Acrobatic Silky

In her yokai shape, Acrobatic Silky looms as an unnaturally tall figure, her grey skin stretched over spindly limbs and crowned by a curtain of glossy black hair. The face beneath is gaunt and sunken, lined across the brow and locked into a wide, lipstick-painted grin that bares oversized teeth. She goes barefoot, her long fingers and toes lacquered red, and dresses in a crimson gown with a violet collar that wraps her elongated neck, topped by a matching wide-brimmed hat. The anime keeps her hair tangled across a ruined upper face until the day she met Aira, while the manga preserves her human features. During her living years she had fair skin, brown eyes, a beauty mark by her left eye, and dark hair that draped over the right side of her face.

The loss of her own child hollowed Acrobatic Silky into something defined by a single craving: to find a youngster who would love her and call her mother. That fixation latched onto Aira, whom she convinced herself had been her daughter in a past life, and she grew possessive to the point of obsession. Yet her drive was rooted in protectiveness rather than malice. She would surrender her own aura to bring Aira back, and even tore away her own jaw to prove she meant Momo Ayase no harm. She also carried a fierce pride in her acrobatic talent.

While alive she was a debt-burdened woman juggling several jobs, including sex work, janitorial shifts, and a convenience-store post, all to raise the daughter she adored. When she spent some of her earnings on a dress for the girl, the men she owed stormed in, beat her, and drove off with her child. She ran after the van and fell, watching it vanish, then climbed a rooftop for one last dance before stepping off the edge to her death. Her spirit drifted the city for years, memories gone but a sense of profound loss remaining. A small girl, Aira Shiratori, once mistook her for her own dead mother and ran up before walking off with her father. That moment convinced the spirit she was Aira's mother reborn, twisting her into the yokai known as an Acrobatic Silky, and she shadowed Aira for ten years.

During the Acrobatic Silky Arc she seized Aira to force the word mother from her, then swallowed Okarun and kicked Momo aside. Heartbroken when Aira called her a monster, she devoured the girl too, blamed Momo, and ignored Turbo Granny's demands to release them, until Momo set her trailing hair alight with a rosary lighter and made her cough up all three. She cornered Okarun next, but Momo had him weave through the building so her permed hair snarled on the structure, and a Turbo-Granny-charged tackle from Okarun blasted her out a window. Learning Aira had died inside her, she offered her aura to revive the girl and ripped off her jaw to show she was sincere. As Momo channeled that aura, she glimpsed the yokai's tragic past. Reborn, Aira watched Acrobatic Silky begin to crumble; Turbo Granny warned the spirit had given up Nirvana and would be erased from all memory unless she conquered her regrets in seconds. Remembering her real daughter and her failure to protect her, the yokai grieved, until Aira embraced her and named her mother, settling her spirit so she could pass on peacefully.