Jasha is a level 65 bugbear NPC, a member of Team Free Love, and a participant in the Tenth Floor races. He remembers multiple earlier lives assigned to the same reused NPC group. After teammate Alevtina dies and the team's van crashes, Carl and Donut help Jasha and Radoslav continue toward the finish. Jasha, Radoslav, and Alevtina enter the race as Team Free Love. Their assigned appearance uses tie-dyed clothing and beads, although Donut observes that the styling resembles a costume rather than an organic subculture. Jasha wears a tie-dyed headband and no pants. The team's floor story casts them as musicians. Jasha sings and plays violin, Radoslav is assigned Pan flute, and Alevtina uses bongos and tambourine. The identities are production roles layered over people who remember being used elsewhere. The team's van overturns during the first race after an obstacle. Alevtina breaks her neck and dies. Jasha confirms the death, discards his headband in frustration, and shares a cigarette with Radoslav while they assess their position. Jasha mourns Alevtina without attaching that grief to preservation of the corpse. The bugbears later leave her body in the water, consistent with a cultural practice that honors the dead without treating remains as sacred. Jasha explains that he and Radoslav remember serving as brothers, enemies, and cousins in different environments. They recall the slime mines, a submarine, the rope city, periods of cold storage, and other cycles. Awareness arrives after a dying crawler tells them the world is a game. The accumulated memory turns a reusable NPC template into a continuous person. Jasha recognizes that the production changed his relationships and setting while expecting him to forget. The Tenth Floor's awakened NPC participants are thus not newly invented racers; many are survivors of repeated narrative labor. Jasha says the team was offered a choice between returning to the cold and racing for freedom. If they win fairly, they are promised transfer to a real place where they will not have to fight or return to the in-between. If they lose, Radoslav believes at least the cycle may finally end. The promise motivates Alevtina's hope of starting a family. It also exposes the coercion hidden in the word volunteer. Refusing the race means storage, while participation offers a small chance of release through lethal entertainment. Jasha initially tells Carl and Donut to continue because Team Free Love cannot cross the finish unless its members are inside their van. Carl builds a towing solution, partly from compassion and partly to reduce the chance of later heats against allied crawlers. Jasha provides information about other teams, the biological Avernus Creeper mount used by Team Sparkles, and racers Dwight and Lucienne. He remains in the van while the damaged vehicle is towed. The alliance is temporary and both sides understand that later race rules may make them opponents. Jasha is alive at his last confirmed appearance in the early Tenth Floor sequence. His later result should not be invented from the absence of a named death notice. The article distinguishes his confirmed level from Radoslav's level 75 Jack of all Trades class, which does not belong to Jasha. His importance is thematic and historical. He can name the cold storage between assignments, describe relationships rewritten around him, and articulate why a supposedly voluntary race is coercive. His testimony turns the Tenth Floor from a vehicle contest into an account of awakened NPC exploitation.
- Radoslav
- Alevtina
- Team Free Love
- Tenth Floor
- NPCs