Janet

Janet is a character in Mini-Grand 5102.

Weapons/Abilities:
Intangibility and invisibility are common to all ghosts, but as a poltergeist Janet is also able to possess inanimate objects and mess around with them. The extent of her poltergeist-specific powers is limited by the emotional atmosphere in the immediate area. Fear, anger, hate, envy, and other similar emotions provide the biggest boosts, but a high concentration of any emotion can increase her power. When inside an object and granted access to a volatile emotional atmosphere, Janet can cause it to do anything from gain teeth to tap dance, but without the emotional atmosphere she can really only make it move around a bit. Very slowly.

Description:
Janet takes the form of a pale blue woman wearing a long, flowing dress. The dress covers where her feet would normally be, and if one looks under it (NAUGHTY NAUGHTY), it becomes apparent that the entire surface of her body is hollow, as if a sheet were draped over some invisible solid object. It ends at about waist height, but the dress covers up the fact that she has no legs. She wears her hair long, and aside from the general ghostliness, is really quite pretty.

Ghosts in Janet's world are much different than ghosts in ours, the biggest difference being that they actually exist. When someone dies, they become a ghost only if they feel they have unfinished business left in the world of the living, and they are granted a ghostly form that will help them finish it. Therefore, the form a person assumes after death tends to be inversely related to the quality of the life they led.

The worst usually comes in the form of Razers, walking suits of armor forged from pure hatred - when you're a ghost, hatred can actually be solid. Razers don't come along often and are the result of someone whose life was a living hell, and whose only desire is revenge in the form of mindless slaughter. They are exceedingly difficult to destroy and more dangerous than a flaming tornado, so it's a good thing they only show once every thousand years or so. It's entirely possible for a ghost's form to degrade and get closer to that of a Razer if they are mistreated, so ghosts tend to garner a good deal of respect from the living, and often enjoy a decent amount of help from authority figures. After all, helping the dead fulfill their final wishes not only lets them rest easy, but it also gives your political image a significant boost.

Janet is a poltergeist, which covers a wide range of ghosts that led crummy but not terribly hellish lives. Poltergeists tend to feel that screwing with people is enough to cover their unfinished business on earth, and nearly all of them have mischievous personalites and, more often than not, a dangerous sense of humor.

Biography:
Janet was born in the crowded slums of an unnamed town to two parents who, to be honest, really weren't ready for a baby girl. Her father was an alcoholic and was in general just plain unreliable, and after a gazillion fights they just split apart. Janet's mother vanished from her life when she was seven, leaving her with a father who wasn't even sober most of the time. When she was twelve, Janet felt she had had enough to decide she was better off running away, and left to join the circus, quite literally - she hitched a ride on a carnival train, and was somehow able to convince the circus performers to take her with them.

At first the ringmaster insisted she be dropped off at the next station, as they had no room for dead weight, but when Janet offered to do all the odd jobs nobody else wanted in exchange for food and housing, he agreed. The circus performers quickly took her under their wing, and she spent the next few years of her life learning all sorts of oddball tricks from acrobatics to juggling. The circus was her new family, and while it may have been dysfunctional at best, she saw it as a vast improvement over the life she had led up to then.

She spent four years with the circus before a dwindling budget prompted the ringmaster to disband it. Most of the performers left in groups, but Janet struck off on her own, determined to make herself a life out of her own efforts. She traveled from town to town, finding work where she could, never staying in one place too long. After a close run-in with the local authorities for squatting, she made it her rule to never stay in one place more than a few months, and thus went the next two years of her life.

But then Janet got a bit stupid. She decided to throw herself a little eighteenth birthday bash, and she had a few glasses of wine, with "a few" meaning "at least fourteen." Next thing she knew she was rising out of her grave as a ghost. It's common knowledge that no ghost can remember how they died, nor can they remember a period of 24-48 hours before the event - it's a mental defensive mechanism to keep them from remembering the pain of death. But in her panic, Janet forgot this, and she flew around town in a frenzy, winding up possessing a car and causing it to crash through a storefront. Two police officers who happened to be patrolling the area came in with the standard cop routine, "put your hands behind your head" stuff, and were extremely surprised when an ethereally blue teenage girl threw herself at one of them, winding up passing through the officer and landing in a sobbing heap on the other side of him.

The police officers tried their best to comfort her and brought her back to the station, where the local ghost authority did his best to gently break the news to the frightened girl that she was dead, at which point she possessed his desklamp and started switching it on and off rapidly enough to give him a headache. Unable to coax her out, he called in an exorcist and lit out for the night. Fortunately (or unfortunately), Janet was abducted into this contest before the exorcist arrived on the scene, which led to a few angry phone calls regarding false alarms.

Development
She caused mischief and made a pair of golems.

Death
Exorcised and shot.