Bijou

<infobox> <title source="name"><default>Bijou</default></title>

<image source="Image"></image> <image source="image"></image> <group><header>Basic Information</header> <label>Civilian Name</label> <label>Aliases</label> <label>Gender</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Death</label> <label>Age</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Post-timeskip</label> <label>Ward start</label> <label>Relations</label> <label>Family</label></group> <group><header>Professional Status</header> <label>Occupation</label> <label>Classification</label> <label>Unique Features</label> <label>Alignment</label>

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<label>Location</label> <label>Teams</label> <label>Previous Team(s)</label> <label>Base of Operations</label></group> <group><header>First Appearance</header> <label>Worm Debut</label> <label>Ward Debut</label></group> </infobox> Bijou is a body-snatcher working as an undercover agent for the Wardens.

Personality

She was a child whose power took her out of one bad situation into another, as yet another example of the ever-present irony of parahumans.<ref name="LIG"/>

Description

Initially appearing as an ordinary looking, if nerdy, woman wearing a full face mask,<ref>Bijou, by contrast, looked utterly normal, if a bit nerdy. Brown-skinned, with glasses worn over a simple full-face mask, collar done up with a ribbon, hair in an old fashioned style. - Excerpt from Interlude 19.a II</ref> Bijou's true appearance is that of a doll-like figure, with a large stream of mixed appendages that resides within the normal looking body.<ref>Bijou reached up to her mask and divided it in two. Holding the halves in place on each side of her face, she split down the middle, forehead to collarbone. Doll-like hands reached out to find grips and help push, while her regular hands helped to widen the divide. When she was done, her head, throat, and upped chest were splayed open.

Appendages and doll’s hands reached out to lash the mask into place on each side of the face, using wire, ribbon, and threads. Occupying the now-empty brain cavity was a blood-slick doll’s head, with a stream of appendages, strips of cloth and doll limbs connected end to end, disappearing down her throat, which had been widened. - Excerpt from Interlude 19.a II</ref><ref>Face split open, ‘Cox’ lay on the floor, the doll head pulling itself free, skittering along the floor on legs tipped by scissors and doll-like fingers, trailing bloody ribbons, chains, and fishing lines with hooks. - Excerpt from Infrared 19.c</ref>

Abilities and Powers

Bijou is classified as a brute, <ref name="LIG">

• She had seizures from infancy, and medication only helped a little. They were almost under control until late childhood, and it was then that a seizure hit and did enough damage that she didn't come back from it... for years, anyway. She came to as if from the deepest sleep, and realized that while she was aware and conscious, she didn't have control over her body. Locked-in syndrome. Unable to communicate, or even to move her eyes, she quickly realized the fate she had been consigned to, and the horrors of the fact that even if she did somehow recover, she had been made what some termed a 'pillow angel' - surgically and hormonally altered to stunt her growth, prevent puberty, and consequently make caring for her as easy as possible. Unable to communicate her desire for this paralyzed existence to end, unable to envision a future for herself with her body being what it is, she triggers.
  [...]
  

Examples: Locked-In Girl (see above for trigger)
The locked-in girl yearns to get away, wants nothing more than for people to realize she's awake and aware, and they stubbornly refuse to see. There's something of a changer aspect to her power, something of a breaker one, because of the complicated nature of her mind-body connection. Her mouth yawns open and her body moves, if only in convulsion, and she crawls forth as a parasite. She crawls forward as a doll's head on doll-joint limbs, trailing ghostly material and a curtain of cords, ribbons, and strings behind her, and she knows instinctively what to do. She can alter the form, reconfigure the fingers into longer limbs or more skittering legs, she can pick up objects and attach them to these limbs, and she uses this to gain access to another, similar girl in the hospital, one who was denied oxygen for too long during birth, with no mental faculties at all. She works her way inside, through crude surgery and a generally tight fit, and seamlessly closes the way behind her, before working the strings and cords through the host's body and finding a place for the crude tools she'd used to get the door open. She ran away, hopping onto a train and crossing the border. They never really looked for her, because the girl she wore as a host wasn't supposed to be mobile, and another body -her old self- had been so badly mutilated by her exit that it painted another sort of picture, prompting a hunt for a macabre killer. She pretended to be an orphan, until a bully at the orphanage provoked her and her retractable tools, uncanny strength and zombie-like durability became apparent. That led in a roundabout way to people discovering her first host. Rather than be captured and discovered, she faked her death, instead, and managed to get the hero that was hottest on her trail implicated, his position taken from him. He was transferred elsewhere and she was free to start again.

She's learned the rules since. She can spend up to an hour inside a corpse before emerging. She has roughly ten minutes to collect every item she thinks she might need, because she can't collect more after accessing her host, and that same ten minute window is time she needs to access that host. As she approaches the edge of the time limit, she feels as though she can't breathe, and she starts dropping parts in a trail behind her. Ten minutes is her best guess as to her real limit. The host has to be a child, it's most comfortable psychologically if it's a girl, and going by her longest stint in a host -one and a half years-, they stop aging when she's within them, among the other, smaller physiological signs.

When she started, she told herself she would only use those who had no ability to think, communicate, or move. She would research ahead of time to know where she needed to go and who would work, she would wait until she was in the morgue, autopsy imminent, and she would slip away, collecting scalpels and syringes on her way to her host. Those days are behind her - her fifth rebirth saw her emerge from a corpse into a morgue far and away from the hospital, in the medical examiner's home and office. There was only the medical examiner's daughter, lying in bed listening to music - and the locked-in girl crossed the line she had set for herself. - Resurrection Brutes</ref>

Bijou is a body-snatcher, she can take over recently deceased corpses and maintain them in a lifelike state.<ref>The doll head, forcing its way into the mouth of a civilian’s corpse, dusty. Fingers pried and dug into flesh, cracked bone, and drove wedges in, parting the face down the middle as she squeezed in. The ‘rookie’ he’d seen in the house, before they’d all gone under and come here. - Excerpt from Infrared 19.c</ref>

History

Background

Bijou triggered as a young child.

She was accepted into Case 53 community, despite not technically being one.<ref>“I’m not technically,” said the doll who had appeared as a girl, who had appeared as a soldier. “But they included me, brought me in. I owe them everything. This… this body is me. Before I changed to that.” - Excerpt from Infrared 19.c</ref>

Post-Gold Morning

She, presumably, enjoyed the Amnesty.

The Wardens provided her with a new, guilt-free body, and offered her a job.

The Ice Breaks

Bijou attended emergency power testing of Case 53s, arranged by The Wardens.<ref name="II19.a">Infrared 19.a</ref>

She infiltrated the patrol-group departing to the The Mall Cluster' dreamscape, alongside Matryoshka. She was preparing to alter power connections related to Case 53s, but was dissuaded from it by Rain.<ref name="II19.c">Infrared 19.c</ref>

Trivia

• Bijou is very similar to a Word of God character, called the Locked-in Girl, as such information from that source is incorporated here.

References

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