Blaise Jeannot Andrieux
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| Blaise Andrieux | |
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| Publication information | |
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| Publisher | George R. R. Martin |
| First appearance | Aces Abroad (1988) |
| Created by | Melinda M. Snodgrass |
| In story information | |
| Alter ego | Blaise Jeannot Andrieux |
| Team affiliations | Shadow Fists, jumpers, Durg, House Vayawand, Dr. Tachyon |
| Notable aliases | the Abomination |
| Abilities | Limited Telepathy, strong mind control, and (later) body-swapping |
Blaise Andrieux is a character from the Wild Cards series of books. Blaise is Dr. Tachyon's grandson. Blaise's mother was Gisele Bacourt, who was Tachyon's illegitimate daughter. He was raised by a terrorist group who taught him to use his mind powers to kill. When Tachyon discovered Blaise's existence during the WHO-sponsored tour of 1987, he brought the boy back to New York to live with him. Unfortunately, Tachyon is a terrible father, and tends to spoil Blaise terribly. .. or rage at him for acting improperly. Blaise himself rapidly grows up to be an arrogant and cruel bully who enjoys using his mind control powers to make people around him act like total fools. Eventually, Blaise goes "wild," running free on the streets of New York and brutally turning on his grandfather. He eventually becomes a complete sociopath who revels in the suffering of others, especially his grandfather.
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[edit] Early childhood (France)
Shortly after the destruction of the Four Aces at the hands of HUAC, the alien scientist known as Dr. Tachyon was deported from the United States. This marks the beginning of Tachyon's "lost years" wherein he wandered Europe in a haze of alcohol and self-pity, deported and kicked around by fearful European governments that didn't want him. While a guest of the revolutionary Left in France and poster boy for other victims of the capitalist HUAC witch hunt, Tachyon met a nineteen year old girl named Danelle Dorcy in the August of 1950. Unknown to Tachyon, their brief affair produced a daughter, Gisele. Tachyon, having received a pardon, returned to New York, founded his clinic and became a significant figure in Ace/Joker society. Meanwhile, his daughter was raised to adulthood by Danelle, who infected the child with her revolutionary fervor. Before her death in a gunfight with the bodyguards of a wealthy French industrialist, Gisele had married the terrorist Francois Andrieux and produced a son, Blaise. Grandchild of Dr. Tachyon, the outcrossing of Takisian and human DNA endowed Blaise with enormous mind-control powers, but very limited telepathic senses. The key limitation to Blaise's power was his inability to read a subject's mind, though he could effortlessly manipulate it.
Raised as much by "Uncle Claude" (Claude Bonnel, a joker entertainer/terrorist known as le Miroir) as by his father, Blaise grew up surrounded by violence, living on the run from the law and with very little in the way of formal schooling or discipline. From an early age he employed his considerable mental powers to help commit acts of terrorism with childish enthusiasm and the full encouragement of those around him. Aside from being a useful tool in Uncle Claude's schemes, Blaise's powers were not derived from the Wild Card virus, so he did not register when tested at birth (mandatory in France at that time).
In the late 1980s, Tachyon participated in a World Health Organisation tour of selected countries to inspect the medical and social health of Wild Card victims internationally. One of these countries was France. Upon arrival there, Tachyon met with the elderly Danelle, who had aged while her alien lover had not. Still bitter and hungry for revenge, she informed Tachyon of the child he fathered then crushes his good spirits by telling him she is dead. Later, at the formal reception for the WHO tour at Versailles, Blaise takes control of a security agent from somewhere safely out of sight. The guard tries to detonate a bomb, but Tachyon overcomes the unseen telepath and foils the attempt. Puzzled by the powerful mental signature, Tachyon reviewed the government records for all known aces. No telepaths of that level were on record.
Initially, Tachyon believed that Danelle had lied and his daughter was, in fact, alive, and using Takisian based telepathy to attack the delegation. Danelle dies in a drive-by shooting before she can reveal any more, but Tachyon probed through her dying mind and discovers the existence of his grandson. Through Bonnel, in his capacity as a member of the French Communist Party, a meeting with Francois and Blaise Andrieux is arranged. The meeting does not go well and when rescheduled, Tachyon is kidnapped. Bonnel blackmails Tachyon into assisting an attack on the French presidential debate, but is outwitted by the alien, and his forces, including Francois Andrieux, are captured. Bonnel nearly escaped with Blaise, but Tachyon put the child into a telepathy-induced sleep and shoots the joker terrorist in cold blood. Using the dead Bonnel as a scapegoat, Tachyon claims that le Miroir was the wild card telepath causing all the recent attacks. Using faked documents, Tachyon leaves for London and then home, taking Blaise with him.
[edit] Life with Tachyon (New York)
Upon arriving in the United States, Blaise was uncomfortably fitted into Dr. Tachyon's already hectic life. Though he adapted well to new languages (English and Takisian) and excelled in martial arts, Blaise's powers and lack of a moral compass made it unwise to enroll the boy in public schools. So the young human-alien hybrid passed from one outraged tutor to the next, most of them presumably quitting after some brush with Blaise's mind-control. Occupied with running the clinic, Tachyon often left Blaise in the care of his sentient ship, Baby, which was immune to the boy's still developing powers, entertaining him with tales of his Takisian ancestors. An incidental benefit of this was New York's citizens were also kept safe. It was during this time period that Blaise first met Durg, one of a genetically engineered strain of soldiers from Takis known as Morakhs. Bred to be immune to telepathic powers, Durg made a convenient babysitter from time to time. Unfortunately, Durg, who had been raised by a rival Takisian House, had no great love for Tachyon and possibly reinforced Blaise's animosity toward his own grandfather.
Also during this time, Tachyon's deficiences as a parent became more and more evident. Harried for time, alternately inattentive and cloyingly affectionate, inconsistent in his teachings, which range back and forth from Takisian-based to more Earth-oriented beliefs, Tachyon engendered a feeling of aristocratic privilege, an abhorrence for the mundane, and a disgust for the malformed jokers in his already unstable grandson. Dr. Tachyon also unhesitatingly employed corporal punishment with both hands and his belt whenever Blaise misused his powers or, indeed, even suggested he might. All this led to day that became the turning point upon which the path of Blaise's future hinged.
While in Atlanta, amid the chaos of the disastrous Democratic National Convention, Blaise fell into the clutches of a tiny deformed parasitic joker known as Ti Malice. Able to fasten upon its victims by the neck, the joker could control the host's mind and superhuman abilities through direct stimulation of the pleasure center of the brain. Resembling a mutated fetus, Ti Malice used its "mounts" to partake in a wide range of experiences both sadistic and sensual. Surrounded by Ti Malice's followers, all addicted to the pleasure their master could induce in them, Blaise (mounted by Ti Malice) was compelled to use his powers upon a centipede-like joker in an orgy of sex and violence. One by one the joker was made to rip off its own limbs. Pleased by his new mount's excited response to the bloody spectacle, Ti Malice instructed his favorite slave, Ezili, to orally stimulate him. Blaise's first sexual experience involved mind-control and mindless brutality, a combination that would typify his behavior for the rest of his life.
The final catalyst for Blaise's descent into murder and mayhem was in the form of Dr. Cody Havero. The new head of surgery for the Jokertown Clinic, Cody found herself pursued by Dr. Tachyon, whose womanizing was legendary. Despite her resistance, a relationship began to bloom and Tachyon entertained the notion that Blaise might soon have a new family with Cody as surrogate mother and her son, Chris, as a stepbrother. This happy notion would never come to pass. Increasingly infatuated with Cody, Blaise was entertaining his own fantasies, ones in which she played the part of lover, not mother. Failing to purchase her affections with a gift of precious stones (gotten from Jube, but assumed by Cody to be stolen), Blaise followed her to the Jokertown Clinic and flew into a rage. The young man's sociopathic nature was now fully evident. After trying to telepathically coerce Cody into sexual submission, and a failed murder attempt on Tachyon himself, Blaise ran away from home. He was just fifteen at the time. Anti-Wild Card sentiment was on the rise, the Shadow Fists crime syndicate was taking over New York's underworld, Jokertown was a virtual war zone, and the government was helpless to stop the Shadow Fists' newest minions, the jumpers; teenage criminals with the power to exchange bodies with their victims. In this environment Tachyon's grandson would truly come into his own.
[edit] Leader of the Jumpers (the Rox)
At first, Blaise survived by psychically compelling strangers to provide money, food, and other necessities. Approached by Molly Bolt, and later the other jumpers, Blaise awed the teenage criminals with a taste of how effortlessly he could control their minds. Eagerly recruited by the jumpers and initiated into their gang, the boy quickly became their leader. Too late to back out, Blaise learns how Prime (an alias of St. John "Loophole" Latham) bestows the jumper power - through sexual intercourse. Humiliated, but unable to turn the jumper power against Prime, who is immune to the gift he grants, Blaise vowed Tachyon would wish he had only killed him.
Loophole/Prime, inconsolable after the death of his favorite jumper, David Butler, lost himself in sexual excess, creating more and more jumpers, while leaving the gang's day to day operations to his new deputy. Under Blaise's direction, the jumper attacks grow increasingly more vicious. While squatting in an old theater, drinking and watching the remake of Howard Hawkes' classic movie Thirty Minutes Over Broadway, Blaise fires his revolver into an image of Dr. Tachyon (as played by Dudley Moore) projected onto the big screen. Soon after, no longer content with controlling others to act as his proxies, the young man graduated to first degree murder, personally shooting a minor Shadow Fist operative known as Christian point blank in the face. Of course, it wasn't Christian who died, but another victim jumped into his place. After terrorizing CEO Connie Loeffler through a series of jumps into joker bodies, the Global Fun and Games corporation became a front for the Shadow Fist syndicate. It is later revealed in Turn of the Cards that around this time Blaise sprang the teenage murderer Alvin the Chipmunk from jail and got Prime to initiate him, mostly because he admired the way Alvin had killed his own parents. Amid all this merry mischief, Blaise continued to pursue his vendetta against Dr. Tachyon, using the jumpers to replace those around his grandfather and compel them to do horrible, though unspecified, things to themselves and others. Only one victim is mentioned by name; Ira Greenstein, Dr. Tachyon's personal tailor. Tachyon had hired wild card detective, Jay "Popinjay" Ackroyd, to locate Blaise, but had only been able to trace the runaway's whereabouts to the Rox - - where no one in their right mind would go.
Finally, the jumper's new leader made his move against Dr. Tachyon. Lured to a romantic rendezvous by a jumper in Cody's body, Tachyon fell prey to a combination of chloroform and Blaise's mind control. Breaking his grandfather's psychic defenses, Blaise employed his body-swapping powers to perform a bizarre triple-jump, one that left Tachyon trapped in the body of Kelly Jenkins, a sixteen year old girl, and vice versa. Cheered on by his drunken cronies, Blaise violently beat and raped the now female Tachyon, keeping her on Ellis Island as his prisoner and virtual slave for several months. Bloat, ostensible governor of the Rox and one of Tachyon's few joker supporters, demanded the alien be returned to his rightful body and released. In response, Blaise goaded the joker with photos of his hero's humiliation.
Subjecting his grandfather to further psychic, physical, and sexual assaults, Blaise unwittingly impregnated Tachyon with "her" own great-granddaughter, thus hopelessly tangling the unborn child's family tree. Tachyon's awkward predicament greatly amused Blaise as well as those jokers who resented the alien scientist as the author of their misery. Lacking her former telepathy, imprisoned in a lightless basement cell, cold, naked, half-starved, and now carrying a child, Tachyon finally caved in and acknowledged Blaise as her master. In short order, the Takisian was fed, bathed, provided with maternity clothing and moved to quarters where her captor could better observe the progress of her unnatural pregnancy. The victory over his long-hated grandfather seemingly complete, Blaise vowed that once Tachyon had given birth he would continue to impregnate her again and again.
Unknown to Blaise, other events were already in motion that would disrupt his perverted desires. Bloat was able to communicate to Tachyon through dreams and, due to the one-sided nature of his own mental powers, Blaise was unable to detect it. Also, as Blaise's child grew inside Tachyon so too did the fetus's latent psychic abilities. Through her psi-lord training Tachyon was able to tap into this low level telepathy and construct crude psychic shields similar to Brain Trust's. Further, the ace vigilante Black Shadow had targeted the jumpers for extermination after his lover fell victim to the Jump the Rich scheme. Shadow had been keeping Blaise and Kelly (in Tachyon's body) under surveillance for some time. Somewhere in her second trimester, Tachyon finally escaped captivity, but not her new body or its delicate condition, with Bloat and Black Shadow's help.
An attack by National Guard soldiers prevented Blaise from pursuing the unwilling surrogate mother of his child. Indeed, at one point, the fighting was so intense that Blaise fled the island accompanied by Kelly (still trapped in Tachyon's male body) and Durg. At Durg's prompting, Blaise set his sights on a new target, his grandfather's homeworld, Takis.
[edit] The Abomination (Takis)
Decades prior to events upon the Rox, Dr. Tachyon had traveled from Takis to Earth in a living starship with its own mind. .. the mind of a child. He even named it "Baby", and its personality had grown somewhat addled after years of imprisonment in a government facility. Still absolutely dedicated to its master, Baby was eventually released back to Tachyon. Blaise used the ship's blind loyalty to hijack it by having Kelly pose as Tachyon. Blaise fled to Takis, leaving Tachyon trapped on Earth in Kelly's pregnant form and without any apparent means of pursuing him. He could not know that Tachyon would contact a representative of the Network (a spacefaring culture reviled by the Takisians) and book passage to her homeworld, where Blaise was busily planning to carve out a personal empire.
Mentally controlling Baby, Blaise had landed the sentient ship in the territory of House Vayawand, Durg's homeland and hereditary rivals of Tachyon's House Ilkazam. With the body (though not the mind) of the Ilkazam heir as an offering, Blaise and Durg used Kelly to purchase their safe passage. Soon the pair began sowing discord and amassing power. Blaise employed his ability to mind control the once-immune Morakhs to deprive his enemies of bodyguards, and his jumper power to then discredit or murder them. Control of Vayawand was complete once Blaise personally executed L'Gura, Rayis (the Takisian equivalent of a king) of Vayawand, and took his place. Preaching a policy of vaguely socialist reforms and a program of interbreeding with the mindblind serfs, Blaise employed the best soundbites of Earth's greatest speeches (Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt are both directly quoted) to set an unstoppable political juggernaut into motion. Revolt swept Takis as Blaise's House Vayawand made military victories, territorial acquisitions, and committed atrocities, akin to Earth's Third Reich during the early years of WWII. Amongst the enemy camps Blaise quickly came to be known as the Abomination, the literal embodiment of the lowest epithet in Takisian culture, an uplanned half-breed that should have been aborted rather than allowed to live.
Accompanied by the aces Captain Trips and Popinjay, Tachyon eventually defeated her grandson and recovered her male body, but not before she was forced to give birth to "their" daughter. Though his bid to conquer Takis was unsuccessful, Blaise possessed an immense amount of virtu, that indefinable Takisian quality to flamboyantly succeed or fail on an equally grand scale. Indeed, Tachyon's grandson left an unremovable mark upon all of Takis, introducing such modern political concepts as demogoguery, propaganda, equal rights and class struggle to an alien culture mired in thousands of years of eugenics, feudalism, and apartheid like racial laws.
