Eliwyse was a Halfling born in the rough areas of Cliffsunder's Grandport, growing up as an urchin among the city's docks, warehouses, and crowded streets. She survived through theft, odd jobs, and whatever opportunities she could find, but everything seemed to go wrong for the young urchin, even by the standards of the waterfront poor. Despite her circumstances, Eliwyse was intelligent, observant, and quick on her feet. As she grew older, she adopted the surname Widdershins believing herself to be permanently unlucky.
Her fortunes seemingly improved when she secured work aboard a merchant vessel operating along the southern coast. Though never particularly skilled at dealing with people, Eliwyse proved herself a capable sailor. Her sharp memory and practical mindset earned the attention of the ship's officers, who taught her basic navigation and bookkeeping. For the first time in her life, she enjoyed stable employment and a clear path toward a respectable future.
That future ended during a voyage to Avenir, when pirates from the Siren's Isles captured the vessel and scattered its crew. Eliwyse was spared and forced into service as a deckhand aboard the pirate ships, where she spent years performing hard labor and learning the routines of smugglers, raiders, and black-market traders. During this time she befriended another enslaved deckhand, a Goblin named Ipgrix. The two gradually learned to communicate, with Eliwyse teaching him Common while learning Goblin herself. Their shared captivity eventually led to a partnership, and together they escaped aboard a stolen dinghy.
After returning to Cliffsunder, Eliwyse became quartermaster of the Go-Getter Goblins and the closest thing the organization had to a competent administrator, as well as its only non-goblin member. While Captain Ipgrix devised schemes and cultivated his reputation, Eliwyse handled records, supplies, navigation, and many of the practical details that kept the smuggling operation functioning. As Ipgrix continually recruited Goblinoids from the Murkmire Marshlands, they had to take on larger loads and ships, eventually operating a "fleet" of three sloops with very little experience in sailing ships. She tolerated Ipgrix's grand ambitions because they proved profitable, but remained skeptical of many of his plans, believing they were attracting too much attention.
The Go-Getter Goblins collapsed following Ipgrix's arrest in Fang's End, but Eliwyse managed to escape alongside the crew's First Mate Yuzzik and Bobgoblin bosun Slonk. The three took an unmarked dinghy northeast to the Murkmire Marshlands, but the arrangement quickly broke down as she clashed repeatedly with Yuzzik over leadership and strategy. Upon reaching the Murkmire coast, she stole the group's dinghy and remaining provisions, abandoning the two goblins and returning alone to Cliffsunder.
Though free once more, she never completely abandoned the hope that Ipgrix might someday escape imprisonment and attempt to rebuild what they had started, sailing the coastline back to the Grandport and hoping that her luck would finally turn around.