⟐History
If anyone were to endeavor to kill their past, Yuka would be the first in line.
Once upon a time, there was a child. This child had a name, and would--one day--grow up to be Yuka. The progeny of two preeminent Chāyì scholars of immense and noteworthy ability, the child was to be a Precursor descendant among Precursor descendants.
This would, of course, prove not to be the case. The child--who we shall, for the sake of simplicity, call Yuka--was, in fact, altogether less than their peers. Where other children would quickly grasp magic with fervor and diligence, Yuka's potential for magic quickly got the better of them; they were, and still are, perhaps the only creature in the entire world that is truly, genuinely
haunted. Since birth, Yuka has been plagued by the specters of her ancestors, and unlike the other Chāyì--who are taught to unlock and harness the memories that are their birthright--Yuka's memories come in physical form. To this very day, Yuka's dreams are of times and lives long past, extremely vivid recollections of lives she never lived.
Of course, it didn't help that Yuka was born in the deepest thicket of Aokigahara, a forest in Japan infamous for being haunted by the dead. In fact, this wasn't far from the truth; the Chāyì, incredibly protective of their knowledge and their hidden homes, infested the forest with creatures wrought in the likeness of the dead and damned, though they are--patently--merely vis driven by the knowledge bestowed by their ancestors.
This did not help Yuka, however. They were already a frightful child, bashful to a fault, for reasons they themselves knew but never imparted to their loved ones. Being raised in the epicenter of a forest known for suicide and hauntings did not help their fears.
To this end, Yuka's childhood was a private one, with few friends and fewer happy moments. Beset upon by ghosts, mentors, and parents of overbearing stature, they lived in shadows twofold; the dark of Aokigahara and the shady coattails of their parentage.
At 7, Yuka received their public last name, the replacement to hide their lineage from the world--Noroimiya. A baleful name indeed, one suitable for their life's woe and their birthright. Yuka showed potential, but that same potential outstripped their capacity. They were imbalanced and poorly prepared for the bevvy of troubles that their particular magics provided.
Yuka's parents, to this very day, wish that they had done things differently.
The chaos that was Yuka's raw, unbridled power shone through like firelight in the forest's murky darkness, and instead of teaching them how to use it, their parents attempted to control it. To bring it under heel. Yuka met this with rage and malcontent. Mentors attempted to cow Yuka to their whim. Yuka met this with defiance and disobedience.
And so, Yuka suffered. Their teenage years were a dark, tumultuous time, fraught with bad musical taste and horrible hair dye. To this very day, Yuka's hair has not truly forgiven her. It was, however, also the time that Yuka found solace in myths and legends--worlds where ghosts were not only real, but a constant. To this end, stories of gumiho--beautiful women of vulpine origin, close to the world unseen--drew their eye.
It was around her 16th birthday that Yuka started to become the Yuka we know today. It started small. Little things, here and there, that helped her forget about the specters that surrounded her, and, in some ways, command them. She found passions. Where once there was a void, there were now a thousand words to fill it. While her lifelong isolation afforded her few friendships and fewer privacies, Yuka found two companions: her dream journal and a girl named Makoto Chigase-Chāyì. Makoto, herself, had two loves: fashion and ghost stories. The former, Yuka adopted for her own--the latter solidified their friendship for years. Makoto, herself, was something of a dabbler; she played at all sorts of different magical venues, but her hobby was potioncraft.
Thus began a mutually beneficial relationship; Yuka offered stories upon stories, poetries, and companionship in exchange for not only a steadfast friend, but to sculpt her personal image as she saw fit.
These potions were no masterworks, however; the changes were slow, sometimes temporary, and often on a regimen. Yuka's sense of taste, much like her hair, has yet to forgive her for the atrocities she's committed. Makoto's presence in this story, however, is less for the transformative nature of her and Yuka's relationship. It is, rather, more important to discuss Yuka's feelings for her, for it is those same feelings that truly created Yuka as she is.
Yuka was infatuated. The filial ties between her and Makoto were distant, to say the least, and she had known no one but other Chāyì--so it was inevitable that such a thing might happen. Makoto, however, did not feel the same way, perhaps for the exact same reasons that Yuka was so enamored. Regardless of her reasoning, Makoto rejected her distant sibling's affections--and it was to that end that Yuka's teenage angst turned dark and sour.
The first book Yuka read that following day was a book on Banes. The second, the Antisophist's Almanac. The third, a tome of potioncraft.
The final book was a compilation of love poems. Before it was burned, every page had a tear-stain to call its own.
By the age of 18, her nighttime visions grew more vivid, more lucid. Her hauntings grew further and further out of control, lapping up any spare vis that she could muster from her surroundings. Yuka had become a whirlwind of woe--her very own ghost story. She had, by this point, begun pioneering her own flavor of the Chāyì's antisophy, weaving dark words into the partial runicographies. The focus of her studies had shifted entirely to debilitating magics, and, to that end, performing those magics in ways never before seen.
Yuka was an artist at her easel. Rage, bitterness, rejection--there had always been a certain violence inside of her, but these tenebrous spells brought a visionary's brilliance to bear. It is often said that pain is a relative thing--and for the lonely, selfish, narrow-minded Chāyì child, these were wounds that would last. She threw herself into her work. In a year's time, her curses and antisophic runicography had grown to the point of renown. There weren't any teachers that would mentor her--many had learned from the mistakes of her prior tutelage--so Yuka took it into her own hands.
However, that renown was not benign. It stained the Chāyì name with a certain infamy; certain proof that hiding away from the world would create monsters all the same. Aiming to wipe the slate clean, Yuka met the Chāyì's executioner.
The Crumblethroat did not slay Yuka, though it was well within his means, and his contingency plan. Instead, this massive, hulking mute of a man--name lost even to the family he was raised by--showed Yuka two things.
The first: pain is relative to the worst suffering one has felt. The Crumblethroat taught this lesson ruthlessly, often by the rod and the switch. Every outburst and umbrage was met in kind, and he performed this task without pleasure.
The second: Rage, anger, hate--all of those things are pointless without a target deserving of them. Misunderstanding is not a reason to hate.
This teaching came with the art of catalysmy, the Chāyì devotion to neutrality and inner peace. Magic had been turned on the Crumblethroat before. He would, as he always had, return it in kind with this art, sending Yuka to bed beset upon by her own woes and curses.
These first days were bitter and painful. They would practice, train, and learn for eight hours of the day, until the Crumblethroat allowed Yuka to return to her room, battered and fettered by the worst curses she could muster. Days were spent so ill that she couldn't even talk, and the Crumblethroat still forced her to learn. Bruises accumulated. By the third month, Yuka could've drawn the woodgrain of the dojo floor from memory. She had certainly spent enough time face-to-face with it. However, by that time, the specters had grown quiet. Before, the Crumblethroat would simply dispatch them as they arrived, pulling their vis into his catalysmic whirls and twirls, but they had ceased to be a real and present problem and had merely become a nuisance.
The ghosts were quieting. The pain ached, but waned. It had been weeks since Yuka had thought about her unrequited love--and she had begun to question whether it was truly love at all. Her practice with the fine, delicate art of Banes had grown sharper, bolder, more utilitarian--it had begun to become a thing all its own, paired with catalysmy in ways never before devised. While these magics were the tools of vitriol and hate, Yuka's intentions had changed.
It was no longer about harming those who had wronged her. There was a greater work to devote herself to. Her first project: the Antisophist's Almanac. Yuka had gone through a few copies--often lost or destroyed--but this one was her favorite. She scrawled notes across every page, late into the night, like a woman possessed. Her feverish hauntings had grown almost silent. Her dreams had become--once again--more like dreams than vivid recollections. Her despair seeped away as passion sparked like a firelight.
Yuka was no longer the Ghost of Aokigahara. Her violence had been tempered. Her woes had been soothed. The Crumblethroat was not a mentor; he was a blacksmith, and Yuka had been honed to the finest point. Every night, Yuka spent hours with a brush, painting the partial runes that defined antisophy. There was a beauty to it. A finery that couldn't be matched. Her poetry had changed to stranger things; less about the passions of romance and the pain of rejection, and more about the quality and intrigue of vis. She had begun to dabble in stanzas surrounding her dreams, and the strangeness of the wights and banshees that haunted her.
One autumn day, Yuka approached the dojo. Today, she did not plan to train.
"Master," she spoke, the brightness of certainty and determination glister-gleaming in her eyes. The Crumblethroat watched and listened, unmoving, a boulder in her path.
"I must go."
And thus, the boulder moved of its own accord. Wards had ever been a staple of Chāyì domiciles, and every Chāyì was beholden to a single law, fashioned through the use of runicography, rather than the rigorous hieroturgy:
You must never leave. To this end, every Chāyì's rite of maturity was to unbind the complex whirls and whorls that defined this inalienable law. And it is to that end that every Chāyì receives a book--the Antisophist's Almanac, the truest compilation of runes and runicographic logic in existence. It is, thusly, their goal to comprehend this grimoire, and apply its teachings to the great, binding lock of their estate.
The Stoplatch of Aokigahara was known for being not the most complex, but rather, requiring a degree of ingenuity to resolve. Within the Stoplatch Room were a litany of ever-moving runes, etched on slats of pure stone. Each had their own effect and intent, and would lash out at the unprepared. To enter the room without proper cognizance of its dangers was tantamount to suicide.
The Crumblethroat, however, was heedless. Stepping through the Stoplatch Room in a slow, rhythmic dance unbefitting of someone of his immense size, the wards of reprisal lashed out and merely swept around him, as if they were a stiff breeze. His disobeyal was blatant, but there were none who would ever dare question it.
And then, of course, it was Yuka's turn. Smooth as a silken whisper, she darted hither and yon, turning runes not simply inert, but destroying them altogether. The runes she crafted were destructive, and some--though few--were made manifest on the fly. By the time her work was done, the room was in shambles--save for the Stoplatch itself.
There was a certain understanding between Yuka and the Crumblethroat. Under his tutelage, Yuka had learned a deep-seated secret that the Crumblethroat couldn't divulge with the speech long lost:
He, too, was trapped here. Damned to die a silent death. The same means by which his voice was taken also compelled him to remain within the woods--and thus, the Crumblethroat stayed, training the Chāyì through his mastery of catalysmy.
Yuka, however, was prepared for this, and well-versed in the art of antisophy. Like a rogue picking a lock, she plucked and pulled at the strands, setting off little chain reactions that peeled the Stoplatch off its hinges.
By the time she was done, Yuka had not only dismantled the Stoplatch as so many had before her, she had
destroyed it. She was freed--free to step into that dark night, to breathe air unfettered. The Crumblethroat knew that this day would come, and, despite his own desire for freedom, could only gaze on as Yuka stepped, clothed in her favorite fineries, out into the great unknown. As she fled, an unholy, sickening thud echoed her footsteps. While she didn't dare look behind, she knew that the Crumblethroat had used her. Cowed to the whimsies of the Chāyì, he could not strike out against his masters, nor could he speak, nor could he leave.
He had used her as a means of escape, after all. Just not the same sort of freedom.
Bitter tears stung her eyes as she fled into the night. It was a cold, unearthly darkness, lit only by the moon's three-quarters glow. This was a darkness that she had never felt. This cloying, foggy thing--it wrapped around her like a noose.
It was then that Yuka remembered: she was not alone in the woods.
Ghostly tendrils writhed around every arbor and branch, blotting out the moonlight and cloaking her in the deepest, most silent darkness. No light could penetrate this pure blackness. Yuka's feet threatened to drop out from under her--her sight had failed her, and now there was only the feeling of bark and the sound of the thicket underfoot. It wasn't the wisps of the Chāyì's fashioning that Yuka feared--it was the dark. The deep, dark unknown, and the very real possibility that there was something greater than mere ghouls in the deepwood. And so, she moved faster. The brush had nettles and branches ripped and tore at her skin, but those were ephemeral injuries. She would not suffer them, just as she could not afford to suffer the loss of the Crumblethroat.
By the time she had reached the border of Aokigahara, she was covered in scratches and wounds, her clothing partially in tatters. She had hardly made it to the roadside of Fujikawaguchiko before, finally, her legs made good on their threat and she collapsed in a heap of flesh, blood, and cloth.
By the time she next awoke, she found herself draped in rope and paper tags, lying on top of a bedroll. It was an unfamiliar feeling, like Yuka had fallen out of place. A man and a woman sat in the next room, huddled over a coffee table, watching and speaking in hushed voices. As Yuka approached, their countenances turned almost fearful, but somehow relieved to find her awake and alive.
She came to know the couple as Susumu and Aimi. Just as she never learned their family name, they never learned hers--which was for the better. The ropes, it had turned out, were pure superstition--Yuka's hauntings had the two terrified that more ghosts were going to spring forth, and so they sought help from Yahatajinja, a major shrine nearby.
It was around this time that Yuka's accent became incredibly apparent; it didn't have any quirks of the local dialect, and the pair were--of course--curious about other aspects of her appearance, particularly the fact that she towered over the two of them at nearly six feet. She was--to them--a stranger in a strange land, but there was such an organic way to her movement, her enunciation, that she could've been nothing except native.
Yuka did the only thing she could do. She came up with a ghost story.
She was cursed by an angry forest spirit to wander Aokigahara for the rest of her days, but she escaped with the help of another, more generous creature. Curses were, of course, a common part of Japanese magical schooling; this wasn't some far-flung tale that no one could've run awry of.
And so, stories and tales aside, the three formed a strange little relationship. For a time, Yuka lived and worked from their home, doing odd jobs around the resort and generally being something of a local spectacle. While this was fine for a time, Yuka knew that she had a greater goal in mind. There were things that had to be done. The Crumblethroat deserved a grave--one emblazoned with a name.
And there were Precursors out there that continued to treat life--
people--as if they were tools, means to an end. Bidding farewell to the pair she had grown so enamored with, Yuka packed her things and headed for warmer shores.
There were things to do. Places to see. Changes to make.
Injustices to fight.
And Yuka, passionate, idealistic Yuka, would see to it that she did, saw, made, and fought them all. It is to that end that she arrived on the shores of Ominar, and it is to that same end that her virtuous nature flourished.
...If, of course, Yuka can find the time between being haunted, hunted, and working a full-time job.
⟐Relationships
Ichirou Kobashi-Chāyì:
Father. Sworn enemy. Well-regarded among the Chāyì as one of the greatest magi of their line. Spectacular antisophist. Yuka doesn't actually know what he looks like.
Siegmund LeMonde:
Apparent outlier. Enemy. Flies under the radar for everyone else, but Yuka is fairly curious about his every move.
Michiko Kobashi-Chāyì:
Mother. Sworn enemy. Regarded among the Chāyì as a similarly outstanding magus. Practitioner of a wide variety of arts, but specifically a feared psychotrope.
The Crumblethroat (Deceased):
Catalysmist. Yuka has personally sworn an oath to give him a named grave. Race unknown; likely human, possibly even Precursor.
Susumu Ōmagatoki:
Close friend, licentia.
Aimi Ōmagatoki:
Close friend, licentia.
Makoto Chigase-Chāyì:
First crush and first rejection. Seen with distaste.
Amity Wayleigh:
Anchorwoman. Coworker. Kind of rude.
Cissnei Cselke:
Coworker. Something of a conspiracy theorist. Good friend, however.
Peony Camaz:
Bitter hatred. Yuka appears to be aware of certain things that go on behind Camaz Ltd's closed doors.
Precursors in general:
Distrust. If they're a Chāyì, Yuka is likely to attempt to undermine them in any way she can manage.