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With bony hands I hold my partner,
On soulless feet we cross the floor.
The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door.
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When I last held him to my breast.
But now we dance this grim fandango,
And will four years before we rest.

---

Manuel "Manny" Calavera is a Grim Reaper, the bridge between the worlds who leads recently departed souls from their brief, mortal coils to their final journey through the Land of the Dead.

It's a glamorous job description, but not such a glamorous job. In reality, Manny Calavera is himself a deceased soul who has been ordered by the Powers That Be to atone for the sins he committed in life by "paying off his debt" through work in the Land of the Dead. So, instead of beginning his four-year journey from El Marrow to the gate of the Ninth Underworld, Manny works selling other departed souls travel packages, ranging from simple walking sticks to the golden ticket, a trip on the Number Nine train that crosses the Land of the Dead in only four minutes. Cynical and competitive, Manny became a hotshot salesman for the Department of Death, content to work and wait until he could finally begin his journey toward the Land of Eternal Rest.



Manny Calavera is a deceased soul in the Land of the Dead. This basically means he look like a stylized skeleton, similar to a calaca. He can speak, eat, drink, and smoke, despite apparently being nothing but a walking set of bones. While his range of expressions is limited, his eye sockets can move in a manner similar to having eyelids, and the line around his teeth moves as he speaks (if you'd like an example, see here). I've inferred that in his life Manny was Mexican, and though in the game he usually uses Spanish for certain words or phrases, for RP purpose it should be assumed he is always speaking Spanish unless otherwise stated. While Manny works as a grim reaper, he is not an incarnation of death itself - he has no power to cause death beyond any normal person, and he uses his scythe to break through the paper-thin "mortal coil" that surrounds souls who have recently died. Manny's being dead also does not make him invincible - he can still suffer injury or "death within death" if his bones are destroyed.

Besides the whole skeleton thing, though, Manny pretty much acts like a normal person. Who is dead and a grim reaper.

A more detailed post concerning the Land of the Dead and Grim Fandango can be found here.


Manny Calavera is from the computer game Grim Fandango and is property of Tim Schafer and LucasArts. He appears here solely for the purpose of role-playing in milliways_bar, from which no profit whatsoever is being made.



Player journal is aberration. Feel free to ping or message me with any questions.