First appearance: × Wounded Warrior Project, Capture the Flag charity crossover
Beans the Terrible was a tiny pixie with kaleidoscope wings, a dance troupe of fellow pixies, and a mouth that never stopped running. He was pulled into the Void for the × Wounded Warrior Project, Capture the Flag charity crossover (title not in metadata) and spent most of it being kind to things that were trying to kill him. The Acolytes chanted his name, the Grandmaster liked him, and his teammate Grog wanted to take him home. He did not leave the arena alive.
Story
Beans arrived at The Dread Fortress through the third portal of the night, cheerfully announcing himself: “Hey guys, how’s it going? I’m here! Yes, we are here, Precious.” The Grandmaster offered him a high chair, which he refused with great dignity as his wings fluttered and sparkling pixies appeared to dance in a line behind him. He then grabbed the camera to plead, “help me. I don’t know what I’m doing here.” He was put on a team with the snake-man Solid and the reeking centaur Grog the Malodorous. When asked about Grog’s smell, Beans said it “Smells like glorious purpose.” Things got darker when the mammoth Pyxis arrived and explained he was hunting the killers of his family: “a little fairy, a strange centaur person, and a cobra of some kind.” Beans, measured at two foot four, was mostly delighted to learn his height: “Woohoo! I’m tall!”
The opening gauntlet ran through three rooms of the fortress, and Beans was the brains of Team A. In the kitchen, faced with a feast that had to be eaten entirely, he shrank the food with magic and fed it to Grog. When Grog flagged, Beans stood behind him cheering “You can do it” while his pixies formed a dance line, and the food went down. In the room of sleeping Chinchillas, each cuddling a kitchen knife, he tiptoed across “very Scooby Doo style” and led Grog behind him “like you teach little kids how to dance.” Unfortunately, the overfed Grog let out a fart with every step. Beans’s attempt at diplomacy (“Ask it to be quiet! I’m being asked to ask you”) failed, and the chinchillas woke up and stabbed everyone. Beans’s parting words to them were “I hope you have nightmares.” The Acolytes loved “the place where your heart is at, Beans,” and gave him a Warrior’s Advantage.
The alchemy room was less kind. Beans offered his team a poem (“Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, so drink the last one”) and noticed that the red vial had no fingerprints and that one chest had no dust on it. He then poured green into red anyway and burned his eyebrows off. Blinded and frustrated, he kicked the dustless chest, which kicked back: it was a mimic, and it bit him hard. Beans was usually the life of the party, but anything that left a mark on him got a mark back. He conjured a blade of fire, yelled “Suffering Succotash, that really hurt!”, and chased the mimic around the room to keep it away from his team.
Then Pyxis paid for a mini-boss, and Thea, the Dread Fortress’s tiny pink imp, was transformed into a giant purple worm, the Abyss Devourer. When one of her tongues missed Beans, struck a stalagmite and split in half, his first instinct was sympathy: “Oh no, that looked like it hurt. You okay?… It’s okay, I can fix it… It’s just misunderstood.” Perry’s swarm of fireflies lit Beans up along with the worm, which offended him deeply: “Hold your freaking horses. I’m a freaking fairy. How dare you?” Then Dave the Doom Duck trapped Team A inside a ring of hellfire. Beans chose this moment to tell the worm she looked great and to recount a band-camp story about a saxophone, which went on for at least five minutes. Beans hated fire and didn’t know who had cast it, but he knew it came from the other side: “The people over there don’t know the wrath of beans.” He answered with a wall of fire around Team B and the remark “I like roasted duck.” Soon after, the worm sank back into the ravine and Team A was free.
When The Box of Chaos crashed down like a comet onto the fortress grounds, the Arbiter said champions had to make a sacrifice to it, calling the wording “just lawyer speak.” Beans asked, “What’s a lawyer?” Solid explained that it was something like a demon. Beans then gathered his pixies and named them the Bee Gees, “Because we’re the bee’s knees.” Light poured down on him, and in a transformation the table compared to Sailor Moon, stars bloomed across his body as he took his starry form. He flew over a river with no bridge and reached the Box first. He tried to advise the Box on how to bargain with him, until it handed him a shadow-made Vorpal Sword “just so you stop talking to me.” When Grog splashed across the river after him, Beans greeted him with “Hey, you took a shower.” A moment later Solid kicked the Box over the trees, and The Arbiter, feeling a little evil, had it land squarely on Beans and Grog.
Then the teams dissolved into a free-for-all. Perry landed on the Box beside Beans, looked at his hands, then at Beans, and decided to put him in it. “Why is everybody coming after me?… JUMPING JELLYBEANS,” Beans cried. Their pixie and firefly swarms clashed, the whole table chanted for a roll-off, and Perry’s natural 20 slammed Beans into the Box. Beans simply annoyed it until it gave him something, and he climbed out wearing a Hat of Vermin. He weathered Pyxis’s moonbeam and shrugged off Dave’s mass banishment along with everyone else. Once the Grandmaster declared that all damage would be doubled (“Beans, you little loudmouth, it is your turn”), he slipped out of the moonlight and fired a blazing bolt of radiant starlight at Pyxis, his whole pixie swarm piling on. “Don’t piss off the fairy!” the Grandmaster crowed, and Pyxis was left gasping that he was low.
It was Beans’s mouth that undid him. When Grog killed Perry, Beans had been egging him on, and Perry heard every “you deserve it.” With his dying breath and frost-giant strength, Perry swung his shovel at Beans on the way out, and the sky darkened. Beans’s last words were wounded, then warm, then indignant:
“I came here just to have fun. Apparently everybody wants to make fun of me… Why is the world getting darker?… I love you all. Thank you guys so much. This is wonderful. Hey, hey, don’t touch me. Get off me.”
The Grandmaster described the two of them as they “struggle and fight in eternity on this ground.” Grog later fought on with Beans’s leftover luck, and his own final words were about rejoining “my friend Beans. I miss that guy. He sings like I do.” Dave the Doom Duck won the match. As it closed, the Grandmaster said, “We’re going to miss Beans now.”
Personality and Abilities
Beans stood two foot four, with shimmering kaleidoscope wings and a troupe of dancing pixies that followed him everywhere and fought beside him as a swarm. He talked constantly, peppered his speech with old-timey exclamations like “Suffering Succotash” and “Jumping Jellybeans,” and slipped into “Precious”-style asides (“Yes, we are here, Precious”). He was relentlessly friendly, complimenting a giant worm on her looks and thanking the Grandmaster’s booming disembodied voice (“You sound awesome”). His cheer had limits: he hated fire, and anyone who hurt him could expect payback.
He was a druid of the Circle of the Stars. In his starry form he became a floating, star-covered figure of light. His magic leaned toward support: he shrank food, encouraged his allies, and read the stars to tip luck for or against others. He could also hit hard with blades and walls of fire and bolts of radiant light. He won a Vorpal Sword and a Hat of Vermin from the Box of Chaos.
Relationships
- Grog the Malodorous: teammate he fed and coached through the gauntlet; Grog adored him (“I’m going to have to take this beans guy home. He’s pretty funny”) and mourned him in his own last words.
- Solid: teammate who wanted him to stop talking to the monster and punch it.
- Perry: shoved him into the Box of Chaos, then killed him with a dying shovel swing; they died together.
- Pyxis: hunted a fairy, a centaur and a cobra for killing his family; Beans nearly flattened him with starlight.
- Dave the Doom Duck: trapped him in hellfire; Beans returned the favor with a wall of fire of his own.
- Thea: the worm he tried to comfort mid-battle.
- Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: took a liking to him (“I knew I liked you for a reason”).
- The Box of Chaos: gave him a sword just to make him stop talking, then a hat after he was shoved inside.
Memorable Quotes
- “Smells like glorious purpose.” (× Wounded Warrior Project, Capture the Flag charity crossover (title not in metadata))
- “Ask it to be quiet! I’m being asked to ask you.” (× Wounded Warrior Project, Capture the Flag charity crossover (title not in metadata))
- “Hold your freaking horses. I’m a freaking fairy. How dare you?” (× Wounded Warrior Project, Capture the Flag charity crossover (title not in metadata))
- “The people over there don’t know the wrath of beans.” (× Wounded Warrior Project, Capture the Flag charity crossover (title not in metadata))
- “We’re going to call this group the Bee Gees. Why? Because we’re the bee’s knees.” (× Wounded Warrior Project, Capture the Flag charity crossover (title not in metadata))
- “I’m just going to annoy this guy until he gives me something.” (× Wounded Warrior Project, Capture the Flag charity crossover (title not in metadata))