The Bison (Eccentriaverse)

The Bison is a semnipotent buffalo prominent in the Eccentriaverse. Primarily the villain protagonist of The Bison and its sequels, he has also warranted mention in several Volkonir-related projects, and even visited the world of Camelorum Adventures on a few occasions, including appearing in the Percolation Warriors saga. Originally a plains buffalo from Nebraska that fused with the Stone of Bovinil Peril, he later fused his identity with Japanese college student Tomi Himada, following Tomi's attempt to kill him.

He is easily one of the most powerful and terrifying creatures in all of Dozerfleet Comics, bearing seemingly unlimited power and very few weaknesses - while still mostly retaining the mind of a beast. That being said, narrative measures used to ensure that he is seldom ever used for plots outside of his own tetralogy have made him a source of many jokes, mostly told to children.

Powers

 * Slurping: He can activate Kirby-style super-suction to inhale his enemies, as well alter the space between atoms in the victims' bodies to temporarily shrink them down while consuming them. This allows him to consume targets up to five times his size.  The power of the stomach portals to Africa is referenced as an explanation for how the Bison can afford to consume so many enemies without exploding, and partially explains how he can even slurp large military missiles intended for blowing him up - without showing any ill effects.  Yet, the use of them is seldom depicted in terms of showing where victims end up.  If he finds the location in the sky over Africa where his victims get teleported to, he can swallow them as they fall from the sky, thus putting them through the "Slurp Cycle."  Unlike Kirby, swallowing victims does not allow the Bison to copy their abilities.


 * Stealth mode: The Bison can turn his eyes back to their original form, allowing him to impersonate regular wildlife. When he leaves this "stealth" mode, however, his eyes glow red and he flies without raising his hooves.


 * Clairvoyance: The Bison seems to intuitively know when others are talking about him.


 * Super speed / strength: He has no trouble at all smashing through buildings or flying at supersonic speeds. Combined with some of his other abilities, he can use this to gain partial control over the weather, such as creating tornadoes.  He also flies without raising his hooves, as a defiance of normal thought patterns about how creatures are supposed to fly.


 * Immortality / Invincibility: Unless the "Kill the Bison Permission Clause" is fulfilled, none may so much as injure the Bison, let alone kill him. It is unknown for how long the Bison may live a single lifetime, though it appears that he can endure many generations, so long as the Stone of Bovinil Peril is bound to his essence.


 * Consciousness projection: Unless the "Gone Beyond the Bison Clause" is fulfilled, whoever kills the Bison will become possessed by the Stone of Bovinil Peril, and will slowly lose their soul and have the Bison's soul seize control of their bodies. The victim will slowly transform into a bison, thus becoming the new host body entirely.  Therefore, "whoever kills the Bison, becomes the Bison."


 * Plasma / laser eyes: The Bison can fire eye beams for a variety of reasons, mostly to incinerate enemies with. However, he has used this power on steel beam building supports to create his own 9/11-style destruction of skyscrapers he targets.


 * Tesseraction: He can seemingly teleport to certain places, in a pinch, though it exhausts him. This allows him to get places faster, when even his supersonic flight can't get him there fast enough.


 * Soul mutilation: The Bison can stare at a victim and force that victim to think about him enough to create a psychosomatic burning sensation that gives the victim the impression of their own soul burning in Hell. Enough of this torture can put the victim in shock, and kill them for real.


 * Telepathy: The Bison can link his mind with a limited number of other minds, knowing thoughts and planting disturbing thoughts in others.


 * Mind control: Those the Bison links his mind to are sometimes able to be controlled by him, becoming "possessed" by the Bison and forced to do his bidding. Usually, this compulsion also leads to victims trying to excuse their actions by invoking the Bison's name.  They will scream his name out right before doing some horrible thing, informing everyone that the Bison is making them do it.  The after effects of "Bisonic possession" may lead to prolonged instability or outright insanity in the victim, requiring hospitalization.
 * Power induction: Victims of Bisonic possession are often temporarily imbued with random bizarre abilities themselves, increasing the damage that the Bison can inflict on an area simply by virtue of his mind slaves allowing his influence to be in more than one place at a time.


 * Red-hot hoofing: He can turn his hooves into red-hot irons, and use them to hoof enemies with, branding them for life or even killing them.

Weaknesses

 * Stone of Bovinil Peril dependency: If separated from the Stone of Bovinil Peril somehow, it will be fully restored -including the Malice Engine (which drives the Bison to randomly pick targets for torment.) The Bison himself will cease to be; yet the Stone may bond with any other bovine-like lifeform that gets too close to it.  The stone becomes nigh-invulnerable, but immobile, and must be close enough to a bovine lifeform to convince said bovine-like being to put the stone in its mouth.  This new bovine will become a new host, until the Stone finds another host it deems more worthy of itself.  It has a preference for buffalo - particularly bulls.  If allowed to get to another male buffalo host, the Stone will bond, and the Bison will live again.


 * Oxygen dependency: If deprived of oxygen for long enough, the Bison can be separated from the Stone of Bovinil Peril. In spite this, he has been known to use his stomach portals to absorb oxygen from the atmosphere over Africa, as well as being able to transfer some of it to his lungs through a similar portal system.  Because of this, he can remain in orbit for long periods of time before having to return to Earth to breathe normally.  He also can only visit the moon for a short amount of time, and cannot travel into deep space without some form of outside assistance.  He cannot threaten deep sea creatures for extended periods of time.


 * Beyondness sensitivity: If anyone does find an elusive way to go "beyond" the Bison, then they are immune to him for 48 hours. He can only kill the "beyond" individual through indirect means, as all his physical attacks will deflect somehow in that time period.  If he attempts to burn the soul of someone who is beyond, then it will simply have no effect.  If he tries to ram the beyond individual, a force field will envelop that individual, and the Bison will simply "bounce off."  This can make him very frustrated, to the point of destroying as many proxy targets as possible to vent his anger.


 * "Sears Tower Come to Abu Dhabi, and Two Dice Roll Thirteen": A set of seemingly impossible feats are randomly arranged each time the Bison is incarnate.  Both of these must be fulfilled - in a very specific order - before someone gains temporary privilege to be able to kill the Bison.  If said individual meets these requirements, but fails to go beyond the Bison first, then that individual will become possessed by the Bison.  A male will eventually lose his soul and his body will become the Stone's new host, slowly transforming him into a new Bison body.  Thus, "Whoever kills the Bison, becomes the Bison."  If the slayer is female, her male next-of-kin will become the Bison instead.  And she will be killed by the Bison out of revenge for having killed him.  (To date, Tomi Himada is the only known Bison slayer.  And he suffered by becoming the Bison's second incarnation, since he failed to go beyond first.)  If the individual with killing privilege does go beyond first, then the Stone will be separated from the Bison, effectively killing him until the Stone can bond with another bison.

Inspiration
The Bison's story originated as a comical joke between two brothers whilst shooting rubber bands at plastic army men. A plastic toy bison was often an additional object that was placed amongst the soldiers. If one did not take out the bison successfully, then all the army men would fill up again for that side and the other side not having rights to the bison would have to start over.

In 1998, a mythology for the world of the Bison first surfaced, particularly to attempt to explain just how he developed the odd habit of flying through the air and swallowing men like spaghetti noodles. By 2005, much of Bison mythology was established, though there are conflicting accounts as to his exact origins. It was later revealed that a plastic bison figure from J's kindergarten class first inspired him to create the character's original incarnation. However, that figurine got trapped behind the vent, and was never seen again.

Personality
The Bison's primary personality and motives center around the goal of the corrupted Stone of Bovinil Peril, which was originally part of the Abdygalis. This splintered-off rock was supposed to enhance the Abdygalis wielder in their desire to oppose the rise of Statism. Over time, the Stone in its damaged state became perverted into having a lust for the destruction of anyone who merely tolerates excessive state control too much in their everyday lives, leading to the Stone beginning to have a disdain for humanity in general. The Stone prefers bovine hosts, but will work temporarily with a human or humanoid host.

When bonded with the Bison, the Stone has their resulting symbiotic merger behave in sometimes unpredictable patterns. At rest, the Bison lies around, behaving like an ordinary field buffalo. But when he feels threatened, senses that someone in the world is "profaning" his name, or just plain doesn't want to allow someone to succeed in life, he comes out of his place in hiding and swallows them or kills them in whatever fashion he sees fit. Overly boastful tyrants also have a tendency to attract the Bison to regions, leading to him lusting for their demises to the point of inflicting destruction on a region indiscriminately, with no regard for collateral damage. As a consequence, the Bison is cursed with an uncontrollable urge to send out psychic waves that affect the weak-minded, often driving them toward an irrational hatred of him often described as "Bison derangement syndrome."

Most of his victims are inhaled, swallowed whole, and his stomach decides their fates. Some are regurgitated later. Others are sent through a portal of some sort to a place in Africa - 20,000 feet in the air, to fall to their deaths. Still others are digested. He is able to shrink his victims in size, similarly to how Tobey the Toilet Monster does so, allowing him to swallow multiple victims and suffer no ill effects.

Those who especially irritate him, for whatever reason, may be hooved and gored, or subjected to psychic attacks. These include "Bisonic possession," where he drives victims to madness and imbues them temporarily with superpowers of their own to spread mayhem with, or "soul burning," where he damages the mind of a victim with psychic attacks until they are traumatized to death, often then literally bursting into flames afterward. The Bison has been known to use his horns to carve his initials into the backs of victims whom he elects to hoof to death.

If the Bison runs out of immediate victims, and begins to calm down, he usually returns to the plains to eat grass. If he becomes especially calm, and nothing provokes him to action for a long while, he seeks hibernation inside glaciers, encasing himself in ice to drown out the world that otherwise tempts him to inflict more destruction.

Trivia

 * He was originally created by the Dozerfleet founder's brother as a gaming token, but has since gone through numerous revisions to achieve his present form.


 * In his story's original incarnation, the Bison was an omnipotent (or semnipotent) buffalo who "walked in" on the 8th day of creation.
 * Resembling any other bison, he was nevertheless gifted with godlike superpowers and superhuman intelligence. From the beginning of time onward, he served as a source of frustration for anyone who grew too successful in life.  His anti-Statism mission was never defined early on.


 * The Bison doesn't raise his hooves to fly, to establish that he's not a Superman clone.


 * His force-shrinking of objects to miniature size to aid in "slurping" of them is modeled after Kirby's power set.


 * His plasma / laser eyes can function similarly to Superman's heat vision. Smashing through buildings and melting the beams is not something he shies away from.  He


 * The original incarnation used "acid dung" to incinerate the flesh of his victims as one of his many attacks. The current Dozerfleet version makes no mention of this.


 * He was able to form hive minds with certain other beings in early drafts, back when he was going to be part of the Dromedeverse. Those "of one mind" with the Bison, at one point, included Ferreto and Maldo, among others.
 * Characters who were imbued into the hive mind became extremely difficult to injure or kill, and could summon the Bison for backup if threatened.
 * Each character joining the "One Mind" also inherited a bizarre superpower from him - similar to how victims of "Bisonic possession" gain such powers in the current version of Bison mythos.
 * "The Brudders," a sort of mafia of mutated men who had become so cartoonish and misshapen because of their affiliation with the Bison, they hardly looked human, were also part of the Bisonic Hivemind. They became the Bison's "secret police," along with Ferreto.  Their job was to scout the world for those who didn't respect the Bison, and force that region to learn to respect the Bison's name...or else!
 * There was at one point in the late 1990s going to be a rival Dinosaur character to the Bison, that sought to keep the Bison in check. This idea was later scrapped.  The Dinosaur had his own hivemind legion, which included "The Uddah Brudders" and Ferretio, a rival to Ferreto.


 * The early Bison had no "Sears Tower Come to Abu Dhabi, and Two Dice Roll Thirteen" clause. He was simply immortal and invincible.  There was no way to go "beyond" him short of being God.
 * His fur contained enough "special information" and power in it alone to overload the most sophisticated data processors and supercomputers on Earth.
 * He did not need to breathe, and could even travel through space in zero time, destroying entire stars if he so desired.
 * He could also pass through Hell undetected. He was forced to wander Physicalia, because Hell was afraid he'd take over.


 * The original was described as a misunderstood monster, trying to proclaim of his own twisted sense of righteousness. In the current Dozerfleet version, he is for all practical purposes just another ijoju (異常獣, "abnormal beast"), the miniature form of a kaiju, certainly way too small to be a daikaiju, yet not humanoid enough to be considered a proper kaijin.


 * Due to the Percolation Wave, a copy of him was created inside of Earth-12131-F, allowing Bison/IvanRider a conceptual sprite to exist of him - of what he would have looked like as a playable character - had he featured as a character in Marvel: Avengers Alliance, as described on the MAA Fanfic Universe Wiki. However, further pursuit of the Bison's Earth-12131-F clone was abandoned after Playdom and Facebook discontinued MAA support on the Facebook gaming platform.