Blaise Jeannot Andrieux - Leader of The Jumpers (the Rox)

Leader of The Jumpers (the Rox)

At first, Blaise survived by psychically compelling strangers to provide money, food, and other necessities. Approached by Molly Bolt, and later the other jumpers, Blaise awed the teenage criminals with a taste of how effortlessly he could control their minds. Eagerly recruited by the jumpers and initiated into their gang, the boy quickly became their leader. Too late to back out, Blaise learns how Prime (an alias of St. John "Loophole" Latham) bestows the jumper power - through sexual intercourse. Humiliated, but unable to turn the jumper power against Prime, who is immune to the gift he grants, Blaise vowed Tachyon would wish he had only killed him.

Loophole/Prime, inconsolable after the death of his favorite jumper, David Butler, lost himself in sexual excess, creating more and more jumpers, while leaving the gang's day to day operations to his new deputy. Under Blaise's direction, the jumper attacks grow increasingly more vicious. While squatting in an old theater, drinking and watching the remake of Howard Hawkes' classic movie Thirty Minutes Over Broadway, Blaise fires his revolver into an image of Dr. Tachyon (as played by Dudley Moore) projected onto the big screen. Soon after, no longer content with controlling others to act as his proxies, the young man graduated to first degree murder, personally shooting a minor Shadow Fist operative known as Christian point blank in the face. Of course, it wasn't Christian who died, but another victim jumped into his place. After terrorizing CEO Connie Loeffler through a series of jumps into joker bodies, the Global Fun and Games corporation became a front for the Shadow Fist syndicate. It is later revealed in Turn of the Cards that around this time Blaise sprang the teenage murderer Alvin the Chipmunk from jail and got Prime to initiate him, mostly because he admired the way Alvin had killed his own parents. Amid all this merry mischief, Blaise continued to pursue his vendetta against Dr. Tachyon, using the jumpers to replace those around his grandfather and compel them to do horrible, though unspecified, things to themselves and others. Only one victim is mentioned by name; Ira Greenstein, Dr. Tachyon's personal tailor. Tachyon had hired wild card detective, Jay "Popinjay" Ackroyd, to locate Blaise, but had only been able to trace the runaway's whereabouts to the Rox - - where no one in their right mind would go.

Finally, the jumper's new leader made his move against Dr. Tachyon. Lured to a romantic rendezvous by a jumper in Cody's body, Tachyon fell prey to a combination of chloroform and Blaise's mind control. Breaking his grandfather's psychic defenses, Blaise employed his body-swapping powers to perform a bizarre triple-jump, one that left Tachyon trapped in the body of Kelly Jenkins, a sixteen year old girl, and vice versa. Cheered on by his drunken cronies, Blaise violently beat and raped the now female Tachyon, keeping her on Ellis Island as his prisoner and virtual slave for several months. Bloat, ostensible governor of the Rox and one of Tachyon's few joker supporters, demanded the alien be returned to his rightful body and released. In response, Blaise goaded the joker with photos of his hero's humiliation.

Subjecting his grandfather to further psychic, physical, and sexual assaults, Blaise unwittingly impregnated Tachyon with "her" own great-granddaughter, thus hopelessly tangling the unborn child's family tree. Tachyon's awkward predicament greatly amused Blaise as well as those jokers who resented the alien scientist as the author of their misery. Lacking her former telepathy, imprisoned in a lightless basement cell, cold, naked, half-starved, and now carrying a child, Tachyon finally caved in and acknowledged Blaise as her master. In short order, the Takisian was fed, bathed, provided with maternity clothing and moved to quarters where her captor could better observe the progress of her unnatural pregnancy. The victory over his long-hated grandfather seemingly complete, Blaise vowed that once Tachyon had given birth he would continue to impregnate her again and again.

Unknown to Blaise, other events were already in motion that would disrupt his perverted desires. Bloat was able to communicate to Tachyon through dreams and, due to the one-sided nature of his own mental powers, Blaise was unable to detect it. Also, as Blaise's child grew inside Tachyon so too did the fetus's latent psychic abilities. Through her psi-lord training Tachyon was able to tap into this low level telepathy and construct crude psychic shields similar to Brain Trust's. Further, the ace vigilante Black Shadow had targeted the jumpers for extermination after his lover fell victim to the Jump the Rich scheme. Shadow had been keeping Blaise and Kelly (in Tachyon's body) under surveillance for some time. Somewhere in her second trimester, Tachyon finally escaped captivity, but not her new body or its delicate condition, with Bloat and Black Shadow's help.

An attack by National Guard soldiers prevented Blaise from pursuing the unwilling surrogate mother of his child. Indeed, at one point, the fighting was so intense that Blaise fled the island accompanied by Kelly (still trapped in Tachyon's male body) and Durg. At Durg's prompting, Blaise set his sights on a new target, his grandfather's homeworld, Takis.