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Earlier appearances

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character

York

The Tenodera · Bug Boy

Emotionless tenodera poet and former crawler who flies the Homecoming Queen and murdered the orc children's yacht.

Story so far

York is a tenodera - a small, flightless cousin of the mantids - who crawled with his entire hive and watched it picked apart floor by floor, until somewhere around the ninth floor a numbness locked deep in tenodera DNA spread through him. He took the deal at the end of the tenth floor, worked as a Game Guide and as a Guildhall Instructor in the Poetry guild, and authored the tenth edition of the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook. He writes verse compulsively and badly, broadcasting poems over open bands until captains block him, because he believes the right words might raise that which was lost in him.

Left alone aboard the Homecoming Queen while the others onboarded into Faction Wars, York carried out the side mission Rosetta had asked him to take: he vaporized The Orc Yacht full of children, including the new king of The Orcs, with a point-defense NPB, and the galaxy wrote it off as crossfire. He had looked forward to it, hoping the killing would finally make him feel something. It did not. Only at the epilogue's end, as Colonel Boomer orders the breaching suits and Cronus-class Power Armor readied to bring the war out of the dungeon, does York at last feel something. He is now a captain in the newly coined resistance organization, the Open Intellect Action Network, and is entering the Outreach Guild.

Appearance

A small, flightless praying-mantis-like alien with mandibles, notably smaller and less physically imposing than a true mantid. He drifts alone through the corridors of a behemoth, sometimes floating in a storage hold with the artificial gravity switched off.

Role

The lone pilot of the Homecoming Queen and the hidden assassin of the orc royal yacht, now a captain in the new resistance.

Relationships

Colonel Boomer — The grizzled elf who ribs him about his poetry over the radio and commands him
Rosetta — Asked him point-blank whether he had the fortitude to kill a yacht full of orc children
Porthus — Ordered the enhancement zone weapons installed on his ship and leads the new resistance
The Mantids — His larger, aggressive cousins, who openly speak of exterminating tenodera
Homecoming Queen — The behemoth he flies alone, calling himself the ship's ghost

Earlier in this series

Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings:

Sources — 4 recorded facts, by chapter
Chapter 8
  • Mantis crawler on the Reavers' eighth floor whom Dante is watching carefully.
Chapter 17
  • Earlier cookbook contributor from a hive who wrote that he always felt alone, and whose words console Ikicha.
Chapter 80
  • The poetically inclined captain who stayed aboard Homecoming Queen and must shoot down the orc yacht.
Chapter 100
  • Emotionless tenodera poet and former crawler who flies the Homecoming Queen and murdered the orc children's yacht.
Character sheet
LitRPG stats — unique to this series. Other books surface a different panel here.
Advocate LVL 71
Race
Tenodera
Top Level
71
Birth Race
Tenodera
Dungeon Exit
Took the deal at the end of the 10th floor
Skills & spells
  • Poetry
Notable gear
  • Homecoming Queen
  • Pen and paper
Character portrait