Bozz

Origin

Bozz is an alien who crash landed on Earth in the Victorian era. His real name is not Bozz, but something like Bzzfrkl, Bzznrft, or Bzzkltr; Bozz is simply the closest human analogue. He is very intelligent and has many powers. Like the others of his kind, he is more comfortable naked than clothed, and stands about eight feet tall, with no hair and a tail. Stuck on Earth, he becomes homesick, bored with the simplicity of Earthlings, and despondent. He wishes to kill himself. Right when he is about to hang himself, he is found by London prostitute Amanda Flynn.

She falls for him and together they start a business together, Boswell and Flynn, Consulting Detectives. They take on the mysterious cases no one else can solve, thereby keeping Bozz interested in life and not death, although he does regularly revert to depression and suicidal thoughts.

Major Story Arcs

A secretary asks them to look into her boss, Lord Giles Morgan, who has apparently died twice before, and yet still lives. Then she is mysteriously killed by a lightning bolt from a cloudless sky. They investigate, with Mandy usually taking the lead and Bozz hanging out in the background checking out details on the sly; for instance asking the local animals for more information.

Bozz starts getting bored and considering suicide again, but Mandy gives him a new idea about the case and he gets invested again. He makes a kind of electrical dowsing rod and finds the source of the mysterious lightning—a machine that controls electric fields. Created by Dr. Pretorius at the behest of a group of plutocrats called the Hand of Four, they used it to resurrect their political puppet Lord Morgan and kill the secretary. The Doctor imprisons Bozz in the machine’s stasis field, but Mandy and a new hired hand, Salem, break him out. Bozz then destroys the machine and defeats the Hand of Four.

Raising Hell

Their success brings them to the attention of Inspector Colin Fitzroy of Scotland Yard, who begins to bring other unusual cases to them. He tells them about some apparently demonic appearances just in time to keep Bozz from getting suicidal again.

Bozz uses his senses to find the source of the demons, which comes from the Townes’ family home. They try to interrogate the family but it turns out the husband, Bradley, has been hiding out in his room for weeks and won’t see anyone.

They are later attacked by some demons and Bozz defeats them by entrapping them in an iron fence that he turns into a malleable lasso. Bozz once again turns homesick and naively rebuffs Mandy’s offer to physically comfort him.

They return to see Bradley Townes and find that he has accidentally disfigured himself by playing around with magic. The culprit is his jealous brother Harrison, a real magician. He attacks Bozz, who ignores his pistol shots. When Harrison rides off, Bozz tells the horses to stop in their own language, and they catch up. Harrison now magically attacks them with a powerful magical orb, summoning a horde of demons. Bozz absorbs the demons into a makeshift wand using his alien powers, and Harrison kills himself rather than let himself be captured.

The Tomorrow Man

The group visits a carnival to lighten up, but Bozz is predictably bored. He wanders off and meets a street boy, Ollie, who manipulates him into helping out with some petty crime. They go back to see Ollie’s friends, and they all quickly become fond of the naïve Bozz, who says that on his planet, people always tell the truth.

A press gang tries to kidnap him, using a pad of ether, but it doesn’t knock him out; instead it blinds him. The kids take him to a mysterious doctor who lives in the sewers to help Bozz. Dr. Paine is a mad scientist who created a time machine and is trying to send all the government to the future so the present will be unencumbered by them. He tried to recruit Bozz to his efforts but Bozz refuses.

Ollie, Salem, and Mandy show up to rescue Bozz. They defeat Paine and destroy his Time Shooter.

Were-Town

Salem and Bozz accompany Mandy on a trip to a rural village where her father lives. He asked them to come because some occult events have been driving business away from his bar. Considering that Mandy hasn’t otherwise heard from her father in 20 years, she is enraged that he only called her because he’s losing some money.

They discover that the strange creatures are coming from a series of paintings made by the local Squire Blakblud, and go off to investigate.

After a chase, they find that he made a deal with the devil: he could turn Earth into hell as long as he spared the village. Not shockingly, no one else likes this plan and they try to stop it. However, Mandy’s incorrigible dad shows up and takes the final painting of Satan himself so that he can complete his portal to Earth. He drops it in a frozen pond, but Bozz melts it out and Mandy destroys it, saving the Earth.

The Cobblestone Jungle

Mandy tries to find out what Bozz does to keep from getting bored on his home planet, and he mentions the practice of Nrgling, their equivalent to sex. Mandy is quite interested in trying this out with the always-naked and apparently well-endowed Bozz, but he diffidently explains that one needs a tail to do it, and that she is “only human.” Hurt that he still doesn’t understand her affection for him, she goes off on a date with Inspector Fitzroy and stays the night. Bozz meanwhile enjoys some of Salem’s infamously spicy food, the first person to do so, and surprises him even more by “seasoning” it with some copper pennies.

Then they start on a new case the Inspector has brought them, a missing African jewel that is suspected to have been brought to England, and may cause a diplomatic kerfluffle. They search the port and are attacked by a poison darts and a laser cannon, the existence of the latter of which perks up Bozz’s interest. He then tracks the poison down to a specific location and they find Colonel Carruthers, an embittered explorer. He is using the jewel to power the laser cannon, which he plans to use to destroy the Tower of London.

Bozz defeats Carruthers’ clan of African warriors by battering them with a huge log, then flies up to stop Carruthers, who takes off in a hydrogen balloon. Bozz dodges his blasts and gets him to blow up his own balloon.

They recover the jewel and return it to Chief Baka, whose tribe owns it. Baka, however, starts to worship Bozz, who resembles the legendary gods of his people. Bozz recognizes the tribe’s jewel as an energy source of his own alien race, and they decide to go back with Chief Baka to see if they can find any other traces of Bozz’s people.

King Solomon’s Spaceship

As they go to Baka’s village, Bozz gets more and more excited. He hopes to find a ship and return to his home planet. Mandy, however, now feels despondent in her turn, as she doesn’t want him to leave. Bozz is oblivious to her feelings on this as usual.

They meet up with another explorer, Jan Kruger, with less than honorable motives. After meeting Bozz he hopes to capture him and put him on display. After Kruger tosses a net on him, Bozz fights back by asking a tribe of baboons to attack Kruger and his crew. They run off.

The group splits up, and Mandy stumbles upon a space ship, just like Bozz is looking for. However, she doesn’t tell him, since she doesn’t want him to leave. Eventually, she decides that she can’t hold back on him, and leads him to the ship.

The ship is in good shape, and Bozz is hopeful that he can use it to return home. However Kruger returns and captures them by threatening Mandy. Salem and Fitzroy (who both love Mandy and have been fighting over the right to her) show up and help rescue them. They battle Kruger, who ends up being killed after chasing a bomb into Bozz’s ship. The ship is destroyed, and they must all return home empty-handed. However, Bozz has finally woken up to Mandy and Salem’s feelings of friendship to him, and seems to have finally accepted his new life on Earth.

Powers and Abilities

Bozz can fly, with a top speed unknown, but probably below the speed of sound. He is fairly agile in flight, able to dodge multiple shots from a laser cannon.

Bozz is very intelligent. He easily picked up English and can also speak to animals in their own languages. He is often able to persuade animals to do what he wants. He can easily comprehend all Earth technology, even the advanced science-fiction-style machines like those made by Dr. Paine and Dr. Pretorius.

He is superhumanly strong, perhaps to the level of a few tons.

He is superhumanly durable: revolver bullets easily bounce off his skin, and he was able to plug the barrel of a pistol with his finger when it went off. He survived the explosion of a hydrogen balloon without difficulty.

He is not affected by gases and minerals in the same way as humans. He often eats metal, especially copper and lead, and when attacked with some ether, it blinded him instead of knocking him out. Eating porcelain gives him gas and alcohol makes him vibrate. He is able to taste deadly poisons and determine their origin without being affected.

His normal senses are somewhat heightened. For instance he was able to detect a secret passage by feeling the slightly cool air that came through it.

He can also see and “hear” many forms of energy, including magical and electrical energy. For example, he can feel the electrical energy in a hidden laser cannon before it goes off, and can “hear” the sound of a portal opening from the netherworld.

He can manipulate and absorb different kinds of energy, including magical energy, as he did when he converted a rifle barrel into a wand and absorbed many demons into it. He created an electrical dowsing rod—just a plain twisted piece of metal—that he could use to increase his natural sensitivity for electricity.

He can emanate heat through his hands, enough to melt the ice in a pond; this ability is usually used by his race during Nrgling.

He is able to manipulate the form and state of physical objects, as he did when he made an iron fence pliable and wound it around some demons like a lasso (this was not an example of strength; the fence moved around like a rope). He was able to make a wallet float towards him through the air using a twisted piece of leather as a sort of wand, which he started to describe by saying that “you establish molecular compatibility between two organic substances. Then, by manipulating electrons in the magnetic spectrum…”

He sometimes uses simple objects to increase or activate his powers, as he did with the twisted leather-levitating wand, the demon-absorbing rifle barrel, and the electrical dowsing rod.