The Birth of Belinda Gray and the Curse of the First Spiritualist

Life, Supernatural

The tragic life and death of Belinda Gray, the first to receive the strange mutation that causes some to be able to see and interact with the stranded spiritual entities of Cairne.

Born to a normal family within the Greenlands commonage, Belinda's meager beginnings started out just as the majority before her, simple and mundane. Her family noticed very early on that the infant's attention tended to shift quite a bit as she matured, often staring off into space or seeming to be focused on empty places. This brought about a great deal of speculation that she may have some sort of sensory deficiency or disorder, and yet as she grew, she was otherwise normal, in fact, even more than normal. The child seemed to be blessed with the gift of tremendous intellect, often seeming to pull information out of the air. The child grew more and more distracted as she matured however, and her parents would often find her weeping in terror, hiding in corners and under furniture, claiming that the "not theres" as she had come to call them would not leave her be. Her family brought her before every Benevolent and healer they could track down, seeking to find a cause for whatever this strange malady was, but as time went by, the issue persisted and grew worse. The young woman would often be found talking to thin air, and even sometimes arguing or frightened by the one sided exchange. Every time she would wave off concern as it just having been the "not theres" again. She stopped sleeping, and her appetite dwindled as her situation worsened, complaining often that the "not theres" would no longer let her sleep, that they were always there, begging, demanding, crying out and even sometimes threatening her. Her last few years were arduous and miserable, as she slowly began to give up her struggle to maintain her own sanity. She slipped away quietly, still mumbling to the "not theres" in her bed.   It was not until years later that other occurrences of this ability began to pop up here and there. while it was extremely rare, the mutation seemed to hold a common thread in its attachment to the ability to interact with the spirits of the dead. Future cases were treated with a more direct approach, starting with psychotropics to calm the individual, and eventually, once the mutation was better understood, how to live with it.