Cá Bảy Màu

Cá Bảy Màu
Species:	Human
Affiliated with:	Faction Paradox
Place of origin:	Melbourne
First appearance:	A Scene
Appearances:	PROSE: What Keeps Their Lines Alive PROSE: White Canvas

Cousin Cá Bảy Màu was a human member of Faction Paradox who originated from Melbourne during the early Ghost Point period. He was genderfluid. She was part of a small Faction cabal with Axastyakis, Mullion, Hole, and Amara. Cá Bảy Màu's mask was made of fish bone. (PROSE: What Keeps Their Lines Alive

Mullion, Axastyakis, Cá Bảy Màu, and Hole were among the members of the cult who were deceived by Auteur's unaffiliated twelfth incarnation into believing that this Auteur instead postdated the version (PROSE: White Canvas) who had become a Godfather of the Faction. (PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine) Acting on her spurious orders, the first cultists deceived by Auteur had helped create tears between the 10,000 Dawns and their universe, allowing the painted warriors to cross into the Dawns after they were tricked by Auteur into believing the Dawns planned to attack the Original Mammoths.

After Graelyn Scythes threw off Auteur's ritual, however, Auteur ordered the hundreds of cultists now under her command to take up residence within a Town she created within the White Canvas, and to act as its innocuous population for multiple years in order to provide a controlled environment in which to raise the deaged Graelyn over again into someone who would go along with what the ritual needed her to do. While Hole was already present in the Town by its tenth year, Mullion, Axastyakis and Cá Bảy Màu, who already knew Hole, arrived in the Town's fifteenth year. When Graelyn first encountered them, Axastyakis was trying to get a drunken Cá Bảy Màu to put an end to his drinking binge and go home, something with which Graelyn and F.I.D.O assisted him.

Over the next two years, Mullion grew increasingly frustrated with Auteur's tyrannical way of ruling the Town, and, in the Town's seventeenth year, eventually decided to confront Auteur, trying to prevail upon their shared species to pretend to not be afraid of her. Her companions reluctantly backed her up but left her to do the talking — with which Auteur was unimpressed, soon using the power of her gauntlet to suck Mullion into the White Canvas, which sent her spiraling through a metafictional, psychologically harrowing nightmare controlled by Auteur, at the end of which she submitted to Auteur's will.

Subsequently, all the inhabitants of the Town, cultists included, were briefly turned into fiction by Auteur, only for everyone to be released and returned to their proper place in the cosmos by Graelyn using the gauntlet, which she'd won back from Auteur. (PROSE: White Canvas)

Behind the scenes

• "Cá Bảy Màu" is Vietnamese for "guppy".
• Cá Bảy Màu was the first canonically genderfluid character in the Doctor Who franchise.
• The character was written to have ADHD. His "background track" was Then the Morning Comes by Smash Mouth.

My main concept for Cá Bảy Màu was that he evokes all those lovely romantic tropes that surround the Doctor, the Eighth in particular, but that he severely lacks any drive for adventure or justice. He thinks of himself as the grand actor, the keen detective, the rebel who cleverly points out whatever others are too scared to address. He is spectacularly wrong on all counts. As a result, his presence in the story is also an absence of everything he could have accomplished, had he been just a little bit better at the whole protagonist thing.Niki Haringsma

Invalid appearances

Graelyn Scythes and Axastyakis walked Cá Bảy Màu to his home after he drank too much. He later accompanied Mullion in demanding that Auteur return them to the Eleven-Day Empire. (PROSE: White Canvas)