Gertrude

Gertrude is William Oh’s guardian, caretaker, and first substantial mentor at Saint Gertrude’s Orphanage. Her importance lies in the unusual union of tenderness and operational knowledge she brings to his life: she can scold him over a loaf of bread, advise him on the economics of Sacrifices and gear, and reveal that she once Climbed as high as the Twelfth Floor. Through that combination, she represents both the ordinary home William Oh is trying to leave and the experienced Climber’s caution he repeatedly risks ignoring.

Guardian in the Orphanage

Gertrude supervises William Oh as the young man prepares to enter the Class Trial. Her care is practical rather than sentimental. When he devours an entire loaf of bread, she warns that eating too quickly will give him a stomachache and make him vomit as soon as he has to run. Even the immediate correction of his table manners carries the pressure of the life ahead: food, endurance, and physical readiness are matters of survival, not merely household routine. When he leaves a bowl and plate covered in crumbs, she points them out while her Relic of the Host glows faintly, turning an ordinary reprimand into a small display of the power she possesses.

William Oh is also given unusual privacy under her care. He has his own room because he is the only young man in the orphanage old enough to join The Hunt. The arrangement marks him as both protected and separated: he belongs to the orphanage, but he has reached the threshold of an adult danger that the other children have not. Gertrude’s later visit to that room makes the guardian relationship explicit. She is not simply an administrator who prepares him for departure; she continues to monitor the person he becomes once the world beyond the orphanage begins claiming him.

Advice Before the Class Trial

Gertrude’s most detailed intervention comes when she points an old wooden spoon at William Oh and urges him not to rush into the Class Trial with the first three Sacrifices he can obtain. Her advice is strategic. He has the entire summer to hunt, and she tells him to shop around, sell some Sacrifices, buy equipment, inspect the market, and wait for another Aspirant to pass on something better suited to him. Most importantly, she explains that he does not have to take his Class that year because the trial has no time limit.

This counsel establishes Gertrude as a counterweight to William Oh’s appetite for immediate commitment. The Class Trial is not merely a ceremonial milestone in her account; it is a build-defining decision whose consequences justify patience. Her recommended sequence—hunt, trade, examine the market, acquire gear, and only then choose—places preparation above excitement. William Oh’s later ambition to reach the Tenth Floor, establish a Lordship there, and eventually claim the entire Tower therefore develops against a warning he has already heard from someone who understands how expensive premature choices can be.

Her knowledge is not abstract. Gertrude says that she used to Climb and reached the Twelfth Floor. That history gives her warning the authority of experience while also making her advice a form of restrained autobiography. She has gone farther than William Oh has yet gone, but she does not present the achievement as a promise that he can safely imitate. Instead, she emphasizes time, equipment, and selection—the habits of someone who knows that survival depends as much on refusing a bad opportunity as on seizing a good one.

Searching, Retrieving, and Nursing William Oh

Gertrude’s guardianship becomes more forceful when William Oh vanishes from the orphanage’s immediate orbit. Leon reports that she has been looking for him for almost a week, and she soon appears at Leon’s General Store to haul him out herself. The scene turns concern into action: she does not wait for William Oh to return voluntarily or offer a gentle reminder of his obligations. Her method is direct physical retrieval, consistent with the practical authority she has exercised at home.

After William Oh’s first major ordeal, he wakes in a familiar bed with Gertrude looming in the corner and asking whether he feels better. Her presence connects the dangerous outer world to the protected interior of the orphanage. She knows that he has been writhing in pain and remarks on the contradiction between his condition and his tendency to insist that he is not suffering. She also tells him that his friends brought him back there, confirming that the orphanage remains a place to which he can be returned even after he has begun building an identity elsewhere.

Her care does not become indulgence after his recovery. When William Oh prepares to leave again, Gertrude demands to know where he is going. She then warns him not to spend his first quest reward on booze and women. The joke is blunt, but its function is serious: she treats newfound money as another danger requiring supervision. When the reward is finally presented, she calls it his first quest reward and moves his injured arm out of the way, combining acknowledgment of his achievement with attention to the bodily cost at which it was purchased. She also tells him that he can rest another day if he is not ready, preserving a choice that his own momentum would otherwise erase.

Knowledge, Limits, and Misjudgment

Gertrude is not omniscient, despite the authority she commands. William Oh believes she is at least level 40 and therefore should have noticed what was happening around her, yet she admits that she did not know the relevant detail. She explains that she and William Oh had been discussing what he was like as a baby while her insects set a trap. The moment complicates her image as an all-seeing guardian: experience and power do not eliminate distraction, uncertainty, or the possibility of being deceived.

Her bureaucratic or supernatural responsibilities also place her in a larger system than William Oh initially understands. When she checks a clipboard and compares him with earlier records, she remarks that he is the sixth William Oh to appear, but seems to be the correct one. The scene gives her a role beyond that of caretaker. She is able to identify, verify, and process his claim to a quest reward, treating his identity as something that must be matched against a record before recognition becomes official. Her faintly glowing eyes and the clipboard together suggest an intersection of personal familiarity and institutional procedure: she knows William Oh as the boy she raised, but she must also establish which William Oh the system is prepared to acknowledge.

Narrative Role and Legacy

Gertrude functions as William Oh’s threshold guardian and mentor, but in an intentionally domestic register. She does not usher him across the threshold with grand ceremony. She points a spoon, cleans up crumbs, searches the shops for him, monitors his recovery, and cautions him about how to spend his money. These small acts are structurally important because they place the immense ambitions of climbing the Tower beside the persistent obligations of eating properly, resting, and returning home alive.

Her influence is clearest in the tension between her measured counsel and William Oh’s expansive goal. He imagines conquering floors in sequence, funneling money and Relics back to his Demesne until the entire Tower belongs to him. Gertrude’s surviving contribution to that vision is less a competing dream than a discipline for pursuing it: take time, inspect the options, prepare, and do not mistake the first available path for the right one. Even when William Oh ignores or outgrows the shelter she provides, her presence keeps the consequences of reckless ambition visible.

The later moral darkness surrounding William Oh throws her earlier care into sharper relief. He eventually confronts situations in which survival demands killing a restrained Climber, abandoning Brianna after giving her what he can, and living with knowledge that is painful rather than consoling. Gertrude is not shown resolving those burdens for him, but the pattern of her guardianship helps explain the kind of counterpressure he has repeatedly received: rest when injured, think before committing, and recognize the cost of action. In that sense, her role extends beyond the scenes in which she appears. Gertrude is the memory of a home that insists the future Climber remain a person while the Tower continually rewards him for becoming harder, faster, and less merciful.