Character · Book 8, A Parade of Horribles

Menerva

A crawler from Porthus's own crawl whose foot was stuck at the end of his tenth floor while she screamed at him to run; he never learned whether she made it. A schoolteacher about to retire, building a house in the eastern canopy with her husband, who dreamed of opening a club where musicians could perform. Rosetta loves him despite 'his unhealthy obsession with finding a missing crawler from his own crawl'.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 38 — Akuma's account: Herot, Menerva and the Pineapple Cabaret
• Chapter 39 — The Lollipop: a needle over the singer
• Chapter 55 — The cleaner bot plan

Arc

The former crawler Akuma names, with Herot, as a builder of the seventeenth floor and the Pineapple Cabaret behind it (ch. 38). Rosetta knows the name, asks Carl a dozen questions about it and will not say how she knows it; Tipid does not — 'She might’ve been a season before my time' (ch. 39). Carl later learns she was on the seventeenth floor in charge of the NPCs who built and occupy the Backstage Death Maze, the place the AI plucked Growler Gary from, where NPCs train for the day crawlers might reach them (ch. 55).