Benjamin “Baldi” Moore

Benjamin “Baldi” Moore is the head teacher of the Baldi’s basics Schoolhouse. Though he hates being called by his first name, seeing it as far too personal. Instead, he prefers Mr. Moore, or Baldi which is a nickname playtime gave him, and one he has stuck with ever since. His appearance is very distinct, with a light skin complexion, long skinny fingers, red lips bright enough that they could have been painted with lipstick, rigid pencil thin eyebrows and a single hair strand on his head which appears to be colored ginger. He wears a long-sleeved neon green shirt, blue jeans, and light brown shoes. He also has an excellent sense of hearing, far better than the average human. As he mentions when frustrated with the player in the game, he can hear every door they open. This apparently is the case no matter where the player is in the schoolhouse, unless they manage to find an alarm clock, which creates a loud noise that distracts Baldi from the player.

Baldi's facial expression while chasing the player is neutral and not one of fury, though it is heavily compressed and distorted. Normally, Baldi’s expression is contorted into a deceptively friendly smile as he gives the player a wave with an awkward bend in his left arm to greet them. Typically, he plays the same set of tricks each time. He gives both students of his school, and players of the video game mathematical problems to solve in exchange for a shiny new quarter. These are typically on a device he created called the You Can Think Pad or one of his several Math Machines. This occurs as the player is supposed to be collecting 7 notebooks, which they are bringing back to their friend who was apparently late for eating practice. What this means exactly, is unknown. Though it might be related to the rules in the school against eating or drinking, so they may have just been late to eating lunch off campus. Regardless, the school is not what it first seems, as there is a more sinister side to Baldi's personality when the player makes their first mistake at solving a math problem, as there are some problems on the You Can Think Pad that are impossible to answer as they are utter gibberish, basically a bunch of numbers melded together into one giant mess. When this happens, Baldi will either say “I get angrier each time you answer wrong” or “I hear every door you open”. If answered correctly, he usually responds in a manner that can come off as playful or sarcastic, saying “Wow! You exist!” Or “Congratulations! Here’s a shiny new quarter!” A lot of these dramatics come from when he was a much kinder teacher, because being an elementary school teacher involves being able to make one’s presence in a room known, and be able to be dynamic with the young kids he works with. Essentially, always putting his all into everything he does, no matter what.

But it’s the switch in personality that makes him disconcerting, because it was never meant to exist. In the beginning, he was intended to be the perfect teacher, completely unable to make a mistake, and capable of answering any questions a student might ask him. He was especially proud of the You Can Think Pad he invented, thinking it would make his teaching more efficient, and increase how many students he could teach, because he genuinely loves teaching, and only wanted what he thought would best help them succeed. But something went wrong with the third question of the second notebook. It wasn’t perfect, it was instead terribly wrong. But if he was supposed to be perfect at his job, there was no world where the third question could be wrong. But in his effort to convince himself that the answer wasn’t wrong, it began to corrupt his own code too, making him aggressive and unpredictable. His aggressive side shows itself as he slaps his ruler against his left hand repeatedly as some sort of compulsive habit or coping mechanism for stress. Typically the ruler slapping follows the tempo of a metronome, as he slowly but surely starts chasing the player, getting faster with each notebook collected and each incorrectly solved math problem. After collecting all the required notebooks, he gives the player a chance to escape the school, albeit in a limited time span, and laughs at their escape efforts. However, there is one person who knows that Baldi’s basics is just a game, one that either needs to be fixed or shut down, and that’s Null, a figure with blue jeans, a red t-shirt, short cropped hair, and no face, just a pair of eyes that seem to know too much. Baldi is either completely unaware of Null’s existence, or when Null does make his presence known, he’s utterly terrified of him, albeit for a reason he isn’t entirely able to understand.

It's generally shown that Baldi likes to create inventions in his spare time, such as: The Math Machine, The fog machine, The Portal Poster, His gravity flipping invention, and The teleporter. Though the Math Machine is his personal favorite, as what could be better than solving math more efficiently, and better keep track of students’ scores? Nothing, in his opinion. Though Baldi isn’t alone in his school. He works directly with the Principal, sometimes referred to as the Principal of the Thing. Who he is exactly, is unknown. He’s generally considered to be less dangerous than Baldi himself, mainly having a tendency for wagging his finger and tossing students in detention for anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds, which is perceived as several hours to the player. His main rules are as follows: no running, no eating, no drinking, no entering school faculty rooms, no detention, and no fourth wall breaks. Fourth wall breaks according to the Principal, mean anything that isn’t intended to work with game mechanics, most commonly items that don’t function in the context of the game. If there is an item a player has that doesn’t exist in the game or shouldn’t exist in the game, the Principal will confiscate it. Every so often, he tosses Baldi or some of the school’s permanent students in detention, though he tries to avoid this as Baldi can get easily irritable by anything that doesn’t match his perception of a normal school day. Despite this, Baldi and the Principal are usually rather fond of each other, arguing or bantering like a married couple. They are both on the same team in creating an environment for learning math, or in the rare case, taking a field trip to a camping site with little to no distractions. Admittedly, Baldi genuinely loves field trips, and it’s considered to be one of his few escapes from the world of math and numbers constantly running through his head in his attempts to convince himself he is still perfect. Though he has a bad habit of trying to enforce rules upon his field trips, such as having to constantly keep a camp fire from going out, or else.

As for the students in his school, there are only 4 main ones. The first one is playtime, a little girl with frizzy brown hair and a permanent grin on her face. She’s always bouncing around with her pink jump rope, asking the player to play a game of jump rope with her, typically 5 jumps as she counts them all out loud with glee. The bad news is that she often does this while the player is actively trying to escape Baldi’s wrath, so she gets in the way a lot unless the player has a pair of kid’s scissors, which can be used to cut the rope, but this makes her sad. If Baldi is particularly angry, he completely ignores anyone else in sight, only having eyes for the player, but if he still has some senses about him, he’ll request playtime to get out of the way, or jump a couple times to oblige her constantly wanting a playmate. He usually loves playing jump rope with her, but his more single minded nature towards mathematics has made him engage with his current students less often than he probably should, which might explain why they randomly roam the halls. The second student is This Is A Bully, just called Bully for short. He tends to demand whatever item the player has, rudely blocking the hallway they are trying to run through if they don’t have anything. The third student, if it can be considered a student at all, is 1st Prize. He’s a science experiment on wheels that loves to hug anyone in sight, claiming that he’s coming, and he will hug you for all eternity. The implication is that 1st prize, much like Baldi himself, doesn’t want the player to leave, as 1st prize often pushes the player through corridors directly to Baldi himself, though 1st prize struggles to turn corners. This is a sign of loyalty to the headteacher, but it also implies that Baldi created 1st Prize, as he has invented countless other forms of technology in the past, which certainly speaks to his loneliness as a teacher in a school that exists in a constant loop, and his desire to remain connected to his students even as he’s changed as a result of the third problem. The fourth student is Arts and Crafts, a sentient sock puppet that gets jealous of how many notebooks the player has collected, usually emitting high pitched noises and spinning aggressively around the player once all seven notebooks are collected. It’s highly likely that arts and crafts was made by Baldi back when there was room for creativity in classes, and not just arithmetic. Lastly, the school has a janitor, but not in the traditional sense. Instead, the school has a sentient green broomstick known as Gotta Sweep, or Sweep for short. It’s called that for it’s signature catchphrase “Gotta Sweep, Sweep, Sweep!” Its’ whole function is to clean the school at any cost, pushing players, students, the Principal, and even Baldi out of the way whenever it wants. Sweep is probably the most singularly driven entity aside from Baldi, so there is a parallel Baldi sees in the Broom that makes him afraid of it. Nevertheless, he keeps it around so that the school is kept presentable. Though there are a few items that can cause a mess around the school, most namely B Soda which is extremely carbonated to the point where it can push someone back several feet and can be purchased with a quarter at the school’s vending machine, though any attempt to drink it could result in detention. There’s also an energy bar that can be bought to keep the player able to keep running, as they will lose stamina as Baldi continues to chase them. Though Baldi himself doesn’t appear to ever need them, only getting faster and faster instead of slower. Overall, Baldi appears to show signs of severe OCD, reduced emotional regulation, and binary thinking that makes his entire school less of a basics in education, and more about basics in how to escape a dangerous man that was once a great teacher, and an environment that seems complicit or shaped around his actions.

However, despite it all, Baldi still has the instincts of a teacher, and there was some things that prove this no matter how corrupted his code becomes. For one thing, if a student requests to talk to him directly in his office, he will not refuse, and it’s one of the very rare occasions where he will listen to what the players have to say about his environment and about his own methods, even if he struggles to change them. The faculty office also functions as his living and sleeping quarters, and it shares a wall with the Principal’s office, though Baldi apparently rarely gets sufficient sleep, staying up far too late grading papers and working on school improvements. Additionally, if the player manages to activate the telephone, he will run to it, thinking a student called in sick, or that a staff member needs to talk to him, even if as it might turn out, nobody is at the phone. If nobody is there, he gets surprisingly quiet and his ruler will stop slapping for a few moments. Lastly, he’s always loved apples, particularly if they’re given to him as a gift. If offered to him, he’ll immediately thank the player and begin to devour it, which causes his hostility to momentarily decrease. The same thing can also happen if he’s given a cup full of coffee, though this can simultaneously make him much faster if he ends up deciding to pursue a player.

A new player has arrived at Baldi’s basics in Education and Learning, but they’re not seeking to try their hand at math or at how fast they can run away from an enraged teacher. Instead, they are looking to understand what could have caused a school like this to exist, and if there’s anything that be done to break its mathematical loop of chaos.