Yinghua Ming

Personal History

For more information, see Ghost Hunting

Yinghua was born in a suburb of Ghost City, the capital of Orchid Province, where she spent most of her childhood years. Through elementary and secondary, she was a regionally accomplished duelist and often traveled for competitions. Her other experiences traveling in her home country included a year-long exchange program during secondary, which brought her to Mist City for a year and left Joey Cheng emotionally scarred for the rest of his nerd life or something. (If you ask her, he's just being dramatic.)

Graduation from secondary saw her acceptange to RSA, an internationally acclaimed tertiary school an ocean away from home. Thanks to her steadily worsening relationship with her parents, she packed her bags and left the moment she was able, then reunited by chance with Joey, who was attending the rival school on the opposite end of the island. (She bullied him a lot. It was really funny.) Although she largely dropped dueling in favor of "studying," she maintained a loose practice schedule consisting mostly of picking fights with students from the rival school.

Her third year of tertiary began with her dorm prefect, who was much more involved in the dueling scene, blackmailing her into taking out his opponents before the competition. This came to a head during the international competition hosted at their school, which ended prematurely when she hospitalized herself and then-top-ranked duelist Qadan Shan, who had been her target. Following her release from the hospital, she formally cut contact with her parents, which ruined her prefect's blackmail material.

Her school's administration, despite no threat of litigation from any involved parties, announced they would be withholding her diploma at the end of her fourth year. Unsurprisingly, Yinghua's response to this was to spark campus-wide riots, which eventually snowballed into a domino effect of several gender-segregated schools (including her own) resuming classes the following year (2019) as co-ed.

Her fourth year research project brought her to Briarcore Institute's Ghost and Apparitional Studies lab. Despite her questionable academic record, the lab's head professor Dr. Ono asked her to stay at Briarcore and work towards her MPhas in their lab, which she readily agreed to after officially graduating tertiary. Her first year as a grad student in the lab saw a request from a friend of a friend landing her in Centinela,

She earned her MPhas in 2024 and decided to stay and finish her degree.

Behind the Scenes

• Given real-world terminology, Yinghua is so, so very Manchurian.
• I can't remember who between Joey and Yinghua happened first, but they both were released into the wild at roughly the same time as a grad student set. Her Disney inspiration is Mulan (with a sprinkling of inspiration from the Mulan stories I got from my mom growing up and the meager historical data available to the English-speaking world.)