The Bedlam Bride (Shi Maria)

The novel's title monster: a unique, half-real demi-goddess spider woman webbed across the southern swamp at the mouth of the island's great bay, listed in the Bahamas bestiary's final “unique” section under some twenty names (the Screamer, the Reviled, Kwaku's Love, the Corrupted Paramour, and the Bedlam Bride). A lonely, talkative mage specializing in trickery, illusion, and mind-bending spell-casting, forever searching for her lost husband, she swallows the trainer Samantha whole, and Samantha, certain she's exactly the body-restoring mage she needs, insists Carl come recruit her rather than kill her — though Shi Maria admits she lacks the proper magic for that and merely knows of a master pulpmancer who could help. Her listed special attacks include permanent insanity and permanent blindness, marking her as a squad-member prize that will demand very careful planning.

Book 6 appearances

• Chapter 8 — Swallows the trainer Samantha whole; Samantha insists she’s the body-restoring mage she needs and demands Carl recruit, not kill, her.
• Chapter 25 — Carl reads her Bahamas-book entry (“the Screamer,” vulnerable only to Psionics) and Mordecai brews Liquid Therapy against her permanent insanity and blindness.
• Chapter 26 — Led to the road by Samantha, she reveals fluent speech and cold cunning, takes Carl’s escort bargain, and lets him injure her just enough to be flagged into a card.
• Chapter 28 — In the mall sim she shrugs off Uzi Jesus’s fire, rips Rude-Dolph in half, and opens her fifth eye, reaching even the “protected” Carl.
• Chapter 29 — Donut’s strongest card by far: fast and sadistic, with a Cockroach trait that returns her to the deck instead of the discard pile when she “dies.”
• Chapter 58 — Donut summons her Shi Maria totem into the Capitol fight, where she devours the enemy corpses “like popcorn,” ending the battle early.
• Chapter 70 — Donut summons Shi Maria into the falling tower; a misfired Golden Combo fuses the spider-demigod with Carl himself.
• Chapter 71 — Piloting Carl’s body, she tattoos the Eye of the Bedlam Bride into his chest to bind herself to him, then returns to the deck, and her city quest follows Carl off the floor.

Related entries

• Samantha (Psamathe) (Character)
• Carl (Character)
• Princess Donut (Character)
• Mordecai (Character)
• The Mock Battle Arena (Place)
• Princess Lunette (Incomplete Flesh Golem) (Item)

Browse

• All Creatures & Bosses
• Everything debuting in Book 6, Chapter 8
• All of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride