CHANGED APP

[ourworldiscrumbling]

PLAYER INFO
Name: Bii
Preferred pronoun: traditional female
Preferred means of contact: grandhighbiichama on AIM, obiisama on plurk
Any other characters currently in-game? Green Giant/Makoto Kino

CHARACTER INFO
Name: Bruno Walton
Gender: male
Age: 18-ish? Gonna do him post-canon for the most memories to eventually draw from and that's how old he'd be after Something Fishy At Macdonald Hall according to our timeline.
Source: Gordon Korman's Macdonald Hall series aka the Bruno and Boots books
Canon Point: Immediately post canon

CANON
History:

SADLY BRUNO'S CANON HAS NO WIKI. This is truly a tragedy because Macdonald Hall is awesome. Also there is barely ANY details about what has gone on in Bruno's life before going to school at Macdonald Hall so I will be bullshitting a little here with headcanon. I'll also assume that the events of the series proceeded roughly in publication order, with one exception. Anyway the books were first published in the late seventies/early eighties, so Bruno was probably born in like 1966 or thereabouts? holy shit he'd be older than my husband

I'm going to have Bruno be originally from British Columbia, because Leah is putting Boots in Toronto and having there be this huge space between them when they're not in school is pleasing to our sadistic hearts. Originally I was going to put him in Vancouver but nope, one of the books mentions he's from a town and not a city so let's just say his town is NEAR Vancouver.

We don't really know anything about his family beyond the fact that he has a sister who he finds annoying but I'm pretty sure we can just skip over that shit for Changed and just not give him family memories. Oh, and we can also guess they're well-off enough to send their son to a private boarding school. I like to think that his dad at least is a lawyer? Also that he's not as super-WASP-y as Boots is (because Boots is the most WASP) so maybe his mom is Jewish. I kind of like that idea, even though I'm fairly sure that the Walton family would be non-practicing.

Anyway, once Bruno hit sixth grade he got shipped off to Macdonald Hall, a venerable boy's school in Chutney, Ontario where he ended up meeting the person who would one day become the most important person in his world: his roommate, Melvin “Boots” O'Neal who shares Room 306 at the Hall with him. The two boys hit it off famously and by the end of Bruno's first year at Macdonald Hall they were inseparable.

So of course the Fish—Macdonald Hall's Headmaster, William Sturgeon to everyone but his students—attempted to separate them.

To be fair, the two of them together, Bruno and Boots, had embarked on a series of pranks that would put the Marauders to shame and if the Fish wanted his school to be less chaotic he'd have to do something to put a stop to their relentless shenanigans. So he sends them to room with two other kids in different dormitories who formerly had singles (Boots with preppy asshole George Wexford-Smythe III and and Bruno nerdy boy genius Elmer Drimsdale) and forbids them contact with each other.

Bruno and Boots, however, are not going to take this bullshit lying down. They end up sneaking out practically every night to meet up by the War of 1812 memorial cannon to plot ways to get Mr Sturgeon to revoke the terms of their separation, all of which end up doomed to failure, even the one where they actually do reform for finals. (Their prior plans mostly just succeeded in alienating their new roommates, George in particular. Elmer would end up drawn into Bruno's nonsense in the future.) Luckily, due to an incident involving a UFO scare and the son of the Malbonian ambassador in which the two boys prove their heroism (sort of), they get the chance to ask to be roommates as their reward. Bruno and Boots are back in Room 306.

Well, until the school running out of money results in the both of them getting stuck rooming with Elmer again when Dormitory Three gets shut down. (This happens in the third book, Beware the Fish, but I'm we're switching the chronological order of the second and third books because it makes more sense that way.) Forming a Committee with Elmer (who they sort of befriended at the end of the first book) and their other friends at the Hall, Bruno and Boots start trying to figure out ways to make the Hall famous so that more kids will go there and it doesn't close down. While all this is going on, Bruno plays with Elmer's experimental broadcasting equipment and manages to send what the Canadian government assumes are terrorist broadcasts to about every television set in a fifty mile radius. Luckily since this happened in the eighties nobody went to prison.

The Hall's future as a school secured and Dormitory Three reopened, Bruno and Boots go home. However, the following year Boots' father threatens to withdraw Boots from the hall and send him to rival school York Academy which has a much more successful athletic record, especially when it comes to their swim team (since Macdonald Hall doesn't have a school pool.) There is only one thing that can be done to fix this, Bruno and Boots conclude, is to GET the school a pool and there are shit-tons of fundraising hijinks the following months to ensure this. They even finally befriend George Wexford-Smythe III who teaches them insider trading.

The next year a school reformer named Walter Wizzle is sent to 'modernize' the hall, although for some reason this means adopting some rather old-fashioned rules like a mandatory ties-outside-the-dorm-room dress code and a demerit system which deals punishment through writing LINES. Bruno is INCENSED with all this bullshit as well he should be. He sets up a Committee to get rid of Wizzle and almost gets himself and his friends expelled a couple times, which leads to everyone quitting said Committee, even Boots. This betrayal (in Bruno's eyes) breaks their friendship for a time, until Boots finds out that Wizzle wants to get Bruno expelled anyway and Boots rejoins the Committee to keep an eye on Bruno.

The girls of Mrs Scrimmage's Finishing School for Young Ladies across the highway—the Macdonald Hall boys' usual partners in crime—are ALSO suffering from a rather annoying new assistant headmistress at the time (a former U.S. Marine named Gloria Peabody) and eventually it isn't the Committee fucking with Wizzle that gets him to leave but a Coalition between the girls of Miss Scrimmage's and the boys of the Hall set on matchmaking the two annoying school reformers so that they'll ride off into the sunset to start their own terrible school together, which they do. At which point Mr Sturgeon makes a rule against committees started without the school's permission because he is nobody's fool.

There are still three years and three books left of events after this, but the most important high-stakes stuff happened in the first four. Briefly, however, the years that followed saw one of their friends from Miss Scrimmage's sneak onto the Macdonald football team pretending to be Elmer, Bruno repeatedly trying to sneak into a film that was having its exteriors shot at the hall while the boys befriended the child star, and the two of them being framed for a series of pranks they didn't commit while Boot's jerkass younger brother made a nuisance of himself as a first year student. It's at the end of this final year at the Hall that I'll be taking Bruno.

Personality:

bruno is the unholy ectobiological child of sirius black and karkat vantas, combining sirius' irreverence and love of pranking with karkat's leaderly aspirations and ability to force his friends to follow his orders when it really matters, have i scared you yet?

So, okay, here's the thing you need to remember about Bruno Walton: he really does mean well. This can be easy to forget when he's leading you into the breach with some crazy scheme or another, but most of the bullshit he pulls is for a higher cause.

And Bruno pulls a lot of bullshit. I'm not just talking about his long history of pranking the Hall alongside Boots, although that certainly counts, but his more 'legit' bullshit that he ostensibly does for a higher cause, namely when the sanctity of Macdonald Hall is being threatened. The sanctity of Macdonald Hall is very important to Bruno. He loves his school, he loves living in Room 306 with Boots, and he'll do anything he can to keep things at the Hall just as he (Bruno) thinks they should be.

What else, what else? He's loud and he's bossy. There is nothing Bruno Walton loves more than being the center of attention. He enjoys grandstanding, making speeches about how their world is crumbling around them. He enjoying taking part in riots. He REALLY loves forming Committees which he designates Boots as co-chair of and them proceeds to staff with their friends. He's prone to make speeches and grand promises without having really figured out his plans on how to accomplish these. He's very often metaphorically flying by the seat of his pants. In some ways his Committees are extensions of himself, as witness how he took Boots' quitting of the Committee in The War With Mr Wizzle as a personal rejection.

Bruno doesn't deal with rejection very well.

He's a bit lazy and prone to sleeping in, preferring to skip breakfast altogether in order to wake up fifteen minutes before class and finish tying his shoes on the way. He's superstitious, at least when it comes to his lucky penny. And, as various antagonists have found out over the course of his time at Macdonald Hall, Bruno Walton never, ever, EVER gives up.

INTO THE HEDGE
Seeming: Possession
Role: The pool. Not the water inside, that's Boots, but the physical container for the water. Maybe not the diving board or the ladder, though. But definitely the pool.
Abilities: He's got enhanced toughness because of being made out of pool tiles. Also, because he's a swimming pool he's got really good acoustics and can be used to amplify both his own volume and other people's.
Description: Take the dark-haired kid in the stripey shirt on this cover, age him up to eighteen or so (because he's post-canon) and assemble him using pool tiles. Because he basically looks like his former self, only made out of little square pool tiles. It's kind of a fresco effect? As a swimming pool, he looks exactly like the pool at Macdonald Hall.
Reasoning:There was an entire book about him and Boots trying to get their school a pool.

MEMORIES
First Memory: (Relationship) Boots. Just, Boots.
Another Five:
1. (Concepts) Macdonald Hall as an institution/school. Comes with the knowledge that the sanctity of Macdonald Hall should never be threatened.
2. (Event) Being separated from Boots by Mr Sturgeon.
3. (Event) Standing in front of Elmer's poster of the Pacific Northwest Salmon during the events of Beware the Fish and making a sinister Fish announcement for the camera.
4. (Concepts) Miss Scrimmage's Finishing School for Young Ladies.
5. (Events) Something from one of the other books maybe? Shit. Which is the most ridiculous out of context? Maybe the end of Mr Wizzle and Miss Peabody's wedding when Wizzle's cottage got destroyed by man-made earthquake and giant Wizzle balloon. This and the knowledge that he was partially responsible for it.

SAMPLES

Prose Sample One: During His Durance

The boy—practically a young man, really—made out of pool tiles had finally stopped shouting and banging on the closet door. Instead, however, he was pacing back and forth within the small confines of his prison, muttering under his breath. His companion, formerly known as the pool water, regarded him with trepidation.

“The sanctity of the house has been threatened!” the pool-tile boy proclaimed suddenly. “Don't you see? Our world is crumbling around us! We'll need a committee. An anti-Mason committee. We'll get everyone we know to join and you,” he jabbed a finger at his watery companion, “can be the co-chair. We'll stage protests! We'll have an underground newspaper. Someone can find a sledgehammer and we'll start breaking him down!”

“If we want him to ever let us out,” his companion pointed out, “we probably shouldn't be threatening him.”

“Details,” the pool-tile boy said dismissively. “They aren't important. The anti-Mason committee is.”

(In that case, his companion realized with a sickening feeling, they were probably going to be here for a very long time.)

Prose Sample Two: At Macdonald Hall

Bruno stared at the abandoned chairs, all thoughts of going to class completely discarded. The Anti-Wizzle Committee. They'd quit it, every single one of them: Pete, Mark, Chris, Wilbur, Larry, Elmer, Sydney...

Even Boots.

Boots, his best friend in the world, the boy he'd live with for years, the boy he'd fought for, the boy he'd spent months fundraising for a pool for even when Bruno couldn't actually swim—

Boots didn't want to be part of the Committee. Had rejected it. Had rejected Bruno. If there was one thing Bruno believed with all his heart and soul it was that nothing should be able to disturb the sanctity of Macdonald Hall, that no one, no Wizzle ought to be able to alter what made the school great.

If Boots didn't get that, didn't understand how important this was to Bruno, then what kind of lousy friend was he?

“Fine,” Bruno addressed the empty chairs. “I didn't need any of you lousy jerks anyway. I can get rid of Wizzle on my own.”

No one answered him. He didn't really expect them to.