Boko
Chameleon archivist character description
"One enters a nation according to its customs just as one enters a river according to its flow." - Viet-Namese saying
Boris Chrome is a self-styled hero, reviled villain, refined aesthete, world traveller, obsessive packrat, brilliant linguist, heartless monster, dedicated anthropologist and mad archivist. Genetically, he's predominantly chameleon, combined with some snake, gecko and human characteristics. The most widely accepted hypothesis as to his unknown exact origins is genetic engineering, but there's been speculation of his mutant or even alien origin as well. Good or evil aren't really concepts that can be applied to him. The most accurate definition of his alignment would have to be that he has a set of priorities which would make him seem quite insane to just about everyone if he wasn't as good as he is at concealing how he really thinks and feels. In short, he pushes the ideal of the conservation, cultural relativism, social integration and diversity to a ludicrous extreme. He worships Vishnu, the Preserver, but Hanuman the Creator and Shiva the Destroyer are demons in his eyes.
Boko, as his name abbreviates to, lives somewhat of an interesting life. He travels the world visiting a wide variety of obscure native villages, adapting to their customs, learning their languages, wearing their articles of clothing, filming, memorizing and practicing their ritual dances, absorbing and cataloguing their cultural elements and mannerisms, recording their chants, integrating himself into their societies, defending them against outsiders' attempts at decimating what's left of them, protecting their land, and collecting samples of each of their distinctive artefacts in return for his efforts. He shows up in old growth forests when trees in them are slated for chopping, disarms the loggers and destroys their chainsaws. He tracks down poachers who target endangered animals and takes them down in action before they can pull the trigger. He hacked into construction, architecture, city planning and development privileged information sources so he could learn whenever old, unique abandoned buildings anywhere in the world are slated for demolition, and show up there in person to try to personally prevent the demolition teams from taking the buildings down. He hacked into the surveillance systems of every museum in the world, frequently examines art-related news and whenever he sees or reads that an irreplaceable painting or sculpture's been stolen, he tracks down the thief to try to take it from him - then raids the museum from everything it's got because he's determined that the museum staff is incompetent, irresponsible and incapable of fulfilling their sacred duty of protecting the objects being kept within them.
It's not that Boko wants to possess them, it's that he doesn't trust some others to take care of objects with as much commitment as he would. He's been convinced that someone could safeguard an object properly and let that person keep it before and it's not improbable that it could happen again in the future. He never goes out of his way to get rid of anyone for revenge or amusement, but whenever completing his task requires him to endanger or harm someone or even take a human life, he doesn't hesitate for a moment before or regret it for a moment after. He has no real deep-seated aggressiveness or selfishness to speak of, and he's good insofar as wanting to save the world in the most literal possible sense is a suitable definition for being good, yet he's evil insofar as valuing objects and concepts more than people's lives is a suitable definition for being evil. Incidentally, he'll go out of his way to save a person's life if he believes that this person's life in particular is something unique and irreplaceable, for example if that person can do something that nobody else can to the best of his knowledge, and this applies to his bitter enemies just as much as to those who think of themselves as being close to him, though that number is usually vanishingly small given his eternal wandering. Every identity is just another skin to shed for him. If he learned that every person's genetic structure is unique, he'd probably go insane from knowing that everyone will die someday, just as he would if he learned that every snowflake is supposed to be unique and started trying to catch all of them in the middle of a snowstorm.
"A place for everything and everything in its place." - The Haunting
Boko lives in a world filled with humanoid animals, so his appearance never gets in the way of his integration. He studied theatre, movie acting, behaviorism, debating, etiquette, diplomacy, face-painting, body language, psychology, sociology, hypnotism and advertising to learn how to always present himself exactly the way he wants to and to understand and influence other people's minds to the fullest possible extent. He has no supernatural telepathy or mind control powers, but he can read people, suggest and persuade them more than the majority of people can. In the end, though, always playing a different character everyday means that he's never emotionally involved in social interaction for the same reasons for which the people he's socially interacting with are, and this creates a real dissociative distance between him and everyone around him. He has a real silver tongue, and can talk his way out of many situations which most other people couldn't possibly talk their way out of.
Boko has both claws and suction cups on all of his fingers and toes, and he can climb, cling to, scuttle and walk on all walls and ceilings no matter how steep, hard or slippery, as easily as on floors. His eyes can function independently from each other and this gives him an exceptionally wide field of vision and an eye in the back of his head, so to speak. He can inject poison with his fangs or spit venom into an enemy's face with accurate aim at a distance of up to twelve feet, and its effects reduce vision, hearing and motor reaction speed to two thirds to three quarters of their usual capacity for two to eight minutes. He has a limited shapeshifting ability which allows him to meld his body into a wide, expanded puddle on a wall, ceiling or floor, flow up, down or in any direction on them, and return to his original shape whenever he comes out of them from anywhere on them. When in this form, he can leave a transparent trail of mucous behind which can make his enemies slip and allow him to find his way around easily by following the scent arrows he leaves behind for himself like a piece of string in a maze.
Boko can change his skin coloration at will, and although he can and does use it to blend into the background almost to the point of becoming almost invisible like most chameleons do, that's not what he limits its use to by far. He can go through five different whole-body colors in one second, make spiralling diagonal stripes move down on him like a barbershop insignia, make inward or outward spirals or concentric circles starting from or ending at the center of his body, have every limb of a different color and keep making them alternate really fast, have cheetah spots buzzing around on his skin like a swarm of insects, or anything else he can come up with on the spot which he thinks he can use to distract and disorient whoever his opponent happens to be at the time.
Boko has natural weapons and two-weapon fighting in the form of his tongue and tail, both of which function as chains, morning stars, rope darts, whips and flails. He can use his tongue to wrap around or stick to and swing from ceilings, beams, poles and branches, and he can coil his tail underneath him like a spring to either break even very high falls or make himself bounce up by uncoiling it suddenly high enough to be able to reach the ceiling of almost anywhere indoors. He can use his tail to grab a foe's ankle, pull them up and hold them up upside-down, slap them back and forth with his tongue a few times, quickly bring them down then back up to make their head come in brief and violent contact with the ground, then spin and send them away from him by swinging his tail at them like a baseball bat. He does headspins in which he alternates between high attacks with his tail, low attacks with his tongue, low attacks with his tail and high attacks with his tongue. He does a bouncing, pouncing then diving series of flips in which he alternates between downward tail and tongue lashes.
Boko has no fixed fighting stance and is either just standing upright with his arms dangling limply to his sides when he's waiting for the fight to come to him or remaining in constant motion in which his limbs just seem to be trailing behind his leading motions. His main weakness, besides his bizarre personality quirks, would have to be that he never uses his fists, elbows, knees, feet or head to strike, grab or throw anyone, and that he never uses any weapons, natural or otherwise. It's not that he wouldn't have the physical capability to do so if he wanted to, it's just that, given the strange way his mind works, doing something like that would simply never even occur to him, even in a life or death situation. He is, strangely enough, quite aware that other people could expect him to kick and punch, though, and he's not above pretending that he's going to when he's fighting someone, but only if he's fighting that person for the first time, so that his feinting will be less likely to be seen for what it is.
Boko's lair, which he calls Noah's Attic, is specifically adapted to his own particular preferences and requirements, but would be hard to make heads or tails of for the average person, much less to navigate effectively. Since he can get around on walls and ceilings just as easily as on floors, there are stairways on the walls and ceilings of his lair which, in addition to making them impracticable to most, make it look a bit like an M.C. Escher painting. It's filled with masks, headdresses, encyclopedias, speakerphones, blueprints, terminals, dictionaries, curtains, cushions, rugs, loincloths, paintings, sculptures and footwear from all over the world, scattered all over with a method to his madness which makes sense to him alone.
In his rare spare time, Boko enjoys juggling because he believes it gives him good practice at trying to keep several different objects which are "up" from "falling" on his missions also. He also owns and loves to use a device in which he can put water and alternate between raising the temperature until it evaporates and lowering the temperature until it freezes, after which he'll either lower it until condensation occurs or raise it until the ice melts into water again, respectively. He thinks of these processes as metaphorical images of how he has to make himself intangible so he can solidify the world around him.
Deep down, all that Boko really wants is for the world to stop changing all the time. He's just not reconciled with the transitory nature of existence, which means he's no Taoist by a long shot, and as paradoxical as that can seem for someone who may seem like a radical at best and a terrorist at worst, always does everything he can to keep things the way they are, to maintain the status quo, in a manner of speaking. He dislikes artists, because they keep bringing new unique things into the world which it's going to mean more work for him to protect, yet no matter how much they annoy him, he feels he has to avoid harming them simply because they contain the potentiality for creation. He holds no grudge for assembly line factories, but would wipe any of them off the face of the Earth without a second thought if he could and thought he had to, since he figures that what's in them is all the same anyway.
He's saved a few people's lives on occasion for his own reasons and never really wanted anyone to die personally, yet wouldn't really mind that much if just one person of every species remained alive in suspended animation, either (as long as none of them would be missing, of course). Ironically, just as his opponents or people who try to get close to him can become frustrated by his constant changes between different colors and different personalities, he deeply resents the world for changing all the time the way it does also, and tries to absorb as much of that change into himself as possible, sacrificing his own stability for the sake of his fanatical crusade to keep the world in stable condition.