Characters / Library Of Ruina - The Reverb Ensemble

Library of Ruina Main Character Index
The Library (Roland) | The Wings | Syndicates (The Five Fingers | Subsidiaries | Other Syndicates | The Reverb Ensemble) | Fixers (Associations | Offices) | Other Guests | Distortions | Abnormalities | Others

The Reverberation Ensemble

^{Click here to see the full Ensemble (Spoilers)} From left to right; Bremen, Oswald, Greta, Tanya, Eileen, Argalia, Pluto, Jae-heon, Philip, Puppet Angelica, and Elena

"We are truth seekers and artists, perched on the boundary as we search for an answer."

- Pluto

An extremely powerful Syndicate consisting of Distortions led by Argalia, the Blue Reverberation. Other members include the Yesterday's Promise, the Blood-red Night, the Puppeteer, L'heure de Loup, the Musicians of Bremen, the Eight Chefs, the Church of Gears, and later on, Oswald and The Crying Children.

They're after the Library's Light, which they nurture by wreaking havoc in the City, in hopes that they'll be able to use it to end the City's "loneliness" and turn everyone into Distortions. Of course, this makes them the enemy of prominent Fixer Offices and Associations, other high-level Syndicates like the Five Fingers, and even the Wings themselves.

Due to the Walking Spoiler nature of these characters, all spoilers for Argalia, Pluto and the Crying Children's entries are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

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In General

• Affably Evil: In spite of being murderous maniacs, most of them are fairly casual and down-to-earth when introducing themselves to the Librarians they’re preparing to fight, with even brutes and oddballs like Greta and Oswald having an amicable chat with their opponent about their lives and philosophy. This is taken up a notch when they wage their attack on the Library itself, with them simply knocking on the front door and waiting a while for a response before they decide they have to force themselves instead.
• Ambiguously Human: These entities used to be human and some have noticeably human parts, but their biology has been drastically altered and they all have supernatural powers that they use to wreak havoc.
• Assimilation Plot: Their implied ultimate goal is to steal The Library's gathered Light re-enact The Pianist's performance on a scale large enough to cover the entire setting; in order put an end to the so-called loneliness of The City. It's implied that what they actually want to do is to spread the Seed of Light into the City as Carmen wished to and Ayin almost did — something that would presumably throw the City into unprecedented chaos.
• Ax-Crazy: As a group, they're all generally unhinged, murderous crazies, all of whom take to their various crimes with outright glee.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Probably to some extent. At the final act of the game, the Library ends up doing similar things as the Ensemble; releasing the Light from the Library building and potentially causing numberous Distortions and E.G.O. users to form, but they also released all the guests that were trapped within it. At the end, the outside world is probably still infested by Distortions as a result of this, but at least someone would be there to contain the chaos.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: All of them are this, even some of those who aren't shown in direct combat as often like Eileen. Averted in their rematch, as they've distorted further into inhuman abominations.
• Battle Aura: As the Reverb Ensemble Distorted, each on of them has aura animations, with Philip's in flames, Elieen's with light, Greta's with swirls of blood, and Bremen's with a vortex of colors.
• Battle Theme Music:
  • Reverberation, a climatic orchestral track that is also a Variable Mix that is made up of instruments to denote their orchestra place, and changes depending on what layer of the Library the fight is taking place. Coda meanwhile is all of them at once, and is used for the battle against Argalia himself.
  • The Grand Finale, a triumphant, heroic piece in three phases for each of the three layers of the even further Distorted Ensemble.
• Biblical Motifs: It's subtle, but their reception reveals that they're based on the Qliphoth, the Tree of Death, much like how the Sephirah were, and as such serve as Foils to the Patron Librarians.
  • The Crying Children: Qimranut - Materialism
  • Eileen: Aiyatsbus - Instability
  • Greta: Chemdah - Greed
  • Musicians of Bremen: Shakah - Lust
  • Oswald: Kaitul - Ugliness
  • Tanya: Akzeriyyuth - Cruelty
  • The Puppeteer: Adyeschach - Insensitivity
  • Blood-red Night: Sheriruth - Intolerance
  • Pluto: Iweleth - Ignorance
  • Argalia: Thaumiel - Duality/Conflict
• Big Bad Ensemble: They share this role in the game with the Wings, the Five Fingers, and even the residents of the Library. However, as antagonists, they have more focus and relevance in the narrative than the Wings and Five Fingers.
• Boss Rush:
  • An unusual example: each floor has to beat a different member, continuing until you've defeated them all or forfeited.
  • Their rematch is a more straight example, as it consists of all of them fighting by layer in their full Distortion forms. Philip, Eileen, Greta, and Bremen for the Asiyah layer, Oswald, Tanya, and Jae-Heon for the Briah layer, and Elena, Pluto, and Argalia for the Atziluth layer.
• Climax Boss: They're the collective reception of the second and fourth chapters of Impuritas Civitatis. The weight of the first battle brings a close on the second most dangerous threat to the City. The second match meanwhile permanently closes the book for the Ensemble, while also bringing an end the threat of the Library, which frees everyone who was booked. They also serve as the Final Boss, due to the next reception against the Head's Agents being a Hopeless Boss Fight.
• Comedic Sociopathy: While definitely not funny for the audience and especially not for Roland, the entire group shares a good laugh over seeing Roland absolutely losing it when he sees how badly the Puppeteer defiled Angelica's corpse. Even the polite and stoic Pluto can’t help but chuckle and admit how funny it all is to him.
• Conducting the Carnage: According to The Purple Tear, the Distortions that make up the Reverberation Ensemble are based on orchestra placement;
  • Argalia is the conductor.
  • Pluto/Yesterday's Promise is the pipe organ.
  • Elena/Blood-red Night is the first violin.
  • Jae-Heon/The Puppeteer is the second violin.
  • Tanya/L'heure de Loup is the viola.
  • Oswald is the clarinet.
  • The Musicians of Bremen's three heads, Doodle-Doo, Heehaw, and Woof, serve as the horn, tuba, and trombone.
  • Greta is the percussion.
  • Eileen is the harp.
  • Philip/The Crying Children are the cello.
• Create Your Own Villain: It's implied that many of them were the direct or indirect victims of Roland's past actions.
• Early-Bird Cameo: All of them appear in the game's intro cinematic long before they actually show up in person, with their black silhouettes surrounding Argalia.
• Evil Is One Big, Happy Family: There is very little similarity between the Ensemble's members bar each of them being former victims of Roland's actions, and even some of their motivations and philosophies are somewhat conflicting. Despite this, not even the mildest amount of division between them is shown, and they seem to have developed a genuine camaraderie.
• Final Boss: As the Reverb Ensemble Distorted, due to the Agents of the Head being a Post-Final Boss, with Argalia, Pluto, and Elena serve as the real last challenge the players face.
• Final-Exam Boss: Each of them take a floor and play to and against the gimmicks and themes of that floor, necessitating having a complete understanding of the game mechanics and the advantages you have on your side to beat them.
• Foil: The Reverb Ensemble is this collectively to the Patron Librarians/Sephirah, in theme with them being based off of the Qliphoth/Tree of Death that opposes and parallels the Sephirot/Tree of Life. This is reflected in their boss battles:
  • Malkuth focuses around burn and buffing herself up in response to enemy attacks, while Philip grows stronger when he accumulates enough stacks of burn on himself and has many ways to retaliate against enemy attacks. His weakness is that unlike Malkuth, Philip becomes more vulnerable the more stacks of burn he has.
  • Yesod focuses around blunt damage and debuffing the enemy into oblivion, while Eileen focuses around managing her legion of Smoke-based followers (who naturally carry lots of blunt dice in their cards) and buffing up her own units. Where Yesod can press on with his buffs despite the loss of his allies, Eileen takes huge stagger damage if one of her followers perish.
  • Hod focuses around debuffs like bleed and paralysis, and specializes in maximizing her dice rolls for consistent offensive gains. Greta is a pure Stone Wall who buffs herself up to kingdom come and tries to sustain herself by constantly healing. If Greta is cut off from her supply of healing, she eventually falls to Hod's wave of debuffs.
  • Netzach deals in afflicting large amounts of stagger damage and protecting himself, where Bremen has a naturally high amount of stagger and tries to keep it filled while bursting down your own. Outpacing Bremen's attempts to stagger you is the key to victory, as eventually you will get to a point where it's impossible for him to break you down.
  • Oswald's collection of debuffs empowers him greatly, while Tiphereth's collection of buffs can harm her greatly. Balancing her debuffs out with Nix makes it easy for Tiphereth to succeed and destroy Oswald after properly assembling the necessary cards.
  • Tanya's emphasis on solo play runs directly counter to Gebura's. Both characters spend the battle buffing themselves up before going to town on each other, but where Tanya subsists on her own, Gebura relies on her allies to support her. Reaching the critical point where both characters are buffed up will see Gebura demolish Tanya due to her teamwork-reliant buffs being far more powerful than Tanya's solo buffs.
  • Jae-hoon controls the battlefield as a malicious puppetmaster, using his allies to protect himself while he powers up. Chesed spreads his buffs around to his party and relishes in teamwork, and successfully outmanuvering Jae-hoon's puppets by supporting each other is the key to victory.
  • Elena's obsession with blood and violence runs up against Binah's soft, measured approach to combat. Successfully cowing Elena as she works in conjunction with the Vermillion Cross is necessary to achieve victory, and interrupting their teamwork with your own will leave the Cross unable to take advantage of his masters' buffs.
  • Pluto is immune to most damage, washes your team in powerful and tricky debuffs before going to town on his own, while Hokma sets up a wall of powerful blocking buffs and Fixed Damage Attacks to survive the onslaught and bypassing Pluto's immunities. Outlasting the debuffs and striking back against Pluto through bypassing his pseudo-invincibility is the path to victory.
  • And lastly, Argalia fights Roland in a one-on-one, Colour Fixer against Colour Fixer. Roland's emphasis on consistent damage and protective buffs rides up against Argalia's damage and high dice rolls. The only way to win for sure is by interrupting Argalia's Secret Art with Roland's own.
• Foreshadowing: All of them are alluded to in some way before they reveal themselves as members of the Reverberation Ensemble.
  • Pluto's work is seen as early as the Rats, who had noticed some of the effects Yesterday's Promise can have on someone while they're out organ harvesting, and is name-dropped by the Hana Association when the Library becomes an Urban Myth. He eventually shows up at Argalia's call just after the Full-Stop Office's intercepted raid on the Church of Gears.
  • Greta and the Eight Chefs are mentioned during the pre-battle story dialogue at Pierre's Bistro, respected and feared equally by the City and likely having a hand (and possibly influenced by the Head's rulings) in some of the more cruel aspects, particularly in the world of culinary arts.
  • Argalia's conversation with Thelma is overheard in the intermission upon the Library becoming an Urban Plague, before showing up shortly after in person to ambush the Full-Stop Office when they go in to attack the Church of Gears alongside Pluto and Eileen.
  • Eileen and the Church of Gears are first namedropped alongside Pluto by the Zwei Association during the Urban Myth chapter intro story before appearing as the Bait-and-Switch Boss for the Full-Stop Office, the cutscene focusing on the indoctrination of a new gear, but Eileen is saved from an attack by the actual Full-Stop Office thanks to Argalia. She's mentioned later by Jae-heon that she was the one who sent he and Elena into the WARP Train, likely having become a full fledged member of the Reverb Ensemble by then.
  • The Crying Children are Philip's new identity, whom first appears as a Fixer for the Dawn Office and becomes a recurring opponent since then, but is introduced proper when Philip runs into Oswald and the 8 o'Clock Circus, his mind being broken to the point he accepts Pluto's deal that creates The Crying Children.
  • Tanya appears by herself having ran into the Kurokumo Clan, initially getting pushed around by the group (particularly Sayo) before having enough and promptly putting them in their place by herself before sending them off to the Library as punishment for their insolence.
  • The other half of the Musicians of Bremen, Meow, Oink and MuMu are the opponents for their scene, but frequently mention Doodle-Doo, Heehaw and Woof during their conversation and how much the Pianist influenced them. They and Meow are also represented by the Musicians of Bremen's logo, as the original four animals represented in The Bremen Town Musicians.
  • Oswald and the 8 o'Clock Circus are mentioned as the subject of a raid by the Wedge Office that costed Pameli her entire body, before they actually appear as Urban Nightmare level threats.
  • The Puppeteer is first alluded to around the same time as Pluto, before he and Blood-red Night actually show up as Dr. Jae-heon and Nurse Elena aboard the WARP Train that had been the subject of a mini-plot fairly early into the game, being the ones responsible for the mess that is Love Town. Their true identities are revealed in a cutscene not long after, though the Puppeteer is much faster to actually revealing himself than Blood-red Night is.
• The Heavy: Of every antagonistic faction in the game, the Reverb Ensemble are the most directly impactful and reoccurring threats that the City has to put up with, Argalia himself practically the primary Big Bad in this regard. As for the Library themselves, they aren't as hostile as some of the authorities such as Associations and the Head bar personal vendettas with Roland.
• Iconic Outfit: The Reverb Ensemble suit itself is something of this, a black three-piece-suit (trenchcoat in the Puppeteer's case) with a large blue insignia on the left shoulder, and all members of the group eventually don it openly at some point or another with Argalia himself being the only exception.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Their key pages are among one of the strongest you can equip in the game, but when you get them, you no longer have much to fight against bar the final battles and rematches against past receptions. Their mass attack pages were also received right when you have no more enemies to fight against.
• It Is Beyond Saving: Despite their differing goals, what unites the Reverb Ensemble is their mutual agreement that the only way to achieve their respective plans for the City is through mass destruction.
• Killed Off for Real: Their rematch as Reverb Ensemble Distorted ends with them actually dying for good, denoted by the fact that rather than the usual death animation, they instead simply burn away.
• Light Is Not Good: Besides the fact that their leader is clad in gold and has white hair, several of their attack effects are by far the most colorful and bright. Argalia himself uses bright blue ones, Oswald has a multitude but with a fair lean towards orange, Eileen's mass attack has a beam of light from the sky, Pluto has his glowing golden seals, The Crying Children have their fire and lasers, and Bremen uses rainbow-colored ones.
• Non-Human Head: This seems to be the other trademark of the Ensemble, outside of Argalia once again: Pluto has a dapper skull for a head, Eileen has a near-completely opaque lamp shade of a veil with gears attached to her head which later becomes metallic and inhuman, Tanya has a wolf head, the Puppeteer's mechanical head is geometric with randomly placed eyes, Blood-red Night has wispy black and red energy flowing from her head which comprises half her face, Oswald wears a mask and jester hat akin to the Crimson Dawn, Greta is a shark but with additional mouths, Bremen has the heads of three different animals, and the Crying Children's is featureless minus an unnerving smile with hands around it.
• Not Me This Time: The Hana Association speculates that the brutal disbandment of the Eight Chefs (a Star of the City tier entity) was due to an attack lead by the Reverb Ensemble. If the group's Sole Survivor, Greta, is to be believed, however, then this speculation is at best a Half-Truth, as they had already self-mutilated themselves to the point that they were nothing more than a few body parts by the time that Greta had defected to the Reverb Ensemble.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: They successfully defeated and killed a Color Fixer and Section 1 of the Hana Association entirely offscreen. At the same time, it's also mentioned that they've all but crippled the Southern Branches of both the Tres and Cinq Associations.
• One-Winged Angel: Their rematch as the Reverb Ensemble Distorted consists of all of them, including Argalia, transforming into full Distortions thanks to the Light Angela releases.
• Rogues Gallery: The full line-up is quite vibrant: A Soft-Spoken Sadist of a Color Fixer, a dealmaking magical black skeleton, the leader of a nihilistic cult centered around gears, a mighty wolf person with a smoking pipe, a mechanically augmented man who turns people into puppets, an undead kidnapper and serial killer vampire, a very familiar Monster Clown, a many-mouthed cannibal shark chef, a horse-donkey-dog headed musician, and a wax person straight out of Silent Hill. The fact much of them are also major members in other factions helps.
• Rule of Symbolism: Each of them are based on the Qliphoth, just as the Sephirah were.
  • The Crying Children represents Qimranut/Materialism due to losing his memories from continuously facing the Library and breaking down due to suffering, now only wanting a world that, in his own words, is a world of isolation, where people don't need to become better people and need to only care about themselves without any regard to others.
  • Eileen represents Aiyatsbus/Instability due to her slavish devotion to Argalia and her gears. Her faith in her gears causes Eileen to blindly follow Argalia and the rest of the Ensemble members. Ironically, Eileen craves the stability her gears and Argalia provide, stating that without Argalia and her gears, she and the rest of the City "are incapable of doing anything on [their] own". Her dependence on her gears becomes readily apparent in her boss fight, where Eileen will become staggered and unable to fight back whenever all of the rest of her Meat Gears die.
  • Greta represents Chemdah/Greed due to her primary motivations for betraying the Eight Chefs and joining with the Reverb Ensemble. Greta makes it a point to cause as much suffering as possible to the victims that become her meals simply so she can get a better taste from them. She later bands with the Reverb Ensemble because the "ingredients" were impure and she became tired of eating "trash", seeking a world of "pure and clean ingredients". In her selfish pursuit for even more delectable cuisine, Greta was willing to let the rest of the Eight Chefs die off without remorse, even stating that so long as they were happy, she had no reason to mourn them.
  • Musicians of Bremen represent Shakah/Lust due to the lengths they go for their "art", with their hedonic lifestyle that surmounts to them becoming a twisted monster of colors and enjoying every second of it. They also ditch their comrades and other founder to join up with the Reverb Ensemble.
  • Oswald represents Kaitul/Ugliness due to seeing the world in a bleak manner, believing that it is pointless to hold expectations for anyone or anything and that it's better to just laugh at it all, wishing for a world where people can laugh without care. On a more surface level, most of his crew members—who are implied to be people who have succumbed to his philosophy—are Distortions that feature some sort of Body Horror such as an elephant with a stitched-together arm for a trunk or a lion whose body appears to be stitched together.
  • Tanya represents Akzeriyyuth/Cruelty due to her Might Makes Right philosophy, which causes her to advocate for a society where the strong abuse their power to coerce and kill the weak, something that she was implied to pick up after her failure to protect her Middle Finger comrades from Roland. She views Kali/Gebura's protecting the weak as a pointless endeavor, stating that they were fine with her strength to protect them.
  • The Puppeteer represents Adyeschach/Insensitivity due to being a victim of Roland's Roaring Rampage of Revenge (despite having nothing to do with the reason why Roland starts lashing out). In addition, he uses his powers on the first-class WARP train passengers, ostensibly due to his disgust over the advantages that the rich have over the poor, and callously treats his puppets as cannon fodder. He, however, readily acknowledges that he doesn't care if he accidentally torments a few random poor that just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time when he does so, making him not so different from his previous tormentor.
  • Blood-red Night represents Sheriruth/Intolerence due to being a self-proclaimed victim of Fantastic Racism from the other City citizens due to her status as a Bloodfiend and her thirst for violence to sate her urges.
  • Pluto represents Iweleth/Ignorance due to deception, both in part of being a victim of it, and his powers based around contracts that screw people over. He states that following the contract by Roland gone wrong, he is unsure if he and everything else around him is real or just a dream, and the reason he sticks by Argalia is because he seeks a world without lies.
  • Argalia represents Thaumiel/Duality due to his contradicting reasons for creating the Reverb Ensemble. On one hand, it's out of despair for losing his sister, yet he does not believe in the concepts of right and wrong, flat out rejecting reality to build a new world free all from "loneliness". He also holds Roland in contempt for failing to save Angelica from the Pianist, yet defiles her corpse by having Jae-Heon and Elena turn her into a puppet.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Every one of them, thanks to the Reverb Ensemble uniform.
• Sinister Silhouettes: All of them appear near the end of the game's opening animation, with Argalia being the only one fully visible. All of them appear as they do when they're officially revealed to be members, meaning things the Puppeteer and Blood-red Night appear as they do outside of their disguises as Jae-Heon and Elena or The Crying Children appearing as such instead of as Philip.
• The Syndicate: In the game's lore, the Reverberation Ensemble is considered a Star of the City-tier Syndicate.
• True Companions: Despite being a gang of psychotic, formerly human monsters that conspire to turn the whole City into abominations like them, the Ensemble actually get along with each other very well in general. Throughout the game, they never really show any signs of disloyalty or issue with each other, and they're very openly friendly within their group.
• True Final Boss: As the Reverb Ensemble Distorted, who can only be fought if all Floor Realizations are completed, and Angela and Roland forgive one another following the fight with the Black Silence.
• Unwitting Pawn: Although they are certainly using the Library, if Hokma's explanation of it were to be taken as granted, then the Library itself is actually using them as well, further proven by the "voice" of what was obviously Carmen advising them, and the Library seemingly instigating events that would let Argalia recruit Oswald and Philip.
• Villainous Friendship: By the time of their raid on the Library the group has become very friendly with each other, thanking each other for helping getting this far and thanking Argalia for bringing them together, with Argalia being modest in response.
• Visionary Villain: Nearly all of them have some vision for the City that they seek to make a reality via the light of the Library. The Crying Children seeks a world of isolation, Elieen seeks a world where every person has a purpose, Greta wants a world of "pure and clean ingredients" to hunt and eat, Bremen seeks a world where they can continue to live in hedonism, Oswald wants a world were everyone can smile and laugh without a care, Tanya seeks a world where Might Makes Right, the Puppeteer seeks societal upheaval from the rich and his son back, the Blood-red Night seeks a world where people can give in to their desires without fear of judgement, Pluto seeks a world without lies, and Argalia's wants a world freed from loneliness. What is particularly notable is that each members ideals differs from each others, yet despite this they still get along very well with each other.
• Was Once a Man: Most of them used to be completely human, but became Distortions after the half-complete Seed of Light. They are also notable for not being self-destructive, one-time Distortions, but instead being sentient Distortions who have embraced and controlled their powers and also retained their humanity. It's also heavily implied that many of them had been victims of Roland in some form or way.
• You All Share My Story: The Ensemble, at first glance didn't appear to have much in common with each other, with a few even resembling Flat Characters with no reason to be together other than shock value. In reality, with the exception of presumably Greta (whose background was left ambiguous) and Oswald, all of the members within it are involved in grudges or other conflicts with Roland, some of these whom he directly led to distorting.

Argalia, the Blue Reverberation

Argalia, The Blue Reverberation

^{Click here to see him empowered by the Light}

"The performance that will soon echo through the City will be my journey to seek the meaning to live... and be the proof of my life."

A top-grade Color Fixer known as the Blue Reverberation, and a "certified lunatic" according to Roland. He's not wrong, considering Argalia's extreme cruelty and general unsettlingness. He's also the conductor and leader of the Reverberation Ensemble. He seeks to "reunite" with and honor his late sister, Angelica, by using the Library's Light to recreate the incident that led to her death and free everyone from their "loneliness". At the same time, he is responsible for crippling powerful Syndicates like the Five Fingers and is even capable of threatening the Wings.

Later, it's revealed that Angelica was married to Roland, making Argalia Roland's brother in law. The three were formerly Outskirts-born children who were experimented upon by a Wing. From there, they managed to climb their way into becoming Colors. It's implied that Zwei sent him to kill the Pianist, only to arrive too late, Roland having killed the Pianist before him. Upon discovering Angelica's corpse by the piano, his sanity took a drastic hit. In his insanity, he began recruiting the Distortions produced from Roland's victims and started hearing Carmen's voice. Thus, he went from The Ace and an unprecedented threat against the City's denizens.

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• The Ace: The guy's a top-grade Color Fixer, a cut above even Grade 1.
• Affably Evil: Unfailingly polite and charismatic, albeit a bit maniacal. It's telling when prior to his climax fight against Roland, he's mostly calm while Roland is obviously barely containing his rage.
• Agent Peacock: He's an effeminate and elegant-looking man that could easily be mistaken for a woman if not for his voice, but he's one of the worst heretics that the city has ever faced. This prettiness is something he likely carried over from his namesake.
• Ambiguously Human: Comes with being one of the highest-grade Fixers, where modifications to the body and mind become borderline required to survive in the job. Argalia, however, sticks out due to the fact that he leads a league of Distortions, yet never shows signs of being one himself, until his final fight.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: According to his Key Page Story, Argalia wants to use the Light to help people "lose the fixation on [their] bodies" and end the fear of death, also as a means of dealing with his own grief over Angelica's fate. If Carmen's words are anything to go by, he means to turn everyone into Distortions, with all the destruction that entails.
• Badass Cape: His signature outfit has one, with intricate golden accents.
• Batman Gambit: His plan involving the Shi Association. The Section 2 Director, Yujin, is hot on his trail and intends to expose his misdeeds to the Head. Luckily, the Shi Southern Branch Manager Thelma owes Argalia a huge favor and also views Yujin as a threat for trying to expose his own corruption. So, Argalia imposes a timed list of tasks for Thelma to shove onto his branch (including a visit to the Library,) ensuring they will be unable to interfere with him and knowing Thelma will deliberately try to get Yujin killed. Lo and behold, Section 2 falls in the Library, which also progresses Argalia's main goal of feeding the Seed of Light. Finally, now that Thelma is no longer necessary, Argalia cruelly kills him off for "breaking his promise."
• Big Bad: By far the most active and involved antagonist of Library of Ruina, whose actions will lead to the City being thrown into chaos and is notably in bad blood with Roland, culminating in a final, climatic confrontation at the end of the game.
• Benevolent Boss: To his fellow Ensemble comrades, he's not exactly an awful person to hang out with. It shows that despite everyone under his wing having potentially conflicting ideologies, all of them are capable of forming legitimate bonds with each other.
• Boss Banter: During the Blue Reverberation reception, he has unique lines if fighting Roland (where he confirms he married his sister Angelica) and Gebura (where he mocks the Red Mist for being stuck in the Library). The former is notable in that it can happen before it is actually confirmed in a story cutscene.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: Your first real encounter with him acts somewhat like this. It's been treated like an ordinary reception, aside that the guy appears on act 2 and has a whopping 500 HP. Fortunately, you only need to take his HP down a half and he will flee, but it's still a fairly high 250 HP. He also has a mass attack page just like most of the harder bosses, which is often seen on late-game bosses or Floor Realizations instead of ordinary confrontations, and is completely immune to ranged attacks.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: In his boss fight proper, Argalia is completely immune to Immobilization, as otherwise Snow Queen's Abnormality pages would be a touch too effective against him.
• Custom Uniform: Argalia wears a very distinct outfit that he keeps even after all the other members begin donning their group uniforms.
• Death by Irony: Wants to turn everyone into Distortions so that they'll embrace their emotions. When the second Seed of Light stops shining, he lets his anger and frustration get the better of him; this leaves him wide open to Roland's attack, something that the latter immediately lampshades.
• Desperation Attack: During his Reverberation Ensemble battle, Argalia will play Final Impromptu once he reaches 25 HP, a card with an effective 11 dice rolls that will almost certainly defeat Roland unless he uses Furioso to counter it.
• Dissonant Serenity: Comes with his demeanor. The artwork for the Preludio and Largo combat pages depicts him with a calm smile as numerous bisected corpses dot the background behind him.
• The Dreaded: If there's something that this guy is even stated to be involved in, it's a surefire indicator that it's just bad news. If he shows up in front of you, you are almost always guaranteed to die in one way or another - Not always by his own hand, but he'll find a way to get what he wants.
• Duel Boss: Late in the game during the Ensemble's attack on the Library he fights Roland one on one.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: If him ordering Jae-heon to turn Angelica into a puppet was merely to spite Roland, then he did genuinely care for her. In his book, he even mentions that Angelica was the only person who comforted him when they were kidnapped and experimented upon by a Wing and he was driven to madness because she died to the Pianist.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • A very Downplayed version happens when he knows the Purple Tear is exploiting him. He was still furious enough to attempt sending his whole Reverb Ensemble against her. In reality, Carmen's voice was implied to have been manipulating him into taking action against her in fear of her foiling the Seed of Light.
  • Played Straight before he enters the Library for the first time with several Church of Gears Mooks, where he outright calls Angela a "Monster", something that most city-goers, even one that isn't a raving lunatic like him would agree with.
• Evil Counterpart: To Ayin, as the representative of Thaumiel, befitting the sphere of Duality and Conflict as Ayin's Shadow Archetype. They both suffered the loss of a loved one; Ayin's mentor Carmen and Argalia's sister Angelica. Ayin, now taking over directive of the Wing that was L Corp, did everything he could to do what he believed would have benefitted the original goal to restore humanity's culture to as it was prior to the state it's in currently, even some of the most cruel actions ever witnessed by the Backstreets, and was just short before being sabotaged by Angela, whom he made in Carmen's image. His top workers would be remade as the Sephirot, whom he personally extracted and turned into such after they came to work at the facility. Argalia, meanwhile, would band together with other Distortions of the Backstreets to form the Reverberation Ensemble through various means, exactly to match the Sephirot as the Qliphoth and guided by a "voice" much implied to be Carmen's and seeking out to use the "Light" of the Library that was once L Corp. and liberate humanity from its state, implied to be turning them into Abnormalities and Distortions in the same vein as Adam's goal, even thanking Angela for allowing him to reach his goal further and further. Additionally, both are all but stated to have been manipulated by their mentors, more explicitly so in Argalia's case by Iori but still possibly implied as such with Ayin towards Carmen.
• Expy: Of Argalia, a character of the same name from Orlando Innamorato. Both have a sister named Angelica, who calls them "Uberto" as an alias, and both pose some sort of challenge to her lovers. However, in the poem, Angelica is the one who ends up outliving Argalia, while in Library Of Ruina the exact opposite is true.
• Faux Affably Evil: Argalia isn't here for friendly banter, but still manages to keep up a friendly and polite facade when he's seconds away from slaughtering his victims, up to and including giving them a pen for the Full-Stop Office to sign their Library invitation or throwing sarcastic and mocking remarks against Thelma, who was being flaked to death by the Smiling Faces.
• Final Boss: Part of the final lineup in the Reverb Ensamble Distorted, the last proper Reception of the game, alongside Pluto and Elena. His passive also makes him immune to go under 100 HP if the former two are still alive, making sure that he's the last proper enemy to be defeated.
• Final Boss Preview: Shows up at the beginning of Star Of The City to scout out the Library. He mainly sticks to using a weak, heavily defensive page called "Scout", but will occasionally throw out a page or two from his deck proper.
• Foil: He's one to Roland. Both of them were driven completely insane by the death of Angelica, who genuinely cared about the both of them. However, while Roland fell into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and killed anyone he suspected of being susceptible to the Distortion phenomenon, Argalia just sat next to Angelica's corpse and went Laughing Mad, while the voice of the Distortions contacted him to spread the Seed of Light for her. Following this, Roland lost his credibility in the Fixer business while Argalia maintained his connections until his colleagues got fed up with his manipulations and decided to take action against him. Appearance-wise, Roland dresses modestly for an incredibly powerful and influential Fixer, while Argalia is extremely flashy and distinct-looking, as befitting his status. Finally, Argalia is subdued and polite, never raising his voice even when visibly angered, while Roland is easily angered and will not hesitate to openly display his wrath. This is also reflected in their ultimate Limit Breaks: both involve the attacker hitting a single opponent many times, but Argalia's Final Impromptu is effectively a 12-hit attack that inflicts extremely high damage, while Roland's Furioso is treated as a single strong attack that inflicts significant disadvantages on the target.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: What makes you think that the same man who blocked the Full-Stop Office's finishing blow against Eileen will not be completely immune to your guns?
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In his final battle as his Distorted form, Argalia focuses on boosting the emotion levels of his opponents, as his allies Pluto and Elena gain buffs when Argalia's opponents reach emotion level 4 or higher. While this can make a prolonged fight against Argalia difficult to sustain, this also has the obvious side effect of allowing Librarians with emotion-based passives to gain the benefits of their passives far faster than usual, along with the other more general benefits of gaining emotion such as quick access to Abnormality pages.
• I Let You Win: Argalia deliberately holds back in the first trip to the Library, merely scouting out the place and using a mildly threatening mass attack page every few turns.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: How he's finally put down for good: stabbed straight through the heart by Roland.
• Kick the Dog: Perfectly willing to raise his scythe against a group of defenseless squatters if it means extracting information they likely do not have.
• Knight of Cerebus: Downplayed considering the game's atmosphere is dark enough, but his appearance in the story marks the turning point where the story's tone really goes downhill.
• Loophole Abuse: His execution of Thelma was implied to be this. Normally, attempting to execute an Association's manager is a grave offense, but he used the Night of the Backstreets to do it, presumably to make sure his execution of Thelma is completely unaccountable by other Associations or authorities.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: He's got fairly long and voluminous hair that goes down his back. At a glance, it is actually easy to mistake him for a woman. Exaggerated after his distortion, which turns his hair into a massive cloud.
• Magnetic Hero: A villainous version of this trope. Argalia relatively speaking isn't as strong as his fellow Color Fixers. What he does have, however, is sheer charisma, managing to convince multiple Syndicates (such as the Smiling Faces and Musicians of Bremen) to do his dirty work for him. The members of his Ensemble are incredibly loyal to him (most notably seen from Eileen and Pluto) and he manages to convince Philip to join his Ensemble despite the latter having every reason to want to destroy his Ensemble instead due to Oswald occupying Wedge Office, preventing them from providing Dawn Office backup, which was a major factor in the subsequent deaths of Philip's colleagues.
• Manipulative Bastard: His entire personality revolves around getting others to do his work for him, be it through recruiting powerful Distortions as allies or even having his intended victims seal their own fates. Considering that his goal is to develop the Library's Light so that he can steal it, he is utterly successful at every turn.
• Motifs: Music and contradictions. All of his cards are themed after musical terms, like Allegro or Largo. This ties into his role as the conductor of the Reverb Ensemble, as well as the fact that his main power seems to be based around creating sound walls to enhance his attacks or protect himself. As for contradictions, Argalia is a walking Hypocrite. He's well-spoken and very beautiful, but extremely cruel and malicious. His deck is themed around the artful form of music, but his key status effect of Resonance is mostly designed to let him brute-force his way through interactions. Lastly, his motivations for creating the Reverb Ensemble are inherently contradictory. He wants to free everyone from their physical bodies and let go of their desires, but holds on to a number of deeply personal grudges and hates Roland with a passion. He claims to love Angelica, but lets Jae-hoon turn her corpse into a puppet purely to get at Roland one last time.
• Morality Chain: While Roland mentions that he isn't the most mentally sane person in the City for a good time, it's implied that Angelica being alive prevented him from just outright going unhinged. Once Angelica was killed by the Pianist and Argalia spotted her corpse in the Pianist's piano, he basically loses it, even going as far as ordering Jae-heon to turn her corpse into a puppet just to get on Roland's nerves.
• No-Sell: Argalia is completely immune to ranged attacks, such as Guns, as shown in the intro for the Full-Stop Office.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: He's Angelica's brother, making him and Roland brothers-in-law. Besides being an all-around lunatic, he also holds a particular grudge against Roland for marrying his sister and failing to protect her from the Pianist, not at all shy about voicing his disapproval. He only accepts Roland as his brother-in-law after he's killed by Roland a second time.
• Omnicidal Maniac: As revealed in The Purple Tear's chapter, his endgame is to use the Library's "Light" and release the City from "loneliness". Downplayed, as his goal seems to be moreso "turning everyone into Distortions" instead of "killing everyone".
• One-Winged Angel: His Light Distorted form has him becomes a Humanoid Abomination. His skin is blue, having apparently fused with his "suit", and lacks a face, with it replaced with a cloud with an opening of blue light.
• Red Baron: The Blue Reverberation. Roland states that he, like Gebura (who was the Red Mist, before she became a Sephirah), was granted a color and a title by the Hana Association.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: He's actually leading a rebellion with the intent of overthrowing the Heads of the World, but he's also more than willing to reach heights of heinousness that would put most in-game characters to shame.
• Sanity Slippage: While it's hinted by Roland that he wasn't exactly a stable person before, The death of his sister cranked his instability up several notches, to the point where he barely bats an eye at defiling her corpse despite her death at the hands of the Pianist being his Start of Darkness.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: One of the reasons why his unhinged actions could run completely unchecked for a good time was because he was one of the most prestigious Fixers in the City with personal connections with many of the City's fixers, the implication for this being his sister working in one of its most prestigious Offices and happened to be the partner (and later, wife) of its leader, Roland. High level Fixers blackmailing their brethren for profits were also not an unusual sight, indicating that the Association leaders most likely brushed Argalia off as yet another incident that they couldn't care less. It's not until Argalia and his Ensemble starts camping next to the Library and wrecking havoc does the Hana Association officially declare his group a Star of the City Syndicate and try to do something against him.
• Sinister Scythe: Carries a rather intricately-designed scythe. Fitting his nickname as the Blue Reverberation, its main color is blue with golden accents.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: He's eerily formal, polite and calm... even when he's blatantly executing his friend and ordering a cannibal Syndicate to chop him into 10,000 flakes and eat them.
• Theme Naming: His fight with Roland has his attacks use music themes.
• Tranquil Fury: Even when he's noticeably furious, he doesn't seem to show it in his portraits and his tone of speech.
• The Unfettered: Will do almost anything for the sake of spreading the seeds of Distortion to the City, even when it comes to ordering Jae-Heon to turn his sister's dead body into a puppet for the sake of making Roland mad.
• Vibroweapon: According to the LOR artbook his scythe functions as one. In-game, this translates to mechanic surrounding the Vibration status ailment some of his cards can afflict or remove stacks of.
• Villainous Breakdown: As Roland beats him down after his resurrection, he curses both Angela and Roland for ruining his one last chance for using the Light as he's stabbed through the heart. Notably, this is the only time his voice raises a tone to scream.
• Villainous Rescue: Saves Eileen, the leader of the Church of Gears. Eileen ends up becoming a member of his gang later on.
• White Hair, Black Heart: Do not let his handsome appearance and polite way of speaking fool you, this man is considered to be one the City's top Fixers, is a "certified lunatic" according to Roland and thoroughly demonstrates it by spending most of his on-screen and off-screen moments pushing high-end Fixer Offices to their deaths, executing foes and sending people to the Library to be killed.
• You Remind Me of X: Initially mistakes Angela for his late sister, Angelica, due to their similar names. But quickly corrects himself, saying his sister is not a monster.

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Pluto, Yesterday's Promise

Pluto, Yesterday's Promise

^{Click here to see him as a member of the Reverb Ensemble}

^{Click here to see him empowered by the Light}

"If you utter your wishes, I will give you what you need to make them come true. Does this offer still sound unsatisfactory?"

An Urban Plague-tired Distortion, a man with a devil's tail and an appearance like a skeleton. He's the right hand man of Argalia and is first seen being tasked with securing Eileen. He acts as the Ensemble's pipe organ.

"Yesterday's Promise" is also the name of the contracts he issues and the name of his power, on top of being his Distortion name. He can form contracts with others by delivering their desires, punishing them if they don't follow the rule of the contract, including a very sneaky unfavorable term written in fine print. These punishments include transforming the unfortunate contractee into Distortions or even outright stealing their organs.

Pluto was the former operator of a Fixer Office. He was blackmailed by Roland via a contract with the fine print requiring him to smuggle Enkephalin to O Corp, something that led to Roland being denied a Nest immigration permit.

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• Affably Evil:
  • Unfailingly polite and amiable whenever he speaks.
  • Subverted in the flashback where Roland is seen scamming his pre-distortion self (not labelled in game, but confirmed in the artbook) with a bogus contract that tricked him into smuggling Enkephalin to O Corp, causing his whole team to be decimated. He responds to Roland exactly like what you would expect in such a situation: annoyance, anger and disgust.
• Apologetic Attacker: Pluto makes it very clear he holds no pleasure in killing your Librarians during his boss fight.

Pluto: [Upon killing a Librarian] Forgive me. I meant no malice.

Pluto: [Upon defeating the Floor of Religion] I hope we will not bear ill feelings for each other over this.

• Armored But Frail: Pluto has the lowest HP of the entire Ensemble, having only a measly 200 in a stage of the game where most enemies have 300 - 500 on average. However, he's immune to most conventional damage sources and has a much higher amount of stagger resistance, meaning that if one were to take him down by staggering him it will take a long time. This is further compounded by that he has Evade dice to recover stagger resistance, and he himself uses cards with high rolls and constantly spams troublesome gimmicks to keep you busy. In the other hand, he is not immune to fixed damage and his second phase is also not immune to status condition-induced damage, so he will go down quick in front of repeated fixed damage or stacking large amounts of burn and bleed on his second phase.
• Badass Fingersnap: His abilities tend to be punctuated by them, be it summoning his signature contracts or golden skeletal hands.
• Barrier Warrior: Pluto's barriers aren't just for protection. He also uses them to cut off the Purple Tear's escape from the Ensemble and to trap Librarians during his boss fight.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: A downplayed version of this occurs with his light-empowered form. While Pluto gains a lot more health and gains stronger attacks, he also loses a lot of his unique abilities that he demonstrated in his prior fight such as his near-total immunity to all attacks and his ability to detain his enemies with his hexes. In addition, his contracts are no longer unavoidable and the effects of his contracts are much weaker, allowing the player to fight him without having to completely modifying their Librarian's decks to account for his contracts. Justfied from a gameplay standpoint, as in this form, Pluto is fought alongside Argalia and Elena and is in addition part of a 3-act reception against the entire Ensemble. It would be quite unfair to the player if they had to build a deck specifically to deal with Pluto's mechanics again while still having to contend with the rest of the Distorted Ensemble.
• Co-Dragons: He and Eileen serve as Argalia's right-hands whenever they are seen together.
• Deal with the Devil: He can grant desires to others in the form of a contract, but if anyone breaks his contract, they will transform into a distortion and cause mass destruction. One such case was the "Thousand Needles" case, where a person broke his Contract and exploded, and if a spike impales another person it will make that person explode and create spikes, ending up with the causalities merging with a Resonator into a massive flesh humanoid that flings massive spikes. Fitting enough his One-Winged Angel form looks like a demon.
• Foil: To Hokma, as a representative of Iweleth. Both are the polite, loyal and insightful right hand men of the men they looked up to, Ayin and Argalia, but their approaches differ from there in no small part thanks to how they were treated before. As Benjamin, Hokma truly did his best to make peace with Angela but his warnings were never heeded, killed even after all he had done in Ayin's name per his orders. Though he remains loyal still, he acknowledges the awful nature of his actions and that he must accept the past and move forward. Pluto, in turn, was the victim of blackmail from Roland and thus was taken in under Argalia's wing, now his top enforcer and doing much of the heavy-lifting due to his powers, and thus among the most important members of the Ensemble as was Hokma to L Corp., even after his death as Benjamin.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: He used to be the operator of some unknown office, but he's now one of the deadliest Distortions to ever grace the City.
• Gentleman Wizard: Gives this impression through his demeanor and aesthetic, seemingly capable of actual literal magic - such as long-distance teleportation, telepathy and creating magical barriers - aside from the power that gave rise to his infamy which can be attributed to his nature as a Distortion.
• Hat of Authority: He wears a top hat, and serves as Argalia's closest associate. When wearing the Reverb Ensemble uniform, the hat is even longer and matches his uniform like it used to for his old outfit.
• High-Class Glass: Wears a monocle over his left eye socket.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: While his contracts in his battle have very punitive punishments for breaking their requirements (His Contract of Light, in particular, can potentially cause a librarian to lose 80% of their max health in one turn), they also provide equally powerful buffs for a librarian whose deck is built specifically around each of his contracts.
• Instant Runes: Bright orange runes are a signature for Pluto's magic.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Rather fittingly for Distortion whose powers involve around a Magically-Binding Contract, one of the ways one can beat Pluto in his battle is to exploit the fact that while his resistances are immune and his Magic Barrier passive prevents him from initially taking stagger damage and damage from status ailments, Pluto's immunity does not cover true damage, and any card or passive that has "deal X damage" as an effect such as Sound of a Star or Dimensional Sections will deplete his HP bar as usual. Thus, one perfectly viable tactic for defeating Pluto is to run multiple Librarians with very weak combat pages and one Librarian with a block-dice focused build and then to take the Lean, Bloody Wings Abnormality card to deal damage to Pluto by constantly deflecting his attacks.
  • If one decides to beat him normally instead, then his second form is also not immune to status conditions that damage, such as Burn or Bleed.
  • One can easily negate the effects of his Contract of Might by simply equipping everyone with defense-based cards that don't posess any offensive dice or only have one offensive non-counter dice.
• Magically-Binding Contract:
  • His power, the Yesterday's Promise, is this basically. Once signed, the involved parties are now bound by the rules of the deal. Not only that, should the other party refuses to follow the contract, Pluto can take anything that belongs to them as collateral. He demonstrates this by literally pulling out one of the Cane Office employees' heart from his body and putting it back, despite not even making contact with that person's body. Even way before the Cane Office, in Yuna or Salvador's books, you can read a very similar case where Pluto outright turns that person into a Distortion of flesh and blood that can inflict mass chaos.
  • He also utilizes this gimmick in his boss fight, which can heavily cripple unprepared parties and basically mandating specific decks that maximize their potential while evading their drawbacks. His key page also gives your Librarians the same Contracts he gives out during his fight.
• Master of Disguise: He can make very realistic disguises, as shown with the disguises for The Puppeteer and Blood-red Night during the WARP Train arc. Or rather, make them appear what they looked like. It's implied that these powers come from his ability to alter people once they've made a deal.
• Mirror Boss: Summons Shades that duplicate your Librarians for his boss fight.
• One-Winged Angel: His Light Distorted form has him appear more like a demon, with Satanic symbols all over his body and growing a pair of wings and horns.
• Out-of-Character Moment: The cutscene prior to the Floor of Social Sciences Realization shows a person heavily implied to be his pre-distortion self raising up his voice against Roland in an obviously disgruntled manner, contrasting to his polite, soft spoken stance in-game. Given the deep shit he would be in for being snitched on by a Color Fixer and offending a Wing, it makes sense for him to.
• Power at a Price: The Contracts he distributes during his boss fight and as part of his key page offer their bearers great boons, but they come with equally great downsides that necessitate a specific build:
  • The Contract of Light fully restores the bearer's Light every scene, but they lose 10% of their HP for every point of Light they leave unspent. This includes Light gained from Combat Pages and from staggering enemies.
  • The Contract of Might grants extra Strength to its bearer, but it also staggers them if they use any page with more than one non-counter offensive die.
  • The Contract of Swiftness grants Haste to its bearer, but it also inflicts 1 Feeble and Disarm to them for every one-sided attack they perform.
  • The Contract of Liberty randomizes the Light costs of its bearer's pages so long as they cost 3 Light or less, but it removes 25% of their HP if they use any page with a certain cost.
  • The Contract of Amplification increases the Power of all dice from Combat Pages with a specific cost by 3, but all dice from Combat Pages not of that cost lose 3 Power.
• Powers Do the Fighting: Creating Shades and contracts aside, Pluto’s attack animations consist of him summoning golden skeletal hands from portals at the snap of his fingers. His exclusive mass attack, Deluge of Brachial Quietuses, launches a whole swarm of them upon his enemies.
• Puzzle Boss: Fighting him conventionally is nigh-impossible due to him having complete immune resistances to all damage types, in addition to him handing out crippling contracts that can be lethal if utilized incorrectly, creating Shades that copy your Librarians and later on, trapping your party members in magic barriers. The majority of his fight will be spent either trying to whittle him down with indirect damage sources or trying to make him actually vulnerable to damage via stagger. Lampshaded by one of the assistant Librarians battling him:
  Librarian: "I don’t think we can take him on in an ordinary way…"
• No Ontological Inertia: If he is defeated in combat, any Shades he summoned will instantly die with him.
• Read the Fine Print:
  • Inflicts this to the Cane Office, forcing them to go the Library to get the books they wanted on their own. Despite the fact, they never agreed to to do so when they originally made the deal with Argalia. This is a part of his deals; there is a small text that someone must follow when he grants them their wishes, that people don't usually read. If the contractee doesn't follow the instruction on this line of small text, however... hell breaks loose, because he can take anything they have (such as their organs) and sometimes even turn them into outright Distortions.
  • Proven by voice clips added to the Floor of Social Sciences Realization, it turns out that the reason he became the Yesterday's Promise was because he was inflicted by this himself. He used to be the operator of a Fixer Office who was blackmailed by Roland in a deal where he has to smuggle Enkephalin for him, and Roland, in a similar fashion as he does in-game, told him to read the fine print. The event led to Roland being denied access to a Nest.
• Reality Warper: His Distortion-born magic is so immensely logic-defying and versatile to the point that it seems like he could do almost anything. It's actually wonderful that he never even thinks of going The Starscream like the rest of the Distortions following Argalia.
• Skull for a Head: Naturally, due to being a skeleton his head is a skull.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Is one of the most destructive Distortions in the game and never appears to raise his voice as he blatantly commits atrocities against his victims.
• Straw Nihilist: As his boss fight reveals, after being :forced to smuggle Enkephalin to O Corp, which wiped out his entire team, he states that he's not even sure if he and everything else around him is real or just a dream, and the reason he sticks by Argalia is because he believes that the world Argalia hopes to create will be better than the current one filled with lies.
• The Unfettered: Pluto will do almost anything for the sake of achieving his goals, even when it comes to blackmailing whole offices or wrecking entire suburbs.
• Wrong Context Magic: Even among other Distortions, Pluto's powers are special: they are described as outright magic - as in, spells and rituals that you wouldn't see anywhere other than the Magical Girl Abnormalities, and he can do just about anything with it. It's not elaborated if his 'magic' is simply an extension of his personal Distortion powers, or if magic truly exists and his Distortion simply gave him the knowledge and skills to use it.

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Blood-red Night

Elena/Blood-red Night

^{Click here to see Blood-red Night}

^{Click here to see her empowered by the Light}

"Feelings? I just kill and then be done with it. I've got to do something to slake this searing desire that gradually grows stronger."

A Star of the City-leveled Distortion that was defeated in the past, but has since returned, acting as the Reverb Ensemble's first violin. She is first introduced as Nurse Elena and was one of Tomerry's creators. It's later confirmed that Elena is her real name.

According to Chapter 41 of The Distortion Detective, she is a Bloodfiend. Predating the White Nights and Dark Days, Bloodfiends are a common type of vampiric Distortion that feeds on blood. Elena is a cut above the rest of her brethren, far more deadly and known for kidnapping people in the Backstreets and Nests. She would tear out her victim's innards and then reanimating them as servants to find her more victims. Fixer Offices who saw her in action usually ended up dead, and even if multiple Fixer Offices were to hunt her down, she would have long fled, leaving only the dead bodies of her victims in her wake. She was eventually defeated by Roland and Angelica under the name of Charles' Office, but has returned by the events of the game.

Her true appearance is seen much later, resembling Nosferatu (as in the Abnormality), with her hair distorted into long, wavy and black spikes and the right side of her face manifesting as a monstrous form of black and red. Before being killed by Roland and Angelica, she wore a red cloak.

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• Anti-Regeneration: During the rematch with the Ensemble one of her attacks, Regurgitation, can afflict Antirecovery which can prevent the target from recovering health and staggering exist for a certain amount of scenes.
• Ax-Crazy: According to a Bloodfiend Elder in the Distortion Detective, Elena was just using Horror Hunger to rationalize her serial killings and she was just this all along, considering that Bloodfiends had non-lethal ways to draw blood from people.
• Classical Movie Vampire: Her motif. In Roland's flashback, she even wears a red Badass Long Robe instead of the Reverb Ensemble suit.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In the Distortion Detective, she's been described as a Vampire Distortion. Her true form resembles something like a Genderbent version of the Nosferatu Abnormality.
  • The Office that killed her was Charles' Office. Later on, we know that Roland and Angelica killed her.
• The Dreaded: The Blood-Red Night was so dangerous, she was known as a legendary force of terror among the Northern and Western parts of the City. Numerous Fixer Offices were sent after her to no avail since she was so elusive that she will more often than not flee from even coordinated assaults before the offices sent to kill her even arrive, and those few who met her personally often end up dead.
• Creepy Monotone: Her voice hardly ever raises from a low and almost disinterested tone, save for her disguise as a Nurse.
• Dual Boss: Fights alongside the zombie Vermillion Cross for her phase of the Ensemble's reception.
• Foil: To Binah, as the representative of Sheiruth. Both were infamous in their heyday, one an Arbiter of the Head and the other a serial killer of the Backstreets, before being taken down by a Color Fixer and brought back from the dead. Binah, however, was under orders from the Head and doing what she was told, whilst Elena sought to kill for sake of survival, still doing what she knows best while Binah eventually grew to be more willing to work with her coworkers in L Corp (and later the Library). Additionally, Binah is insightful and stoic and will make it known, but Elena's much more coarse and isn't subtle about how much she's fueled by her want to kill. Even Jae-heon called her out on being something of a hothead.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Just like Jae-heon, Elena didn't go insane after boarding a WARP Train and seeing all the carnage unfold. She doesn't even display any form of discomfort, only trying to calm Tommy and Merry down. Of course she was unfazed by it, because Pluto casted a spell on her that made sure she experiences 2 weeks of time inside the WARP train instead of the supposed 1984 years.
  • In the Distortion Detective, Moses makes mention of the identity of the Office who killed her, known as Charles' Office. It turns out that the person who killed her is actually Roland.
  • During the Floor of Language Realization, which can be done before Blood-red Night is formally introduced to the story, Roland is overtaken by Nosferatu's EGO (the Abnormality himself bearing a strong resemblance to Bloodfiends in general), half of his face is taken over by a black and red shadow just like Elena's current form, and he’ll even name-drop her title in one of his ramblings.
  "A night when one is allowed to pursue all kinds of desire… A neverending, blood-red night".
• The Ghost: Unlike the other Reverb Ensemble members, the Blood-red Night was only seen posing as Elena prior to Chapter 6. It's in-universe too, considering that she was said to be so elusive that she would often just escape without confrontation upon being attacked by multiple Offices, and most people who met her never lived to tell the tale. Her true form is finally revealed just before the Purple Tear's reception.
• Horror Hunger: Elena viewed her thirst for blood as this when she initially became a Bloodfiend, forcibly reassuring herself that she was killing other people simply to survive. She has long since accepted her bloodthirst by the events of the game, however.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: She tries to explain this as her viewpoint to Binah and inside her keypage, believing that she and her fellow Bloodfiends were subjected to an unfair amount of prejudice despite looking just like other humans save for their urge for blood. Believing she had to kill others to survive on her own, she grew an intense hatred for normal humans and viewed them as monsters, despite the fact that she’s just a sadist using her thirst for blood as an excuse to go on a massacre.
• Kubrick Stare: Her default expression as Blood-red Night.
• Life Drain: Elena heals when doing damage with nearly all of her attacks.
• Necromancer: Blood-red Night can empty the entrails of corpses and control them to move around for more victims, presumably being driven by their instinct to fill themselves. Best shown with her creations Tomerry and the Vermilion Cross.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: With a name like the Blood-red Night and her tendency to kill thousands for food, she most definitely is bad news.
• One-Winged Angel: Her Light Distorted form has her appear to be completely made of blood, with the Bloodfiend side of her normal self now encompassing her whole head. Also has wings that forms a sort of robe around her.
• Our Vampires Are Different: According to The Distortion Detective, Blood-red Night is one the strongest Vampire Distortions, among a class of common distortions that can arrange from Urban Myth tier nuisances to Star-level threats.
• Psychotic Smirk: Unlike her other and more extreme Slasher Smile, the artwork for Circulation has her sport a very serene and blissful expression while tasting her claw for blood.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: This is a given considering all the similar visual cues to fellow vampire Nosferatu.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Both her human disguise and real form had red eyes, and she is among one of the most dangerous Distortions roaming the city. In her true form, one half of her face is human, and the other half was a red and black monstrosity with a glowing red eye.
• Red Is Violent: Her name and her outfit in Roland's flashback, all emphasize the color of red. She is also explicitly one of the most violent members of not only the Reverb Ensemble, but the Bloodfiend race as a whole.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Red, fittingly enough, to Jae-heon/Puppeteer's blue, at first as the much more compassionate and expressive nurse but also a lot more coarse and hotheaded than the fellow doctor.
• Serial Killer: Blood-red Night killed a total of 4,712 people and extracted their veins for food before she was slain. And unlike her fellow Ensemble members, her crimes weren’t done in an emotional spree killing or as a means to an end, but instead out of an urge to commit violence, lying in wait and stalking victims like a predator.
• Slasher Smile: She sports a particularly sinister one when talking about tearing out Angela's blood vessels after she becomes human.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Despite being one of the most violent and sadistic members of the Reverb Ensemble, Elena speaks in a relatively calm and restrained tone even when she's openly talking about tearing out the veins of the people she meets.
• Start of Darkness: Not her, but for Roland, slaying her in his Glory Days and thus gaining Angelica's admiration was integral to his current jaded view of the world as a Broken Ace.
• Super Smoke: In keeping with the vampire theme, Elena's evade animation has her turn into black and red smoke. The clicking of bats can even be heard while doing so.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: As a Bloodfiend, Elena was forced to drink human blood for sustenance. Following her nature as a Bloodfiend simply trying to survive caused regular people to persecute and shun her as a monster, which Elena saw as completely unjustified. Ultimately though, it seems to have become something of a Freudian Excuse for her actions, especially when it was revealed that even for Bloodfiends Elena's actions were overboard.
• Token Evil Teammate: Not to the Reverb Ensemble, though she is admittedly one of the less Affably Evil members, but rather to the Bloodfiend distortions. According to one of their Elders in Distortion Detective, the Blood-red Night was needlessly addicted to violence and killing, in the process making her Freudian Excuse ring hollow due to the fact said Elder also shows Bloodfiends don't need to kill in order to survive, being able to drain a non-lethal amount of blood from their victims.
• Unexplained Recovery: Both dialogue by the WARP Cleanup Crew and a flashback before the Floor of Philosophy realization battle implied that Elena had been killed by Roland long before the events of the game had begun. Yet she returns as part of the Reverb Ensemble without any explanation on how she came back to life.
• Villain of Another Story: She was an active threat long before the events of the game, having been dealt with before by Roland and Angelica and alluded to in the Distortion Detective but is alive again in present day as a member of the Reverb Ensemble.
• Villainous Friendship: Implied with the Puppeteer, as they're usually seen working together and are on more casual terms than other members, fitting for two Distortions capable of reanimating flesh, although the Puppeteer notes that she's not all that easy to talk to while on the WARP Train.
• Wolverine Claws: Her weapon of choice, and it serves her well in siphoning people's blood and tearing out their insides.

The Puppeteer

Jae-heon/The Puppeteer

^{Click here to see the Puppeteer}

^{Click here to see him empowered by the Light}

"I personally think there's no such thing as choice in our lives. Someone is playing tricks on all of us, mischievously and sneakily. Staging an endless puppet show, attaching invisible strings to us. Now, shall we get started? It's time for a little puppetry."

An Urban Nightmare-tier Distortion taking the form of a tall man wearing the standard Reverb Ensemble suit and a metal, multi-angular head sporting eyes across its form. As the name suggests, he turns his victims into living, monstrous puppets. He first appears disguised with Pluto's help inside the WARP Train and was responsible for the creation of Tomerry. After the WARP Train boards as intended, he makes a Motive Rant before wreaking havoc in earnest, turning all of the first class passengers of the WARP Train into his puppets, then throwing them into the Library to get them killed. Because of this incident, he will soon be exalted to a Star of the City. His real name is Jae-heon, and he serves as the Ensemble's second violin.

It's revealed that he used to be a technician from an unknown laboratory who wanted to bring back his son by using numerous puppets made from the corpses of already dead children. After the Pianist incident, Roland attacked his factory during his Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Pre-distortion, he was a man with white hair and a yarn sweater, similar to his disguise back in Love Town.

---

• Affably Evil: Walks a thin line between this or Faux Affably Evil. He's always soft spoken and is generally polite, both under the Doctor Jae-heon guise and when he reveals himself as the Puppeteer while he's delivering a Motive Rant. At the same time, his cruel actions were intended for the first class passengers he loathes for buying their way out of anything that could trouble them, and expresses pity for the lower class passengers and those who actually got first class by chance and happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
• And I Must Scream: It turns out that while the Puppets he creates can only make clicking noises, their sentience is still intact; they are aware of being manipulated by the Puppeteer but can't do anything.
• Badass Longcoat: His Reverberation Ensemble suit is uniquely stylized into a trenchcoat, much like the actual trenchcoat he wore under his pre-distortion guise. According to the LOR artbook, this is entirely his personal preference.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Not him, but rather, his son died in an accident where he was ran over by a road roller.
• Deadpan Snarker: He's among the snarkiest characters in the game for how generally unemotive he is.
  The Puppeteer (To Roland): You're being calmer than I expected this time. Rather than, you know, throwing a furious fit.
• Death by Irony: After professing his hatred of the complacent rich and elite at every turn, it's Chesed, a member of the rich and elite who is not so complacent, that puts the Puppeteer down.
• Death of a Child: His primary motivation; he was first trying to revive his son using the corpses of children, but Roland attacked his laboratory and prevented such.
• The Dreaded: Of all the Reverb members outside of the obvious Argalia, he and his puppets are alluded to with fear arguably the most besides Pluto up to the reveal of who he is and who he's affiliated with.
• Even Evil Has Standards: If his Motive Rant is anything to go off of, he has a special hatred for the higher class folk who can pay their way out of problems while the lower class must simply endure the same issues and suffer in doing so, even openly stating the pity he felt for the WARP Train's victims and how they must suffer for ages before they're back to normal like nothing happened, and with no recollection of what happened.
• Flunky Boss: He's accompanied by a Puppet, Nimble Puppet, Weighty Puppet, and Puppet Angelica in his battle. He regularly applies a puppet strings buff to his puppets, boosting their stats and making them unkillable while they have Puppet Strings, forcing the player to target Jae-Heon to remove those puppet strings.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: A random Backstreets technician desparate in reviving his son turns into one of the most fearsome Distortions to ever grace the City.
• Foil: To Chesed, as the representative of Adyeshach. Chesed was once a firm believer of inevitable suffering, feeling guilt back in L Corp. for what he did during Garion's attack, and thus trying to give his workers a good last few days before they inevitably die. He was not only a merciful and kind man from the City with prestige attributed to his skillful name, but the most personally wounded by Ayin and Angela directly thanks to the incident involving several Abnormalities being released for some quick energy extraction. Jae-heon outright states to the first class passengers of Love Town's WARP Train that he loathed them for buying their way out of their issues while the low class suffer still, and that he believes there is no such thing as choice in one's life, exacerbated by his particularly cruel powers as the Puppeteer himself a mere technician of the Backstreets who suffered the most directly from Roland due to preventing him from reviving his son despite being an otherwise innocent man.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Right before he drops off his guise, he namedrops Pluto, another close confidant of Argalia seen earlier. Pluto is also the person who made him resemble his pre-distortion self and made sure he's unaffected by the enclosed time-space in the WARP Train.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Just like Elena, Jae-heon didn't go insane after boarding a WARP Train and seeing all the carnage unfold. Sure enough, he's been able to maintain his sanity with Pluto's assistance and was thus able to hatch a plot directed against W Corp.
  • When talking to Tommy and Merry in the train that he and Blood-red Night were infiltrating, he also mentions Eileen sending them in. Eileen is actually the name of the Church of Gears leader and Argalia's left hand, so eagle-eyed players can actually deduct that something is amiss as soon as that name is mentioned.
  • During Roland's flashback in the Floor of Language Realization, one of the people he specifically targeted for his Roaring Rampage of Revenge is only labeled as "a technician" trying to revive his son, but this person has the exact same white hair and brown yarn sweater as the disguised Puppeteer back in Love Town. To no suprise, that is actually the Puppeteer pre-distortion, and he explicitly confirms this before the Reverberation Ensemble's reception.
• Grave Robbing: Is apparently very adept at searching for corpses, considering he was able to attempt reviving his son by finding the corpses of multiple children, and he was able to pinpoint Angelica's corpse inside the Pianist's piano out of a bunch of mangled bodies.
• It's Personal: He's the person who suffered the biggest transgression from Roland despite being completely unrelated to his loss, and thus is the most personally driven to get back at him. Recovering Angelica's corpse for use as a Puppet was the push needed for Roland to break his composure and lash out at Argalia, verifying this for all three of them.
• Hypocrite: A subtle one, but Jae-heon is guilty of many of the same grievances that he hates the Cityfolk for. Fitting for being the representative of Adyeshach.
  • In his Motive Rant, Jae-heon asserts that none of the people in the City can truly be able to make free choices, claiming that there is always a higher power manipulating the City-folk, likening this higher power to a person staging a puppet show. This is ignoring the fact that Jae-heon's own power literally hijacks his victim's free will and prevents them from making any choice at all.
  • In addition, Jae-heon nurses a large grudge towards Roland, who is responsible for Jae-heon's Start of Darkness due to attacking and destroying the puppet that served as Jae-heon's son out of a desire for vengeance despite the fact that Jae-heon had nothing to do with the Distortion phenomenon and the subsequent Pianist incident. What makes Jae-heon hypocritical, however, is that after distorting into the Puppeteer, Jae-heon is perfectly willing use his powers on all of the first class WARP Train passengers out of a desire to torment them for perpetuating the suffering in the City with their wealth. Even though he acknowledges that some of the first class WARP Train passengers could have simply been unlucky citizens that only got a first class seat due to a lottery, Jae-heon still follows through with his torture, making him not so different from Roland.
• Master of Threads: Downplayed as while strings come with being a gruesome Marionette Master, they're mainly used to buff his puppets (and fellow Librarians with his Key Page). The only time they're used offensively is in his Mass Attacks but he otherwise fights with his puppets. Played straight with his Light Distorted Form as he employs more direct usage of his strings.
• Motive Rant:
  • He turned all the first class passengers of the same WARP Train that became Love Town into Puppets because he was disgusted that they can all pay exorbitant fees to distance themselves from the carnage of the regular class seats while he and the regular class passengers have to suffer from Love Town. The entire pre-battle story dialogue for the Puppets is Jae-heon's monologue directed to the first class passengers.
  The Puppeteer: I have no hard feelings for the somewhat average commoners back there, but you lot make me upset, if I'm being honest. The way you try to squirm your way into comfort with money like the maggots you are agitates me beyond reason. Life sure is bizarre, isn't it. You spend your hard-earned cash for a first class ticket to keep yourself safe and sound from the torture of time... But now you're about to suffer something entirely else. You unfortunately run into the likes of us and meet a terrible fate. Just because you've taken first class seats.
  (Elena walks in on him part of the way through, and asks;)
  Elena: What the hell are you doing quietly muttering lectures to yourself?
  • He delivers a second one during the Reverb Ensemble's reception to Roland when he writes off the body he attempted to bring his son back in as nothing more than an amalgam of corpses, answering his true motives as a member of the Ensemble.
  The Puppeteer: You don't get to decide the worth of my method. Or the ways of anyone else here for that matter. I... never did any harm to you. The worst I did was use the bodies of children who'd already gone astray and lost their lives during the night. Even so, if the parents of those kids wanted to hold me accountable... I was ready to accept their judgement... Not yours, Roland! You had no right to kill my son who was just about to be given new life, or judge me for my actions! That day, staring at the fire which engulfed all I had, I swore to myself... That I'd do everything... to make you suffer the same. And to make this damned world suffer as well. There was no justification for a maniac who was lashing out at blameless people to kill my son... Then I came across another chance. I could awaken to this power... But I was confused, and lost my way for a good while. My head was brimming with all kinds of thoughts. That was when the orchestrator here reached out to me, and led me to this exact moment.
• Non-Human Head: The Puppeteer looks otherwise fairly normal for a Backstreet-goer, but he has a distinctly odd head; polygonal and angular, it's divided in random areas by grooves with blank, circular red eyes on several of the surfaces, some having no eyes and some having more of them.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: The process of creating Puppets involves a very messy and agonizing process of cutting people open and molding their bodies into the desired shape while also stringing them up to be manipulated. In the case of the victims on WARP trains, they were very much alive and kicking through the whole thing, much to the Puppeteers glee.
• One-Winged Angel: His Light Distorted form has his body stitched together and mummified, and has spider-like limbs bursting out of his back and legs and connected with red string.
• Papa Wolf: He was devoted to bringing his son back from the dead, and being denied this chance was his Start of Darkness.
• People Puppets: His superpower is basically this, turning people into Puppets made from flesh or bone, which he freely manipulates. There is no way to return a person transformed by the Puppeteer back to normal.
• Powers Do the Fighting: His attack animations involve his puppets blocking or attacking for him, with Jae-heon making very little movement himself. These attack animations carry over to anyone using his key page as well.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The blue to Elena/Blood-red's Night's red, being much more reserved, calm and unexpressive compared to her.
• Secret Identity Vocal Shift: The Puppeteer's voice is the same as it was while under the Jae-Heon guise, but with a noticeable filter added to fit his mechanical visage.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist:
  • He hardly raises his voice and speaks fairly eloquently, regardless of the situation.
  • Actually subverted when he's still human and moments before being attacked by Roland, where he can be heard manically laughing as he "revives" "his son" from the corpses of multiple children, before freaking out when Roland barges into his laboratory.
• Start of Darkness: He genuinely wasn't a bad person to start with, but it was Roland, during his fit of blind rage after Angelica's death, burning down his laboratory and the bodies that would've revived Jae-heon's son that drove him to be motivated by vengeance.
• Tragic Villain: By his own account, the worst he had done was gather the bodies of already dead children, who died of causes unrelated to him, in order to revive his son. While amoral and disrespectful to the families, this was hardly an atrocity compared to other tragedies in the City and most definitely not related to Roland's loss. He was even perfectly willing to face the punishment of the families whose children he had desecrated. His chance at reuniting with his son was denied because of Roland's rampage following Angelica's death, which pushed Jae-heon over the edge and wanting to get back at the world for his misery. The fact that Roland had absolutely no connection whatsoever to any of his own victims only served to make Jae-heon's hatred for Roland all the deeper.
• White Hair, Black Heart: Jae-heon (before his Distortion) has white hair, and not only he has a particularly cruel power post-distortion, he is also directly involved in one of the most infamously horrifying moments in the game; Love Town and Tomerry.
• Villainous Breakdown: Not especially so, but he finally loses his cool when Roland writes off his work to bring back his son as delusional, and remains pissed off even during his chat with Chesed pre-battle.
• Villainous Friendship: Implied with Blood-red Night, as they're seen working together and talk pretty casually around each other. With any other character they're seen talking to, they’re insensitive and dismissive at best and outright hostile at their worst.
• The Unfettered: Jae-Heon will do almost anything and everything to achieve a goal, including brutally stiching an innocent couple into a giant flesh abomination and turning every first class passenger of a WARP train into puppets. Parts of his motivation for turning Angelica's body into a puppet was to get on Roland for killing his son during his Roaring Rampage of Revenge.

Tanya, L'heure de Loup

Tanya, L'heure de Loup

^{Click here to see her as a member of the Reverb Ensemble}

^{Click here to see her empowered by the Light}

"Ehey, why see that as stealing, gal? This is just how the world is, and the best ones adapted to it come out on top, simple as that. Adapt or die. If you can't, you either become food or fall behind until you're wiped out. The so-called apex predators are the creatures best fit to survive in this ecosystem, ain't that the truth?"

A woman with a wolf's head acting as the viola for the Reverb Ensemble. Her real name is Tanya. First seen confronting the Kurokumo Clan and forcing them to investigate the Library after humiliating them in combat.

According to the Official Project Moon artbook for Library of Ruina, Tanya was a former executive of the Middle Finger. Judging from how the book also states that all Reverberation Ensemble members had a connection with Roland, it's also implied that she was one of the survivors of Roland's Roaring Rampage of Revenge, who attacked the Middle Finger and wiped out most of its operations.

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• Affably Evil: She talks casually with her fellow Reverb Ensemble members, particularly Bremen and Greta. Notably, compared to the other Reverb Ensemble members, she still acts like this to other people, even the Kurokumo Clan she metaphorically has at gunpoint after slaughtering their numbers, whom provoked her first.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: After her debut where she inflicted a Curb-Stomp Battle upon the Kurokumo Clan, she has been seen wearing one, as proof of being a member of the Reverberation Ensemble.
• The Brute: She's physically the strongest of all of the Ensemble members and acts as the Reverb Ensemble's main muscle, beating up lower leveled groups to force them into desperate situations (such as the Sweepers and the Kurkumo Clan).
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Delivers one to the Kurokumo Clan, forcing them to serve her interests.
• Foil: To Gebura, as the representative of Akzeriyyuth. Both are powerful combatants who had once failed to protect their comrades against an indiscriminate massacre from a powerful fighter of the City, the Arbiter Garion in the case of Gebura and Roland in the case of Tanya. However, Gebura, despite once drowned in a blind wrath to destroy all Abnormalities, managed to contain it thanks to her Core Suppression. Tanya, in the other hand, after failing to protect her fellow Syndicate members from Roland's insane Roaring Rampage of Revenge, derides her men as weaklings who can't be protected and the Middle Finger's principles of brotherhood as a weakling's ideology, instead indulging in screwing over and beating fellow Syndicates and even abuses her domination over them by forcing them to do her dirty work.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: She has a prominent scar around her left eye, though it didn't seem to damage her actual eye.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Always seen with a smoking pipe in her mouth.
• Graceful Loser: Takes her death at the hands of the Library pretty well due to her Might Makes Right philosophy.
  Tanya (Upon death): "…You beat me fair and square. Can’t complain ‘bout a good display of strength."
• Gratuitous French: Her Distortion name translates from French to "The Wolf's Hour".
• I'm a Humanitarian: Comments on how she, Greta and Bremen might be able to have a barbeque (read: human meat gathered by Bremen's Syndicate) after so long if they can run it by the Puppeteer first.
• Lean and Mean: So far, Tanya is the tallest of the entire Reverb Ensemble besides Greta and possibly Oswald, and one of the tallest in the cast in general, but isn't nearly as massive as Greta.
• Lightning Bruiser: Fast ^note  She is the only enemy in the game with a speed dice with a natural max value of 9, dishes out huge amounts of damage, and has a decently large pool of health, all amplified by the fact that you have to take her down twice.
• Loophole Abuse: The version of Beatdown Tanya uses in her fight against the Floor of Language targets all librarians but it isn't a mass attack. This means that it's vulnerable to being destroyed by Gebura's Great Split: Vertical when used on another combat page or by your own mass attack such as Great Split: Horizontal.
• Might Makes Right: She reveals that strongly believe in this philosophy before she fights Gebura. In fact, her main motivation for joining the Reverb Ensemble in the first place was to force this belief on the City, and it's impled that she picked up this belief after surviving Roland's attack against the Middle Finger, who wiped out her whole operations all by himself.
• Non-Human Head: Has a human body, but a wolf head.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: Right after Sayo mocks her upon meeting, she immediately beats the Kurokumo Clan's members single handedly and executes the survivors by sending them to the Library. Upon grouping up with the others to confront the Purple Tear, she immediately proposes she breaks the Fixer's limbs before she can make a move.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Her passive, Hour of the Wolf exists solely so players cannot abuse the Claws of Savagery Abnormality page against Tanya. Instead, it’ll inflict Bind on her when used.
• One-Winged Angel: Downplayed, but more than Greta. Her Light Distorted form has her topless and with golden tattoos all over, her face is completely in shadows and her hair (and a tail) is made of shadows as well.
• One-Woman Army:
  • She takes on about 100 members of the Kurokumo Clan and effortlessly comes out on top. Later, she’s seen leisurely slaughtering a den full of Sweepers in their own home, a group of brutes most other Backstreet citizen has learned to be terrified of meeting.
  • Not her, but it's implied the reason she distorted is due to her whole cartel getting demolished by an insane Roland, a veritable One-Man Army.
• Sand Blaster: Downplayed, as once she is empowered by the light her main fighting style remains as physical as ever, however she also gains a passive sandstorm ability that chips a small amount of health off each librarian every turn.
• The Social Darwinist: As a consequence of her Might Makes Right philosophy, Tanya fully believes that the only way the weak can survive is by serving the strong. Otherwise, the weak will merely get killed off. It's implied that she picked up this mindset after seeing Roland wipe out her whole cadre in the Middle Finger on his own.
• Speed Blitz: The idea behind the combat page, Overspeed. The rolls are nothing to write home about (especially for the acquirable version which costs a hefty 5 Light), but if the attacking Speed Dice is higher than the target's all dice on the page gain +6 Power.
• Turns Red: Her passive, Time for Round Two, causes her fully recover both health and stagger resist and gain a permanent 2 strength and endurance for the rest of her battle after she goes down to 1 HP.
• Villainous Friendship: Has something of one with fellow animal-themed Reverb Ensemble members Greta and Bremen, them seemingly the only two who can understand Bremen and their Syndicate having a history of supplying District 23 plenty of (albeit low quality) meat, and they casually discuss sharing the meat over a barbeque after running it by the Puppeteer.
• Wolf Man: She has the head of a black wolf, though it's hard to discern if the rest of her appearance matches up like with Greta.

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Oswald, the 8 o'Clock Ringmaster

Oswald, the 8 o'Clock Ringmaster

^{Click here to see him as a member of the Reverb Ensemble}

^{Click here to see him empowered by the Light}

"Laugh to your heart's content at the end of a weary life, and maybe you could have a good eternity's sleep!"

A Distortion clown in red and white with a wicked grin, who serves as the ringleader of the 8 o'Clock Circus. He is later given an invitation by Pluto to join the Blue Reverberation's gang following Philip's transformation into The Crying Children, becoming the Ensemble's clarinet. He resembles the monsters faced in the Crimson Ordeals in Lobotomy Corporation, even sharing a clown mask as the Crimson Dawn.

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• Affably Evil: He's not far from trying to break down Phillip and driving him insane, but he perfectly open for banter and pep talk during his time running the 8 o'Clock Circus, and is generally friendly to strangers. Even as an Ensemble member, he’s open for laughs while chatting with Tiphereth.
• Background Music Override: During his boss fight, when he takes control of a Librarian, the 8 o'Clock Circus theme plays over the Reverberation Ensemble's boss theme.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Despite being an over the arch Monster Clown, he can actually fight very well, being able to beat E.G.O. Philip into submission one-on-one.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: During his battle, Oswald will continuously inflict the Stupefied effect on a random Librarian, forcing that Librarian to fight for his side for either a few scenes or until another Librarian staggers them.
• Break Them by Talking: He does this to Philip by displaying him illusions of Yuna and Salvador berating him for his incompetence and weakness after humiliating him effortlessly in combat, causing him to outright break and accept Pluto's offer that turned him into the Crying Children. Apparently, the images of Yuna and Salvador that Oswald displayed to him are not their real feelings, but Philip's suspicions about them.
• Call-Back: Not only his design invokes those of the Crimson Dawn, he also likes to talk about explosions or self-destructing a lot, something that the Crimson Dawn actually does in Lobotomy Corporation. During his boss fight, he even lets out the giggle which played when Crimson Ordeals were defeated in that game.
• Cloud Cuckoolander:
  • Befitting a clown-like creature, Oswald's dialog is very out-there. He apparently tells people apart by the way they "smell", being able to tell Pluto as a fellow Distortion by the fact he shared the same "stench" as him.
  • If his words were to be taken as granted, even before he became a Distortion, he was always a lonely man who kept making up imaginary friends and wanted to open a Circus despite they supposedly don't exist in the City. Later on, a voice that he calls "Ms. Sun", heavily implied to be Carmen, turned him into a Distortion and manifested the 8 O'Clock Circus for him.
• The Corrupter: Oswald is directly responsible for both Emma and Noah's transformation which they did willingly due to Oswald's words. In addition, Oswald was the main person responsible for Philip's breakdown and transformation into the Crying Children. Finally, it is implied by Philip's words upon meeting Oswald that all of his troupe members are actually former humans transformed into Distortions due to Oswald's influence.
• Death or Glory Attack: Exaggerated with the playable version of Oswald's exclusive combat page, CLIMAX~!!!, which is a summation mass attack that has a pitiful min roll of 1 and a not-so-pitiful max roll of 50 (which is the highest roll that the player can reach without any power stacking from any combat page in the entire game).
• Evil Is Hammy: Of course he is, he's a full time Monster Clown.
• Flunky Boss: Joined by two members of his circus in battle.
• Foil: To Tiphereth, as the representative of Kaitul. Tiphereth A/Lisa carries on a hopeful outlook in life as was taught to her from experience with Tiphereth B/Enoch, going along with Angela's plan regarding the Seed of Light and the Library based off of goodwill and faith that maybe things will work out. She even had to personally put Tiphereth B out of his misery, having come to terms that she needed to move on without him. Oswald gives people who confront him and the 8 o'Clock Circus a brand new meaning in their lives, "earnest efforts to bring merry smiles to people," but twisted horribly as seen with Emma & Noah (whom were close friends that now cannot function without each other) and, moreover, Philip, who he even seems to be hanging out with like a friend as though Lisa and Enoch once did despite Oswald having broken Philip's mind.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Before the 8 O'Clock Circus reception, Oswald tells Emma and Noah that he used to be a lonely man who kept dreaming of imaginary creatures before a "Ms. Sun" distorted him and gave him a Circus filled with them. The "Ms. Sun" was most probably Carmen, the founder of the Seed of Light Project and the instigator of the Distortions. Carmen has been referred to as some sort of "Sun" by Ayin (Abram), and the other Sephirah picture her as a bright woman capable of mesmerizing, fiery speeches.
  • Not just him, but the whole 8 O' Clock Circus is considered a Distortion. It's also seemingly portable. Cue the Golden Ending, and Zena the Arbiter reveals that the Library was Angela's E.G.O., the "Good Counterpart" of Distortions.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: His Stupefying attack doesn't work that well if you only have one Librarian. Combined with the Wrath or Nix Abnormality page in effect, and it will completely and utterly turn against him.
• Malevolent Masked Man: Wears a mask akin to the Cheers for the Beginning Crimson Ordeals.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: His main ability seems to be the creation of horribly mangled and bizarre creates from the parts of humans he convinces to become part of his circus, with creatures resembling an elephant, lion, fish/mermaid and other 'animals' having distinctly human parts on them and their mismatched skin being stitched together and discolored between patches. Emma and Noah are even made with Oswald performing a haphazard job of removing Noah's legs and attaching them on Emma to make him taller, and transplanting Emma's eyes onto Noah to make him Emma's spotter.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: In his Light Distorted form, he has six arms. Two hold up his cape, two wield gnarly looking knives, and last two possess sharpened claws.
• Monster Clown: His whole design invokes this. His mask in particular brings to mind the creatures known as Cheers For The Beginning from Lobotomy Corporation. Uniquely for most things that qualify for a Monster Clown, personality-wise he's not that monstrous.
• Mind Rape: His other main ability, aside from creating his circus crewmates through bizarre surgery, seems to be an ability to influence and infiltrate the minds of others. Specifically, those who are desperate and weak, as Emma and Noah were quickly charmed or convinced to join him rather than go back to their deadbeat lives. He brings this out full force against Philip by instantly deducing his cowardly history, and then proceeds to bombard the unstable man with a berating from his dead and dear colleagues until he's a distorted wreck. In his actual boss fight, he’s able to infiltrate and charm the minds of Librarians and force them to join his side.
• Noodle Incident: Tanya complains about one of the Ensemble members almost getting crushed thanks to him and his antics when they break into the Library.
• The Nose Knows:
  • He can identify Distortions by their "stench". This is how he correctly guesses that Philip is very close to Distorting, despite the fact that he still looks completely human.
  • Before his boss battle, he doesn't notice Tiphereth - or her Librarians - until she speaks; and even after that, he has some trouble counting them. Coupled with his constant metaphors regarding odors, this implies that Oswald is blind and "sees" the world through his sense of smell.
• One-Winged Angel: Becomes an even more monstrous version of himself, gaining four more arms and becoming more clownish and lanky, with an even longer jester hat.
• Stone Wall: For his boss fight, Oswald may look like he has a low amount of hit points and low rolls on his attacks, but between his massive resistance to stagger, heavy usage of status ailments, and status as a Flunky Boss, it can be extremely difficult to get serious damage in on him. This becomes even more pronounced in the Distorted Ensemble rematch. Oswald now gains a new passive which prevents him from losing more than 50% of his health in a single scene. Compounding this is the fact that Oswald constantly leaves the battle to summon Mr. Knife and Ms. Mermaid (or Mx. Bunny if Jae-Heon is dead) meaning that for most of the battle Oswald can't even be damaged.
• Straw Nihilist: Oswald believes that holding expectations and hopes for both the future and for others would only lead to disappointment. Tiphereth believes this to be just his way of avoiding consequences, but Oswald insists that having fun and living in the moment is far better than experiencing the disappointment that expectations bring.
• Tactical Suicide Boss: Heavily downplayed for his reular attacks. Winning clashes against Oswald's combat pages results in Oswald rewarding the clashing Librarian with a small buff depending on the combat page they clashed against next scene. However, his main gimmick depends on controlling your librarians.
• Talks Like a Simile: Much like Binah before, Oswald often speaks in difficult-to-decipher metaphors. However, if he refers to someone's stench, he was most likely referring to how deep someone has succumbed to the Distortions.
• The Unfettered: Isn't far from psychologically breaking down people who trespass into his Circus. Phillip, in particular, gets the worst of it.
• The Unfought: Not Oswald himself but rather, one of the troupers he mentions, Ms. Ant, is never fought and doesn't even make a physical appearance.
• Villainous Breakdown: Will drop his cheerful demeanor if you kill one of his minions in battle. Given that he takes stagger damage upon their deaths, it is implied that he is even heavily affected by their deaths psychologically.

  Oswald: M-my goodness… Our crew member…

  Oswald: WHY MUST YOU TORMENT US INNOCENT BEINGS WHO ONLY WISHED TO BRING LAUGHTER!!!

• Your Heart's Desire: Transforms any of his intruders into mutants or abnormalities per their desires. For example, Noah wanted to "watch the world from a higher place", so Oswald turned him and his partner into a clown abomination where Noah is a handpuppet with four eyes. (Because he also complained about doing monitoring work.)

Musicians of Bremen

Bremen/Doodle-Doo, Heehaw and Woof, The Musicians of Bremen

^{Click here to see them empowered by the Light}

"Bwakbwak!! Arfarfbwaeghii!!! NEIIIGHRUFFHII~!!"

Former members of a Syndicate of the same name who have Distorted, joining into one body. Originally humans known as Doodle-Doo, Heehaw, and Woof, they were driven insane by the Pianist much like the other three Syndicate members. Afterwards, they left their Syndicate and joined with Argalia. Collectively known as Bremen, they have the heads of, respectively, a rooster, a donkey, and a dog, and serve as the Ensemble's horn, tuba, and trombone. They can be first seen accompanying Argalia when he was confronting the Index, wearing a Reverb Ensemble suit.

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• Animal-Motif Team: In keeping with the theme of the Musicians of Bremen: Doodle-Doo is a rooster, Heehaw is a donkey and Woof is a dog.
• Body Horror: Their three heads bleed a different shade of technicolor blood, and their boss fight has them grow horns out of their backs to quite literally make noise. Their light-empowered form has each of their heads become a skull while their main body becomes fused with a brass instrument.
• Classy Cane: They hold one behind themselves, which combined with their stance, the Reverb Ensemble suit and positions as Musicians of Bremen give them an almost Vaudeville theme.
• The Dividual: While Bremen is technically three separate people that have merged together, the fact that the player is only introduced to them in person after they have performed their Fusion Dance and the fact that none of their individual wills can be expressed after their Fusion Dance owing to them being The Unintelligible makes them effectively a single character.
• Flunky Boss: They're accompanied by two Puppets, a Church of Gears Worshipper, and Ms. Mermaid in their battle for some reason.
• Foil: To Netzach, as the representative of Shakah. Netzach outright states people shouldn't suffer for art and such, his Character Development stemming from having found purpose in living again and the will to move on in the world, and hence why he's the most opposed to Angela's methods of gathering books for the Library. The Musicians of Bremen's entire shtick is killing people for sake of art, having found new meaning with the Pianist's melodies and thus wanting to replicate the perfect sound. Both were also motivated to do what they did in joining their factions because their idols, Carmen and the Pianist, were killed. In addition, both had sacrificed their bodies in pursuit of their goals. While Netzach selflessly offered up his own body for the Cogito experiments in an attempt to bring Carmen back, the Musicians of Bremen selfishly allowed their bodies to merge to become a gruesome Distortion that is The Unintelligible to practically everyone else.
• Fusion Dance: Doodle-Doo, Heehaw and Woof merged bodies to become a Distortion with one body but all of their heads.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Present in the artwork for Chorus, which has Doodle-doo, Heehaw, Meow, MuMu and Oink pre-Distortion performing their music in the dark with the eyes of their masks glowing.
• The Hedonist: Since their in-game dialogue consists entirely of seemingly unintelligble animal sounds, it's not very clear why they actually Distort or what their goal is, until you read their book and find out that this is their motive.
  Bremen's Page: "Let's go on an adventure—a world that changes with every step. The me that changes after each step I take. My eyes dazzled by colorful light, I pursue pleasures that I don't have. Don't scold us because you can't understand our pursuit. You just happen to be one of the many who feel joy from common things. We—on the other hand—don't see any colors in those. You're the ones drenched in nasty pleasures. We're simply looking for what we lack. But complete satisfaction will never come; it'll only sink deeper in the raging thirst. We will spend our days in yet grander debauchery. We're happy, though. We can wet ourselves in new colors every day, unlike the rest of you."
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: Heehaw's special combat page inflicts the unique Tagged! status effect on her target. For the next scene, if the target manages to win at least one clash against an enemy, they gain the combat page that enemy used. This includes the otherwise inaccessible combat pages that the Musicians use, which consist of 0-cost pages that either inflict heavy debuffs on enemies or powerful buffs on allies and come with powerful rolls as well.
• Instrument of Murder: Comes with being insane musicians seeking to emulate the Pianist, but Bremen can literally grow them out of their bodies if their own voices prove insufficient when using Chorus at the Climax.
• I Am a Humanitarian: They were more than excited to eat the bodies of burnt Thumb Soldato when Argalia was confronting the Index to hand them some. Tanya has to calm them down since the bodies were majorly used for other purposes and not food.
• Intelligible Unintelligible: The player can’t understand a thing they’re saying, but the scene where they show up with Greta and Tanya allows the two animal-like Distortions to at least hint at what they’re shouting in their conversation. Unfortunately for Netzach, no such interpreter exists in the banter between him and Bremen since Reality Has No Subtitles, leading to Netzach providing the bulk of exposition on art and philosophy in their place.
• Moveset Clone: Quite a few of Bremen's pages are upgraded versions of the combat pages used by the human Musicians of Bremen with names to reflect the fact that they are upgraded versions. (For example, Bremen uses the page Powerful Tendon Chords which is an upgraded version of the Tendon Chords combat page)
• Multiple Head Case: The Musicians who joined with Argalia personally have merged into a single body with three heads. It's telling that the Purple Tear calls them three separate instruments instead of one.
• No Indoor Voice: Granted, they're basically animals at this point, but every single line of 'dialogue' uttered by them is a cacophony of barking, crowing and braying at the top of their lungs, even beating out Greta in volume, something Netzach asks them to tone down before their fight.
• Non-Human Head: Meow, Oink and MuMu wear animal themed masks, but Doodle-Doo, Heehaw and Woof's masks seem to have actually become their heads likely as part of becoming a Distortion, made even more evident by the fact they only speak in loud, out of sync animal noises.
• One-Winged Angel: Becomes a hideous Animalistic Abomination with their animal heads reduced to skulls and that has instrument horns protruding from their back.
• Reverse Arm-Fold: Their default stance, while they hold a cane behind themselves.
• Samus Is a Girl: The other Musicians mention that Heehaw's a girl.
• Sharing a Body: The three Musicians all share the same body with their heads each emerging from the neck, and each of them seem to still be "themselves," what little worth they can convey to others.
• Sole Survivor: Of the known Musicians of Bremen, as they didn't partake in Meow, Oink and MuMu's attack. They latter join them after losing to Netzach. It's later even Subverted as Meow, Oink and MuMu were presumably sent back to the City allive while the Musicians who became the Distortion became Killed Off for Real.
• Support Party Member: Downplayed in that while they certainly hit hard by themselves, their main gimmick in their fight involves around them spamming many, many buffs for their allies while inflicting heavy debuffs on the Librarians. They play this much more straight in the rematch against the Distorted Ensemble, as they focus primarily on buffing Philip, Eileen, and Greta with combat pages while building up light which allows them to grant even more buffs to their three teammates.
• Tactical Suicide Boss: They take fatal damage to all attacks the turn after they use Chorus at the Climax. Which they will begin to use regularly in their second phase.
• Two Girls to a Team: Heehaw and Meow are this to the rest of the Musicians of Bremen.
• The Unintelligible: All of their dialogue consists exclusively of them making animal noises corresponding to their respective animal heads. The only ones who seems to understand their speech are Tanya and Greta.
• Villainous Friendship: Has something of one with fellow animal-themed Reverb Ensemble members Greta and Tanya, them seemingly the only two who can understand Bremen and their Syndicate having a history of supplying District 23 plenty of (albeit low quality) meat, and they casually discuss sharing the meat over a barbeque after running it by the Puppeteer.

Greta, the Eighth Chef

Greta, the Eighth Chef

^{Click here to see her empowered by the Light}

"Why think of ‘em the same kind as you? You get wind of something savory, an’ ya find and eat it. What’s more is there to think about? The smell in the air tells me that there’s a fresh ingredient out there. How could a predator ignore the scent of blood in the ocean current!"

One of the Eight Chefs, Greta is a Star of the City-tier distortion taking the form of a humanoid white shark with several teeth-filled mouths on several portions of her body. She wears the Reverb Ensemble's blue suit and bloodstains can be seen on their body.

She is a cannibal chef who specializes in fine cuisine made out of human flesh, and serve as the Ensemble's percussionist.

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• Achilles' Heel: The bleed status effect serves as one for Greta. She takes additional damage while she has bleed and bleed counteracts her ability to heal via her attacks.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Very large, muscular violent and every scene she speaks in has her constantly shouting full of pride and hunger for something to cook and eat.
• The Brute: Her few appearances paint her as something of this, being easily the largest of the Reverb Ensemble and a member of the feared Eight Chefs. She acts the part too, with her loud and boisterous attitude juxtaposed with frequent comments on when she'll be able to serve her next victim.
• Chef of Iron: She's one of the Eight Chefs, the members of which are said to be Star of the City level threats.
• Defector from Decadence: Out of the Eight Chefs, she alone did not partake in their decision to cook up and eat their own body parts, outright calling them, "morons". This is implied to be one of the reasons why she joined up with the Reverb Ensemble, and didn't object to them finishing the rest of her old group.
• The Dreaded: According to Pierre's Bistro earlier on, she is supposedly a Star of the City, just about the highest threat level someone can gain, thanks to her position as one of the Eight Chefs, indicating that they're a well-known terror within the City.
• Eat the Rich: She means this in both the figurative and literal sense of the term. Greta wants to change the disparity between social classes, closing the gap between the rich who exploit the poor, and the poor who struggle under the rich. To her, fat and greedy rich folk taste just as bad as starved and desperate people, and so a medium between the two would make for the ideal ingredients for her.
• Eaten Alive: Put on display with her card art, with one image showing a very much alive and panicking Mook being clenched in her fist and lowered into her maw for a bite.
• Evil Chef: Even before her allegiance to the Reverb Ensemble is known, as one of the Eight Chefs she makes it a point of making prolonging the suffering of her victims as they're cooked, promoting it to the City as seen with Pierre's Bistro.
• Extra Eyes: Her Light Distorted form has her grow extra sets of eyes.
• Fan Disservice: In her Light Distorted form, Greta is shirtless, but given that she's a giant, anthropomorphic shark covered in mouths, it's most definitely this.
• Foil: To Hod, as the representative of Chemdah. Both were traitors to their original groups though their feelings about their act of betrayal differ: Hod, in her life as Michelle, was a double agent for the Head and felt so much guilt for her actions she hanged herself, having to realize over time during her next life she wouldn't be forgiven by forcing the good person image, and thus works genuinely to redeeming herself and helping those under her care. Greta, as one of the Eight Chefs, makes it a point to cause as much suffering as possible to the victims that become served as her meals, later banding with the Reverb Ensemble and letting the rest of the Eight Chefs die off without remorse.
• Hat of Authority: Even as a member of the Reverb Ensemble, she has to get the point across that yes, she is indeed one of the Eight Chefs as she continues to wear a chef's toque around, if the giant meat tenderizer wasn't also a giveaway.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: She heals rapidly during her boss fight by eating bags of meat, mid-combat. Possibly justified due to the supernatural, physics-defying nature of Distortions.
• I Am a Humanitarian: She's a Cannibal chef with a fine taste for human meat.
• The Juggernaut: In gameplay terms: She can't be staggered, instead taking a large amount of damage, and has heavy resistance to status ailments, making it almost impossible to stop her or slow her down. It doesn't help that she has a staggering 1000 hit points. This is downplayed in the Distorted Ensemble reception, where Greta has less hit points than her previous reception, but still serves as the Stone Wall of her fellow Ensemble members.
• "Kiss the Cook" Apron: The page art for Taste Test has Greta wearing a bright pink apron with a big heart stitched onto it, while she enjoys a drink of blood and human stew she's making.
• Mad Artist: The Eight Chefs promote cannibalism, and believe that drawing out the suffering of someone enhances the flavor of the meal they become. Greta is no different, and almost every sentence is in some way related to cooking and/or murder.
• Meaningful Name: 'Greta' means 'pearl'. The marine origins of pearls and sharks aside, Hod comments on her pearly white skin before battle.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: To keep up with her shark theme, but all extra mouths sport equally many sharp teeth.
• One-Winged Angel: Downplayed compared to the others members, as her Light Distorted form is just her with Extra Eyes and without her shirt, revealing more mouths.
• Skewed Priorities: Right before her boss battle, she displays a big distaste for greedy rich folk, calling them entitled and denouncing them for taking resources away from the common folk, who are then forced to fight each other to survive. The reason why she dislikes excessive economic disparities, though, is because She Is A Humanitarian, and apparently rich greedy people and poor desperate people both taste bad.
• Slasher Smile: Her default expression, not helped by her features making it look like they're coming from a lipless mouth or that all the other mouths look like they're making similar smiles.
• Sole Survivor: Of the Eight Chefs, as the others were taken out in one fell swoop by the Reverb Ensemble as the Hana Association postulates. Granted, by then, according to Greta herself, they ate themselves until there was nothing but tongues and teeth. This is Subverted for her too, since her Distorted self was Killed Off for Real within the Library.
• The Spook: Unlike the other Reverberation Ensemble members, Greta's past was mostly left unknown and/or ambiguous, making her arguably the most enigmatic of all Reverberation Ensemble members.
• Threatening Shark: A humanoid shark person, and a very threatening one at that. Fittingly for her tastes for human flesh, some shark species are known to cannibalize each other given the chance.
• Too Many Mouths: She has extra toothy mouths all over her body, including her forehead, hands and even tail. Becomes more pronounced in her Light Distorted form, which we see she has mouths all over her body.
• The Unfettered: Greta will do almost anything for the sake of creating the most delicious human flesh cuisine possible.
• Villainous Friendship: Has something of one with fellow animal-themed Reverb Ensemble members Bremen and Tanya, them seemingly the only two who can understand Bremen and their Syndicate having a history of supplying District 23 plenty of (albeit low quality) meat, and they casually discuss sharing the meat over a barbecue after running it by the Puppeteer, which Greta is convinced she can do after proposing a good enough sounding meal.
• Villainous Glutton: Comes with being one of the Eight Chefs and a shark woman, always looking for a good excuse to get to cooking up human flesh and thinking up what meal she should make next out of it.

Eileen, Church of Gears Leader

Eileen, Church of Gears Leader

^{Click here to see her Distortion}

^{Click here to see her empowered by the Light}

"Everyone in the City is like a gear spinning along without a purpose..."

The Leader of the Church of Gears, a group of religious fanatics who embrace Nihilism and graft gears onto their heads to increase their reflexes and traits. She was targeted for assassination by the Full-Stop Office, only to be saved by Argalia. She later joined the Reverberation Ensemble, becoming the group's harp and a Distortion herself.

Eileen inherited her position from her father, who is implied to have been responsible for abducting people to turn them into Gears during his time as the leader of the Church. He was killed by Roland during his Roaring Rampage of Revenge, which led his daughter into joining Argalia and Distorting.

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• Ambiguous Situation: It's unclear just how she became a Distortion during the Smiling Faces' chapter.
• Angelic Abomination: Her final form after being empowered by the light. While not so horrifying on her own, she has a distinctly bizarre appearance and gears that are bloodily jabbed into her wings.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: Starts wearing one ever since joining Argalia's Reverberation Ensemble, the group's signature outfit.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: Acts as the Bait for the Full-Stop Office's Switch, with the scene first focusing on her the members of the Church killing an unfortunate soul in one of their rituals before being attacked by the Office, only to be saved by Argalia and forcing said Office to enter the Library to die.
• Co-Dragons: Were Argalia's most trusted confidants alongside Pluto. If Argalia is seen alongside another Ensemble member, it's usually her or Pluto.
• Daddy's Girl: Eileen wears a gear made from her father that presumably guides her. It's implied that his death in the hands of Roland pushed her into Distorting.
• Disappeared Dad: She wears a gear created from her father on her back, which grants her guidance and superhuman reflexes. It's implied that he was the former head of the Church of Gears who kidnapped people and turned them into gears, and was killed by Roland in his mass killing spree.
• Dodge the Bullet: Because of the intelligence gear grafted on her head, she can dodge incoming bullets without fail unless the gear itself is damaged.
• Eyes Always Shut: Though initially hard to see past her thick veil, her face is visible and it's apparent that she never opens her eyes.
• The Fatalist: She expresses this philosophy, viewing that the gears show her what is destined to happen and that trying to rebel against the gears is a futile effort.
  Eileen's Key Page: "Where we live, there is nothing that can be achieved with your own will. A flow that we cannot go against dictates us. What we call "gears" are simply there to show the flow."
• Flunky Boss: Her battle's main gimmick is that she is nearly impossible to damage as long she has other living Church of Gear worshippers by her side. She also continuously summons more every time she changes phases.
• Foil: To Yesod, as the representative of Aiyatsbus. Yesod, the Patron Librarian of the Technology floor, was the most openly rebellious to Angela's plans, concerned with the process needed to reach their goal, having put up with before in the Information department as he never understood in depth what all the work forwarded to him by other departments meant but was expected to handle it anyways. He's disdainful towards those he's interacting with at first, but eventually grows to respect them and lighten up. Eileen, the leader of the Church of Gears, is accepting of those who seek to escape the nature of life by becoming gears, some grafted to her head to augment her mind and body, and for the most part doesn't do any major actions personally, having to be saved by Argalia and Pluto and thus join with the Reverb Ensemble. Both were also implicated to be driven to their states by the deaths of people close to them; Malkuth/Elijah in the case of Yesod/Gabriel, and Eileen's father.
• Mechanical Monster: The gears on her head aren't ornamental; she, like the rest of the cult, are cyborgs who use said gears to enhance themselves, and this before she seemingly became a Distortion. The members fought during the Blue Reverberation's chapter are straight up monstrous, being a combination of corpse and Brain in a Jar, with gears all over them, with gears in their brains as well.
• Mysterious Veil: Wears a veil over her entire face, even when she's wearing the Ensemble's signature outfit.
• One-Winged Angel: Turns into an Angelic Abomination with gears jabbed into her wings during the Reverb Ensemble Distorted.
• The Stoic: In contrast to the other Ensemble members, who are rather expressive, Eileen is quiet and composed, bordering on being an Emotionless Girl. It's probably due to her partially robotic nature as a Distortion.
• Straw Nihilist: The philosophy of the Church of Gears.
• Reverse Arm-Fold: In her Light Distorted form.
• Undying Loyalty: Shown to be especially loyal to Argalia, following his wishes without question and speaking to him with an almost reverent tone.

The Crying Children

Philip/The Crying Children

^{Click here to see E.G.O. Philip}

^{Click here to see the Crying Children}

^{Click here to see him empowered by the Light}

"I... don't want to hear anything. I don't want to see anything... or speak anything... I'm tired of it all. Right now, all I want is to just... cry out loud."

A middle-of-the-road apprentice of Salvador's and a worker of the Dawn Office. After surviving an encounter with the Library, he becomes terrified of the the unmatched strength of the former L Corp employees stationed within and the fate of all the organizations that entered. From then on, he begins down what can only be described as a long path of sorrow, and after eventually reaching the end of his sanity, he becomes a Distortion born from his wish not to see, hear, or speak - only to cry. He was eventually recruited by the Reverberation Ensemble after being saved from the Liu Association.

The Crying Children manifests as an angelic and faceless humanoid figure made out of wax, with his "face" covered by a pair of hands. He serves as the cello of the Reverberation Ensemble.

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• All Your Powers Combined: In his final boss fight, Philip combines elements of all his previous receptions. He also uses combat pages that are upgraded versions of his Dawn Office and Wedge Office receptions in addition to pages that he has used during the Crying Children reception.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • When Philip faces Malkuth in the Reverb Ensemble reception, he states that his memories of Yuna and Salvador have mostly faded. It is left ambiguous, however, if this is just a result of Philip distorting or if his mind and memories were negatively impacted by the fact that Philip was previously nearly completely booked from his first reception as the Crying Children, with only small portion of the Crying Children managing to escape from the booking process. The official art book suggests the latter, the sole survival of the Unspeaking Child leaving him as an embodiment of his own apathy and cowardice.
  • Since the Library has a book of the Crying Children already, it's unclear if the previous booked Philip was sent back to the City as a full human or a Distortion after the one who joined the Ensemble was Killed Off for Real in the final confrontation.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: After escaping from the Library as the Crying Children, we haven't heard about him until Argalia throws his whole set of minions against the Purple Tear, where he's mutated completely into a less monsterous and more humanoid form of the Crying Children and wearing a Reverb Ensemble suit, indicating that he's become so broken that he joined the organization who tormented him a while ago.
• Angelic Abomination: His Crying Children form he takes at the height of his despair depicts a trio (later multiplied into dozens) of angelic cherubs who depict the See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Speak No Evil poses respectively. When the cherubs combine, they take the form of a single giant crying angel statue depicting the Do No Evil pose, whose heart is an empty bleeding gap and lacks a face.
  • His Ensemble form isn't quite so angelic, but the motif of See and Hear No Evil is still present with two hands growing out of his face that cover his eyes and ears. His Light Empowered form, however, brings out the angel motif in full force one last time, with him having become a shattered, featureless and fiery stature with one wing, now capable of throwing out even more fire and brimstone than the previous forms he's taken.
• Battle Theme Music: Warriors. in his first boss fight, And Then Is Heard No More in his second as The Crying Children.
• Beef Gate: Twice in a row. Philip in his E.G.O form can be a major roadblock to make sure you're ready to finish Urban Plague, and he takes a lot more effort to work through his burn and powerful attacks. And he serves this role again as the Crying Children, his fight having a whopping seven phases, consisting of multiple enemies with extremely disrupting passives and area-of-effect long range attacks. If you haven't completed a Floor Realization battle yet to get an extra employee and E.G.O. pages to burst down the Children, you are going to have a hard time.
• Boss Fight: First towards the end of Urban Plague as E.G.O. Philip, than again as the Crying Children in Urban Nightmare, and finally as part of the Boss Rush amongst The Reverberation Ensemble.
• Came Back Wrong: Even though his Distortion operates on From a Single Cell, Philip does not come out nearly unscathed from his defeat at the hands of the Library: As the only part of his form to escape being turned into a book was the Unspeaking Child, the only parts of his mind left afterwards are his apathy and cowardice that it represented.
• Cowardly Lion: Deconstructed. Philip is described as a coward at heart, but still rushes into the library multiple times... only for his cowardice to continually get the better of him. His continued cowardice in the fear of asking out Yuna, being unable to save Salvador, or dealing with Oswald's words culminates in him turning into the Crying Children. And even as the Angelic Abomination, it still manages to have enough of his cowardice to flee from battle, and it's implied that the Library deliberately let him flee this time so it could get some high profile association decimated.
• Creepy Monotone: After becoming the Crying Children and joining the Reverb Ensemble, Philip speaks exclusively in a dull voice with nearly no inflection in his voice whatsoever.
• Despair Event Horizon: Philip's delusional beliefs that Yuna and Salvador treated him as an inept and the former is going to cheat with the latter's wife and children and their subsequent death in the Library, as well as his failed escort of the Wedge Office, broke him down so hard that he accepts Pluto's offer to turn him into a distortion and joins him after a rampaging spree.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Philip shows up in the game's intro cinematic, playing a game of cards with other guests on a table in the Library, directly across from the viewer. His Ensemble form can also be seen among the silhouettes surrounding Argalia later into the cinematic.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: When the Crying Children was released out from the Library and started a rampage that killed 80,000 people in V Corp's Nest, the only building that escapes its wrath is the deserted Dawn Office building, whose combatants were all killed by the Library. This means that no matter what kind of monster Philip has became at the end of the day, he still cares about Salvador and Yuna enough to spare their deserted office.
• Exit Villain, Stage Left: Does this on every instance he's faced. The first time he ran to Wedge Office for reinforcements on his own volition, the second time Oscar planted an escape button onto him, and the third time where he became a full blown Distortion, although it's implied the Library itself set him free for his third battle. The fourth time we see him, it's when the Blue Reverb threatens the Purple Tear with his whole ensemble, and he managed to become so broken that he became one of its members himself. By the time of the finale, the last encounter against Philip definitely kills him off for good.
• Eyeless Face: The Crying Children's current look lacks any identifiable features, save for his mouth, outlined by the fingers of the hands around his jaw.
• Fatal Flaw: Cowardice. Philip's tendency to run away from disadvantageous battles earned Yuna and Oscar's distrust towards him and holds him back from being capable. Not only that, the Library, Oswald and Pluto were also adept enough to capitalize on his cowardly tendencies to flee from a disadvantage to make sure combatants who were otherwise capable of dealing with the Ensemble get drawn and vanish into the Library so they spread the Seed of Light into the City unopposed.
• Fisher King: As he changes phases, his background, a cracked stone mausoleum, becomes more and more engulfed in flames and lava, representing his rage and sadness for what he lost, and his growing resolve to avenge them. Later, it changes to a collapsed version of said mausoleum filled with blood when fought as the Crying Children.
• Foil: To Malkuth, as the representative of Qimranut. Malkuth's entire Character Development has been devoted to coming to terms with confronting her old life and accepting it, formerly having jumped on the chance to prove herself which lead to her death. She managed to turn her life around and take control of her situation as best she could, which is what she always sought after. Philip chooses to run away from his problems, falling further and further into delusional despair from how much he regrets everything, eventually Distorting after agreeing to Pluto's contract so he needn't do anything else but cry.
• Foreshadowing: A subtle one occurs in the way that E.G.O. Philip's fight is presented. One of E.G.O. Philip's passives is called Unstable Shell of E.G.O, in addition, E.G.O. Philip's seemingly-pristine marble coliseum has numerous thin cracks which widen as the battle progresses. These two elements combined show that despite Philip seemingly overcoming his flaws, he is still a deeply traumatized man who is on the verge of a mental breakdown. A fact that Oswald and Pluto would later take advantage of.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: Can fire large red lasers as the Crying Children.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: An ordinary high-grade Fixer who distorted into a form so destructive that it wrecked havoc in a type of severity exceeding even the Pianist, later becoming a member of a dreaded organization of Distortions to help raise even more hell for the City.
• From a Single Cell: Or rather, from a single cherub. By the tail end of his seven phase battle and dozens of incarnations of cherub statues and larger Crying Children form destroyed, only one remained to be an easy kill to end the battle. This being Philip though, it managed to run away before the final blow and manifested outside the Library. Sure enough, the whole Crying Children statue was reconstructed wholly to cause an apocalyptic amount of deaths outside.
• Heroic Resolve: Gets this after the fight against the Wedge Office, allowing him to manifest E.G.O. and fight the Library in a much more powerful form. Later, said resolve is utterly broken by Oswald and his own insecurities about the people he's trying to avenge, leading him to Distort and become the Crying Children.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: A few of Philip's attacks in his final battle inflict burn to both himself and his target. In addition, if he has enough burn stacks, his attacks also deal additional damage. This comes at a cost, however, of making him super vulnerable to stagger damage when he is in this state.
  • Has something of a habit of this as far as providing tools to defeat himself goes. His first fight during the Dawn Office reception yields a lot of Burn-inflicting pages, which do an excellent job of ripping through his health when fought again in his E.G.O. form, even in spite of his initial defenses. Later, as the Crying Children, he yields a very Burn-focused key page, which paired with all the Burn-related pages from his past fights makes it much easier to set him sufficiently on fire in his last fight to render him weak to stagger damage.
• Icarus Allusion: His associations with fire and angels as well as his fall from potential E.G.O. user to a Distortion made of wax brings this to mind.
• Increasingly Lethal Enemy: In his first boss fight. He starts off in his Feather Shield mode, focusing mostly on reducing damage done to himself while playing pages with mostly defensive dice. After a few turns, he switches to Searing Sword mode, where he tries to inflict as much Burn as possible using pages with only offensive dice. Allow him to remain too long in Searing Sword mode, however, and he gains 5 dice and uses Burning Strike, a page with a single dice with a 30-40 roll that is all but guaranteed to kill one of your Librarians. After using Blazing Strike, Philip will return to Feather Shield mode and repeat the cycle. Beating Philip requires the player to deal as much damage as possible to him before Philip manages to overwhelm the player with endless stacks of Burn damage and too many uses of Blazing Strike.
• No-Sell: In his last two fights, he is immune to Burn damage (However, Burn stacks can still be apply, and he's much easier to stagger if he has enough stacks of burn). Considering that he uses plenty of Burn himself, this can be an example of Required Secondary Powers.
• One-Winged Angel: Transforms and gets his E.G.O. through a Heroic Second Wind, leading to a much more difficult fight than the ones before. Notably, in his E.G.O. and Light-empowered forms he literally has one wing, which he uses as a shield. Later goes through a far darker version when he Distorts into the monstrous Crying Children, becoming a wax statue of an angel, and then again after being empowered by the light, be surrounded in flames as his body breaks apart.
• Person of Mass Destruction: While the Crying Children's kill count is still not as impressive as the Pianist, he still killed 80,000 people in a Nest owned by V Corp. Since Nests are supposed to be incredibly safe this makes his rampage worst than the Pianist's who only attacked the Backstreets.
• Playing with Fire: Just like his Office, he specializes in this in his E.G.O. form, with fire burning in the background. It's less prominent in his initial form as The Crying Children, but brought back in full force in his stabilized form as a member of the Reverberation Ensemble.
• Razor Wings: The cherubs attack with these alongside kicking. When merged as one, the wings take the form of Salvador and Yuna attacking with their own bladed weapons.
• Recurring Boss: Philip runs away from the fights he's in to return another day. First as a regular Fixer of Dawn Office, then he returns with Wedge Office only to then gains a brimstone E.G.O., and then he becomes the Distortion called The Crying Children. He's fought one last time as part of the Reverberation Ensemble reception, before finally being booked. Even after that, he's fought another time as part of the Boss Rush against The Reverberation Ensemble Distorted after they get resurrected by the light. After that, he's fully Killed Off for Real.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: As Malkuth begins speaking to Philip about the virtue of enduring life's challenges, he bluntly shuts her down on the premise that causing his pain by killing the rest of Dawn Office hardly puts her in a position to lecture him on how he handles it.
• Slasher Smile: His default expression as The Crying Children, though the smile is made not with his actual mouth but with the hands that cover his face.
• Spree Killer: When he first Distorts and escapes the Library (again), the first thing he does is manifest in a Nest and kill 80,000 people in an emotional outburst, only stopping to sob in front of his old Office and then continue on his way. After this, he's reduced to merely trailing behind the rest of the Ensemble and following their lead as they carve a swath through the City.
• Straw Nihilist: After crossing the Despair Event Horizon and joining with the Reverberation Ensemble, Philip has abandoned his ties to his past self under the premise that he'll eventually lose anything that he gains.

Philip: "Why are people taught that they must earn things? Jobs, assets, friends, family, knowledge, wealth... They tell us that our lives are made successful and content by acquiring them, whatever they may be. Even though nothing in this world lasts forever. What we get is destined to depart from us one day. Eventually, when people try and fail to latch on to them in an unsightly struggle, they despair and lament. I did, too. Do relationships between people really matter? They'll all break in the end, sooner or later. Can't a person be himself and walk down a path he chose purely on his own, without anyone else's intervention? He may seem like a nobody, but he'll ultimately gain more."

• Supreme Chef: According to Salvador, Philip makes excellent Ssanghwa-cha^note a type of Korean medical tea with an egg yolk on top of it.
• Token Good Teammate: As an Ensemble member, Philip is arguably the chillest, unlike the rest who are textbook Sociopaths or just flat out homicidal. The 'only' visibly monstrous thing he did was kill 80,000 people in the Nest his former Office was in, and in a fit of inconsolable and barely lucid despair. After he joined the Ensemble, it seems like he's just there for the ride after having nowhere else to go and nothing else to look forward to. Compared to bloodthirsty maniacs like Greta and Elena or cold and calculating menaces like the Puppeteer and Pluto, Philip is by far the most passive and least ambitious Ensemble member, despite ironically having a bodycount that more than likely exceeds everyone elses work.
• Tragic Monster: Philip has had a lot of trauma land on his shoulders since accepting the invitation to the Library with Yuna and Salvador. Even before then his lack of confidence in himself and his fear that Yuna sees him as inept led to him assuming she liked Salvador a lot more than him, something that knocked his self esteem to the point that Salvador himself noticed Philip's low mood and promised to talk through his concerns and issues once they'd completed their mission at the Library. However, Philip saw his trusted mentor and his crush killed and "booked", and while he escaped his emotional state only got worse with the feeling he'd abandoned them. Like Lulu, back in the Streetlight Office episodes, he tried to return to the Library to reclaim Yuna and Salvador's books with the help of the Dawn Office's sister branch, only for them to all die as well and Philip to manifest an E.G.O. He once again escaped, but found himself at the 8 o'clock Circus and at the mercy of Oswald... his subsequent trauma and guilt for not being able to help his team led to him breaking down completely and accepting Yesterday's Promise's offer, which in turn led to him twisting into an Abnormality-like Distortion. When he once again fails to best the Library and its Librarians even with all this new power, he goes on a destructive rampage out of grief, with a death count close to that of the Pianist's, and is marked for removal by the high-ranking Liu Association because of it. By the time the Purple Tear's chapter comes around, Philip is too broken mentally to care anymore, and has willingly allowed himself to be recruited by the very people who took his grief and trauma and used it as a weapon against him. He's even fully aware he's been led astray by the very people he's working for, but he has no where else to go and no where else to be, so he stands by his own choices, with his Key Page noting he was actually grateful in a way that everything that happened meant he achieved something.
  Philip's Page: "I followed your troupe in order to find a way to be happy, but what good did it do for me? Staying with you only exacerbated my suffering, defeating the whole purpose of joining you in the first place. I do want to add that you were not at fault here, though. I was the one who tormented myself. Had I known what I know now back in the past… would that have lessened the pain or changed anything? No, I don't blame myself for the choice in that moment. Even the failures and misery of the past were all part of the voyage leading up to this moment, so I'm thankful that I managed to achieve something for once. I might have drowned in my own tears and sorrow back then, but ultimately, I'm grateful for the choice I made… and all the things in the world."
• Technicolor Fire: Downplayed, but the majority of the fiery attacks used by his Ensemble and Empowered forms are ashy or even pitch-black with an orange glow to them, contrasting his earlier use of more mundane orange and white flames.
• Trauma Conga Line: It's been a long conga line for Phillip. His paranoia of Yuna viewing him as an inept, his multiple attempts at fighting the Library, turning into a Distortion, being mentally assaulted by the 8 o'clock Circus, and Pluto's negotiations push Philip to a breaking point. When the Blue Reverberation threatens the Purple Tear with his whole Reverb Ensemble, it turns out that he ended up becoming a part of it.
• Uncertain Doom: The sole member of the Ensemble who's demise is ambiguous, because of his regenerative abilities and having fought previously: the Library had transformed most of him into a book, with only the Unspeaking Child remaining to join the Ensemble; No word is mentioned what becomes of the majority of him that is released alongside the rest of the defeated guests, or what form it would take.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: A running theme is that he always runs away, with things only getting worse afterwards.
  • His first fight ends with him fleeing the Library, leaving the rest of Dawn Office to be booked. He comes to regret this, and becomes a major reason for his Distorting.
  • During his E.G.O. fight after the booking of Wedge Office, just as he's about to be killed, Philip suddenly ups and vanishes. As it turns out, Oscar placed an escape device on him to help him escape the Library... but it lands him in the middle of Oswald's 8 O'clock circus, leading him to become a Distortion and a member of the Reverb Ensemble.
  • In his third fight as the Crying Children, despite getting rid of all but one cherub, said cherub flees instead of getting booked, with the implication that the Library itself decided to let it leave in order to bring in more powerful people. You only gain his Unstable Page for your troubles.
• Villain Has a Point: As an Ensemble member, he finally arrives to the Library for what he expects to be his final visit in one way or another and gets to personally talk to Malkuth about the nature of emotion, loss and nihilism. Malkuth makes the point that one can learn valuable things from loss and pain - Philip retorts that this is a bold claim coming from someone part of the group who killed everyone he cared for.
• Wing Shield: He gains a single brimstone wing upon manifesting E.G.O. which functions as his shield. In his boss fight, he severely reduces oncoming damage and deals Burn to his attacker when in Feather Shield Mode. One of the passives for his Unstable keypage, Plumed Escutcheon, functions as a nerfed version of the Feather shield effect which only afflicts Burn onto attackers.
• Wreathed in Flames: His empowered form has him completely covered in flames.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Phillip's determination, his Cowardly Lion tendencies and his sorrow over losing all of his beloved teammates to a near-undefeatable, apocalyptic abomination might make him a protagonist who would ascend into a legendary hero in nearly any other video game setting...but not this one. In Library Of Ruina, these traits that would otherwise make a decent Badass Normal protagonist instead leads him to an infinite spiral of sorrow until he joined the group that broke him, who also happens to be affiliated with said apocalyptic abomination who took his dearest seniors away.

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