Agatha

A homeless woman with a shopping cart, an IKEA bag of spray paint and a flamingo with an arrow through it, who burned Meadow Lark, walked into the dungeon first, and turned its stairs into a ramp by pushing her cart at them (ch. 22). Level two without a tutorial. She pushes into the boss fight uninvited, Carl takes her cart into inventory and she screams about it until the pigs rain down (ch. 26, ch. 27); the achievement for it, Bully and a Thief, comes up in ch. 30. Then she is gone down the ramp, ahead of everyone, edited out of the recap (ch. 31), leaving grub corpses for them to find (ch. 30).

The inventory History tab is the reveal (ch. 47): three Valtay Corporation items — a pulse pistol, a personal shield, an illegal communications relay — passed through Carl's hands inside her cart. She wheels into the stairwell chamber as he reads it, calls him a cart thief, and gives him one look that says stop; the feed is out while she descends. 'Them critters already know I'm here. They just don't know what to do about it.'

A thought Carl chooses not to write down (ch. 8), and a comparison — GumGum is 'an orcish, well-muscled version of Agatha' (ch. 14). The Valtay are everywhere on this floor; she is not.

One appearance, at the end: level 8, still human, still classless, the flamingo still in the cart, turning the stairs at station 36 into a ramp and going down first. Carl stops Imani from intercepting her: 'We'll talk later' (ch. 34).

Named by the Syndicate's liaison as an outside source Carl might have, 'or any of her helpers' — none are in his bubble (ch. 19); Carl remembers the second floor: 'Them critters already know I'm here.' Li Jun sees her, level 12, arrive from nowhere and go down the stairs early without a word (ch. 33). The epilogue's homeless man in handcuffs, screaming in a strange language in an airport parking garage as the world ends, goes unnamed; the book does not tie him to her (epilogue).

A Flame-ingo like the one in her cart turns up among Bautista's beanies (ch. 57). In the epilogue a shopping cart is visible in a glass pod far above (epilogue).

'A Residual, though she is a different kind' (ch. 51). In the epilogue, agent number 22 behind the Meadowlark kitchens in Wenatchee, ten years alone from the collective and liking it, lighting a barrel to draw an entrance: 'May the Eulogist ever sleep' (epilogue).

A crazy old white lady with a shopping cart, level 23, no class, who cannot be recruited or enter Larracos and goes to the bar where Lucia drinks; the Prime Minister himself orders Carl not to interact with her; the AI has a soft spot for her (ch. 28). She surfaces as warlord of the War Mage Rebellion with three action items that restore the original rules (ch. 68), is a residual of the rarer kind, in line with the Nebulars, the Apothecary's enemy (ch. 69), and is removed for abandoning her post (ch. 73). Akuma: she jumps to the Waiting Room and reappears outside an open stairwell; find her on the tenth; 'She seeks to kill us all […] Everybody and everything' (ch. 78).