Nejkira

Nejki wasn’t born a girl. She was born a male kitsune, and at school she was constantly teased for not being as much of a “boy” as the others. Nejki was tired of constantly trying to fit in as the "right" kind of boy, so she resorted to a desperate act.

She collected black magic books she’d obtained from shady dealers and began searching for a spell that would transform her into a girl. Thanks to the spell, she became more petite, more soft, and cuter. The spell also permanently erased all her traumas, including her own voice, which had been a source of discomfort and suffering for her, making her physically inaudible to those around her.

Her unstable spell caused a magitronic power grid outage throughout the entire heavenly world, and the authorities came after her. Eventually, the heavenly police found her, accused her of witchcraft, put her on trial, where, being mute, she could not defend herself, and so she was exiled to the mortal world. In the mortal world, since she is a yōkai, humans cannot actually see her in person. That’s why she uses metaversal lenses—which she kept as a souvenir from the Department of Magitronic Technologies at Inari Academy — so she can appear as a virtual character in earthly metaverses like VRChat, as well as on the screens of our devices on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch.

However, in order to communicate intelligibly in the mortal world, she constructed a magical vessel called a "speechboard" ("žvanidlo" in Czech) into which she inserts words using magital packets. If someone hears Nejkira making "blop, blop!" sounds, that is the sound of those packets. For Nejkira, they are the only sounds she can make. Since they are of magical origin, they are exempt of her curse of mutedness. The speechboard then catches these blops, decodes their content, and writes it on itself as text. The speechboard can often be glitchy, and sometimes it misinterprets the packets, either displaying them several times in a row or mixing up the words. If anyone wants to understand Nejki right now, they have to read the words and sentences on the speechboard, or watch her facial expressions and body language.

She herself doesn't bewail on her incident with magic at all. She has learned to adapt to her silence; it feels more natural and liberating to her — since then, she has been able to communicate in other ways and has practically no desire for a counter-spell that would give her voice back. She still comes across as curious and energetic, and she has absolutely no regrets about her decision to become a girl.