I'm nothin' but a ghost, you know

World

Magic

For the most part, Beth’s world is a fairly standard Earth. The big difference is that magic existed before the modern era. It still exists, but it’s no longer used by humanity and is basically considered a myth.

A lot of various supernatural beings exist, too. Though most of them have no bearing on Beth’s story. There’s no like sasquatches or vamps, but Fairies and ghosts and all that jazz exist in some form or another.

Once upon a time…

Early Life

Bethany was born a farmer’s daughter. She was the only family her father had. Her mother had disappeared shortly after her birth, and she had no other siblings. So growing up, Beth was no stranger to hard work. She did her fair share of work around the farm, took their crops to the village for sale, and spent her free time teaching herself to read.

At the age of 15, Beth’s father fell ill. He did recover, however the sickness left him weak. He was no longer able to do any labor-intensive work, which meant that almost all of Beth’s time was spent keeping the farm going.

Curse

A traveling merchant, Clara, came to live in Aerwinn when Beth turned 20 and the two became very close as time passed. Clara was the only person Beth really had the time to talk to outside her work, as she was the one who bought most of the farm’s crops. They eventually fell in love.

Unfortunately, Clara was betrothed. Beth didn’t know this until her Fiance, Andres, arrived in Aerwinn. In true soap opera fashion, Mr. Fiance was less than pleased Clara and Beth were romantically involved, and decided to take care of things by casting a good ‘ol curse on Beth.

Thus, she became the girl out of time, though that wasn’t the initial intent of the spell. Andres had only wanted her to be like a ghost, in that no one would be able to speak to her, see her, or know that she was even still alive. Which was the case all around, Beth was trapped and unable to interact with the world in any way that would let people know she was there...she was just also effectively immortal. Which sucked for her.

The next couple thousand years were mostly uneventful for Beth. She did a lot of traveling, because after her father died and Aerwinn withered, there was nothing much for her to do. She couldn’t talk to people or have an effect on the world at all, so aside from learning languages and listening in on people’s day-to-day activities, Beth didn’t pay much attention to what was going on in the world itself.

The biggest thing to come from that time was her slowly learning what the curse did and didn’t allow her to do. It also gave her the ability to pull things out of time like she was. Nothing big, she couldn’t like pull a house out of time. But smaller things. A hair brush, an Ipod, a blanket. Those things would exist in the same space she did, so they would turn as invisible and intangible as her.

She also realized that as the world changed and became more advanced, the curse had to adapt, too. Which weakened it slowly. It had to spread itself thin, in a way, to keep her out of sight and out of mind. But in doing that, she had a little more freedom in the things she could do, which I will go into on her abilities.