Characters:
(SPOILER WARNING: The following character sheet is usually up to date. This means that there's a spoiler on about every line. If you are new to this series, go ahead and hop over to chapter 1.)
Sir Marceline Vetiver Abadeer, the Vampire Queen:
Everyone's favorite angsty vampire sorceress. Right now, she's trying out college to see if it suits her. She was born in Georgia in the late 80's to an elementary school teacher and a demon lord, right before the Eastern Bloc nuked the U.S. with an experimental bomb derived from radioactive ore found in a comet and about a thousand conventional neutron bombs. Rather than hitting D.C, the comet bomb hit her hometown for mysterious reasons and she survived while her mother died of radiation. For the last thousand years she's lived an active life, become a vampire and married a certain candy-based dictator not once but twice.
Her interests include music, film photography, literature and beating the crap out of people she doesn't like with axes, swords and blunt instruments. She's the current frontwoman of The Thieves, a post-post-post-everything-rock band that has begun work on their first EP.
Sir Sue:
Is she Marceline's girl or are they just friends? Who even knows? Dating is complicated. She's a warrior from a harsh, icy realm that used to be part of Canada, where warriors must earn their names in battle. In exile after the death of her lover, she named herself and found her way to a place that would teach her the secrets of life in exchange for her skill with a broadsword. That place was the Heroic Lyceum of the Holy Enchiridion.
Her interests include geomancy, geography, archaeology, birdwatching and photography, but her real love seems to be the university airplane. Recently she's put her musical talent to good use as the keyboardist in The Thieves as well.
Princess Bonnibell Bette Bubblegum I, Princeps Confectionis:
The long-lived fascist dictator of one of the more outlandish kingdoms near the Atlanta blast-zone. Apparently, she really is made of bubblegum. She doesn't appear a lot but Marcy has a lot of unresolved issues from their two marriages and assorted brief flings.
Sir Simon "Ice King" Dmitrievich Petrikov, DPhil, PhD:
Prewar Russian-Jewish-American archaeologist, antiquarian and linguist noted for his translations of the Pnakotic Fragments, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, and the Hero's Enchiridion. Highly influential member of the Thirteen, founder of the archaeology, history and foreign language departments of the Lyceum school of Humanities. Unfortunately, he's completely mental and dependent on a mystical artifact known as the Ice Crown, a fact blamed, among other things, for the bizarre questions on the Lyceum Entrance Exam, which was his attempt to rewrite the ACT from memory. Nowadays he just lives in a frozen realm generated by his crown and talks to penguins.
Still, he managed to raise a certain half-demon girl most of the way to adulthood, and that's got to count for something. Recently, he managed to get himself almost functional with the help of some pharmaceuticals, just long enough to see his adopted daughter off to college at his old school.
Steven "Fox" Foxham, PhD.:
He's one of the little talking foxes from near the blast zone, as well as the Dean of English, the Bursar and whatever else anyone tells him to be. Really, he's a great guy, but would they just leave him alone, so he can finish translating Goethe?
His other interests include finding a new chancellor because he's already tired of the job, atoning for past mistakes and cooking Italian food for his girlfriend Vixie.
Sir Charles S. "Charlie" Colin, PhilD.:
The last (and possible the only previous) chancellor, a mysterious man known for eating peanuts and being much older than he looks. He may have made a deal with Marceline's father, and certainly has been involved in shady dealings with the fairies. His mentor was almost certainly Simon Petrikov, not that he could be bothered to act like him. Thank Glob he's gone, right? Right, guys?
Like Nikita Kruschev, he's fond of making ambiguous threats, and like Howell he's fond of shouting in Latin, though he makes it sound much more pretentious than Howell does. Will he be back?
Sir Howell Rex, PhD:
Master of the Knights. He's a mutant of some kind, with three eyes and very, very fast reflexes. He's also in his ninth century, though he's aged a little over the years. While his sense of humor is sometimes ominous, he's generally a great guy. No one knows who his husband was, though Sir Sue thinks it was the Master of Wizard City.
He's forgotten more about fencing than just about anyone who ever lived, though his substance problems years ago can't have helped. His other interests involve Zen meditation, curating the university library and recounting his past battles at excruciating length to everyone sitting at the bar.
Mungey, PhD.:
He's one of the little jelly mutants from the outer wastelands. His people speak a corrupted form of English, but when he learned classical English he was entranced by grammar on a conceptual level that he learned about six other languages in a matter of a couple of years. He now speaks German (and teaches it), Dutch, Roumanian, Hebrew, Koine Greek and Latin. While one of the great linguists of the age (Foxham is honestly his main competition so far as the Lyceum goes), in other ways he acts more or less like a fifteen-year-old boy, including liberal use of pyrotechnics inside the Liberal Arts Building, a severe lack of an indoor voice and frequent use of the word "duuuuuude."
He's actually only seventeen, but for his species that's well into adulthood. He has no excuse. He's also been used as a convenient aerial surveillance system, as he's decently easy for an athletic person to hurl several stories up in the air, and reforms pretty quickly if he gets squished, for instance if he falls from a height of, oh, I don't know, several stories up in the air.
Ms. Carol Joy Donovan, MA.:
A doctoral student teaching English Comp., Poetry Comp., and World Lit. at the university. She adores Marceline, but consistently annoys her by appropriating vampire culture. Noted for her habit of cultivating rare Andean cave bats in her office. Aside from Sir Howell, she's probably Foxham's only close friend in the faculty; when Chancellor Colin was fired, Fox gave her Colin's old office.
She's a big fan of Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams and whoever wrote that song that The Sombreros did back in the day.
Sir Julian:
A snake person, or snerson. He's in Pi Kappa Alpha, which should tell you everything you need to know. If not, let's just say that a chapter of his frat was once nearly disbanded for drunkenly beating a pink flamingo to death.*
Hunson Abadeer, alias "Martius Ossian," "Martin Oisin," et cetera:
Lord of the Nightosphere, master torturer, famous incubus, and all-around prick. He happened to seduce a much nicer lady in the outskirts of Atlanta in the 1980's, resulting in the birth of a certain half-demon. Odder still is that he seems to have fallen in love with the mother, even though he should have been incapable of non-egocentric feelings, and he cohabited with her for some time. Perhaps we should say that "love" needs a good number of quotation marks around it in his case.
He enjoys breaking the damned on the famous spiked wheel passed down through his family, discovering new forms of bureaucratic torture, and smoking Resublimated Tincture of Souls in his ethereal pipe. Unbeknownst to his Legions of the Night, he also works as a line cook at a restaurant on Ooo in his spare time, to indulge his passions for simple carbohydrates and for making people's lives miserable.
Before that, he apparently came to the Lyceum at some point and might have had secret dealings with Charlie.
Death:
He's literally death.
The Fairies:
Marceline has only met one, but she was a real killer. Luckily Marcy managed to get away in time… right?
J. D. and his pack:
Some coyotes from the Great Wastelands who have recently been sighted in the Appalachians, especially in the area around the Lyceum. Apparently, they knew Simon at some point, though exactly when is rather unclear.
They've sworn loyalty to the Vampire Queen, to her great dismay.
John Milton England, PhD.:
A robot of some type, programmed to be as English as possible, apparently made from an old set of plate armor and various bits of electronics. He teaches English, because why the hell not? Noted for his discourse on the literary habits of the Roundhead officers in the English Civil War.
Bob James, M.D.:
Well-liked young doctor in Wizard City, graduated from the Wiz-City/Lyceum medical exchange, Class of 2980.
The Master of Wizard City:
Does he have a secret past with Sir Howell? What, indeed, is he? Has he always been some form of giant ape?
Max Toadman, PhD:
Giant toad noted for his controversial historical theories, some of which have been described by Mungey as "bull-ass-shit." He teaches history at the Lyceum and is very likely not to get his tenure now that his friend Dr. Colin has been banished.
*IRL: at the Hattiesburg Zoo in MS, 2014.