From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

Babe was originally conceived to be my beer-swilling, ass-grabbing, face-smashing, all around hell-raising Lobo homage. After the World Metahuman Wrestling background occurred to me[1] and the concept for Parts Unknown started to take shape, the character ended up a lot more down to earth. While Babe still loves a good fight, he's turned out a lot more mellow and mature than I planned, slow to ire and focused as much on the safety and well-being of his crew as his own indulgences. -- AlwaysAPrice "...aaand the challenger! From parts unknown! At EIGHT FEET, THREE INCHES tall, weighing in tonight at ONE THOUSAND, EIGHT HUNDRED SEVENTY-FOUR pooounds! He is.... ...BABE! THE BIG! BLUE! OX!" Twin columns of bright blue pyrotechnic sparks arc over the entryway, hard rock pounds through the arena, and the massive steel doors emblazoned with the World Metahuman Wrestling logo slide open at the top of the ramp. The Bovine Barbarian emerges to thunderous cheers and thrusts his barbed-wire-wrapped fists up into the sky. On the way to the ring he stops, kneels by the security barrier to give a young fan a piggyback view of the crowd. He kneels again so the boy's attractive mother can retrieve her son -- the camera cuts to audience reaction, and thus misses Babe's lascivious leer down Mom's shirt. Contents 1 Powers 1.1 Super Strength 1.2 Resilience & Training 2 Equipment 2.1 Barbed Wire 2.2 Polly Bunyan's Axe 3 Weaknesses & Limitations 4 Personality 5 Background 5.1 World Metahuman Wrestling 5.1.1 Babe's Career 5.2 Parts Unknown 6 Player Notes 6.1 Build 6.2 Page Credits Last Updated: 11/10/2010

50 The Callous Babe the Big Blue Ox Canyon Carver Former WMW wrestler, founder and leader of Parts Unknown. · Natural Brute · Super Strength/Super Reflexes Battle Axe/Super Reflexes Player: @AlwaysAPrice Affiliations Villain Group Parts Unknown Rank Main Event (Leader) · Other Affiliations · World Metahuman Wrestling (defunct) Identity Real Name Babe Aliases Blue, Big Bad Blue, The Mad Cow, The Bovine Barbarian Headquarters Diamond Station, Cap au Diable Occupation Former professional wrestler Legal Status Felon, fugitive (wanted in Mexico) Physical Traits Species Big Ox Sub-Type Blue Gender Male Height 7'10" Weight 1420 lbs.

Powers

Super Strength

The limits of Babe's strength have never really been tested. While he often lifted other "superweights" over his head in the ring, that is not a reliable metric due to both the cooperation of the other wrestler and the fact that those wrestlers, like Babe himself, were often billed as being several hundred pounds heavier than they actually were.

Resilience & Training

Babe's incredibly dense musculature makes him nearly impervious to most mundane forms of physical assault. However, performing safely in the WMW ring with other supers required extensive training in minimizing actual injury while maximizing the apparent effect of the blows traded, training that Babe is learning to apply to real combat situations in somewhat unconventional ways. Reading his enemy's body language and reacting almost presciently as a result, he absorbs impacts and falls and exaggerates his injuries to throw his foes off-guard by filling them with false confidence -- though when an attack does land as it was intended to, it hurts.

Equipment

Barbed Wire

Since not long after his WMW debut and still to this day, Babe wraps his chest and entire right arm in barbed wire, both for effect and to add to the hurt he dishes out.

Polly Bunyan's Axe

Shortly after the War, Babe broke into the WMW Hall of Fame's War Memorial, an exhibition honoring the over eighty WMW performers who lost their lives using their amazing abilities to defend Earth from the Rikti, and stole the axe Paula Barnes carried first as part of her "Polly Bunyan" gimmick and later as a weapon against the Rikti. He has not explained this action to anyone, though most who are aware of it assume it was a sentimental act.

Weaknesses & Limitations

He pulls his punches against all but the most dangerous threats, though this is less mercy than habit. Babe's not actually a very skilled fighter; all he knows is what the WMW trainers taught him, and while that does include some basic grapples and holds, most of it is inapplicable to real combat. Up against someone who can match his strength and durability, he would be fairly easily trounced.

Personality

Babe doesn't know what he is or where the hell he came from, and at this point he just doesn't care.^[2] He has only the haziest impressions of memories from before WMW began training him, and he hasn't tried to bring them into focus in a very long time. He misses the glory, manufactured as it may have been, that he had as a WMW Megastar. Babe's friends in WMW were the closest thing to a moral compass he had, and without them he was directionless, a willing slave to his vices.

Babe takes work where he can find it and doesn't ask questions, a trait that has led to an increase in his employment on the wrong side of the law -- but as long as they keep him in booze, cigars and babes, the less inclined he is to care what he's asked to do. Babe's not a killer; however, he has no qualms about causing extended hospitalizations, and his flexible morality tells him that his responsibility for what happens to someone ends as soon as the paramedics arrive. If they die after that, it's the doctor's fault.

Since reconnecting with fellow WMW survivors Hype and Silver, Babe's been more centered and focused, uneasily settling into the role of leader in the underground commune they've come to refer to as "Parts Unknown" in a nod to their past. While he's still likely to take the easy, obvious route in any endeavor, the responsibility of leadership has begun to give him pause when considering his words and actions, as he considers the ramifications for those who have adopted Parts Unknown as their safe haven.

Background

World Metahuman Wrestling

World Metahuman Wrestling opened for business in early 1973, and enjoyed 30 years as one of the world's premier brands of superhuman sports-entertainment. At first little more than a refuge for mostly-reformed villains and disgraced professional athletes caught using unfair superhuman advantages, by the late 80s it was a phenomenon, with a roster bolstered by well-known heroes retired from active duty by injury or fatigue, not to mention mutants who grew up as fans and had no interest in great power's great responsibilities.

The superhuman abilities of WMW's "Megastars" allowed the company to showcase outrageous main events: the four-building Steel Canyon Skyscraper Rumble made WMW Powered Up '99 the top-selling Pay-Per-View event of the year (and cost WMW quite a pretty penny repairing the craters left by the eliminated contenders).

WMW's last show, taped two days before, was broadcast on May 23nd, 2002, to record low ratings -- that day marked the beginning of the first Rikti invasion of Earth. The vast majority of WMW's performers joined the world's heroes in fighting off the invaders. Most of them were killed in the conflict. A handful of WMW Megastars, however, did not; they fled to various parts of the world not under siege, and when the smoke cleared many former fans remembered who they were and excoriated them online. Babe was one of them, and the perception of his cowardice in light of the sacrifices made by his fellows has stuck with him even though he was never a registered hero.

Babe's Career

Debut: WMW Monday Night Maul - April 25th, 1994 (as "Bodyguard" for then WMW Women's Champion Polly Bunyan)

Final Match: WMW Thursday Throwdown - May 23rd, 2002 (Loss via Disqualification vs. "The Tentacled Technician" U-Vox)

Signature Moves:

• The Cattle Driver: A tilt-a-whirl tombstone piledriver.
• The Longhorn Lariat: A massive short-arm lariat delivered with his barbed-wire-wrapped right arm

Title Reigns:

WMW Superweight Title:

• Won August 1998 (via Pinfall vs. Craven Calhoun) - Lost November 1998 (via Pinfall vs. Polly Bunyan)
• Won December 1999 (via First Blood stipulation vs. Santa Claus) - Lost July 2000 (via Submission vs. Mad Jack Mercy)

WMW Tag Team Title:

• February 1995 - July 1995 (w/ Polly Bunyan)
• May 1997 - September 1998 (w/ Polly Bunyan)
• October 2000 - January 2002 (w/ Silverback Gorilla)

Other Notes:

• Babe was the only WMW Superweight Champion to lose the title to a woman.
• Babe was a member of two of the three longest-running WMW Tag Team Title reigns in history.
• Despite his high profile title reigns, Babe was generally regarded as a mid-carder. Even while holding the company's most prestigious belt, his title reigns would often take a backseat on television to flashier, more dramatic angles, with his title defenses used to feed viewers into spectacle main events.
• Babe's horns presented a unique challenge not only to his opponents but to Babe himself -- longtime rival Mad Jack Mercy even developed a hornlock submission maneuver specifically for their matches that several of Babe's other opponents would try to imitate, though Mercy was the only one to ever force Babe to tap using the hornlock. Another oft-replayed use of the horns against Babe occurred during a match against Silverback Gorilla, who narrowly avoided the Longhorn Lariat by springing onto the incoming arm, then hooked his legs over the horns to execute a hurricanrana. It was the first time the maneuver was ever successfully performed against Babe, who was thought unthrowable by all but the largest Megastars at the time.
• Babe is not actually blue. It's a dye job.

Parts Unknown

Info to come.

Player Notes

Build

It took a few tries to land on a build I liked for Babe; the first attempt was the classic SS/Invuln, but I found the dark scheme of Brute Invuln annoying to look at and I already had an SS/ Brute in Hamhock. When I12 dropped, I rerolled him to Axe/Will, but Axe just didn't thrill me at the time, it felt too sluggish, and I knew from Scrapper experience (Choppin' Broccoli was rerolled from scratch when I got fed up with Willpower at 42) that /WP is just a set I'm chronically incompatible with. So despite Axe being the obvious choice to satisfy concept, I started him over yet again, this time as SS/SR, a combination I'd wanted to try as soon as Brute /SR was announced.

As expected the combination has been a blast, but it's been slower going than my last uber-SR, Xaia, because of the shit condition of the Black Market. After I sat down to plot out a budget respec to nearly soft-cap Babe and solve several of his endurance woes, I've been having a lot more fun both playing and RPing Babe in recent weeks. At the time of this writing Babe is 46, and rapidly closing in on being my first 50 villain that's not a /Dark Corruptor. Also, after a fun experience with higher level Axing through Grinnin' Lizzie, I've decided to give Axe/ Babe another shot as an alt build with /SR, and have him sitting around for when SS/ Babe is finished.

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