Jola, also called Jola the Yule Cat, is a mythic Icelandic creature represented by a totem card during the Eighth Floor's T'Ghee card battles. He belongs first to Katia Grim and then to Princess Donut, who adds him to her active deck. When summoned, Jola manifests as a fat, hairy, dirty-brown Persian cat the size of a house, with a huge candle melted onto the top of his head. He is male, speaks Icelandic, and is larger than the already massive Shi Maria.
Jola combines exceptional size and durability with an unreliable temperament. His candle reveals invisible creatures, and his powers become more dangerous against opponents who are naked or children. He usually attacks the enemy selected by his own instincts, but he may refuse to fight, disregard instructions, or threaten an allied crawler. His appearances therefore demonstrate one of the central hazards of T'Ghee combat: possessing a totem's card gives a deckmaster the ability to summon it, but does not make the creature obedient or safe.
Transfer from Katia to Donut
Katia gives Jola's card to Donut before the group enters Club Vanquisher. The card identifies him as a mythic creature from Iceland, and Katia has already found him troublesome enough to surrender one of her excess totems. Donut reacts with interest rather than annoyance. After examining his abilities, she decides that Jola is valuable enough to place in her active deck immediately.
Adding him creates a deck-building problem because Donut already has the maximum practical number of totems she wants to carry. Instead of removing one of her established cards, she uses a consumable Combo card to merge two other problematic totems. She applies their available utility enhancements and makes the merger permanent with a Glow-Up card. This restructuring creates room for Jola while preserving Shi Maria, whom Carl and Donut consider dangerous but necessary for the challenges ahead.
Donut spends several hours practicing with the altered deck. When Carl asks whether Jola obeys her, she answers that he is excellent as long as no children are present. Her qualification anticipates both the creature's reveal sequence and the condition that makes him stronger around children. It also shows that Donut knows about his predatory impulses before Carl witnesses a summoning. Jola is not a surprise card whose danger becomes apparent only after a battle; Donut knowingly accepts that risk because of his combat value.
Jola adapts more easily to the deck's other personalities than several of Donut's existing totems do. Shi Maria and the newly created Lazarus compete over kills, while other cards quarrel or merely tolerate one another. Donut reports that both Shi Maria and Lazarus get along with Jola. He does not join their rivalry, and his own elaborate reveal sequence is impressive enough to attract comment without provoking the same dispute. His calm relationship with fellow totems contrasts with his unpredictable behavior toward targets and crawlers.
Manifestation and abilities
Jola's first witnessed manifestation transforms the area around him before his body fully appears. The sky darkens, digital snow intensifies into a blizzard, and artificial Christmas lights overlay the buildings in the battlefield's suburban memory. A large, partly melted yellow candle appears overhead and ignites. The flame sits on Jola's head once the rest of his form resolves, and its light exposes creatures that had been hidden by invisibility.
His body is terrestrial rather than airborne. Carl initially struggles to understand the scale of what he is seeing because Jola simply stands higher than the surrounding structures. The totem is bigger than Shi Maria and resembles an extremely fat, long-haired, dirty-brown Persian cat enlarged to the size of a house. His growl is deep enough to shake the ground, while heat radiates from the candle and melting wax vanishes into his fur. A seventy-five-second timer governs his first observed summoning, after which the temporary manifestation must disappear if the combat does not end sooner.
The system's introductory verse presents Jola as a hunter of idle, unclothed, and unfinished people, with a particular appetite for children. Donut later provides the useful mechanical explanation: the candle can reveal invisible opponents, and Jola receives an advantage when his opponent is naked or a child. The dungeon's version is more murderous than the traditional creature as Katia understands it. Donut summarizes the folklore's Yule Cat as an ill-tempered figure, whereas the totem's powers turn the clothing motif into a direct combat condition.
Jola has high health and can absorb attacks that would destroy smaller totems. That endurance does not make him invulnerable. Snare effects can slow him and reduce his strength, and sufficiently powerful explosives can remove a large portion of his manifested body and health. His enormous physical dimensions are an advantage in open combat but a liability in confined areas. Donut sometimes cannot summon him where a ceiling or narrow passage would prevent him from functioning.
Although Jola generally understands what his deckmaster wants, compliance is inconsistent. Donut describes him as a creature who mostly does as asked, does not antagonize the other totems, and sometimes merely sits down rather than fighting. In later combat, Carl gives him a direct defensive command and is ignored. These are not signs that Jola has failed to understand the battlefield. He selects his own target, uses an ability suited to that target, and reacts to another crawler's conduct. His independent priorities simply override Carl's instruction.
Battle with the Nightgaunt
Donut first summons Jola during a fight against an invisible Nightgaunt deckmaster and its Quench Moths. The opponent is fixated on Carl's Nightgaunt cloak and neglects its own deck, while the moths and their master are difficult for the crawlers to see. Jola's candle immediately removes that advantage by revealing the Nightgaunt and all six dog-sized moths. The moths then dive into the candle flame instead of exploiting light sources for their own bonuses, destroying themselves against the very ability that exposes them.
The Nightgaunt has not summoned a defending totem, allowing Jola to attack the deckmaster directly under the T'Ghee rules. Jola addresses the creature in Icelandic and pounces, striking it to the ground with enough force to split the surrounding earth. The Nightgaunt continues trying to reach Carl rather than responding effectively. Jola finally picks it up in his jaws, shakes it to death, tosses the body, and swallows it.
Completion of the battle does not leave the corpse permanently inside the totem. Jola turns his attention to Carl, speaks another untranslated Icelandic warning, and disappears when the deck resets. The mangled Nightgaunt body then reappears in midair and falls to the ground. This sequence establishes the distinction between Jola's temporary manifestation and the lasting result of his attack: he can consume a target while present, but the target's physical remains return when he is dismissed.
The encounter also reveals why Katia and Donut regard him as both powerful and inconvenient. He defeats a deckmaster rapidly, negates invisibility, and survives without meaningful injury, but his final stare at Carl is not reassuring. Donut admires the result and compares his food-driven behavior to an aggressive show cat she once knew. Carl instead treats the totem's appetite and interest in him as a threat. Both reactions prove justified in a later battle.
Fight against Judge Lucian
Donut summons Jola again during the confrontation with Judge Lucian's hydra deckmaster. Lucian counters as the cat forms, placing a Cripple snare on him. The effect both slows Jola and sharply reduces his strength, forcing the enormous cat to lumber through the battlefield rather than overwhelm the opposing totems immediately. Even while crippled, Jola shrugs off a magic missile from King Croissant, the small cat paired with the Alpha Carl totem.
Jola eventually reaches Alpha Carl and swipes at him, but the target retreats while throwing a sticky hob-lobber. The explosive attaches to Jola's head and destroys half of his face, reducing his health by approximately half. He continues advancing. When Alpha Carl becomes caught in a snare trap, Jola closes the distance with visible enthusiasm, only for King Croissant to activate an escape and remove them both just before Jola's claw lands.
The fight ends without Jola locating them again. Geraldo briefly uses the candle on Jola's head as a handhold while launching himself toward the hydra, showing that allied totems can operate around Jola's immense body even when he is not following a coordinated plan. Jola searches for Alpha Carl and the kitten until his timer expires, then disappears with an angry hiss. His performance demonstrates both his durability and the practical ways an opposing deck can neutralize him: movement penalties, sustained damage, escape effects, and the short duration of a summoning can prevent his size from deciding a battle.
Confrontation with Quan Ch
Jola's most dangerous conflict with an ally occurs during the assault on Quan Ch. Donut waits to summon him until Carl calls for her available totems, then applies a Time Extend while sending Jola and a combined version of Lazarus into the fight. Jola appears inside the capitol building, fills one side of the room, and rises to the ceiling. His presence crushes an automaton spider beneath him, an incidental consequence of placing a house-sized manifestation in a crowded battlefield.
A hostile death worm passes through Jola because the summoned totem is non-corporeal to it, but Jola does not respond to Carl's order to keep the worm away from the group. He concentrates exclusively on Quan and repeatedly criticizes the crawler's clothing in Icelandic. Jola then uses an ability called Fashion Critic, which blasts every item Quan is wearing from his body. The effect resembles Donut's Laundry Day spell, except that Jola intends to eat the removed clothes. By stripping Quan naked, it also places the opponent within one of Jola's favored target conditions.
Carl takes Quan's magical cloak during the attack. Jola reacts with another Icelandic statement that includes an unmistakable threat, glares at Carl, and finishes swallowing Quan's trousers. Rather than returning his attention to Quan or obeying a defensive command, he turns toward Carl and prepares to pounce. Carl urgently asks Donut to end the battle. The combat elsewhere has already concluded, so the T'Ghee reset dismisses Jola in a burst of smoke in the middle of his leap.
Carl later groups the incident with other cases in which totems injure or kill supposed allies. His conclusion is not that Jola malfunctioned, but that the card system's creatures were never guaranteed to be safe. Jola's hostility follows his own logic: clothing and its theft matter to him, and Carl has taken a garment the cat considers subject to his judgment. The event confirms that ending the combat, rather than commanding the totem, is the reliable way to stop him once he has selected an allied target.
Tactical limits and last known status
Jola remains listed among Donut's active totems after his first battles, alongside Shi Maria, Lazarus, A-Bang-Bang, Skylar Spinach, Geraldo, and Raul. Donut can support him with cards such as Time Extend, but drawing him is not automatically useful. His value depends heavily on space, the opponent's condition, and whether his independent behavior aligns with the party's immediate objective. He is especially effective at revealing hidden enemies, absorbing punishment, and overpowering an exposed deckmaster, but poorly suited to precise protection or cramped terrain.
His final explicit mention on the Eighth Floor emphasizes that size restriction. During a battle in a confined, collapsing area, Donut tells Carl that she has already discarded Jola because he is too large for the location. In T'Ghee play, that discard removes the card from her current options; it is not described as Jola's death or permanent destruction. No later final-canon scene in the supplied novels establishes whether the card persists beyond the Eighth Floor's game. Jola's last confirmed status is therefore that of a usable but situational totem in Donut's deck, not a permanent pet, a continuously present companion, or a creature known to have died.