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boogiewoogiebugleboyP L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Mici
OOC Journal:chelicerae
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope
Email + IM: presidentshinra[at]gmail; shinra brat @aim
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Jon Snow, Daphne Morales-Kocchar, Seraphim Dias, and Annie Sawyer
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Boy Blue
Canon: Fables (Vertigo Comics)
Original or Alternate Universe: OU
Canon Point: Right after his death.
Number: RNG me please!
Setting: A world just like ours, sort of - or at least halfway. In New York there is a street where fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters live in exile from the original worlds that they came from. These original worlds were taken over roughly 300 years ago by an evil Emperor known as “The Adversary” who stormed world after world, killing people in his wake and conquering. Some of the people (known as Fables) got away to our world, which they call the Mundy, and set up a life. Now they’re trying to live as unobtrusively as possible, complete with spells that turn regular folk (called Mundies by the Fables) away from Fabletown.
There’s also a place for non-human Fables (like the Three Little Pigs) in upstate New York called the Farm, which is important in Blue’s story.
History: The important thing to know about Blue is that he's old. Old like, over a thousand, old, and he still looks sixteen. This is what we know about his early background: he says he's Fortune's favorite son, which might just be a saying, but considering this is a world where the North Wind and the spirit of Darkness are very real people, it's probably not. At some point, he fell asleep in a haystack when he should have been watching the sheep, and the farm went to shit in the meantime (the cow was in the corn! The corn!), but what exactly is true and what is lost in translation from Albion (his homeland) and the Mundy (the human world) is unknown.
During the time of the Napoleonic Wars, when the Adversary was invading the Homelands, there was one last bastion of hope - the Last Castle. At the time, Blue was fighting as an aide-de-camp for the Free Company of Colonel Bearskin, and was damned good at his job. The Last Castle guarded the last trip out from the Homelands to the Mundy, which was set to go very soon, and the Adversary sought to stop them.
That was when a mysterious woman, who called herself Red Riding Hood, was chased into camp and wounded. Blue helped nurse her back to help and they "fell in love," and she suggested they have Friar Tuck marry them so that instead of fighting in the last battle the next day, they can go to the Mundy together. Blue refuses, citing duty, but they have one last romp anyway (and Blue oversleeps, which isn't important but what is with this kid and sleep, huh?) and Blue hurries them to the last ship heading out. He packs up Red Riding Hood on the ship and hurries to the battle, where he basically anticipates dying.
However, Colonel Bearskin gives him the powerful witching cloak, telling him that he has to survive and go to the Mundy and tell them what happened with this last battle, especially because Blue is in love and Red Riding Hood is on the other side. Blue agrees, and watches everyone die before he takes off. However, Red Riding Hood, not wanting to be parted from Blue, didn't go on the ship, but instead headed back into the battle where she presumably perished.
Fast foward a few hundred years. Blue is, like the rest of the Fables, in exile in New York City. He's Snow White's office aid: his best friends are Flycatcher (the Frog Prince) and Pinocchio, who he has an apartment with, and he while he doesn't long for the glory of war (which he feels is no glory at all) he does miss Red Riding Hood. He's a trumpet player who, despite being excellent, can't get any gigs because he is 'too white, too young, and too hayseed' - no one thinks he knows the blues.
Until one day, she shows up. Red Riding Hood comes into the Mundy through a secret door, and Blue is overjoyed at first, but the joy is quickly curdled when she weepingly tells him about the horrors she faced and spurns him. This is short-lived, however, because soon she shows up on his doorstep after he's tormented all his neighbors with sad music, and they go to a warehouse and have sex. There, Blue tells her he knows she's not the real Red Riding Hood, that the sex just confirmed it, and demands to know who she is. She tries to bluff but fails, so instead she disables Blue with magic, tortures him, and basically infers she'll eat him. To make matters worse, she breaks all his fingers in both hands. It turns out she's really Baba Yaga, and she works for the Adversary. They return him to Fabletown with a message from their boss.
Dr. Swineheart patches up Blue just in time for him to get really pissed about his hands, the fact that he had sex with the enemy, and for him to stupidly force the good Doctor to tape a sword to his hands so he could join in on the ensuing battle. While it's a victory for Fabletown, it's not for Blue, who is stuck wondering what happened to Red Riding Hood, and why did Baba Yaga choose to impersonate her. After the battle, he 'steals' both the witching cloak (which he's learned to use in the centuries he's been in the Mundy) and the Vorpal sword, the most powerful blade in the universes - while they are listed as stolen by Prince Charming, the new Mayor of Fabletown, the truth is PC gave them to Blue as this was also a reconnaissance mission. Blue goes back to the Homelands to find out what's going on.
In a mission that lasts approximately five years, Blue invades Homeland after Homeland in search of answers. It turns out the witching cloak is ridiculously powerful, letting him shapeshift, hide objects, turn invisible, and teleport. He's known there as the Dark Knight for his tendency to kill parties of Gobs who are on patrol at night.
He finally finds the Emperor after a convoluted trip through several Homelands, killing Baba Yaga's guards and a dragon in the process. After finding the Emperor, tricking his way into an audience and beheadhing him, he is caught in midflight by the Snow Queen, who takes him to the real puppeteer (literally, as it's Gepetto, and the Emperor is actually a wooden puppet). The lock Blue in a birdcage and Gepetto agrees to bring the 'real' Red Riding Hood in exchange for Pinocchio's body (yes, Pinocchio was 'killed, and yes, Blue dragged around his BFF's body to use as collateral, but to be fair he did intend on taking him back to Fabletown), who is in fact not Blue's Red Riding Hood - Blue's Red Riding Hood is another sorceress using Red Riding Hood's form. Blue, heartbroken, nonetheless uses the witching cloak remotely to escape the birdcage and tries to assassinate Gepetto, but fails. When he fails and Gepetto and his bodyguards are after him, he takes Red Riding Hood and goes back to Fabletown. Pinocchio, under a loyalty spell to Gepetto, chooses to stay with his father.
There he reports to Charming who then, for 'stealing' valuable treasures, imprisons him despite Blue carting back a veritable library of maps and secrets (bum deal) and sentences him to live in exile from Fabletown on the Farm, which is a farm in upstate New York where the Fables who can't pass for human (like the Three Little Pigs, who staged an uprising) live. Blue goes under protest, telling Red Riding Hood that she's not his Red Riding Hood and she doesn't owe him anything. At the Farm, Rose Red, the administrator, tells him that basically she knows he's a hero and fuck Charming, and basically has him doing assistant work and not 'hard labor.’ He works and begins to develop feelings for Rose Red.
At this point in the series he take a backseat up until Fly becomes king of Haven and Blue is utilized as a go-between the Homeland Kingdom of Haven and Fabletown/the Farm, using the witching cloak. While they prepare for war, it becomes evident that Blue is a scout/messenger. He carries the Vorpal Sword with him, and he is the only one who knows how to use the witching cloak. At this point, too, he confesses his feelings for Rose Red, who rejects him (and later marries Sinbad).
Once the war starts, Blue is still acting as a scout/messenger, and gets shot in the arm with a magic arrow that pierces the Witching Cloak. However, the wound doesn’t heal, and after the war ends and Fabletown is safe, he finds it’s starting to rot. He goes to get it looked at by the Doctor, who operates on Blue and cuts off his arm in the process.
However, this isn’t the end of it.
It seems that the magic from the Witching Cloak isn’t anything good. It belonged to a being named Mr. Dark, who is the essence of nightmares, and the magic is killing Blue. Even Fly, whose magic is powerful, cannot save him. Rose Red, seeing him on his deathbed, weeps that she loves him, and Blue tells her that she never really did love him, but instead, she is in love with the idea of the romance of his illness, and is in love with his glory, and tells her to go back to her husband and leave him alone.
And then Boy Blue dies.
(in the latest issue it’s revealed that in his death he “goes on” and he’s shown with both arms, which is how I would like him to come aboard the ship. However, it's pretty much stated that his appearance in the last issue is going to be the last, and he's not coming back.)
Personality: Blue is like a sweet, but serious kid. While he looks like a teenager and at times acts like a teenager, he isn't really one: he's much more thoughtful, much more responsible and caring. The thing about Blue is that he's also intensely unassuming. For a majority of the series, Blue doesn't do anything special: he's friendly and nice but he doesn't seem special. He doesn't go out of his way to do anything spectacular or heroic. When he's settled in Fabletown, and later, on the Farm, he just does his job and is relatively quiet about the entire thing. This is because Blue has had his "glory;" he's been to war and he knows that there's nothing glorious about it. He wants to live a quiet, simple life without fear and without problems. He doesn't want to be a hero. He wants to play his trumpet and read his comics and hang out with his friends.
He is pretty intensely into the things that he likes: he’s a musician at heart, and expresses his feelings through music. This becomes a problem when he becomes depressed and plays the blues ceaselessly, annoying people to the point where they lodge a complaint with Snow White. However, it’s not that he’s bad at it (he’s really very very good) it’s just that he doesn’t stop. This is also shown with how he takes to his tasks - there is a relentlessness about him. He was assigned to discover the mysteries of the Witching Cloak, for instance, and he spends years figuring it out, until he manages to master an intensely powerful magical item.
Blue knows how to be a hero. He knows how to be a badass, he knows how to fight and kick butt. That fact means that when called to service, he responds without question. He's intensely loyal to every cause he commits to, displayed by the fact that he chooses to stay and fight to the death when the woman he loves is going away and he could easily go with her. He commits to fight during the upcoming war against Gepetto, and he chooses not to reveal to Fabletown that Prince Charming is a big fat liar who falsely imprisoned him. Nothing can stop him when he's determined, even if that means taping a sword to his hands so that he can go out and fight, which he insisted on doing when Baba Yaga broke all his fingers. His dedication can be seen in his decision to accept the charge to go kill the Adversary. His heroism is so potent that when in dire straits another character ponders 'WWBBD' or 'What Would Boy Blue Do?'
His loyalty extends to his friends, too. Despite the whole 'turning Pinocchio's body over to the Adversary' thing, he really had intended on bringing his best bud back. He's remarkably clear-eyed about what people are doing, even his friends, and he's not hesitant to tell them exactly what he thinks, including telling Fly, who is getting ready for war, that he doesn't know what he's doing and this is a dumb idea, or telling Rose Red that she doesn't deserve him because all she wants is the attention of being in love with Boy Blue, who is dying. While this doesn’t mean he’s always right (he was really, really wrong about Fly, who ends up being a big damn hero in a huge, massive way) it does show a remarkable amount of bravery to be able to say things like that to people who he loves.
On that note, there's something slightly sad about Blue. While he can be happy and smiling, part of him will always be melancholy. Partly this has to do with the fact that his love life is a walking disaster, and even after two hundred years, he's thinking about Red Riding Hood, and even after he's 'over' her (that is, when the real Red Riding Hood falls in love with Flycatcher) and he's trying to move on (with Rose Red) there's something sad about him. That's why he plays the blues, after all. It’s revealed, in the last issue he appears in (and probably the last issue he will ever appear in, as Willingham seems to be really content with not bringing Boy Blue back) that he is still looking for love. There is a part of him that is always looking for someone to love him, someone to care about him without caring about the glory of war or the hero that he can be.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
+ eternal youth - Blue looks about 16-17 and always will. (one artist draws him as looking about 12, but Buckingham has been pretty consistent with 16-17, and besides, it makes his love life a lot less creepy)
+ super strength and fast recovery from injuries. Fables are incredibly resilient and their strength is based on their popularity (for instance, Cinderella finds it no hardship to lift a car by herself, and Snow White recovers from a gunshot wound to the head that basically blew half her head off). While not nearly as powerful as the princesses, Blue is pretty resilient.
- not invulnerable. He’s eternally young and may heal quickly, but he can be hurt and killed an is susceptible to anything that would do harm to a human.
- eternal youth - it's hard to be taken seriously when you look like a teenager, especially when you don't tell people you're not. But even in Fabletown, he's always kind of seen with the attitude of "he's just a kid" (at least until the war). He's also sort of exhausted. When he dies, he does it willingly. While not suicidal, he's old. He has a bit of an old-man mentality sometimes (like how he is starting to see love as a kind of an adventure that he just doesn't have the time or energy to handle)
Inventory: The Vorpal Sword - from Alice in Wonderland, but it’s been in Blue’s care for a long time now. It’s a powerful magical item, because it can cut through anything like butter and kill magical monsters. For game mechanic purposes, I say it will not be able to cut through locked doors or walls of unexplored parts of the ship, or any NPCs or armor that the mods tell me it cannot cut through.
One b-flat trumpet, in it’s case.
One ivory hunting horn, on a leather strap.
One pair of blue shorts.
One blue shirt with a little musical b-flat note at the bottom.
One letterman-style jacket (blue) with a treble clef patch on the sleeve.
His outfit from Homelands (that is - a blue shirt with b-flat fastenings, blue pants, blue boots, and a blue dread pirate Roberts style mask, but no cloak, as the witching cloak is not coming with him)
One pair of blue Chuck Taylor high tops, and a couple of pairs of socks.
Appearance: He’s a kind of a cute, blonde kid who only wears blue - I estimate he stands at about five-six or five-seven, because while he's taller than a great number of the shorter Fables, he's tiny compared to Fly, and a little shorter than Snow White when she's wearing heels. He’s pretty lean, not muscle-y at all. Looks like this!
Age: At least 1000, but probably more. I play him at 1,200ish. He doesn’t remember the year he was born.
AU Clarification: n/a
S A M P L E S
Log Sample: It's quiet, and that's always a problem in these parts.
Blue doesn't want it to be quiet. Silence means a night alone, and around here that means he'll start talking to his cloak at any second. The first year was too busy, too hectic, too rushed. The second year was spent walking through a Homeland so full of talking animals that even invisible, the chatter got into Blue's head and refused to get out.
This is the third year, and the silence that Blue once craved is now too loud. It fills the nooks and crannies of his head, it makes him long for the sounds of New York City, for Fly's comfortable snoring, for Pinocchio's complaining. It makes him want to take his trumpet (hidden away, the word is Chet Baker) and play a song, instead of just having his war horn. He loves his war horn, but it doesn't exactly play music.
Blue pokes at the fire in front of him and shifts, restless. He doesn't want to admit that it isn't just the loneliness - it isn't just that he misses his friends. What he misses most is the peace. Everyone in Fabletown wanted to come back to the Homelands, to reclaim their worlds, to see the land they were born in. But Blue was happy, before Baba Yaga came. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. It was a quiet life.
Blue had finished with war.
He pokes the fire again and listens. There's still silence pressing against him; not even the crickets were out tonight. He runs over the fingering for When I Fall in Love in his head, ignoring the words and focusing on the trumpet part.
Or I'll never fall in love.
The lyric comes into his head too fast for him to stop it. Red Riding Hood, he thinks, standing up, pulling his cloak tighter around himself. That's why he was doing this. That's why he was missing New York City, missing his friends, missing Snow's kids growing up. That's why he was missing the peace and silence and quiet of a life as a secretary. It wasn't so that he could have the glory of fighting the Adversary.
It's so that the next time he plays that song, he'll have someone to play it to, and they'll know he means.
And the moment I can feel that you feel that way too,
That's when I fall in love with you.
Blue banks the flames and is about to continue when he hears it - the distinct sound of a troop of gobs moving, and he lifts the hood of his cloak. Well, he had been hoping for something, right?
Comms Sample: I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. You play a tune long enough and you think that’s the only tune there is, and then someone does something like invent a new instrument and you forget that once it wouldn’t have surprised you.
[Jeepers creepers. He didn’t figure this at all.]
It’s kind of like a funny book. Something right out of Buck Rogers.
[Pause.]
Or Superman.
Your Name: Mici
OOC Journal:
cheliceraeUnder 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope
Email + IM: presidentshinra[at]gmail; shinra brat @aim
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Jon Snow, Daphne Morales-Kocchar, Seraphim Dias, and Annie Sawyer
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Boy Blue
Canon: Fables (Vertigo Comics)
Original or Alternate Universe: OU
Canon Point: Right after his death.
Number: RNG me please!
Setting: A world just like ours, sort of - or at least halfway. In New York there is a street where fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters live in exile from the original worlds that they came from. These original worlds were taken over roughly 300 years ago by an evil Emperor known as “The Adversary” who stormed world after world, killing people in his wake and conquering. Some of the people (known as Fables) got away to our world, which they call the Mundy, and set up a life. Now they’re trying to live as unobtrusively as possible, complete with spells that turn regular folk (called Mundies by the Fables) away from Fabletown.
There’s also a place for non-human Fables (like the Three Little Pigs) in upstate New York called the Farm, which is important in Blue’s story.
History: The important thing to know about Blue is that he's old. Old like, over a thousand, old, and he still looks sixteen. This is what we know about his early background: he says he's Fortune's favorite son, which might just be a saying, but considering this is a world where the North Wind and the spirit of Darkness are very real people, it's probably not. At some point, he fell asleep in a haystack when he should have been watching the sheep, and the farm went to shit in the meantime (the cow was in the corn! The corn!), but what exactly is true and what is lost in translation from Albion (his homeland) and the Mundy (the human world) is unknown.
During the time of the Napoleonic Wars, when the Adversary was invading the Homelands, there was one last bastion of hope - the Last Castle. At the time, Blue was fighting as an aide-de-camp for the Free Company of Colonel Bearskin, and was damned good at his job. The Last Castle guarded the last trip out from the Homelands to the Mundy, which was set to go very soon, and the Adversary sought to stop them.
That was when a mysterious woman, who called herself Red Riding Hood, was chased into camp and wounded. Blue helped nurse her back to help and they "fell in love," and she suggested they have Friar Tuck marry them so that instead of fighting in the last battle the next day, they can go to the Mundy together. Blue refuses, citing duty, but they have one last romp anyway (and Blue oversleeps, which isn't important but what is with this kid and sleep, huh?) and Blue hurries them to the last ship heading out. He packs up Red Riding Hood on the ship and hurries to the battle, where he basically anticipates dying.
However, Colonel Bearskin gives him the powerful witching cloak, telling him that he has to survive and go to the Mundy and tell them what happened with this last battle, especially because Blue is in love and Red Riding Hood is on the other side. Blue agrees, and watches everyone die before he takes off. However, Red Riding Hood, not wanting to be parted from Blue, didn't go on the ship, but instead headed back into the battle where she presumably perished.
Fast foward a few hundred years. Blue is, like the rest of the Fables, in exile in New York City. He's Snow White's office aid: his best friends are Flycatcher (the Frog Prince) and Pinocchio, who he has an apartment with, and he while he doesn't long for the glory of war (which he feels is no glory at all) he does miss Red Riding Hood. He's a trumpet player who, despite being excellent, can't get any gigs because he is 'too white, too young, and too hayseed' - no one thinks he knows the blues.
Until one day, she shows up. Red Riding Hood comes into the Mundy through a secret door, and Blue is overjoyed at first, but the joy is quickly curdled when she weepingly tells him about the horrors she faced and spurns him. This is short-lived, however, because soon she shows up on his doorstep after he's tormented all his neighbors with sad music, and they go to a warehouse and have sex. There, Blue tells her he knows she's not the real Red Riding Hood, that the sex just confirmed it, and demands to know who she is. She tries to bluff but fails, so instead she disables Blue with magic, tortures him, and basically infers she'll eat him. To make matters worse, she breaks all his fingers in both hands. It turns out she's really Baba Yaga, and she works for the Adversary. They return him to Fabletown with a message from their boss.
Dr. Swineheart patches up Blue just in time for him to get really pissed about his hands, the fact that he had sex with the enemy, and for him to stupidly force the good Doctor to tape a sword to his hands so he could join in on the ensuing battle. While it's a victory for Fabletown, it's not for Blue, who is stuck wondering what happened to Red Riding Hood, and why did Baba Yaga choose to impersonate her. After the battle, he 'steals' both the witching cloak (which he's learned to use in the centuries he's been in the Mundy) and the Vorpal sword, the most powerful blade in the universes - while they are listed as stolen by Prince Charming, the new Mayor of Fabletown, the truth is PC gave them to Blue as this was also a reconnaissance mission. Blue goes back to the Homelands to find out what's going on.
In a mission that lasts approximately five years, Blue invades Homeland after Homeland in search of answers. It turns out the witching cloak is ridiculously powerful, letting him shapeshift, hide objects, turn invisible, and teleport. He's known there as the Dark Knight for his tendency to kill parties of Gobs who are on patrol at night.
He finally finds the Emperor after a convoluted trip through several Homelands, killing Baba Yaga's guards and a dragon in the process. After finding the Emperor, tricking his way into an audience and beheadhing him, he is caught in midflight by the Snow Queen, who takes him to the real puppeteer (literally, as it's Gepetto, and the Emperor is actually a wooden puppet). The lock Blue in a birdcage and Gepetto agrees to bring the 'real' Red Riding Hood in exchange for Pinocchio's body (yes, Pinocchio was 'killed, and yes, Blue dragged around his BFF's body to use as collateral, but to be fair he did intend on taking him back to Fabletown), who is in fact not Blue's Red Riding Hood - Blue's Red Riding Hood is another sorceress using Red Riding Hood's form. Blue, heartbroken, nonetheless uses the witching cloak remotely to escape the birdcage and tries to assassinate Gepetto, but fails. When he fails and Gepetto and his bodyguards are after him, he takes Red Riding Hood and goes back to Fabletown. Pinocchio, under a loyalty spell to Gepetto, chooses to stay with his father.
There he reports to Charming who then, for 'stealing' valuable treasures, imprisons him despite Blue carting back a veritable library of maps and secrets (bum deal) and sentences him to live in exile from Fabletown on the Farm, which is a farm in upstate New York where the Fables who can't pass for human (like the Three Little Pigs, who staged an uprising) live. Blue goes under protest, telling Red Riding Hood that she's not his Red Riding Hood and she doesn't owe him anything. At the Farm, Rose Red, the administrator, tells him that basically she knows he's a hero and fuck Charming, and basically has him doing assistant work and not 'hard labor.’ He works and begins to develop feelings for Rose Red.
At this point in the series he take a backseat up until Fly becomes king of Haven and Blue is utilized as a go-between the Homeland Kingdom of Haven and Fabletown/the Farm, using the witching cloak. While they prepare for war, it becomes evident that Blue is a scout/messenger. He carries the Vorpal Sword with him, and he is the only one who knows how to use the witching cloak. At this point, too, he confesses his feelings for Rose Red, who rejects him (and later marries Sinbad).
Once the war starts, Blue is still acting as a scout/messenger, and gets shot in the arm with a magic arrow that pierces the Witching Cloak. However, the wound doesn’t heal, and after the war ends and Fabletown is safe, he finds it’s starting to rot. He goes to get it looked at by the Doctor, who operates on Blue and cuts off his arm in the process.
However, this isn’t the end of it.
It seems that the magic from the Witching Cloak isn’t anything good. It belonged to a being named Mr. Dark, who is the essence of nightmares, and the magic is killing Blue. Even Fly, whose magic is powerful, cannot save him. Rose Red, seeing him on his deathbed, weeps that she loves him, and Blue tells her that she never really did love him, but instead, she is in love with the idea of the romance of his illness, and is in love with his glory, and tells her to go back to her husband and leave him alone.
And then Boy Blue dies.
(in the latest issue it’s revealed that in his death he “goes on” and he’s shown with both arms, which is how I would like him to come aboard the ship. However, it's pretty much stated that his appearance in the last issue is going to be the last, and he's not coming back.)
Personality: Blue is like a sweet, but serious kid. While he looks like a teenager and at times acts like a teenager, he isn't really one: he's much more thoughtful, much more responsible and caring. The thing about Blue is that he's also intensely unassuming. For a majority of the series, Blue doesn't do anything special: he's friendly and nice but he doesn't seem special. He doesn't go out of his way to do anything spectacular or heroic. When he's settled in Fabletown, and later, on the Farm, he just does his job and is relatively quiet about the entire thing. This is because Blue has had his "glory;" he's been to war and he knows that there's nothing glorious about it. He wants to live a quiet, simple life without fear and without problems. He doesn't want to be a hero. He wants to play his trumpet and read his comics and hang out with his friends.
He is pretty intensely into the things that he likes: he’s a musician at heart, and expresses his feelings through music. This becomes a problem when he becomes depressed and plays the blues ceaselessly, annoying people to the point where they lodge a complaint with Snow White. However, it’s not that he’s bad at it (he’s really very very good) it’s just that he doesn’t stop. This is also shown with how he takes to his tasks - there is a relentlessness about him. He was assigned to discover the mysteries of the Witching Cloak, for instance, and he spends years figuring it out, until he manages to master an intensely powerful magical item.
Blue knows how to be a hero. He knows how to be a badass, he knows how to fight and kick butt. That fact means that when called to service, he responds without question. He's intensely loyal to every cause he commits to, displayed by the fact that he chooses to stay and fight to the death when the woman he loves is going away and he could easily go with her. He commits to fight during the upcoming war against Gepetto, and he chooses not to reveal to Fabletown that Prince Charming is a big fat liar who falsely imprisoned him. Nothing can stop him when he's determined, even if that means taping a sword to his hands so that he can go out and fight, which he insisted on doing when Baba Yaga broke all his fingers. His dedication can be seen in his decision to accept the charge to go kill the Adversary. His heroism is so potent that when in dire straits another character ponders 'WWBBD' or 'What Would Boy Blue Do?'
His loyalty extends to his friends, too. Despite the whole 'turning Pinocchio's body over to the Adversary' thing, he really had intended on bringing his best bud back. He's remarkably clear-eyed about what people are doing, even his friends, and he's not hesitant to tell them exactly what he thinks, including telling Fly, who is getting ready for war, that he doesn't know what he's doing and this is a dumb idea, or telling Rose Red that she doesn't deserve him because all she wants is the attention of being in love with Boy Blue, who is dying. While this doesn’t mean he’s always right (he was really, really wrong about Fly, who ends up being a big damn hero in a huge, massive way) it does show a remarkable amount of bravery to be able to say things like that to people who he loves.
On that note, there's something slightly sad about Blue. While he can be happy and smiling, part of him will always be melancholy. Partly this has to do with the fact that his love life is a walking disaster, and even after two hundred years, he's thinking about Red Riding Hood, and even after he's 'over' her (that is, when the real Red Riding Hood falls in love with Flycatcher) and he's trying to move on (with Rose Red) there's something sad about him. That's why he plays the blues, after all. It’s revealed, in the last issue he appears in (and probably the last issue he will ever appear in, as Willingham seems to be really content with not bringing Boy Blue back) that he is still looking for love. There is a part of him that is always looking for someone to love him, someone to care about him without caring about the glory of war or the hero that he can be.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
+ eternal youth - Blue looks about 16-17 and always will. (one artist draws him as looking about 12, but Buckingham has been pretty consistent with 16-17, and besides, it makes his love life a lot less creepy)
+ super strength and fast recovery from injuries. Fables are incredibly resilient and their strength is based on their popularity (for instance, Cinderella finds it no hardship to lift a car by herself, and Snow White recovers from a gunshot wound to the head that basically blew half her head off). While not nearly as powerful as the princesses, Blue is pretty resilient.
- not invulnerable. He’s eternally young and may heal quickly, but he can be hurt and killed an is susceptible to anything that would do harm to a human.
- eternal youth - it's hard to be taken seriously when you look like a teenager, especially when you don't tell people you're not. But even in Fabletown, he's always kind of seen with the attitude of "he's just a kid" (at least until the war). He's also sort of exhausted. When he dies, he does it willingly. While not suicidal, he's old. He has a bit of an old-man mentality sometimes (like how he is starting to see love as a kind of an adventure that he just doesn't have the time or energy to handle)
Inventory: The Vorpal Sword - from Alice in Wonderland, but it’s been in Blue’s care for a long time now. It’s a powerful magical item, because it can cut through anything like butter and kill magical monsters. For game mechanic purposes, I say it will not be able to cut through locked doors or walls of unexplored parts of the ship, or any NPCs or armor that the mods tell me it cannot cut through.
One b-flat trumpet, in it’s case.
One ivory hunting horn, on a leather strap.
One pair of blue shorts.
One blue shirt with a little musical b-flat note at the bottom.
One letterman-style jacket (blue) with a treble clef patch on the sleeve.
His outfit from Homelands (that is - a blue shirt with b-flat fastenings, blue pants, blue boots, and a blue dread pirate Roberts style mask, but no cloak, as the witching cloak is not coming with him)
One pair of blue Chuck Taylor high tops, and a couple of pairs of socks.
Appearance: He’s a kind of a cute, blonde kid who only wears blue - I estimate he stands at about five-six or five-seven, because while he's taller than a great number of the shorter Fables, he's tiny compared to Fly, and a little shorter than Snow White when she's wearing heels. He’s pretty lean, not muscle-y at all. Looks like this!
Age: At least 1000, but probably more. I play him at 1,200ish. He doesn’t remember the year he was born.
AU Clarification: n/a
S A M P L E S
Log Sample: It's quiet, and that's always a problem in these parts.
Blue doesn't want it to be quiet. Silence means a night alone, and around here that means he'll start talking to his cloak at any second. The first year was too busy, too hectic, too rushed. The second year was spent walking through a Homeland so full of talking animals that even invisible, the chatter got into Blue's head and refused to get out.
This is the third year, and the silence that Blue once craved is now too loud. It fills the nooks and crannies of his head, it makes him long for the sounds of New York City, for Fly's comfortable snoring, for Pinocchio's complaining. It makes him want to take his trumpet (hidden away, the word is Chet Baker) and play a song, instead of just having his war horn. He loves his war horn, but it doesn't exactly play music.
Blue pokes at the fire in front of him and shifts, restless. He doesn't want to admit that it isn't just the loneliness - it isn't just that he misses his friends. What he misses most is the peace. Everyone in Fabletown wanted to come back to the Homelands, to reclaim their worlds, to see the land they were born in. But Blue was happy, before Baba Yaga came. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. It was a quiet life.
Blue had finished with war.
He pokes the fire again and listens. There's still silence pressing against him; not even the crickets were out tonight. He runs over the fingering for When I Fall in Love in his head, ignoring the words and focusing on the trumpet part.
Or I'll never fall in love.
The lyric comes into his head too fast for him to stop it. Red Riding Hood, he thinks, standing up, pulling his cloak tighter around himself. That's why he was doing this. That's why he was missing New York City, missing his friends, missing Snow's kids growing up. That's why he was missing the peace and silence and quiet of a life as a secretary. It wasn't so that he could have the glory of fighting the Adversary.
It's so that the next time he plays that song, he'll have someone to play it to, and they'll know he means.
And the moment I can feel that you feel that way too,
That's when I fall in love with you.
Blue banks the flames and is about to continue when he hears it - the distinct sound of a troop of gobs moving, and he lifts the hood of his cloak. Well, he had been hoping for something, right?
Comms Sample: I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. You play a tune long enough and you think that’s the only tune there is, and then someone does something like invent a new instrument and you forget that once it wouldn’t have surprised you.
[Jeepers creepers. He didn’t figure this at all.]
It’s kind of like a funny book. Something right out of Buck Rogers.
[Pause.]
Or Superman.
