Bane
- This article is about the banes of Interlife ghosts. For the banes of paques, see jin fane.
A bane is a particular object or substance that has the potential to hurt or harm a ghost on Interlife Earth. Being in contact with its bane, or for a powerful bane even in its proximity, will cause a ghost pain, and in extreme cases even physical (or rather ethereal) harm. Naturally, most ghosts will go to great lengths to avoid their banes, and finding a ghost's bane (if it has one) can often be an effective method of keeping a ghost at a distance, or driving it away. A ghost can try to bear the pain and come close to its bane, but it takes considerable effort and willpower, just as it would for a mortal to continue doing something that caused him pain.
Not all ghosts have banes, and some ghosts have more than one. According to some estimates, about 55% of ghosts have a bane of some sort, and 15% have two or more banes. (This 15% is included in the 55%, not in addition to it.) These estimates, however, could easily be very low; certainly, ghosts have a motivation to keep their banes secret, and many ghosts may have banes that they have not disclosed. For that matter, it could be that some ghosts have banes unknown even to themselves, since they never happen to have encountered them since their divestment. Some spectrologists, in fact, speculate that all ghosts do have banes, but many ghosts may never run across their banes and discover them.
Origin
A bane is typically a type of object that was connected with the death of the ghost, or perhaps with something that he particularly feared or disliked in life. To a ghost who had had a fear of snakes, snakes might be his bane—especially if he was killed by a snakebite, though this isn't a necessary condition. A ghost that died by violence commonly has its murder weapon as a bane, though the connection to the death may be more tangential. A ghost who died by choking on a chicken bone might have bones as its bane, or chickens, or perhaps food in general. A ghost who died by slipping on a patch of water that came from melted ice and hitting his head on the corner of a table might have water as his bane, or ice, or tables (perhaps only tables similar to the one that killed him), but it's also possible for him to have shoes as his bane (because his shoes lost traction on the water), or even, say, movie posters, if he happened to be looking at a movie poster at the time that he slipped, or hamburgers, if there happened to be a hamburger on the table near where he hit his head, or even a particular melody that happened to be running through his mind just before he died.
In any case, even when the bane is clearly connected with the ghost's death—and not to something it feared in life but that wasn't actually present at its death—, the circumstances of death alone do not seem to dictate the bane. Two people who died under very similar circumstances might have completely different banes, both connected with the same form of death but in different ways, or one may not have a bane at all. The factors that determine exactly what a ghost's bane will be are very poorly understood, and the precise banes a given ghost will have on divesting may be even in principle unpredictable.
Effects
The effects of banes vary, both qualitatively and quantitatively. In general, the more unusual the bane, the closer it was connected with the ghost's death, or the more the ghost feared or hated it in life, the stronger it is. This, however, is a general trend impossible to rigorously quantify, and, again, the precise strength a bane will have seems a priori unpredictable.
Most banes cause the ghost some sort of disagreeable sensation. This may mean mild discomfort, or nausea, or a tingling feeling more strange than really unpleasant. It may also mean a feeling of icy cold, or burning hot, or an itching irritation ranging from annoying but slight to maddeningly unbearable. The bane may cause the ghost pain, either localized in a particular part of its form—a headache, or a feeling like a stubbed toe—or throughout its body; depending on the strength of the bane, the pain may be anywhere from a mild ache to terrible agony.
The effects of a bane may work over large distances, but tend to drop off the farther away it is; not surprisingly, the stronger the bane, the larger the distance it's usually effective over, though this isn't always true either. A bane that causes a horrible pain in the gut when a ghost touches it may, when three meters away, cause a significant but more tolerable pain, and at ten meters a noticeable but barely significant twinge. A bane that merely makes a ghost feel queasy at close range may have no effect at all at ranges longer than a meter. On the other hand, it's also possible, though uncommon, for a bane with a very mild effect to nonetheless retain that effect over tens of meters of distance.
Though it's relatively rare, some banes actually cause a ghost not just pain or discomfort but actual physical harm. The visual effect of such a bane varies; the ghost may grow more and more transparent, or wounds may open across its form without apparent cause, or the ghost may seem to age and wither. In any case, whatever its appearance, the damage is real, and though in some cases the damage stops at a certain point, leaving the ghost injured and weakened but not finishing it off entirely, in other cases sufficient exposure may destroy the ghost. (Ghosts with such damaging banes may be understandably disinclined to discover by experiment the result of prolonged exposure.) The damage is almost always accompanied by pain, but there have been a few cases of ghosts being damaged by a bane but without any adverse sensations to accompany the affliction, only discovering their damage by seeing its physical signs or others' reactions to them, or by becoming aware of the bane—or perhaps not discovering it at all until it's too late, and being destroyed.
Even more rarely, some banes may have odd effects other than (or in addition to) unpleasant sensations or straightforward damage. Cases have been documented of banes slowing the motion of the affected ghost, or at close range immobilizing it entirely, of banes causing the affected ghost to shrink in size, of banes causing other sorts of transformations. These exotic banes, however, are exceedingly rare, and no pattern has yet been discovered regarding when and why they arise.
If a ghost is exposed to two banes at once, then it feels the results of both. Usually, if the results are similar, they do not accumulate; rather, the stronger predominates. However, if the results are different (one bane causes pain and the other nausea, for instance), then the ghost will feel both in full force. It is possible for a ghost to have separate banes one of which includes the other, such as dictionaries and books in general. In that case, the more specific bane will have the stronger effect (which will supersede that of the weaker bane); while the ghost may find any book mildly discomfiting to be around, dictionaries may cause a sharp pain.
Naturally, the more common the bane, the bigger a problem it tends to be for the ghost. A ghost with a bane that it rarely encounters—women with bright purple hair, or wombats (especially if the ghost does not reside in Australia), or a specific and not particularly popular brand of cereal—is likely to be little inconvenienced by its bane, and will not usually find it difficult to avoid it. Indeed, the ghost's bane may become a problem for it only if the ghost's enemies intentionally place it in the ghost's path. Ghosts with more common banes—such as knives, or saltwater, or chairs—might find it a great deal harder to stay away from them. Their banes may largely determine their choices of where they spend their time in the Mortal World—a ghost with a bane of saltwater, for example, is hardly likely to want to spend much time near the seacoast—, and many such ghosts simply avoid the Mortal World entirely as much as possible, spending almost all their time in the Spirit World and venturing into the Mortal World only as often as they absolutely have to to maintain their existence.
The ghost does not have to be aware of a bane to be affected. A ghost will still feel the effects of its bane even if it has no idea of the bane's location or presence. This actually makes banes potentially useful in one way, in that a ghost can take advantage of them to detect whether or not its bane is nearby. Of course, the fact that "using" the bane in this way involves exposing the ghost to the bane and all of its consequences make this a somewhat unpalatable option.
Unique banes
Sometimes a ghost may have as a bane not a type of object, but one particular object—often their murder weapon, though there are certainly other possibilities. Such unique banes are thought to make up only about five to ten percent of all banes, though, again, accurate estimates are hard to come by, given that such unique banes have an even greater probability than other banes of never being discovered. Unique banes tend on the average to be stronger than other banes, though this, again, isn't necessarily the case.
It's quite common for a ghost with a unique bane to have a class of objects the bane belongs to as a more general bane. For example, to the ghost of a person who was suffocated with a certain embroidered pillow, that pillow might be a unique bane to the ghost, but pillows in general may be a bane as well, albeit a less effective one. This can go to three or more layers deep: a ghost may have a specific sacrificial knife as a unique bane, any similarly curved knife as a less powerful but still potent bane, and knives in general as a relatively weak bane.
Abstract banes
Some unusual banes are not physical objects; some ghosts are affected by specific actions or confluences of circumstances. A ghost may be adversely affected by a particular gesture, for instance, or by the speaking of a particular word. It may be a pattern that affects it, such as the shape of a capital omega, or two objects crossed at right angles. It may even be a matter of time; a ghost may suffer the effects at the start of every year, or the night of every new moon. (In such a case, the ghost is likely to simply avoid the Mortal World during those times; such banes rarely affect them in the Spirit World.) These abstract banes are, again, believed to compose only some five or ten percent of all banes.
Living banes
Living creatures can be banes as well as inanimate objects. Generally, this extends to particular species or broader taxa of living creatures; spiders are a relatively common bane, for instance, and some unfortunate ghosts have a bane of arthropods in general. Wolves, cats, and snakes are also fairly frequent banes. The bane may also encompass only creatures of specific markings or other characteristics, or creatures undergoing some special activity—only black cats, for example, or three-legged dogs, or rearing horses. Not a few ghosts actually have human banes, though to no known ghost are all humans bane. Rather, a particular ghost will have as a bane humans of a particular description or vocation—redheads, for instance, or doctors, or stamp collectors.
A ghost may even have a specific individual as a bane, and in fact there have even been a few cases where a ghost's bane was another ghost. In all known cases of the latter, the second ghost had been the first ghost's bane as a mortal before the second ghost died, and continued to be its bane after its divestment; while it may be possible for a ghost to become another ghost's bane directly (perhaps the ghost of a mortal it killed), there are no known cases of this occurring. Furthermore, it seems for the most part to be only when a particular individual is a bane to a ghost that he continues to be a bane after his death and divestment. If, for instance, postmen are a bane to some ghost, then it is only living, mortal postmen who have this effect; ghosts who were postmen in life (or ghosts who pursue a similar occupation in the Spirit World) will not generally do so.