Miss Nadine is a Chee teacher and guardian of six former pupils in the Hunting Grounds. Queen Imogen's attack on their community leaves Nadine in the body of a giant caterpillar and the boys in altered forms. She continues to care for them through centuries of conflict, accompanying their alliance with Signet on the dungeon's sixth floor. The original Nadine dies during the assault on Fort Freedom. Edgar subsequently makes a living tattoo from her remains and Signet's memories; when Signet dies, the likeness takes the form of a Chee flesh golem. This later Nadine remains with the children on the ninth floor and joins the group departing for the twelfth.
The Chee school and Imogen's attack
Before her transformation, Nadine was in charge of a Chee day school. The dungeon's description of her Bearded Sage Caterpillar form also identifies her as a former actress, a part of her earlier life about which it says she would be reluctant to speak. The boys later traveling with her had been her pupils. They knew her before the violence that separated their community from its land and forced its survivors into a long struggle with the High Elves.
Signet places the attack before Scolopendra's later catastrophe. At the time, her father Finian still ruled, and Imogen served him as Sorcerer General. According to Signet, Imogen transfigured the Chee and sent cleansers after them. Most of the community did not escape. The six boys who survived with Nadine were children then; Signet says other schoolchildren were changed into different creatures, while these six all received the same kind of transformation. Nadine became a caterpillar. Her new body was not a natural stage of a Chee life, nor was it the ordinary intelligence of the caterpillar species. She remained the boys' teacher in circumstances that had destroyed their school.
The later account of Scolopendra's attack complicates any simple description of when the boys acquired their altered forms. Holger recalls that the survivors had already endured Imogen's spell when Scolopendra's cloud reached them. He wonders whether that earlier exposure protected them from some of the cloud's effects, but admits he does not know. In a ninth-floor recollection, Carl instead describes the nine-tier attack as having turned the kindergarten class into were-castors. Signet's account explicitly places Imogen's transfiguration earlier. What is clear across these accounts is that the boys and Nadine survived both assaults, while the damage to their village and surrounding region shaped the lives they led afterward.
Holger remembers sickness when Scolopendra's cloud arrived. Animals across the river were killed or changed, and the surviving Chee nearly starved. He credits Nadine with saving them. The account does not specify every act by which she found food or kept the group together, so her role should not be reduced to an invented rescue episode. It does establish that her care continued after the first escape, through a second disaster that threatened the survivors with hunger. The boys grew up over the following centuries amid fighting with the High Elves and the Naiad Confederacy, yet retained their attachment to their former teacher.
Guardian of the were-castors
By the time Carl and Princess Donut encounter Signet's party on the sixth floor, Nadine is identified as a level 50 Bearded Sage Caterpillar. The species is ordinarily a large, furry, tree-dwelling insect that feeds on leaves and eventually forms a chrysalis. The description stresses that such caterpillars are normally harmless and not especially intelligent. Nadine's Chee origin explains why this individual instead travels with a disciplined group of fighters and responds to their danger. Her inability to speak in this form leaves her feelings visible mainly in movement and sounds, including worried hissing and chittering.
The six were-castors ride her in a row, using her enormous body as transport through the wet jungle. She moves ahead of Carl's group, apparently chewing a route through dense growth. This is a practical part of the alliance: the boys can travel together on their guardian while Signet leads the party away from the river and toward its next objective. It also keeps Nadine physically close to the men she once taught. Although they have become an elite fighting force, they have not outgrown that shared relationship.
The boys' conduct offers a smaller sign of her place in their lives. During an argument with Clint, Holger threatens to tell Miss Nadine on him. Their quarrel briefly turns into a physical scuffle, despite the centuries they have spent surviving and fighting. His appeal to their old teacher is playful, but it only works because both still recognize her authority. Much later, after her death, Holger describes her care in parental terms. His response makes clear that she was more than an escort or mount for Signet's soldiers.
Nadine's presence in Signet's coalition has a specific history. Signet had lived among the Chee after being cursed and knew the children before their long years as warriors. When she introduces them to Carl, she identifies Imogen's campaign as the cause of their exile and transformation. Nadine and the boys therefore share a grievance against the queen that predates the current sixth-floor hunt. Their cooperation with Signet is grounded in the destruction of their own community, not merely in a convenient alliance against a nearby enemy.
Fort Freedom and the death of the original Nadine
At Fort Freedom, the former naiad palace, Signet's force attacks by water. Nadine remains on the riverbank with Carl, Donut, Areson, and a smaller guard while the assault group enters the partly submerged castle. She watches the were-castors disappear into the water and hisses anxiously. Areson tries to reassure her. When bodies begin to surface and an explosion sends bloody water from the castle, Nadine rushes toward the river despite Areson's warning that she cannot swim. Her movement is a response to the danger facing the people inside, not evidence that her caterpillar body could survive the crossing.
The fight reaches the bank when Claude Sludgington the Fourth suddenly appears beside Carl's group. Carl is thrown backward into Nadine, momentarily stopping against her soft body. She then moves uphill toward the borough boss. As Claude seizes and swallows combatants, Nadine launches herself against his side, striking at him with her mandibles. The attack draws his attention. His lightning hits her directly, and her caterpillar body explodes. The original guardian is killed in that fight; her later appearances have a different material origin.
Holger's reaction links this death to another loss from the castle assault. He reports that Clint was torn apart before his eyes, then cries for Nadine and says she had cared for the boys for so long that losing her feels like losing a mother. Carl blames himself for the boss's arrival. Areson rejects that account of responsibility, observing that Nadine had already started toward water she could not cross and describing her death as a warrior's. Holger asks whether enough of her remains and whether she is worthy, anticipating what Edgar will do with her body. The surviving were-castors gather around those remains when Signet returns from the castle.
Signet's party has taken Fort Freedom, but its victory does not erase the losses on the bank or in the water. The were-castors revert to their short Chee forms as they mourn Nadine; others search downstream for Clint's body. Signet asks Edgar if enough moonlight remains for his work. The question follows the survivors' concern about Nadine's remains and leads directly to the creation of her tattoo. Her death is thus both a decisive end to the caterpillar-bodied teacher and the event that makes a later likeness possible.
Edgar's tattoo and the child in Nadine's memory
Edgar uses a thin, needle-like implement and material from Nadine's remains to make a small moving figure on Signet's thigh. He does not simply draw an ordinary portrait. Dots placed on her skin move into an image, which first resembles the caterpillar and then changes into a young Chee woman. Signet describes the result as a blood-and-ink elemental combining Nadine's physical remains with Signet's personal memory. She expressly distinguishes this likeness from the dead woman herself. The tattoo can move and react, but its resemblance is not proof that the original Nadine has returned.
The image also contains a young Chee boy: Clint as he had been before the transformations. Edgar has no body from Clint to use. Signet explains his presence through Nadine's love for her pupil: the child was so strongly held in her memory that his likeness emerged with hers. This is a particular feature of Nadine's memorial, not evidence that Edgar separately recovered Clint. Holger recognizes the child and addresses him while the surviving were-castors bow before the figures. The scene gives them an image of the teacher and friend they have lost without reversing either death.
Nadine's likeness later remains visible among Signet's tattoos as the group moves toward its final confrontation with Imogen. At this stage she is carried on Signet's skin. The distinction matters because the next change does not occur when Edgar finishes the tattoo: it follows Signet's own death. The elemental made at Fort Freedom and the independent body Carl later meets are successive forms. Neither makes the caterpillar's destruction at the riverbank disappear.
Life after Signet
During the final battle with Imogen, Signet's tattoos take bodily form. Carl finds the young Clint clinging to Nadine's apron while both are frightened and injured by lightning. Clint's health is nearly gone, and a potion Carl gives him works. Nadine speaks to Carl and says Signet has given them life that will endure. She directs him to take the incomplete golem resembling Signet's mother, Lunette, and seek a pulpmancer to help Samantha. Nadine then lifts Clint and holds him while the fighting continues. Her first observed actions in this new body are again the protection of a child and the delivery of Signet's last request.
The precise identity of this Nadine is more complicated than the continued use of her name. Signet had called the tattoo a memorial facsimile made from remains and recollection. After Signet's death, Nadine can speak, act independently, suffer injury, and care for Clint; she describes herself and the others as alive. The account establishes a living flesh golem with Nadine's appearance and relationships. It does not establish that the consciousness of the teacher killed by Claude passed unchanged through the tattoo into that body.
On the ninth floor, Carl encounters Nadine as a young Chee woman among the people who arrived with the elf castle. Clint is now a kindergarten-aged Chee child, while Holger remains an adult were-castor. Nadine's authority in their group has a new everyday shape. Clint complains that she has forbidden him from rough play with Tina and wants the bear cubs Randy and Todd kept away from her. He also wants to prove that he and the other children can fight. Holger tells him to return to safety and make sure Nadine knows where he is, because she will be worried. The exchange places her in an active caregiving role rather than leaving her as a figure remembered only for the sixth-floor battle.
As fighting threatens the castle later in the ninth-floor conflict, Holger remains near Clint, Tina, Nadine, and the other frightened children instead of joining Carl's immediate operation. Another character speculates that Holger may now have romantic feelings for Nadine; that is an observation about his possible feelings, not a confirmed relationship. Near the floor's end, Carl sees Nadine attending to children while Holger carries young Clint on his shoulders. The group is preparing to leave for the twelfth floor, and the children are among those going. Nadine's last confirmed appearance in this account is therefore with the dependents she continues to watch over, in the Chee form given life after Signet's death.