today i wanted to introduce one of my favourite OCs to all of you MCoG fans because it’s the last day before artfight and it’s her first time participating in the fight:
Marianne Lafleur.
(before i start, i urge everyone who also has mcog OCs to reblog this and write about their characters too 😋😋 we should assemble an army. ok enjoy my ramblings)
born in France from a portuguese father and a french mother, Marianne moved to the south of Portugal with her family at a young age. Her mother, a baker with a failing business, tried her best to work and help Marianne’s father, a fisherman, to earn enough profit to sustain the family.
when Marianne was about 6, her parents had a son named Lucien.
Marianne grew up watching and sometimes helping her father fish near the coast. she knew how to speak both French and Portuguese by now. at 18, her father taught her how to sail, tie knots, man the sails of their small fishing sailboat, and Marianne was inspired.
at 19, she decided to leave her home and join a life a of piracy after being swayed by the riches she could possibly steal — her cause was to steal in order to sustain her family, since they did not have much. with the little money she had, she bought her own sailboat and left. Lucien joined the army at 13 (around the same time Marianne left) also looking to help his parents out.
Marianne found it hard to join a crew, but she made her way around the mediterranean sea first and then to Morocco, looking for random groups of thieves to join. by the time she was 25, she had a somewhat solid reputation among criminals and other members of black markets/smuggling groups and so she was able to form her first very own crew. she operated mainly around Africa, the mediterranean, and sometimes the middle east through the Suez canal.
now, at 29, someone else was also starting out his ventures as something more than a soldier — an Admiral perhaps: Francisco Gomez (pls ignore how i gave him a first name…….. i had to. also, he’s a man of stature, he’d definitely have more names between his first name and his surname but i have not come around to think about those yet. maybe i’ll name him after my bf who is indeed spanish and has loooads of names lmfao)
he operated locally at first, until he was assigned naval duty to keep an eye out for smugglers along the Atlantic — or rather, what little of the Atlantic the Spanish knew. however, soon enough, rumours of a distant continent started spreading, and Gomez was determined to see it for himself.
at 30, he crossed paths with Marianne for the very first time. a skirmish off the coast of west africa, nothing crazy really — but enough for him to meet his lifelong enemy. Marianne did not manage to sink his ship, and vice versa, so she aborted the fight because she had never battled against the royal navy of Spain before.
after this small fight, Marianne also heard about this new continent. nothing much was publicly known about it yet, so she felt curious and decided to head there too.
Gomez was needed as an Admiral when the Spanish were first exploring and assembling ports in places such as in Puerto Rico, and securing other previous ports such as Isabela. as a busy man, he dealt with a lot of men and ships, and unfortunately, he started crossing paths with Marianne more often once she had arrived to the Caribbean. by now, she had a larger crew and a bounty on her head… and Gomez wanted to take advantage of this.
he was a young man, in his early 30s now. blonde hair to his shoulders and that same stupid goatee. Marianne found him intriguing.
he began searching for her in his spare time, looking to arrest her. but every time he engaged her in combat, she would either win or escape, and the adrenaline of the chase fuelled him more than the bounty, over time.
the first time he captured her was in Havana. he arrested her and held her in the brig of his ship, but after some long banter, she caught him lacking and escaped. Gomez, now slightly enthralled by her attitude, decided he would keep chasing her.
this was their life for a long time until 1532. Gomez chased her, she escaped, he captured her, he let her go, she evaded him, pissed him off, stole his things... they were both in their 50s now when the events of MCoG started — Marianne was 50 and he was 54. Gomez had returned to Barcelona because duty called him to, since he had to join Perez and Gaspard en route to the New World again but not before he kidnapped Zia. Marianne remained around the New World. this was more or less when Marianne found her now-adopted child Onu, but i will not get into that because otherwise this would get too long. maybe on another post!
when Gomez returned to the New World (and after the Esperanza sank), he met with his old rival again, except now Marianne had her eyes on El Dorado. but so did he. petty competition ensued — Gomez was no longer looking to arrest her and win her bounty, now all he wanted was the city.
Marianne helped the kids sometimes, other times she’d team up with Gomez, but it was very on-and-off… until the destruction of Tseila.
by then, Gomez had deserted the Spanish Armada along with Gaspard, and the two couldn’t possibly return to Pizarro now without facing execution. Marianne, coincidentally, also had just faced a mutiny on behalf of her crew — they had gotten tired of her complicated friendship with Commander Gomez, so they ditched her. Onu remained in the New World with the kids & Mendoza, and Gaspard wanted to go his own separate way since he was never fond of Marianne.
now it was just her and the ex-Commander. having left behind their lives at sea, they hopped on a ship back to Europe — to Portugal — to live in the same house Marianne grew up in.
by now, her parents had passed from illness. her brother Lucien had died too, so the house was completely hers. and now it was Gomez’s too. he had grown to like her over the course of time, so settling in with her wasn’t nearly as mortifying as it would’ve been otherwise. plus, to hide his feelings, he played it off as “merely survival” and that he “had no other choice but to stay hidden here”.
so yeah. the two lived in portugal till the end of their lives. S4 Gomez Kilwa slave arc never happened. there is no war in ba sing se
