First appearance: S2E13 — The Brave — Buli v Chancy · watch it on YouTube
Buli, better known by his own preferred title, Buli the Brave, is a tiny owlbear barbarian who stood three feet and one inch tall and wanted everyone to know he was not cute. Pulled into the Void to face the bard Chancy, he fought through the longest Deathmatch the arena had seen up to that point. Along the way he was set on fire repeatedly, turned into a butterfly, and stripped of nearly every feather. He fell in the end, but even death and a bottomless well have not quite finished him off.
Story
S2E13 — The Brave — Buli v Chancy
Buli arrived in the Void bristling the moment the Grandmaster called him adorable. “Not adorable. I am fierce,” he insisted, and he claimed he had once destroyed an Aboleth with his bare hands and bathed in its blood. He produced a tiny set of bagpipes, “the most destructive metal deathly musical instrument in the world,” and blew into them with no idea how to play. Against Chancy, a fairy bard who claimed to have slain 10,000 dragons, Buli was unimpressed: “Anyone can kill a dragon.” The arena was a ruined castle on a seaside cliff with a deep, uncovered well, and Buli started hidden inside the ruins, where he lost a shouting match so badly that his first attacks went shaky.
His early fight was a parade of glorious failures. He clawed his way up a twenty-foot wall on the second try, after the Acolytes ruled that height doesn’t matter but girth might (“Very wide. Very girthy”), then disguised himself by holding a brick in front of his eyes, on the theory that “If I can’t see him, he can’t see me.” The Acolytes pelted both champions with dodgeball debris, someone in the crowd threw their own feces onto the field, and Grimace from McDonald’s apparently landed on him. Chancy’s music found him with a fire bolt. Buli’s flying leap at the bard ended face-first in the dirt ten feet short, after Chancy mocked him as “the cutest little owlet plushie.” He answered by hurling a flaming hot pepper from the debris and declaring to the crowd, “It looks like Chancy can’t handle the heat!” He shrugged off Chancy’s insults with a perfect 20, earning the nickname “Buli the brain” and his own claim that he had about 400 brains.
At Gerald, the Box of Chaos, Buli tormented his rival by holding up a very small lute that Chancy swore was stolen from him. Buli kept it as leverage and instead stripped naked, sacrificing all his clothes, which he had been “seasoning,” to the delighted Gerald. The box gave him a scroll with one word burned onto it, “FLY,” and it lifted him barely off the ground. Chancy answered with a fireball and then turned him into a butterfly in a matching blue petticoat, “the worst moment of his life.” Buli fluttered onto the nose of the most fearsome beast he could find, Doug, who pounced on Chancy in his defence. Then Christina the ghost crawled out of the well, searching for her runaway groom Frederick, and her voice melted the spell, leaving Buli scorched and still flapping his arms. The two champions briefly agreed to a truce, and Buli made splashing noises to fool her toward the well. Chancy then patted him on the head, and the truce ended on the spot.
The rest of the fight was pure owlbear fury. Buli dangled the lute over the well, let the crowd’s chant of “Drown the loot!” decide its fate, and dropped it in. He hit the invisible bard with rock-filled pillows and charged with his claws, snapped his great axe on a disastrous swing, and dropped to his knees wailing, “Why can’t I hit anyone?” The Grandmaster blessed him for his persistence. He finally grabbed Chancy and dragged them both into the well, but Chancy flew them out. When the last fireball burned away his remaining feathers, Buli refused to die. Naked, weaponless and smelling of cooked chicken, he headbutted Chancy with burnt stumps for claws and rose again inside a cloud of daggers, one dagger poking into his twitching eyeball, shrieking “Buli the Burned! Buli the Deathless!”, before he finally fell. The Arbiter picked him up by the leg and tossed him down the well, and no one ever heard him hit the bottom. After the show, the Arbiter announced that Buli was back up, barely, and still falling. In the last glimpse of him, a used-to-be-fluffy thing drops through the dark chasm, opens one eye, and says, “I’ll be back.”
Personality and Abilities
Buli is small, round and feathered, with big eyes and a temper that makes him fluff up “more than seemed possible” until his little owl head spins around. He speaks of himself in the third person and collects grand titles: the Brave, the Brains, the Fierce, the Strong, the Murderer, the Destroyer, and, by the end, the Burned and the Deathless. He hates being called cute, and a single pat on the head was enough to end an alliance. He is proud of being an owlbear: “We never cry. We don’t even have tear ducts.” He is not much for big words. He tried to “wage” when he meant to rage, and when the Grandmaster said she had been hoping for “a spell of castration,” he admitted, “Buli don’t know how to spell either.”
In a fight he is a charger. He drops to all fours, runs along walls, and leaps claws-first at his enemies. He carried four or five kinds of axes on his back but mostly fought with his claws, his head and whatever junk was lying around, from flaming peppers to bags of rocks. Despite his supposedly low intelligence and wisdom, he kept shrugging off magic aimed at his mind, which he explained as “how I keep my enemies guessing.” His real gift is refusing to die. He stood back up twice after he should have been finished.
Relationships
- Chancy: His opponent and bitter rival, a bard he refused to believe was famous. He stole and drowned Chancy’s lute, and Chancy burned him to a crisp for it.
- Doug the Pug: As a butterfly, Buli landed on Doug’s nose, and the pug pounced on Chancy to defend his new friend.
- Christina the ghost: The ghost of the well, whose voice broke the butterfly spell. Buli briefly helped trick her, then turned her against Chancy by telling her the fairy knew where Frederick was.
- The Arbiter: Buli refused his advice because the Arbiter was “Chancy’s super fan.” The Arbiter later threw Buli’s body down the well.
- The Box of Chaos: Gerald gladly accepted Buli’s seasoned clothes (“These are just my size”) and gave him a flying spell in return.
Memorable Quotes
- “Not adorable. I am fierce. I am brave. I am strong. And I am here to win.” (The Brave)
- “It is not how tall you are. It’s what you do with it. My mom told me that.” (The Brave)
- “The world is not ready for a Buli that can fly.” (The Brave)
- “I don’t want you to ever pat me on the head! The truce is over!” (The Brave)
- “I’m not a man at all, I’m a monstrosity.” (The Brave)
- “Buli the Burned! Buli the Deathless!” (The Brave)