First appearance: S5E3, Eldritch Fangs - Ruby Rust v Robbie Clark and the Hunger · watch it on YouTube
Ruby Rust is a giant constrictor snake with a day job in software development and a side career as a champion fighter. He has no arms, no legs and no nipples, and every one of those facts became a joke at some point. Across two Deathmatches in the Season of Fate he went from an underprepared office python to a non-Euclidean horror who frightened his own hosts. His story ended in an odd kind of peace: no more deadlines, no more taxes, just hunting for mice.
Story
Eldritch Fangs
In S5E3, Eldritch Fangs - Ruby Rust v Robbie Clark and the Hunger, Ruby slithered out of a red summoning circle before Thea and the Lord of Fate, the title the Arbiter took after usurping the Grandmaster. Ruby introduced himself as a coder who types with his tail on a big-button ergonomic keyboard, one key at a time. The Lord of Fate asked if he was a Python who codes in Python. Ruby corrected him: he uses Java, and he wore a drinking helmet with hot java on one side and a cartoon poison bottle on the other. Ruby is a constrictor, not a venomous snake, so he carried his venom with him. His opponent was Robbie Clark and the Hunger, a cheerful runaway boy with an eldritch horror fused to his spine. Ruby asked if the boy could take the backpack off. He could not.
Thea opened a portal to The Voiceless Mountaintop, a freezing peak under a blood-red sunset. Ruby is cold-blooded, so he sipped his hot coffee to stay warm. He admitted he doesn’t get out much and had learned to fight from martial arts and action movies. He spat poison in Robbie’s face, but the Hunger’s mouthy tendrils simply sucked it back out. When The Box of Chaos slammed into the snow, Ruby cut off part of his own tail and handed it over (“Yeah, I’m a zoologist”). In return he got the Shield of the Golden King. With no arms to hold it, it fell face down in the dirt, so the shadowy dealer in the box tied it to him with twine. Ruby then bit his own tail stump, rolled at Robbie like a hoop and wrapped him up. During a chaos event the Acolytes broke into the Macarena, and Ruby tried to do the hand movements with no hands. He failed so badly that the twine frayed and the shield fell off. Thea flew down to comfort him: “You are the greatest Ruby Rust out there.”
Ruby kept fighting. He burrowed under the snow and dragged Robbie down by the legs. He tried to hypnotize the boy like Kaa from The Jungle Book and set off an avalanche that stopped at Robbie’s feet (“You fell right into my plan”). He snapped off one of his incisors to buy Morir’s Cataclysm, whose words wrapped around his skin as glowing markings. He shed his skin and climbed back into it the wrong way round to fake an approach. That one went badly. The Hunger later cracked his helmet, and the java and poison spilled into the snow. When the Hunger’s spores tried to make him docile, Ruby pretended to fall for it, cooing for a hug, then crushed his opponent: “But I’m a constrictor snake, bitch!” He finally landed his signature move, the Big Squeeze, but the Hunger broke free by snapping Robbie’s own bones.
With one trick left, Ruby ate his own lower half like an Ouroboros to gain one last burst of strength, leaving his lower intestines hanging out the back of him. He charged with blood pouring from his mouth and stabbed with his single remaining fang. The Hunger tore open a fissure beneath him, and Ruby fell into it. In his mind he reached for the ledge, forgetting once again that he had no limbs. Robbie emerged from the Hunger like a butterfly from a cocoon, looking freshly laundered, and the tentacles sucked up Ruby’s biomass. His last thought was the website he was halfway through building, which would now never be finished. In Dried Blood afterwards, calling himself “Ruby Red,” he described the loss as “an unfair fight with an Eldritch demon,” not as losing to a child.
Bone Rust
Ruby came back in S5E13 — Bone Rust — Ruby Rust v Bone Daddy, and he was not happy about it. “Why must you keep torturing me? I was devoured whole by some sort of hunger, and now I’m still here.” Thea’s revival had gone wrong. She had left the job to Thomas the Goblin, who was still working on his certification and, as the Lord of Fate pointed out, can’t read or write. Ruby kept glitching. Tentacles erupted from his back, his head turned inside out, and eyes burst from his scales. He begged to die. Thea put a band-aid on him, and where she touched him his black ichor became real skin with ruby, diamond-shaped scales. He then coughed up his missing helmet, still holding its two drinks. His opponent was Bone Daddy, fighting alongside his devoted skeleton Darcy. The Lord of Fate then made Ruby a promise: if he won, they would put him back to normal. Ruby bared his teeth at once.
The fight took place in Emmery’s Tavern. Ruby oozed out of Darcy’s grip like a tar pit and spat java and poison to dissolve a cage of bones. He sent a splinter of black goo as a decoy, then circled behind and grabbed Bone Daddy’s ankles. A chaos event turned everyone’s morning coffee against them. Bone Daddy held his bowels, but Ruby pooped himself (“There’s a lot of poop coming out of that cloaca”). Later Bone Daddy’s bullwhip burst Ruby’s skin “like a hot sausage.” Darcy shredded his back half, and Bone Daddy rolled the pieces into a meatball for the fire. The meat crawled away from the heat and grew a humanoid hand. Thea, feeling guilty, filled the new hand with band-aids. Ruby then held Bone Daddy with a humanoid arm, a bat’s-wing arm and a tiny porcelain doll’s arm. That last one applied a band-aid to his cheek. In another chaos event, Thea let out a long tuna-pickle fart that coated both champions in pink glitter, which ended up “directly between my muscles and the tendons,” as the skinless Ruby put it.
When Bone Daddy armored himself in Darcy and the tavern’s giant skull, Ruby spread his back end across the floor “like a paintbrush.” He assimilated the man sleeping on a table, the shady quest-giver and the bartender, and used their senses to see the attack from every angle and dodge it. He told the Box of Chaos the shield had been his first (“Give me something better”). He traded an old patron’s last years of life, and the man crumbled to dust. In return Ruby got a small screaming box holding a dark soul. Ruby then wrapped Bone Daddy in the Big Squeeze, and the shield was destroyed. Bone Daddy begged him to spare Darcy. Ruby dismissed her as furniture, so Bone Daddy hurled them both into the fireplace. For a brief moment Ruby became himself again, an ordinary python with his jaw and eyes back in place, and he swallowed Bone Daddy whole. Crawling out of the fire, he grew to the size of the bar and pulled furniture and patrons into himself. He then tensed his “wee snake abs” and crushed his opponent to bone dust from the inside. Only a single finger bone of Darcy escaped.
Victory was not the end. Ruby kept growing in power, morphing and evolving, then turned on Thea and the Lord of Fate: “Where are your protections now?” Thea produced five Chinchillas. One volunteered, and she threw it at Ruby, who devoured it. His muscles relaxed, his insides rearranged themselves, and he shrank into a cute, big-eyed, non-sentient python. “Aw, you fixed it too much,” the Lord of Fate complained. “Now it can’t code.” Thea kicked open the door and released him into The Void. His thoughts faded one by one.
“Peace. At last. No more deadlines. No more projects. No more rent. No more taxes. Just hunting for mice.”
Personality and Abilities
Ruby is a massive serpent with crimson, diamond-shaped scales. He is defined by his drinking helmet, which holds java on one side and poison on the other. He is a polite, slightly nerdy professional who calls himself a zoologist and takes offence at thoughtless language (“I find that language offensive,” he said of “rule of thumb”). He is very touchy about his lack of limbs, and once said that calling attention to the problem was worse than the problem. He is also happy to show anyone his cloaca, a running joke the show never let go. His fighting style borrows from action movies and relies on a careful plan: poison, bury, constrict, then swallow his opponent whole. In his first fight the plan never quite came together. In his second, it did.
His natural gifts include constriction (his signature Big Squeeze), burrowing, shedding his skin, a nictitating membrane that shielded his eyes from a glob of blinding slime, and a tail that regrows after he drops it. After the Hunger assimilated him, he gained much stranger powers. He could ooze like tar, grow borrowed limbs, sprout fanged mini-snakes along his body, stretch like putty, absorb other creatures and share their senses, and swell to enormous size.
Relationships
- Robbie Clark and the Hunger: The opponent that defeated him and consumed his biomass. The assimilation left Ruby glitching and monstrous when he returned.
- Bone Daddy: His rematch opponent, whom he swallowed and crushed to bone dust.
- Darcy: Bone Daddy’s skeleton companion. Ruby dismissed her as “nothing more than a table to me,” which enraged Bone Daddy.
- Thea: Brought him to the arena, cheered him on, slipped him band-aids out of guilt, and finally restored him with a chinchilla and set him free.
- The Arbiter: As the Lord of Fate, he promised to put Ruby back to normal if he won, then complained when the fix worked too well.
- Thomas the Goblin: Botched Ruby’s revival.
Memorable Quotes
- “I don’t use Python… I don’t use Ruby or Rust either. I use Java.” (Eldritch Fangs)
- “I do not, which is why they can’t kick my ass.” (Eldritch Fangs, on whether snakes have asses)
- “But I’m a constrictor snake, bitch!” (Eldritch Fangs)
- “I’ve got every drink that I need right here. First the java, then the venom, then your blood.” (Bone Rust)
- “Your Darcy is inanimate. She only moves by your command. She is nothing more than a table to me.” (Bone Rust)