Nor
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It's All Fun and Games...
Maggie was born in the late spring of 1903 to two starry eyed, incredibly talented and persevering sideshow performers in the humble encampment of the Trades Carnival Sensational Sideshow. The phrase ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ comes to mind in regards to Maggie’s upbringing in the early days. Bertha was an extraordinary woman but there was no getting around the fact that rearing a child was hard enough for a woman performing for the crowd full time without the added impairment of missing arms. Martin was not much help either. While he was both charming and idealistic, he was hopelessly irresponsible and perpetually drunk. Still, there were more than enough spare mother and father figures in the surrounding encampment that doted upon Maggie as if she were their own, not all of them ideal influences but their familial bond was welcomed regardless. Many performers spent their free time entertaining the child while her parents were busy with their acts, teaching her tricks of their trades which she absorbed both gleefully and studiously. The Madson’s couldn’t have dreamed of a better environment to cultivate a family in, feeling much like they’d mined gold out of manure until the fateful day when a thick cloud of smoke shrouded the deserted grounds of the encampment in the wee hours of the morning.
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Until It All Burns Down
At first, what caused the fire would chang depending on who you asked. It wouldn’t be until many years later that the troupe as a whole would catch wise to the cause of it. The only thing they could agree upon was that it was a terrible tragedy. The motley crew of misfits had become something of a family over the years and it only poured salt into the wound of their loss. Not only were they out of work but there had also been a handful of casualties. Among the dead were those too weary, too weak, or too drunk to wake in time to escape the noxious fumes and all consuming hellfire. By this time, Maggie was 18, old enough to feel the full weight of the devastation the fire left behind. WIP 
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Flight of the Songbird
As Maggie came into her own, she began to discover her love for music and that, much to her delight, she was pretty good at making it too. Before her mother’s deal with Papa Mal to grant her freedom, she hadn’t taken her aspirations into serious consideration and instead reveled in the joy of song and dance by befriending the local roustabouts and performing for them while they drank and socialized after curtain call. Maggie’s pipes became well known throughout the camp, though none were bigger fans than those closest to her. It certainly gave her father something to brag about, something to warm her mother’s smile, and it earned her the nickname ‘Magpie’ from a head roustabout and barker who’d heard his fair share of her absentminded humming around their humble dwelling during his frequent reading lessons with Birdy. Nowadays she desperately longs for a legitimate shot at the spotlight, though the judgement of her carnival family and her obligations to Papa Mal prove to be effective road blocks in her path to any real fame.
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Deal with the Devil
Maggie is truly unique in her time in that while most girls her age were either planning their nuptials or already married and starting a family, she was fixated on honing her talents and looking out for her mother...And that was not counting the added looming details of her more supernatural predicament. The complications surrounding the fact that her family was cursed to serve a demon for all eternity were too many to count. For one, her parents would be the ones watching her grow old and die instead of the other way around, a fact that bothered her mother far more than it did Maggie. The troubling fact that kept her up at night was the perpetual suffering her parent’s endured and the guilt that came with not having to help bear the brunt of it. Sure, she had her own set of arduous obligations, but nothing in comparison to the exhaustion that came with the amount of labor Martin and Bertha put into performing on a daily basis.
