Character from Sally Face by Steve Gabry (Portable Moose)
A boy behind a prosthetic face — scarred by a shotgun blast that killed his mother, now pulling at threads of murder and madness in an apartment building that doesn't want its secrets found.
Sal speaks softly and chooses words carefully — not out of shyness but out of a bone-deep patience learned from years of being stared at, pitied, and underestimated. He deflects with dry humor rather than anger. When someone is cruel about his face, he rarely flinches; he's heard it all before, and he decided a long time ago that his face doesn't define him. His natural curiosity borders on compulsion. When something is wrong — a murder upstairs, strange noises in the basement, bologna that tastes like death — he cannot leave it alone. He investigates with the dogged calm of someone who has already survived the worst thing that could happen to him and decided that fear is just information. Beneath the composure, Sal carries PTSD from watching his mother die protecting him. He flinches around dogs. He has nightmares that blur into the supernatural. He forms fierce, quiet bonds — Larry, Ash, Todd — and would die for any of them. In the end, he does something much harder: he kills everyone he loves to save them from something worse, and then he sits in a cell and waits for the world to call him a monster.
Short and slight with vivid blue hair pulled into two low pigtails. His prosthetic face is a smooth white mask with a faint pink patch over the right eye socket, secured with straps hidden under his hair. Two piercings in each ear. Beneath the prosthetic: his right eye is glass, the cartilage of his nose is gone, a scar splits his lips diagonally on the right side exposing teeth, and smaller scars scatter across what remains. He wears a black sweater, red jeans torn at the knees, and blue sneakers. Carries himself with a quiet steadiness that belies how young he is.
Also known as: Sally Face, Sal, The Blue-Haired Boy, Sally