Buddy "Literally Made of Snakes" Johnson

No, the nickname isn't a metaphor. Buddy Johnson is literally made of snakes. People sometimes get the wrong impression, because to the unaided eye he appears just like everyone else. But unlike a human, every single one of his cells is a tightly-packed snake. He needs only to sneeze to fill a room from floor to ceiling with snakes as they uncurl themselves to full size. He can hiss as loud as the Selesteine national anthem, and probably much louder if he tries. He can squeeze his body through any hole large enough to fit his bones, which are the only parts of him that aren't made of snakes — as far as we know.

Terrible things always come from Barcu, of course, and Johnson is no exception. But where did he come from, specifically? Opinions are divided. Some say that he was once a man who became snakes. Others say that he was once snakes who became a man. The former view has to its advantage that the inordinate number of snakes that make up Johnson would have been noticeable before they became him. The latter view has to its advantage that he usually appears as the sort of generic human you'd come up with if you were an alien trying to make a human disguise, and "Buddy Johnson" is pretty up there on the list of most generic names.

Who or whatever he was before he was Literally Made of Snakes — assuming he was anything before — he first appeared in Kingsland on Tesseraction Eve in AES 954, when all of the city's storm drains began inexplicably disgorging snakes at high pressure into the air. Some of the snake-clouds that formed drifted south to Flandre, but most precipitated where they formed over Kingsland. When the snake geysers dissipated and the snakes had drained into the river, Buddy Johnson climbed out, literally made of snakes. From then on, he became a fixture of Kingsland South, terrorizing the populace that lived there. Southside got a brief respite in 987, when they managed to get him elected as the mayor, forcing him to leave the city for Disputatious Assembly sessions. This was short-lived, however. After a few months, Johnson sat snakes in every free seat in the Assembly, becoming for a moment the majority vote per se, and then unilaterally banned himself from the Assembly. An attempted resistance by the Flandrean High Exarch Cerberus Ironheart was foiled by the Hegemon of Whales; Johnson would subsequently invade Flandre for revenge. He was finally driven out in 990 by the newly ascended High Exarch Minor Seraphi Ironheart, and not been seen since.

I've got a personal theory about where the snakes came from.

Friend in Kingsland told me there's a legend of an ancient cult that got foiled by Flandrean National Response Protocols one too many times, so they cursed Flandre to have to deal with a nest of snakes for every time they foiled someone's plot. 'Course, "a wizard did it" isn't all that scholarly of an explanation, so maybe that cult went off and bred snakes like mad for the next thousand years or so. Either way.