Icey Birdwell

**Icey Birdwell**, full name **Isadora Birdwell**, is a character from ! (Exclamationpoint). He is a calm, level-headed eighth grade student at Capital Junior High School in Capital City, Exclamationpoint. Along with being a member of the Capital Junior High drama club and Mr. Brook's homeroom class, his family is famous throughout the universes for their immense control over space-time and reality.

## Description

Icey is a very chill (haha) person by nature and usually has a casual smile and a caffeinated drink in his hand (he prefers cold drinks, while his counterpart from the beta universe prefers hot drinks). Because he has a reputation for being cool, many of his classmates at Capital Junior High School have started rumors claiming that he has a number of unusual abilities, most prominently flight (due to his surname) and time travel. No one knows how well he does academically, nor do they know where he and his family live. He speaks about most things using really vague language, a trait which can easily piss off his friends and classmates. As described in the unfinished Exclamationpoint Dating Sim, Icey lives in fear of the so-called "Birdwell Family Curse", a supposed phenomena which says that any person that a Birdwell loves will die due to their reality-warping powers, and cites this as a reason why he's afraid of getting too close with a lot of his classmates (and feels selfish for choosing to hang out with them at all when doing so would put them in danger).

## Relationships

#### Erin's Friend Group

Icey hangs out with Erin and her friends often throughout Exclamationpoint stories, likely because he understands that they're the main characters. Whenever anything strange goes on in their dimension, Icey usually shows up to explain everything and try to help them fix it. Erin often teases him about his many love interests, much to Icey's indifference.

#### Jonah Blackwell

Jonah is one of Icey's closest friends and a fellow member of the drama club. She's romantically interested in Icey, but it's unclear as to whether Icey reciprocates her feelings.

#### Noah Vogan

Icey could see Noah's genius at a glance due to his powers and immediately took an interest in him, which has always annoyed Noah (who claims that Icey is nosy and annoying). Even so, the two are close friends and Icey can often convince him to show up to social gatherings that he'd otherwise skip.

#### Epona Amy

Epona has an obsessive crush on Icey and is constantly doing whatever she can to make him go out with her. That attraction is the premise behind a lot of Exclamationpoint stories (especially *Genderswapped Exclamationpoint*) and it's the reason why Epona joined drama club. Due to the fact that Epona is Sarah K. Amy's niece and Sarah K. Amy wants to subjugate all the people in Exclamationpoint with powers, Icey is understandably disinterested in going out with her, but he remains polite about it so she won't lash out at him.

#### Holland Trees

Holland is *also* romantically interested in Icey, but due to the distortion effect that surrounds her, Icey is not afraid to make his distaste for her unknown and avoids her whenever possible.

#### Mr. Nogan

Mr. Nogan, Capital Junior High's foreign language teacher, really really hates Icey. This is because he's an adult version of Noah Vogan from a dimension in which he and his dimension's version of Icey began to date in high school and became engaged after college. However, due to the Birdwell Family Curse, Mr. Vogan was sent to Exclamationpoint's primary dimension through an interdimensional tear on their wedding day as they were about to kiss at the altar. He changed his name to Voah Nogan in this dimension (because he knew that the people of Exclamationpoint would be too stupid to see through his disguise...and they were) and holds a vendetta against all versions of Icey Birdwell because he assumes that his version of Icey "abandoned him" to rot in an alternate dimension.

## History

Icey was born as the fourth child (and the fourth son) to Meredith and Celeste Birdwell. Meredith's side of the family possessed amazing powers over their own dimension and the many other dimensions surrounding it, and he would often venture off into these worlds and collect strange artifacts that he would later use to decorate the Birdwell family living room. His powers would be passed on to all of the Birdwell's five children, although the power between the siblings differed greatly. Meredith constructed their wooden treehouse-like cabin in the mountains outside of Capital City shortly after Celeste became pregnant with their first son Bryony, and Meredith added new rooms to the house whenever his wife became pregnant with another child. The house is affected by the Birdwells' reality warping abilities such that unless a Birdwell shows them to the residence, outsiders can neither locate the house nor remember where it is (if they've been there before).

A few years after the birth of their daughter Chandler, an interdimensional rift spawned from Meredith's power absorbed Celeste Birdwell and caused her to disappear from their reality. Meredith made the decision to abandon his children so he could travel across time, space, and every dimension in an effort to find his lost wife, and he has never been heard from since.

In their father's absence, his oldest son Bryony was left to take care of his younger siblings. In order to avoid making the same mistake their father made, Bryony has forbade his younger siblings from ever using their reality warping abilities and has encouraged them to take up time-consuming, addictive hobbies in order to distract them from their urges to experiment with those powers. Icey's abilities are the strongest of all five Birdwell siblings, and although he tries to keep them in check using his caffeine addiction, he lives in constant fear that he'll slip up and send one of his friends or loved ones into an interdimensional rift like his father did.

## Appearance

Being mixed race, Icey has kinky (type 4a) dark brown hair and lighter brown skin. He has dark hazel eyes and often wears unfittingly warm clothing for the weather (always including a long scarf). He also wears a pair of goggles on his head that he uses as a headband to keep his hair back. He'll get a lot taller as he grows up, and even now, he's one of the taller students at Capital Junior High.

## Roles in Stories

#### Exclamationpoint Dating Sim

Icey is the main character in the Exclamationpoint Dating Sim that began (and ended) development in 2015. He has the ability to choose between potential love interests Jonah Blackwell, Epona Amy, Felipa Rosado, Noah Vogan, and Toru Anson, all the while struggling with the Birdwell Family Curse dictating that everyone the Birdwells love will die due to their reality-warping powers. The original script for this game was almost entirely lost, but each route would involve a "Good Ending" where Icey and his love interest would live happily ever after and a "Bad Ending" where folks would start dying (due to some combination of the Birdwell Family Curse and random happenstance).

#### *Exclamationpoint Halloween*

While Icey was not a character at the time of the original Exclamationpoint Halloween comic, he appears in the story *Exclamationpoint Halloween* as one of the first students to enter the haunted annex. He immediately gets a bad vibe from the building due to his powers, but he refrains from admitting that anything's wrong despite questioning from Erin, Jonah, and Noah. He was dressed as Shulk from *Xenoblade Chronicles*, purportedly because *Xenoblade Chronicles* was obscure prior to Shulk's inclusion as a playable character in *Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U/3DS*.

#### *Final Story*

The 2015 Exclamationpoint story *Final Story* (which was ironically one of the first Exclamationpoint stories that was properly written as such) saw the setup for what was (at the time) The Creators' original plans for the end of Exclamationpoint, which borrowed heavily from the end of *Harry Potter*. The plot centered around Sarah K. Amy deciding to stage an attack on Capital Junior High School in order to eradicate the Birdwells--Icey more specifically--because she sees them as a threat to her rule.

#### *Gage Segovia: Ace Attorney*

Icey plays a minor role as a suspect in Toru's "murder" in *Gage Segovia: Ace Attorney*. He helped the drama club and the art club with an afterschool project that overlapped with the time of the "murder", and it's reasoned at first that he could've easily wandered off and committed the crime without anyone knowing since he's known for disappearing and reappearing at random. However, Epona testifies in order to give him an alibi, stating that Icey spilled his drink at the time when the weapon used to assault Toru was stolen from the supply room and had to run to the bathroom to clean up the mess, accompanied by Holland, Jonah, and Epona. He is cleared as a suspect at this point, but even after the truth is reached in the trial, it's shown that Icey's English is still corrupted from the time he spent around Holland afterschool on the day of the crime.

#### *Genderswapped Exclamationpoint*

In *Genderswapped Exclamationpoint,* it is revealed that Icey cannot occupy the same space as his counterpart from the beta universe, Chilley Birdwell, at the same time. As such, when Epona attempted to take Chilley to the alpha universe along with the other genderbends, she forced Icey into the beta universe. Icey doesn't have much of a presence in the story because of this until Emory Amy decides to take Epona's place in the alpha universe to monitor Chilley's behavior, at which point Leah Birdwell switches out Noah for his beta counterpart Noelle at Icey's request in order to protect him from Emory. However, after Chilley proposes to Epona, Emory knocks Noah out with a frying pan and traps Icey in a similar proposal to counter Epona's attempts. He uses this opportunity to explore the Amy castle's dungeons, at which point he comes across a very-alive Jordie Blackwell and willfully trades places with Chilley so she'll have the opportunity to save him. After Chilley's subsequent capture and rescue, Icey helps the alpha universe defend against Emory and allows both universes to communicate with each other one last time before he closes communications between the two for good.

#### *Holland Trees*

Icey stars as Holland's primary love interest in the eponymous *Holland Trees*, in which Icey is portrayed as a guy who smiles and "laffs" a lot. Despite the fact that he is Holland's primary love interest, however, Icey is barely in the story, only appearing in "Chapter One; Day wit tha boyz", "Capster 2; epnoah nooo", "Chapter 3; shit", "Chater 8; an the man lied is...", "Chapter 12; icey nd i finally go on a date wooooo!", "Chaper 15; teh finalle is gonna be soon kimo :(", and "CHpater 16; OKAY I PROMISE THS IS TEH LAST ONE" (only 7 out of 16 chapters) and having very few (if any) lines in most of these appearances. It is revealed at the end of *Holland Trees* that Holland used her strange mind-altering abilities to "corrupt" Icey into participating in her story, explaining his out-of-character behavior. It is unknown if Icey remembers the events of *Holland Trees* (or which aspects of this story are actually canon, if any).

#### *XTREME GRANDPA DANGLEHOPPERS*

In *XTREME GRANDPA DANGLEHOPPERS* (more commonly known as the Exclamationpoint/Danganronpa crossover), Icey (as Yukio "Yuki" Muranaka) is a survivor of Momoko Higa's killing game. He occupies a very similar role to Kyouko Kirigiri in *Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havok*, assisting protagonist Rin Fukui throughout the story and being considered "suspicious" by the other members of their class. While his talent is unknown at the start of the story, he is later revealed to be the Super High-School Level Reality Warper.

## Trivia

* In his original design, Icey had straight, slicked-back brown hair and tan skin. Different descriptions disagreed on whether his eyes were dark brown, dark green, or dark teal, which ultimately inspired the decision to make his eyes dark hazel instead.
* His original name was Isaac, which previously made him the only Birdwell sibling to have a name that matched his assigned gender.
* It's said that Icey's powers are similar to Mary-Sue powers and Parrot's abilities, and as shown through scenarios such as the destruction of the JoJo Roleplay Dimension, he has some authority over both Nagito Komaeda (who borrowed Mary-Sue powers from his cousin N) and Parrot. This implies that the importance of the Birdwell family is known across dimensions (unlike Mary-Sue powers, which are usually only confined to individual universes).