TL;DR: The other half of the home-team Leadchurch wizards from book one, and the trapped party's reckless improviser. Gary takes the spider-cave shortcut with Tyler at the chapter-ten split, makes it through partly through luck and partly through terrible decisions that accidentally work, and is one of the wizards Todd briefly weaponizes against the party in the late-game brawl.

Spoiler level: full book. This page assumes you've finished An Unwelcome Quest.

Snapshot

Gary's energy is the trapped party's id. Where Tyler reads the dungeon, Gary kicks the dungeon's door. The book treats this as a feature rather than a bug — Todd's game rewards improvisation in ways its author probably didn't intend, and Gary's first instinct (try the obviously bad thing) lands about half the time. The other half is Tyler's problem.

Role in the story

Gary is on the couch at Phillip's cottage for movie night in the Prologue, blinks out with the others, wakes in the clearing in chapter one. He takes the spider-cave shortcut with Tyler at the chapter-ten party split. The cave subplot (chapters eleven and fourteen) is the book's purest gamer-comedy and Gary is the moving part — he is the one who chucks the rusty sword end-over-end at a spider, kicks the rock door at the cave's exit, and inadvertently solves at least one navigation puzzle by not realizing it was a puzzle. He re-joins the full party at the chapter-eighteen crossroads reunion.

In the climax (chapters twenty-one through twenty-five) he is part of the pendulum-chamber group and one of the two wizards Todd briefly weaponizes via the game's NPC controller in chapter twenty-four — the parallel of Tyler's possessed moment. Brit the Elder's kill switch in chapter twenty-five frees him. He walks out of the game in chapter twenty-six and back into movie night in chapter twenty-seven.

Personality in plain English

Casual, collegial, jokey, confident enough to design large schemes and naive enough to fall into them. He doesn't hold grudges — partly because he has the attention span of a pet — and he gets along with everyone in the Leadchurch fraternity by default. He treats the game's rules the same way he treats the laws of physics: as suggestions other people are taking too seriously. The other trapped wizards alternately depend on him and want him to be quiet for five minutes.

His worst habit is that he commits to the bit. Once he has decided that the rock door must be kicked, he is going to kick the rock door, and the door is going to win the first time. His best is that he never freezes — paralysis isn't in his repertoire — and inside Todd's bad game that turns out to be a survival trait.

What he wants

Out of the game. To get back to the Rotted Stump and the pewter tankard and the chalkboard he draws his next bad plan on. To not be the one who has to apologize for the cave-mouth incident.

What he fears

Mostly: that he is going to lose Tyler in the cave the way the party lost Jeff on the bridge. The book is clear-eyed about how aware Gary is of this fear and how badly he hides it.

Key relationships

• Tyler. Cave-mate, party-buddy, and the only wizard in the trapped party who can keep Gary alive at sprite-scale combat. The pairing was Phillip's call at chapter ten. They never explicitly say it out loud, but they trust each other completely.
• Phillip. Senior wizard at distance. Gary's read of Phillip is that Phillip is the adult who lets the rest of them be children, and he is mostly correct about this.
• Jeff. The other home-team wizard from book one. Gary's grief in chapters six through fourteen is the most-spoken in the trapped party — he is the one who can't stop bringing Jeff up.

Visual identity

Inside Todd's game Gary wears a dark-brown hooded leather rogue costume — the cover's center-figure hooded silhouette, with a shallower hood than Tyler's. Brown trousers, brown leather boots, no weapon at first; from chapter fourteen on he carries a small rusty pixel sword (or short-sword) two-handed but inexpertly, taken from the spider cave. The short brown beard catches the lip of the hood — the sprite-tell that this is Gary under the hood, not Tyler. In the Prologue and chapter-twenty-seven epilogue the canonical kit returns: a deep-brown conical hat (no stars), a plain wool robe in muted forest-green with a brown leather belt, brown trousers and brown leather boots, and a wooden staff with a glowing white pixel orb. Adult male, mid-thirties, light skin tone, medium build slightly stout. During the chapter-twenty-four possessed-friends brawl the eye-pixels glow a single red dot each — the same sprite-tell as Tyler's possessed beat, broken by the kill switch in chapter twenty-five.

Aliases

The following names and references in the book all point to this character. Use any of these as link anchors back to this page.

• Gary (canonical — the most common form)

Discussion questions

1. The spider cave rewards Gary's improvisation more than Tyler's caution. Does the book think that's the cave being well-designed or badly-designed?
2. Gary's grief over Jeff is the most-spoken in the trapped party — he keeps bringing Jeff up. Is that processing, avoidance, or both?
3. Gary spends the climax briefly possessed by Todd's NPC controller. The book pulls back from showing exactly what he does in that brawl. Why?
4. Tyler and Gary read at sprite-scale as interchangeable home-team wizards from book one — but the book has given each of them a different load-bearing role in the trapped-party arc. What does Gary do that Tyler couldn't, and vice versa?
5. Gary kicks the rock door even though Tyler has told him not to. The door wins the first time. Why does the book make this beat funny rather than ominous?