Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
The manager decodes the whole train floor as a bigoted galaxy-map cartoon — and slaps Carl for keeping the cursed ring.
Back on the job, Mordecai buys a cleaner bot for the gore-soaked safe room, then catches up on everything he missed. Spotting Frank Q's Ring of Divine Suffering on Carl's finger, he grabs his wrist and demands he take it off — the rings mark their owners as the first crawlers hunters kill on the sixth floor, and every Faction Wars champion secretly wields one; it's tourist bait to farm combatants for power. When Carl fixates on the wrong detail, Mordecai smacks him (breaking his own no-temper promise), and Carl grudgingly pulls the ring, agreeing only to sell it before floor six.
Then he decodes the Iron Tangle from Katia Grim's map: the named lines trace the Syndicate's wormhole logo, the abyss is the galactic center, the tracks are the original worm-paths, and the whole floor is a racist political cartoon smearing the Krakaren ('the Apothecary') and the goat-like Plenty who invented the tunneling comms system. He rebuilds the crafting room with new benches — a metalworking table, a second specialized alchemy table, and a Bolt-Thrower's Workshop — for the descent.
About five feet tall, a mud-colored warty toad-creature with hanging jowls, a wide face and inflatable throat pouch; freshly cleaned after the blood geyser, webbed hand still stinging from slapping Carl.
The party's manager, alchemist and strategist, decoding the floor's structure and lore for the endgame.
Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings: