Theo

""Well, if you're not here to kill me... Welcome to Simple Flip Island! I am Theo! King of all the Land!"" Theo (best known in the outside world as Coconut Boy) is the deuteragonist of Meta Runner.

He is the main playable character of the in-universe game Ultra Jump Mania and Tari's first friend/ally. Despite being a simple computer program, he appears to be fully sentient and possesses consciousness.

Appearance
Being a video game character, Theo has very unrealistic and cartoony proportions.

He is short, but has a large head about the same size as the rest of his body. He has a small, stubby nose and similarly small ears. He has large light-blue eyes and fuzzy eyebrows. His hair is similar to a tree, with most of it being green like leaves and something similar to that of a palm tree sprouts out from the top of his head.

He wears a yellow short-sleeved overshirt with a white flower pattern on it and a white vest underneath. He has half a coconut strapped across his back like a backpack that he uses as a weapon as well as brown shorts and a belt with two apples and bananas strapped on.

Much like other defining parts of his body, his arms and legs are quite short, although he has a reasonably large bulk.

In season 2, his eyes are bigger and his eyebrows are now the same color as his hair.

Personality
Theo is quite childish, happy-go-lucky, fun-loving, and occasionally stubborn. He doesn't understand the consequences in serious situations, meaning that Tari often has to look after him. He often just accepts that he's going to die in most bad situations, which annoys and concerns Tari.

In season 2, he seems to better understand the real world, as he stopped referring to Lucks as an "evil boss" and he called TAS-Corp by its name. He also seems to exhibit a newfound fear of death, as he expresses concern over the possibility of what might happen if Lucks destroyed his cartridge again before Tari reassures him that everything will be okay and sends him out of the game. Not long afterwards, Theo questions what material he's made out of in the real world after glitching again.

History
Theo is one of the many versions of him in different cartridges of Ultra Jump Mania (specifically TAS-Corp's speed running cartridge). He happens to be aware that he's a video game character, thus being used to dying countless times because of the player.

On a speed runner tournament, Belle Fontiere is playing his game, trying to execute a glitch in order to beat a world record. Theo misses the goal and drowns in lava, resulting in Belle's loss. Tari then starts to play his game, initially playing in a clumsy manner, only to get better as she goes on. Tari then accidentally warps herself into the game, meeting Theo face-to-face. Theo mistakes Tari for a boss at first, but ventures through the level with her, growing a bond between the two of them.

He meets Lucks when he presents himself as a recolored Theo. After Tari gets forced out of the game when Lucks' scientists drill through her arm, Theo is brought out along with her. Initially, Theo believes that they were teleported to a "secret level". After tossing his coconut at a TAS-Corp employee, the pair escape the building and run through the crowded city.

Theo eventually gets separated from Tari still believing that they were in a secret level. As he's walking in the streets, people stare at him in shock as they see a real life video game character pass by. After accidentally scaring a random lady due to a visual glitch, Tari scoops Theo up and runs off. They stop at an alleyway, where Theo realizes that he's in the real world and that his powers don't work anymore.

They enter a building full of streamers called The Hive and take shelter at a streaming pod, where Theo blindly plays a video game and starts a stream, calling attention to them both. The pair find themselves cornered by Belle and some workers from TAS Corp and get split up. He successfully evades the soldiers, but he witnesses Tari getting caught. Being too late to save her, he loses hope, but is suddenly approached by Lamar Williams, offering him help.

Sitting in Lamar's car, they crash into a transport van, freeing Tari from the ruckus. A car chase commences, in which Lamar and Theo bond over their sense of humour, even complimenting a body pillow. With Tari's ability, they escape a border of TAS Corp soldiers and head towards the secret hideout embedded in a restaurant, where they meet the rest of MD-5, a ragtag team determined to take down TAS Corp for their evil schemes.

When Tari is set to play a game of Battle Blaze against Masa Shimamoto to prove her worth of joining MD-5, Theo warps into the game to aid Tari, throwing Masa off with banana mines.

Afterwards Theo starts glitching out, leading the team to think that he needs to return to his game.

When he and Tari warp into MD-5's cartridge of Ultra Jump Mania, they get forced out of the game since there was another Theo in-game. The team realize that Theo can only return to his OWN cartridge, which is held back at TAS Corp.

The next day Sofia Porter presents Operation: Silent Demon, a plan in which she will hack into the TAS Corp's network and extract their files and records of their wrongdoings to spill to the public, and also source the info on Theo's cartridge and register a delivery request back to them.

The team look to an underground competition held in Gamma Tech Stadium hosted by none other than TAS Corp. The game played in question being Tempest. In the plan Tari is required to execute a game-breaking glitch in order to crash the servers and give Sofia the opportunity. Theo is Tari's biggest supporter during these practices.

Throughout his time with MD-5, Theo finds himself getting closer to Lamar, to the point where they become best friends.

On the very day of the underground competition held in Gamma Tech Stadium, he and Tari warp into Tempest to battle alongside Lamar and Masa. He and the rest of MD-5 manage to successfully fight off the remaining players for Tari, but he eventually get eliminated from the game. When Tari is trapped and tortured by Belle, he cheers her on outside to get back up.

The plan succeeds, until he and every one get corned by Lucks and his mercenaries. Theo witnesses the plan going downhill, as Lucks reveals to the team that he hacked Theo's cartridge and used him as a spy tool. When Tari offers herself to TAS Corp. in exchange for her friends' freedom, Lucks makes sure Tari stays loyal to TAS Corp and MD-5 doesn't bother them again by destroying Theo's cartridge. His physical body is erased, but Lucks keeps the main chip to preserve Theo's consciousness, currently keeping him in suspended animation.

Following Tari's surrender to join TAS Corp. in order to free Masa, Sofia, and Lamar, its revealed that Theo was restored but due to his game cartridge being broken by Lucks, has to remain within a white room to sustain him.

He has shown to being able to speak with Tari on rare occasion, with the latter claiming that Lucks hadn't let her see him in weeks and that part of their deal was that he would ensure Theo's safety in exchange for Tari's "loyalty" to TAS Corp.

Lucks himself has been studying Theo for months along with his scientists, unable to understand why Theo is able to exist in the physical world or how to replicate the results, as well as why he is so human-like despite being an artificial intelligence program.

Bored of his confinement, Theo decides to glitch himself out of the room and ends up going into the company server and is seen by Belle, to her shock, before Lucks' quarantine program recaptures him and traps him back into the safe room.

Later, Belle is able to sneak her way into Sheridan's abandoned lab and use the command on the controller to gain access to Theo where she makes a deal with him: she'll help him get back to Tari if he helps her find information on Project Blue, more specifically, on Lucinia and her mysterious disappearance.

Using a glitch, she is able to return him to the server where he searches through the data until he finds a file with the name "Lucinia" on it and Belle uses her glitching skills to defend Theo long enough for the file to download to her arm, but later abandons Theo to avoid being caught and escape with the file.

After being returned to the safe room again, Lucks realizes the room can't contain Theo because he dislikes it and decides to make him feel "more at home" by putting him back inside his broken cartridge, which is heavily damaged and causes massive glitching across the game, scaring Theo.

Over a week inside his corrupted game, he is seen running from glitched out enemies when Belle returns and informs him that she isn't going to abandon him like last time and tells him that by clearing the game, it will automatically return him to MD-5 through the link she established to Sofia's phone and works together with her to complete the damaged game despite the immense difficulty.

While MD-5 is helping Tari to transfer the backup server from Sofia's phone at the stadium, Belle is busy trying to help Theo clear through the corrupted game but fails due to the sheer damage done to the cartridge. As she vents her frustration, Theo notices data from the server bleeding over into the game and a strange pink light seen floating around the level, giving him an idea as he asks Belle to follow his lead as he executes a glitch that allows him to clip through the wall and get to the goal post, to her surprise.

Unfortunately, after Lucks realizes MD-5 is trying to sabotage Tari and Evelyn's showmatch, he has all TAS-Corp agents go on high alert and Belle is discovered inside Sheridan's old lab, leaving Theo stuck inside his game.

When Tari later warps into the server to save Theo, Theo remarks how Tari looks "cool", causing the latter to ask "what she was before". The two proceed to continue progressing through the game, discovering new glitches in the process. Right when the final flag appears in the distance, Evelyn joins the game as a enormous glitched monster made of every character in the game and steals the flag. Tari and Theo are unable to beat her because of her infinite lives cheat, but Tari reminds Theo that they only need to touch the flag to win. Tari tells Theo to do something while she holds Evelyn off, which turned out to be the Coconut Burst Jump glitch. Theo "misses", only to reveal that he was actually performing a glitch where his coconut got stuck in the handle of Tari's dropped pineapple hammer, trapping it in an infinite spin, causing Evelyn's arm to overload and malfunction, allowing Theo to touch the flag and beat the game, causing a game cache reset.

Tari sends Theo back to the real world, where he's glad to see Lamar again. After completing "Phase 2" of Tari's plan, which was crashing into Lucks' van, the MD-5, reunited, corners Lucks. Lucks explains the truth behind Lucinia and that part of her memory merged with an A.I., Tari. Theo realizes that Tari is like him, as they are both computer programs. After everyone reassures Tari that they still care about her, Masa accidentally shoots Lucks as a result of his arm being hijacked. Theo and MD-5 flee the crime scene and run into Marco, who offers them a ride.

Trivia

 * He seems to be, by his appearance, based off of Tom-Tom from the Wonder Boy series, and possibly a bit of Master Higgins from its NES counterpart Adventure Island.
 * His moveset is based off of Mario's from both Super Mario 64 (physical abilities) and Super Mario Odyessy (coconut)
 * According to Tari, Theo talks about the concept of death a lot for a kid due to his numerous deaths and respawns mainly due to speedruns and thus, finds it fun in killing the game's enemies.
 * Previously, the MD-5 assumed that Theo was unsafe outside of his game. Actually, it's almost the opposite. If the device holding Theo's character data is destroyed, Theo will die unless his character data is somehow preserved.