Characters / Team Fortress 2: Non-Player Characters

Main Character Index
Offense Classes (The Scout | The Soldier | The Pyro)
Defense Classes (The Demoman | The Heavy | The Engineer)
Support Classes (The Medic | The Sniper | The Spy)
Non-Player Characters

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Mann Co. & Associates

The Administrator

The Administrator (Real name: Helen)

"Overtime!"

"It saddens me that despite my best efforts to instruct and better you, some of you insist on finding new ways to fail."

Voiced by: Ellen McLain (English), MªRosa Guillén (Spanish)

The Voice. Also known as The Announcer, The Administrator is the source of the mysterious disembodied voice that announces vital events during the match, angrily berates the team upon failure and congratulates them upon victory. This disappointed and slightly angry Evil Overlord clearly lets you know in the world of Team Fortress, a tie does not mean everyone wins, but that everyone loses.

The Administrator secretly controls both RED and BLU (and, by extension, every country on the planet), supporting each team when necessary. To prevent either team from realizing this, she condemns any friendship between RED and BLU. She is Miss Pauling's direct superior and an acquaintance of Saxton Hale, allowing her to influence the production of new weapons. The Administrator has an affinity for cigarettes and the magazine Punishment Monthly, and occasionally posts on the official Team Fortress 2 blog, usually to berate the players for abusing glitches or exploits to gain unlockable items.

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• Applied Phlebotinum: In the comics, she uses Australium to fuel her life-extension technology, just like the Mann Brothers (though hers is far more refined).
• Art Evolution: Compare her original design with the picture on the far right.
• The Baroness: Of the Rosa Klebb variety.
• Big Bad: Well, she used to be. Gray Mann's abrupt murder of Redmond and Blutarch pretty much stole the title from her. She takes the role back once both Gray and the Classic Team are eliminated, as the former states that her motives are much worse than his own.
• Big Good: She starts to take on this role when Gray enters the picture, especially as of "Ring of Fired". Whether her ulterior motives are actually noble or not remains a mystery, however.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Some of her Mann vs. Machine responses have her directly stating that the players lost the game.
  "Do not all die at once!"
• Busman's Holiday: She spends her one hour per year of vacation time at the park... making the pigeons fight each other.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Just read the first paragraph of this blog post.
• The Chessmaster: Helen's plans for the Australium cache she stole are so shocking that their Unreveal reduces an entire senate hearing to horrified silence◊.
  • In "Ring of Fired", it's revealed she stole all of Saxton Hale's Australium just in case Gray Mann won.
  • As of "A Cold Day In Hell", Charles Darling has reminded us of the above mystery - the Administrator has amassing the largest collection of Australium outside of Australia itself for years in secret. Just what does she plan to do with it?
    • "Blood in the Water" gives a fake-out to her motives: it looks like she wants to power yet another Australium life-extender machine, but it's made clear that it won't save her life for more than a few years, enough to settle some "final debts".
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: In a world where a gang of guys dressed up in red fight a gang of guys dressed up in blue, it's rather telling that she and her assistant are clad in purple.
• Epic Fail:
  Flawless defeat!
  Humiliating defeat!
  You didn't kill any of them!
  Next time, try killing one of them.
• Even Evil Has Standards: She's fine with murder and deception, but really hates cheating. It robs you of the feeling of superiority you get from you besting your foes!
• Evil Laugh: "The bomb has almost reached the final terminus! Ah-hahahaha!!!" Well... at least she's happy for once...
• Face Death with Dignity: She used up her last supply of Australium in one go, which actually reversed her age in exchange for cutting her remaining lifespan down to only a few hours. She then hits us with this quote:
  You're right. It's over. And if I'm going to call an end to all of it... well... Well. Why not look my best?
• Fantastic Drug: Australium. She uses the substance to extend her life, but her words to Engineer strongly imply that the substance is addictive. She tells him that when she was first exposed to the substance, she wanted more, and it soon became all that mattered to her.
• Feels No Pain: Apparently she's suffering from nerve dampening in her old age. Well, OK, that was partly a lie. She's so old that her nerves have decayed to the point that she, by her own admission, doesn't feel anything anymore. It's implicitly demonstrated by getting her old Life Extender - which was sunken bone-deep into her arm - torn out and replaced without any anesthetic.
• I Control My Minions Through...: Revenge/Fear. Inciting conflict amongst former friends could only distract the Team from thinking about who was calling the shots for so long. Luckily for Helen, in this universe, Even Evil Has Loved Ones, and The Administrator's threats to the people and things most precious to the Team are enough to let the Team know what's in store if they ever make a move against her.
  • According to The Showdown, she can also control the Heavy and the Pyro through weapon ownership.
• Identical Granddaughter: Bears a strong resemblance to Zepheniah Mann's maidservant Elizabeth, down to the skunk stripe. Same with the woman that entices Radigan Conagher with the Australium some decades later. With the revelation that the Administrator has been using a Life Extender, they're likely all the same woman.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Absolutely relishes in watching the mercs fight and die over and over again. She also has several, uh, excited unused responses for players going on kill streaks in Arena mode, which you can still hear on servers with stat-tracking mods installed, and seemed to enjoy watching Soldiers and Demomen killing each other during the WAR! Update a bit too much:
  "Kill him, slaughter him like a dog!"
  "Dominate him! Crush his bones to powder!"
  "Kill him again, and again and AGAIN!"
• Ironic Hell: The Naked and the Dead shows that when she temporarily dies during the period of her life extender's inactivity, the place she goes to is much like the control room she commands the world from, except the Ominous Multiple Screens all show her face instead of monitoring all the places she usually watches.
  "This is where I wake up when I die. All the cameras face inward, you see. So all you can look at is yourself. For eternity, presumably. Very poetic."
• Iron Lady: She runs a conspiracy that controls every government on the planet, and is just as ruthless and sour as parasitic mold on a lemon tree.
• Large-Ham Announcer: But of course. Her screeches of "AUSTRALIUM" in Special Delivery mode are a particularly notable example, as is her iconic "Overtime!" shout.
• Living on Borrowed Time: She has a Life-Extender machine. The Naked and the Dead reveals that she had the last remaining Australium in existence, enough to give her an extra six months...only for her to burn through said supply just to reverse her age and to do one last thing. Even worse, the Engineer is horrified by her decision, since she only has a few hours left if she's lucky.
• The Man Behind the Man: Or, in this case, The Woman Behind the Manns.
• Manipulative Bitch: She commands and manipulates both the RED and BLU teams, without either knowing. She also has eyes and ears in every major government, for as of yet-unknown reasons.
• Mini-Me: The Pocket Admin is a doll resembling her that's wearable by all classes.
• Mission Control: For both opposing teams.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Despite being old and skinny in "The Naked and the Dead", she's strong enough to punch a thick window so hard that it cracks.
• Must Have Lots of Free Time: She has only one hour off work every year.
• Mysterious Employer: If you're on RED or BLU, you'll just know that she writes your paycheck and hires you to kill the other team. What neither side knows is that she owns both sides, meaning that they work for the same person.
• One-Winged Angel: When she is forced to accept that there is no more Australium left in the world, she uses the very last vial of it to transform into a much younger-looking woman with glowing yellow eyes.
  • Even before she does this, her elderly appearance is very deceiving. When she briefly loses her temper and punches a window, she manages to actually crack it with a single strike, despite looking so old and feeble that she could crumble into dust at any moment, and is dropping in and out of death.
• Older Than They Look: Played straight for a while, but then averted when her Life Extender has been shown to be failing in "Blood in the Water"; she's now exactly as wrinkled, decrepit and generally unhealthy-looking as you'd expect from someone who's burnt through at least one Life Extender machine. She plays it straight again at the end of The Naked and The Dead after she overdoses on Australium and manages to reverse her aging.
• Pet the Dog: Say what you will about her, but she certainly rewards excellent performance. Get a A+ credit rating in Mann Vs. Machine, and she'll give the team a bonus. Considering cash is absolutely vital in this mode, especially in Mann Up Mode, it's quite generous of her, and she's hardly reluctant about giving it out, either.
  • In "Blood in the Water", she shows a surprising amount of empathy at one point, admitting to Miss Pauling that she is proud of her and apologizing for snapping at her moments beforehand.
    Administrator: I apologize. You've done well and I'm... proud of you.
  • In the same comic, she gives a veiled thank you to the Engineer and his family for giving her more time than she believes she deserves. So she is at least capable of showing gratitude to others when they've done her favors.
    Administrator: Your family has already given me more time than any of us deserve, Mister Conagher.
• Phlebotinum Overdose: In The Naked and The Dead, she places a large amount of Australium in her life-extension device, which temporarily turns her back into a young woman but shortens her lifespan to an hour.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: "Tank! Kill it!"
• Purple Is Powerful: She controls both teams, which are colored red and blue. Yep.
• Progressively Prettier: Combined with Art Evolution, The Administrator was drawn slightly more attractive, or at the very least less creepy, as the years went on.
• Really 700 Years Old: Most likely the oldest living character in the series, easily somewhere over 150 if the theory that she was Zephiniah's maidservant Elizabeth is correct. It helps that she has a Life Extender far superior to the ones the Manns use.
• Red Right Hand: The white skunk stripe in her black hair is a subtle example of her villainy.
• Silver Vixen: Saxton Hale thinks so, calling her a "chain-smoking seductress". Her One-Winged Angel form certainly looks much better, as the Australium she uses to transform ends up reversing her age.
• Villainous Breakdown: She starts to lose her composure once she realizes that all of the Australium is gone, delivering a Big "SHUT UP!" to the Engineer before punching a window and using the remaining Australium to go One-Winged Angel in order to "settle some debts".
• Villainous Cheekbones: Has very prominent cheekbones, and is an evil mastermind.
• Taking You with Me: Subverted: She planned to blow up her base when Heavy shows up rather violently, only to stop when it turns out he came to ask for more weapons.
• The Voice: A particularly vitriolic one whose tones range from archtriumph to poisonous contempt, depending on how badly you're failing her.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: She has to ask Miss Pauling what friends do together, and she won't stand for it developing across the RED/BLU lines.
• Wham Line: As Miss Pauling lies dying in Gray Mann's island, she has what may or may not be a vision of the Administrator (who claims it's the same place she goes when she dies), and demands to know what she's doing, admitting she's always known she's planning something big, and wanted to be a part of that. Helen gives her a stony look and asks:
  Tell me, Miss Pauling... if you've never questioned my intentions, in a decade under my employ... because you "trusted" me... why are you asking now?
• Worth It: Her practical response to using up six months-worth of Australium to reverse her age and shortening her lifespan to a few hours. Or less.
• With Us or Against Us: A variation of this during the WAR! update, to the Soldier and Demoman:
  "It's me or him, and I pay your salary. Make your choice!"
• Workaholic: Apparently, her vacation time is one hour per year.
  • This obviously explains Pauling's limited vacation time as well. One must have to wonder how much Pauling had to haggle for the other 23 hours.
• You Have Failed Me: Plenty of times, usually when your team loses, and hilariously parodied in the WAR! update when she classifies friendship as a personal failure.
• You Owe Me: During Mann vs. Machine:
  "The robots are here! Protect Mann. Co! You owe me, Hale."

Miss Pauling

Miss Pauling

The Loyal Assistant

"You know, forgetting for a minute that we don't condone friendship, it's sort of... almost... uh... reprehensible. Totally and completely reprehensible."

Voiced by: Ashly Burch

The Administrator's young and perky assistant, taking care a variety of odd jobs ranging from secretarial duties to carrying out hits and disposing of bodies. Despite having a much more merciful attitude, she still gets her jobs done efficiently.

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• Action Girl: Has hints of this. While she's no mercenary herself, she's not afraid to do clean-work with her guns and was ready to storm RED base by herself with a shotgun to find RED's intelligence. She's fine with messy jobs like digging shallow graves, sanding prints off corpses' fingers, and yanking out teeth. She's also enrolled in a boxing class, though doesn't seem particularly good.
• Adaptational Sexuality: A writer for the comics stated Miss Pauling is a lesbian, which is part of why she doesn't reciprocate Scout's attraction, and possibly why she was staring at Zhana and Soldier fighting naked (despite definitely not be attracted to the latter). However, the video "Expiration Date" implies that she is interested in Scout, suggesting she is either straight or bi.
• Affably Evil: She can be sweet, polite, and considerate even when disposing of bodies of victims, and even towards an intended victim, like she is towards the Scout (probably) at the end of "Expiration Date".
• Ascended Extra: Sort-of. Before "Expiration Date" she had only cameos in the game's online videos, but now she's the first non-playable character to get a main character role in said videos.
• Beleaguered Assistant: To every member of the team, including the Administrator. In the Australian Christmas/Smissmas update, she desperately tries to stop the Spy from involving a child in a shopping mall massacre. The Spy outright ignores her, though thanks to him, the child singlehandedly takes out the Humanoid Abomination Old Nick with an icicle to the neck. By "Expiration Date" she's become the mission control, cleanup crew and backup member for the merc group in case of emergency.
  • For a more specific example, she treats Pyro like a child, inflecting the voice of a kindergarten teacher when giving them their assignments and referring to them as "buddy," or chiding them whenever they begin to maul their teammates.
• Bespectacled Cutie: Scout admits this is part of the reason why he crushes on her.
• Beware the Nice Ones: She basically threatened Saxton Hale that if he's not going to listen to her, he's going with her to an early shallow grave. All without breaking her Beleaguered Assistant/Perky Female Minion appearance.
• Big Damn Heroes: During "Unhappy Returns" where she saves the Soldier, Demoman, Scout, and Spy from getting hanged.
• Blood Knight: A more subdued example, but "Expiration Date" showed that she found battling a bread-derived abomination for her life to be exciting.
• Boxing Battler: She delivers one of her contract messages while in the middle of sparring in a boxing class.
• Break the Cutie: As her objectives go way downhill to the point of hopelessness, she begins to lose her composure. She even cries while she's imprisoned alongside the mercs in "Old Wounds."
• Busman's Holiday: She's forced by law in the Tough Break update to go on vacation, but she still gives the Mercs contracts when she's not hanging out with them.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Murder is apparently just another day in the office for Pauling. "Expiration Date" has her disposing of witnesses from the Mercs' latest shenanigans... while at the same time having a video chat with said Mercs. Her possible plans for a date with Scout involve burying said witnesses' bodies, while subtly implying that she intends to kill him too.
• Butt-Monkey: During the Tough Break campaign, a fair number of her contract calls have her suffering for comedy. This includes being put through electrotherapy by Spy, having digested hotdogs teleported into her colon, having her hair fall out while watching Medic use radiation to sew a heart inside another heart.
• Cannot Tell a Joke: One of her Gun Mettle lines.
  Miss Pauling: It's Miss Pauling. THE Miss Pauling. ...that's- I- I'm not actually famous. That was a joke I've been researching. (Beat) Could you write your amusement, on a scale of 1 to 100?
• Cleanup Crew: Most of her job involves cleaning up evidence and killing witnesses.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Again, she acts as more of a voice of reason to the more insane mercs and her boss, keeping the former on track during missions.
• Closer to Earth: Relatively Closer To Earth, that is. Especially evident in "Ring of Fired":
  Soldier: Miss Pauling, Pyro cut off my hand!
  Miss Pauling: Pyro, don't cut off Soldier's hands.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Since she does work for the Administrator (who oversees both sides of the land war between Redmond and Blutarch), it's only fitting that she also wears purple.
• Consulting Mr Puppet: When talking to Heavy about a job, she includes Sasha as if she were a real person.
• Consummate Professional: Takes her work very seriously, to the point of having a nonchalant chat with Sniper (the team's Consummate Professional) about the most efficient body disposal techniques while doing their jobs in "Blood in the Water."
  Miss Pauling: Heh. Is that where you were going to bury us?
  Sniper: Yep. Right in those shallow graves.
  Miss Pauling: You know, you could be digging those six inches shallower.
  Sniper: Hrm. That seems too shallow. Barely even a grave at that point.
  Miss Pauling: I thought the same thing. But here's the secret: get a hacksaw. Speeds up the decomp rate. Trust me, ten minutes with a saw will save you thirty with a shovel.
• Crashing Dreams: In "The Naked and the Dead" comic, Miss Pauling finds herself in what she believes is the afterlife. She finds the Administrator and asks her what she wants. "Blood," the Administrator says. "It's not enough. I need more blood!" Readers then see Miss Pauling's unconscious body lying on the ground as Medic shouts the same line, frantically replenishing her lost blood.
• Crossdresser: Her policeman uniform in "Ring of Fired" consists of a baggy policeman's uniform and a mismatched mustache. It ends up fooling Merasmus (but not Soldier, who sees through her disguise immediately).
• Depending on the Artist: Her appearance and clothing changed slightly over the years, but her current comic design◊ and her Source Filmmaker model◊ almost look like they could be two different characters.
• Distaff Counterpart: Saxton Hale acknowledges that his own assistant, Mr. Bidwell, is basically a male Pauling.
• Do Wrong, Right: After talking the Sniper out of killing her and the Demoman, she critiques the shallow graves he left as giving himself too much work, when he should have cut up their corpses to speed up the decomposition rate.
  Ten minutes with a saw will save you thirty with a shovel.
• The Dragon: While she's definitely a nice girl, she's also very much capable of casual cold blooded murder.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Miss Pauling will respect the letter of the law, when doing otherwise would result in bad publicity for her company. In what may be a more genuine example of morals and ethics, she seems truly terrified at the prospect of the BLU Team putting a little boy in danger.
  • A few of her in-game lines imply she thinks Medic's a little too crazy, even by her company's standards.
• Graceful Ladies Like Purple: She wears a purple dress while on duty.
• Gun Nut: When she sees a rare, beautiful gun, she gets doe-eyed◊. She also lists "looking at gun catalogs" as a way to spend time with friends.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Pauling's sociopathy is generally Played for Laughs in the Tough Break update's contract voicelines. One of them sees her going on a Teufort cave tour that happens to visit the same place she buries all her bodies in, another has her telling a safari tourist mauled by a tiger to "keep it down" because she's on the phone, a third has her shoo away a Casanova Wannabe by telling him "I'm trying to get someone killed for money, can you give me a second?"
• Hartman Hips: Has prominent hips◊.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Spends a lot of time around Demoman, Soldier, and Heavy, all of whom are much taller than she is.
• I Control My Minions Through...: Authority. She tries, bless her heart. She tries so hard.
• Incompatible Orientation: With Scout, which he presumably doesn't realize. Although it's still debatable if she's a lesbian or not due to a lack of confirmation from the staff at Valve.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Downs a glass of wine when she learns that Bill-Bel blew up most of his Australium cache by painting failed rockets with it.
• Limited Wardrobe: Depending on the Artist, although her outfit is always purple. Michael Avon Oeming always gave her a different outfit whenever she appeared (and is so far the only artist to draw her in pants). Heather "Makani" Campbell usually draws her in a purple dress with short sleeves, and a darker purple belt with black Mary Janes, and her SFM model portrays her in a purple shirt with white collar, black skirt, and black flats, and a barrette holding her bangs back.
• Manipulative Bitch: Miss Pauling will lie, turn friend against friend, and put a bullet through her fellow employee's brains, all while maintaining a pleasant demeanor and a (relatively) cool head.
  • After "Ring of Fired", she apparently had become very attached to the RED Team, to the point of trusting her secrets and her life to the mercs.
• Mini-Me: The Pocket Pauling is a doll of her that the Scout can have, which sits on his messenger bag.
• Mission Control: Comic-only example, but during the Administrator's absence, she seems to be the one coordinating the mercenaries' battle plans in between missions.
• Miss Exposition: Serves as this to the Admin and the Team, most of the time.
• Morality Pet: This blog post suggests she's this to her boss, at least a little. "Shadow Boxers" also suggests she's this to a couple members of the Team. Later issues show that she's definitely this for Scout.
• Motor Mouth: When she gets really excited at the end of "Expiration Date".
  Miss Pauling: That... was so... much... fun!
  Scout: You're not mad?
  Miss Paulling: I was furious! Oh my god, you set off the briefcase alarm! And you were having a prom for...some reason. But then there was a monsterandweshotitandIbuiltabombandIthinkmylegsbrokencanwedothisagain!?
• Must Have Lots of Free Time: Inverted, she apparently only has one day off per year. She hangs out with the mercs during her time on instead.
• Mysterious Past: Besides the fact that she works for the Administrator and Mann Co., almost nothing is known about her. In "Old Wounds", she claims to have worked for the Administrator her whole life; in "The Naked and the Dead", the Administrator (in Miss Pauling's dream) comments on the younger woman being in her employ for a decade and never questioning her intentions. Miss Pauling appears to be in her early 20s, so assuming both of those things are true, she must have been working under the Administrator since she was a pre-teen.
• Nerds Are Sexy: In "Expiration Date", Scout specifically cites her ability to read and her slightly crooked glasses as things he finds attractive about her.
• Nerd Nanny: Invoked, played straight, and inverted. Miss Pauling manages a bunch of loony men who play games for their own, and their boss's, amusement, particularly Scout, the youngest and most himbo-y of the bunch. However, many of the men, insane though they are, are twice her age, and a few can easily overrule her orders, ending up parenting her, particularly Spy.
• The Nicknamer: In her in-game lines, she picks up the mercs' habit of nicknaming them "Demo," "Engie," "Big Guy," and "Doc". In fact, she notes that calling Demoman by his full title actually sounds kind of weird.
• Noodle Incident: When calling in Heavy for a favor, she mentions him paying her back for something that isn't specified.
• No Full Name Given: Only referred to as Miss Pauling. In the "Fight Songs: The Music of Team Fortress 2" CD box, there's a caption that reads "F. Pauling."
• Not So Above It All: Downplayed example. While having good reason to be skeptical of the Soldier's methods to infiltrate Gray Mann Co. for espionage, she readily goes through with it herself when she realizes that it does in fact work (at least until the Mecha Engineer was created).
  • Played pretty damn straight in "Expiration Date" when she gets exceptionally hyper after helping RED fight off a large bread monster.
• No Sympathy: In one line in the Tough Break update, she yells at a lady to shut up while a tiger is mauling said lady to death.
• Only Sane Employee: Overlapping with Only Sane Woman, she is undoubtedly the crown queen of the trope out of everyone in Team Fortress. While she fears the Administrator and is unamused by the wackiness of the mercenaries, she manages to keep calm and composed in all but the most dire of circumstances.^note The only time this changed was when she realized the Spy is going to use a child to get them out of a jam in A Smissmas Story, even if it does work without harm to the boy. "Ring of Fired" has shown that she's even grown used to the mercs, which is quite impressive.
  • By "Expiration Date", she is pretty much become One of the Boys, showing that she has a close relationship or as close those of the team have with one another, acting as a hitman in case of an emergency (stolen briefcase scenario) and finding their shenanigans extremely enjoyable.
• Perky Female Minion: Despite breaking friendships and killing several people, she still comes across as this. Push her too far, though, and that mask of sweetness will slip.◊
• Plucky Office Girl: Despite being the boss's secretary and ground control for the Mercs, Miss Pauling receives little respect from the Administrator and the Team; her efforts to avoid bad situations have either been ignored or backfired spectacularly.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Despite probably being the sweetest and most "normal" character in the TF2 universe, she's more than willing to casually get her hands dirty with a revolver and a bag of quicklime.
• Progressively Prettier: Miss Pauling was a bit odd-looking in her first appearance◊, a little better in her next appearance◊, being cute if plain-looking later◊, to being just adorable◊ starting with the "Love and War" update.
• Quest Giver: She's the one who gives the players contract missions if they purchased a Tough Break Campaign Pass.
• The Reliable One: Miss Pauling's efforts to clean up the Mercs' messes and give them good publicity are pretty much the only reason they haven't been arrested and executed.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: She's seen using all sorts of handguns, including a Hand Cannon, a silenced pistol and a Derringer.
• Silk Hiding Steel: She's friendlier than most of the other characters, yet she doesn't have problems murdering, or having others murder, if the situation calls for it.
• Skewed Priorities: While downplayed considerably when compared to the Mercs, it's still there.
  "This isn't just a fight for Mann Co., or Saxton Hale. It's a fight for your jobs."
• Slapstick: Not even Miss Pauling can escape the slapstick. In the Old Wounds comic, she gets punched in the nose by Zhanna in order to knock the Classic Demo to the ground, who is sequentially strangled on by the Spy's leg-chains.
  • In some of her lines in the Tough Break update, she suffers such indignities as getting a molar punched out in a boxing class, getting undigested hot dogs teleported into her colon, getting bitten by raccoons, and getting zapped by an electrified piano courtesy of the Spy.
• Straight Man: Given the sheer audacity of pretty much every other relevant character in the Team Fortress universe, she winds up being this by default. This being the universe it is, the token straight man is a lesbian.
• Suddenly Voiced: Finally appears as a major character in an official video, complete with a voice and her own model.
  • It continues in the Gun Mettle update; she hosts the "Contracts" mode. She'll talks to you when you start the contract, while you do it, and when you finish it.
  • She gets still more lines in the Tough Break update, after being forced to go on vacation while still giving the Mercs contracts.
• Team Mom: She's the one mostly keeping the team together, especially in the comics.
• Teeth Flying: She's obviously distracted during the contract message she delivers while in a boxing class, resulting in one of her molars getting punched out.
• Title Drop: Delivers one in "The Naked and the Dead" to a dying Classic Heavy.
  Miss Pauling: We're Team Fortress. And you're dead.
• Unfazed Everyman: All of the violence she see's and has to do herself would break any normal person, she has probably been on the job long enough to have Seen It All.
• The Watson: Despite being like a mission control, she is slightly out of touch with how things are run on the field.
• Workaholic: Enforced. She only gets one day off per year.
  • The Tough Break update has her legally forced by the New Mexico Department of Labor to go on vacation. Several voice lines suggest she'd rather be working. Either way, she still gives the Mercs contracts.
• Yes-Man: Miss Pauling usually obeys the Administrator, though there are a few hints that Miss Pauling is afraid of what will happen if things don't go The Administrator's way.

Saxton Hale

Saxton Hale

Machismo Ho!

"Half the time even I don't know why I'm hitting something!"

Voiced by: Matthew Simmons (in-game), JB Blanc (Jungle Inferno short)

Testosterone Poisoning personified. Saxton Hale is the rugged Australian CEO of Mann Co., star of the Saxton Hale's Thrilling Tales comic series and an all-around man among men whose favorite pastimes include fighting, drinking and battling with rare and ferocious animals. Identifying features include his exceptional moustache, trademark shirtlessness, rippling muscles, crocodile-tooth lined hat and a patch of chest hair shaped like Australia. Saxton is the latest Hale to take up the reins of Mann Co. since Zepheniah Mann left its ownership to loyal aide and tracker Barnabus Hale in his last will and testament. His boisterous presence is felt in all areas of the company, from the slogan ("We sell products and get in fights") to the customer forms, which include tickboxes for informing product-thieving rivals that he is coming to pummel them to death with his bare hands. His inspiring image also features on numerous Mann Co. catalogs and promotional materials. He is known (and feared) for his belief in handling customer service issues personally, with his official policy being: "If you aren't 100% satisfied with our product line, you can take it up with me!".

As of the Summer 2023 update, Vs. Saxton Hale Mode allows players to take control of the man himself in a fight to the death against RED mercenaries. He's armed only with his fists, but has a tremendous amount of health and mobility, alongside some special abilities; his Charge lets him bulldoze through anything in his path, his Slam can damage and knock away a tightly-knit group of players, and his Saxton Punch is highly lethal against a single target.

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• Amazon Chaser: Loves Margaret because she's one of the few beings on Earth who can keep up with the carnage he can dish out.
• Arms Dealer: He's got perhaps the single most profitable arms companies in the world, having something for both the richest, most glamorous and skilled mercs around and the dregs, and everyone in-between.
• Ascended Extra: He started off as a small image in an update page, and later became one of the major storyline characters. As of the Mann Vs. Machine update, he's now the new boss of the former RED and BLU teams (though he's not paying them). As of the Vs. Saxton Hale update, he is now a playable character in his own unique game mode.
• Awesome Aussie: To Memetic Badass levels. In fact, he isn't even using Australium to do it, as he doesn't lose his physique when the rest of the Australians do upon the loss of their supply.
• Badass Boast: "I have PERSONALLY MANSLAUGHTERED 1,593 physicians in various forms of unarmed and/or unwilling combat" (from a letter in which he hears about a Hypothetical Fight Debate between him and Dr. McNinja).
• Badass Normal: In the world of Team Fortress 2, most Australians are tremendous badasses due to their use of Australium, and they lose their power once their Australium supply runs out. Saxton Hale does not - he really is just that manly.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: The only way of fighting he accepts.
• Big Damn Heroes: Shows up in "The Naked and the Dead" to help Team Fortress fight off the Classic Team's robots, as well as dropping a few crates filled with weapons for them.
• Black Comedy Animal Cruelty: He loves to hunt and brutally slaughter all sorts of rare (and usually dangerous) animals just for sport, including literally punching the yeti into extinction. The fact he does all this with his bare hands while never suffering a scratch makes it too absurdly silly to take seriously, however.
• Blood Knight: Whether against a dastardly villain, a monstrous beast, an army of robots, or a bunch of hippies protesting his products, Hale lives for a fight. It's a passion so strong that it ends up being his downfall in "Ring of Fired". He set up a policy for Mann Co. in which he relinquishes control of it to any rival CEO who beats him in a fistfight. Ordinarily, this policy doesn't endanger Saxton’s company since his strength and skill are unparalleled; it just indulges his love of combat. But in the present, Gray Mann exploits a loophole: Saxton automatically loses if he refuses to fight his opponent. He does this by establishing his preteen daughter as the CEO of his company before taking the challenge, correctly predicting that not even Saxton could bring himself to hurt a child. Upon his victory, he adds insult to injury by denying Saxton the opportunity to go down fighting.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Very much so. The boast above is just one of many. The bruiser part comes from his ridiculous feats (jumping out of an airplane without a parachute before using a passing bald eagle to slow his landing before somersaulting through a window and landing in his office seat). His passcode to his premium weapons cache is him punching a pad with 2,751 pounds of force per square inch!
• Breakout Character: He was originally just a small part of an update's blurb, but after gaining popularity, he became a recurring character in the comics, starred in the Jungle Inferno short, and was eventually Promoted to Playable as the focal point of Vs. Saxton Hale Mode.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: For all his lunacy, Saxton is shown to be a very competent businessman who keeps Mann well in the black, often by pulling Crazy Enough to Work schemes that pay off. The comics recount an incident where he realized that the elderly were an unexploited demographic with a fair amount of disposable income, and so started up an imprint dedicated specifically towards marketing to them, which was not only successful, but made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet.
• Calling Your Attacks: His playable iteration loudly announces his charged attacks.
• Carpet of Virility: In the shape of Australia, no less.
• Characterization Marches On: Now don't take it the wrong way; stabbing a knife deep into a gorilla's chest in a mano a mano fight and promising that every page of your autobiography comic will feature another's death is hella Badass... but for Saxton Hale the very idea of him needing or even humoring the idea of using anything but his bare hands to end the life of a living creature can seem out of character for the man who exploded a yeti with a single punch. He's also not shown completely shit-stomping the gorilla in that scene, where later Hale appearances would have him effortlessly dominating it in a fight like it was a child.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Well, he started out as a parody of the actual Charles Atlas, so it comes with the territory. Though most characters in TF2 are incredibly proficient fighters, and Saxton likely owes at least some of his prowess to Australium, he's the character who most comes off as full-on superhuman. In his own game mode, he can survive attacks that would kill any of the already-Made of Iron mercs several times over, and his fists pack enough of a punch to have an explosion radius. And this is barely an exaggeration from how he's written in the comics.
• Contractual Boss Immunity:
  • The Spy's backstab is normally a One-Hit Kill against an enemy, but unless the Spy was the only player on RED when the round began, it is only a Percent Damage Attack against Hale.^{To be specific...}The damage formula is Hale's max health divided by total alive players at the start of the round, but not less than 500 HP.
  • The Sniper's fully-charged headshot is also normally a One-Hit Kill, but Hale's health is so ludicrously high that 450 damage is just a small dent on him.
  • Downplayed with attacks that stun enemies, such as the Holiday Punch and some kill taunts. Hale can still be stunned by these, but after either a short duration or taking too much damage, he will automatically break out of the stun and push away nearby enemies.
  • He's partially immune to sentries (taking 50% of damage from them) and miniguns (taking 60% damage).
  • Humorously Averted with the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" taunt. Should Hale lose to the minigame, he will instantly die, no matter how much health he has remaining.
• Dull Surprise: In Jungle Inferno, his reaction to Bidwell telling him that he's just rendered the yeti species extinct after killing the last one is large annoyance due to the fact that he legally can't refer to his theme park as "Yeti Park" due to there being no more yetis for the parkgoers to kill.
• Explosive Instrumentation: As shown here, his company's stuff seems to just randomly catch fire, or melt. He claims it to be intentional, because they're products for men. The comic this fact first appeared in was later declared to be non-canon, but the gag itself shows up again in the one year Manniversary catalogue.
• Everyone Has Standards: He has very violent policies in place as CEO, such as accepting a takeover only if the rival CEO personally beats him in combat. But he falters with he finds the head of Gray Gravel is a little girl, since he can't bring himself to beat her up.
• Generation Xerox: Grandson of Barnabus Hale. Barnabus even got into random fights with animals just like Saxton does. As shown in the "Loose Canon" comic:
  Barnabus Hale: Skip me for now, mayor! I like this cougar's pepper sauce!
  • Less so for his father Bilious Hale, who seems to have been calmer and more down to earth, wore a business suit, maintained a strict "no mercenary warfare on the premises" policy and spent his days coal-mining rather than adventuring. That said, he was still ludicrously badass and macho, able to punch his way out of a collapsed mineshaft.
• The Great Exterminator: He is, among other things, known for routinely hunting entire species of endangered animals and even cryptids to extinction as one of his hobbies. By "hunting", we mean him beating the crap out of them up close.
• Great White Hunter: The greatest. And only hunting via bloody, lengthy, unarmed combat will suffice.
• Honest John's Dealership: He takes pride in selling shoddy products that catch on fire.
• I Control My Minions Through...: Money. The promise of a steady paycheck and a steady stream of carnage is what compels the mercs to stay after the gravel wars end.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Despite being the one of the most muscular men in the world, Mags accuses him of getting soft and gaining "baby fat" since he gained ownership of Mann Co.
• Land Down Under: And proud of it!
• Large Ham: Loud and boisterous.
• Lightning Bruiser: In his own game mode, which should not be surprising. His health and speed scale to the number of opponents he's fighting and the amount of health he has left, respectively, but even at his bare minimum, he has more than triple the health of Heavy and the same movement speed as Spy and Medic. His punch, meanwhile, deals the same damage as a random crit even before accounting for the explosion usually tacking on similar damage to a rocket. His only weaknesses are that he's restricted to close-range combat, and he has the entire opposing team fighting him.
• Meaningful Name: His last name, Hale, probably comes from the Saxon term haelaeh, which refers to qualities of heroism such as courage or strength.
• Megaton Punch: His trademark Saxton Punch is powerful enough to gib a Heavy in only one hit while also hurting other players near the impact. According to the Gun Mettle Update comic, his average punch clocks in at 2,751 PSI. For comparison, the hardest punch on record is 1850 PSI. He also splatters a Yeti with a single punch during the Jungle Inferno cinematic.
• Mini-Me: The Pocket Saxton is a doll cosmetic of him wearable by all classes.
• Naked People Are Funny: There are little other possible reasons for appearing on the cover of "Ring of Fired" seen from behind wearing only his shoes and socks. Good thing he has them back by the next issue.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: His actions (or inaction) during "Ring of Fired" render the entirety of the mercenaries' efforts at fighting the robots completely meaningless.
• Promoted to Playable: Vs. Saxton Hale Mode lets a player take control of him, tasked with fighting off everyone on the RED team. Notably, he is the first (and currently only) character besides the mercenaries to be made playable.
• Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: The Apple employees are quick to apply a certain incident in which the moon gets blown up to Saxton Hale after it gets announced on a newscast.
• Real Men Eat Meat: As demonstrated in the "WAR!" comic and his desk doubles as a griddle in "Ring Of Fired".
• Sell-Out: The main reason his relationship with Mags became estranged. 15 years before the "Mann Co. No More" storyline, Saxton was an animal fighting adventurer full time with Mags and promised her that he would never take a job at Mann Co. However, he did leave her when he inherited Mann Co. from his father and while he still spends a lot, if not most, of his time adventuring, he still didn't have enough time for Mags.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: He and anyone associated with Mann Co were "nowhere near the launch site of the rocket piloted by Poopy Joe, and have nothing whatsoever to do with the tragic explosion that occurred moments later."
• Testosterone Poisoning: He doesn't provide the trope picture for nothing. His list of notable achievements reads like a laundry list of Chuck Norris facts, except he actually did all of that. Or at least claims to have, and could plausibly have done.
  • AN APE WILL DIE ON EVERY PAGE!
  • You will believe a shark can cry!
• Unsound Effect: Tends to show up whenever he shows up in a comic (he's way too manly for normal ones).
  • PROPERTY DAMAGE!
  • BRAVE JUMP!
  • Extends to anything that looks like him, as seen/heard when Soldier gives Old Nick a COMPOUND ELEVATED SKULL FRACTURE! with a statue of Hale.
  • And in "Loose Canon", Barnabas Hale is shown fighting a COUGAR!
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Apparently, one of the reasons is because he worried about getting rabies from clothing items that were bit by animals like raccoons.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Even if it means losing his entire company. He is, however, OK with ordering his employees to fight one on his behalf, although it doesn't work because they Wouldn't Hurt a Child either.
• Wrestler of Beasts: One of Saxton Hale's hobbies is fighting endangered beasts. He's even caused a number of them to go extinct, since many of them are the Last of Their Kind.

Redmond and Blutarch Mann

Redmond and Blutarch Mann

Above: Redmond and Blutarch, 1850. Below: Redmond and Blutarch, 1971.

"I'm no closer to beating him than I was a hundred years ago!"

— Blutarch

Voiced by: Nolan North

The two twin brothers who own RED and BLU, respectively, and continually fight for ownership of a worthless parcel of land their father willed to them both. Blutarch decided to take the land by force by hiring nine mercenaries to perform a land grab; unfortunately, his brother thought to do the exact same. Since neither twin could take the land by force, both decided to simply outlive the other twin, hiring Radigan Conagher to build them a life extending machine.

---

• Always Identical Twins: Zig-zagged; Redmond and Blutarch are definitely this trope, but their fraternal brother Gray is decidedly not.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: They were the original owners of RED and BLU before The Announcer.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • As the announcers of the Helltower map, they might remark that "this update makes too much sense".
  • At one point, Blutarch mentions that he "senses a disturbance in the Force", only to immediately retract this on suggestion from his lawyers.
• Colourful Theme Naming: Redmond and Blutarch.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Blutarch dies once a day or so, his life-extending machine bringing him back to life every time. The same apparently happens to Redmond.
  Blutarch's assistant: Give him a moment, dear. He's just dead.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Both think that the world still uses steam engines in the 20th century, and even worse, think that gravel powers them. Gray tells them that it's coal that powers them and everyone uses gasoline engines now.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Redmond very nearly approaches a valid point by asking what humanity will use for fuel when gasoline runs out, and how there may be a need for a renewable fuel source. Unfortunately, his logic is...less than sound otherwise.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Even a colossal dimwit like Redmond knows digging straight through an Indian Burial Ground is a stupid idea.
    Redmond: Why would anybody dig through an Indian burial ground to reach Hell? Just dig somewhere else!
  • They're both disgusted when they find out that Gray killed and ate the mother eagle that raised him, along with her chicks.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Blutarch's voice is deep.
• Evil Sounds Raspy: Redmond's voice is raspy.
• Flanderization: When the game was first released, gravel pits were just some of the monetarily-worthless warzones that RED and BLU waged their Forever War on. Later the Mann family is shown to put the lion's share of their wealth in gravel-based investments, believing it to be a fuel source. Then as of 2013, Redmond and Blutarch use the word "gravel" in place of both "God" and "fuck/hell" in their dialogue.
• Godzilla Threshold: Parodied. Even when dead, they're still willing to win the war by sending the other to Hell.
• Identical Twin ID Tag: Their suits are red and blue. However, a closer look (especially at their character models) reveals very subtle differences in jawline and aging between the two.
• Inadequate Inheritor: Both of 'em. Zepheniah is so disgusted by his sons' petty bickering and buffoonish idiocy that he wills each of them exactly half of his empire of gravel pits with the ultimately justified expectation that the two of them will just waste their time fighting with each other for the whole deal, blind to the fact that they're utterly worthless (the gravel pits, or Redmond and Blutarch? Yes.) He leaves his personal estate to his maid Elizabeth and his extremely valuable munitions company to Barnabas Hale instead.
• Informed Poverty: On numerous occasions, people like Gray seem under the impression that Redmond and Blutarch's gravel reserves are "worthless" and that they're bleeding money. In real life, quality gravel is actually a sought-after resource used in construction, and doubly so in the lifetimes of Redmond and Blutarch, which saw massive industrialization across the US. Considering the two brothers can clearly afford mansions, top-of-the-line life support machines, teams of well-paid mercenaries and moving the Alamo, their gravel pits have clearly paid off with time.
• Ironic Hell: Blutarch says that, during the time between when he dies and when his life extender kicks in, "there is nothing there". It's a more than appropriate fate for the man who seeks world domination.
• Killed Off for Real: After a century of cheating death with their immortality machines, they are stabbed at the end of "Blood Brothers" by their brother, Gray.
  • They're ghosts now.
• Large Ham: Oh, they're hammy in the comics when they want to be, but this goes straight up to high levels of ham in Helltower, thanks to Nolan North's voice.
• Mirror Character: In the most literal way possible. Aside from color scheme they're both completely identical in both appearance and personality, yet they both loathe each other with every fiber of their beings.
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: They're the announcers in the Helltower map. And 90% of what they say is just bickering at each other.
• Missing Mom: She dies in childbirth off-panel.
• Mister Seahorse: Though never enacted, they were planning to build a machine to allow one of them to.
• The Nothing After Death: According to Blutarch, who has been continually dying and reviving through the use of the immortality machine. Subverted when they both die and turn into ghosts. Not only do they flat-out state Hell exists, they both try to send each other to it. The players even visit it!
• Oh, No... Not Again!: They've died so many times due to their respective life-extender periodically failing that when one dies, the other would calmly reassure any witnesses that their brother had just died as usual and will be slightly resurrected soon. Gray makes this permanent.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Not really. They can pretty much still do everything they could do while they were alive.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Blutarch does this twice, once to Radigan, once to Dell.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Subverted. Despite having a red and blue colour schemes, they both have the same personality.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: They've become so obsessed with their feud and so stubborn/senile that they've failed to realise that A. Their father basically stabbed them in the back and gave their real birthright, Mann Co, to a third party, and B. The gravel they've spent decades fighting over is literally worthless in the modern world. Gray actually points this out to them right before he kills them.
• Sibling Rivalry: And how! It started literally the moment they were born. Their rivalry was so strong that they turned into ghosts because they weren't sure who died first, and are still bickering and trying to sabotage each other.
  • They are competitive in absolutely everything. Even things that, by their very nature, aren't even remotely competitive, such as praying.
• Skewed Priorities: Aside from what they were doing in the first place... So they've both been murdered by Gray, they're somehow able to manifest as ghosts that can basically do what they could do while alive (and more, considering the state of their bodies before they died). What do they do? Get revenge on Gray? Nope! Try to send each other to Hell to settle the gravel wars once and for all!
  Blutarch: (last words before being killed by Gray) No! We still have so much gravel to fight over!
• Sore Loser: In the Helltower Event, the losing brother has the power to drag both teams to Hell with him.
• This Is My Side: In a sense…
• Too Dumb to Live: They spent their entire lives fighting over a worthless piece of land simply because neither wanted the other to have it. That's not even getting into their plans of having a machine built to make it so that one can get the other pregnant. Gray kills them very shortly after.
  • Just to reiterate how absolutely stupid they are, their own father, via his will, basically tells them to their faces that he's deliberately screwing them over and expecting them to fight over the gravel pits for the rest of their lives as punishment for their idiocy. This completely flies over their heads.
  • Further supplementary material reveals exactly why they want the gravel pits: they believe gravel powers steam locomotives, which they still think are the dominant means of transport. Even when disabused of this notion, they don't entirely understand.
    Redmond: Whoever owns those pits would be a god. What do you think powers the world's steam engines?
    Gray: Coal.
    Redmond: No, grav—
    Gray: No, it really is coal. Or it was. Engines run on gasoline now.
    Redmond: "Graveline", eh? Well, semantics, it's all gravel in the end, of course…
    Gray: [Beginning to lose patience] Gasoline. And no. It's not. Again, it's truly, truly not.
    Redmond: Feh! And where will the world be once this fanciful "liquid gravel" of yours runs out? No, I have it. We simply need to create a machine that turns gravel into coal. And that coal will power our PREGNANCY MACHINE, so we can — [Dies, again]
• The Unfavorite: Again, both of them, this time to Gray. They'll try to plead with their father for acknowledgement on Helltower in regards to who's better, but no matter who begs him for attention, Zepheniah will basically admit under his breath that Gray is his favorite, probably because Gray is cunning, dangerous, and not a total dimwit, unlike his twin brothers.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Whichever brother wins Helltower will send the losing team to Hell just to mock the losing brother... and he'll send his own winning team to Hell too just so he doesn't have to pay them.
• Upper-Class Twit: Pretty much a perfect example. Fighting over useless land for years?
• Vague Age: Averted. They're 150 years old.
• Why Won't You Die?: Blutarch has this to say about his brother:
  "I have mounted an epic campaign of leisure against the ravages of time. Waiting for nature to do to my brother what my men could not. And yet here we are at the end. And he... won't... DIE."

Zephaniah Mann

Zepheniah Nicodemus Mann

Quite a cheery guy, isn't he?

"I, Zepheniah Mann, being of sound mind, do hereby vow to haunt the earth as a horrifying poltergeist, until such time as I have quenched my all-consuming thirst for vengeance against the world, and especially against my dunderhead sons."

Voiced by: Nolan North

The above is taken from The Last Will And Testament of Zepheniah Mann, which is about 90% of his entire existence in the game's related media. (The rest is appearing as a ghost on Harvest Event and Helltower.) Patriarch of an arms dealing empire who wasted his fortune on worthless land in the Americas, his will sets up a posthumous vengeful scheme to set his sons against each other forever, and sets up the Backstory for this game.

According to his will, he has only given his belongings to four people: his maid Elizabeth, who got his personal estate; his aide and tracker Barnabas Hale, who took control of his business empire; and his sons Blutarch and Redmond Mann, who got the land to fight over.

He appears on the map Harvest Event as a ghost to haunt the mercenaries for waging noisy battles over his grave. Any player who gets too close gets stunned for several seconds. He also cameos in Helltower, where he'll briefly converse with Redmond and Blutarch.

---

• Arms Dealer: When he ran Mann Co.
• Asshole Victim: After coming to the Americas with his sons, he slowly contracted pretty much every known disease at the time, rendering him so sick that he ended up writing his last will and testament on scraps of his own skin. Considering his snobby, prickly nature, it's pretty hard to feel bad for him at all.
• Bedsheet Ghost: His undead form on Harvest Event.
• Benevolent Boss: Treated his employees far better than he did his family.
• Body Horror: Oh dear gravel, the sheer state this man was apparently in before his death. He seemed to ailed with damn near every illness in the world by the time he penned his last will and testament. Including eyelid tumors, skull bloat, and impetigo so severe his skin started sloughing off, which is what he wrote his will upon. He even somehow got womb fever despite, for all we know, being a man his whole life. It is likely only out of complete and utter spite he was able to hold himself together long enough to pen his last will and testament, let alone be of sound mind like he claimed to be in the above quote.
• Call-Forward: Tons, not least the 'pit of gravel', as well as contracting marasmus, the disease Merasmus gets his name from.
• Gender Bender: Possibly? One of the many diseases he contracted before death was "womb fever, a complication from a serious bout of superfluous uterus".
• Generation Xerox: Had a brother of his own, Silas, but the story hasn't gone into whether or not Zepheniah and Silas had the same kind of relationship Redmond and Blutarch did. Presumably they didn't, since Zepheniah never showed any obsession with one-upping Silas in the comics.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He's more or less the guy who's responsible for the eternal war between RED and BLU, and eventually, the Robot Wars of Mann Co. In short, the reason the Team Fortress world's the way it is? All his fault.
• Jerkass: He reacts to his wife giving birth with annoyance at her screams of pain. When told she died in childbirth, he coldly asks about the kid's fate. When told all three of them survived, he commented with "Good. At least she did something right." He also wanted to kill Gray for being weak and ugly - when he was just born.
• Mini-Me: A Pocket Zepheniah, in his ghost form, is one of the four options for the "Pocket Halloween Boss" cosmetic.
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: He deliberately left the otherwise worthless land to both his sons, so they'd fight over it. He probably didn't predict just where this would lead...
• Never My Fault: He blames Blutarch and Redmond entirely for his decision to blow most of his fortune buying up worthless land before even visiting it for the sake of pits of gravel (he dismisses the gravel they found as "fool's gravel"). As he puts it, "If it takes a brave man to admit he is in error, then surely a man willing to admit that both his sons are stumble-bum muttonheads is twice as brave."
• Pet the Dog: Generously rewards Elizabeth and Barnabas with his estate in his will: the former being given his estate and tobacco plantation, and the latter his entire Munitions company. Then again, it was either them or his sons...
  • It's implied that his ghost may have genuinely accepted Gray as his favorite son, or at least for being much smarter than his brothers.
• Offing the Offspring: He tried to kill Gray right after he was born for being ugly (and supposedly weak). Though his ghost now seems to give him the most approval out of all three brothers (for obvious reasons).
• Posthumous Character: He died a century before the events of the game.
• Rasputinian Death: In his trip to the Americas, he apparently contracted over two dozen horrible diseases.
• Trauma Conga Line: Being contracted with every known disease at the time can do that to you.
• Troll: He deliberately and posthumously screws over both his sons by splitting the worthless land they got him, knowing they'd be far too stupid to realize that he gave their true birthright to a third party, instead spending more than a century trying to kill each other to the point where they managed to commission immortality machines to try and outlast each other as much as possible until Gray finally shows up and kills them, and even then, they still don't give up on that, instead focusing on trying to send each other to Hell in order to win. Zepheniah's ghost is at least impressed by their tenacity, but he's more than happy to mock them both by telling them that Gray is his favorite.
• Waistcoat of Style: In ''Blood Brothers'', when he's discussing business with Barnabus Hale.

Gray Mann

Gray Mann

Elderly body, lots of experience.

"Unlike you two pampered imbeciles, I built my empire. I have studied. I have plotted. I have waited."

Voiced by: Matthew Simmons

The lost third son of Zepheniah, revealed in his hidden birth certificate. Rather than stupid and greedy, he's instead intelligent and cold, and he's made his move.

---

• The Ageless: He has a spine implanted immortality machine that is substantially better than his brothers'. While he has undoubtedly aged, he's still rather healthy and independent (as opposed to his brothers, who are confined to wheelchairs and constantly have to be resuscitated by their life-extenders).
• Bad Boss: In the Vs. Saxton Hale mode, he hires the RED Team to fight Saxton Hale for him. At the end of the match, he fires them regardless of whether or not they win.
• The Bad Guy Wins: In "Ring of Fired", Gray outsmarts Saxton Hale, takes over Mann Co, fires the team, and sends the Administrator into hiding... And then it winds up subverted by a hairsbreadth when it's revealed he wanted Mann Co. for its Australium cache—which the Administrator was smart enough to make off with when Gray made his move.
• Big Bad: Looked to be gunning for the position with the dawn of Mann vs. Machine, and has claimed and solidified it with each new comic he appears in. The put this into perspective, his sudden arrival on the scene caught the Administrator off guard. He loses this position in "Old Wounds" rather suddenly.
• Blackmail: Apparently tried this on Zepheniah for a cache of "miracle" gravel (hinted to be Australium).
• Cain and Abel and Seth: Gray to Redmond and Blutarch.
• Colourful Theme Naming: Gray, to go along with Redmond and Blutarch.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  Gray: And I sent the letters proposing this truce. Which, I might add, it took you literally thirty seconds to turn into an idiotic crime against nature. Congratulations.
• Didn't See That Coming: He was so focused on defeating Saxton Hale that he didn't figure on Helen having already betrayed Saxton.
  • Also, he didn't plan for Classic Heavy usurping him in the middle of his robot-army fortress.
• Even Evil Has Standards: While dying, he admits he was planning to do terrible things, but the Administrator's plans are far worse, and he uses his dying breathes to urge the crew to stop her.
• Evil Counterpart: To the Spy in appearance and weapon choice, and also to the Engineer in building robots.
• Evil Genius: He could talk right out of the womb, and apparently invented a new form of algebra "to pass the time".
• Gadgeteer Genius: He built an army of robots, for starters. While even he has flaws, he's intelligent and self-aware enough to identify flaws in his plans and know when to change his strategies, unlike his brothers, who engaged in an intractable stalemate for decades.
• Hypocritical Humor: Criticizes his brothers for wasting their fortunes. His robots run on piles of money. It gets worse: he chastises his brothers for thinking gravel has any lasting value... while his robot-building headquarters is his own gravel company. And worse still; in a non-canon comic, it takes him a year to realizes he's squandered his fortune in a war over the exact same land his brothers fought over. Granted, that's still a huge improvement over his brothers, who literally took over a hundred years to make than realization.
• Immortality Seeker: In "Ring of Fired" it turns out the only reason he really cared about Mann Co. was to get at a large supply of Australium to fuel his life-extender.
• Kick the Dog: After taking over Mann Co. and kicking Hale out, he doesn't even allow Saxton to gather his trophies out of pure spite.
• Killed Off for Real: Rather anticlimactically and suddenly in "Old Wounds". Classic Heavy yanks his Life Extender out of his back and he bleeds out/dies due to lack of Australium trying to warn Pauling about the Administrator's motives.
• Knight of Cerebus: Compared to most other characters in the TF2 canon, Gray is deadly serious and his appearance marks the shift to a noticeably darker tone for the overall TF2 storyline. In particular, the video debut of his robot army is much more solemn than usual and almost completely devoid of any humor whatsoever.
  • This doesn't make him immune to the other characters' typical shenanigans, however, such as when he accidentally burnt his hands on Hale's desk (which inexplicably doubles as a griddle) or even being shown to have his own Dartboard of Hate towards Hale in a non-canon comic.
• Know When to Fold Them: What makes Gray so dangerous is that, unlike his brothers, he has the ability to recognize when a plan isn't working and change course accordingly. By "Ring of Fired," he decides to personally concede the war for Mann Co. to Saxton Hale... but it's only a ploy to introduce his next plan. Through his daughter, he's able to wrench the company out of Hale's hands by using his own policies against him.
• Long-Lost Relative: To Blutarch and Redmond.
• Never My Fault: Averted. While he seethes at the fact all his robots are imbeciles, he admits it's his fault for designing them, and even claims that the "hailing circuit" was his one moment of weakness. Then he tries to fix his mistake by designing a MUCH smarter robot mini-boss.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Looks a lot like Christopher Walken, in some appearances at least.
• Not So Above It All:
  • He's used for a few moments of humor. And in hindsight, making robots that run on money really wasn't a smart idea.
  • The Vs. Saxton Hale voicelines added in the Summer 2023 update paint him as a petty Large Ham not unlike his brothers. He also makes a bad "gray area" quip in one of the round start lines.
• Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: Subverted in a non-canon comic, after a year of (unsuccessful) war against the Mercenaries, the money he amassed for his empire is all gone because he powered the robots with that money - which was used by the mercs to buy more weapons from the very company he was trying to destroy. All his robots did was give Mann Co. a giant loan.
• Older Than They Look: Surprisingly manages this. Despite looking like a man in his sixties or seventies, he's at least 150 years old.
• Only Sane Man: He is the only member of the entire Mann family, past or present, who understands gravel is worthless.
• Out of Continues: His Life Extender runs on Australium, of which all he has left is currently in the Life Extender (the tank is about 80% full as of "Ring Of Fired"). And Helen made off with the Australium cache Saxton was sitting on. He is not happy about this.
• Outside-Context Problem: Gray Mann is a Chessmaster on par with the Administrator herself, is relatively immortal and has a massive army on his side. No one was prepared for his sudden intrusion into the plot, and he has in fact nearly won several times; only some quick thinking by the Administrator and Miss Pauling have prevented his victories.
• Raised by Wolves: Just before his father could kill him as an infant, an eagle burst into the room (there was an eagle plague at the time) and stole him to its nest. When he got older, he ate the eagle and her children.
• Robot Master: Well, he is behind the robot army in Mann vs. Machine.
• Self-Made Man: Or is he a Self Made Mann?
  Gray: Unlike you two pampered imbeciles, I built my empire.
• Separated at Birth: From his two brothers, by an eagle.
• Surrounded by Idiots: He says this of his robots, but acknowledges it's his fault as he built them.
• Underestimating Badassery: He believed that the sheer power and quantity of his Gray Army robots would be enough to annihilate the mercenaries they were modeled after with ease. Gray also thought that the Administrator and Miss Pauling would be of little threat. He was wrong on both fronts, though his opinion of either party did not improve. Only in death did he acknowledge he had been outmatched.
  Gray: Do you have any idea what a man of my intelligence could have done to this world if I'd have gotten that Australium first? But I don't have it. She does. And as much as I hate to admit it, she's smarter than me. I think she might even be angrier.
• The Unfavorite: At his birth at least. His father initially wanted to have Gray smothered in the crib due to his unusually weak and frail frame compared to his brothers and his ability to speak perfect English at less than a day old. He is saved at the last second by an Eagle Attack. Much later when all 3 brothers are dead, Zepheniah's spirit tells Redmond and Blutarch that Gray is his favorite son because he's the only one who didn't grow up to become a complete moron.
• Ungrateful Bastard: He killed and ate the eagle that raised him, and its family.
• Vague Age: Averted. Like his brothers, he's 150.
• Weak, but Skilled: He's a frail old man, but a genius mastermind.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Downplayed. While he hasn't explicitly declared wanting validation from his father, his drive to conquer Mann Co. does seem to be because he's certain he deserves that family birthright, especially since his father never gave him a chance and tried to kill him at birth. Surprisingly, he's actually succeeded in gaining his father's posthumous respect, as the ghost of Zepheniah Mann at Helltower tells his other sons that Gray is his favorite.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In Vs. Saxton Hale mode, he hires the RED team to defeat Saxton Hale. If they win, he immediately fires them on the condition that he doesn't need them anymore.

Olivia Mann

Olivia Mann

Gray's little "angel"

"Hale! I don't have all day."

The daughter of Gray Mann.

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• Ambiguously Absent Parent: We don't know who her mother is. Considering Gray's incredibly advanced age, she may well be adopted.
• Boisterous Weakling: While she's all too eager to fight Saxton freaking HALE in a bare-knuckle fistfight, all her ankle-gripping, piggy-backing and hammering away with all she had did absolutely nothing against him, and she only "wins" because Saxton couldn't bring himself to beat up a child.
• Colourful Theme Naming: To go along with Redmond, Blutarch, and Gray, her name is derived from Olive green.
• Daddy's Little Villain: Despite her cute looks, she's just as deadly as her father.
• Disappeared Dad: As of his death in the comic "Old Wounds".
• Kick the Dog: After firing Saxton Hale, she sets all the robots on non-violence mode to deny him the right to a proper fight.
• Little Miss Badass: Subverted: she certainly has the attitude, and is confident in her ability to defeat Saxton Hale in hand-to-hand combat... but she turns out to be exactly as proficient as an untrained little girl would actually be, and her attacks consist of ineffectual punches, foot-stomps and bites that Hale doesn't even pretend to register. She still wins the "fight", but only by default since Saxton simply couldn't find it in himself to fight a child.
• Puppet King: Obviously, Gray is the real brains of the two, but even so she's been appointed CEO of Gray Gravel simply to cheat Saxton Hale out of Mann Co.
• Sheathe Your Sword: She wins the duel for control of Mann Co simply by being a little girl, since Saxton Hale was unwilling to beat her up.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Has not been seen since "A Cold Day in Hell". Her status since her father was killed by Classic Heavy is unknown.

Charles Darling

Charles Darling

"A hunter needs his trophies, Saxton. You of all people should understand that. You were my best student, once. Before you gave it all up, for her."

A very wealthy former adventurer and mentor of Saxton Hale, currently his nemesis. He owns Darling Zoos, and intends to capture every wild animal on the planet and put it in a cage instead of fighting them to the death.

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• Ascended Extra: Essentially, after his singular comic appearance that seemed to be a one-off-gag. Ever since "Unhappy Returns", he's become much more involved in the overall plot, and is entirely aware of what the Administrator is up to, as he's going after her cache of Australium with Saxton's help, and might be personally curious about why she's been collecting the stuff.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: Most of his appearances have him in a tuxedo, or at the very least a waistcoat. While his fighting prowess is never shown, in the past he has brought down animals several times his size, and taught Saxton Hale how to do the same.
• The Bus Came Back: "Unhappy Returns" is the first time he gets more than a few panels in years.
• The Collector: His goal is to make a collection of every animal in the world. He even has a few extinct ones.
• Early-Bird Cameo: He was already showing up back in Hale's very first comics before finally appearing in "Unhappy Returns", along with his introduction into the plot proper.
• Egomaniac Hunter: He fully embodies the Egomaniac part of this trope to its fullest and beyond. How he passes the time? Reading his own literature — as in, books that he himself wrote.
• Enemy Mine: Forms one with Saxton to get Mann Co. back in exchange for Australium.
• Establishing Character Moment: To make sure the reader understands from the get-go that he's an evil, narcissistic hunter, Unhappy Returns introduces him smirking evilly... while holding a self-authored book and standing before a self-portrait of him, both of which portray the exact same expression he has on his face.
• Evil Mentor: Used to be Saxton's.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: He wishes to capture all the animals in the world so he can keep them as trophies or make money off them in zoos. Saxton Hale wants to stop him so all his animals can run wild and free... so he can hunt them down and fight them to death with his bare hands.
• Immortality Seeker: Not Charles himself, but he wants to invest in Life-Extenders so his trophy animals can live forever in his collection.
• Long-Lost Relative: In ''Gray's birth certificate,'' Zepheniah's wife, Bette, is stated to be the daughter of "Wm. Darling Esq.". Could Charles be a distant relative of the Mann's?
• Punny Name: Of Charles Darwin.
• Trophy Room: Parodied. He has the typical den full of exotic mounted heads, but all the wild game he's bagged was captured alive and kept standing on boxes behind the walls, so he can always "look into their hilarious defeated eyes".
  Darling: ...These animals aren't dead. They're just sad.
  Horribly Depressed Giraffe: Mrr...
• Villain Has a Point: While he's a cruel, twisted businessman who runs the "zoos" he's created solely for greedy, exploitative purposes, he's still the closest thing in-universe to a real conservationist. (As opposed to Saxton, who prints comics with gorilla blood for ink.)

Margaret

Saxton Hale's Old Flame, who now works for Charles Darling. Agreed to help Saxton take back Mann Co.

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• Amazonian Beauty: Used to fight wild animals with Saxton Hale on a regular basis, and is still every bit as capable, so you know she must be this.
• Dissonant Serenity: Page 60 of Unhappy Returns has a flashback of her tearfully staring out a window during a rainy day... and casually strangling a tiger to death while doing so.
• Noodle Incident: During The Naked and the Dead, she recounts an old story of wildlife hunting with Saxton. Their hunt for one particular cougar ended up with them in the belly of a whale, with a bunch of hippies on a boat that got swallowed earlier. The next part of the story is left vague, but they did something inside that whale, and it involved said whale's various internal organs. The only other hint as to what it might be is that, while talking about that event, they share an intimate glance.
• Women Prefer Strong Men: Part of why she was into Saxton, it seems; when they reunite, she remarks that he had so many abdominal muscles she could barely count them, and nowadays he "only" has six. And after he left her to manage Mann Co., she tried four other partners, none of whom survived more than a week with her.

The 1850s Team

Redmond and Blutarch's original team of mercs, which appeared to be comprised of some of the most famous men of that time.

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• Badass Longcoat: Spy wears one. It's double-breasted with a high collar.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Billy the Kid (Scout), "Stonewall" Jackson (Soldier), Abraham Lincoln (Pyro; in this universe, Honest Abe also invented stairs), Nikola Tesla (Engineer), John Henry (Heavy), Alfred Nobel (Demoman), Sigmund Freud (Medic), Davy Crockett (Sniper), and Fu Manchu (Spy).
• Famous, Famous, Fictional: The Spy (Fu Manchu) is the only one of the team to be fictional rather than a Historical Domain Character.
• Historical Domain Character: All except the Spy, who's a fictional character instead.
• Historical In-Joke: Of course Alfred Nobel would be the Demoman, he invented dynamite!
• Posthumous Character: All of them are long dead by the time the game takes place.
• Multinational Team: This team hails from the United States (Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Heavy, Sniper), Sweden (Demoman), modern-day Croatia (Engineer), Austria (Medic), and China (Spy).
• Rocket Jump: The Silver Gun Mettle Campaign Coin describes Honest Abe as the inventor of the rocket jump. Though he was the supposed stand-in for the pyro, not the soldier of the original team, this is still possible in game, given Pyros can reflect and launch themselves off of enemy rockets.
  • This flies in the face of well established lore naming William Shakespearicles as the inventor of the America, stage plays, the second floor, rocket launchers, and by extension, rocket jumping. This also makes no sense as the entire reason why a young Abraham Lincoln invented stairs was so as to avoid the crippling leg and ankle injuries that could arise as a result of going upstairs
• Scarf of Asskicking: Heavy was apparently fond of these.
• Token Minority: As the Demoman on this team is white, Heavy is African-American, instead.

Gray's Mercenaries (spoilers ahead)

Team Fortress Classic

The Team under the Mann brothers' employ. Top row, left to right: Sniper, Spy, Medic, Heavy. Bottom row, left to right: Scout, Demoman, Soldier, Engineer, and Pyro.

The Team 40 years after. From left to right: Scout, Demoman, Engineer, Sniper, Pyro, Soldier, and Spy. Not pictured: Classic Heavy, Classic Medic

"Them? Don't worry about them. You've got us now."

— Classic Heavy

The previous Team Fortress, comprised of the characters from the game Team Fortress Classic. Gray Mann reunites them to battle against their successors. As revealed in Catch-Up, they used to work for Redmond and Blutarch starting from 1930 before they were fired and replaced with the Modern Team sometime before 1968. For their game-related tropes, you can go here.

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• Anti-Villain: On the outset, their goals are no different that their successors': Kill people and steal stuff for money. Although their methods are a bit more brutal (compare Modern Sniper's preference for headshots to kill a target immediately, vs Classic Sniper's preference for bodyshots to let them suffer before they die). In the end, they actually care for one another as friends far more than the Modern Team, with Classic Heavy even betraying his principle to try and secure life extension machines for his team to prolong their lives. Compare this to earlier in the arch, where Modern Sniper was debating on murdering an unconscious Modern Demoman, but was only stopped by Ms. Pauling because they needed Modern Demoman for the upcoming mission.
  • However, "The Naked and the Dead" seems to subvert this, as the Classic Team quickly show themselves to be more morally bankrupt than the Modern Team; The Classic Pyro is incredibly sadistic (even more so than the other mercs), the Classic Sniper seems to prefer drawing out his kills compared to the Modern Sniper (who prefers to just kill his targets and be done with it), and the Classic Heavy is an arrogant Immortality Seeker who has no problem murdering his employers if he can benefit from it as well as torturing and murdering the Modern Team. And this isn't even getting into the Classic Scout and Soldier wanting an orphanage for an "endless supply of free kids" for God knows what...
• Archnemesis Dad: Might be the case in terms of Modern Engie/Dell and Classic Engie, since the Engineer Update revealed TFC Engie to be Dell's father.
• Arc Villain: In "Old Wounds" and "The Naked and the Dead".
• Artificial Limbs: Classic Engineer has an entire robotic lower half.
• Bait the Dog: A consistent characterization amongst almost all of them is that their Laughably Evil and Affably Evil personalities inevitably give way to depravity. For instance Scout and Soldier have a heartwarming talk about quitting the team to start their dream of having opening an orphanage... to give them an endless supply of children to use for something unspecified that can't be good.
• Badass Crew: Much more militaristic than the modern team and with none of the dysfunctionality.
• Band of Brothers: Classic Heavy specifically refers to the team as "my men" at one point and is visibly angry when he learns they may have been subjected to experiments by the modern Medic. As of "Old Wounds," Classic Heavy kills Gray and attempts to kill the modern Team due to the deaths of his own teammates.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The modern team has been wearing solely red garb since the disbanding of RED and BLU. These guys wear blue. This may possibly point towards an in-game appearance down the line, much like how Gray's robots are colored blue in-game and up against solely red mercs, despite initial promotional material depicting them as gray-colored and fighting a united RED/BLU force.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Classic Pyro drills into Modern Soldier's Teeth after he's accidentally spilled the information they need and intends to do the same to Zhanna.
• Combat Pragmatist: Subverted at first when Classic Heavy bring a gun to a fistfight, he uses it to kill the Medic and throw it away to challenge the Modern Heavy at fisticuff. When he is clearly losing due to a enraged Heavy he try desperately to crawl back to his pistol and then finally using the Extending life machine, this line sum it up
  Modern Heavy: You are a coward.
  Classic Heavy: You think I care? Winnin's winnin' pal.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: These hardened killers met some doozies.
  • Classic Pyro had one of her napalm grenades shoved into her suit which was then sealed over it. The suit held. Classic Pyro...not so much.
  • Classic Spy was punched so hard by Soldier it snapped his neck.
  • Spy strangled Classic Demo to death with his foot manacles.
  • Classic Sniper was counter-sniped.
  • Classic Scout and Soldier were burned alive by Pyro.
  • And finally, after getting gruesomely gored and beaten by both Medic and Heavy, Classic Heavy aged decades in seconds while bleeding out and simultaneously giving birth to a baboon. Not good.
• Double Tap: Classic Sniper shot Sniper twice when they first met, killing him. Medic managed to bring him back later though.
  Classic Heavy: We SHOT him! TWICE! That means we wanted him dead, you useless kraut $@#$%!
• The Dragon: They report directly to Gray Mann and are just as dangerous as the modern team. Probably moreso; according to Gray, they "came highly recommended" and they've certainly proven why so far. The Classic Heavy in particular seems to be the team's leader.
  • The Administrator gives credence to the "more dangerous" bit in "Blood in the Water". She warns Miss Pauling about this team and, upon Pauling's assertion that she and the modern team can handle them, dismisses this and advises for her and the modern team to just run as soon as they encounter them. Her advice turns out to be well-founded, if only because the Modern team have almost no weapons.
• Dragon Ascendant: Classic Heavy usurps Gray's position as this in "Old Wounds."
• Evil Counterpart: Every class on the modern team is represented here. Which makes sense.
• Evil Old Folks: They technically all qualify, but Classic Sniper, Heavy and Pyro qualify more than the rest.
• Feed It a Bomb: Not literally, but the way Zhanna stuffs a grenade down Classic Pyro's Suit before stuffing her helmet back on gives the same visual image.
• Foil: The Classic team are opposites to the Modern team in almost every way besides their jobs. Realistic Private Military Contractors who treat each other with the formality of coworkers vs. an Army of Thieves and Whores that will go at each others' throats but reconcile to get jobs done. Sadists that love torturing their enemies to get what they need, against a roster of overly violent mercenaries — about half of whom are lunatics — that would probably kill far more people than necessary unintentionally. Unsympathetic Anti Heroes compared to morally grey heroes that do their work for reasons beyond their own paycheck; the list goes on.
• Given Name Reveal:
  • Scout: Greg.
  • Soldier: Ross.
  • Pyro: Beatrice.
  • Demoman: Greg.
  • Heavy: While it wasn't used in the story proper, during the writing process he was referred to as "Chevy".
  • Engineer: Fred.
  • Sniper: Virgil.
• Kick the Dog: Classic Heavy takes out his frustrations with the modern medic by crushing Archimedes.
• Killed Off for Real: Classic Pyro (Beatrice), Classic Demo (Greg) and Classic Spy are all murdered by the Modern Team in "Old Wounds". By the time "The Naked and the Dead" ends, the only one left alive is the Classic Engineer, considering that the Classic Medic is nowhere to be found.
• Knight of Cerebus: Much like Gray himself, the classic team is dead serious and much more competent and organized than their modern counterparts. Fitting, considering the tone of their game compared to that of TF2.
• Large and in Charge: While not as impressive as Saxton Hale, the Classic Heavy is literally a bodybuilder in his 60s. He towers most of the cast and is specially intimidating when paired with Gray Mann or the Medic.
• Legacy Team: The original holders of the "Team Fortress" designation. When the modern team entered the picture, they appended "Classic" to their name.
• Mirror Boss: An Australium-enhanced Classic Heavy serves as one to Modern Heavy in a close-quarters brawl between the two.
• Mister Seahorse: The modern Medic's literal context, in "The Naked and the Dead", says it all: The classic Heavy could have given birth to a baboon from a uterus the Medic put inside him at the press of a button. And if this panel◊ is anything to go by, he did.
• Moral Myopia: Classic Heavy is murderously enraged when the Modern team kills some of his friends. He himself has no problem murdering their members, torturing their members, killing his own employer, as long as it gets him what he wants. It makes it kind of hard to feel bad for him, put it that way.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Classic Spy disguises himself as Modern Heavy to trick information out of Miss Pauling, and winds up walking into and interrupting hers and Spy's dual cyanide suicide attempt. While he's successful in obtaining said information which became worthless as Gray and nearly every Classic member dies in the end, had he just let Miss Pauling and Spy die, the modern team would've been down two of their major members.
• No Name Given: Like his modern counterpart, the classic Spy's name is not mentioned.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Averted for the Classic Engie, who responds to the Classic Heavy telling him to make more life-extenders by saying that it would take more biology knowledge than he has and that he's primarily an automated defense system engineer. He doesn't have the eleven PhD's that his son does.
• One-Winged Angel: Classic Heavy gets much, much stronger by jabbing Gray's life extender into his side after Modern Heavy gives him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown for killing Modern Medic.
  • Which becomes a Clipped-Wing Angel after he has it forcibly removed where he dies not too long after being taken off of the life extender.
• Only Sane Man: Also like Gray, they don't exactly approve of the antics around them. Modern Medic has already done quite a bit to get on their nerves.
  • As of "Blood in the Water", these guys show just how much they're playing for keeps. Right after a tragic-yet-still-somewhat-goofy scene involving most of the modern mercs (along with Miss Pauling and Heavy's sister, Zhanna), these guys show up and any trace of humor immediately vanishes as Classic Sniper immediately puts two bullets in his modern counterpart's chest before anyone can even react. The issue immediately ends on a cliffhanger showing the classic team with a massive upper hand and the modern team looking utterly terrified.
  • The Classic Engie seems to slip into this role after Classic Heavy makes his intentions clear, at least in conversation with him.
• Only in It for the Money: Classic Heavy makes his team's priorities perfectly clear.
  Classic Heavy: [The Administrator will] have to reveal herself soon. When she does? We'll kill all of them. You'll get your rocks. And we'd better get paid.
  • Subverted when they backstab Gray Mann to take the Australium for themselves and obtain immortality. "The Naked and the Dead" reveals that it's only really Classic Heavy's motive, the rest really are just in it for the money (except the Scout and Soldier, who share a dream of something involving large amounts of orphans).
• Outside-Genre Foe: Compared to the more comical modern team, the Classic mercs are played dead serious. They almost read like an attempt to show what Heroic Comedic Sociopaths like the team would be like if they were in an even slightly realistic setting.
• Predecessor Villains: Both Gameplay and Storywise, the Classic team is this to their modern TF2 counterparts.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: They were the original team from Team Fortress Classic
• Private Military Contractors: They certainly give off this vibe. They appear to act as a military unit and hire themselves out as a whole.
• Professional Killer: Just like our heroes, though much more emphasis on the "professional" part.
• Psycho Rangers: Brought out of retirement specifically to hunt down the modern team.
• Punch-Clock Villain: They have absolutely no interest in the Australium and merely regard Gray as an employer with a paycheck to provide. Except for the Classic Heavy, who is an Immortality Seeker.
• Put on a Bus: Classic Medic is either fully retired or dead.
• Rapid Aging: Classic Heavy is on the receiving end of this after having Gray's life extender removed from him, and he dies not shortly after. Interestingly, he appears to age far past what he looked like before he installs the life extender.
• Retcon: Possibly. Art from the Engineer Update implied the Classic Engy was current Engy's father, but this Engineer is either unrelated to him or looks much different due to age. This stands out moreso since Catch Up shows the whole team in their prime, and Classic Engy does look like Modern Engy's father. Then again, forty years (in-universe) is enough time for his appearance to change so drastically. The Classic Pyro was unambiguously male in Team Fortress Classic, since they all shared the same masculine voice lines. "Old Wounds" revealed that the Classic Pyro was a woman named Beatrice.
• Retired Badass: All of them, but they've been brought out of retirement.
• The Rival: For the RED Team mercs.
• Rogue Protagonist: Not that they were ever said to be the good guys in the original game, however.
• Samus Is a Girl: The Classic Pyro is revealed to be an old woman named Beatrice in "Old Wounds."
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Classic Scout and Soldier think about taking off and starting an orphanage when things get rough. Unfortunately for them, Pyro had other ideas.
• The Sixth Ranger: Ninth, rather. The only member of their team to have been replaced is Classic Medic, whose spot is now filled by the modern TF2 Medic.
• The Smurfette Principle: The Pyro is the only woman on the team.
• The Starscream: Classic Heavy kills Gray Mann and takes over his operation.
• Stealth Pun: The only member of the Classic team not accounted for is the Classic Medic, who has been replaced by the Modern Medic. Much like their old days, It seems like they were "IN NEED OF MEDICAL ATTENTION!"
• True Sight: It's revealed Classic Sniper got eye replacements that give him a version of this, one that can see through everything including Spy disguises.
  "I trusted him. To pluck out my eyes and replace 'em with these. Damn things see through everything. Can't sleep at night, they see right through my eyelids. But let me tell you, it's worth it to see you rat*** spies coming."
• Villain Ball: TFC's members seem to fall into this in "The Naked and the Dead". Notable in that up to that point they were completely professional about their job and didn't make such mistakes.
  • Classic Sniper gloats to the Modern Spy instead of killing him on the spot, which gives Modern Sniper enough time to climb through the window and kill him with his own sniper rifle. Modern Sniper lampshades this afterwards, calling him a sadist rather than a sniper.
  • Later, the Classic Heavy manages to convince Modern Heavy to drop his minigun, and then pulls out his own concealed pistol, which he uses to kill Modern Medic... and then discards in favor of Good Old Fisticuffs with Heavy, who is younger, a competent fighter in his own right, one of the few people as big as he is, and pissed at him for killing Medic. While he has a severe stab wound in his gut and a deep gash across his face from Medic's saw no less.
• Villainous Friendship: The Classic Heavy seems to be quite fond of his teammates.
  Classic Heavy: (unleashing blood-sucking robots at his captives) You killed some good soldiers today. Friends of mine. I hope this hurts.
• Walking Spoiler: The fact that this team plays a big role in the Team Fortress Comics series is already a massive twist, especially since they are only introduced about halfway into the story with very little foreshadowing. However, it's the Modern Medic's involvement and their eventual betrayal of Gray in "Old Wounds" which really seals the deal.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Classic Soldier and Classic Scout don't get to do any on-screen fighting before getting Killed Offscreen by modern Pyro.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The Combat Medic and Civilian are the only TFC classes not accounted for, except for some brief lines by the modern Medic commenting that the Classic Medic must not have experimented on them at all and he was approached in the first place because they needed a Medic, implying their one is long dead by then or just left.
• Would Hurt a Child: Judging by their dialog, Classic Soldier and Scout are anything but motivated by orphan welfare when they plan to open up an orphanage for the "endless supply of free kids". Modern Pyro violently begs to differ.
• You Don't Look Like You: As explained above under Retcon, the Engineer looks very different than how he was shown in older photos and flashbacks, which could be Justified ue to how much time has passed.

The Mercs' Families

Scout's Mom

Scout's Mom

The mother of the Scout. Not much is known about her except that she is dating and engaged in a romantic relationship with the other team's Spy.

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• Absurdly Youthful Mother: Seriously, who the hell bears eight kids and looks like that? On top of that, if Scout's dream is to taken, she was once even hotter. She's also at least in her late 40s to early 50s now, as Scout himself is 27 and the youngest of 8 kids.
• Mini-Me: The Pocket Momma is a team-colored cosmetic doll version of her for the Spy. Though unlike other team-colored items, this one is in the opposite colors; RED Spy's Pocket Momma is blue while the BLU Spy's is red.
• Really Gets Around: According to Scout, his father walked out on him at a young age, but never mentioned if he shared the same father with his 7 brothers. Due to being the youngest of eight children, his mother may have conceived them by different men.
• Satellite Love Interest: So far, her only notable quality is being the punchline for a Your Mom joke, and someone the Spy shows affection for.
  BLU Scout: What are you, president of [RED Spy's] fanclub?
  BLU Spy: No... That would be your mother! (displays photos of BLU Scout's Mom and RED Spy being intimate)

Demoman's Parents

Mr. & Mrs. DeGroot

The Demoman's parents. They gave up Demo as an child, and re-adopted him when his talents began to show as part of admittedly stupid family tradition. The father is dead, while the mother now lives with her son.

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• Blind Black Guy: Both of Demoman's parents are (or were, in the case of his father) blind, likely due to their intensive use of explosives. His mother even berates her son for still having one eye left into adulthood.
  Mrs. DeGroot: No Demoman worth his sulfur ever had an eye in his head past thirty!
• Happily Married: Implied. Mrs. DeGroot says that she misses her late husband every day while holding a family picture.
• Jerkass Has a Point: She would have berated Demoman anyway while he was overachieving, but did have a point that he really let himself go after being fired from Mann Co.
• Parental Abandonment: As stated, they gave him up and took him back after his talent for explosives began to show. Given that it's part of a family tradition, it's likely that at least one of Demoman's parents had this happen to them, too.
• Pet the Dog: Mrs. DeGroot finally praises her son when he gets his old job back with Mann Co.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Demoman is constantly trying to please his mother, who complains about all his purported lack of effort.
• When I Was Your Age...: According to Mrs. DeGroot, her late husband walked fifty miles in the rain to blow up the queen of England for a nickel.
• Workaholic: Mr. DeGroot had 26 jobs in his life, and Mrs. DeGroot thinks her son is slacking for only having three, even though he makes five million dollars per year and lives in a mansion.

Sniper's Parents

Mr. Jonathan & Mrs. Mundy

The parents of the Sniper. Apparently do not approve of his chosen career.

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• Cloud Cuckoolander: Sniper's dad, upon seeing a rocket crash-land near the house carrying a baby New Zealander, has nothing to say except, "Our prayers have been answered! A rocket for our very own!" It is not explained why they were praying for a rocket.
• Expy:
  • Visually resemble Eustace and Muriel Bagge of Courage the Cowardly Dog. According to Word of God, this was intentional.
  • Certain revelations about Sniper's backstory in "Blood in the Water" mean that they fulfill this trope for John and Martha Kent from Superman.
• Killed Offscreen: According to Sniper, he found them dead in their home just after he was fired from Mann Co.
• Never Mess with Granny: Sniper's mother is shown in Heaven to be surprisingly ruthless for a smiling little old lady. Of course, she is Australian.
  Mrs. Mundy: We want ya ta stay, dear. But you left a lot of rotten @#$%s down there that need killin'.
• Parents as People: Very close when Sniper was a child, but some friction emerged later on as Sniper chose a career they wouldn't support him in. Seems they came around on assassination as a career sometime between "Meet the Sniper" and Sniper possibly meeting them in Heaven in "Old Wounds", though.
• So Proud of You: In their brief encounter in Heaven, Jonathan praises his son's professionalism with a comforting hand on his shoulder.
• Why Couldn't You Be Different?: According to Sniper, they're not big fans of what he does for a living. In his Meet the Team video, Sniper is seen arguing with his father over the phone on the subject. That said, they finally come around to admire his job after they're dead, their souls telling Sniper to leave heaven and give their murderers the vengeance they deserve.

Bill-Bel and Lar-Nah (big spoilers)

Bill-Bel and Lar-Nah

These people are the birth parents of the Sniper. Years ago, Bill-Bel tried to escape in a rocket, but his son Mun-Dee (Sniper) accidentally snuck into the rocket during an argument. When the rocket pierced the dome of New Zealand, the place was doomed. They managed to hide in a hidden lab for 40 years, after which the two escaped when the mercs showed up.

---

• Abusive Parents: Both of them were planning to leave Sniper to die to save themselves, and did so again in the present day.
• The Alcoholic: Lar-Nah has spent the past forty years stuck in the lab drunk on wine and making death threats. When she escapes in the last rocket, the rocket is filled with bottles of booze.
• Broken Pedestal: They were such a massive disappointment to Sniper that he continues to regard his foster parents as his real family.
• Cassandra Truth: Inverted. Everyone in New Zealand believed Bill-Bel when he predicts the surface of Earth to be buried by magma, but he's really just insane and making wrong predictions.
• Corrupted Character Copy: They're clear parodies of Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van, Superman's parents. Instead of their homeland being destroyed because they ignored an accurate warning, everyone believing Bill-Bel's insane doomsday theory caused New Zealand to be destroyed.
• Dirty Coward: Bill-Bel steals the merc's submarine to save his own hide when the lab begins to flood.
• Ditzy Genius: It takes a genius to design an underwater country and build rocket ships. And it takes a ditz to have said sinking of their country be completely unnecessary and to waste the most valuable substance on Earth as rocket paint.
• Hate Sink: In a universe where there's virtually no truly good character, these two are the only ones presented with virtually no redeeming qualities, being a pair of selfish, dimwitted scientists who don't even care all that much about their own son, and were originally going to leave him (as well as each other) for dead to escape for themselves, then abandoned him to save themselves again. You can tell Sniper regretted ever meeting them.
• Ignored Expert: Subverted.
  Bill-Bel: A decade ago I warned you a disaster was coming! I warned you we must move our nation beneath the sea! And you would not listen!
  Minister 1: We DID listen!
  Minister 2: We're underwater right now!
  Minister 3: We did everything you told us to! And nothing happened!
• It's All About Me: Bill-Bel built a rocket big enough for one to escape predicted ecological disaster, but he intended to use it for himself and leave his wife and child to die. His wife planned to do the same. In the present day, Lar-Nah ditches her husband and the team in the last rocket, and Bill-Bel promptly flees the flooded lab in the team's submarine, leaving them behind.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Despite being a self-proclaimed scientist, Bill-Bel doesn't seem to know much about any sort of actual science. His "predictions" that the Earth would be flooded with magma, supposedly based on credible data, turned out to be completely bogus, and when confronted with an unknown substance with any number of applications that could be theoretically uncovered through experimentation, he uses all of it as rocket paint.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: When Lar-Nah sees Bill still has one Australium rocket left, she steals it and flies into space to be free from the sunken nation. Her takeoff cracks the dome over the last unflooded spot in New Zealand, and Bill steals the mercs' multi-seater submarine all for himself to flee.
• Walking Spoilers: They reveal a lot of secrets about the world of TF2.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: Double Subverted. Miss Pauling, having tracked the last cache of Australium to New Zealand, asks them to tell her where it is while insisting it's just worthless stones. Bill responds that as a scientist he doesn't fall for that and knows the true value of that mineral... only for us to find out he actually knew nothing about Australium's properties and just used it to paint his rockets.

Radigan Conagher

Radigan Conagher

"..."

"Alright."

The Engineer's soft-spoken grandfather, who was contracted to build an immortality machine for Blutarch Mann so he could outlive his brother Redmond. He was later asked by the Administrator's ancestor to create the same machine for Redmond as well. In exchange for this offer, Radigan was given one hundred pounds of Australium, an element that helped Australia become the world's most technologically advanced nation.

From this amount of Australium, Radigan created a variety of new inventions. However, the Australium's radiation eventually caused Radigan to become Australian; he went from a regular scientist to a muscular, shirtless, mustached scientist with a robotic left hand and chest hair in the shape of Texas.

---

• Artifact of Doom: The Golden Wrench, implied to have been built from Australium.
• Artificial Limbs: He eventually replaced his left hand with a prototype Gunslinger.
• Carpet of Virility: After his transformation into an Australian, he gets one—in the shape of Texas, no less!
• Cursed with Awesome: There are probably worse fates than Testosterone Poisoning that one can succumb to.
• Cyborg: Eventually wore a robotic arm.
• Posthumous Character: Dead in the present.
• The Stoic: He didn't show much emotion is the comic.
• Viral Transformation: His (presumably) continued use of Australium gave him a moustache (seen here) and a muscular build, as shown in the hidden pages of the Engineer Update.

Heavy's Family

Heavy's Family

"You'll always look out for us. And we love you for it. But now you must let us look out for ourselves."

— Yana

Heavy's family, consisting of his mother and three sisters (Zhanna, Yana, and Bronislava). All of them broke out of The Gulag with Heavy years ago and since then he's sent most of his money to them. As of "Blood in the Water," Zhanna has become Soldier's fianceé.

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• Action Girl: Zhanna joins Soldier and Spy in "assaulting" the submarine base in "Blood in the Water." She's actually pretty good at snapping necks, at least. "The Naked and the Dead" has her demolishing at least several robots alongside Soldier.
• Amazonian Beauty: All three sisters are stocky around the waist, possess bulging arms and legs, and fairly strong jawlines, having been hardened by a life of wrestling bears and surviving in the wilderness. Doesn't stop them from being attractive, in their own way; Zhanna in particular is quite a Sensual Slav, and Soldier and (initially) Scout are glad to accept her advances.
• An Arm and a Leg: Zhanna cuts off her hand with a shard from Grey's broken life-extending machine to escape her bonds in "Old Wounds" (though she tried dislocating her thumb as taught by Soldier to try getting out first, which of course didn't work). She quickly regarded herself as a handless monster after the fact, but Soldier assures her that she is ravishing and that reattaching the appendage will be no problem.
• Badass Family: When Heavy insisted he stay to protect them from anyone who'd come after them, they explain people already have come and they took care of them. Violently.
  • Before that, Yana and Bronislava make their appearance by dragging in a bear they hunted themselves.
• Blunt Metaphors Trauma: Zhanna apparently picked this up from her brother, because when Soldier asks her to kill "with extreme prejudice", she interprets this as "be racist at them". Although that might just be because she's kind of kooky herself.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Zhanna picks up her fianceé's "HUTTAH!" cry when snapping necks. They even snap a man's neck together in "Blood In The Water".
• Composite Character: Zhanna combines Heavy's short temper and broken English with elements of Soldier's Dumb Muscle.
• Everyone Has Standards: Even Zhanna thought that Soldier's plan to fight naked was weird, morally wrong, and gross. Up until he convinced her to try it anyway.
• Fangirl: Yana and Bronislava were pretty excited when they heard some of Heavy's former colleagues were paying a visit. Though they thought it was Spy and Sniper...
• Flanderization: Zhanna is introduced as having No Social Skills and a blunt desperation for sex after having spent her whole life in a remote lodge, but later comics show her to be an utterly insane Cloud Cuckoo Lander on par with the Soldier. It's justified as his influence rubbing off on her.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: Zhanna gets engaged to Soldier within a few hours of having sex with him.
• Gilded Cage: They've spent the last twenty years hiding in the same cabin in the middle of nowhere, surviving on bear meat. Zhanna was ready to screw the first man she saw, while they were all happy to leave.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Implied. After living most of their lives in an isolated cabin in the Siberian wilderness subsisting on bear meat, Heavy's sisters are... a little desperate for the male touch, to the point that the Scout, who was on recovery from having several of his organs mauled out by a bear while wearing a hotdog suit stolen from Amelia Earhart's plane, is seen as a perfectly acceptable partner. Unfortunately for them, he turns them down, but Zhanna finds love in the Soldier, and takes to Soldiers's Axe-Crazy ways....a little too well, much to Heavy's chagrin.
• Happily Married: Happily Engaged for Zhanna and Soldier.
• Mother Russia Makes You Strong: It most certainly has. Though they're pretty damn tired of eating bear meat.
• Ms. Fanservice: Zhanna spends most of "The Naked and the Dead", well, naked (and covered in honey). Compared to the litany of shamelessly naked male characters, her parts are barely censored in comparison, only covered with a thin layer of honey to give a Barbie Doll Anatomy effect.
• Naked People Are Funny: Zhanna joins the Soldier in getting nude and covered in honey in order to fight robots.
• Out of Focus: After being introduced in "A Cold Day In Hell", Yana, Bronislava, and Heavy's Mother don't appear at all in the next comic, "Blood In The Water".
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Played for Laughs. Zhanna is extremely quick to bust out an entirely censored tirade against the Spy when told to be racist by Soldier.
• Sex Equals Love: Zhanna's first interaction with Soldier was demanding he make love to her, because it had been years since she had even seen an eligible man. Since then, they've been a tight couple.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Spy thinks Zhanna and Soldier are this, calling them "rutting pigs".
• The Sixth Ranger: In "Blood in the Water," Zhanna is tagging along with Miss Pauling and the mercs.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: In at least some ways, Zhanna is as crazy as her boyfriend, the Soldier. It's implied that part of what persuades her to treat her relationship with him so seriously is that, towards the end of "A Cold Day In Hell", he confesses that he's homeless but promises to buy her the biggest, stinkiest barn that money can buy after he gets paid for the latest job. In "Blood In The Water", she mistakes "extreme prejudice" to mean "be racist to the enemy", a mistake the Soldier admits to making in the past, and when Soldier offers her a necklace of human ears as an engagement present, she delightedly throws herself into his arms for a passionate kiss. Not to mention the whole "nude and covered in honey" thing.
• Spy Catsuit: Zhanna is wearing Natasha Romanoff's Marvel Movieverse costume on the cover of "Blood In The Water". So is Soldier.
• Unnamed Parent: His mother has yet to be named.

Enemies and Bosses

Horseless Headless Horsemann

The Horseless Headless Horsemann

TF2's Resident Headless Horseman

"Rwaa ha ha ha haaa!"

The crazed and powerful spirit of Zepheniah's brother Silas Mann. The Horseless Headless Horsemann is the first boss NPC of Team Fortress 2. He is commonly found haunting Mann Manor.

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• Alliterative Name: The Horseless Headless Horsemann, and the two items associated with him: the Horseless Headless Horsemann's Head and the Horseless Headless Horsemann's Headtaker.
• Ax-Crazy: RED or BLU, he will attack anything that gets in his way. Bonus points for using an actual axe.
• The Berserker: He's an unadulterated mass of undead, homicidal aggression. Shooting him won't stop him from killing you because he'll plow through your shots, any sentries in his path and your entire team without slowing down. The only thing that'll give him pause outside of him deciding to pull off a BOO! stun is when he finally succumbs to his wounds.
• Came Back Strong: Silas wasn't much when he was alive, but when he comes back to whoop ass though, he's grown to a height of 8-10 feet, can swing an axe around hard enough to easily kill anyone caught by it with pathetic ease, and can bulldoze through anything and anyone who tries to stop him.
• Dem Bones: By the time he comes back from the dead, the corpse of Silas has long since rotted away barring his skeleton.
• Camera Screw: invoked The camera shakes when he's nearby. As if everything going dark and the music weren't unsettling enough.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: He has at least 3000 HP under his belt, with another 200 added for each player on the server. He also shows up only with a minimum of 10 players are on the server, meaning without cheats he always has at least 5000 HP.
  • Servers normally can hold up to 24 people, with some servers being able to hold up to 32 people. This means that the Horsemann can peak at around 7800~9400 HP. For comparison, the highest HP any player can go is 450, which is an overhealed Heavy.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: After being mortally wounded, he'll float limply for a bit then explode. Fortunately it won't hurt you if you're nearby.
• Enemy Mine: Aside from passing off aggro and the more serious players, both teams commonly team up to defeat him when he spawns.
• Headless Horseman: He wears a jack-o-lantern as a head, however.
• Implacable Man: Once a player is marked as "it", the Horsemann will pursue them relentlessly, chopping down anything in his path. However, the "it" status can be passed to another player by tagging them with a melee weapon, and is removed if the designated victim survives long enough. Additionally, the Horsemann is immune to all debuffs, and unlike MONOCULUS! and Merasmus he doesn't have a timer. His rampage won't stop until he's dead.
• The Juggernaut: This thing packs an immense amount of HP, delivers brutally powerful strikes, and moves as fast as a Scout. And most of all, absolutely nothing will slow him down or hinder him in the slightest as he runs to his unlucky target.
• Large Ham: He doesn't even speak, and he manages to chew scenery with the best of them.
• Lightning Bruiser: He is as fast as a scout's normal speed. Fortunately, he can't jump.
• Mini-Me: The Pocket Horsemann is an All-Class cosmetic doll of him that rides in a leather pouch. Holding its own Mini-Horseless Headless Horsemann's Headtaker.
• Nerf: Scream Fortress 2015 made it so getting hit by his axe wasn't invariably lethal, reducing the damage to 80% of the victim's base health.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: He's got 3000 to 5000 health at his weakest and will shrug off everything you throw at him. The only reliable way to put him down is to band up and shred him with gunfire.
• Off with His Head!: Any killing blow made by the Horsemann will decapitate the victim.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: He starts out with his axe slung over his shoulder using both hands. As his health wears down, he starts swinging it with only one hand.
• One-Hit Kill: For a long time, only two things can survive his Headtaker: A Wrangled Sentry, and a Dead Ringer Spy. And in both those cases, only just (and he'll probably swing again).
• Oxymoronic Being: One would think that lacking a horse and having a head means he wouldn't qualify as a Headless Horseman in the first place, but that's the TF2 world for you.
• One-Man Army: His only desire upon spawning is to kill as many people as he can before they finally re-kill him, and with his titanic health and painful axe swings, he can very easily take on both teams at once and win several times over.
• Palette Swap: Aside from his entrance, exit, and scaring animations, he's a sized-up reskin of the Demoman.
• Percent Damage Attack: His attacks always deal 80% of the target's maximum health, so while it can't One-Hit Kill anyone, it is able to kill anything in only two hits.
• Shows Damage: As his health goes down, the Horsemann readjusts his grip on his axe. He goes from an erect stance with a two-handed grip, to a slouching stance with a one-handed grip. This is the only indication of damage dealt to him, as, unlike the other Halloween bosses, he lacks a health bar.
• Slasher Smile: Carved into his pumpkin head.
• Status Effects: Can sometimes do an AOE fear that stuns all enemies near him.
• The Undead: Silas Mann's ghost, who has possessed his skeletal corpse, got an axe and gone on a rampage...for some reason.

MONOCULUS!

MONOCULUS!

He had his good eye on ya the whole time!

Voiced by: Gary Schwartz^note as MONOCULUS! uses slowed or pitched-down Demoman voice clips

The Demoman's disembodied left eye taken from his body and haunted upon opening a forbidden tome at Merasmus the Magician's castle. After Soldier enrages Merasmus, he unleashes the eye upon the team, setting up the events leading to the 2011 Halloween event.

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• Artificial Brilliance: His AI is more complex than the Horsemann, that's for sure. He leads his shots, prioritizes threats, and can juggle combo.
• Attack Its Weak Point: If a player that has recently escaped the Underworld attacks him, he will be temporarily stunned.
• Berserk Button: Gets really pissed upon taking a critical hit.
• Bold Inflation: His name is officially spelt in all-caps and an exclamation point.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Like the Horsemann, he can take an incredible pounding. Helps that he's resistant to miniguns and flamethrowers.
• Death from Above: His main method of attack is to rain down smaller eyeballs which do the same damage as critical rockets on both teams.
• Enemy Mine: Enforced, even more so than the Horsemann. When he appears, the capture point resets and both teams cannot cap until he is either defeated or leaves the map, so there's no point to killing each other, other than being a jerk.
  • Now enforced by the server. When he appears, the teams are unable to harm each other until he's gone. Look out for Engineers taking the opportunity to build at the enemy spawn.
• Faceless Eye: A giant, magically animated eye, disembodied from the Demoman's face and grown a couple times larger.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: He teleports around a lot and will only stay around for 90 seconds, though this also makes it easier to defeat him because doing so opens up a portal to an area that if you can exit gives players invulnerability, crit-boosts, overheal, and a speed boost. Buffed players also stun him when they damage him.
• Giant Eye of Doom: This happens a lot around MONOCULUS!.
• Glass Cannon: In comparison to the Horsemann being an immovable damage sponge, MONOCULUS! is easier to push around. He also has a hideously strong damage advantage, spamming eyeballs that kill most classes in a couple of hits.
• Insistent Terminology: It's not "Monoculus", it's "MONOCULUS!". Valve insists that upon being killed by him, the player must raise their hands toward the ceiling and scream the name at the top of their lungs. It's just the etiquette. And when the police arrive, be sure to explain!
• Long-Range Fighter: Compared to the HHH, who is strictly a melee combatant outside of his stun attack, and Merasmus, who is dangerous to those both far from and near him, MONOCULUS! has absolutely no melee attack to speak of. He just floats around and shoots anyone that catches his eye.
• Mad Bomber: His main attack is bombarding anybody within sight with rockets. Angering him by laying a crit hit on him will only make him worse in this regard, as he starts pumping out critical rockets that will lay low almost anything they hit in three-round bursts.
• Macross Missile Massacre: When it Turns Red, it starts pumping out crit-rockets like a machine gun.
• Mini-Me: A Pocket MONOCULUS! is one of the four plushie options for the "Pocket Halloween Boss" cosmetic. He also has a hat-version of himself that can be worn by all classes.
• One-Man Army: He can lay down an impressive assault upon the players when he finally shows up and if you rile him up with critical hits, then he starts carpet bombing everything he sees. Expect heavy casualties when he finally shows up.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: His eye goes red when a critical hit lands on him.
• Taking You with Me: Anyone near him when he dies is coated in Jarate. And since he's no longer around, both teams are going to be focusing on each other again pretty quickly...
• Time-Limit Boss: He only hangs around for 120 seconds per appearance, so if you want the achievements for taking him down, make sure to do it quickly and hope the other players want to kill him as well.
• Turns Red: Shooting him with critical hits will make him shoot volleys of faster projectiles that lead their targets flawlessly. He noticeably looks angrier when this happens.
  • Thanks to an update, defeating him causes him to become stronger when he next spawns.
• Unstoppable Rage: Despite it only lasting a brief amount of time, shooting him with a crit will result in him mercilessly blasting everything within reach with clusters of critical eyeball rockets when he recovers, and little, if anything can stand against him until he snaps out of it.

Merasmus the Magician

Merasmus the Magician

COWER, FOOLS! MERASMUS IS HERE!

^{His original appearance in the Bombinomicon comic}

"Who dares disturb Merasmus the Magician?"

Voiced by: Nolan North

An old magician and an early contractor of the Demoman, partially responsible for the latter's loss of his eye. He was also the Soldier's roommate until the Soldier became intolerable. Eventually, Soldier evicted Merasmus and killed him by accident (if reflexively burning dead bodies can be considered an accident), causing the magician to vow revenge on Soldier's entire team; these events led him being the Scream Fortress 2012 boss.

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• Arch-Enemy:
  • For Soldier. The two absolutely loathe each other, due to their various antics pissing each other off to no end. In particular, Soldier has snapped Merasmus's staff, turned his home into a raccoon sanctuary, and murdered his second roommate after moving out. In return, Merasmus has tried to kill and/or torture Soldier and his teammates every Halloween through various means.
  • To a lesser extent, Merasmus serves as this for the Demoman, as he was directly responsible for the removal of his eye, and subsequently, unleashing it upon the team in the form of MONOCULUS!. Unlike with Soldier however, Merasmus doesn't hold any ill will towards Demo, and in fact, barely even acknowledges him in the present day, even when Demo is hurling insults at him and reminding him of the score they have to settle during Halloween maps.
• Apologetic Attacker: If the Wheel of Fate lands on Jarate.
  "Jarate for everyone! I'm so, so sorry!"
• A Wizard Did It: His existence is as much of a defiance to this trope as a literal example. He actually is (somewhat) responsible for the Demoman losing his eye, unleashing MONOCULUS! upon the mercenaries, and sending them to DeGroot Keep.
  • Subtly noted by the BLU Spy as the reason why Soldier was somehow qualified to be a public defender in a court of law.
  • As of Scream Fortress 2012, it was revealed that Merasmus isn't as powerful of a magician as he claims. However, this in no way means the magic he can use won't tear you and everyone else present a new one when you fight him.
  • Discussed once again in the Scream Fortress 2015 comic (in regards to why they keep dealing with Merasmus in the first place):
    Heavy: Every Halloween, [Merasmus] comes here and tries to kill us.
    Miss Pauling: So why do you let him in?
    Soldier: He's a wizard, Miss Pauling.
    Scout: Yeah. He knows magic and crap.
• Affably Evil: Acts nice even as an evil wizard.
• Artifact of Doom: Apparently an avid collector of these. Hell, he even tells people to not gaze upon his broom, despite the Demoman actually being forced to do so to do his work (either that or it's a Verbal Tic).
• Artificial Brilliance: Not limited to one attack like the Horsemann and MONOCULUS!, and he knows how and when to use them effectively.
• Attack Its Weak Point: If a player runs into Merasmus while they have a bomb head, they will not only get an enormous power boost, but also stun him and make him take significantly more damage.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Merasmus may be quite silly at times, but if you manage to anger him enough to act, his wrath is a very dire thing indeed. It even comes up in his boss fight, as he plays his own brand of prop hunt with the teams if he isn’t taking on both of them at once and massacring them.
• Black Magic: He uses this.
• Blood Magic: "Blood Money" reveals Merasmus uses sacrificial virgin blood (his own).
• Bold Inflation: Like MONOCULUS!, his name in-game is stylized as MERASMUS!
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: "Wait, wait, wait. Merasmus lagged. Do over."
• Butt-Monkey: Every time he meets Soldier, something bad happens to him. For example, in Doom-Mates, he returned home from after 3 days to find that Soldier had buried his fridge in the yard and hid sour cream all over the property. Because the sour cream was not kept in the refrigerator, it had all gone bad and attracted every raccoon in the area, which meant his home had to be annexed by the city and turned into a raccoon sanctuary.
• Breakout Character: Starts out as a Hand Wave explanation for Medieval Mode, not even given a name, just referred to as a magician that Soldier angered once. Since then, he's been a recurring feature of Halloween events, introduced into the TF2 storyline proper as of Ring of Fired, and implemented into the game itself through being the Ghost Fort boss and the one in charge of Halloween contracts.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Despite his frequent misfortunes and somewhat goofy nature when it comes to magic, he's an utter monster in a fight, as his boss battle showcases very well.
• Canis Latinicus: His spell incantations.
  Merasmus: Mortus Longdistimus!
• Card-Carrying Villain: We'll let him tell it:
  Merasmus: Most villains don't think they're evil. They think they're heroes. Not me! I'm reclaiming it! EVIL WIZARD! I'm rotten to the bone and I don't care who knows it!
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Much, much more so than MONOCULUS!. Because of his ungodly HP (33750, plus 2500 per player on the server), nigh-permanent invincibility, and Healing Factor, it practically requires the cooperation of both teams to kill him within the time limit.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: Many of his lines. One of the comics featuring Merasmus is called "Doom-Mates".
  "Time to play hide-and-seek... YOUR DOOM!"
  "DOOM! All of you are doomed!"
• Double Take: Any time the players get something beneficial from the Wheel of Fate.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady: Played for Laughs. Aside from Soldier, Demoman, Medic, Heavy, Scout, and Mister T-Bone, everyone refers to Merasmus as either "Ma'am" or "witch-woman", something he never bothers to correct. Strangely enough, even Miss Pauling makes this mistake.
• Enemy Mine: Invoked the same was as with MONOCULUS!, the control point becomes locked whenever he's around. And he will require the complete cooperation of both teams to bring down.
  • Now enforced by the server. When he appears, the teams are unable to harm each other until he's gone. Look out for Engineers taking the opportunity to build at the enemy spawn.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Some lines have him apologize whenever a spell involves Jarate.
• Evil Is Hammy: Very loud and proud.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Some of his artifacts and magic, such as the Bombinomicon, often backfire on him.
• Evil Laugh: He has several when he appears and when he uses the Bombinomicon.
• Expressive Accessory: The ram skull he has on his head seems to be sentient, unsurprisingly. Being a skull, however, it just stares at things.
• Flight: Even when he's supposedly on the ground, he isn't going to fall down that deep pit if you manage to get him in there.
• The Genie Knows Jack Nicholson: Merasmus makes reference to Harry Potter despite the books not even been written yet in Team Fortress' 1968-1972 setting, or for that matter, its future author being old enough to write. He also mentions Ticketmaster and the Internet in other lines. He is magic, after all.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: Like MONOCULUS!, he can teleport around the map. In Merasmus' case, it happens after recovering from stun and when using the aforementioned Prop Hunt trick.
• Grenade Spam: Pulls Bullet Hell levels of this when he uses the Bombinomicon to shower the central area of Ghost Fort with bombs. If he pulls this, however, he also renders himself vulnerable to taking critical damage from all attacks.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The players who he gives bomb heads can run into him to stun him.
• Inept Mage: Downplayed. He's a competent wizard, but not a stellar one, and his design of the Wheel of Fate is dubious at best.
  • Less and less downplayed as time went on. In "Blood Money" he was unable to escape the Yakuza, then in "Gargoyles & Gravel" he ends up in debt with the Russian mafia instead (and is revealed to be living at a YMCA in the coinciding update), and finally after the events of "Ring of Fired" he was detained by ordinary police and currently being held in an ordinary penitentiary.
• Irony: He is a reskined Sniper in-game, yet the Sniper is the best class to use against him, particularly if he has the Huntsman.
• I Shall Taunt You: He'll taunt you mercilessly while hiding.
• Kill It with Fire: His most common attack during his boss fight, he casts a spell that not only sends everyone around him flying, but lights them on fire.
  • One of the Wheel of Fate cards can spontaneously immolate everyone on the map!
• Large Ham: He is completely over-the-top and sounds almost like Vincent Price.
• Large-Ham Announcer: Starting with the 2014 Halloween Map and most of the Scream Fortress Maps going forward.
• Mad Bomber: Thanks to the Bombinomicon's magic, he has as many bombs as he wants. He uses this to devastating effect in the boss fight, having the book spew bombs all over and around the control point; it's very common to see several players die to this at once.
  • He can also randomly roll a bomb at you while in his regular attack phase. It's rarer and much easier to avoid, but he may surprise you with it.
• Magic Misfire: Some of the Wheel of Fate consequences he's trying to curse the players with are actually entirely beneficial.
  Magic! It is not... an exact science.
• Magic Staff: His weapon of choice when not using the Bombinomicon, both for spellcasting and simple bludgeoning.
• Meaningful Name: His name resembles "marasmus", meaning severe emaciation due to starving, and he is indeed quite skinny.
• Mini-Me: A Pocket Merasmus is one of the four plushie options for the "Pocket Halloween Boss" cosmetic.
• Monster Roommate: To the Soldier of all people, for a while. (Though, given the Soldier's personality, it's not clear which one is more monstrous.)
  • And as of the official comics, he's somehow managed to end up roommate with Tom Jones. The Soldier makes quick work of him.
• Off with His Head!: A killing blow achieved with a staff whack will decapitate the victim.
• One-Man Army: Despite his ineptness at magic, when he takes to the battlefield he will utterly destroy you, your entire team, and the other team at once in a straight up fight.
• Palette Swap: He's a sized-up reskin of the Sniper (though he has the Heavy's animations if the dance card is selected).
• Playing with Fire: One of his favorite afflictions to give to the combatants.
  "Fire! You're all on fire!
• Punched Across the Room: He's no Horsemann in terms of damage, but one swing from his staff can send you pretty far.
• Running Gag: Being mistaken for a woman.
  • Scream Fortress 2014 and 2015 both have him borrowing money from foreign crime organizations for some "eldritch" reason; 2014 has him borrowing money from the Yakuza to build an amusement park for Bonzo, "the evil Sumerian Circus God", and 2015 sees him borrowing from the Russian Mafia to buy little gargoyles that collect souls.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Merasmus casts the dance curse, he gives a shout out to Thriller, which is fitting since his voice is modelled after Vincent Price.
  • His lines, "It is the crit-boostening!", "The hide-ening!", "Plague of head biggening!", and "It is the bloodening!" are references to the Quickening from Highlander.
  • "Everything is coming up Merasmus!" is a references to "Everything's Coming Up Roses" from Gypsy: A Musical Fable. Alternately, it may be a reference to "Everything's coming up Milhouse!" from The Simpsons, where the quote is sometimes mis-attributed to.
  • A running gag is his hatred of/desire to prove himself a better wizard than Gandalf and Harry Potter.
• Sickly Green Glow: His magic.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: Scream Fortress 2015 features a couple of his lines getting bleeped:
  Merasmus: "Either you kill my past self and I get my soul, or my past self kills you, and I get yours!" [laughs] "I don't [BLEEP] care! I'm all about souls tonight!"
• Spectacular Spinning: His death animation involves him spinning and flailing wildly in mid-air.
• Tactical Suicide Boss: Adding ÜberCharges (and other beneficial effects) to the Wheel of Fate doesn't seem like such a good idea in hindsight.
  Merasmus: YOU! ARE! GODS! ...I don't know why I put that on the wheel...
  • Subverted during the actual fight however, as this form of ÜberCharge immediately fizzles out if he spawns during it. The Wheel of Fate Crits aren't subject to this, though their effect at the start of the fight is negligible.
  • He also insists on bombing everything with a spellbook that hates him, and will blow him up whenever it can.
• Tarot Motifs: He has a custom-made deck of tarot cards for use on the Lakeside event map. A random one is chosen every time the control point changes teams, each with a different effect including Gravity Screws, Super-Speed, all players suddenly dancing on the control point, the aforementioned Jarate rain, and so on.
• Tattooed Crook: As seen in "Grave Matters".
• Technicolor Magic: Most of his magic, as well as his ghost form, is a bright green color.
• Teleport Spam: Will do this whenever recovering from stun or going to hide.
• The Battle Didn't Count: One of his death quotes is him groaning that you won, then he'll quickly say it was a tie.
  • Actually played straight since he does indeed come back, possibly even in the same round.
    Merasmus: You haven't heard the last... of Merasmus the Magician!
  • As it turns out, he's right; he's back in solid form as of "Ring of Fired" and is celebrity Tom Jones' roommate.
• Third-Person Person: Merasmus almost always refers to himself in third person.
• Time Abyss:
  Merasmus: I was born before time, dark larvae from the putrid womb of the ancient ones!
  • Later Subverted; he's only 6,000 years old.
    • Then again, assuming that the God seen in the mercs' near-death experiences is real and taking a low estimate for the date of the First Day, it's still possible for him to have come into existence prior to the universe's creation, which would confirm his quote and squarely classify him as an eldritch/divine being.
• Timed Mission: Like MONOCULUS!, he only sticks around for 120 seconds.
• Total Party Kill: His penchant for area-of-effect attacks can cause this if the players are particularly unlucky.
  • As a sidenote, it's possible to have this done to the entire enemy team during regular gameplay if you're an Engineer; just build a Sentry near the point and wait for Merasmus to pick the Dance Party card from the Wheel of Fate. Anything that isn't the same color as the Sentry will be immediately gunned down while stuck in their dance poses. Even a Mini Sentry can accomplish this before the dance ends.
• Trrrilling Rrrs: He trills the "r" in his name a lot in the 2014 Halloween event.
• Two-Faced Aside: He has a few lines, mostly to the Soldier.
  "Merasmus arrives on a tide of blood! Oh, hello Soldier."
• Unexplained Recovery: In "Ring of Fired", about 10 months after we last heard from him, we see he got his physical body back somehow and became Tom Jones' roommate.
• Verbal Tic: If you mention one of his possessions, he'll reflexively tell you to GAZE NOT UPON IT!!
  • He's also fond of DOOM! and FOOLS!, with him admitting he's not even sure why he calls people fools half the time.
• Virgin Power: The comic "Blood Money" reveals that Merasmus is a 6,000 year old virgin, and uses his own blood for sacrifices.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With the Soldier, possibly. A few of his punchlines indicate that he might not hate the Soldier quite so much as he claims.
  • Doesn't stop Merasmus from raging at him when he dies though.
    Merasmus: I die! Soldier! You were the wooorst rooommaaate!
• Voluntary Shapeshifter: The reason one of his two "Get Back Here!" Boss tactics is such a pain.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: He sounds notably more unhinged when he pulls out the Bombinomicon for the bomb rain attack.
  Merasmus: MAGIC, EVERYONE! MAGIC!
• You Fool!: Says this many times in both the game and comics.
• Your Size May Vary: In the actual game, Merasmus is a giant who towers over everyone, but in the comics, he's around the same normal size as the mercs. Given that one of his magic spells is resizing heads, it's not totally out of the wall that he can resize himself to appear more menacing.
• Yubitsume: In the comic "Blood Money," Merasmus' right pinky finger is noticeably shorter and bandaged up, after racking up a debt of $12,000 to the Yakuza. It's implied he did this to show them his respect.

Bombinomicon

Bombinomicon

Giving you a bomb head.

"Hey, buddy! You look like you could use a bomb for a head. Pow, zoop! Off I go."

Voiced by: Nolan North

An ancient tome of explosive magic, a haphazard wild card, and Merasmus' other roommate. Although he remains mostly at the call of Merasmus, he has no qualms about antagonizing him, given the chance.

---

• Action Bomb: Capable of turning players into one. See Why Am I Ticking? below.
• Affably Evil: He's so friendly that you just can't help but like him, despite working for Merasmus in his first appearance, and being the Devil in his second.
• The Casanova: Claims to know how to attract the ladies and briefly mentions seeing a cookbook.
• Character Catchphrase: Several:
  • "Hey, buddy!"
  • "Pow, zoop!"
  • "It's good stuff."
• The Dog Bites Back: Apparently he doesn't like his owner. He'll choose two players to turn into bombs and instruct them to run at Merasmus.
  Merasmus: AH! Who told you to do that!?
• Equippable Ally: You can obtain him after beating MONOCULUS! on Eyeaduct. Wearing him makes your corpse explode when you die, but not anything else;
• Face of a Thug: This scary old tome with red eyes and sharp, bloodstained teeth is more of a trickster.
• Flight: The Bombinomicon appears to be able to levitate if there's a player underneath him with a bomb head.
• Friendly Enemy: Despite (mostly) serving Merasmus, he's quite friendly to the players, and when you make it to hell in the 2013 event, he's genuinely glad to see you.
• Keet: Very enthusiastic.
• Lovable Traitor: Doesn't care if Merasmus gets hurt, and infact encourages the mercs to do so.
• Manipulative Bastard: He is able to convince the young Demoman to read his pages.
• Motor Mouth: Talks very fast and has a lot to say whenever he talks.
• Portmanteau: "Bomb" and "Necronomicon".
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Though he seems pretty amicable. See Face of a Thug, above.
  Bombinomicon: I hate that wizard! You should go blow him up.
• Satan: Apparently he got put as the Devil while we weren't looking. He's amicable, at the very least.
  Hey it's me, the Bombinomicon! Bad news, you're in hell. Good news, I'm the devil!
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: Pow, zoop!
• Sickly Green Glow: His bombs glow green, and when he's hovering above a bomb-headed player, the space between him and the bomb is green.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: As long as it involves bombs, he'll be happy to attack anyone.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: One that contains "over 400 pages of spells, enchantments, recipes and anecdotes about blowing things up", and two of those spells see use when Merasmus uses the Bombinomicon to rain bombs on the mercenaries and when the Bombinomicon turns a player's head into a bomb.
• Unwanted Assistance: Sometimes you'll have the misfortune of getting a bomb head right before Merasmus decides to play Prop Hunt. All you can do in this case is hope that another player reveals him fast enough, because running into props with the bomb head does nothing, even if it is the one Merasmus is hiding as. This has since been patched; running into a prop with a bomb head destroys the prop and removes the bomb, but doesn't grant you the UberKritzSpeed boost.
• Verbal Tic: Hey buddy! Pow, zoop!
• Vocal Dissonance: Scary as the book looks, he sounds like a fast-talking Italian dealer.
• Wild Card: He will happily tell you to run at Merasmus when you have a bomb head, yet he'll just as gleefully turn the control point into a blasting zone at Merasmus' command.
• Why Am I Ticking?: The Bombinomicon can turn you, specifically your head, into a bomb. This forces you into the humiliation pose (though with a speed boost) in which you can only run around helpless. The goal is to run into Merasmus with it; a successful hit will not only stun him, but also give you temporary Crits and Uber so you don't get hurt from the explosion. Failure to hit him means... well, you get hurt from it, which will take a huge chunk out of your HP if not outright kill you.
  Bombinomicon: Giving you a bomb head. Run at the wizard!

The Robots

The Robots (Gray's Army)

Beep bop boop.

A seemingly-endless army of robots created by Gray Mann to reclaim the Mann Co. empire in the name of the Mann family. Each unit is made in the image of one of the mercenaries, some using default weapons, some using specialized loadouts, others still having a completely new bag of tricks. Strangely enough, they run on money.

---

• Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: The robots can seemingly rotate their waists all the way around; their legs always face the direction they're going, while their upper half faces the direction they're aiming at. The Medic and Heavy robots also demonstrate 360-degree wrist rotation with their taunts, while the Sniper's taunt has its elbow bending both ways.
• Action Bomb: The Sentry Buster is a pressure mine on the legs of a Giant Demoman.
• Anti-Structure: The Sentry Buster's role is to destroy an Engineer's Sentry Gun should it destroy a certain number of robots. They can also destroy other Engineer buildings in their path by trampling them.
• Artificial Brilliance: In-universe, the Mecha Engineer was eventually made to correct the robot army's Artificial Stupidity. Out of universe they do some very crafty things; they avoid Snipers, strafe from side paths, prioritize killing Medics, and so on. They also follow pretty decent rules when it comes to detecting spies, and are even smart enough to move their Sentry up to keep the players pushed back.
• Artificial Stupidity: In-universe. The robots are programmed to attack "all things Mann Co.", which includes an incredibly obvious decoy facility the Soldier made with some paint and an abandoned warehouse. They were also fooled by the Soldier's robot disguise, his Halloween costume. To clarify, they were repeatedly outsmarted by THE SOLDIER. In-game, the robots are fairly simplistic in terms of behavior, usually just blindly charging down a set path even if it takes them directly into Sentry Gun fire; their threat mainly comes from numbers, inflated stats, and accuracy.
• Boom, Headshot!:
  • Upgrades for the Sniper's primary weapons, except Huntsman, take it to the extreme; headshots (lethal or otherwise) on robots will cause an explosion that damage nearby robots in addition to debuffing both the target and the bots hit by the explosion. Overlaps with Cranial Processing Unit.
  • Averted for the robots as Sniper robots aim for bodyshots only. Huntsman Snipers can land headshots (as evidenced by kill icons), but their headshots don't crit.
• Boss Battle: There are several boss robots in the game, which are mechanical juggernauts surpassing the Giants and sometimes even Tanks in difficulty. They are unique in the sense that they have a visible health bar.
  • A boss Major Crits, a variant of the original Major Crits Giant that is essentially the same except for massively increased health (32,000 compared to 4200) and a few minor stat bonuses. This boss has the same tactic: unleash a brutal, 30-rocket crit-boosted storm guaranteed to rip apart anybody stupid enough to stand in his way. However, his shots move very slowly and he is easily the least threatening boss in the game.
  • Chief Blast Soldier, appearing in certain waves in Mannhattan Missions. While he has 2 variants, his strongest one features 58,000 HP, a 9-shot clip, and vastly improved firing speed. While his shots are under a damage reduction and he will rarely kill anyone, his rockets have a massive knockback boost, allowing him to plow anybody out of his way instantly. However, it is still not too hard due to its abysmal damage output making it more of an annoyance.
  • The final wave of Empire Escalation has, for lack of a better name, the Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy (referred to as "Chief Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy" on the wiki). The Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy has a monstrous amount of health, packing 60,000 HP and a Deflector Property that allows him to shoot down projectiles, rendering the heavy artillery of your team almost useless. In addition, like other Giant Heavies, the Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy's minigun shreds anything standing too close, and the Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy has a property that allows the Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy to recover 8,000 HP every time the Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy gets a kill. If your team is competent enough to not let the Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy rack up kills, the Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy can be rather easily dealt with once you whittle down the Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy's massive health bar. If not, have fun chipping the Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy guy down to nothing, especially with the Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy healing for over 13% of the Giant Heal-on-Kill Deflector Heavy health with each kill.
  • Sir Nukesalot in the semifinal wave of Hamlet Hostility, is a massive Demobot with what amounts to a Loose Cannon that fires Sentry Busters. His bombs are crit-boosted, deal enough damage to One-Hit Kill everything and have a massive blast radius. Fortunately, he has a slow fire rate and a long fuse on his shots, but he still has 50,000 HP to back up his monstrous firepower.
  • Major Bomber, one of the 3 original Final Bosses, is the Final Boss of Disintegration. While he only has 40,000 HP, he has a regeneration property that allows him to regain 200 HP per second. While he won't fire until fully loaded, the result is a 12-round rain of critboosted grenades that will vaporize or severely wound any class. Even getting close enough to hurt him is dangerous, and to make matters worse, while the other final bosses have no backup besides Spies and Snipers, Major Bomber comes with Scouts and Engineers.
  • Captain Punch is a hulking beast of a robot which appears as the Final Boss of Bone Shaker. He possesses a whopping 60,000 HP and wields the Fists of Steel, which further reduce any ranged damage by 40%. This effectively boosts his HP past that of tanks, and that's not even counting his Healing Factor which recovers 250 HP per second. Although it takes doubled damage from melee strikes, it's nigh-impossible to melee fight it due to its nonstop One-Hit Kill strikes, although melee strikes will do immense damage to it. Extreme firepower and coordination is required to take him down before he gets the bomb to the hatch.
  • And Broken Parts tops this all off with Sergeant Crits, who is arguably the most powerful bot in the whole game. Boasting 60,000 HP, a 250 HP/sec healing factor, an 11-shot clip, and critboosted rockets, this mechanical monster unleashes huge bursts of rockets to liquefy any unfortunate targets. Unlike Major Crits, his rockets do not suffer from a speed penalty, meaning dodging the barrage is out of the question. While its clip is smaller than Major Crits, its reload time is also significantly shorter. Extreme caution and firepower is required to take this beast down, as its combination of massive health, massive damage, and regeneration makes him worthy of the title of Strongest Robot Boss.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Pretty much any giant bot, but especially the Giant Heavy flanked by several Ubercharge Medics. A coordinated assault, including Shoot the Medic First, is required to bring this colossus down, especially if the wave spawns a Tank in the meantime. Worse, you will rarely fight just one Octo-Heavy in a single wave…
• Car Fu: Tanks will crush players that get sandwiched between it and a solid surface. Engineer buildings are also destroyed instantly when it runs over them.
• Cyber Cyclops: The robots based off of the Demoman have one eye in the center of their head. While it's harder to see thanks to their helmet, Soldier robots also only have a single eye.
• Damage-Sponge Boss:
  • Tanks. They just slowly follow a preset path, but they have a hell of a lot of health (10000 at least, and 60000 at most), if they make it to the hole you lose, and the other robots can use it as a distraction to attack you or advance their own bomb. To make matters worse, it's immune to all debuffs and takes 75% reduced damage from Miniguns.
  • The Mecha Update introduced special boss robots that boast more health than the tanks, and regenerate health quite quickly, to the point where they're, for the most part, the only thing in the wave that has to be defeated. Captain Punch is the most extreme of the bunch, considering he boasts about 60,000 HP, along with wielding the Fists of Steel (since you most likely won't be using melee weapons against him due to his One-Hit Kill attacks, the 40% ranged damage reduction effectively gives him 84000 HP vs ranged attacks).
• Diesel Punk: The way they shake as their engines rev give this impression.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Even they find robots running on money to be a questionable idea.
• Elite Mook: Two kinds: Robots that use unlock weapons, and Giant Mooks with halved speed, but a new feature to enhance their respective class' strength.
• Evil Knockoff: Well the RED and BLU teams aren't saints, but...
• Fragile Speedster: Most Giant Scouts, compared to other Giant Robots. While they run extremely fast, aren't slowed by carrying the bomb, and still have much higher HP than regular robots (roughly 1000), they still get torn apart quickly by focused fire and tend to have ineffectual weaponry, making them vulnerable to body-blocking.
• Giant Mook: Giant robots are a frequent enemy on the harder missions or later waves. They usually move at half the speed of regular robots, but have vastly more HP, and most of them have powerful new abilities compared to their smaller versions.
• Glass Cannon: In later waves, both the players and the robots become this. Players are easily capable of taking out groups of robots en masse, but all it takes is one robot to get a lucky shot to kill even an overhealed Heavy.
• Glowing Mechanical Eyes: All robots have brightly glowing eyes. These are actually color-coded to correspond to their behavior (as robots have AI levels corresponding to the regular bot AI difficulties, which affects their aim and reflexes): robots with lower AI levels have blue eyes, while robots with better AI have yellow ones.
• Healing Factor: Several high-level bosses and a select few Giants have health regeneration.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: A quick Engineer can grab their sentry as the Sentry Buster arms itself, saving the sentry while dooming the Buster to a pointless death. It's even an achievement.
  • In fact, the Sentry Buster can sometimes actually blow up its fellow Robots.
  • The Giant Charged Soldier is perhaps the only Giant that is easily countered single handedly by a single player. Its low rate of fire and slow projectile speed means that a Heavy with the Deflector upgrade can render the poor bastard completely ineffectual. The infinite crits alongside all of it means a Pyro can not only do this, but also turn its own rockets against the horde, easily oneshotting any Medics the giant has healing it.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: None of the bots need to pick up ammo (despite common rumor, most of them do need to reload).
  • Particularly notable are the Giants. Giant Charged Soldiers and Rapid Fire Demos reload so fast that it often looks like they aren't reloading at all, and Rapid Fire Soldiers play this trope brutally straight.
• Instakill Mook:
  • Spy Robots naturally retain their human version's ability to Back Stab, and will go for stabs whenever possible.
  • Exploding Sentry Busters instantly kill any player or Engineer building within their blast radius. Fortunately, they can also kill other robots (Giant Robots instead take heavy damage).
• I Shall Taunt You: Like bots outside Mann vs. Machine mode, enemies will sometimes taunt after killing a player.
• The Juggernaut: Unlike the other robots, Tanks cannot be slowed down in any way. They are immune to knockback, stuns, and slowing effects, will push anyone standing in the way, and instantly crush any buildings they run over (and even crush players should they get stuck in an unfortunate spot). The only way to stop a Tank is to destroy it as quickly as possible.
• King Mook: Three of the missions included with the Mecha-Update end with facing giant robots, including Captain Punch (Steel Fist Heavy), Major Bomber (Grenade Launcher Demoman), and Sergeant Crits (Rocket Launcher Soldier). All of them have ludicrous damage boosts (from guaranteed crits and/or an innate damage boost), as much health as the most durable tank which constantly regenerates, an increased ammo clip, nearly immune to knockback, and greatly increased rate of fire and reloading. However, they fight alone except for sniper and spy support bots, and most of them are even slower than normal giants. The Two Cities update adds Sir Nukesalot to the list, and unlike the above three, he operates differently in that he has an upgraded Loose Cannon that fires cannonballs with dramatically increased blast radiuses and damage bonuses, though thankfully he can only fire one shot at a time before having to reload.
• Laser Sight: Sniperbots have a visible laser beam, instead of just a dot like normal Snipers. Given that they go for rapid bodyshots and that you'll likely be fighting twenty other robots at the same time, this is a necessity to help avoid them or take them out.
• Lethal Joke Character: The Heavy Mittens. They are incapable of doing damage directly, but can pin you in place so the other robots can run past or finish you off.
  • Don't forget that Criticals don't affect Sentry Guns, so if you're an Engineer and you're using the wrangler… yeah.
• Lethal Joke Item: Many 'useless' or 'underpowered' weapons become very powerful in this game mode. Of particular note is the Third Degree, a Fire Axe that deals damage to anyone linked by a Medic's healing beam. A single critical hit on the giant robot or ONE of its Medics will instantly kill ALL of the Medics. Also, the usually ignored Beggar's Bazooka becomes very powerful after a few rounds, as it can rapidly fire a bunch of rockets in a wide radius.
  • At the same time, some otherwise popular weapons are a lot less useful in this mode. The Degreaser, for instance, has very little merit over the regular Flamethrower given that landing a combo on a single enemy does basically nothing, and an Engineer with the Gunslinger might as well not have bothered to show up.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • Sentry Busters. They move at 187% speed, have 2500 health, and can potentially win the game for the robots by blowing the everloving shit out of your Sentry and everyone else within a three-teleporter radius.
  • Super Scouts move at TWICE the speed (267%) of a regular Scout and do not suffer speed loss while holding the bomb, so they can destroy you if the players don't have some W+M2 Pyros, a Natascha Heavy, or any other player who can slow bots down (or just have someone body-blocking them as they deal almost no damage).
• Macross Missile Massacre: Rapid Fire Soldiers, described as wielding the "machine gun of rocket launchers." Some other variants can pull this off too, namely Major Crits.
  • Regular Soldier Robots spawn in big enough groups to cause these on arrival, and it is nothing short of terrifying.
  • A fully upgraded Beggar's Bazooka can unleash this on them. Unsurprisingly it's why the BB is considered one of the better weapons to use against them. The Air Strike can likewise unload on them with a barrage of rockets when fully upgraded and with a few kills racked up (which is very easy to do when you're firing into a crowd of robots).
• Man Versus Machine: Add another "n" in the first word to get the name of the update they were introduced in.
• Mecha-Mooks: Well, obviously. They're also loyal to Gray, who used a significant portion of their processing power for a hailing function.
• Mighty Glacier: Any giant robot tends to be beefy and pack a punch, but winds up being very slow. That is, if it's not a giant Scout (especially the Super Scouts), in which case...
• Money Spider:
  • They literally run on money. Lampshaded by Miss Pauling, to justify why the Mercs are now fighting giant robots:
    Miss Pauling: For reasons I can't comprehend or explain, the robots run on piles of money. Destroy them and whatever falls out is yours.
  • Gray Mann states in "Death of a Salesbot" that because of this stint, he is now actually going bankrupt while Mann Co is posting record profits, considering that whatever wasn't burnt by the robots went straight into Mann Co's pockets (the Mercs almost instantly turn the money in to buy new upgrades), doing the exact opposite of what he intended. This later prompted him to use alternate methods to gain control of Mann Co.
• Mook Chivalry: Ha ha, you wish. The melee bots will gleefully swarm you like locusts, and on higher difficulties the ranged bots will focus their fire on a single target - this can be especially painful when it's a gang of Soldierbots or Demobots (or both). Suddenly those Resistance upgrades you could safely ignore on easier difficulties become a necessity.
• No Water Proofing In The Future: Robots can be slowed down with upgraded Jarate and Mad Milk.
• One-Hit Kill: Provided they have the right weapon, some of them can even taunt-kill!
• One-Wheeled Wonder: Robot Medics move with a single wheel compared to the other robots' two legs. It still uses the same hitboxes as a regular Medic with legs.
• Only Sane Man: The Mecha-Engineer is the only robot that wasn't fooled by the Soldier's Paper-Thin Disguise.
  • The Scout Robot in "Death of a Sales-Bot" that tells Gray he should build robots that don't run on money.
• Point Defenseless: Averted. Deflector Heavies will reliably shoot down any projectile thrown in their direction.
  • Player Heavies can do the same thing with a minigun upgrade.
• Professional Butt-Kisser: All of them, save the Engineer, as Gray devoted a significant amount of their processing power to make them absolutely loyal to him. This design choice also made most of them (again, save for their Engineer) even dumber than the Soldier.
• Robot Me: All of them (excluding the Sentry Buster) are built to resemble each member of the Mercs. The Spies, however, are able to disguise themselves as flesh and blood.
• Robot War: Gray uses them to wage one against Mann Co., with the human Mercs fighting them off constantly.
• Rogue Protagonist: Before the Mecha Update, (human model) Engineers sometimes showed up on the robot team due to glitches. And it's easy to see why they were left out before Valve could iron the Mecha Engineer's coding out.
• Shoot the Medic First: A given since it's TF2, but this tactic is even more crucial in MvM, where some medics can Uber their target if not killed first. And some like the Quick-Fix and Giant Medics, heal at such an absurd rate that anything they are healing is physically impossible to kill until the Medic is disposed of first.
• Spy Bot: About as literal as it gets. The Announcer calls the trope out by name.
• Status Buff: If the bomb carrier isn't destroyed after a while and isn't a Giant, it'll receive buffs in stages which stack, marked by a graphic on the bottom of the HUD. First stage is a defensive buff that is shared with nearby robots, second stage is health regeneration, and the final stage is critical hits all the time.
• Stone Wall:
  • Tanks. They can't even attack players (except in rare exceptions noted above), but they more than make up for it in HP.
  • The Steel Gauntlets are robot Heavies with 900 HP and the Fists of Steel. They aren't much of an offensive threat due to their melee range, but make up for it with their incredible durability against ranged attacks.
  • Giant Medics. They have nearly as much health as giant Heavies and use a Quick-Fix with a ridiculously powerful heal rate^note The rate without using the Übercharge is 6720 health per second; enough to heal any robot but the King Mooks in less than a second, so about 1/5 of the time they'll be effectively immortal and recover all previous damage.
  • Generic Giant Soldiers. They have the same rocket launcher as every other soldier, half the speed, and much higher health. That's it, they aren't any more dangerous than a single normal soldier robot.
  • Giant Black Box Soldiers have a significant damage penalty compared to other Soldiers, meaning they won't do much damage even though they fire three shots at once. However, each of those three rockets heals it by 1000 HP on hit; if you don't have a good Pyro, Medic, or Heavy, these things can be a real chore to kill.
  • Giant Demoknights and Pyros, unless you're stupid enough to walk right up to them, are comically inept, being half the speed of their regular counterparts and armed with short-range weapons only good for close quarters, as well as partially locked into a straight course for the bomb hatch. Just stay out of range and shoot them lots. Note, however, that Giant Pyros are extremely good at airblasting; save your rockets until they're looking the other way.
  • Giant Scouts are fast, durable, and can rush the bomb to the hatch very rapidly, but slow them down and they can't really fight back much.
  • And then there's Captain Punch. 60,000 HP, heals 250 every second, resists 40% of all ranged damage, and is armed with a pair of fists. Anyone attempting to exploit his weakness to melee damage has to contend with his powerful melee attacks, while everyone else just has to walk casually in the opposite direction to avoid him. The challenge is trying to kill this guy before he gets to the bomb hatch.
• Unique Enemy:
  • Armored Sandman Scouts and Giant Bonk Scouts are both exclusive to waves 1 and 5 of Empire Escalation.
  • Giant Jumping Sandman Scouts only appear in Metro Malice wave 3.
  • Wave 2 of Bavarian Botbash features a variant of the typical Soldier robot that uses the Cow Mangler 5000 instead of a stock Rocket Launcher. The bots themselves do not have a special name, however, and are simply referred to as "Soldiers".
  • Non-giant Deflector Heavies only occur on the last two waves of Mannslaughter.
  • The Holiday Punch-weilding Heavy Mittens robots only appear on waves 4 and 6 of Data Demolition.
  • Rapid Fire Bowmen (referred to in-game as "Bowman Rapid Fire") are exclusive to Empire Escalation wave 2.
• Zerg Rush: Seems to be the main tactic of the army. This is especially true of Scoutbot waves. Harder missions will often have regular combat classes marked as "Support" robots, meaning they will infinitely respawn throughout the wave until the robots designated as part of the wave are all destroyed.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The robots get reskinned into flesh-and-bone zombies for Halloween.

Skeleton Army

The Skeleton Army

An army of Skeletons collectively act as the closest thing to the boss of the fifth Scream Fortress event. After the Mann Brothers' mining operations disturbed an Indian Burial Ground, the vengeful spirits may rise from their graves to assault the players, sometimes led by a giant Skeleton King. In addition, they can also be employed by a player who obtained the spell to summon them.

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• Asteroids Monster: Kill a regular skeleton, and he drops four skulls that each grow into mini-skeletons.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Denotes which team they'll chase after, with green skeletons attacking both teams.
• Dem Bones: The entire lot of them.
• The Dreaded: The Mann brothers will express fright when the Skeleton King arrives:
  Redmond: The Skeleton King! Oh... gravelpits, you are in for it now!
  Blutarch: Run! It's the Skeleton King!
• Indian Burial Ground: Lampshaded by Redmond in "Grave Matters".
  Redmond: Why would anyone dig through an Indian burial ground to reach Hell? Just dig somewhere else!
• King Mook: The Skeleton King acts as their leader, for the most part.
• Mêlée à Trois: When they appear, it’s not an uncommon scenario to be caught in a skirmish against both skeletons and other players.
• Mighty Glacier: The Skeleton King does a good bit of damage, but almost every class can outrun him.
• Mini-Boss: The Skeleton King is the most powerful threat on the map barring the other players, but his much lower health and speed compared to the other Halloween horrors allows a competent player to take care of him easily.
• Mini-Me: A Pocket Skeleton King is one of the four plushie options for the "Pocket Halloween Boss" cosmetic. The smaller skeletons are also this for the taller ones.
• Mini Mook: Small, big-headed skeletons sometimes appear alongside their normal counterparts; see Asteroids Monster above.
• Scary Scarecrows: They have reskinned scarecrow counterparts on the Farmageddon map.
• Sickly Green Glow: The team-neutral skeletons glow and flash green.
• The Undead: The deceased occupants of the Indian Burial Ground that decide to do something about your occupation.
• Zerg Rush: They're understandably more brittle than Gray's robot army, so sheer number is their only real advantage.

Others

Mayor Mike

Mayor Mike is a minor character from the comics. He's the mayor of Teufort, but surprisingly he knows very little about what Mayors are allowed to do, resulting in him legally screwing things up for a lot of people. He's also quite savvy, almost getting half the Mercs executed until Miss Pauling comes to the rescue.

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• Arc Villain: Is the primary obstacle in "Unhappy Returns".
• Cloudcuckoolander: It's later revealed that he (and almost everyone else in Teufort) is completely insane due to the contaminated water supply.
• Faux Affably Evil: He's constantly smiling, very polite, insists the Mercs call him 'Mike' instead of 'Mister Mayor', and sentenced four of them to be executed. It may or may not be subverted with the later revelation that he's got a particularly brain-scrambling case of lead poisoning. He may not quite be faking an affable attitude as much as not being aware he's not supposed to do that.
• Hanging Judge:
  Mayor Mike: I pronounce this trial over and both of you guilty!
  Defense Lawyer: Your honor, the defense requests that we have the trial first.
• Mayor Pain: He simply seems to believe the Mayor can do anything he wants, including sentencing people to death.
• Psychological Projection: The "crimes" he arrests the mercs for are phrased suspiciously like they're things achieved through political power (i.e., something Mike could have done and forgotten about). For example, the mercenaries didn't bulldoze a school and build a casino; they "accidentally rezoned [the school] into a parking lot" and "petitioned the government to build [a casino]".
• Psychotic Smirk: Particularly during the trial.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Arrests Scout, Spy, Soldier, and Demoman and orders them to be hanged. This is on the grounds that he imagined that they did things like requisitioning the town square into a garbage dump and registering a retirement home as a pedophile sanctuary, instead of the murder, property damage, and war crimes the team actually did.
• Ultimate Authority Mayor: Subverted. A book on what a Mayor's capacities are is found out to be more of a pamphlet, and he was more or less accidentally riding on the townspeople's ignorance on what a mayor can actually do.
• Windmill Crusader: Extremely sheltered and brain-damaged as he is, Mike doesn't seem to trust anything outside of Teufort, particularly the mercenaries (who, up until he antagonized them, posed no threat to his town specifically). When he finally discovers the joys of reading at the local library, he cheerfully orders all books not about Teufort to be immediately burned.^note This leaves a grand total of one.

Old Nick

Nicolas Crowder, or Old Nick, is the Spirit of Australian Christmas who kidnaps children and forces them to work in his workshop in Antarctica.

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• All Myths Are True: The newspaper at the end of the comic referred to him as a "Thought-to-be-Mythical Holiday Mascot". Or it could be referring to the fact he's mortal.
• All There in the Manual: His origins are given in one section of The Australian Christmas update post.
• Badass Cape: Wears a pelt made out of koala pelts. He calls it a cape.
• Composite Character: His motif and gig of kidnapping and punishing children makes him a combination of Santa and The Krampus.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The Scout and Soldier beat him up before a boy manages to stab and kill him. Though it isn't clear how powerful he actually is.
• Evil Old Folks: The Bad Santa Spirit of Christmas still has the form of an old man.
• The Gambling Addict: According to "True Meaning", Old Nick apparently owes money to The Mafia because he likes betting on college basketball.
• Head Hat: He wears the top half of a reindeer skull (with a red nose) on his head.
• Holiday Personification: Of the fictional Australian Christmas.
• Horse of a Different Color: Old Nick uses kangaroos to pull his sleigh, rather than reindeer.
• Humanoid Abomination: He's an old, evil, supernatural, Santa-like being, but it's Downplayed since he still looks human other than being very tall and having extremely thin pupils (or none entirely).
• Insistent Terminology: The koala thing he is wearing is not a stole; it's a cape.
• Killed Off for Real: A newspaper makes it clear that he's dead, despite being a mythical being.
• The Krampus: He takes the "punishing naughty kids" part from Krampus' original story.
• Meaningful Name: "Old Nick" is sometimes a nickname for The Devil as well as referring to Saint Nicholas.
• Monochromatic Eyes: He has completely white eyes in most panels of the comic.
• Muggle in Mage Custody: He's a supernatural being who kidnaps kids, where they are forced to make toys for him.
• Nemean Skinning: Old Nick's cape consists of several koalas stitched together.
• One-Shot Character: Unlike TF2's Halloween mascot Merasmus, who became prominent enough to feature ingame and in the actual story comics, Nick only appears in the comic "A Smissmas Story" and hasn't reappeared since^note Aside from the "Wutville" Smissmas map ostensibly being his workshop.
• Pity the Kidnapper: He tried to take Little Jack with him to be one of his forced workers only to end up getting stabbed in the neck by an icicle.
• Pseudo-Santa: He's the "Santa" analogue of Australian Christmas. He started as an Australian settler in 1788 who decided he didn't like the heat and provisions and set off to settle the South Pole instead. Somehow still alive, he now uses his sleigh, drawn by sinister-looking reindeer (and a kangaroo), to kidnap children from Australia (and apparently other countries, given that "A Smissmas Story" takes place in the United States), bring them back to his workshop, and force them to make gifts year-round, which they then give to him. He then sells the duplicates online for prices so low he's practically giving them away. Appearance wise, he lacks the beard and wears a reindeer skull with a red nose instead of a hat, as well as a cape made from skinned koalas over a red shirt in lieu of the traditional red-and-white coat.
• Really 700 Years Old: Nicolas Crowder first arrived on December 18th, 1788, and is still around when he encountered three of the mercs. The in-game's story starts, by the earliest, by 1978.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: He wears a red shirt with black overalls and gloves. Though he also has gray/white in his color scheme (His koala cape and reindeer skull) to help with his Christmas motif.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: After taking one look at the heat and privations from the less-than-year-formed Australia when he was a settler, the old man said "screw this," and set off on a one-man voyage towards the South Pole.
• Shady Scalper: Inverted as his method of getting all those workers is more than shady, but he resells all of those gifts (including extra hats and weapons) at very cheap reduced prices as a secondary seller. (Sound familiar?)
• Spikes of Villainy: His kangaroos have harnesses covered in spikes.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: He only shows up for 5 pages in one issue before he is killed.

Medic's Doves

A flock of white doves that Medic keeps as pets.

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• Curiosity Is a Crapshoot: Most of the time, the doves harmlessly observe Medic's medical experiments. Archimedes, however, is very curious about human organs, going so far as to land in Heavy's giant chest wound in "Meet the Medic". This creates problems when he lands in Scout's chest offscreen and is accidentally sealed inside by Medic.
  Scout: You would not believe... how much this hurts.
  (Archimedes coos from inside Scout's chest)
  Medic: Archimedes?
• Disturbed Doves: In "Meet the Medic", the doves fly out from behind Medic before he deploys for battle. An action taunt allows Medic to pose heroically as the doves fly out from his coat.
• Evil Counterpart: The Spy has a raven named Aristotle, who wears a tiny mask of Medic's Archimedes dove.
• Made of Iron: The doves find themselves in all kinds of deadly situations, but always come out in one piece. For example, the Medic accidentally sealed Archimedes into Scout's chest in "Meet the Medic", but the bird remained alive. Another dove was swallowed by a giant bread monster but emerged unscathed in "Expiration Date".
• Morality Pet: For Medic.
• Named After Somebody Famous: One of Medic's doves is named after the ancient Greek scientist Archimedes of Syracuse.
• Parrot Pet Position: Archimedes (and his many variants) perches on Medic's shoulder this way as a cosmetic.
• Pet's Homage Name: Again, Archimedes is named for an ancient Greek mathematician.
• Sacrificial Lamb: When Classic Heavy kills one of the doves, Medic is hysterical. Fortunately, Medic revives the bird.
• Starting a New Life: According to the description under the plush Archimedes doll at the Valve store, Archimedes and his flock worked as wedding doves. While this career was lucrative, Archimedes always felt that something was missing. The best day of his life was when Medic adopted him (which involved Medic stealing a catering van at a prime minister's wedding).
• Team Pet: They're this for the Medic, at least.
• Uncatty Resemblance: Medic resembles them when wearing his white battle outfit. His long white coat resembles a dove's tail. In "The Sound of Medicine", the lab coat resembled dove wings as Medic descended from above.

Balloonicorn

The Mayor of Pyroland and an inflatable unicorn who only exists in Pyro's head. Has two holiday counterparts called "Reindoonicorn", who is also part reindeer as well, and "Balloonicorpse", who's painted to look like a skeleton.

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• Color-Coded Characters: By default, he's pink if he's on the RED Team or light blue if he's on the BLU Team.
• Early-Bird Cameo: He appears as a hanging ornament on the first page of "A Swissmas Story" before being introduced in "Meet the Pyro".
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: He's a cross between a balloon and a unicorn.
• Flight: Being part balloon is most likely what makes him fly through the air.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Implied. The cosmetic's description mentioned that he is on a hair trigger and is "usually pretty drunk".
• Hidden Depths: His item description reveals that he's having trouble on the job, his wife is cheating on him, and he abuses alcohol. Of course, Balloonicorn isn't real in the first place and all of the item descriptions in general should be taken with a grain of salt.
• Invisible to Normals: Can only be seen by players wearing Pyrovision Goggles.
• Living Gasbag: He's a "living" inflatable unicorn.
• Living Toys: He resembles a stuffed unicorn doll, except he's a balloon.
• My Little Phony: It's probably not a coincidence he came out at the height of Friendship is Magic's popularity.
• Non-Human Undead: The Balloonicorpse is him with a skeleton makeover.
• Palette Swap: Besides the two team colors, the Balloonicorpse is painted as a skeleton version, but the body doesn't change.
• Portmanteau: Balloon + unicorn = Balloonicorn.
• Shout-Out: A pink unicorn that can also simultaneously be invisible is also based on a real-world paradox concept.
• Team Pet: Can be equipped on the battlefield and he doesn't even have to be restricted to Pyro, even though only they can see Pyroland in-universe.
• Unicorn: An inflatable one.
• Your Size May Vary: He's rather big in "Meet the Pyro", but as a cosmetic, he's only a little bigger than the characters' heads.

God

Yes. The Big Man himself. He appears in the comics to greet Scout when the latter briefly dies.

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• Disproportionate Retribution: He was just about ready to end humanity right then and there because Scout has not gotten laid yet, thinking of them as ungrateful beings who rejected his gift to them (read: Scout). He was talked out of it.
• God Is Good: He is willing to let Scout into heaven and shows Scout exactly what he wants to see.
• God Is Inept: That he acts a lot like Scout should tell you enough about how competent he is. A good example of this happens when he almost lets slip that Tom Jones isn't Scout's dad, at which point a cherub hastily snaps Jones' neck to ensure Scout doesn't find out.
• Grandpa God: Like most modern incarnations of God, he takes the form of a bearded old man.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Sometimes God uses a less than formal vocabulary.
  God: So... man to man... the ladies back on earth. They've all lain with you, right?
  Scout: What? No! Why, were they supposed to?
  God: What? @#$%ing... yes! You were my GIFT to them!
• Sure, Let's Go with That: Was confused by Scout's claim of Tom Jones being his dad, before quickly catching on and having the real Tom Jones (who was killed by Soldier and is now in Heaven) disposed of to keep Scout from finding out.

The Devil

Ruler of Hell, whom Medic sold his soul to. Appears in the comics to collect his due. Or at least tries to.

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• Big Red Devil: His size varies, but even at the smallest he still reaches the Medic's height. While sitting.
• Deal with the Devil: He is the Devil, so it comes with the territory. The only deal we see him make didn't go well for him, however.
• The Devil Is a Loser: His only appearance has him being screwed out of a deal by the Medic.
• Royal "We": Refers to himself this way. Being the ruler of Hell probably has something to do with it.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Wears a formal business suit.

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