Graveborn

 

Quiet, serious, studious, Graveborn has always felt more comfortable alone than in a group. Alone, her being a ubume doesn’t need an explanation. It is as rational and obvious as her having two eyes and one mouth. She doesn’t need to explain why her body is room temperature. She doesn’t need to explain why she has no pulse. Everything about her is normal when everything is just her.

 

And her mother.

 

Because her mother, her first mother, is always with her. Sometimes, she is her shadow whispering lullabies in her ear. Sometimes, she is an owl with its talons planted firmly on her shoulder. But she is always there. She is attached to Graveborn through an intangible umbilical of primal, unbreakable, mother love.

 

When her mother was alive, Graveborn shared one body with her. Now with her mother dead, she shares one body and one soul.

 

Graveborn doesn’t like talking about being an ubume. She doesn’t like talking about what she is. It’s frightening. It’s embarrassing. She thinks it’s better to flicker about the edges of Ishinomori’s student body and focus on her studies. Inspired by how the Japanese counterpart to TIMS, Uranaishi, located her within her mother’s grave and negotiated with her mother’s ghost for her to be peacefully placed in foster care, Graveborn wants to become a paranormal investigator specializing in psychopomp guidance. She wants to investigate possible manesological disturbances and work with the ghosts causing them to reach peaceful resolutions.

 

Ghosts are often too confused, too frightened, and too needy to be judgemental. Humans on the other hand live relatively stable and predictable lives, therefore they developed preconceptions. This is why Graveborn, a girl with feet on both sides of the Sanzu river, prefers the quieter side to the livelier side.

 

Between Two Worlds

 

Graveborn, buried as Kano Mizuko, adopted as Shiro Mizuko, is a ubume.

 

An ubume is a complex manesological union. Modern manesology recognizes that ghosts are not singular entities. Every soul is divided into components, and sometimes these components can be shared between souls as in the case of a manesological union. Graveborn is not the child Shiro Mizuko nor is she the mother Kano Yuria. She is mother and daughter united in one body, one soul.

 

A soul is composed of multiple smaller souls, each capable of operating independently but all tending to desire union. How these various components interact determines the characteristics of a ghost. A ghost with a weak physical soul (khet in the Egyptology derived taxonomy still used informally by the Carnacki Foundation) can only manifest as shadow or mist while a ghost with a strong physical soul has a body with substance and weight. A ghost with a weak imprint soul (sah) looks like a blob or sheet while a ghost with a strong imprint soul looks much as they did in life.

 

Some souls resonate across the entire human noosphere. Some souls exist only as a function of mankind, not the individual. A legacy soul (shut) is derived from the collective memory mankind has for the deceased. Those with a strong legacy soul find themselves compelled to behave not how they were, but how people remember them acting. 

 

The social soul (ib), often called the heart, for in truth it is better description than the academic “social soul,” is the least understood part of the human soul, likely because it’s not something to be understood and intellectualized but intuited and felt. It is often described in textbooks as “humanness,” but that is a poor description, as many living humans lack crucial elements of the ib. It is sometimes described as “Astral empathy,” or as “self-awareness distributed across the noosphere,” but even this isn’t as descriptive as the simple and obvious–the ib is exactly what the ancients called it, the heart. 

 

The ib is guilt, and obligation, and longing. The ancient Egyptians believed that a person’s ib grew from a drop of blood from their mother’s heart and would give unbiased, objective testimony to their character when they stood before Anubis for judgement. It is the part of the soul that least belongs to a ghost and most belongs to humanity. When one thinks about a ghost and feels indescribable warmth or coldness flood their being, they touch upon that ghost’s ib, or lack thereof.

 

Mizuko shares an ib with her mother. This is similar to how Martin’s Nedjes is the empowered ib of her mother Ankhesenaten granted independent but limited control over her mothers’ other souls, but Mizuko is not a sapient ib. She is connected to her mother by a shared ib. This mutual ib binds Mizuko to her mother like an umbilical cord and grants Mizuko the properties of both the living and the dead.

 

Mizuko’s mother, Kano Yuria, died late in her pregnancy. Her husband perished suddenly during an attack by automated soldiers of the Belriel Empire, and the stress of his absence was compounded by an early labor. She was instantly taken to the hospital, but in her despair she attracted a thought-form, and they were able to save neither her nor her child.

 

Mizuko died without a name, and that influenced her rebirth. Her lack of a name allowed her mother to intertwine her soul with hers, her nominative soul, or rn, becoming hers. When Mizuko was unearthed by Uranaishi, given to the Shiros to raise, addressed as an independent person, and above all given the name Mizuko, this caused her rn to split from her mother. Her mother took the separation badly and lashed out violently at the Shiros and Uranaishi.

 

Yuria was cremated along with her daughter, and one flesh became one ash.

 

But Yuria’s love endured.

 

Without a voice, the wind became her voice. Without tears, the rain became her tears. Without a womb, the earth became her womb.

 

Beneath their family plot, their haka, mother and daughter continued the process nature delayed. In the dark soil, amid the rocks and worms, Mizuko was reborn. She was reborn without pulse, or breath, or warmth, but was reborn as flesh nonetheless, not ectoplasmic material. She was not completely human, but not completely a ghost either.

 

Within the grave, Yuria carried Mizuko to term and beyond. Mizuko grew, fed by roots and dew.

 

To this day, Mizuko feels calmed by dark, cramped areas. Surroundings that would make the average person insane with anxiety are to her a soothing, familiar blanket. Her room is always dimly lit. She only turns on lights when she needs to read something. When she wants to relax, she doesn’t watch movies, listen to music, or talk to friends. She sleeps, wrapped tightly in a thick blanket scented to smell like earth. When out and about, she wears sunglasses to dim all sources of light around her.

 

As Mizuko grew, her mother began to haunt the surrounding city, stealing things to feed to her daughter. This is how Mizuko and Yuria came to the attention of Uranaishi. They investigated and unearthed Mizuko, and though she came out kicking and writing like any newborn plucked from the womb, her mother came out with even more wrath. A ensued, and Uraniashi was victorious. Yuria and Mizuko were not the first ubume they had dealt with. 

 

Though no power in all creation could spiritually separate Mizuko from her mother, they could be physically separated, and her mother limited to existing within her shadow. It was heartrending to tear them apart. Neither mother nor child wanted to separate.

 

But Mizuko had to be removed from her mother. A hole in the ground could not be her entire life. The living, even the half-living like Mizuko, must be allowed to live.

 

Mother and Ghost Mother

 

Mizuko’s relationship with the mother of her birth and death is complicated, as can be seen with how she uses the family name Shiro instead of Kano.

 

After she was unearthed, Uraniashi placed Mizuko in protective care. With Mizuko inside a room constantly monitored by telepaths, Yuria could only manifest in subtle forms–as a shape in Mizuko’s shadow, as a whisper in her head, or the feeling of a cold hand on her shoulder.

 

Mizuko learned to call Yuria her “ghost mother” and the woman that adopted her, Shiro Etsuko, as her “mother.” Dr. Shiro was a highly trained manesologist, and thought Yuria naturally wanted to kill her for getting between her and her daughter, Dr. Shiro knew how to handle her, and what was more, she knew how to handle poor Mizuko who struggled to understand why “ground mommy” wanted to take her back to the ground and why that was bad.

 

Gradually, Yuria learned to loosen her grip on Mizuko. But it took a long, long time. Ghosts do not change readily.

 

Throughout her life, Mizuko has struggled against her mother. Yuria has been known to attack anyone deemed a threat to her daughter, even over Mizuko’s protests, and when she was younger she would sometimes try and drag Mizuko back to their shared grave, though she learned to stop doing that when Mizuko entered middle school. Sometimes at night, especially after Mizuko has had a hard day, she manifests as a layer of earth and smothers her. Mizuko wakes up filthy, smelling of soil, and annoyed.

 

Mizuko’s relationship with Yuria, while still strained, has improved over the years.

 

As a freshman, she was a practicing Buddhist, as the idea that one day she could transcend human desire, such as the desire that shackled her to her ghost mother, appealed to her. She’s no longer a Buddhist, having converted to Christianity in her junior year. As she got older, she began to see her ghost mother less as a nuisance and more something to negotiate with and direct. It was then that Christianity with its message of universal forgiveness and reconciliation appealed to her.

 

“It’s like I’m the mother and she’s the child.” Mizuko once said. “She’s selfish like a child, unconcerned about anything that doesn’t involve an immediate source of comfort and security, namely me. Her rage is pure and terrible like a child. But like a child, I can’t hate her. She means well despite her actions.”

 

Mizuko’s mother has been a source of anxiety, fear, and embarrassment for Mizuko, but Mizuko has learned over the years how to direct her mother’s impulses towards positive ends. In a fight, Mizuko can’t do much. It is here that her mother proves extremely useful. 

 

Yuria has a powerful khet which allows her to manifest in a variety of forms. She can appear as a mound of moving grave dirt, a gale of icy wind filled with frozen tears, or most commonly, a white owl speckled with red perched protectively on Mizuko’s shoulder.  

 

No matter the form she takes, Yuria is a ferocious combatant. Mizuko typically works to restrain Yuria, but when she allows her ghost mother to cut loose, she strikes with the wrath of a wounded mother.

Mizuko and Yuria’s shared ib sometimes manifests through Yuria’s khet as a red line connecting the two. It looks a little like a blood vein and a little like an umbilical cord, and is completely unbreakable. While this line can potentially trip up Mizuko, she has learned how to use it as a tool and weapon. One very effective attack she’s learned to use involves ordering Yuria in owl form to encircle the opponent with the ib, ensnaring them and leaving them helpless for whatever violence Yuria wishes to inflict with her supernatural claws and beak…

 

Psychopomp In Training

 

As alive as she is dead, the rules of the universe apply themselves in strange ways to Mizuko. She doesn’t need to eat, or drink, or sleep, or breathe. She doesn’t need warmth, though extreme cold is detrimental to her as it freezes her blood. She does, in fact, have blood–it simply doesn’t pump through her body. It moves on its own. Her friend Black Witch, who uses blood to power her spells, keeps a few vials of Mizuko’s blood on hand, remarking that while it isn’t necessarily more powerful than normal blood, it has different technical properties and its inclusion in her arsenal increases what she can do. Mizuko’s blood is apparently very useful in spells that act upon the odic layer between physical reality and the Astral.

 

Mizuko’s blood was how Black Witch met Mizuko. After hearing about Mizuko, Black Witch came up to her and asked if she could borrow a few pints to experiment with.

 

Mizuko can manipulate the odic layer. She can function as what is known in manesology as an odic lens. She can make Astral effects more or less pronounced in the physical world. She can determine, to an extent, how thought-forms manifest. She can, for instance, choose if a monster coming into physical reality from a nightmare is the size of a skyscraper or the size of a toy. She can apply her odic lensing on herself, and after entering the Astral and manifest back on Earth in a different form. She can even do this to heal wounds, though she’s rarely wounded. Her body is part flesh and part ectoplasm. Like a ghost, she can vary the strength of her khet and become intangible, but only to an extent. She can feel things pass through her, and though this sensitive phasing is sometimes uncomfortable for Mizuko, she finds it useful in several respects. It gives her an awareness of where she’s phasing that ghosts don’t normally have. She can sweep through a plot of land or long abandoned ruins and discover long-lost treasure–or bodies. Her friends often ask her to find misplaced objects, because she’s very good at it. She is sure to find any misplaced socks or lost car keys with just a few quick passes around a house.

 

Mizuko’s odic manipulation is invaluable to her prospective career as a psychopomp as she can tune the specific souls of a ghost. She can do what manesologists normally have to use a device called an odic tuner to do. She can make a ghost whose weak sah forces her to look like a hollowed-out shell look human, for instance. But though she can determine how ghosts manifest and in what shape they manifest, she can’t determine how they leave. For that, she turns to thaumaturgy. While she’s only a dabbler in the thaumaturgical arts compared to her friends Black Witch and Fairy Dreaming, she knows thaumaturgy as it pertains to ghosts quite well. Though a Christian, Mizuko prefers oriental traditions for thaumaturgy. “Buddhism is sort of in my DNA.” she once stated. “My family picked the bones out of my ashes before I was even born.” When she needs to calm, comfort, or restrain a ghost, Mizuko uses Taoist coin charms and Buddhist ofuda. Two of her most prized possessions have been passed down to her from her manesology teacher Dr. Kitaro Nozawa–a coin sword from the Tang Dynasty that once belonged to the legendary ghost hunter (and ghost himself) Zhong Kui and a jacket fringed with white ofuda paper. The coin sword is highly transportable, breaking apart into a pile of coins when she whistles, and is highly flexible in combat. Not only can it stretch and flex like a whip, it can break apart into a cloud of individual coins and strike opponents like a swarm of bees. As the sword and its components can move in and out of the Astral to strike at odd angles, Mizuko has studied swordsmanship under Helen Bisclavret, the Chevalier Louve of the Monster League, who teaches her the mathematically precise art of destreza. The jacket functions as a harae and drives out evil with every step she takes. The writing on the strips of paper varies, but most often translates to “eternal love.”

 

Though gaeitie is commonly used by psychopomps and manesologists, Mizuko doesn’t use it. Gaeitie does not agree with Mizuko. The ancient material binds ghosts and other Astral beings to it, and in Mizuko’s case it’s presence makes her sick. Being in the same room as a piece of gaeite gives her headaches and makes her nauseous, but she is not incapacitated by it the same way ghosts are, and in some situations her sensitivity to gaeitie is a benefit. Once, she was able to free a trapped ghost by following the pain she felt until she found a buried gaeite candle from the Edwardian period.

 

Mizuko’s human senses are slightly dulled. She relies on noosphere enhancements to make up for her weak eyesight and hearing. She never has her food seasoned as taste wise it never makes any difference to her. But she has the senses of a ghost to compensate. She can tell things about a ghost or other Astral being just by looking that humans would need special equipment to perceive. 

 

Mizuko, like Astral beings, does not have a soul. Her thoughts do not imprint upon the Astral. Her flesh and soul are, in a sense, one and the same. This has several advantages and disadvantages. She is able to orient herself in Astral spaces much better than a human. She knows instinctively how to navigate fairypaths, and even fairies sometimes find themselves lost within their shifting skies and grounds. But she is also vulnerable to powers and abilities that act upon the Astral, gaeite being an example, though not to the extent ghosts are. Gaeite causes her pain, but does not hold her, and a Carnacki pentacle will cause her discomfort, but cannot seal her from a room. The part of her that is flesh protects the part of her that is spirit. 

 

She is also more vulnerable than the average human to thought-form infection as the average human soul acts as a barrier between thought-forms and the human body. To compensate, she is protected by noosphere shielding and her ghost mother.

 

Misfit Girl

 

Though an introvert, Mizuko has a close group of friends. While under the care of Uraniashi, she befriended a boy named Ibushi Kenta who was possessed by two thought-forms of love, a “mother” and “father” who manifested around him as an unbreakable tower to seal him off from the world and a bolt of light that shot out to incinerate any potential threats. As children that struggled with over-protective, supernatural parents, the two had much in common and grew a close friendship. Kenta and Mizuko also befriended two American children in the TIMS program–a girl named Tanya Abelman who woke up with a new metapathogen every morning based on the nightmare she had and a boy named Donald Swift who like Kenta was imprisoned by thought-forms, a bubble of light and a field of dark brambles.

 

At Ishinomori, Mizuko fell into the “misfit girl” circle, a group of girls that don’t fit in with the majority. Most girls at Ishinomori are “magical girls” in that they follow fashions and behaviors pioneered by early Japanese superheroines like Alice Freegift who was the first to call herself a magical girl. Magical girls stress having a bubbly, optimistic sort of personality, but that isn’t what Mizuko is like at all. She’s quiet, reserved, and serious. There’s a certain playfulness to the magical girl style, a sort of false-naivete, and Mizuko doesn’t believe she has time for anything like that–and even if she did, she thinks she could find something else to do with her time. She also clashes starkly with the established aesthetics of magical girls. She doesn’t do bright colors. She doesn’t take off her sunglasses. She doesn’t even have good posture, though her training with Ms. Bisclavret means she’s very agile when she needs to be. And where most magical girls have adorable pets by their side, Mizuko has her mother, often in the form of an angry, blood-stained owl connected to her through a glowing red ib that appears somewhat like a vein and somewhat like an umbilical cord.

 

Mizuko is friends with several other “misfit girls” including Black Witch, Fairy Dreaming, and Stranger 3. She met Black Witch when she asked to borrow some of Mizuko’s blood for her spells and ever since then the two have been “blood buddies,” even if Mizuko finds Black Witch’s effervescent personality somewhat exhausting. Fairy Dreaming and Mizuko bonded over their shared interests in the world of Fairy. Fairy Dreaming based her superheroine persona on the lore of Fairy from her looks to how she uses her powers, and as an up-and-coming psychopomp Mizuko is very familiar with Fairy. The great border-land of Fairy has produced some of the greatest psychopomps in the multiverse.

 

Mizuko can tell there’s something strange about Fairy Dreaming. When she works a glamor to look like a fairy, the glamor seems to almost go beyond illusion. It is as if she truly transforms into a fairy. But Mizuko’s teachers assure her that Fairy Dreaming is simply naturally talented when it comes to illusions, and Mizuko trusts her teachers. But she still can’t shake the feeling that when she looks at Fairy Dreaming she’s not looking at a human that disguises herself as a fairy but a fairy that disguises herself as a human…

 

In Stranger 3, Mizuko recognizes someone with as much drive and focus as herself. Though Stranger 3 is far more talkative and sociable, she still places her education well above anything else. Mizuko has found that, scatter-brained curiosity aside, Stranger 3 makes a great study partner.