Posted by dull thud on April 19, 2001 at 10:16:56:
In Reply to: Yet More Research - Worrying, Isn't It? posted by HH on April 18, 2001 at 07:03:58:
Goodly Sir / Dear breathtakingly evil criminal genius (delete as appropriate),
returning on Tuesday from a few weeks away from computers and things, I noted that you had requested information regarding my character (said post now swept under the rug). So here it is. Just for, you know, future reference, and so it wouldn't look like I'd been ignoring you.
dull thud (italics important) is twenty years old, about six foot two and weighs a sickly ten stone. His eyes are very pale blue and his hair is black and unkempt. He habitually wears a battered, greying leather jacket that should have been washed sometime last year, along with jeans, oily plimsolls and a rock band t-shirt. He has recently taken to wearing a black armband for Joey Ramone.
He recently arrived from Scotland, but his accent only comes through strongly in moments of stress ("ye bastart" is a typical quote in these circumstances). Deeply involved in the Paradopolis underground rock scene, he earns a crust as a sound technician and occasionally by writing articles for the better-known fanzines. His favourite local bands are Mitchum Is Busy, Moose Factory and Disquieting Anal Fixation. If you express the slightest interest he will, at a moment's notice, make you a compilation tape.
thud - the only other name he has revealed is Davie, and he rarely uses it - has the ability to teleport up to eighty feet directly above him. Usefully, he can also fall an unlimited distance without sustaining injury. This comes as the side-effect of a state of enlightment attained after repeatedly hurling himself off a bridge.
More interesting powers come from his, er, travelling companion, Cressida. Cressida is a mutant tapeworm. She is between fifteen and twenty feet long, depending on the time of day. She is also a telepath. Stranger than that is her ability to briefly transform nearby objects into things that rhyme with them. She lives in his small intestine, and to stay vaguely healthy thud eats huge amounts and takes a vitamin B12 supplement.
Whereas thuddy (as only Cressida ever gets away with calling him) is quite ambivalent about the whole hero thing, Cressida sees it very much as their duty. She can be something of a nagging-older-sister figure, but she's usually right. Cressida knows a surprising amount about the outside world; she doesn't sleep, and so she asks thud to do so in front of the television or near a radio tuned to the BBC World Service.
dull thud and Cressida live in a slightly grimy bedsit near the Fatal Toilet bar, in the hip, happening studenty area that separates Carrington from the nicer end of Hell's Bathroom. They also turn up now and again at Malmo Diphtheria's School of Music in Pierce Heights.