Meet Kisegawa[]
Kise is a tsukumogami ("ninety-nine year spirit" or "tool spirit"), a type of yokai created when a tool or other object that has been taken care of and in continual use for at least a century gains a soul and personality of its own. She is a solid gold and painted/lacquered bamboo kiseru, a traditional Japanese smoking pipe made to be both functional and beautiful as a sign of status at a time when tobacco was cost-prohibitive to all but the rich. Her tsukumogami subspecies is known as a kiseru-obake.
She's a current member of the Modern Mythic Relations.
History[]
Kise tells her creation as a tragic love story: The artisan who forged her was not as well-known at the time, having made her as a gift for the Yoshiwara courtesan he had fallen for and intended to buy out of her indentured servitude contract. She could show off and share the more intricate status symbol to potentially draw in better clients and raise her rank while he created more to sell and put toward her debt. Unfortunately like many in the profession, sickness took the courtesan's life before her contract could be ended, and the artisan threw himself completely into his work to distract from his pain. His craft got even better and his story garnered him pity and, in turn, notoriety among kiseru crafters of the time, leading him to ironically make the amount he would have needed in a short time frame after it was no longer relevant.
In the meanwhile the kiseru itself had automatically become the property of the Matsubaya Brothel and spent the next 100+ years being inherited by courtesans of the house, a few of which even made it to the top ranks of oiran, the rare and most prestigious courtesans to match the likes of the richest samurai and lords. The tsukumogami's soul was forged from the combined lives of women that were trained for the majority of their lives to interact with and entertain the upper crust of society and provide the fantasy of an ideal wife: confident, prideful, intelligent, beautiful, skilled. Though in that era yokai were still generally bound to hide from mortals to keep the balance, and so she only showed her spirit form when interacting with other tsukumogami and yokai in secret.
Eventually with the decline of kiseru usage in favor of cigarettes and the closing of the brothel when the red light districts were outlawed in the mid 1900s, Kise was sold to a number of antique collectors over the years, several of which kept her and her case boxed up and out of use for most of their ownership, where she lay mostly dormant until eventually being transferred to an archaeological museum in England around 2215. Despite being significantly weakened as a spirit from lack of use, being out of the darkness of a box and put on display at least woke her from her dormancy. Hundreds of years as part of the museum collection forced her to adapt to new knowledge and language as she could only eavesdrop on tours and wandering bits of conversation, finding that even if she showed herself most people couldn't even see or hear her.
This changed with a chance encounter with a vacationing Jayden, who was able to interact with the tsukumogami and was fairly easily persuaded to break her out of her "prison of uselessness". While not a particularly quiet escape, Jayden's dumb luck and his singular ability to hear his willing accomplice kept him out of actual trouble long enough to take her back with him and introduce her to the newer guild he was a part of.
Links[]
Trivia[]
- Kisegawa means "Auspicious Shallow River" and is considered a myoseki ("famous name") of the house she was owned by, passed down and inherited by oiran who were believed to possess the traits and therefore continue the legacy of the previous name users.
- The symbol on her chest/pipe form is her creator's signature mark.
- She is very much an "ojou" type.
- She has utter disdain for cigarettes (given that their prevalence led to the decline of her kind) and calls them "cheap peasants".
- She was once gaslit by the fey Ráma for 2 weeks into thinking that she couldn't properly master the Prestidigitation spell because he secretly taught her Mold Earth instead of Prestidigitation. She returned the fey-vor by gifting him "cookies" made from dirt and mud she'd excavated and disguised using the Mold Earth spell he taught her.
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