“Am I prideful? Egotistical? Vain? Yes, I am all these things and more! I am prideful because I have something to be prideful about–namely, myself!”

 

–Snow Maiden

 

“She’s overcompensating. We see it a lot in ghosts that cling to their human identities. The very thought that they’re different from who they were in life causes them great suffering, so they try so hard to express their human identities they become a caricature.”

 

–Dr. Kitaro Nozawa

 

 

Introduction

 

Beautiful, popular, successful–Sara Ito is one of the highest ranked students in Ishinomori School. With several doctorates under her belt and a guardian giant named Snowborg 273 generated by her superconductive variparticle field. The boys want her, the girls want to be her, but Sara cares little for other people. The ice queen is an ice queen. She is laser-focused on raising her rank and improving herself. She is a perfectionist, and her personality resembles that of a snowflake–intricate, complex, organized, but also sharp and cold. She also carries a secret–she’s not just a girl that uses the theming and imagery of a ghost. She is a ghost. Part of why she pushes herself–to the point of pushing others away–is that she fears if she can’t be the best possible Sara Ito, then she might not be Sara Ito at all.

 

Snow Maidens and Japan

 

The Yuki Onna is a popular figure in Japanese culture. Not only do they exist within Japan’s incredibly diverse mystic shadow (there’s a yokai for everything, and also a few yokai that represent nothing), but ghosts throughout Japan have adopted the persona of the yuki onna through FSS (folklore substitution syndrome). Ghosts sometimes manifest with amnesia. They sometimes forget who they are, and when they do they search their fractured memories for some scrap of a personality. Sometimes they find this scrap in the recollections of familiar figures from their native folklore or religion. Sometimes, with this scrap being more vivid to them than whatever is left of what they can recall about their lives, these ghosts come to believe themselves to be these figures. A ghost finds himself in the woods. He can’t remember who he is. But he can remember that fair folk live in woods, and move invisibly and intangibly like the air. He comes to the conclusion that he must be a fairy–and more to his pity, because fairies are notoriously cruel to ghosts that think they’re kin to the Tuatha De Danan.

 

One such infamous ghost, the Snow Maiden of 1975, was the ghost of a Japanese mountain climber who perished on Mt. Everest. The ghost took over Mt. Everest and assaulted Nepal with blizzards until the Monster League calmed her down. She now goes by the name Nadare (Avalanche) and maintains a museum dedicated to the history of Everest exploration inside an ice cave near the summit.

 

The look and mannerisms of snow maidens have even been taken up by the living. If a Japanese girl develops superpowers even slightly related to ice and cold, odds are that they’ll at least entertain the idea of being a Snow Maiden. They’ll dress up in white kimonos and bleach their skin and grow their hair out long. It’s so prevalent that it’s almost expected of female cryomancers that they’ll go through a Snow Maiden “phase.” There’s even a club for Snow Maidens up in the Kiso Mountains. There are even Snow Maiden cafes where attractive young women serve clients ice cream in crystal bowls amid traditional Japanese décor, as bizarre as it might seem. 

 

Men with ice powers have it rough in Japan due to this strong association between ice powers and yuki onna Ice powers are considered “girl powers,” and men with ice powers are assumed to be homosexual. So strong is the association that global fast food titan Johnny Winter’s, famed for it’s hot burgers and cold shakes, rebranded itself Johni Winter’s and adopted a cute yuki onna as its mascot when it opened in Japan. 

 

Sara Ito isn’t the first young cryokinetic to call herself Snow Maiden–far from it. But she is the most prestigious and the most powerful, capable of forming a large snowman around her which she operates like a guardian giant.

 

The Snow Maiden

 

Sara Ito’s supername isn’t Snow Maiden, it’s The Snow Maiden. She considers herself the Snow Maiden before all other Snow Maidens and invites those that disagree to take it up with her list of accomplishments and guardian giant.

 

And yes, in case you were wondering, her supername  is The Yuki Onna in Japanese, because even though Japan doesn’t use articles like the, Sara was quite a fan of how American superheroes would make use of articles to spice up their supernames. The Blue Beetle, The Red Bee. The Crime Fighter.

 

Sara is highly competitive and took on the Snow Maiden name in an effort to make it “hers” even among a sea of “imitators.” She’s a loud, boisterous, and somewhat bratty perfectionist who doesn’t mind correcting her teachers in front of the class or outright skipping if a lecture bores her. She loves to be the know-it-all. Her grades in STEM classes are perfect, but her grades in the humanities are lacking from her not putting forward more than the minimum effort required of her. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t see any point to the humanities. Technology, engineering, science–these things have a use. These things help her improve her guardian giant. Literature? History? She doesn’t have time for things so inconsequential.

 

Sara loves being a superheroine. She loves the attention, the pageantry, the high-stakes, and seeing her ranking rise and rise as Snowborg defeats greater and greater threats. She’s hellbent on getting into the upcoming tournament against Martin’s and has even threatened her teachers with zoning completely out of her humanities classes if they don’t put her in.

 

Sara’s secondary hyperstasis, which she ostensibly developed on her own while taking advanced physics classes at Ishinomori, allows her to create a superconductive field out of semi-tangible variparticles. For what actually generates this superconductive field, read the “Sara’s Secret” section, but for now let’s talk about the cover story. Sara claims that by mentally controlling a field of variparticles so that their quantum values become null (effectively making them, from a physical perspective, not exist) she can make it so that the electromagnetic resistance of an environment is eliminated–and even facilitated. 

 

In other words, she makes it very, very cold. Atomic motion slows down to a crawl as absolute zero approaches. The “traffic” of the subatomic world clears, giving electromagnetism an open field. For instance, an electric charge sent across a wire frozen to near absolute zero will persist indefinitely. But Sara can lower temperatures to even further below absolute zero where atomic motion not only ceases generating electrical resistance, it facilitates the flow of electricity. She didn’t name her guardian giant Snowborg 273 after -273 degrees Celsius, which is absolute zero. She named it after -273 degrees Kelvin, which is much, much colder than absolute zero.

 

Sara can make things so cold that particle physics reorders itself. Zero-point energy is not only released but released in such a way that it amplifies conventional energy sources through informational resonance. This could, in theory, make Sara an excellent support heroine increasing the energy outputted by her teammates, but Sara is far more interested in using this zero-point resonance to power her personal guardian giant.

 

Sara’s superconductive field is like an artificial ghost. It’s invisible, intangible, and very, very cold. Sometimes, it can be perceived as little lights around her, little hiccups in thawing quantum foam that causes photons to get a little confused.

 

Sara’s superconductive field is like an artificial ghost because it is, in truth, a ghost. It’s a part of her, and the trust part. The girl-shaped object is just a distraction.

 

Sara’s Secret

 

Sara has a big secret, and it’s a testament to the good relationship we have with Ishinomori that they would trust us with it–Sara isn’t just a girl dressed up like a yuki onna. She is one. She’s a ghost.

 

Sara, inspired by the venerable guardian giant Lord Glacius, originally designed her superconductive field to be attached to an aether drive, the traditional power source for guardian giants. While testing her superconductive field, she ignored safety protocol and tried to force a union between the field and the drive in the hopes of creating a gestalt engine with the powers of both. The result was the full molecular disintegration of her body and the generation of her ghost. 

 

She now haunts her superconductive field and is hellbent on making it and the guardian giant it powers greater than any aether drive guardian. She’s driven in a way only a ghost can be. She needs her field to be the best. She needs to be the best. Her teachers are worried that her tunnel-vision obsession isn’t healthy, and is preventing Sara from coming to grips with the reality of her situation–that she died. Sara Ito died from her obsession, and now it’s preventing her ghost from truly living.

 

Sara is not the easiest student for our kids to interact with. In many ways she’s a bully. But please remember that her actions come from a place of deep pain and great confusion.

 

Snowborg…Fall!

 

Ishinomori kids are very fond of their transformation and summoning words, known as superphrases. Stranger 3 is fond of shouting VIRAL…ENCODE when she uses her powers, for instance. Sara, huge fan of the pageantry of superheroics that she is, took a lot of time to come up with her superphrase.

 

When she shouts SNOWBORG…FALL!, her superconductive field creates what can most accurately be described as a giant snowman atop of her.

 

Get it, as in snowfall?

 

Yes, Snowborg is a giant snowman–stereotypically so and proudly so. Sara thinks Snowborg is adorable…and you know what? She’s right. Snowborg is a cute engine of destruction.

 

Snowborg 273 forms like a shell around Sara and she can feel through its slushy fingers and see through its tiny (relative to its entire body) coal eyes. As one might expect, it can freeze opponents and arrest their molecular motion, but it’s got a couple of other tricks. Snowborg is a weird guardian giant, and it can do some weird things. 

 

It can fold the fabric of space to  “blizzard-port,” turning into a flurry of snow and then quickly materializing elsewhere. This works through the magic of quantum science. Snowborg makes itself so cold so fast that the energy loss causes it to “bounce” out of the universe.in a tiny explosion, scattering the parts of its body in a blizzard while zero-point energy reforms the information of the shell at a different location.

 

Personally, I think the universe simply gets a little fed up with the “colder than absolute zero” thing and puts Snowborg in time-out, but what do I know? I only use my BLANKET system, I have no idea how it’s actually supposed to work from a mechanical perspective.

 

Speaking of my BLANKET system, Snowborg uses a similar principle of quantum displacement to store an arsenal of weapons. Ishinomori recognizes that Sara is one of their star students, even if they wish she had a more humble attitude, and don’t hold back when it comes to kitting out her guardian giant with goodies.

 

Snowborg 273 can summon a “broom,” really a large naginata whose bristles are composed of several blades, an elastic “scarf” made of rhecite that can restrain foes, a top hat that contains a high-powered ultra-megabeam (Snowborg! Time to pull victory out of our hat! Defrost busterrrrrr!!!), and an array of shiny photite emitter “buttons” that can project illusions and laser beams.

 

The coal eyes and mouth are just for decoration and to make Snowborg look expressive. They don’t have a function..