One would be forgiven for expecting Maggie to be more professional in how she goes about her life. She's clean-cut, presentable, and has a pretty respectable job in being an archaeologist - digging up cool stuff from civilizations past and being entirely too fixated on rocks. What they don't really know is that Maggie lied to get here. No training, learning on the stop as well as she can, and if some people happen to take issue with her attitude - well, she's still getting paid.
Maggie is, as she would put it, ‘Ul’dahn trash, born and raised' - and as a result, she's not quite up to snuff on her social graces. She can be crass, argumentative and downright insulting on the best of days, and these attributes have only been exacerbated since she picked up the current object of all of her woes - what she understands to be a cursed soul crystal, exuding aether and corrupting her very essence. Now suffering from chronic aethersickness and a whole lot of knowledge about the battles of a previous civilization that she didn't ask for, Maggie's energy levels and mood take a turn for the worse - she can be outright cruel, if provoked.
It's a precarious position that she's landed herself in, and Maggie isn't necessarily equipped to handle it - and the professionals she's talked to have given her a prognosis of physical and/or ego death if she can't sort out her situation quickly. A damning position to be sure, realizing all at once how lonely you really are.
Born and raised in Ul'dah to an unfortunate one-night stand, Maggie wouldn't really find a lot of the finer points of life until a lot later in life. Growing up fast and needing to provide for her house left Maggie without a lot of time for socialization as a kid, forming a strange family dynamic of her and her mother being cooperators. Maggie was, of course, still reliant on having an adult in her life, but… just in a different way.
Until it wasn't to be - the influx of refugees from the fall of Ala Mhigo lead to a lot of bodies in the same area, and while that's unpleasant, it was the rampant disease among people who didn't necessarily make enough to be treated that lead to a slow death for her mother. Not willing to turn to her father, knowing who he was but rejecting the thought out of principle and pure, unfiltered spite, Maggie realized, in typical Ul'dahn fashion, that she needed a way to make money, alone, and quickly.
She eventually finds herself applying for a job as an archaeologist, lying her way through the questions to at least give her a starting point while she looked for something else. She settled into the work with some ease, though - even without having formal training and study into the history of the world, Maggie could pick up enough on the fly to at least hold a conversation. With more on the job training and study on her own, she became competent enough that you'd almost be unable to guess that she didn't really deserve to be here.
The job where it all started going wrong, she figures, is a job about a Mhach site - with several of them underwater, Maggie allocated a hefty chunk of her research funds to get the water breathing blessing of the Kojin and give herself an edge, and busied herself swimming around at the site, looking for things others could have missed.
It was there, on the ground of a chamber somewhere deep within, that she found a peculiar rock. At a glance, she reasons it must be a soul crystal - and what a great find, if it is. It wasn't until she touched it that she realized her mistake - aether pours into her body. At first, she felt powerful - a slight hassle that she couldn't get rid of it, but they could figure that out later. A few days later, though, and the other side of the situation hit - it was too much. She could feel herself changing - it was warping her into something she's not so sure that she liked.
Burdened with too much aether and no way out, Maggie roams the lands looking for a solution to her problem, answers as to what she's found, and, perhaps, a reason to actually want to survive at all.