Thea

First appearance: S5E1 — Rise of the Lord of Fate — Atlas v Killy Yesman · watch it on YouTube

Thea is The Arbiter’s small, pink, impish assistant at The Dread Fortress. She is roughly a foot tall and shaped like a potato, and she was once a worm from the Hollow, sent to kill the Arbiter. Now she summons champions, runs errands she forgets, wrangles the Chinchillas and gets thrown at people, all while pursuing gold stars and employee of the month. She is voiced by Caustic Phoenix. She should not be confused with Thea of House Plintos in Cor’thun, a different person from the days of Skypiercer.

“A mindless worm that I plucked from the soil to do my bidding.” — the Arbiter, describing his ward

Story

The Season of Fate

Thea first appeared in the Season of Fate, a vision of rule that only the Arbiter lived through. In it he reigned as the Lord of Fate, and Thea was his brand-new assistant. In Rise of the Lord of Fate he granted her his old title, “the Arbiter.” She explained her credentials: as a worm she had drunk champions’ spilled blood and lived among their bones, so she knew their injuries, weaknesses and strengths. Her flesh went gray when she meditated. She opened portals by clapping, with no control over what came through, and that night it was chinchillas with towels, an AA battery and hibachi chefs. She stole the Acolytes’ dice for the end-of-round rolls, called for “blood cannons,” proved bad at counting, and took over the closing speech. Somewhere in all this she chopped off her own thumb and fed it to the crowd.

The weeks that followed built her legend one disaster at a time. She claimed variously to have a mother, to have gone to college (a lie), and to have been “specially bred” by a loving family “to be an invincible worm.” Asked whether she could die, the Lord of Fate answered, “No, unfortunately.” She bled sparkling blue glitter, had a credit score of about 20, and was thrown as a weapon so often that it became a job description. She face-hugged Cervantes, was caught mid-javelin flight by King Man Frog Bofus’s tongue, was hurled at Granny Edith by Teddy Oso (she had openly taken Granny’s side), served as a basketball in Bone Daddy’s match and as a fart gun against Kopy Katt, and was flung through Frigidoom by Atlas. That same night she was beaten into the ground with the Lord of Fate’s metal chair and crushed under the Box of Chaos. On an earlier night Frigidoom’s ice had frozen her into a popsicle. She vomited on the Acolyte Julia and ended that night by pulling Frigidoom’s plug.

Her working life was a long fight for gold stars, which the Lord of Fate carved into her forehead. She had five ink stars by the end of the Chaos in Chinchilla Forest match and earned a sixth against Frigidoom. She claimed seven, lost and regained one, lost two more in a single night, and had some stolen by a copy before the Lord of Fate partly restored them. Her bedroom, originally a large closet, became his office, so she slept in a box. The Lord of Fate classed her as a 1099 independent contractor with no paid time off, and the Acolytes helped her with the tax paperwork. Formal complaints piled up about a farmer’s pig’s feet and about Mrs. Humphrey’s children, who had been rolled down a hill. She kidnapped champions to book them and rented The Crimson Keep, a wedding venue with a cleaning crew included. She farted during the flour attack and laced everyone’s corn dogs with laxatives “as a bonding experience.” She licked up Bob the Barbarian’s leg sweat (“spice”), and in a later match drank his sweat and vomited on the front row. She gave Robbie Clark New Balance shoes, and cried when The Hunger refused her hug.

She lost her teeth and her wings during one break and duct-taped the wings back on. Later she lost her teeth again and regrew them, first as two sets of human teeth and then as endlessly regrowing sharp ones, and she brewed sun cola with the goblins. She revived champions, let Thomas the Goblin heal them, and gave Ruby Rust band-aids. She found a 10,000-email backlog on a 1995 Windows computer, launched “Thea answers emails,” duct-taped Bofus’s cheeks, kicked both champions in the shins, and joined Kyle Stoddard’s Simperi. She once got hold of The Shadow King’s blade and threw it away. She also became radicalized, complete with blonde hair, sunglasses and a mustache. For the season finale she organized the first Chaos Royale to cheer the Lord of Fate up, and she delivered the season’s closing address while holding Dylan the chinchilla.

The Season of the Trials

In the real timeline, Thea was born in Murder at the Dread Fortress, created from the worm that “sucked up the blood of the arena.” She was murdered by Iris that same night and found face down in gravy. As a “corpse” she kept talking. The Arbiter brought her back (“Just because I created her”), and she finished the night perched on Iris’s shoulder. Along the way she revealed a gold-star chart, a friendship with Tim, a ban on hot dogs except “backwards,” and a claimed trademark on “time eyes,” which she says earns her money every time the Arbiter casts the spell.

On The Ether Drifts she was given mind-speech. She delivered the chaos event, and a piece of her skull went into Gerald, whose power she then channelled into Atlas. In the Deathmatch that followed she was Atlas’s backpack, then his core (together they made “Fatlas”). She swallowed a blue pill on his behalf and was ejected as an escape pod. She had also forgotten to send the invitations. During Tip to Tip she glowed neon pink from eating glow sticks, was lured to a mausoleum by a lich grandfather for hide-and-go-seek, and asked Richard S. Skelman to prom. She threw her poop at him out of love, tore off Richard Knottley’s arm with a rocket pack, and paid four teeth in rent to sit inside the Box of Chaos. She broke the round-three card over her knee. The Arbiter now wants to send her to a therapist. One team named itself after the mission to “find Thea, clearly the most chaotic object in the universe.”

For The Hunt for #2 she threw a kitchen party at which goblins and chinchillas drank the Dread Fortress dry. She assembled Team C through a pink spiral portal, licked a gold star and handed it to The Duke, threatened to poop in shoes, and announced her belief that the Arbiter gives her an unlimited budget. By the season finale she was “about seven weeks old.” She could only count to three, had fed the receipts to Doug, and was keeping her farts in a jar.

The Capture the Flag Crossover

At the Wounded Warrior Project charity crossover, Thea arrived in boxing gloves, carrying a steak knife. The Arbiter then transformed her into her “true form”: the Abyss Devourer, a gargantuan purple worm thirty to forty feet long, with multiple tongues and rotating rings of teeth. She refused to eat one combatant because of how he tasted and split a tongue on a stalagmite. Beans’s Wall of Fire killed her, and she slid back into the ravine. She was resurrected, and by the end she was Thea the Imp again.

The Season of Vigilance

In Season 7 the Arbiter gave Thea the job of finding champions, with mixed results. In A Soup Served Cold she skipped the work for “a craft… project.” She heckled Andy Gammage from among the insulting children and debuted Thea Teaches, her own unapproved commercial. In it, Claude, the Fortress’s French janitor, is an evil wizard. She refused to explain the commercial and hopped up the steps farting. By the next week the Grandmaster was calling her “a potato of a brain.” Thea still wrote the champion profiles, tasted the vodka first, tripped while carrying Akumu’s weapons, gave the cheese professor’s head to Doug, and played darts with the Grandmaster. When she had nothing to do, the Grandmaster noted that there was “nothing more terrifying than Thea idle.”

Against The Pebble she stole a mic for karaoke and was outscreamed. She owed the Pebble a one-time call, so she shielded him. She got hit with a poison condom balloon, clamped a halberd with her butt and rode it, did burnouts with Iowa-Ska, and finally carried the dead Pebble off with a potion. In Bone Force she was looting organs in the Arbiter’s secret lab for “the army,” opened the champions’ portal with a fart, and volunteered “as tribute.” Then Jerry Bonesman’s knockoff polymorph wand, a prize from the Box of Chaos, turned her into a pink T-Rex. She body-slammed and gnawed a Wall of Force and napped by the fountain. She stayed a T-Rex long enough to wreck a Fortress hallway before the Arbiter restored her.

After that she was sent for toilet paper and ran around the lava fields instead. She vacuumed up a fart smell to make a candle. When both Livid Lady Lin and Gandor Thalion Umbrae were reduced to dust, she vacuumed them up too, along with a Gilmore Girls DVD, and set about piecing them back together: “This is going to be my greatest puzzle.” In Necro-Nightmare she ate the welcome packet and pooped out the contract. She also promised the chinchillas triple pay, mopped the piss-soaked grass, and admitted she had removed Claude’s arms “earlier,” though she says she’ll give them back.

Thea’s Revenge

In Thea’s Adventure the unions’ bylaws finally won Thea one day off a year, and the Arbiter, who had also installed a door on her closet so she would stay in at night, took her to the candy land of Sugar Hills. She celebrated by pooping in her room first (“No one said your room couldn’t be a bathroom”). In Sugar Hills she threatened Emmery out of his 1994 Pontiac Bonneville, drove it down the sidewalks, drowned an old man in icing, took forty candy-cane shivs from Baptiste without paying, and let the car roll on through town with nobody at the wheel. One of the people it hit was a badly built warforged walking backwards: her little brother Theo, a worm in a mech suit, who had spent eleven years looking for her.

That reunion revealed who Thea really is. She is a worm of the Hollow in The Ether Drifts, the people whose mayor, Timothy, died in Season 1. They sent her to kill the Arbiter, and she took a blood oath to do it. Then she forgot some things, came to love the Deathmatches and her job, and stayed undercover. The Arbiter believed he had picked a random worm to be his servant. He had not. Thea had made an offering to the god Fil, who gave her “control of that moment” and promised she would one day have hands. When she did, she would owe Fil a handshake. The Arbiter’s reaction: “You fucking idiot! You’ve been talking to Fil!”

She and Theo tried to kill him at a candy castle. She throws her guns instead of firing them, and her first pistol, aimed at his crotch, did more damage than he had done to her. When he summoned a lightning ghost of Baron Voltágè, she stomped her four hands into the ground and raised The Pebble, whom she had revived with a potion and who owed her one. Theo’s family self-destruct, the Thermopolis, vaporized both siblings and all of Sugar Hills. The Arbiter rewound time, then offered them Strako, Timothy’s real killer, and a deal: front-row seats for the worms, royalties to the Hollow, hands for Theo, and a new title for Thea as the Dread Fortress’s ambassador to the worms of the Ether Drifts. It came with no extra pay and only one day off a year, but she got a pope hat. Theo’s second Thermopolis took Strako with him. Theo left her a burning note she cannot read, and she keeps it secret. The Arbiter asked her not to mention any of it to the Grandmaster.

In the Dried Blood epilogue Thea reported to the worms’ council in her hot-blue pope hat, carrying Theo’s ghost in a crystal orb. She promised the worms the arena’s dead bodies to eat, and gave out her email for letters: TheaIsGreat.

Ambassador to the Worms

Under the deal, the first Deathmatch of the new era had to be held at The Ether Drifts, her home, in front of the worm delegation, and Thea found both champions herself: the half-orc barbarian Zhora Bloodfang and Bezil, a foot-tall winged cat. In S7E11 she prepared her home for guests and assembled a gift basket of gummy worms and bloody fingers from the last champions. There were only about five fingers left, because somebody had been eating them, and when asked if it was her, she would neither confirm nor deny. She insisted on going straight to the Drifts, so the champions wouldn’t see the Dread Fortress first and think her home less cool. When the Arbiter called Bezil a house pet, she pointed out that house pets can’t talk. When both champions opened with natural 1s, she warned them, “Don’t fucking embarrass me and roll another nat one or I’ll come out there and kill you myself.” When the Arbiter threatened her pope hat, she reminded him she earned it “with my own efforts and a little bit of a sewing machine.” After Bezil killed Zhora with a flaming hairball, Thea rolled in on rolls of duct tape and put her back together, checking which butt cheek went where and whether she wanted her head facing forwards. She then left to get toast. She later brought out a platter of tiny hats for Zhora to dress Bezil in, and had two giant tanks of krakens ready for the winner she expected, which she had to roll away.

Personality and Abilities

Thea is pink, about a foot high and potato-shaped, with no neck and unimpressive wings that shed glitter. She has long pointy ears, a ridged spine, an arrow-tipped tail and tiny bony fingers. She is missing a thumb, and she claims at least five eyeballs. She also has hair, which she sheds when stressed. Her blood has been glitter-blue, green with fear (it changes with her mood) and, most recently, teal, changing with whatever she has been eating. Her jaw can open wide enough to swallow something her own size, and her diet runs to hot dogs, Gushers, doughnuts, goldfish crackers, glow sticks and the occasional ankle. She is lactose intolerant, and has been told: “Don’t feed the Thea.”

Her main talent is portals: pink, glittery and summoned by claps, pixie dust or farts. She has also summoned chinchillas, spoken with animals, discovered she can give a shock, and, according to the Lord of Fate, cannot die. She herself credits a whole potion she drank as a child, which made her glow silver for twenty minutes, and says the Arbiter only thinks he has revived her. She has four hands, a gift from the Arbiter that she calls “a bit of a curse and kind of a gift.” She is a monster hunter who attacks with her intelligence, a strong historian, and a collector of guns, which she throws. She cannot read or write, though she opens the Arbiter’s mail anyway. She is loud, bloodthirsty, devoted to the Deathmatches, and stays pink by rolling in champions’ blood. She insists, loudly and often, that she is people. The Acolytes agree, and there is a hashtag. Her guiding philosophy: “If you just let people think you’re stupid, you don’t have to be in charge of anything.” She has been called “too stupid to be held accountable.” She says the Fortress has “a good dental program,” and through it she has collected a great deal of Tooth Fairy money.

Relationships

• The Arbiter: her creator, boss and, by her blood oath to the Hollow, her target, who says he gave her “your consciousness and your existence.” He calls it a business relationship and denies being her father. She wanted to call him Daddy and settled for Papa.
• Theo: her little brother, a worm of the Hollow. They share a secret tongue shake, a hatred of a pigeon named Sean, and the family secret of the Thermopolis.
• Fil: gave her control of the moment the Arbiter chose her, in exchange for a handshake once she had hands.
• The Grandmaster: Thea likes her (“I like her hair”) and blames the Arbiter instead. Thea works for her and the Arbiter, and is the one who cleans up. They play darts, and the Grandmaster thinks little of her brain.
• Claude: the Fortress janitor, cast as the evil wizard of Thea Teaches. She removed his arms and says she’ll give them back.
• Iris: murdered her on her first night, then gave her a shoulder to sit on.
• Doug: the recipient of her receipts and a severed cheese head.
• Chinchillas: her responsibility, from feeding and walking to unionizing and triple pay.
• Stuart: the Fortress IT man, who resets her email password.
• Richard S. Skelman: her prom proposal and the target of her love-thrown poop.
• The Pebble: she owed him a call, shielded him, carried him off when he fell and revived him with a potion. He repaid her by rising out of the earth to smash the Arbiter’s face.
• Atlas: wore her as a backpack, then as a core.

Memorable Quotes

• “I am people!” (S5E11)
• “Halloween lives in your spirit.” (S5E12)
• “I put a towel down first.” (S5E15, on sleeping in the Lord of Fate’s throne)
• “I volunteer as tribute.” (S7E6)
• “This is going to be my greatest puzzle.” (S7E8)
• “Triple pay for everyone!” (S7E9)
• “No one said your room couldn’t be a bathroom.” (S7E10)
• “You thought you were a puppet master. But no, we are the worms inside your body puppeting you.” (S7E10)
• “Don’t fucking embarrass me and roll another nat one or I’ll come out there and kill you myself.” (S7E11)

Appearances

• S5E1 — Rise of the Lord of Fate — Atlas v Killy Yesman
• S5E2 — Identity Crisis — Kopy Katt v Professor Alonzo Quixote Cervantes
• S5E3, Eldritch Fangs - Ruby Rust v Robbie Clark and the Hunger
• S5E4 — Chaos in Chinchilla Forest — Tormiir v Granny Edith
• S5E5 — Frigid Fedoras — Kyle Stoddard v Frigidoom
• S5E6 — American Amphibian — King Man Frog Bofus v Richard Knottley
• S5E7 — Ducks of Death — Robbie Clark & the Hunger v Bob the Barbarian
• S5E8 — Graveyard Grudge — Granny Edith v Teddy Oso
• S5E9 — Patriotic Punch Up — Bob the Barbarian v Richard Knottley (Dick Twist)
• S5E10 — BoneBound Brawl — King Bofus v Bone Daddy (and Darcy)
• S5E11 — Appliance Adversaries — Atlas v Frigidoom
• S5E12 — Imitation Game — Kopy Katt v Ragu
• S5E13 — Bone Rust — Ruby Rust v Bone Daddy
• S5E14 — Froggy Style — Kyle Stoddard v King MAN FROG Bofus
• S5E15 — Cosmic Collision — Teddy Oso v Ragu
• S5E16, Chaos Royal (Season 5 finale), the first Chaos Royale (four-way)
• S6E1 — Murder at the Dread Fortress (TTRPG Murder Mystery)
• S6 Ep2 · Ether Drifts Part 1 · TTRPG One Shot (Team A mine mission)
• S6 Ep3 — Ether Drifts Part 2 — Team A deathmatch (Atlas v Robbie Clark and the Hunger v Copycat)
• S6 Ep4 — Tip to Tip - Part 1 (TTRPG One Shot)
• S6E5, Tip to Tip - Part 2 (Richard Knottley v Richard S. Skelman, the leadership Deathmatch)
• S6 Ep6 — The Hunt for #2 - Part 1 — Team C (Frigidum, Bob the Barbarian, the Duke) v Billy
• S6E7, The Hunt for #2 - Part 2 (season finale). Team C final - Frigid Doom v Bob the Barbarian v the Duke
• × Wounded Warrior Project, Capture the Flag charity crossover (title not in metadata)
• S7E1 — A Soup Served Cold — DeeDrah v Gazpacho Man Andy Gammage
• S7E2 — Under the Oil Tree — Big Business v Bog Boy
• S7E3 — Chinchilla the White — Akumu v Jinx
• S7E4 — The Cheese — Sila v Ol’ Pumpernicklejack
• S7E5 — Rock and a Hard Place — Iowa-Ska v the Pebble
• S7E6 — Bone Force — Jerry Bonesman v TD
• S7E7 — A Father’s Son — Agatha Middlebrooke v Lug Hardblock
• S7E8 — Private Bathrooms — Livid Lady Lin v Gandor Thalion Umbrae
• S7E9 — Necro-Nightmare — Squiggles v Ray S’urdead
• S7E10 — Thea’s Adventure (Thea’s Revenge, a one-shot)
• S7E11 — The Cat’s Meow — Zhora Bloodfang v Bezil