Otto

A mute scholar-historian trapped (by choice) deep in the Grey Vale Cave, camped on a ledge by a campfire. He communicates only in Handspeak sign language — Silithane is the one party member who can translate — which makes him terrified of the cave's hand-monster above all others: lose his hands and he loses his only voice. He is no fighter but a remarkable climber (five pull-ups off a 2 mm fingertip-hold), and could leave the cave any time; he stays because he means to go deeper, to find the prison of seven cells he believes the vanished pre-Rivalon race sealed beneath the cave. A historian by vocation, he wants to understand what those people were and what they thought worthy of imprisoning — and idly wonders whether freeing imprisoned "gods" might give Orathos "more options than just the Flame Queen."

(Name rendered "Otto"; spoken a handful of times, spelling a best guess. Almost certainly the wall-licking "scholar of the mysteries of the past" Jaxley described in Sessions 23–24.)

Session 25

• Met on his ledge; signs his history to Silithane, who relays it. Two months trapped, by choice, seeking the seven-cell prison below.
• Hires Thalia (a contractually-bound courier) to deliver a package "to the prison downstairs" — the package is Otto himself ("The prison downstairs. It is me." … "I have my package.") — paying a coin purse and a bag, which flips the whole party's stance toward descending.
• Asks to accompany the party into the under-cave (he's ventured down "once or twice" but found it too frightening alone); the party leaves him resting with the Mush Mother while they fight the gobblers.
• His "prison" lines up with Thalia's Primeval Awareness, which senses seven significant creatures (the Queen above, six below) — and with Otto's belief it may be a "prison-temple to worship imprisoned gods."

Session 26

• Refuses to speak with the ledge scholar who studies the Queen, signing that the man is a fool and a Laewendas servant.
• Lost. When the Queen wakes and chases the water-group, Otto dives with them — but he was never included in Silithane's Water Breathing (Magra wrongly believed he was). As the slowest creature he is caught and de-handed by the Queen while the others escape into the under-prison.
• The delivery ends with him. He was the package, so nothing is left in Thalia's bag to carry on with — the party reached the prison and he did not. No handless body is found, a thin hope he might somehow be alive.

Session 27

• Mourned as dead. With the party reunited in the under-prison, Magra apologises for telling him to dive without the Water Breathing, and the group concludes he is almost certainly dead — the very death they heard the Queen inflict (grimly rationalised by the trapped father as "some poor schmuck with lung cancer"). The delivery cannot be completed by anyone but him, since he was the parcel; the thin hope that he survived persists only because no handless body has surfaced.