Character · Book 3, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

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

Arc

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).