his mob annexed all of the territories previously controlled by the late Big Mahoney and the comatose Sandy C, becoming one of the main players north of the Sprang River in the process. The Stitches also grew in number, thanks to the desertions from their ex-rivals and the addition of a very special new member: Margot Grey. Braxton had quickly taken a liking to her, not least because of how efficiently she had employed her newly-awakened metahuman power. If there was something he needed were people who could keep their heads cool while not becoming complete psychos. Margot spent the next 4 years of her life as part of the gang, learning the extent and limits of her power, finding love and learning how to be a thief and a burglar, after she showed some real talent in that line of work. Everything changed on the night when Stitches robbed a truck belonging to one Oswald Cobblepot, the supreme overlord of the Downtown criminal underground. At the time, they didn’t know that, among what they had stolen, there was an item that an Emissary of the Sect of Shadows had bought at one of the auctions of stolen goods which were periodically organised by the Penguin. Their ignorance of course was not going to save them from “proper retribution”.

4. Jumping at Shadows. All the people with some degree of authority in the 13 Stitches had been assembled by Braxton in the gang’s HQ to discuss what to do with their newly-raided loot. The reunion was interrupted by the body of the lookout being thrown through the skylight, slamming into the wall of the room and falling to the ground in a mangled mess of broken limbs. With all the eyes in the room focused either on that horrible view or on the shattered skylight, no one noticed a small, old lady with almond eyes coming in from the room’s only entrance, which fatally happened to be opposite the place where the lookout’s corpse had hit the floor. No one except Margot, who had learned to recognize a distraction when she saw one. For a fraction of a second, the two women’s gazes met. Then, the old lady shut the door and switched off the lights. For a while, Ms. Grey couldn’t see anything – but she definitely heard lots of things, mostly screams of pain, grunts and death rattles. When the lights were turned on again, the intruder was cleaning the blade of a knife with a piece of fabric while all of her fellow Stitches were lying on the ground. Not all of them were dead (Braxton, for example, was definitely still alive), but the few who weren’t would have likely preferred to share their fallen comrades’ fate. Margot fell on her knees, thinking that she had been spared by that woman to be tortured in some horrific ways. Instead, she was simply asked if, by chance, she was the one who had broken the safe in the van open. Ms. Grey replied affirmatively. The old lady, a satisfied look on her deeply wrinkled face, extended her hand towards the much younger woman. She presented herself as Moldir – just Moldir – an official Emissary of the Sect of Shadows. She had come to Gotham to take possession of a ring that had once adorned the finger of Timur the Conqueror and which held great significance to the Presiding Committee of the Sect (she picked it up from the pile on the table while she was talking and slipped it into an internal pocket of her dress), but as a recruiter for her organisation she had also found something of great interest. The fact that she had been the only one in the room to react wisely to her diversion had piqued her interest. Finding out that she was also skilled enough to pick the locks of a Schuster A90-Y, a notoriously “difficult” model, even for professionals, without damaging its contents in the slightest, had proved that she was prime material for recruitment. Had she taken her hand right then and there, Margot would have taken the first step on the path to becoming a member of the Sect. Noticing that Moldir hadn’t even bothered explaining what would have happened if she hadn’t, she felt like that was an offer she couldn’t refuse. She took the outstretched hand and followed the Emissary out of the room. The last memory she has of the 13 Stitches is the garbled voice of her former boss begging for something she couldn’t quite catch.

Metahuman Powers

Her “Talons'' are a set of retractable, keratin-based claws that reside in place of regular fingernails. At will they can extend up to 5 inches, making for the perfect concealed weapon. During assassination missions she was known to dip her talons in toxins allowing for guaranteed death. Allegedly this was done to the point her talons carry a residual amount of these toxins, not enough to kill but can quickly disorent those (lacking in 3rd Level Toxin Resistance) cut by them. Magpie is also known to have used them as tools to aid in climbing, lockpicking and a myriad of other ways.

The slicing power of her talons is so high that she can cut through a 1-inch thick sheet of steel with a single movement. This technique is highly dependent on her ability to manipulate her own qi, boosting the strength of her arm and the cohesion of her soft tissues with her talons for the duration of the slicing motion. Without it, the sharpness and resilience of her mutated fingernails would never be enough to perform the same feat and she could incur in severe injuries in the process. She learned this technique as a young adult under the tutelage of Lady Shiva of the Sect of Shadows.

The earliest recorded use of her talons was at age 14 in a classical life-or-death situation (as related in the “Origins” section of this dossier), but since the only account of that event comes from Ms. Grey herself, hardly a reliable source considering how many times she has offered conflicting versions of the same event to muddy the waters of her own past, it’s unknown whether that was actually the first time her powers manifested. Due to this uncertainty, a geneticist who treated Magpie during her stay in Metropolis suggested that she was actually born with her powerset and that the first time she used her talons was inside her biological mother’s womb or during the delivery, killing her: a tragic incident which could explain why she would be abandoned shortly after. While a fascinating theory, the evidence produced by the geneticist is hardly conclusive.

Other Skills

- Fluid in French, Thai and Greek in addition to having an adept level in Cantonese and at least 3 slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian);

- Master of disguise. She can flawlessly replicate any accent given time and through use of make-up, posturing and qi can make herself unrecognisable;

- Trained by instructor officers of the Sect of Shadows and then by Lady Shiva herself after she she reached the level of seniority she needed to join a sub-organisation led by a member of the Outer Circle. Margot has a high degree of control over her own qi, which allows her to enhance her own senses to superhuman levels and control her perception of pain. Similarly to Dinah Lance, she can make a part of her body nigh-invulnerable to physical damage for a time, albeit that’s limited to is limited to her arms and shoulders;

- While not as physically strong as fellow student Terry Thielman or Dinah Lance, her base strength is about twice that of a woman with her physical stats;

- In place of strength her focus was applied to agility, she is able to jump 5 feet from a standing position, sprint 100m in 7 seconds flat and scale a 2-storey building in 5. Lady Shiva herself asserted that she was the nimblest out of all her disciples;

- Fifth Striped Ribbon in the Sect of Shadows nomenclature, which translates in the following recognized rankings across the spectrum of martial arts: 8th Dan in Judo, 5th Dan in Kendō, 7th Dan in Karate, 7th Dan in Taekwondo and 6th Degree Red Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

- She’s adept with many forms of technology, particularly those related to concealment and signal jamming. She is even skilled enough to create her own gadgets and near perfect replicas of items she’s stolen. All skills that we believed were gained during her period within MAZE.

Limitations

- Obsessive Personality. Margot has a bad habit of fixating on goals and developing tunnel vision;

- She suffers from kleptomania. At the beginning of her life of thievery she quickly discovered that her obsessive personality translated to this profession in the need to steal literally everything of value during a heist. This “all or nothing” mentality is understandably risky and has led to her capture more than once. It also adds to her reputation in the metacriminal community as one of the most thorough professionals in her line of work;

- Pathological liar, at least when it comes to her personal history. She feels compelled to lie about everything, even when she knows that her account is incompatible with that of eyewitnesses, if it means shielding aspects of her private life from other people, even professionals who’d just like to help her.

Sexuality

From a young age Margot knew she was a Lesbian, a fact she made no effort to hide from people in her life. Her adoptive mother, while coming from a more conservative background, quickly accepted her daughter’s sexual preferences though they rarely discussed them. Leaving aside short-lasting flings which had little impact on her life, these are the women who left the biggest mark on Ms. Grey:

Bethanie Ravencroft was the very first person Margot could call “a significant other”. She wasn’t just a fellow member of the 13 Stitches. She was the lynchpin of a large part of Braxton’s strategies, being the troubled daughter of then-GCPD Commissioner Jonathan Ravencroft. As such, her sway with “daddy” allowed her friends to get off with slaps on the wrist at her word. However Margot was able to see that, for all her talk, Beth was just a spoiled rich kid looking for thrills and a way to rebel against her dad. One night she confronted her on the fact that, for all that she thought that being a gangster was all fun and games, Bethanie had entered a world where “kill or be killed” was the norm rather than the exception. Emotions ran high during that confrontation, until Ravencroft surprised Margot by pushing her onto the bed of her studio apartment and starting to make love with her. Ms. Grey had always been attracted by her, but she had never guessed that she returned those feelings. Over the course of their relationship Margot would discover her dominant side to the delight of Bethanie, who added a stylish black leather choker to her everyday accessories as a hint at her status as her lover’s sub, as well as being able to indulge her long-known foot fetish;
Margot’s attraction to Sandra Wu-San, a.k.a. Lady Shiva, had been there since their first encounter. However, it would find its first expression during an early sparring session between the two of them. She had learned a lot from the Sect instructor officers who had taken care of her training right after being recruited by Moldir, advancing in a very short time almost to Striped Ribbon level. That had made her arrogant and she had stupidly told her new boss that she didn’t need to go easy on her. The Jiu-Jitsu lesson lasted a grand total of 11 seconds and at the end of it the side of Margot’s head found itself pinned to the ground by the foot of the world’s deadliest woman. The humiliation she felt in that moment awakened something in her and her long-neglected kink became overwhelming. Heedless of the possible consequences of such a perverse action, she stuck her tongue out and tried as hard as she could to lick the strong foot pressing against her head a scant few centimetres from the corner of her mouth. Luckily for every bone in Margot’s body, that (admittedly a little pathetic) scene didn’t make Lady Shiva snap. It amused her. She removed her foot, letting her newest underling roll on her back. Then she proceeded to sit down gently on her lap and brought both of her feet to Margot’s face. The latter immediately got to work. From that point on, the relationship between the two women only grew. It’s not hard to guess why in this particular instance, Margot never even attempted to pursue the dominant role. Rather, she viewed this as further mentoring from Shiva, who repeatedly reviewed her performance after each rendezvous. It was a very complicated relationship, but Ms. Grey seems very fond of talking about it and, at the centre of her usual labyrinth of lies which surrounds her past experiences, the feelings of passion and respect for her teacher/commander are still easily recognisable;
Neither Margot nor Terry Thielman would consider what they shared a proper relationship, though for different reasons. After Terry became Shiva’s official lover and submissive partner and before Magpie was sent back to the US on a mission to infiltrate the secret government operation known as Task Force X, Shiva would at times bring Margot into her private chambers to practise her skills as a Dom, ‘offering’ Terry as the Guinea Pig for such practice. Margot was a keen learner and often enjoyed lengthy sessions with the future Mrs. Thielman, always with their mistress somewhere in the picture. To this day, Ms. Grey is very proud of what she accomplished during those sessions. According to her, ‘working’ on a subject like the stern and even somewhat grim Terry until she was turned into a quivering wreck counts as one of her highest achievements. Of course, it wasn’t love, just pure sadism. On the other hand, Mrs. Thielman’s memories of those moments are filtered through the twin lenses of shame and anger. She hated Magpie from the bottom of her heart and went along with what she saw as prostituting herself only for Lady Shiva’s sake. And like in every proper abusive relationship, the latter never really appreciated this act of self-sacrifice;
Magpie met Soseh Mykros after her departure from the Shadows, during that weird period in her life where she was truly trying to change for the better and find a place in the world as a heroine, rather than a villainess. Without a doubt, Soseh, one of her teammates in Black Adam’s hero organisation which Margot had joined on the leader’s invitation, was of great help in that sense. Raised to become a soulless, implacable assassin, the only person she had killed in her whole life had been her horrible father, to the relief of many. Fighting criminals and exploiters as the heroine Nemesis, like the Greek goddess of retribution against the arrogant, Soseh was exactly the partner Ms. Grey was looking for at the time: a person with a firm moral centre, altruistic to a fault, wise beyond her years – plus gorgeous, filthy rich and a real wild cat in bed to boot. Had she been even a little bit interested in BDSM, she would have fought to the death anyone denying that she was the ideal woman. It was during those sunny afternoons spent in Ms. Mykros’s opulent villa on the Mediterranean Sea, lying on her side on a beach lounger next to her girlfriend, with their legs intertwining and looking into her eyes, that Margot truly felt complete for the first time in her life. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the tragic way their relationship ended, which rested exclusively on Margot’s shoulders, had severe psychological (and psychiatric) repercussions on the American woman;
Selina Kyle, a.k.a. Catwoman, was Magpie’s main rival upon her return to Gotham. It was an extremely cordial rivalry, though, since neither woman would have ever lifted a finger against each other after the superbly clever plan they had concocted together to avoid a tragic destiny at the hands of the Joker Gang. It was not a rare occurrence (to the point that it’s not unbelievable that they were doing it on purpose) for the two of them to find themselves competing for the same prize, thus developing a tradition of congratulating the victor in a very physical way. During such contests, it’s pretty much impossible to tell whether it was the desire for their quarry or for the role of dominant partner in the following “celebrations” which was the main drive. It wasn’t love they shared, but it’s undeniable that they were (and still are) extremely fond of each other. As women who both lived very eventful lives and went through experiences normal people can only picture in particularly vivid nightmares, having each other, either as a lover or friend, makes them feel a lot less lonely in this harsh world;
Ms. Kyle introduced Karon “Punkhead” Walsh, her fence and apprentice of her former fence, to Magpie after being recognized as heiress of Don Leo Calabrese and leaving her days as a thief behind. One for the few things she was really sorry about when she retired from being an active thief was the fact that she was leaving Magpie alone. Of course the two women have kept seeing each other from time to time, but the woman who runs the Italian Mafia of Gotham City will inevitably live in a different world than a “mere” professional thief. That’s why she ended up playing Cupid between Margot and Karon, who had recently broken up with Holly Robinson, Selina’s long-time protégé. The two women got along like a house on fire despite their very different personalities. The garrulous, thrill-seeking, unruly Margot craved an anchor of stability, while the contemplative, phlegmatic, focused Karon secretly longed for someone who could bring an element of uncertainty in her life. To this day they’re still an item, though Margot has had to turn down all of Ms. Walsh’s offers to move to her place. While she truly loves Karon and doesn’t mind adding a pinch of spice to her life, she’s made enemies over the years and she’d like to keep her beloved Punkhead as safe as possible from any potential reprisal against Magpie.
As it should be clear from this section so far, foot fetishism and being the dominant partner in a BDSM relationship are well-known paraphilias of Ms. Grey’s. Her style of domination can best be described as a pleasure overload. Margot delights in binding down her sub and then worshipping, massaging and teasing them to the edge before letting them cool off and resuming until their climax, leaving them totally drained. Due to her mother’s line of work and her upbringing, sex was something she had knowledge of since at least first grade. Her openness to discuss such topics casually is quite often shocking to people who have known her only for a little time.

Spirituality

She used to identify as an atheist and attribute it to her upbringing. At the time of her commitment to a mental institution, she once said to a psychiatrist following her case: “hard to believe there’s a Hell when you grow up in Gotham”. However, after her time in the Sect, the Suicide Squad and, most importantly, Black Adam’s Rightful Covenant, she prefers the term ‘irreligious’ to describe herself. In the aforementioned interview, she later added: “I once met this woman. She incurred the wrath of this Egyptian goddess – the one with the lioness head, you know which one I’m referring to, right? She’s spent the past 35 centuries locked in an endless cycle of suffering. Every time she’s reborn with the hope of a normal existence, but eventually the were-panther that is the goddess’s curse awakens and she spends the rest of her days destroying everything she loves and killing everyone she cares for. And then she dies in atrocious ways, unmourned and unloved, for the cycle to begin again. I know for sure that gods exist. Just like I know for sure that I’m never going to worship any one of them.”

Key Moments

- Braxton might have welcomed Margot with open arms in his criminal organisation, but the thought of working with a 14-year-old metahuman with a bodycount made a lot of her new “colleagues” uneasy. Who could guarantee that she wouldn’t have lost her mind and turned her talons against the other members of the 13 Stitches? Or that her powers hadn’t just partially awakened and she wasn’t suddenly going to change into some inhuman monster, all claws and fangs? After all, there were so many horrific stories about teens like Margot going about… The boss himself stepped in and settled things by sending her new underling to Metropolis, where specialists would have checked the actual extent of her powers. Of course, one can’t just simply phone to one of the research centres on metahumans in the City of Tomorrow and make an appointment, so Braxton had to consult with his contacts and find somebody who could ‘ship’ Margot inside the walls and fabricating all the documents she was going to need. According to several testimonies (none of which, unfortunately, can be used in court), that somebody ended up being Lex Luthor, at the time in his mid-twenties and looking for ways to expand the shipping company he had recently inherited from his father. Mr. Luthor apparently took Ms. Grey under his wing, creating a new identity for her, finding an apartment where she could stay, introducing her to some of the best specialists in the field of metahuman powers in the Western Hemisphere. In return, she took the occasional oddjob from him, exploiting the fact that, to his chagrin, in the City of Tomorrow metahuman teens paradoxically had more freedom of movement than many non-metahuman adult entrepreneurs. Once it was proved that Margot was not at risk of further mutations, she went back to Gotham City, now in full control of her talons and with a considerable amount of experience at not being conspicuous in places she shouldn’t have been. Luthor, on the other hand, would conduct several hostile takeovers in the following 6 months and Lexcorp monopolised shipping in and out of Metropolis before the end of the year;

- November 1994 was by far the most eventful month in all of Ms. Grey’s life. It started with the security breach in the Imaginary Number District of Metropolis, a crisis which required the intervention of Task Force X, which she had infiltrated under orders from the Presiding Committee of the Sect of Shadows. Six different life-or-death situations in the span of 48 hours later, she had her reunion with the man who had helped her get into Metropolis years before, Lex Luthor, and she asked for his assistance to get out of the Suicide Squad. Feeling like he owed a debt to Magpie, Mr. Luthor did indeed get to work on the technology of her neck implant and synthesised in a matter of minutes a substance which he promptly injected into her ‘good behaviour guarantee’’, rendering the flammable liquid in its micro-tank inert and atoxic. Still with her neck implant on, but without the threat it presented, she managed to organise the prison riot in Belle Reve which allowed her to escape from the maximum security complex. Then there was the frantic, high-altitude battle on the plane from Atlanta to Bangkok against Lady Vic, the British mercenary who had every reason to want Magpie dead for the way she had made her look like a fool in Kuala Lumpur two years before. A frantic, high-altitude battle ensued. It took a fall from 27,000 feet to make both women re-evaluate their priorities and find a way to survive. Then came two long weeks of trying to reach Bangkok and her old superior, Lady Shiva, with any means necessary. During that time, Margot was harassed non-stop by members of the League of Assassins and hit men sent by Amanda Waller, while being frustratingly unable to contact any member of the Sect she knew in that region. In the end she didn’t even make it to Thailand. She was in Karachi, Pakistan, and she was summoned in front of Monsoon, one of the Exarchs of the Sect, the highest-ranked members of the organisation a mere operative like her would ever have the chance to see. There, Margot’s world crumbled around her when Monsoon informed her that, because of her collaboration with Lex Luthor, persona non grata to the Shadows due to Lexcorp’s many deals with Talia Al-Ghul and the Wayne-Head Enterprises, the Presiding Committee had declared her a traitor to the Sect. And finally, after miraculously escaping from Karachi and the veritable army of Shadows that had been let loose by the Exarch, she first came in contact with Black Adam’s Covenant, while she was trying to lie low and go dark in Oman. She would have understandably preferred not to get involved in something as huge as taking down a H.I.V.E. facility developing WMD in the arid Omani hinterland, but as long-time associates of the Shadows, the local H.I.V.E. forces had successfully apprehended Ms. Grey after fortuitously recognizing her. Having escaped from her cell while Black Adam and his allies were beginning their attack, she had given her personal contribution to their operation by wreaking havoc inside the base while her ‘new best friends’ took care of the external defences. It was the very last day of the month when the Supreme Leader of Kahndaq replied to Magpie imploring for protection against the innumerable enemies she had all over the world by proposing her to turn over a new leaf and putting her considerable skills at the service of the Covenant – and therefore of the people they protected. A bit dumbfounded at the idea that anybody could ever see her as hero material, she nevertheless accepted Black Adam’s offer;

- The reasons which brought Margot Grey to throw her heroic career and a relationship with a woman she genuinely loved out of the window, all for the sake of two pounds of precious metals and jewels, will probably never be completely clear. The curtain of smoke and lies she put up around most meaningful events in her life is the thickest around that particular moment, reaching even the subconscious part of her mind. Inquiries about her thought processes in the crucial hours after the task force of the Covenant she was a part of prevented the tomb of King Shuttarna II from being desecrated and raided were attempted by inducing a hypnotic state in the subject – and they still ended up returning contradictory statements. But while Magpie’s motives are still indecipherable, we have at least complete reports of her actions, during and after the incident. Ms. Grey had been tasked with guarding the eastern wing of the tomb, where the treasure chamber was located. When reinforcements arrived to secure the archeological site, one of her teammates (who wishes to stay anonymous) noticed that a superbly-crafted ornamental necklace had been removed from the statue it adorned. When a thorough search of every person who had ever set foot in the complex was ordered, Margot panicked and rushed into a hopeless escape attempt, seriously injuring two members of the Covenant in the process. She was stopped in her tracks by her fiancée, Nemesis, who fought her to a standstill until the leader of the Covenant himself, Black Adam, stepped in and subdued his rebel ally in less than a second. She might have successfully begged for forgiveness, had she only stolen that necklace, but trying to escape and injuring her allies in the process were flagrant violations of the rules of the Covenant. She was forever expelled from the organisation, her heart was broken when her beloved Soseh dumped her with a letter, where she wrote that she could have forgiven her criminal actions but not how gratuitously she had thrown away her new life, and she was sentenced to prison in a maximum security facility in Lebanon, where most metahuman felons were sent from across the Middle East. One week after she started serving her sentence, she attempted suicide by slitting her own wrists. Saved by the prompt intervention of the prison guards, she was moved to the psychiatric ward of the same facility a few days later;

- Ms. Grey knew very well that moving back to her hometown, with its lively criminal scene, meant that it was only a matter of time before she got into a collision course with one of the major players in the city’s underworld. What she didn’t expect was that it would happen so soon after her arrival and that the major player would end up being the organisation still known as the Joker Gang, which hardly had a presence in the field of jewel theft. Unfortunately, it’s hard to predict when the luxury mansion you’re ransacking is going to be stormed by 30 armed thugs in clown makeup and masks, who also happen to be competent enough to capture you before you can vacate the place. That wasn’t the end of Magpie only because Selina Kyle, a.k.a. Catwoman, also happened to be a guest of the cells of the Joker Gang’s HQ because of an unrelated slight to the organisation and that gave Harley Quinn, de facto leader of the Gang, the idea of setting up a little show for her troops. “Birds vs. Cats: who will survive?” was the name of the event, starring a fight to the death between Margot and Selina. The former was stronger, younger and better trained than the latter. Magpie could have just gone along with it, knowing that she had good chances to come out on top and survive to see the next day. But neither professional thief felt like providing that kind of entertainment to their captors and together they hatched a risky plan to save both of their skins. The “fight” consisted of the two women entering the arena, circling each other for about two minutes, striking a single blow at the same time and being immediately knocked to the ground. While the audience was making their displeasure with the show (and the fact that the bookmakers refused to give a clear answer about the fate of their bets) by rioting, Magpie and Catwoman managed to exploit all that confusion and uproar to escape from the Joker Gang HQ. It was the start of a beautiful friendship (with benefits), which lasts to this day.

Outstanding Feats

- Despite not being the mind behind it or the only person involved, it’s undeniable that Ms. Grey was the MVP of the operation which in 1992 allowed the Sect of Shadows to take possession of the fabled treasure of the Indonesian guerrilla leader Singa (“lion” in Malay; no records of his birth name survive). Active during WW2, Singa amassed a fortune raiding both the Dutch and British colonial authorities and the invading Imperial Japanese Army before and after the outbreak of the second global conflict, hiding it in an undisclosed location in the Indonesian archipelago just before his untimely death in 1944. Margot was responsible for retrieving/stealing two of the three artefacts which Singa left to his lieutenants, which together would reveal the exact position of the hidden treasure (the trio never solved the riddle, being more interested in backstabbing each other than cooperating), and then successfully fended off many attempts by rival organisations to get to the guerrilla’s hidden fortune (incidentally, these were the circumstances behind her first encounter with Lady Vic). The Sect Emissaries dispatched by the Presiding Committee saw Magpie and the other members of the expedition triumphantly arrive piloting a WW2-era British S-Class submarine, full to the brim of money, jewels, ingots, weapons, relics and art objects. Classified Sect documents which were leaked in the aftermath of the crisis which shook the organisation in 1998 reveal that the experts which catalogued and sorted the treasure estimated its total value in 84 billion US$;

- In the Summer of 1993, with the Republic of South Africa well on its way towards the end of the apartheid regime and the local chapter of the Sect of Shadows in complete disarray (the Shadows had secretly sponsored minority-ruled South Africa for more than 3 decades), Magpie accompanied her superior and mentor, Lady Shiva, to that country. She and a few other members of the Outer Circle had been tasked with salvaging what they could of the once sprawling local section and eliminating the inefficiencies – physically, if necessary. With so many leading members of the Sect converging on the same place, far away from their strongholds, the League of Assassins (which had fought a secret war on the side of the Black majority throughout the Eighties and early Nineties) sent the Seven Men of Death, their most elite force, and around a hundred additional operatives in support roles on a mission to eliminate as many officers of the Sect they could find. Whip, a female member of the Seven, was the one who took upon herself to terminate Lady Shiva and her entourage and she might have succeeded after her main target was poisoned if it hadn’t been for Margot’s intervention. Despite Whip breaking her left arm a couple of seconds into their fight, Ms. Grey, using her massive amount of dirty tricks and exploiting the Assassin’s overconfidence, not only survived against her opponent much longer than it should have been possible, but even managed to kill her, piercing her heart with a sai Margot had fortuitously recovered during the fight. Lady Shiva fully recovered, but she was the only survivor among the original delegation of Outer Circle officers. All the other members of the Seven Men of Death successfully terminated their targets;

- An entire year had passed since Ms. Grey had relocated to Europe and started her career as a self-employed professional thief. Pretty, shiny and expensive things were of course her favourite targets, but her formative experiences in the underworld of secret organisations and cloak & dagger had taught her that a single piece of sensitive information was much easier to sell at the price it was actually worth than any pearl necklace or ruby bracelet. It had all begun with what should have been the most straightforward of jobs: following a woman who had been contacted by MAZE, the mercenary intelligence service, for a job interview at a desk job, so that she could learn something about the people sent by the organisation to conduct the interview. What Margot wasn’t expecting was that the woman would have a heart attack out of nowhere while she was driving across the French countryside. Being very good at improvising, Margot decided not to let that incident discourage her and put her disguise skills at work, becoming the woman she had been following before 10 minutes had passed and showing up at the job interview on schedule. Thanks to her exposure to the internal bureaucracy of the Sect of Shadows, she knew enough about the way paperwork was handled inside secret organisations and had no trouble getting her desk job. She spent three months as one of MAZE’s bookkeepers and came out of that experience with a veritable treasure trove of information. Not only she managed to acquire the complete, digitised archives of the organisation from 1971 to 1997, which she’s exploiting to this day as her ‘insurance policy’, having devised a system that would release them on the World Wide Web for everyone to read if she ever gets assassinated, but she also considerably expanded her horizons in the field of cutting-edge technology, thanks to a pretty young woman from the R&D section who proved to be very reactive to her flirting;

- Having lost all of naivety decades before, Ms. Grey was expecting some kind of retaliation from the Unicorns Triad after she had managed to steal the fabled Three-Lion Cup from the supposedly-impenetrable vault of the boss of that gang. However, thinking Gotham’s Chinatown a more insular community than it actually is, she was expecting a collection of brutish henchmen you could hear coming two blocks away. She wasn’t expecting to fall into a well-crafted trap devised by the Tally Man, the newest sensation in the crowded world of hired assassins on the US East Coast. Margot was shot point blank in the side and then twice in the back with the assassin’s signature .38 calibre revolver. It took all of her willpower not to lose her consciousness and that herculean effort didn’t go to waste. Before Tally Man could shoot his 4th bullet, Magpie got hold of his long, flowing robe and proceeded to sweep him off his feet. A frantic ground battle began to decide the ownership of the man’s robe, one which Margot had to win if she wanted to have a chance to live to see another day. And indeed, running on pure adrenaline, the thief managed to wrest control of Tally Man’s working clothes. The hit man himself struck the floor with the back of his head when his robe came off, which gave Margot the opening she needed. Still clinging to the clothes, she jumped out of an open window to her salvation: the roof of a skytrain station. And then to the roof of a skytrain which departed the station just a couple of seconds later. She got off the train (not entirely voluntarily) only once she had put more than a mile between her and the killer, deep in the district of Old Gotham, near the station of Moench Row. At the end of her tether, she just curled up on the roof of a small, abandoned building and closed her eyes, hoping for death or a miracle to come quickly. Instead there came Black Canary, alerted by her ally Oracle, who in her Watchtower received the feed of every CC camera in Old Gotham and had easily recognized the professional thief. Seeing Margot in that pitiful state, Dinah immediately brought her to the healing tank the Birds of Prey kept in 96 Gorfinkel Street. Once Magpie was floating in the regenerative fluid, Dinah could dedicate her attention to the black robe Ms. Grey was still clinging to when she found her, recognizing it as Tally Man’s. In a major stroke of luck, she found out an internal pocket where the hit man kept copies of all of his contracts and that the next debt/life he was going to collect would be that of Jason Bard, ‘guilty’ of having unveiled, back when he was an active private eye, some ‘youthful follies’ of a woman who had recently married the heir of one of the city’s Mafia families, which had caused a major scandal at the time. Margot was asleep throughout the entire battle between the Birds of Prey and Tally Man, but her vital contribution to saving Mr. Bard’s life was so undeniable that no member of the team, not even the usually rigid Oracle, felt like bringing her to the closest police station once she was pulled out of the tank.

Fun facts

- As a default she speaks with a formal Southern English accent despite never having spent any extended period of time in England. This is a consequence of being raised by her foster mother, who spoke with that accent due to spending her childhood at an English Boarding School;

- Her main alias also has an English origin, an old nursery rhyme about magpies told to her by Cynthia Grey: One for sorrow. Two for joy. Three for a girl. Four for a boy. Five for silver. Six for gold. Seven for a secret, never to be told. According to an old superstition (with roots in the ancient practice of ornithomancy), the number of magpies seen tells if one will have bad or good luck. She chose it as her official codename at the age of 16, when she was a member of the 13 Stitches and a bit on the edgy/poetic side like nearly all teenagers. Her reasoning was that, since she usually worked alone, seeing her while she was busy with a heist would inevitably bring great sorrow to the poor soul;

- Like every respectable criminal, she dislikes talking about what she does with her spare time whenever she’s not busy planning her next huge hit or carrying it out. However, it’s more or less an open secret that over the years she’s developed a major interest in the art of photography. Her first experiences with a camera happened during her reconnaissance training with the Shadows. Every time she finished developing the films, she felt that, while those pictures were more than adequate for the purposes of her training, she could have done much better with a different equipment and more time to ‘study’ the way the subject should have been framed. She bought her first professional camera when she was 22 and things started snowballing from that point onwards. A number of her pictures have even been displayed in galleries and publications over the years, in all cases under the alias Cassandra Pye;

- It wasn’t uncommon for friends/rivals Catwoman and Magpie to team up when it came to carry out high-risk burglaries (in such occurrences, it was the one who managed who actually managed to run away with the stolen goods after vacating the crime scene who got to enjoy the “special privileges” in the following victory party). Success was usually guaranteed, since two of America’s best professional thieves working together made them a force to be reckoned with no matter the odds, but their last job together ended up being a lesson in humility for both women. The duo had infiltrated the obscenely luxurious yacht of Mr. Julián Castillo, the notorious Chilean copper tycoon, thinking they knew every single square inch of it. Instead they had found out the hard way that Castillo had kept an entire set of security systems out of the official blueprints of his ship. Margot and Selina had found themselves trapped between twin steel walls which had come down the ceiling of the main hall on Bridge C, trapping them in a box. Before the former could slash her way out with her Talons, a powerful narcotic had been pumped into the box, putting them both to sleep in record time. They had woken up in a huge cargo hold barefoot, their costumes unzipped, their equipment and gadgets confiscated, their upper bodies immobilized by lots of expertly-knotted nylon rope and their ankles tied together by titanium cuffs, each pair connected by a length of chain to a massive iron ball. Mr. Castillo was right in front of them, wishing to congratulate the duo in a “so close, alas no cigar” way before disposing of them, which he did simply by pulling a lever. The floor opened right under the two women and they were rudely introduced to the waters of San Diego Bay. After nine fathoms of near free-fall, the iron balls touched the bottom of the bay. The situation was desperate. Magpie couldn’t even use her Talons to cut the ropes since her hands had been tied in a way that she would have grievously pierced her own hands had she taken them out, making her lose control of her fingers. It looked like that was the end of both of their careers when Magpie felt Selina’s lips on her own. But rather than it being a goodbye kiss, it ended up being both women’s salvation. In the span of a heartbeat, the two women dematerialised and re-materialised in Selina’s apartment, back in Gotham. After two hours spent getting rid of their restraints, Margot finally had the chance to ask her friend and colleague what exactly had happened. Selina replied by baring her right arm and showing her a scar shaped like a zero on her triceps. Magpie could have sworn that she had a ‘2’ tattooed in the same place until the day before. She explained that, eleven years before, when she was still little more than a rookie, she had been of great help to a magician, a former heroine that had embraced the ‘gray zone’ of the superpowered community, and she had paid her debt by giving Catwoman eight extra ‘lives’, which she could use to cheat death in whichever way she wished. She wasn’t sure if it would have worked for another person too, but she was extremely grateful that it did – and that, during the plunge, they hadn’t drifted far enough from each other that she wouldn’t have had a chance to find an answer to that question. While that was the unquestionable high point of Ms. Grey’s relationship with Ms. Kyle, it was also the thing that ruined it. The fact that Selina had used her last extra life to save her from certain death couldn’t not have an impact on Margot’s feelings for her. Post-heist sex and bondage were great, but in her heart she knew that she now wanted more than that kind of relationship, just like she knew that Catwoman was not the kind of person who could ever give it to her. Selina abandoning the life of the cat burglar to become head of Gotham’s Mafia a couple of months later was a blessing in disguise, since it forced their relationship to change and become more distant (though only in a physical sense), removing the Damocles’ Sword that had been hanging over Margot’s head ever since the incident on Castillo’s yacht;

- As she likes to tell anyone inquiring about her romantic life, right now Margot is married to her job, which makes Karon Walsh her lover and that explains why she would never betray her. The only thing she can’t stand about her current significant other is how obnoxiously professional she can be whenever Magpie brings up the matter of Punkhead – a real black swan in her line of job, since she doesn’t try to swindle everyone at all times – personal fence. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how much she complains about the way her current one (and the one before him, and the one before her…) treats her, or the horrible things she threatens to do / does to her during their moments of intimacy, Ms. Walsh is unwavering. Having a client who’s also her girlfriend is the biggest conflict of interest she can think of.

Confidential Info

- Thanks to the 2002 Transparency Agreement between the JLA and Prism, we’re now able to confirm that Ms. Grey’s escape from the mental hospital near Beirut she had been committed to was enabled by a third party. Taken into custody in the HQ of Prism in Malta in May 2001, exactly 4 years after the breakout, Lucie Chesneau, a.k.a. l’Ombre Grise, also a professional thief and Magpie’s partner in their escape from the maximum security wing of the institution, revealed during a questioning session that her presence in that mental hospital had been orchestrated by none other than Soseh Mykros, a.k.a. Nemesis. The Greek-Armenian vigilante might have been adamant about not wanting anything to do with her ex-girlfriend anymore, but deep down she still cared deeply for her and not just on a basic human level. Hearing about Margot’s attempted suicide was a real blow to the heart for her. She felt like she needed to do something for her but she couldn’t expose herself. She ultimately found a work around when she apprehended l’Ombre Grise while she was busy plundering a French billionaire’s villa near Sidon (Lebanon) during a pool party she had, by chance, been invited to. The police were not called and Nemesis struck a deal with Ms. Chesneau: she could guarantee that the Covenant would never inconvenience her in any way and that her latest theft would be forgotten if she accepted to follow all of Soseh’s instructions, wherever they would take her. Of course Lucie didn’t expect at the time that those instructions would involve her being committed to a psychiatric ward under a false identity, but throughout her confessions she’s quite clearly impressed by the efficiency Ms. Mykros displayed when it came to making all the parts of the plan come together, especially when it came to the deliveries (one piece at a time over several months) of the tools the two women would need to mount a successful breakout. On her part, Lucie displayed outstanding people skills, considering that she was capable of handling a person in a very delicate mental state pretty much flawlessly, in some ways helping her healing and rebuilding confidence more than either the doctors or the drugs. The JLA decided to follow Prism’s lead and not share the contents of the questioning session pertaining to Lucie’s association with Margot Grey with any member of the Covenant, due to the chance that such a course of action would expose the vigilante known as Nemesis to disproportionate retribution;

- To this day, it’s not clear what compelled Magpie to move back to Gotham City in mid-1999. The ‘official versions’ the JLA has been able to collect cannot be trusted. Her trying to put as much distance as possible from the stomping grounds of the Covenant assumes that she took 2 years, starting from her escape from that Lebanese psychiatric hospital, to realise the soundness of that course of action. 2 years which never saw a single incursion of the Covenant in France, where Grey had settled down. The idea that she had crossed the Atlantic Ocean because she had stepped on the toes of the thief syndicate known as CYCLOPS is equally hard to believe. For all of that organisation’s boasting, there’s never been a single occurrence of an attempt at the life of one of their enemies. A woman with Grey’s abilities and training, plus the protection granted by MAZE, should have nothing to fear from a threat of that level. It might have been a case of homesickness or a need to return to her old stomping grounds now that she was once again a professional thief, like she had been in her teenage years as a member of the 13 Stitches. On the other hand, part-time League member Ralph Dibny, a.k.a. Elongated Man, is certain that Magpie was invited to come back to the US and that there’s a connection between Grey and a number of other supervillains and wheeler-dealers of the criminal underworld who have moved to America starting in 1999. While Mr. Dibny has not yet produced anything more than circumstantial evidence in support of his theory, the JLA plenum granted him the resources and mandate to carry out a proper investigation in March 2003.

Testimonies

Terry Thielman: "Being pimped out to her because Shiva thought it made for a nice show was perhaps the first moment when I realized how toxic and hopeless that relationship was, so I should be thankful for that. Still, she gleefully participated in the action without remorse. I’ll never forgive her for that."

Barbara Gordon: “She’s an inveterate criminal, incapable of perceiving her actions as wrong unless they negatively affect her. But she has limits she won’t cross and she’s tough in a way people who believe that cruelty is the point seldom are. Make of that what you will.”

Pamela Isley: “I thought she was just the latest Suicide Squad rookie I could turn into my toy and pawn. Until the day she clocked me so hard it was a miracle my jaw stayed in one piece and ratted me out to the Wall. The day I kill her, first I’ll need to congratulate her for pulling one over on me, of all people.”

Black Adam: “I trusted that woman. When I found her, she had nothing and I gave her everything. Soseh, that noblest of warriors, even gave her her own heart. And she repaid us with betrayal. Her withered soul is rotten to the core. And you can’t reason with rot, only excise it.”

Selina Kyle: “It was a difficult time for me. Holly and I were butting heads more and more often and my body was starting to have trouble keeping up with my lifestyle. Meeting her kind of rekindled my flame. My last year as a pro thief was possibly the most fulfilling one thanks to our rivalry.”

Dinah Lance: "She isn't a bad person deep down, I’m sure of that. However, I can't stress enough that her learning only part of Sandra’s [Lady Shiva’s] techniques was a net positive."

{ The dossier was jointly written by me and and builds upon my 96 Gorfinkel Street series. The picture is a Christmas present for my co-author, but he gave me the permission to upload it and the accompanying text in my own gallery. The original Magpie is copyright of DC Entertainment. }