The second book in the Threadbare saga, we see Threadbare finally free of his incidental imprisonment at Melos's hands at the end of the first book. It's been five years and he has a few tasks ahead of him. He has to find out what happened to all his friends, rescue Missus Fluffbear, rescue Cecelia, kill a demon, and overthrow the king. No big deal, right?
Right.
Threadbare when he frees himself
Once upon a time there was a teddy bear who made himself a mouth and a voice of strings and things, and said "Status." And this is what he saw.
- Name: Threadbare
- Age: 5
- Jobs:
Greater Toy Golem Level 9
Bear Level 8
Ruler Level 4
Scout Level 3
Tailor Level 8
Model Level 2
Necromancer Level 1
Duelist Level 1
Animator Level 1
Enchanter Level 2
Golemist Level 1
Smith Level 1 - Attributes:
- Strength: 79
- Intelligence: 58
- Dexterity: 41
- Charisma: 56
- Perception: 57
- Constitution: 83
- Wisdom: 89
- Agility: 51
- Willpower: 47
- Luck: 53
- Pools:
- Hit Points: 216 (236)
- Sanity: 147 (167)
- Stamina: 102 (122)
- Moxie: 103 (123)
- Fortune: 110 (130)
- Defenses
- Armor: 34
- Mental Fortitude: 24
- Endurance: 44
- Cool: 20
- Fate: 9
- Actually Pretty Funny: Zuula and Maddy don't get along well at first, but they're stuck with each other. They start to get along when Maddy puns off of Zuula's comment about tits.Missus Fluffbear: What's a gazonga?
Garon: [sigh] I'll tell you lat—
Zuula: Tits.
Missus Fluffbear: Oh, okay.
Garon: Mom!
Zuula: What?
Garon: They're basically kids!
Zuula: Kids know what tits are. Not last long as babies ot'erwise.
Maddy: Shouldn't that be "udderwise"?
Zuula: [Beat] [roaring laughter] - Adorkable: In-Universe. You'll note that while all of his stats and defenses go up, Threadbare's Cool remains at 20. Dude just ain't hip. Word.
- Badass Boast: A subtle one in Celia's mecha. How will she deal with her enemies? She'll make them see Reason.
- Bittersweet Ending: Celia's learned the truth about Anise and her father, that Caradon is dead, and is ready to turn traitor to the crown... but she also got murdered by Anise.
- Blood Knight: As the text reminds us, Zuula engineered a massacre between the remaining monster population of Taylor's Delve because she thought it would be an awesome fight.
- Brutal Honesty: While Garon is uncomfortable explaining things to the excessively innocent teddy bears, Zuula just tells them what's what and they're okay with it.
- Comically Missing the Point: Madeline wants to try putting a baby in a doll to see if it can still get adventurer classes. Garon's upset by this. She backtracks... because she remembers there are no babies around.
- Crate Expectations: Zuula breaks open a random barrel in Outsmouth because it worked that one time in that dungeon, remember?
- Distracted by the Sexy: When Threadbare goes in search of Madeline to get help grinding Missus Fluffbear's luck, Pulsivar gets called away by the siren lure of Bobcat mating season, ending up in the clutches of the cat-themed Necromancer Ghost Threadbare met in the Catamountain dungeon.
- Due to the Dead: Missus Fluffbear insists on burying all her Raccant friends.
- Evil Laugh: Maddy cackles with glee when she unlocks Fire Elementalist.
- Exact Words: Anise has to be very, very careful with what she says in order to accomplish her betrayals.
- Fat Bastard: In addition to all the wealth he's stolen from the people of his valley, Baron Comfort is a portly fellow, what with all the food he's been stealing from his malnourished subjects.
- A Father to His Men: Though Melos knows he'll never be able to pull it off himself, thanks to the trouble he's fighting, he's proud of Celia for trying this herself, and she handles it quite well.
- Flat "What": Celia manages to shock Melos twice during his ridiculously unfair test against the four Knights. First she recruits Mordecai (thanks to Anise's treachery), and second she firstly first reveals she'd recruited Kayin to support her during the fight.Melos: What.
Celia: I thought you might try something like this, father. So I went and found allies.- Maddy gives one, too, when Threadbare reveals that his Model job is giving a forty point bonus to each of his pools.
- Friendship Moment: Threadbare finds the lair of the deadliest creature in the valley... and starts cooking some fish? Then the beast shows up... and starts running around in joy, licking him and purring up a storm. It's Pulsivar, delighted to have a member of his family back.
- Gone Horribly Right: Threadbare doesn't have the time or materials to upgrade Missus Fluffbear right away, nor does she have the intelligence to understand what he'd be trying to do, so instead he gives her a bike horn if she wants to attract attention and communicate. It takes a while to get her to stop just honking the damn thing over and over.Missus Fluffbear: HONK HONK HONK HONKITTY HONK HONKLY HONKS
- Groin Attack: Celia isn't above honking a dude in the nads, whether it's a Knightly shield slam or by taking over a dude's pants as an Animator and giving him the Nutcracker Special.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: Melos subjects Celia to one last test. He pits her, unarmed and unarmored, against four Knights who outlevel her. However, she blindsides him by having freed Mordecai, who evens the odds and helps her take them out.Celia: No rules, father! No rules!
Melos: She's our daughter, Amelia. Hell help us all. - Hypocritical Humor: All of Zuula's criticisms of vampires apply to her, too. They lie! Well, sometimes it okay to lie. They eat people! Well, orc eat people, too, but we honest about it. They undead! Well, me undead, but me orc first.
- I Hate You, Vampire Dad: Madeline's vampire minions all express a degree of upset about having been converted to undead. Garon takes it above and beyond, having spent five years raging against her while chained to a bed.
- Important Haircut: 16 year old Cecilia has trimmed her wild mop down to a manageable buzz. After her conversation with Mastoya and Anise, where she commits to committing a massacre, she goes to the privy, vomits, cries, and promises herself she'll shave her head.It would be less trouble when it was all gone.
- Innocently Insensitive: When Threadbare gets to level five in the Duelist skill, he asks what the Swinger skill is... in the presence of a bunch of women cultists who had been tricked into having sex with a random fish dude.
- Jerkass Has a Point: The Baron's a thieving bastard who leaves his subjects to starve while he gets fat and surrounds himself with mismatched wealth, but he's right that the Crown is abandoning its duties to protect the kingdom and is focusing all its own stolen resources on the war effort.
- Lethal Joke Character: Threadbare picked up the Model class incidentally in the first book. Turns out it gives awesome buffs to your pools so long as you don't eat anything "bad". As a golem, Threadbare doesn't eat at all, so he has no trouble keeping that skill leveled. At the start of the novel it's giving him a 10-20% boost to his pools; by the end it's 25-35%. At first the others are stunned by how stupid that class is. Then they're stunned by how awesome it is when combined with other classes.Zuula: Still weak. Bad by itself... But it not MEANT to be bit itself, is it? Zuula have to rethink this. Muchly.
- Let's You and Him Fight: Referenced by name as an ancient orcish war gambit, and how Threadbare &co defeat both Madeline's team and the Necromancer.
- Level-Up Fill-Up: Threadbare continues to rely on this for much of the novel, as he's still low enough in all his levels that he can reliably get these during and after big fights.
- Magic Knight: She doesn't have the typical skillset for a Knight, but Celia is a more than capable combatant thanks to her levels in Scout and Animator. She puts all her jobs to work in the field.
- Meaningful Name: Graves transferred into the Knights from the Necromancer corps.
- Mini-Mecha: Celia has done the hard work of being a Tinker, a Smith, and a Knight, crafting all the pieces of her armor and enchanting them into the fifteen foot tall powered armor she calls Reason and unlocking the rare and difficult class of Steam Knight.
- Naughty Tentacles: They're Hatecraft's kink. He used a spell to summon them while forcing Glub to have sex with the women in his cult.
- No Social Skills: Maddy helps Threadbare practice his small talk. Unfortunately, he's a five year old teddy bear who spent most of that time pinned to a ceiling and she's a dungeon-spawned vampire who's not much older, so she just knows the stereotypes and he knows absolutely nothing.
- Oh, Crap!: Threadbare realizes exactly how boned he is when every time he lands a hit on Anise Layd'I he gets multiple skill-ups.
- The Paladin: As a Knight (mounted combat, to give her strength) and a cleric (something about killing undead), then fighting a cultist (Hatecraft), Missus Fluffbear unlocks the Paladin class and becomes an even more unstoppable Badass Adorable.
- Poor Communication Kills:
- Threadbare tries talking to the Raccants at first to recover Missus Fluffbear. It fails, because they can't understand each other and he ends up killing a lot of them.
- This is averted when Missus Fluffbear gets her voice upgrade and he explains to her right away what happened and she forgives him because it was an honest failure, not malicious.
- Purple Prose: Hatecraft's thoughts are nothing but the worst kind of this, used to great comedic effect.The small bell he employed as both an early warning system and a doorknocker dolled out its brazen peals, and Hatecraft hurled imprecations and threats at the beast, until it revolved its bulging, piscine eyes, and retreated to the depths of the dark cove, descending beneath the boat until such time as his viridian orbs and herring-enhanced exhalations could best be utilized for the purposes of intimidation.
- The Reveal:
- Anise Layd'I is a demon and she has class levels and of course she's evil and she's working to destroy the kingdom.
- Melos is trapped in a nightmare where he never has a moment's peace and can barely ever sleep, because when he does, his avatar does all the evil things you'd expect of the Dungeon's Final Boss. He's spent fifteen years struggling to keep the kingdom from collapsing into Oblivion with only a demon wearing his wife's face to keep him company.
- Rule of Three: People are surprised at Threadbare's classes.Zuula: Wait. You got Ruler? Seriously?
Madeline: Model? Seriously?
Missus Fluffbear: Scout? Seriously? [giggle] Sorry, everyone else was doing it. - Sergeant Rock: Sgt. Tane is a no-nonsense, war-tested soldier who leads his men with knowledge and will. Just because she's the king's daughter doesn't mean he'll let Dame Ragandor do anything stupid. He respects her and likes her for meeting his eyes and muttering that she's not happy about it, though.
- Shout-Out: One boss Threadbare fights in the Raccant dungeon is a shout out to MC Hammer. Another he doesn't fight is the Very Model of a Varmint Major General.
- Multiple members of Celia's squad approach her to tell her she needs sleep. She lets them know she has a Scout skill that lets her get away with it and that she cleared it with Sgt. Tane. She finds their lack of faith disturbing.
- The story at Outsmouth is an extended shout out to H. P. Lovecraft. One of his favorite settings was the village of Innsmouth, the pervert in charge of Outsmouth is L. P. Hatecraft, he has a thing for tentacles, and the villagers worship the "mediocre old ones". It's a nice Affectionate Parody of a Lovecraft story.
- They also ask if Annie Mata has seen "the yellow sign" and follow The Thing in Yellow.
- One of Celia's knights notes that they'll be able to recognize the baron of Pad's Village because he'll be the one not totally covered in shit.
- Some of the wildlife outside of Outsmouth includes Rodents of Unusual Size. The gang's creaky wagon is too much for them to want to mess with, though.
- Missus Fluffbear learns the word jinkies just in time to contribute to a conversation about a crazy old man pretending to be a scary old god.
- After Zuula do smash open a barrel, Garon do chide her and remind her that it was only that one time in that dungeon that it worked. She ask if he want her stay a while and listen? Anyway, maybe she find that kid's one spare pegleg in there.
- Part of Hatecraft's whiny inner monologue is to whine about how his perfect porn setup got derailed by the tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells.
- Stealth Pun: Inverted with the Bearserker. Berserkers were already warriors who fought with a bear-like ferocity in a trance state and wore bear-skins (berserk literally translates to "bear skin").
- Sue Donym: To get into the village of Outsmouth, Threadbare animates a large doll and has it drive a wagon with the name "Annie Mata's Traveling Toy Circus".
- Surfer Dude: Glub just, like, wants to explore you know? And his band's gonna take off any day now, for real.
- Take That!: LP Hatecraft is way too fond of using obscure words with too many syllables.
- Took a Level in Badass: Thanks to five years struggling to survive in the wild on his own, Pulsivar has leveled up from a Tom Cat to a full on monster, a Bobcat. Fortunately, he remembers Threadbare and the smell of his family's soap.
- Training Montage: It's an ancient ritual that takes most of a day. Fortunately, the people involved don't really notice, because it's a montage.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Kayin and Graves, of all the Knights in Celia's squad, pick up right away on her plan to get the Baron to try and betray and murder them, recognizing that the man's a complete cock-waffle.
- Verbal Backspace: After Threadbare tells Madeline he spent five years digging himself out of the ruins of Caradon's demolished home, Missus Fluffbear gives a HONK and he apologizes, explaining that she dug them out, while he extricated himself from the sword.
- World of Pun: The world remains the same. The Raccant dungeon is full of various puns about garbage and rap. One of the mobs is literal garbage, making a Missus Fluffbear Midboss a Trash Panda. Meanwhile, a Raccant Midboss is an MC Hammer clone with a skilled called "Raccant Touch This".
- The god Pau is the god of rain and storms, which is why lightning says his name when it strikes.
Threadbare at the head of a literal rag-tag group of heroes
Once upon a time there was a teddy bear whose little girl had died. But he wouldn't let her go and he knew that their story was far from over. He had much to do, so he said "Status" to check himself, and this is what he saw.
- Name: Threadbare
- Age: 5
- Jobs:
Greater Toy Golem Level 15
Cave Bear Level 12
Ruler Level 11
Scout Level 7
Tailor Level 11
Model Level 8
Necromancer Level 11
Duelist Level 6
Animator Level 12
Enchanter Level 10
Golemist Level 12
Smith Level 10 - Attributes:
- Strength: 124
- Intelligence: 216
- Dexterity: 135 (142)
- Charisma: 110 (145)
- Perception: 107
- Constitution: 138
- Wisdom: 201 (208)
- Agility: 112 (126)
- Willpower: 199
- Luck: 89 (96)
- Pools:
- Hit Points: 330 (410)
- Sanity: 417 (545)
- Stamina: 257 (358)
- Moxie: 309 (424)
- Fortune: 196 (283)
- Defenses
- Armor: 52 (59)
- Mental Fortitude: 42
- Endurance: 62
- Cool: 20 (47)
- Fate: 15 (22)
