Character · Book 2, Carl's Doomsday Scenario

Mordecai

The tutorial guide assigned to Carl and Donut: a former crawler, born skyfowl, who chose Changeling and reached the eleventh floor of his own season, now serving out an indentureship as a shapeshifting NPC in a guild room with his mother's ashes and a photograph of his brother. He is bound by rules about what he may say, and he says as much as he can.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 1 — The jury room
• Chapter 2 — Race and class
• Chapter 3 — The Over City explained
• Chapter 4 — Knives from a window
• Chapter 5 — Boxes at the Pug
• Chapter 6 — Signet
• Chapter 7 — The lion's heart
• Chapter 8 — Water Lily
• Chapter 9 — Heather the Bear
• Chapter 10 — The big top
• Chapter 11 — The pitch
• Chapter 12 — Mongo holds the pyramid
• Chapter 13 — Mordecai's room
• Chapter 14 — The One-Eyed Narwhal
• Chapter 15 — The Desperado Club
• Chapter 16 — The Silk Road
• Chapter 17 — GumGum
• Chapter 18 — Miss Quill
• Chapter 19 — Danger Zone
• Chapter 20 — Manasa's last song
• Chapter 21 — Katia
• Chapter 22 — The Mysterious Letter
• Chapter 23 — Ten sticks of dynamite
• Chapter 24 — Remex
• Chapter 25 — Carl's Doomsday Scenario
• Epilogue — Epilogue: the leaderboard

Arc

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).