#anonymous rat rolled a nat 20 in persuasion and messed Morris up for life 👍

[butleroftoast]

When laying out his personal history, Morris has been described as realising he prefers the company of rats to humans. He'd probably describe it this way himself, if anybody ever prised a discussion on his background out of him.

It's not entirely untrue. He does prefer the rats to the noble families determined to eradicate the pests from their estates, and that is why he left for the druid circle. What he neglects to mention is his first conversation with a rat after learning Speak With Animals.

The rat - not part of the colony Morris lives with now, but a male who had escaped a poisoning incident in his own nest - told Morris about life in the city. He told him about the constant struggle for survival, never knowing whether a tempting piece of food would be deadly, about people's horror over their presence, how he'd seen a rat mother and her pups beaten to death with the flat end of a fire pan. Worse, he told Morris about the comfort of the nest and the day the ratcatchers found it. It was a story Morris was intimately familiar with, but not from the rat's point of view.

Some ratcatchers used terriers (young rats up for a fight, torn apart, through the stomach, head from legs, their blood and innards smeared across the dog's jaws). Some would send bolts of magic down the holes (a brilliant light, and then a pile of corpses, flattened and laminated against the wall). Some would lure the rats out with sweet-scented oils and foods, cage them, and then drown or burn them or, worse, keep them alive, to be used to cheat some other noble out of their coin, or to fight each other and the dogs in pits.

Then there was the poison, which was safer for property than magic and more thorough than trapping or dogs, despite the smell a week later. Often the cheapest option, the other added bonus was limiting the noble's interaction with a common ratcatcher, who could instead lay the poison and go, leaving the cleanup for the servants later.

Meanwhile, from the perspective of the rat: returning to the nest with a bounty of food, followed by a creeping sickness. Tainted food or starvation, no escape, bodies on bodies of sick rats squeezed together until there was no room to move, those who weren't poisoned suffocating on the hides of their dying family, and the smell. It's how they communicate, and how the rat told this tale, and therefore how Morris felt it: the overwhelming, sickening stench of fear and death clogging ever-diminishing air.

And that was him. He caused that. To humans it was pest control; to the rats it was a slaughter.

The rat communicates this story pretty matter-of-factly, merely recreating the sensations it experienced. There's not much room for deep emotional speculation in a rat's life. It haunted Morris, though, and he knew there would be no going back.

(Spending more time with the rats throws his priorities so out of alignment that he becomes unable to see it any other way than as committing mass murder, even though the rats never seem to care much about his past and readily acknowledge that rats kill rats in desperate times. It's only much later in his arc, when he's forced, painfully and reluctantly, to connect with actual people again, that he begins to accept he was a human doing a human thing and his subsequent reaction may have been slightly disproportionate. It did not require a lifetime of isolation and self-loathing. Maybe his response was more deeply rooted in his own mental health issues than he was prepared to admit.)