Banished Divinity: Learning to be Human

He launched himself at me again. More crying. More wetness. But underneath it, I could feel him nodding. Small, fierce nods that meant yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

I held him. And for a moment, in the quiet of my room, with the weight of his small body against mine, I felt something that I had never felt before.

Not power. Not fear. Not the cold satisfaction of being feared.

Peace.

Moo Moo went stiff.

His whole body seized. His fur stood on end. His eyes—his enormous, perpetually tear-filled eyes—went wide and blank, like he was seeing something I couldn't see. His antennae—those tiny, almost invisible feelers on top of his head that I had always assumed were just for show—began to vibrate.

"Moo?" I said. "Moo Moo, what's wrong?"

He didn't answer. He couldn't answer. His body was rigid, trembling, caught in something I didn't understand.

And then—

Zap.

A spark. Blue-white, crackling, leaping from Moo Moo's antennae to a point in the middle of my room. The air shimmered. The light bent. And then—

She was there.

A girl. Standing in the middle of my room like she had always been there, like she had simply been waiting for someone to turn on the lights.

She was my height. My build. My brown hair, my brown eyes, my face that I saw every day in the mirror.

But she was not me.

She was translucent. Faint. A ghost made of moonlight and poor life choices, her edges soft, her form wavering like heat rising off pavement.

She wore a deeply confusing T-shirt—and when I looked closer, I realized it featured those men from the posters. Why humans willingly wore other humans on their clothing remained a mystery to me.

She also had on ripped jeans, which appeared to have lost a battle with something sharp and never recovered, and her hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail that somehow looked both accidental and aggressively intentional at the same time.

She looked around my room with the expression of someone who was seeing it for the first time.

Which, I realized with a jolt that went through my entire body, she probably was.

"Holy of all realms," I breathed.

The ghost—the spirit—the thing that wore my face—turned to look at me.

"Hello?" she said. Her voice was faint. Distant. Like she was speaking from very far away, or through very deep water. "Hello? Can you hear me?"

I stared at her.

She blinked at me.

Can ghost blink?

Moo Moo, who had collapsed on my bed like a deflated balloon, let out a weak "Moo" that neither of us acknowledged.

"Can you hear me?" the ghost asked again. Her voice was more solid now, more present, like she was tuning a radio and slowly finding the right frequency.

"Yes," I said. "I can hear you."

"Oh, thank goodness." She let out a breath that might have been relief or might have been the sound of a ghost trying very hard to remember how breathing worked. "I was beginning to think I didn't have much time left. My goodness, this is—this is strange. Being here. Like this. I keep trying to touch things and my hands go through them. It's very inconvenient."

I did not respond. I was still staring. My brain, which had processed the fall from the heavens and the discovery of mortal family and the appearance of a small green creature from my past, was now encountering something it could not process.

A ghost.

The ghost of the human Sera.

Standing in my room. Wearing a many faces t-shirt. Complaining about not being able to touch things.