Harlan Gardener is a techno-mage who currently works with his girlfriend Holly Blackthorne (and occasionally their other girlfriend Robyn Foxlane) at her private “Witch for Hire” business. While Holly is the one who most often goes out in the field and takes on the physical challenges, Harlan is the planner, the researcher, the one who makes sure her magical gadgets and artefacts are working, and the one who provides her with her convenient battle spell tags. He may not be much of a fighter, and he doesn’t have her supernatural luck, but his magical talent and knowledge is vast, and his knack for coming up with plans that seem bizarre at first but somehow work has saved the day more than once.

Harlan was born in Mystic Grove five years before the Blackstone Invasion, as the only son of Chancellor Emeric Gardener and his head of PR Danielle DeVille. His early childhood was pretty uneventful; he rarely saw his very busy parents but had the best nannies and caretakers, with his favourite nanny being a young woman named Ramona.

A serious and studious boy, Harlan was never very popular with the other kids who considered him “weird and boring”. The teachers at his school, however, loved him because he was an excellent student who never caused any trouble, and (because teachers sometimes forget what it’s like to be a student) sometimes they held him up as an example for the other students to follow… which of course did not make him any more popular. As such, he spent a lot of time on his own, studying and reading and learning.

When he was ten he started reading magic books and found that the magical principles seemed simple, and that he decided there and then that he would learn magic — not, as would have been the case for many lonely children, in order to become more popular or to prove something to the others, but because he genuinely found it fascinating. He proved to have quite the talent for magic, and by the time he was thirteen he was performing all sorts of minor spells.

Excited to share his new passion with his parents, he performed some spells for them and accidentally uncovered some secrets about his mother Danielle: Not only was she not his biological mother — his actual biological mother was his nanny Ramona, who had been in a secret threesome with both Emeric and Danielle — but she secretly been a succubus this entire time and had used her succubus powers to seduce and control Emeric Gardener’s political opposition.

“I suppose that explains the secret orgies in the basement that I’m not supposed to know about.” a flustered Harlan observed.

He couldn’t bring himself to expose his parents — they had been busy and distant, but never cruel. And so, in exchange for his son keeping the secret,  Chancellor Emeric Gardener quietly stepped down from his position and left the seat to one of his opponents, Selene Whisperwind.

Harlan spent more time away from home after that, both because things had become really awkward and because he had been accepted into the White Coven as a trainee. At fourteen, Harlan was one of the youngest trainees in the Coven, but quickly showed himself to be one of the most talented when it came to magic and the understanding of magic. He was in fact so talented that when he was seventeen, Count Ravenwood personally recommended him for a place at the most prestigious university of magic in the world: Evershade University in Tir’Galdur. He was immediately accepted as a Wizardry student.

It was at Evershade that Harlan met Holly Blackthorne and Robyn Foxlane. Holly was a minor Tir’Galdur noblewoman who had grown up in Paragon Bay unaware of her status as “The Honourable Lady Holly Blackthorne of Caer Valor” and had come to the university as a Sorcery student because all Tir’Galdur nobles were obligated to study magic. And Robyn was a Tir’Galdur commoner from a large family who had studied Bardic magic at Evershade for generations. The three became friends and eventually lovers, and Harlan noted as he ended up fucking two girls at the same time that maybe he did have something in common with his father after all.

During his four years at Evershade Harlan had a lot of adventures and misadventures. He excelled in his studies, he discovered that their schoolmate Lady Davinia Duskvale was in fact a vessel for the spirit of the tyrannical Vespara and that Holly had been Vespara’s first choice for a vessel. When Vespara fully possessed Davinia and took over first Evershade and then Tir’Galdur as a whole, Harlan was one of the few who escaped her mind control and, along with Holly, Robyn and a number of others, spent a year in hiding and fighting a desperate guerrilla war against Vespara. It was during this time he figured out how to craft what he called “spell tags”, essentially small cloth tags with magic spells interwoven into them that you could fasten to your clothing and tear off in order to cast the spell. And while it was Holly who eventually (and after a stretch of mind-controlled orgies and a magic flute used as a dildo) defeated Vespara, it was thanks to one of Harlan’s spell tags that her spirit was eventually banished from Davinia.

Holly was hailed as the “Chosen Hero” and told that she was the new Chosen Queen of Tir’Galdur. When she, realizing she’d just become a puppet Queen controlled by the ruling noble class, refused the throne and chose to return to Paragon Bay, Harlan of course went with her, and Robyn also came along. The trio purchased a small house in Willowbound Lane, Mystic Grove, where Holly and Harlan started running their “witch for hire” business.

Though nobles from Tir’Galdur are constantly scheming to get Holly to return to Tir’Galdur and become the Queen she was “destined” to be, so far they have managed to thwart their schemes and remain in their lives as independent contractors.