Be Calm is a webcomic started in August of 2011 by two Tumblr users who decided to create a text adventure in the vein of Ruby Quest. It follows the adventures of Red, a mysterious masked figure, and his companion Ardois, a one-armed young man, through a strange, underground facility.
As of March 2015, Be Calm is being rebooted by its creators as a new adventure with the same setting and characters. It runs parallel to the Badscaryplace ARG, which gives more insight into the facility's original purpose and what exactly went on there before Red woke up without his memory.
The original comic provides examples of:
- Air-Vent Passageway: Used to get around all those pesky locked doors.
- Amnesiac Hero: Red and Ardois, of course.
- Amnesiac Dissonance: Sort of. Neither of them were evil, but they were bitter rivals, and Ardois's last diary entry before his memory loss reveals that even then he acknowledged that they would have been better off working together from the start.
- Big Damn Heroes: Red pulls this by beheading a monster before it can kill Ardois.
- Big Good: W h o and his brothers Nimda and Snimda appear to be this.
- Blood Bath: Ardois wakes up in one after hurling a piece of metal through Richard.
- Cheshire Cat Grin: Momus, all the time.
- Cool Mask: Red starts out with a plague doctor mask until he loses it to a monster, while Ardois sports a pretty neat gas mask until he gains a new arm and no longer needs it.
- Cowardly Lion: Ardois.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Richard and Ellis.
- Cry into Chest: Ardois when Red hugs him to comfort him.
- Dead All Along: Richard.
- Deadly Hug: Ardois to the real Richard.
- Dreaming the Truth: Every now and then the characters relive their lost memories in dreams.
- Handicapped Badass: Ardois is missing an arm, Red is missing an eye.
- Hearing Voices: Red and Ardois do this a lot, the voices are that of their fanbase telling them what to do.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: Ardois and Richard were this before all the death and amnesia.
- I Hate Past Me: Ardois continually dreams of his lost memories, and he doesn't always like what he finds. He even apologizes to the Organ Grinder for something he doesn't even remember doing.
- Interactive Comic: And the characters know it.
- Jerkass Gods: Momus, maybe some of his siblings too.
- Mercy Kill: See Deadly Hug, above.
- Ominous Music Box Tune: The Organ Grinders musical device, it plays Greensleeves.
- Physical God
- Power Fist: Ardois, once he regains his arm.
- Together in Death: Richard and Ellis.
- Viral Transformation: It quickly becomes apparent that being exposed to the air in the underground facility for too long can have seriously bad effects. Namely, mutating your body until you turn into a monstrous killing machine. The ARG attached to the reboot hints that part of the facility's original purpose was to figure out a way of studying these mutations in a controlled environment.
- Walking Shirtless Scene: Red. All the time. Ardois joins him as well after his clothes and mask are melted by monster spit.
- Wham Line: "Them." And he looks directly at you.
- White Mask of Doom: Red and Aodh, he seems to be wearing a white medical mask.
- Your Days Are Numbered: Momus to Red and Ardois.
