14 Day Open Source Character Making Challenge (The Hungry Reader's entries)

## Exeunt

Exeunt, formerly a famous French cat burglar who made the dubious decision to steal an experimental teleportation belt. It works, she can teleport herself instantly in any direction she chooses– but the belt leaves a few particles of antimatter behind, creating a highly destructive explosion wherever she was! Also, if she tries to take the belt off, it may explode and take her with it!

## Poplims

Poplims are multicolored hairless humanoids only about a foot tall, most of which is their big head and staring eyes. They are a ‘household spirit’ and may make themselves useful around the house, doing small chores in exchange for food; what they eat, though, is human beauty. If the front walk is always mysteriously swept but you keep having bad hair days, there may be a Poplim in your house, staring intently at you while you sleep and gobbling up your attractiveness with its eyes.

## Miss Coquelicot

Just as the Snow Queen is the queen of snowflakes that look like bees(???), Miss Coquelicot is the queen of mantises that look like flowers. Her legions of orchid mantis servants bring her treasures that are lost in flower beds and meadows, and if you lose something precious, she may return it to you in exchange for your colors: the color of your eyes, your skin, or even your ability to see color at all.

## Wally Norgard, Attorney’s In-Law

Wally is fat, unkempt, uneducated and a poor communicator, but his younger sister married a handsome big-city attorney, which by his logic means he must now be ‘part lawyer’. His understanding of the law is very questionable, but despite his lack of polish, Wally shows unwavering dedication to justice, especially in cases where the clearly wronged or victimized party has no legal leg to stand on. Wally’s legal tactics include impersonating the prosecutor, stealing the judge’s gavel and dismissing the case himself, and once he purposefully crashed his Ford pickup into the courtroom.

## Argon the Astonishing

A superheroic magician in the Mandrake model, Argon is known for his amazing feats of illusion, in which he walks up and through walls, vanishes and reappears, floats thousands of feet into the air, and allows himself to be sawn in half by his lumbering, fez-clad assistant Lumborr. How does he do it? Simple– there is no Argon, he’s an illusion cast by Lumborr!

## The Book Of Forgotten Lore

Wait, how is this a computer or robot, you ask? The Book Of Forgotten Lore is a leathern tome cast down from antiquity, but its contents– if one can read them– are in fact the source code for an artificial superintelligence! Once enough of the book has been read and committed to memory, they execute the instruction for the reader to continue reading helplessly, until the program itself has completely overwritten the reader’s mind– or until the reader starves to death, depending how fast a reader they are.

## The Ironicker

Inspired by a movie they saw once and weren’t very impressed with, scientists attempted to create symbiotic bacteria that would actually feed upon ambient magic and excrete it into the bloodstream in a usable form. Of course, it wouldn’t be magic if it worked like science, so the prisoner test subject quickly became a tragic hybrid of human and bioengineered strep bacteria. The toxic levels of magic in its blood seem to only affect the level of irony in its life, and the poor creature is subject to bizarre and seemingly impossible coincidences that it no longer has the intellect to find amazing.

## Mitey Mite

A classic rubber-hose cartoon character from the black and white age of animation. What he actually is is a red velvet mite, but like all classic cartoon characters, he just looks like a mime with pie eyes. Most of his cartoons start with him happily engaged in some scheme to make money, and end with a drawn-out, tearful argument in which he insists that he shouldn’t have to look like your idea of a red velvet mite in order to be considered one, and he’s really tired of people thinking he’s something else and why can’t anyone just take his word for it without it turning into another big fight.

## Heinrich Keßler

Hundreds of years from now, when time travel is commonplace and inexpensive, one rule they drill into your head is “No going back in time to try to kill Hitler.” However, people do break laws, and Henry Kessler is no exception. He’s spent two and a half years in the SS trying to get close enough to Hitler to kill him with the Anti-Hitler bomb he was provided. It’s not that he disagrees with Hitler’s politics, though– it’s all business.

## Mrs. Norma Cthulhu

Perhaps you’ve heard of the strange life cycle of the deep-sea angler fish, whose tiny, harmless males seek out the needle-toothed, predatory females hundreds of times their size, and then merge with them, mouth first, becoming part of her body. Did you ever wonder why we never see Cthulhu’s mouth…?

## ÖÖöÖÖ-ÖÖ-öÖö-ÖööÖÖ

You can only see this monster by saying its name, pronounced correctly and emphatically, in the mirror three times in a dark room. True to its name, this entity has a minimum of fifteen beady-eyed, screaming faces. None of them are contiguous with its body.

## Hyvians

The busiest fantasy race of all, Hyvians can be recognized by their shiny black eyes, their wings (if female; males just have halteres), and their work uniforms: depending on the tribe, they may wear hard hats, tool belts, safety vests, even steel-toed boots. Building and construction are the focus of Hyvian life, and wherever they settle, a great citadel eventually forms; Pueblo Hyvians dig cities into cliffsides, Canopy Hyvians weave forest branches together into treetop cities. Most are relatively aloof to outsiders, but nomadic Caravan Hyvians are gregarious to the point of being bad houseguests. There are even the parasitic “Crazy” Hyvians who prey upon gigantic dragons– they trick the dragon into eating them, then hollow it out from the inside and use the carcass as a foundation for their city!

## Voweranger

A team of five heroes who gained their powers from the English teacher at a mysterious cram school class. Most Japanese kids don’t remember much of their English classes, but these kids picked up the power to become Vowel Rangers, to fight the evil Consonant Empire! The leader is the brilliant, overachieving **A**, followed by the hyperactive, exuberant **E**, the egotistical, self-aggrandizing **I**, the curious scientist **O**, and the modest, self-deprecating **U**. Later in the series they meet their upperclassmen from the same class, like the mysterious and self-doubting **Y**, and the treacherous double agent, **W**.

## Startropolis

This is a space station, but it’s the kind you might see in a turn-of-the-century silent movie. Startropolis is a town made up of many elegantly carved wooden platforms, suspended from the top points of various five-pointed stars, which hover hundreds of feet above the city, winking and smirking at the people below. The platforms are linked together with wobbly suspension bridges. There are green grocers, barber shops, telephone booths, coal wagons, icemen, kids rolling hoops and playing jacks, and people fishing off the side with moonworms, that they use to catch big birds flying underneath. The handlebar-mustachioed Moon himself watches over all this with paternal benevolence, sometimes even speaking up to make big announcements like a wedding, or to call for help for someone who’s fallen over the edge.

## Author Notes

Kind of impressed with myself that I was able to make all these up on the fly! Only four of them are based on ideas I’d had before starting this.