Alpha Outpost Blues

"Protip: get a bit crazy, it keeps you from going completely insane." —Lieutenant Colonel Peter 'Mega' Firebrand

Alpha Outpost Blues ^{[dead link]} is an online, text-based role playing game, hosted on the RedvsBlue.com site forums. It is based loosely on both the Haloverse and RvB canon, yet what specifically is undetermined and there's absolutely No Fourth Wall to be found.

On a planet named Undae a lot of armies are based, one of these being the Blue Army's Twelfth Armored Cavalry, generally just referred to as the blues. They are led by Lieutenant Colonel Peter Firebrand and-

No, no, this just isn't the right way to describe it.

Alpha Outpost Blues is the tale of the Blue Army, which consists of several crazy, murderous, sociopathic if not downright insane soldiers, as they deal with all sorts of crap that goes against logic, physics, common sense and damn near everything else one can imagine. When they aren't fighting enemies from their past or back-from-the-dead no-longer-allies, they're either finding underground caves, Forerunner ships, magical crystals, or simply fighting among themselves.

There are occasionally underlying plots, but these generally take a back seat compared to the wacky hijinks the characters get themselves into.

They have since moved on to a new planet, Tribute and the new RP can be found here ^{[dead link]}

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Tropes used in Alpha Outpost Blues include:

• Artificial Human: Sarah, the daughter of Mega and Fox
• Ax Crazy: Numerous characters, most notably Pete and Sam.
• Author Avatar: Lucas, Indy's creator is s literal example, as he is a teenager who is a Physical God within the realms of West Mountain.
  • Cam is a less literal example because his character is modeled directly from his own personality. Though not a physical god, he slices through the fourth wall like it's butter.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: The longer you're around, the higher your rank, and more ridiculous stuff you can get away with.
• Awesome but Impractical: Experimental weapons, and the radiation bomb fall under this trope.
• Awesome Yet Practical:The crystals, nano swarms, and forklifts.
• I Call It Vera: Cam's revolver. He calls it Shelby.
• Back From the Dead: Captain Pete, doubly triply QUADRUPLY so for the AI, Skysong. Naturally he isn't too happy about this. Captain Red's back too, seems like Captains do this a lot.
  • Sarah, too.
• Battle Couple: Mega and Fox
  • Badass Family: With the addition of their robot daughter, Sarah
• Black and Gray Morality: The RP has shown to have a corrupting effect on the players, because relatively nice characters have insanity in a month. The most sane person is Major Tori Roberts, who's method are pretty standard. The most insane person is Cam, who loves the base itself more than the people inside it.
  • Cam summed it up nicely with, "This base is a black hole that consumes all innocence and sanity. That's what makes us us."
• Bored with Insanity: "My mind is still adjusting to sanity. It was bound to happen."
• Boring Yet Practical:Indy during his time Brought Down to Normal was the embodiment of this trope.
• Big Freaking Gun: Due to the Gadgeteer Genius nature of many of the characters, there are several throughout the RP, most notably Mega's KMG (Knife Machine Gun)
• Big Bad: I think its safe to call Pete this.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Mostly done by Cam and Mega. Cam knows he's in an RP, while Mega can hear the out of character talk as voices in his head.
• Bunny Ears Lawyer: Numerous characters. Best seen in Nomad.
• Butt Monkey: Everyone has their turn. Indy gets it the most often though.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: The role-play never actually settles down into a definitive genre. One page it could a life or death mission capturing a rampant AI on an abandoned ship, and another page is seeing what the resident nut is up to. To put things in perspective, every trope on this page has been played for laughs, and for drama at least once.
• Colonel Badass: Lieutenant Colonel Peter 'Mega' Firebrand.
• Comedic Sociopathy: Being run solely by lovers of the Red vs. Blue series, naturally this is prevalent throughout.
• Cool Car: The Warthog that is customized and pimped by WO-2 Marc Draak. It has an auto-target gun on the back with 5 barrels and a Electric Discharge Grenade launcher. It has multiple layers of plating and is the fastest vechicle around.
  • Thijs and Indy made a pretty cool forklift.
    • It has two mini mac cannons and a slipspace engine. Yeah, its pretty fucking cool.
• Crazy Awesome: Follows logically from the Authority Equals Asskicking and Ax Crazy tropes
• Crowning Moment of Awesome: Mega single-handedly destroying an Energy Projector on foot, while fighting Pete.
• Cloning Blues: Averted by Mega's view of the Blue Crystals. When asked which one is the 'real one', they reply with: 'who the hell cares?'
• Cluster F-Bomb: Oh so very much...
• Cyborg: Fox, Mega's girlfriend.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Captain Red He got better.
  • A lot of unactive characters got a bridge dropped in their lap after the Captian's last battle.
    • some have gotten better.
• Enemy Mine: Pete helping against the Salt Vampires.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Pete's hideout at Froman is mostly underground.
  • The original West Mountain base was this trope.
• Everything's Worse with Bears: The Mutant Bears.
• Expansion Pack Past: The characters that have been around for a while tend to develop this.
  • Especially the Captain as of late. He's gone from a military scientist from Reach, to a Time Lord (since retconned out), finally to being adopted as a Sangheili warrior.
• Face Heel Turn: Indy went from Neutral Good to Neutral Evil.
  • Face Heel Revolving Door:And back to Neutral Good.
• A Father to His Men: Mega, sometimes. Loc was certainly fatherly to us.
• Fun with Foreign Languages: A lot of the writers come from the Netherlands, so one can occasionally find a whole page of dutch conversation between characters. The other soldiers must have an extremely specific Weirdness Censor for them to accept their usually english-speaking coworkers to suddenly break out in Dutch despite having no history of even being in the Netherlands.
• Fourth Wall Observer: Cam easily qualifies.
• Heroic Sociopath: It's very hard to find someone on the Blues' side that isn't this. Major Tori Roberts might be one of the only ones.
• Killed Off for Real: Major Steele,Ex-Captain Pete
  • Disregard the latter.
    • No, he's gone for real this time. We promise.
      • Word of God confirmed in fact.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Popularised by ex-Captain Pete, then expanded on by the Wetware CPU; Skysong, now every man and his dog/rabbit/crow has got on-board.
  • Indy is now the resident Gadgeteer Genius as he can make anything in an instant.
• Genre Savvy: Quite a lot of characters. Cam does this often, on the verge of metagaming.
• Green Rocks: Mega's crystals.
  • Cam has the white crystal now. it is made out of super compressed partials of space and time and has the potential to Destroy Life As We Know It. Why the fuck did we let him have it, again?
• Lampshade Hanging: Several characters.
• Mad Scientist: Mega, sometimes.
  • Indy's starting to get doses of this.
• Man Child: As is the case when mostly fully grown characters are authored by mostly teenagers, just about everyone fits this trope.
• Mary Sue:On the surface, it seems like many people are this trope, but everyone dislikes each other, and aren't perfect.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Captain's gleeful torture and prompt execution of Jason by way of a drug to induce the worst possible memories in the subject. Speaking as his creator, it was at that point the Captain became truly irredeemable in my eyes.
  • Everyone else viewed said creator crossing this when his "good" character killed a cat. Immediate ban.
    • Not just killed, but beat, skinned, and cooked said cat before burying the remaining three.
• Names to Run Away From Really Fast: Considering that most of the character names are not only made up by the players, but also based on their on-line usernames, this tends to pop up quite often.
• No Fourth Wall:What so ever. The fourth wall is more like a fourth door. We have had a few people go into the game. Yes, actual people. In a forum game.
• OCC Insanity: Every once in awhile, when the thread is inactive, you can find pages upon pages of random, senseless Out of Character discussion. One time, the Admins came back to find 15+ pages of Fetish preferences.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Even though he's one of the longest fixtures in the story, no one knows what Lieutenant Nomad's real name is.
• Our Vampires Are Different: They are made out of salt.
• Sanity Slippage: Again, damn near everyone, although it comes to light best in Skysong/Sierra.
• Schizo-Tech:The base has nano technolgy,technopaths, and advanced mechs. Yet the technology for everything is still Halo based, meaning that we still use cars, and guns with bullets.
• Shared Mass Hallucination: Poor Indy... Cal Pal is starting to get a taste of it too. Stupid Indy... Leaking his brain juice everywhere...
• Sliding Scale of Anti-Heroes:It goes from Type III and gets worse from there.
• Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Hardness: Alpha Outpost can be on the Beyond No Fourth Wall side of things at times.
• Sorcerer's Apprentice Plot: Sergeant Indy took the mantle of computer chief while Sky was offline. Zany antics ensued.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: And how!
• Rule of Cool:The Lieutenant Colonel has a machine gun that fires knives. And it's not the craziest thing to be invented there.
  • Cam has a revolver that fires nukes, that explode into revolvers that fire nukes...
• Something Blues
• Technopath: Indy is one of these, through implants.
• Ultimate Job Security: Just exactly why are these guys still in the army? Subverted in Skysong, who actually had to pay for his crimes against the Mutant Bears
  • Of course, there is the theory that Command placed them there to get rid of them.
• No Such Thing as HR: Cam shoot our you knee again? Go join a union, you big baby.
  • • "Why haven't we court marshaled Band yet?" "If we court marshal him, we'd have to court marshal everyone. I'm not doing all that fucking paperwork just to lose my job."
• Under Construction: Seriously guys, I'm going to pistol whip the next person who thinks its a great idea to mess around with explosives while inside the base.
  • -hides C-4 behind back- Of course, sir!
• Villain Protagonist: At times, though they try not to cross the Moral Event Horizion.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: The orange, purple and blue crystals have this as a side-effect to their otherwise beneficial powers.
  • Could also apply to the higher ranking officers. Good lord, are they a bunch of psychopaths.
    • Indy's technopathic abilities give him split personality disorder, and to stop that he had to be Brought Down to Normal.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Some players (and therefore, their characters) tend to disappear quite often.
• Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Binx. 'Nuff said.
• The Scrappy:Bink. Oh god, Binx.
• You Have Been Warned: The regulars almost always warn newbies of what an awful place Alpha Outpost is. Some leave, some stay. Don't say we didn't warn you.
  • "Welcome to Alpha Outpost, Newbslime." is a favorite of the regulars when Newbies are just learning of the hijinks of AOB.
• Another Dimension: Finch and Cam have somehow ended up in the Multiverse RP.