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Name: Blue
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psychopomposity
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IC Information

Name: Grendel
Canon: Fables (specifically the spinoff Telltale game, The Wolf Among Us)
Gender: Male
Age: Many, many centuries chronologically - in human form, he looks somewhere in his early-to-mid-thirties.
History: On the Fables wiki. Player-choice-determinant events will be left vague unless coordinated by any canonmates who might conceivably pop up in the future, with one exception in that he'll be coming from a playthrough in which his arm was not torn off in his brawl with Bigby.

Personality: Grendel is Grendel. He prefers to go by "Gren" these days, but he is the Grendel of Beowulf infamy. In his "glory" days he lived alone with his mother in a cave on the edge of a moorland he stalked at night, killing and devouring hundreds at mead hall Heorot and the surrounding area when the sound of drunken revelry got on his blasted nerves over the course of a proud, unrelenting twelve-year one-monster reign of terror, which ended when the eponymous Beowulf ripped his arm off in a wrestling match and left him to bleed out.

Those days are long over, and Grendel's still not a great dude, but with the migration out of the Fable Homelands and the amnesty issued to former monsters and villains to allow them the same chance as everyone else to live a new life, all he wants is space and quiet, which he still woefully doesn't have, given that the Fables planted their stakes in what would become metropolitan New York. He still absolutely hates noise and bustle (though he's ostensibly not gobbling people up over it anymore; in a throwaway line, he implies he kills more frequently than never), but Fabletown's rules mandate all Fables are able to blend in and deal with/among humans, and he gets much more exposure to it than he cares to working to afford glamour - magic that allows beastly Fables to take human shape and therefore spare them needing to live at the Farm, which isn't meant to be a terrible place, but is a limiting one that Fables tend to find plenty of reason to view or regard as a dehumanizing (or de-Fablizing, if you will) prison.

His isn't a rare position for a Fable to end up in. Mythology, folklore, and fairytales are full of an array who were all differently-equipped for a migration into a brand-new world on an uneven playing field. Royals who were able to avoid abandoning their fortunes for the Fables' exodus and other better-off or better-respected Fables were most readily-able to contribute to building and leading Fabletown, and wound up forming its de facto upper crust, if not its authority (ex-serial killer Bluebeard receives a certain amount of odd grudging "favoritism" from the Fabletown government thanks to financial contributions and investments of resources obtained through his days as a noble), with the worst off either badly-watched and left to their own devices or not given the leeway that those who've already got a head-start on them would be given if they are being dealt with.

Gren hates city life and he can at least in part blame the Fabletown government for it, and looks for and sees absolutely everything he can wrong with them - he hates their letting those struggling the worst through it all fall by the wayside; he hates bureaucracy as a convenient block to efficiency; he hates that the way he sees it, they will descend from on high and deal with the town's zeroes and ne'er-do-wells when somewhere among them is the root of a problem that runs the risk of becoming theirs; and he hates perceived government muscle and strongarm Sheriff Bigby Wolf (the Big Bad Wolf himself).

Gren lets out hatred or anger or frustration one way or another. He blows off steam by drinkin' his stress away (and, on one occasion, getting high off prescribed medication and mixing it with scotch against doctor's orders) at the Trip Trap, a relatively quiet Fable dive bar, for a bit of that space and solitude he otherwise doesn't quite get his preferred share of. While that's what he wants at the bottom of it all and he doesn't go out of his way to make himself a terror, he doesn't take kindly to it being disrupted, he doesn't hold heck of a lot in, and drowning his quote-unquote sorrows definitely doesn't quench the fire enough to kill the impulse to fight, run his mouth, etc. etc.; from there, he doesn't stop once he gets going until he's made his point and/or worked it off. He doesn't condemn violence from anyone else, either, if it's not for the sake of domineering (he's as outraged as the rest of the town when the crime lord the Crooked Man is tried) and isn't taken longer than it "needs" to be if it's been deemed and being used as a "solution" (he'll stick up for Bigby's decision to kill the Crooked Man without a trial if it's taken and encourage an execution if the trial does happen, but when Bigby's overall track record comes up in the former event he'll also somewhat brattily say that he "didn't do shit wrong, and [he] got tossed around [Holly's] bar" in reference to the bar fight scene that ended with him scratched up and possibly mutilated on the ground - although depending on player choices, Bigby could've been either the one to bring it to blows or acting in self defense).

Potentially part and parcel with a league-long temperamental streak is honest passion and thereby the potential to care downright white-hot intensely, and not only does Gren have standards, for all his gruffness at best, he is capable of liking people. He hates dealing with people he doesn't know, but he appreciates hands-off-ness, being around those who do afford him the space he wants so much and respect the boundaries he maintains; and when he likes someone, he'll a good amount of that internal burnin' he's used to working out through exploding or dampening with a drink to vicious loyalty. While he's still not exactly openly cuddly or chummy about it (and, come now, who needs to be when you've connected with someone? He and Holly seem to communicate to a non-negligible extent through speech-free looks, especially when others are around), he's capable of not only having friends but loving them and protecting them fiercely, be it in the obvious way or honor-wise, as when he and Holly go berserk on the Tweedle Brothers for crashing and then insulting the deceased at Lily's funeral. And though he's not sentimental he is in-touch and one for sympathy on the emotional level - he looks and acts plainly concerned about Holly after Lily's death, and he blows up at Woody and wishes him nuked from orbit after Holly finds out that he regularly saw Lily (a prostitute) as a client while sorting through Lily's things.

Interpreting him at his best, Grendel's frank and emotionally honest. He wouldn't be so vindictive and bitter if he didn't have a sense of what's right and what isn't. He wants a basic amount of respect, and, again, badly craves peace and quiet - but he's intense and easily insulted and quick to react. He doesn't put up any pretense or play tough - he falls in a slump openly blubbering his eyes out with pain on the floor after Bigby rips his arm off if he does, and immediately looks unambiguously worried when he drops by the Trip Trap afterwards - but picks and chooses his fights, if not his "wars", in the heat of the moment, on perceived instigation, dissing, injustice, crossing lines. As one who really does want to keep to himself on the whole, he doesn't go way out of his way mess around that far outside of his personal walls, wherever he imagines they are, which, on one hand, keeps him from taking things further than immediate heat or factors allow them (quoth Jack Horner to Holly, "What's with you guys? You and Gren are always all, 'Let's get a posse together!' But as soon as the Big Bad Wolf walks through that door, your tails go between your legs!"). On the other it establishes him as hot-headed and impulsive and prone to imbalanced judgements and seeing conflicts he'll take on with a smugness at the least; anything that reaches past those walls gets an unrestrained reaction, internalized if need be but waiting to be externalized. He stews over the ever-present state of things and lashes out, he breaks his own half of the silence he's after to make whatever comment or tirade he's spurred to, and he'll accept anyone he sees as close enough to consider within those aforementioned walls as an implicit "us" against an external "them".

Powers/Abilities: Like any reluctantly good nonhuman Fabletown citizen, Grendel wears a glamour - a magical spell that gives a non-humanlike Fable a human form that they can switch in and out of, ostensibly at will. The spell doesn't last forever and his is implied to be a cheap one, liable to "fail" or cover to fail certain traits up as the spell wears off; and since his physical capabilities match that of whichever form he's in and his glamoured form is that of a normal enough if sleazy-looking lanky thirtysomething, he'd say it doesn't do him any practical good besides blending in.

Suffice to say he's much stronger in his natural form, and much more agile than he looks, but doesn't demonstrate any blatantly supernatural qualities of his own apart from those which come with being a Fable.

Fables are exceedingly difficult to kill with durability/recovery ability reflective of how well-known they are in the "mundy" (non-fairytale/mythological) world. Fables can be incapacitated or killed, but the odds of cleanly recovering from any non-instakill-injury tend to be in their favor, unless one takes advantage of some supernatural advantage or a weakness included in the Fable's mythology (e.x. the Big Bad Wolf's Achilles heel is silver).

Keepsakes/Mementos: He's not shown to own any things - but possible items include a bottle or a few of scotch, smashed-up and/or bloodied furniture (i.e. chairs, the pool table or cue, or the coat rack) from the Trip Trap (and/or Heorot, even), the card he wrote to the deceased Lily, and... none of this appears in the game, but maybe some of the remains of dead warriors or creatures from his and his mother's cave? 8|a

Sample: This is everything.

This sums it up. "It" - every way they could be getting spit on happening at once. Two disruptions of what's already an insult. Bigby gate-crashed, for his case, not for Holly. He brought the case here. Thanks to Crane, Lily isn't at her own funeral anyway.

Lily doesn't deserve this. Holly doesn't deserve this. None of them ever do anything to fucking deserve this...

And it feels like everything.

The glamour's off. He's looming over all three of them - Bigby, Tweedle, Tweedle - so's Holly. Break them in half.

"You think you motherfuckers can come here uninvited?" Voice's bigger, too. Rising to the edge of a real roar. "You think you can just fucking interrupt Lily's funeral?!"

"Calm down, darling - it was just a simple business transaction." Absolutely fake-cool tone. The Tweedle's still addressing Holly, but he's waving his gun. Not pointing it - pointing would imply steadiness. No way were they expecting this. What'd happen, maybe - they'd fucking well better have - but what the hell they'd be ready to do about it? Not a chance. He and Holly are going to take them apart, rip them to pieces and devour 'em.

When she says the word.

"You fucking freaks are not getting away with this," she says.

"Holly! Don't move!" says Snow, who's here for the politics and got pulled away for the case and who has the second-least right of anyone here to say anything, period.

"Yeah, listen to your lady, love!" says a Tweedle. "Things, uh - don't have to turn sloppy, now!"

Ha - was that an "uh"? This is good. Now it's good. Going to feel even better. They've already turned "sloppy", and whatever he and Holly do, the net of it is not going to be on them.

"It's not worth it, Holly; they'll leave on their own," says Bigby, the one with the least-least right to talk, still smack between Gren and Holly and the two little toad-faced shit-eating bastards -

One of whom aims his gun. "Yeah, let's spare all the fuss," he says. "It's just a dead whore."

Gren hears gunfire early. Furious noise, and a single discernible internal voice that sounds like his blasting a gate down with a shout of Lily!

Nothing but disgrace!

"I'm gonna kill you!" he yells, and Holly roars.

Then they both charge. One Tweedle for her, one for him.

A gun goes off and a flash in his head shocks his focus open. Holly's on the ground. No! He calls, smacks one of the Tweedles down. Rip them both apart!

The other one yells something, Bigby tackles him, Gren can barely bother himself to notice. He's got one.

Make this good...

A click below his focus. It's narrowed again enough that he doesn't think about it until after a shattering blast and a kick in the stomach that knocks him back and collapsed onto his side.

His stomach hurts like a creature's taken a bite out of it.

Shot.

All wrong...

There is another shot.

It doesn't matter.

He tries to call his focus back. Bigby's still here. Snow's here, too, with Holly - still down.

Is she moving...? Can't tell. Tweedles gone; otherwise it wouldn't be quieter now.

Everything, everything went wrong.

His focus swims out again. It's all pain, Holly, and one long roar.

Even hearing those things in his head wears and scrapes and beats his consciousness down and away, and shortly it's gone.

Mindset: Grendel is going to be furious when he comes to in Monad - he'll be able to accept that it is an afterlife, sure, but it sure ain't no afterlife he's ever heard of and what the hell does it think it is reeling him into it? Death will have shifted him from being at the mercy of one system he's not used to to another with plenty of grudges carried over to pout over - and while he'll be furious on his own behalf, he'll be honestly scared on Holly's. He saw her go down after being shot by the Tweedles before his pull point, and on one hand, he'll eventually confirm she's not in Monad, too, but on the other, neither is Lily, and whether or not she's dead doesn't tell him how she is doing. He isn't going to assume he can cheat or escape death - but he's going to be pretty damn sulky, at least in the beginning, knee-jerk disdainful of anything he perceives as a part of Monad itself, and particularly liable to lash out if he's ever teased with the possibility of getting even one chance to see or affect how things are going back in Fabletown.

G̶̶l̨͡i̵͢t̷c͝͠h̕é͠s̷̷͡: Grendel hates human noise, no secrets there. But the one primal thing that completely freaks him out is debilitating pain; in his original source, he let out a horrified, horrifying howl when Beowulf started to pull off his arm because he hadn't felt what it was like to be on the losing end of a fight before, and the shape he's in at the end of his brawl with Bigby comes to mind - on that note, he has a scar around his right shoulder where Beowulf tore his arm off that looks to be his one obvious physical weak spot; Bigby turns the tables on him by tearing into it, and the player's given the option to have Bigby pull his arm back off by keepin' on tearing at it.

Other than that, he doesn't seem to have any notable fears or insecurities that present themselves as such, but he does have buttons on-display for the pushing. Lack of privacy and space riles him up, he hates being under anyone else's thumb, and he's quick to take things personally and leap on the defensive at interpreted slight or attack, be it on him or anyone he's got a decidedly positive opinion of.

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ᴛʜᴇ FIRST GREAT BARFIGHT

among the banished monsters.

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