ARDELIA LORE: MR. DOLLY AND HER BACKSTORY

Ardelia is a volcano geologist from Rhodes Island, and she is followed everywhere by Mr. Dolly, an invisible pink creature that knocks over cabinets, steals her equipment and licks the hotpot soup. Every mess, it turns out, is Mr. Dolly dragging her back to something she keeps forgetting.

Her four profile files are titled “Mr. Dolly’s Game”, and each one is the same trick played on her in a new place: a disaster shelter, a hidden valley, a rich city and the ship. Her voice lines and text threads fill in the rest, from the nightmare that keeps her racing the Blight to the obsidian she treasures most.

How we checked this. Everything below comes from Ardelia’s profile files and voice lines in the official English localization, plus her in-game text threads, checked against the current game data on 15 October 2026. The text threads exist only in Chinese in the files we have, so those parts are our translation and are paraphrased. Where the files only hint at something, we say so. The images are scenes from our own Short about her, built from the same files.

Endfield Hub is a fan-made resource and is not affiliated with Hypergryph or Yostar.

Short version first: Ardelia’s story in three minutes, told as a seismograph log of every “Dolly-quake”, from our YouTube channel. The full story with every source follows below. More backstories are on the Endfield lore hub.

TL;DR - Key Points

• Mr. Dolly is invisible by choice. It shows itself only when it wants to, and it is really a whole flock of Dollies.
• Its chaos is always a lesson. Each profile file is one “game” that pulls Ardelia out of a rut.
• The shelter: a girl tells her “You don’t understand”. Mr. Dolly wrecks the ward and leads her to a piano.
• The valley: overworked and scared, she chases it off route into ancient volcanic columns and sleeps soundly for the first time.
• The city: one speech makes her famous. Mr. Dolly vanishes and she finds it in a field of wildflowers.
• The ship: it licks the hotpot, sets an alarm to “baa baa baa” and decides you can be trusted.
• She is racing the Blight. A nightmare sends her to calculate a 1.7% chance of disaster, which she finds terrifying.
• She is a reconvener. Her file says Originium scoured her old illness away.

Who Is Ardelia?

Ardelia is a female Caprinae with Rhodes Island authentication, born on October 18. She is Oripathy negative, her physical strength, combat skill and tactical acumen are all ordinary, and her Originium Arts assimilation is “Outstanding”. Her HR summary calls her “an expert geologist from Rhodes Island” who specializes in volcanic hazards and now spends much of her time in the field for Endfield.

The HR assistant who wrote that summary, Martin Marvin Malen, is clearly a fan: “You’ll often find her venturing out alone, collecting samples, studying geological structures, and transforming observations into theories.” Thanks to her, Endfield understands Talos-II’s geology and the Blight far better, and “her research has laid the groundwork for emergency plans in case of Blight outbreaks.”

She introduces herself to the commander with a request: “My current focus is the correlations between geological disasters and the Ætherside. I’ve heard about you for quite a while, Endmin, and I have so many questions for you. Oh, there’s something else… Can I address you as my Professor?” She has called the commander Professor ever since.

In combat she is a 6-star Nature Supporter with an Arts Unit. Her battle skill sends Mr. Dolly charging in and applies Physical and Arts Susceptibility, the Shadows of Mr. Dolly heal the team, and her ultimate calls the whole flock. Her kit, builds and damage numbers are on her operator page, including the Ardelia damage calculator.

Who Is Mr. Dolly?

Mr. Dolly is a fluffy, pink, wool-covered creature, and most people cannot see it. “It’s invisible to you right now, but it loves playing with you,” Ardelia tells the commander. “What’s Mr. Dolly doing now? Well, it’s trying to sit on your… Oh dear! Mr. Dolly! Stop it!”

Asked where it came from, she keeps it simple: “We met on a quite ordinary day, and then it decided to stick around and never left me ever since.”

In another voice line the commander asks the obvious question, and she corrects them on two counts. “Mr. Dolly only show themselves when they want to be seen… Is Mr. Dolly the Sovereign? No. Mr. Dolly isn’t a name for any one in particular since they’re a flock of Dollies… Awww, come out and tell the Professor yourself! Mr. Dolly, I know you can talk!”

It fights with her, too. Her ultimate lines are all requests: “Please help, Mr. Dolly!”, “Don’t go too far, Mr. Dolly.” and “Be gentle, Mr. Dolly.” After a win she checks in on it: “We’ve done it. Hope you’re not tired, Mr. Dolly.”

The Shelter and the Piano

The first file, “Mr. Dolly’s Game I”, starts soon after she joins Endfield. She visits a settlement shredded by the Blight and stays at the shelter, organizing supplies, changing bandages and telling the wounded “I understand your sorrow.”

A young girl cuts her off. “You don’t understand. You stand straight. Your steps don’t falter. No disaster has carved its marks into you.” Maybe Ardelia was sick once, the girl says, but she healed. “That’s luck we’ll never taste. Our stories end in the same sentence: lifelong pain.”

The girl has a point, and the file says why. Ardelia is a reconvener, and “the Originium had scoured the reconvener’s illness away”, leaving her able to hear “wind whispers and microscopic fractures in stone”. In front of people who are still in pain, that perfect health leaves her with nothing to say.

So that night, Mr. Dolly goes to work. It trots between the beds “leaving chaos in its wake”: medicine cabinets toppled, tea trays upended, a freshly filled hot-water bottle kicked under a pillow. The nurses curse the sudden heat, and the children shriek about “something furry” burrowing under their blankets.

Ardelia chases it into an old break room, where it has uncovered a dusty piano. Mr. Dolly stomps on the keys, and the discordant chime “jolted Ardelia into clarity”. She sits down and plays Leithanian arpeggios on the yellowed keys. By the third piece the children have crept in and are curled up against Mr. Dolly’s fur. The girl comes too, and sits in the farthest corner.

“It still hurts,” she murmurs, “but when you play… the world becomes something worth enduring.”

The Valley of Columns

The second file shows Ardelia getting worse. Talos-II’s geology is nothing like the volcanoes she knew, which were full of “the vitality of expansion, eruption, and flow”. Under the Blight, the rock layers “lost their logic, the earth as if diseased.”

She starts surveying high-risk zones alone and turns her life into task lists. She stops writing her thoughts as poetry, forgets meals, and clenches her fists in her sleep. “How much time do I have left?” she wonders. The file is careful to say it is not death she fears. It is “a desperate race against the crumbling of this strange new land.”

So Mr. Dolly leaps out of a shallow pit, knocks over her rock hammer, snatches her instrument case and runs. She chases it “off-route, off-plan” into a quiet valley, where hexagonal pillars of columnar volcanic rock rise from the ground “like piano keys”. She kneels and sketches them, not for a mission or data, “but simply because it was beautiful and captivating.”

That night, under the stars, she asks the question. “You led me here on purpose, didn’t you?” Mr. Dolly rolls over and taps her boot. She admits she is scared that if she slows down, “it’ll be too late”, then falls asleep against its fur, “soundly and sweetly under the open sky”, for the first time.

Her journal entry the next morning: “Ancient volcanic ruins discovered in the northeast. Columnar joints well preserved.” Then: “Led here by Mr. Dolly. Reconnected with my love for geology. Mood: content.” And: “Note to self: Slow down. Stay healthy.”

Famous Overnight in La Fantoma

The third file sends her to La Fantoma, “the gem of Band, the gilded city of Talos-II”, to speak at a forum on “Order in the New Geological Ecology of Talos-II”. She planned a standard presentation. It causes a stir.

Corporate representatives bring blueprints, senior researchers pitch collaborations, government officials hand her binders. A stranger in an elevator asks for her autograph for his lab, kids at crosswalks shout “I wanna be a scientist too!”, and a street vendor hands her a soda and asks for book recommendations for his nephew. She is kind to all of them. She just “wasn’t ready to be ‘known’.” After a three-hour roundtable she runs out the door, past a giant poster of herself labeled “Young Female Scientist Role Model.”

That is when Mr. Dolly disappears, and the city starts filing reports. A woman in a mall screams about “something fluffy” bumping into her. A rooftop flower bed is trampled by “something pink”. Someone posts a blurry photo of “something round” jumping a ticket gate, carrying a bag of cotton candy.

She searches half the city until her shoes wear thin, and finds it sprawled in a patch of wildflowers at the city’s edge. “What are you even doing here?” Mr. Dolly rolls over. She sits beside it and switches off her handyterm. “After all, nothing suits a geologist better than the open wild.”

One of her text threads shows Mr. Dolly was involved before the speech too. In our translation: the commander gets odd messages from her account, “Child? Child? Do you want to play a game? Do you have anything to say to the earth?”, followed by Ardelia apologizing that Mr. Dolly grabbed her communicator while she was stuck on her speech. It does it again, quizzing the commander (“Do you really not want to be friends with the earth?”) and grading their answers (“the seventh best answer this year”). Reading the chat back, Ardelia realizes Mr. Dolly was recruiting the commander as her advisor. Her speech becomes this: Talos-II is in pain, but it is also trying to heal, and the job is not to “control” the land but to understand it and help it recover. Mr. Dolly signs off: “You’re welcome, child.”

Mr. Dolly Boards the Ship

The fourth file opens with Ardelia boarding the ship with her sample box and noticing something is missing. “Where’s Mr. Dolly…?” It is already happily wandering the ship.

The crew notices. Xaihi bows to empty space: “My sincere apologies, I did not mean to step on you, noble invisible being.” The canteen shouts “Who licked half the hotpot soup base!” Someone’s alarm has been changed to “baa baa baa”, and they are going to be late for sword practice. Yvonne runs down the hallway: “It must be a ghost! And it’s pink! Oooohhh, I’m calling dibs!”

When Ardelia arrives, she finds the commander crouched by a door, slowly holding out a hand “as if waiting for some silent consent.” Mr. Dolly looks at them for a moment, then leans in and lets their fingers sink into its wool.

Then the file runs through the crew in a string of unattributed lines that read as Mr. Dolly’s verdicts, with no names attached: a “devout sister” who “pays little mind to anything beyond the pursuit of wisdom”, a “cheerful chef” who “hides weightier thoughts behind that grin”, a girl “who dreams of being a master pugilist”, and the one “who shares my shade of pink”, who has “already found her path”. Later, Ardelia sits with Mr. Dolly on the Bridge while the ship sleeps. As for the masked one, Mr. Dolly flicks its ears and lets out a soft, satisfied “baa”, “as if saying, ‘You can trust the Endministrator.’”

Racing the Blight

Her text threads show what she is racing. In one (our translation), she messages the commander late at night after a nightmare: she missed one parameter in her data, and the Blight spread along a fault, set off a volcano, cracked the planet’s strata and broke Talos-II apart. Instead of going back to sleep she runs the numbers on four weeks of volcanic and crustal data. If the Blight keeps spreading along the rift zones, the chance of large-scale volcanic and earthquake disasters is 1.7%.

The commander thinks that sounds low. She does not. “No, that probability is already terrifying.” She is writing from the northern ice fields, where the Order of Steel Oath is escorting her to the most extreme Ætherside activity, and she asks for another squad at dawn. Volcanoes are frightening, she says, but full of life. The Blight has only withering and death, “so all I can do is race it with everything I have.” The commander answers that as long as she keeps running, they won’t stop either.

Another thread is a tour of her rock collection. A meteorite impact breccia that made a crater floor sparkle “like crushed diamonds” in the sun. A Blight-eroded tillite, the oldest record of Blight damage she knows of, which reminds her not just to record the Blight’s history but to end it. And her most treasured sample, which is not from Talos-II at all: a piece of obsidian from near the Siesta volcano. It matters, she says, because it stands for Terra.

Life on the Ship

Between surveys, Ardelia is a gentle, slightly clumsy presence on board, and her voice lines are full of small jokes at her own expense:

• The warning signs. “There are all sorts of warning signs aboard the ship and … and I keep tripping over them. I just couldn’t notice them when I’m thinking about things.”
• The snacks. “Try these. They’re Higashinese snacks that Miss Akekuri gave me. Uh, I don’t need any, actually, because … I-I had some already. Why is this unopened? Ah, umm… Miss Akekuri gave me a-another box!”
• The dark circles. “I’m definitely not working too hard. Hmm? What about the dark circles around my eyes? Oh, uh … the book was just too interesting.”
• The staff upgrade. Antal offered to turn her staff into a portable prospecting tool “with a suite of wondrous features”. If Akekuri hadn’t pulled him away after three hours, “he probably would’ve spent the entire day explaining every detail!”
• The torn clothes. “Another tear in my clothes? Oh, it’s okay, really. I can stitch it up again.”

She runs a reading group, tends the plants in the Growth Chambers, and once danced to the latest pop with Yvonne at her welcome party until the spins left her dizzy. She also returns the favor Mr. Dolly keeps doing for her. “Professor, are you alright? You look really tired. Please don’t tell me you stayed up all night again… Uh-uh! No ifs or buts. It’s rest time now.” And on a walk: “You’re always out in the front, like you’re trying to shield us from whatever danger’s ahead… Maybe … you don’t have to go so fast. We’re right here with you, and we want to help too.”

A Reconvener With No Past

The darker thread in her files is quiet. Her first file calls her a reconvener, and her voice line about Rhodes Island explains what that left her with: “I had no blood relations, childhood, nor past to call my own, but Rhodes Island taught us how to live and understand ourselves. Professor, Rhodes Island is my home … and they all told me that it was yours as well.”

Read that way, the girl at the shelter was right in a way she could not know. Ardelia’s health was given to her, not earned through recovery, which is why “I understand” rang hollow. Mr. Dolly’s answer was not to argue but to make her play. The same pattern runs through every file: when she hides in work, worry or other people’s expectations, Mr. Dolly breaks something and she finds her way back to what she loves.

For how reconveners work across the roster, see our breakdown of whether Endfield characters are the same as the originals.

What the Files Don’t Say

• Whose reconvener she is. Her files never name an original. Players often connect her to Eyjafjalla from Arknights, because of the volcanology, the Caprinae ears, the Leithanian music and the Siesta obsidian, but no line in the files confirms it.
• What Mr. Dolly actually is. It is not the Sovereign, and it is “a flock of Dollies”. The files never call it a sheep, never explain why it is invisible, and never show it speaking in the profiles, though her text thread has messages from her account that are clearly not hers.
• Who the crew in Mr. Dolly’s verdicts are. The devout sister, the cheerful chef, the would-be pugilist and the other pink girl are never named.
• Who changed the alarm or licked the hotpot. The file lists them among the shouts after Mr. Dolly boards, but never pins them on it. It is a fair guess.

Further Reading

• Ardelia’s operator page, with her kit, builds and the damage calculator.
• Endfield characters vs the originals, for what a reconvener is.
• Yvonne lore, the scientist who called dibs on the pink ghost.
• Xaihi lore, who apologized to the invisible being.
• Akekuri lore and Antal lore, her snack supplier and her three-hour staff consultant.
• Endfield lore hub: every operator backstory and our story Shorts.