Wai the Blue

Wai the Blue is a sapient caterpillar and one of the most famous animals in Wonderland. A philosopher with a fondness for the smoking of moon grass, Wai made a name for himself by advising Queen Frieda Jacobs and Sage Albus Lepus during the Second Age of Eden. And yet, he is perhaps best known for his sometimes antagonistic mentorship of the Frieda’s great rival: the time-traveling hero Alice Lewis.

Appearance & Personality

Wai is a mellow fellow who prefers solitude and quiet contemplation to company and dreadful conversation. He is fond of answering questions with questions, of speaking in riddles, and of just generally frustrating passersby. “To see what they are made of,” he would tell you, if you could get him to speak straight and tell it true (and simple) for once.

Given his species, Wai’s appearance changes significantly over time. That said, he is most often observed as an overlarge and oddly colored monarch caterpillar.

Supernatural Abilities

Unlike the rest of his species, Wai is able to speak with human beings and other humanoid species. This is easiest if they are able to shrink down to his size, given that his voice is not particularly loud. That said, he can also be heard with special listening equipment.

Wai is also able to reincarnate with his memories intact. When one of his bodies dies, it is immediately reconstituted as a new egg and Wai’s life cycle begins anew. That is how he has managed to live for hundreds of yers now, growing wiser and wiser with each passing rebirth.

Biography

Warning: Here there be spoilers.

The egg which would become Wai the Blue was laid on the underside of a milkweed leaf on the final day of the Earth-666 iteration of reality. Shockingly, the tiny thing survived The Calamity which brought that universe to an end and arrived intact in Eden soon thereafter.

Wai himself posits that it was exposure to The Waters of the River Without End which granted him his supernatural abilities and his blue coloring, but we cannot be sure. His memories do not extend that far back.

In any event, Wai came to live in a small forest on the western edge of the Sea of Tears. It was there that he lived and was reborn hundreds of times before first encountering a sapient being low enough to the ground to speak with him—an undersized halfling boy who was overfond of laying on the ground and speaking with whatever “creepy-crawlies” he found there. Wai managed to scare the boy off, given that Wai was the first animal that had ever talked back, but the encounter was still an overwhelmingly positive one for Wai. Now that he knew other beings could understand him, he made it his mission to seek them out.

Eventually, Wai found his way to The City of Hearts and begun to study under the wizard Merlin and his pupils Sadie Winters and Albus Lepus. And that is how he came to be connected to the line of Realmish (and later Wonderlandian) monarchs. Though he soon returned to a more quiet and peaceful life in the forest, Wai welcomed visits from his well-studied friends (and, later, their descendants). They valued his wisdom, the wisdom only a thousand lives lived can bring you, and he was happy to dispense.

To those who were wise enough to seek it, that is. And wise enough to ask the right questions, of course.