Brandon Andrews

Brandon An is a human crawler, former Meadow Lark maintenance worker, and early member of the elderly-survivor group later known as Team Meadow Lark. The story slug “Brandon Andrews” reflects an earlier indexing error; the novels identify him as Brandon An and identify his brother as Chris Andrews 2. Brandon's engineering work, loyalty to vulnerable residents, and death while defending the team make him an important early model for Carl's rescue ethic. Brandon is registered as crawler number 12,330,671. His canonical surname is An. Carl first assumes Chris is Brandon's biological brother and refers to the men collectively as brothers, while the interface gives Chris the name Chris Andrews 2. The exact pre-dungeon naming history is less important than keeping Brandon distinct from the erroneous “Brandon Andrews” form used by some indexes. Both men work night maintenance at Meadow Lark, a care facility near Wenatchee, Washington. They remain on site for overtime after an oven problem and are present when the collapse begins. Agatha starts a fire while trying to keep warm outside, causing the facility's approximately 250 residents to be evacuated from the building before the collapse. A stairwell later opens nearby. Agatha's overloaded cart turns the stairs into a ramp, allowing residents with limited mobility to descend. Brandon, Chris, nurses Imani and Yolanda, and other staff guide the group. Many residents are elderly, ill, or cognitively impaired. Physical ailments improve after entry, but dementia and other cognitive damage do not simply disappear. Brandon understands immediately that abandoning the slower residents would be safer for the able-bodied staff and refuses to do it. The Meadow Lark group establishes a defensive position nicknamed Speedbump. Brandon and Chris use maintenance knowledge to reinforce the space and control approaches. Brandon adds shuriken-like spikes and other improvised defenses, demonstrating the same practical relationship to terrain that later makes him useful in mobile operations. The name is self-deprecating, but the structure preserves a community that the dungeon's opening logic appears designed to eliminate. Brandon's work turns caregiving into a tactical problem that can be solved rather than a reason to leave people behind. Brandon begins with ordinary tools, including a hammer suited to his maintenance background. He later carries a massive lightning maul. The weapon gives him the appearance of a conventional heavy fighter, but his most important contribution remains applied engineering. He designs or helps construct the Meadow Lark parade transport and contributes to explosive devices, including the Bomb Chicken and the weapon Carl calls the MOAB. Brandon understands load, balance, structure, and the physical consequences of moving heavy equipment through an environment not designed for it. Brandon recognizes Carl as another person who instinctively returns for those in danger. Their private communications are practical and respectful. Carl values Brandon's judgment because it combines technical competence with an unwillingness to treat people as expendable. Donut remembers Brandon's loyalty and later condemns Maggie My for the manipulation that separated him from Chris. Her anger preserves the interpersonal part of his death rather than allowing him to become only another falling number. Maggie My manipulates Chris and contributes to a rupture between the brothers. Brandon dies believing Chris is angry with him. The unresolved separation intensifies the loss for both Chris and the surviving coalition. Brandon sends Carl a final message after the conflict. Carl saves it in his scratch pad and rereads it. The exact text matters less to Carl than the continuing presence of Brandon's voice and the knowledge that reconciliation never occurred. Brandon dies protecting the team from shade gremlins. Later discussion also connects the disaster to a former elderly resident's encounter with a succubus, which produces a swarm of dangerous offspring. These references describe parts of the same wider crisis rather than changing the confirmed cause that he died in defense of the group. His death is final. Later books call him the late Brandon and compare other large mallets to the weapon he once carried. The references show that he remains part of the coalition's shared memory long after the early floors. Brandon's practical designs survive him, but his larger legacy is ethical. He proves that protecting a high-needs group can generate capability rather than only consume it. The Meadow Lark survivors later include powerful healers, leaders, and combatants whose existence depends on the staff members who refused the opening logic of triage by abandonment. Carl cites Brandon alongside Yolanda and other dead allies when confronting the unequal value the production assigns to lives. A crawler can die saving dozens and receive less institutional concern than a powerful off-world employee. Brandon's memory sharpens Carl's recognition that the show controls not only danger but whose death is permitted to matter.