open/close all folders
The Party
Alfric Overguard
An ambitious and single-minded new adventurer left scrambling to set up a party after his first carefully crafted group was poached by a rival.
- Amazon Chaser: He's rather taken by a priest of Xuphin, who had made herself well over 7 feet tall.
- Arranged Marriage: He was matched with Lola as a child thanks to a prognostication entad that seemed to indicate they would be good for one another. He calls it off after she poaches his first dungeoneering party.
- Blessed with Suck: He certainly thinks so about being a chrononaut. The safety net is nice, but people hardly ever think about the practical realities of reliving the same day or the constant suspicion just being one invites. The rest of the party try to understand his point of view but aren't terribly sympathetic given the whole "come back from dying" thing.
- The Clan: In addition to being chrononauts, his branch of the family have specialized in dungeoneering, making them particularly wealthy and influential.
- The Comically Serious: He's aware of how he comes off to people and will occasionally play on it for a laugh.Alfric: Personally, I like a sandwich that you need a strategy to eat.
- Damager, Healer, Tank: Takes the tank role. His abilities as a chrononaut were particularly helpful, as the resets provided him a way to safely train for such scenarios as breaking bones, being stabbed in the chest, strangulation, acid burns, and just about anything else his parents could think of at his request.
- The First Cut Is the Deepest: His highly dysfunctional relationship with Lola has left a few scars and he can't seem to help but expect the worst from a relationship with Mizuki.
- Major Injury Underreaction: Alfric has deliberately trained himself not to scream in response to such trifles as having your arm squeezed until your wrist breaks in two places, since it can attract extra attention in a dungeon and get you killed. The other party members do find his stoicism a bit unnerving at times.
- Massive Numbered Siblings: He's one of six. His mother used entads to gestate them all so she wouldn't have to take time off from dungeoneering. She wanted them all to share a birthday but their father talked her out of it.
- No Social Skills: Not exactly true, but his extreme focus on dungeoneering makes him come off as standoffish and humorless most of the time.
- Serious Business: Most obviously dungeoneering, but adhering to the rules about disclosure is something Alfric doesn't mess around with. He gets a little frustrated when his family members are cavalier about it, since it's an ideal they are all supposed to be taught from birth.
- Walking Spoiler: The fact that he's a chrononaut is pretty fundamental to his character and rather hard to talk around given the gender distribution of the party.
Hannah Carthaigh
A Cleric whose true-believer religious convictions are viewed with disfavor by her more bureaucraticly-minded superiors in the church.
- Damager, Healer, Tank: Takes the healer role. She can heal most any wound that doesn't affect the brain and isn't immediately fatal, provided that the other side of the body doesn't have the same injury. Naturally asymmetrical things like most internal organs, or injuries that are coincidentally symmetrical, give her trouble though.
- Guy on Guy Is Hot: Her favorite romance novels all revolve around male-males couples.
- I Hate Past Me: By her own admission she was an obnoxious twit at her seminary and her Reassigned to Antarctica status was something she could have easily avoided if she had been a little less argumentative and zealous with her superiors, teachers, and classmates.
- Jumped at the Call: When she heard an adventurer had been asking about her in town she immediately started making arrangements to drop her duties at the temple she was assigned to. By the time Alfric showed up she was all packed and ready to go to the dungeon. Partly this was because she had always wanted to try dungeon diving, but mostly it was an excuse to leave an unwanted position she had been given to keep her out of the way.
- Mundane Utility: Symmetricalization is a sacred process that brings her closer to her god. The fact that it also lets her mend chipped cups and torn clothing is just a bonus.
- The Paladin: She's the party's secondary melee fighter in addition to their healer.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: She annoyed her superiors enough that they put her in an out of the way posting just so they wouldn't have to deal with her. Either she'd stay in the post and replace an elderly priest, or she'd leave the formal structure of the church and no longer be a nuisance - a win-win, from their perspective.
- Team Mom: Her training as a cleric makes her well suited to the role and she makes a point of regularly checking in on how everyone in the group is doing and offering what advice she can.
- Verbal Tic: She likes to pepper her speech with an inquisitive "ay?".
- White Mage: A Cleric in the service of the god of symmetry, whose priests are known for their facility with emergency healing magic.
Isra Jamin
A druid orphaned at a young age who didn't realize her natural abilities weren't shared by others. Her habits and behavior, particularly her hunting and meat eating, also make her unusual among other druids.
- Cultural Rebel: Isra doesn't exactly fit in with other druids. They are almost universally vegetarians, while she has no problem eating meat and made her living as a hunter before trying dungeoneering. She also was raised solely by her father, while the standard method of creating druids makes them distinctly matrilineal.
- Druid: Is one unintentionally due to the circumstances of her birth and her father's disinterest in his new community. She spent most of her life unaware of the fact and used her abilities to hunt more effectively.
- I Thought Everyone Could Do That: She gets bit by this hard, especially after the death of her father. She spent most of her life thinking everyone had her druidic skillset (eg reliably knowing and controlling tomorrow's weather) but had deemed it something you shouldn't talk about to be polite. Over time it developed into an ingrained fear that she'll betray some social rule no one ever explained to her, like asking a merchant why they sell ointments that don't do what they say they will.
- Impoverished Patrician: Isra's parents were some part of the upper class before they had to flee their original home. They died before they could pass along any details, only leaving behind a collection of valuable entads to provide a hint as to how high up they had been.
- Minor Living Alone: The hexmasters tried to defy this trope, but she was too good at evading them and they eventually gave up trying to find and relocate her after a year or two.
- No Social Skills: Played for drama. Being orphaned and living on the edges of society did her no favors, but having no idea she was a druid has seriously skewed her experiences with people. The revelation causes her to reevaluate almost every single interaction she's ever had. Technically she does have a well developed set of social skills, they're just geared toward interactions between wild animals and don't map onto human social customs all that well.
- The Paranoiac: Being robbed by a family friend after her father died made a lasting impression, and she tends to be suspicious of other's motivations.
- Power Incontinence: Part of her problem growing up had to do with how her druidic powers work. They don't take any effort on her part to use, they just feel like a natural extension of her body and senses, like stretching a limb or hearing a noise would be for non-druids. In dungeons this can actually prove hazardous, as they are innately hostile to a degree and her druidic perceptions make her vulnerable in a way the others don't have to worry about.
- Twice Shy: She and Verity clearly have an attraction to one another, but are still sorting out their feelings.
- Weather Manipulation: Isra can both predict and control the weather reliably, down to the details of which hours will be sunny vs cloudy. As with many of her abilities, she was surprised to learn that other people can't. The local meteorologist had been driven a little batty by her presence and is quite relieved to finally find out what had been making her predictions so unreliable for the last decade.
Mizuki Yono
An aimless young woman whose status as a sorcerer makes her something of a pariah among other mages.
- Big Fancy House: She inherited one that was made from a single block of stone and a single (titanic) tree as part of a religious rite. It's four stories tall and was meant to serve as the centerpiece of a displaced community, but that idea fell through when the emperor everyone was fleeing died young and they all moved back. Now it's just an improbably tall house in the middle of a rural town that is far too large for one person.
- Cool House: Muzuki's house later gets upgraded to this thanks to the addition of extendable entad legs that let it get up and walk around wherever the party wants to go. The really cool part is that it includes an extra-dimensional effect that accounts for the basement.
- Flight: Mizuki's favorite piece of loot is a helmet that reduces the wearer's weight and lets them fly around faster than running speed. Alfric doesn't usually let her wear it in dungeons, though, since it's much more useful for a melee fighter; she just uses it to fly around the countryside.
- The Gadfly: She's usually the first to crack a joke, even when it's not appreciated.
- Older Than They Look: Mizuki is short and petite, looking by far the youngest of the group, whereas in reality she's over twenty making her the oldest person in her party.
- Playing with Fire: Mizuki's sorcery always produces effects opposed to the local influences in some way, whether it's flight or time manipulation or throwing lightning, but she gets a big grin on her face when the prevailing mood is fireballs.Mizuki: I'll try not to make it too loud, but no promises.
- Reality Warper: Sorcerers are a minor version, with an emphasis on Warper. They're able to affect the magic around them, but they can't produce any on their own and need some pre-existing magic to work with. This makes them generally unpopular with other mages whose workings they harvest and alter. Mizuki also discovers that if she's not careful, she can actually damage other magic users by drawing too much out of them.
- Team Chef: She was trained in the "Womanly Art" of cooking from a young age, and generally enjoys making elaborate meals for the party. She jokingly calls the "Anyspoon" she got in her first dungeon her favorite entad.
- Team Mom: Despite being the least serious member of the party, she adopts the role once she's training to be a wizard. It helps that she's going late and the people she's mom-ing are generally in their mid-teens and on their own for the first time in their lives.
- Will They or Won't They?: She has an attraction to Alfric, but his extreme devotion to dungeoneering best-practices has so far kept her from acting on it.
Verity Parson
A bard chosen by the god of infinity for unknown purposes who resents the distraction from her music.
- Blessed with Suck: A chosen one of the god of infinity, and really wishes she wasn't.
- Broken Ace: Her social climbing family already held her to a high standard, but the revelation she was chosen by a god elevated it to a whole new level. Nine months before the story started, she abandoned them and moved to an out of the way town she only knew about because of an obscure piece of trivia, just to escape the constant pressure.
- Impoverished Patrician: Her family is on the cusp of becoming an example. It's to the point where her performances (and the relatively minor fees they can charge for them) might well be the difference between their fortune and failure.
- It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: She's certainly of this opinion. Her being chosen by Xuphin added greatly to the pressures she was already under regarding her music career, leading to her running away nine months before the start of the story.
- Magic Music: As a bard she uses music to provide an array of buffs to the party, enhancing strength or speed or perceptiveness, although she can only boost what already exists, and generally only one or two things at a time.
- My Beloved Smother: Her mother had her life planned out for her and is unwilling to accept that Variety disagrees with her goals.
- Reality Warper: As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that something she's doing is affecting the dungeons and giving them challenges far higher than a newby dungeoneering team would normally expect. Once she gets a handle on it, she's able to discharge all of a dungeon's stoted power, with some control over its contents, although its imprecise and her subconsciousthoughts are still leaking in.
- Socialite: She comes from a family of them.
- Twice Shy: She and Isra clearly have an attraction to one another, but are still sorting out their feelings.
Vertex
Lola Underhill
A cruel and manipulative person from Alfric's past who poached his first dungeoneering party.
- Arranged Marriage: With Alfric. It gets called off for good after her Manipulative Bastard habits come to light.
- The Clan: A chrononaut from another branch of the family roughly on par with Alfric's.
- Combat Tentacles: She has a set thanks to her alienist abilities.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Alfric's ethics mean he's unwilling to paint her in a purely negative light, however justified, leaving just enough room for the adults in their lives to give her the benefit of the doubt. Hint: she abuses her "Groundhog Day" Loop powers without compunction or regret and is utterly despicable, even (or perhaps especially) by the standards of the other chrononauts.
- Manipulative Bastard: Emphasis on manipulative, emphasis on bastard. She got her powers far younger than was good for her, has a relatively high number of resets, and is entirely lacking Alfric's compunctions about using them for her own benefit. By the time she's an adult she has decided she can do whatever she wants to others so long as she resets before anything becomes permanent, up to and including casually torturing and murdering people for information she can use on the days she doesn't reset.
- Opportunistic Bastard: She tries to play herself off as a schemer, but she's really just stumbling along, depending on the resets to wipe away her blunders until she ends up with results that are good enough.
- The Rival: She sets herself up as one to Alfric after she was unable to manipulate him into bending his adherence to the rules they were taught as children.
- Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!: Takes this sentiment to heart and runs with it. It's unclear just how far she has gone on undone days, but she has made it clear that she takes an entirely pragmatic attitude to them.
Josen
A serious and stern young wizard.
- Academic Alpha Bitch: He's been practicing magic since a young age and has little to say to those who don't give the craft proper respect (read: just about everyone).
- Et Tu, Brute?: Alfric knew that some of the members of his first party had concerns about funding, but he didn't expect Josen, his closest friend, whom he'd been making dungeon plans with for four years, to turn away from him too.
- No Sense of Humor: He makes Alfric seem like the picture of jocularity.
Marsh
A young Pyro using dungeoneering as a way to defer military service.
- Lovable Jock: He's rather boisterous and tries to act as a mediator between the two parties when they're forced to interact.
- Nothing Personal: Alfric tried to structure the party as a professional business venture, and unfortunately for him Lola was willing to make a better offer.
- Wild Hair: Long hair is a boast of a pyro's control of their powers and a mark of pride.
Grig
The party's nervous bard.
- The Chains of Commanding: He takes over leading the group after Lola is arrested, mostly because he was the only one willing to put in the effort to keep the group together. He finds it much more stressful than she ever did.
- Nothing Personal: Alfric tried to structure the party as a professional business venture, and unfortunately for him Lola was willing to make a better offer.
Mardin
A cleric of Oeyr and the most level headed of the group.
- Nothing Personal: Alfric tried to structure the party as a professional business venture, and unfortunately for him Lola was willing to make a better offer.
- White Mage: Played a bit straighter than with Hannah.
Kell
A young wizard who specializes in smaller, short term constructs.
- Fourth-Date Marriage: How he decides to deal with his unrequited attraction to Mizuki.
- Level Grinding: He went up five elevations in a week by going through a few dungeons on his own, clearing out everything he could One-Hit Kill and running from anything he couldn't.
- Utility Magic: At least compared to Josen, he's more willing to tinker with his constructs rather than focus on raw firepower.
- Sixth Ranger: He's Lola's replacement after the events of the first book.
- Unlucky Childhood Friend: He remembered Muziki fondly and quickly fell in love with her after meeting again as adults. She didn't feel the same way, which prompted him to accept Cate's offer to move to the demiplane.
Other Characters
Harmon Overguard
Alfric's father. An adventurer at the end of his career mulling over what he'll do in retirement.
- Amazingly Embarrassing Parent: He doesn't mind spending an hour to set up a long distance teleport if it means he can talk to his son's first adventuring party.
- Blood Knight: Part of his attraction to the dungeons is the chance to test himself in combat and be victorious.
- Munchkin: He's where Alfric got his love of entad experimentation and combination from.Sometimes minimalism just means hiding all the maximalism.
Ria Overguard
Alfric's mother. Quite possibly the most accomplished adventurer alive.
- Blood Knight: It's not obvious most of the time, but she insists on killing Cate at least once in an undone day just to prove it's possible.
- Mama Bear: Once the true extent of Lola's transgressions comes to light, Ria wants to personally murder the girl. The only thing stopping her is having it very explicitly spelled out that taking matters into her own hands would start a war between two of the three chrononaut families.
- Mom Looks Like a Sister: At their first meeting Verity wasn't sure if she was Alfric's mother or one of his older sisters.
- My Beloved Smother: When she started to wind down her career and step back from dungeoneering she put the extra energy into mothering her children, to mixed results. To her credit she realized she was becoming overbearing and has tried to be better about it.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Her insistence on killing Cate triggers several booby-traps she had set up, killing around 25 thousand people. It gets undone though, as Cate had planned.
- Person of Mass Destruction: She would be this if she ever went to war. Her favorite sword has seven independent abilities, including Super-Speed to a factor of ten and applying wounds to all designated enemies of the same species — humans qualify — within a very large range, meaning that she could reap soldiers like wheat. And it's not her only piece of equipment, by a long shot.
- Shipper on Deck: She wants to see her children happy and has an active interest in Alfric's love life. Almost the first thing she does upon seeing him again is asking who in the group he has his eye on. She later tells Mizuki that of all the friends Alfric has brought home, she's her favorite.
- The Worf Effect: Getting killed over twenty times by Cate firmly establishes them as a force to be reckoned with.
Emperor
The Overguard family dog.
- Big Friendly Dog: So big that the Overguard children like to ride on his back, and so friendly that the dog has been indulging them for generations. He's also used to sleeping next to anyone who needs comforting at night.
- Extreme Omnivore: One of his traits.
- Intellectual Animal: He's the smartest animal Isra has ever seen and can shrug off her druidic influence if he wants to.
- Really 700 Years Old: He's been in the family for a few hundred years and has yet to show signs of aging.
Cate Peregrin
An investigator the party meets after reporting a possible sealed monster. She takes an immediate interest in the herb dragons, much to Isra's annoyance.
- Animal Lover: She's immediately taken with the baby herb dragons and makes excuses to feed and watch them while her business keeps her in the area.
- Cool Old Lady: Mizuki thinks so, at least.
- Creepy Good: She floats rather than walks, there is something just a little off about her facial expressions, and her job is finding giant monsters before they ravage the countryside, although that last was partly a way to keep tabs on dragon sightings and make sure none of them were ever linked to her.
- Dark and Troubled Past: She's the last living dragon/demiplane the world knows of after a crusade was waged against her kind in the distant past. She had a controlling mother who she cut ties with hundreds of years ago, and she has no way of reconnecting with or even knowing if she's still alive. Her first attempt to establish a town on her demiplane (which her kind seems to need for unknown reasons) ended in a civil war and she abandoned the population on an isolated tropical island. Her second attempt is going better, but only because she was threatened by the Inter government into establishing normalized relations, which she went along with mostly in the hopes it will coax another of her kind out of hiding.
- The Magnificent: Her official title is The Seeker of Secrets.
- Motive Misidentification: Her interest in the herb dragons is partly a cover to approach the party in secret and try to recruit them to her colonization effort.
- Really 700 Years Old: Literally the case.
Penelope Overguard
Alfric's eccentric aunt and former dungeoneer who now runs an Extranormal Institute for dungeon-created sapients.
- Big Fancy House: She lives in a gigantic entad that can take any configuration and layout as long as it is based on cubic or square proportions.
- Eccentric Millionaire: She put her profits from dungeoneering into caring for sapient dungeon creatures.
- Extra Normal Institute: She runs one for dungeon-made species that meet most of the criteria for personhood. It's pretty questionable by local standards, as they tend to have huge gaps in their cognition and most of them (over 99.9%) are essentially mentally impaired adults that can't function in wider society when they grow up, if they ever do.
- Soapbox Sadie: By her own admission, she has opinions about the ethics of dungeoneering and will share them at length if given half a chance.
Kali and Pek Overguard
A pair of teenage bastlefolk being fostered by the Overguard family.
- Mother, I Want To Marry My Sister: Pek thought he'd marry Kali when they were little, but they have settled on a brother-sister dynamic by their late teens.
- Gem Tissue: Their most notable non-human traits are small rocks embedded in their faces. They can pull them out harmlessly and animate them to do small tasks.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: A common theme for bastlefolk it seems. It's hitting Kali especially hard at the moment, and she hardly ever takes off the entad that lets her look human.
- Missing Child: Kali goes missing during the party's visit to Plenarch. It isn't the first time she's run away from home, but it might be connected to a series of other disappearances that have occurred in the city over the last few months.
- You're Not My Mother: Penelope tries to care for them like a mother, but they have complicated feelings about it and don't embrace her as much as she'd like.
Akina and Chizu Yono
Two of Mizuki's little sisters
- The Gadfly: Chizu has the habit same as Mizuki, and spent most of her time at the party to celebrate Mizuki becoming a wizard spreading fake gossip about the family back in Kiromo, and occasionally herself, just because Mizuki has no way of telling what parts she's making up.
