Mordecai

Part 1 — the drunk in the guild room

A level-50 Rat Hooligan with a photograph of his brother and an urn of his mother's ashes (ch. 3), Mordecai is the book's exposition and its conscience. He tells Carl what the crawl is, that it is his last tour, that the deepest any crawler has gone is floor 13; he explains species, stats and ratings (ch. 4), inventory and safe rooms (ch. 5), and is cut off mid-warning as the tiara goes on (ch. 7): 'You can always leave the party.'

He is bound: he may not name a boss's weakness before the fight (ch. 25), may not discuss the Desperado Club or the third floor, and answers the question of whether the bosses will always be people with 'there will be a lot of… recycling' (ch. 12). Within those limits he gives the book its method — 'There will always be clues. Look for them' — and its warning: 'There are no gods here. Just those who pay for the privilege' (ch. 25).

Part 2 — the Bugaboo

On the second floor he is a seven-foot obsidian Bugaboo with a tidied room (ch. 35, ch. 47) and a history. Odette was his trainer; he would rather devour his own children than work for her again (ch. 35), and she admits she pushed him too hard and he paid dearly (epilogue). His brother was a crawler who took the Storm Commander class on her advice (ch. 47); he will not say more. Damien is a name he flinches at.

With the cameras off in Zev's presence he says what he cannot otherwise: the Bloom, the badges, the bankrupt kua-tin system, and Borant forced by its own government to end the game as fast as it can (ch. 36). Odette has told Carl the rest — Mordecai's contract only counts if one of his crawlers reaches the fourth floor (ch. 29) — which is the motive under every piece of help he gives.

The manager

An Incubus in a tuxedo, three hours in formal wear, waiting to run the jury room (ch. 1) — and then, tricked, Donut's manager: no codex, no television, teleported to every saferoom she enters, and paid by her survival. His first act as manager is to get blackout drunk in twenty minutes and materialise with his pants down (ch. 4); his second is to drug a bopca and steal the newsletter (ch. 8). 'Managers only have one rule.'

What he gives the party is the whole floor's method: the finger-breaking trick (ch. 6), the Elites lecture (ch. 7), the Pestiferous Vine's poisoned-blood weakness (ch. 10), Eklund's name for the program and the Satch Toad cure (ch. 9), the cinnamon-and-thistle potion that saves Mongo (ch. 12), doppelgangers and wombats in buckets (ch. 21), Suppurating Eye (ch. 21), liches who never shut up (ch. 23). He is wrong about the lich and says so.

His own story leaks out sideways: Odette taught him the sixth floor's plants — she was with him there (ch. 13); Quint remembers when he was supposed to be free (ch. 15); the manager benefit upset him for reasons that are 'complicated' and 'nothing to do with you' (ch. 15). Managers are system-protected from the fourth floor and freed the moment their ward reaches it. Carl's last chat message on the floor: 'Congratulations' (ch. 25). Odette's last word on him: 'He has a lot of experience in the subject, unfortunately' — the subject being gods (epilogue).

The toad

A Grulke — five feet of warty toad, level 50 — no newsletter as a manager, only court notices (ch. 2). He engineers the conjoined level-five space and gets his own door back: 'Thank the gods' (ch. 3); a schedule on a whiteboard, a map of the lines that outgrows the board (ch. 3, ch. 7); Special Brew, stat potions and Fragmenting Potion Balls from a level-three alchemy table (ch. 7). Then Chaco walks into the room and Mordecai's tongue throws a chair: Naughty, seven days, his room gone with him (ch. 7). 'He sure knows how to hold a grudge, that’s for sure. It’s been hundreds of cycles […] If I hadn’t done it, he’d have died. And then we’d all have lost her. We’d have lost Odette.' Clarabelle: he gets one warning, she thinks (ch. 8).

Back

He returns to two skulls, a blood-soaked room and a recipe book (ch. 29), and within minutes sees the ring on Carl's hand. Divine Suffering rings are what the sixth-floor hunters come for; every Faction Wars champion wears one; 'It is evil.' He smacks Carl on the side of the head and does not freeze — 'Don't touch me ever again' (ch. 30). Over Katia's map he reads the floor as the Syndicate's own history — the logo, the H'lene waystations, the Apothecary and the Plenty — and calls it a racist political cartoon (ch. 30). He admires the landmines and the healing smoke and says nothing about where they came from. On summoning he knows more than the Cookbook does, and why: 'I learned it the hard way. The hardest way possible' (ch. 32). 'If it's a Carl idea, it's probably a brilliant idea that's going to get you killed' (ch. 31).

A clipped bird

On the fifth floor Mordecai is a rock-edge skyfowl cleric, near his real shape for the first time in ages and furious about the clipped wings — 'a eunuch […] thrown into a supermodel orgy' (ch. 1). He is the floor's manual: shapeshifters sorted by how they change, Gondii and Infiltrators explained (ch. 5, ch. 14); saferooms that protect NPCs only when a crawler is present (ch. 4); the marketplace and when to sell (ch. 3); Faction Wars laid out on a flower-shaped map, petal by petal (ch. 24); withering spirits, Primal Degeneration, and the law that protects an insane AI's life (ch. 24, ch. 28). He brews Rapid Detox for two drunks and calls it torture (ch. 5), Dolores Doesn't Splat for a fall (ch. 12), and, with a sex doll's help, a Phase Lava Rock potion from a sponsor's yam (ch. 32, ch. 34).

'By his left tit'

He shatters a table under Firas's boots (ch. 5), streams Toy Story to forty children from a library he never mentioned (ch. 10), tells Carl not to trust a man who slept with an ooze (ch. 22), and is taken into a liaison hold for five days without knowing why (ch. 19). He remembers Drakea, a bune who died when a trap 'unnaturally backfired' (ch. 28). At the end he begs Carl to throw the ring away: 'You can't fight a war like this and expect to win' (ch. 34).