Stand-In
The one category of spectator at the parade's end that still shows a dot on Carl's minimap. The examine text says only that a stand-in is someone brought to the arena by audience vote, that most of them are inside the arena as promised but there were too many to fit, so the overflow was seated out on the route — and that it does not matter who any of them are, because they are all the same in the end. In practice they are bound captives wearing the horribles' masks: Florin spots them struggling in the judging stands, and Carl watches one through the jumbotron whose mask shows a manatee and whose body is a slime trying and failing to form arms and break free. The rest are released into the arena wearing the masks of the beasts they are standing in for, with whatever they arrived with, and outnumbered by the mobs a hundred to one. Carl sees a masked woman run down by panther mobs; the mask rolls clear and she is an orc. Whether they actually die or wake back up in their rooms on the eighteenth floor, he never finds out.
Book 8 appearances
- Chapter 92 — Examined in the viewing stands: the only spectators with minimap dots, masked and tied up and struggling — one of them a slime under a manatee mask — with the System's description refusing to say who any of them are.
- Chapter 93 — The overflow are loose in the arena as it fills with mobs; a woman in a horribles mask is run down by panthers and revealed as an orc, and Carl notes he has no idea whether the dead ones simply reappear in the eighteenth-floor resort.
Related entries
- The Horribles (Creature)
- The Arena (Floor 11) (Place)
- The System AI (Character)
- A Parade of Horribles (Floor 11) (Place)
- Carl Summons Scolopendra (Event)
Browse
- All System Notifications
- Everything debuting in Book 8, Chapter 92
- All of A Parade of Horribles