Cullen

Cullen is a longtime friend of Joe Mulligan whose importance lies in the grounded, communal support he provides when Joe’s private grief escalates into an attempt to summon Maggie back into reality. He is not presented as a soldier, genius, or supernatural actor. Instead, he belongs to the ordinary circle Joe misses while traveling: the friends, relatives, and familiar local figures who give Joe a life beyond his relationship with Maggie. Cullen’s usefulness emerges most clearly when that ordinary friendship is placed beside a ritual involving a cult, a dimensional rift, and the possible return of a Class-3 entity.

Identity and Background

Cullen is described as physically short and, in the earlier period of Joe’s friendship with him, associated with the same borderline unhealthy physique as Joe. Five years later, however, he has been inspired by Joe’s improved fitness and has worked to get himself into shape. The change does not erase his recognizable identity; he remains vertically challenged, but his body records an effort to respond to the example set by his friend. This modest physical development contrasts with Joe’s self-description as someone who was never born strong, fast, smart, or suited to anything important. Cullen belongs to the same social world of unexceptional people, yet he demonstrates that change can occur without turning a person into an extraordinary figure.

His friendship with Joe is also marked by practical familiarity. When Joe arrives at the abandoned factory where the summoning will take place, he assumes that Cullen and Benny Vanson have already handled most of the preparation. The assumption proves correct: the candles are positioned, the participants’ places are marked, and the central centerpiece is ready. Cullen therefore functions not merely as a spectator but as someone willing to undertake the tedious material work required by Joe’s desperate plan.

Friendship with Joe Mulligan

Joe’s attachment to Cullen is revealed most directly when the luxury shuttle Silver Tempest makes him homesick. The vessel contains a bathroom, bedroom, living room, kitchenette, virtual-reality pod, the shoggoth-infested equipment associated with Maggie, and the servant automaton Jeeves. Yet the abundance of technological comfort only clarifies what Joe lacks. He misses spending time with Benny and Cullen, watching AJ maintain her perpetually alert manner, receiving visits from Officer Maloney, visiting Eugene Charles’s shop, and even encountering Edith Mandrake. Cullen is thus part of the emotional geography of Joe’s home: not an incidental acquaintance, but one of the familiar people whose absence makes extravagant travel feel lonely.

The relationship also carries enough frankness to withstand teasing and disagreement. Cullen questions whether Joe’s friends can be trusted with the preparations, while Joe insists that they live for precisely this sort of rubbish. Later, Cullen asks whether Maggie has another, less insane sister, and Joe replies that Kelly is the only one. Cullen answers that he does not particularly like her. The exchange is deliberately ordinary in a setting that is anything but ordinary. Cullen’s ability to speak casually about Joe’s dangerous family circumstances preserves the tone of an old friendship rather than allowing every conversation to become solemn exposition.

Cullen’s presence also helps distinguish Joe’s bond with Maggie from the broader network of relationships around him. Maggie worries that Joe’s gullibility, optimism, and naivety could allow another person to replace her in his affections, while Joe’s father, Barry Mulligan, warns him not to let Maggie become his entire world. Cullen does not articulate the paternal version of that warning, but his continued presence embodies its practical alternative: Joe has a life made of multiple attachments, and Cullen is one of the people who help keep that life intact.

Role in the Summoning Plan

Joe’s plan to recover Maggie depends on reproducing the ritual once used by the Cult of the Gazing Star to summon Magh’rathlak the Observer. He has gathered notes, recordings, and comments left by the entity, persuaded Maggie’s vessel to transfer them to digital media, and learned the ceremony’s precise requirements, including a yearly planetary alignment, chants, props, and devices. Cullen helps convert that knowledge into a physical operation. In the factory’s innermost chamber, his preparations sit alongside the candles, marked positions, central altar-like centerpiece, and the forty-two robed participants who will perform the chant.

The setting gives Cullen’s contribution an ironic weight. The building is an enormous domed factory squeezed between hyper-scraper foundations; it has not manufactured anything for a long time, but it carries personal significance for Joe because it recalls Maggie learning to walk. Cullen helps prepare this emotionally charged industrial relic for a ritual that is simultaneously a reunion attempt, a reckless experiment, and a revival of a cult practice. His labor makes Joe’s impossible hope materially executable, even though Cullen himself is not the source of the supernatural knowledge.

His concern is practical rather than mystical. He asks Joe how his nerves are holding up, recognizes that the plan may end badly, and observes that Benny’s romantic pursuit of Kelly is likely to fail. When Joe says that he and Maggie have “worked it out,” Cullen points toward the blank slate in the back and challenges the claim. The joke registers the gap between Joe’s emotional certainty and the thin evidence available to everyone else. Cullen does not dismantle the plan, but he refuses to treat Joe’s hope as proof.

Comic Counterweight and Moral Perspective

Cullen’s humor operates as a pressure valve in a narrative crowded with cosmic entities, military intervention, and unstable reality. His complaint about Kelly, his skepticism about the plan, and his commentary on Benny’s prospects do not make the danger disappear. Instead, they keep the participants recognizable as friends who are improvising around a crisis. The contrast is especially sharp because Joe has recruited desperate, mentally disturbed, easily manipulated, and dangerously foolish people to fill out the ritual. Joe acknowledges that exploiting such people is predatory but decides it would be worth doing if Maggie returned. Cullen’s ordinary presence helps expose how far Joe has moved from normal friendship into ethically compromised desperation.

Earlier discussions about virtual reality and purposelessness provide a related social context. Joe argues that he is content with a life free from pressure and that virtual reality gives him an easy way to interact and have fun. Another speaker describes spending all day in V-Life because, without it, there would be nothing to do and perhaps even an impulse to perform strange rituals for excitement. Cullen is not identified as the speaker of that reflection, but the attitude belongs to the same circle of people for whom leisure, boredom, and friendship coexist with the possibility of grotesque escalation. The later ritual turns that comic possibility literal.

Change and Narrative Significance

Cullen’s arc is deliberately modest. He does not become a supernatural hero, a military operative, or the person who resolves the summoning. His notable change is physical conditioning, while his enduring function is social: he remains present, helps prepare the site, asks after Joe’s nerves, and supplies candid reactions when the plan becomes absurd. That modesty is significant because Joe’s crisis threatens to redefine every relationship according to Maggie’s absence. Cullen resists that gravitational pull simply by continuing to be Joe’s friend in recognizable, sometimes irritating, practical ways.

When the military commandos eventually intervene, they know that the revived cult is conducting an extremely dangerous ritual, but they do not know that Joe is involved. They also cannot predict what entity might emerge through the dimensional rift, since the returning presence may not be Magh’rathlak the Observer at all. Cullen’s preparations therefore stand at the point where private mourning becomes public danger. The story’s cosmic stakes do not erase the human scale of the undertaking: candles had to be placed, positions marked, equipment arranged, and friends recruited. Cullen represents that human labor, and through him the summoning remains not only an occult event but also a group project assembled by people trying, with varying degrees of wisdom, to keep Joe from facing loss alone.