The Rime of the Ancient Mariner who are playing dice for the souls of the crew. With a roll of the dice, Death wins the lives of the crew members and Life-in-Death the life of the mariner, a prize she considers more valuable. Her name is a clue to the mariner's fate: he will endure a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross. One by one, all of the crew members die, but the mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew's corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces. Eventually, this
The Keys to the Kingdom butler is compared to Nestor of "The Adventures of Tintin"; a character describes Monday's Noon as exactly how she imagined Jane Austen's Mr Darcy; the Piper is a re-creation of the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin, who with his music led a population of rats from a city, later to do the same to the town's children, whose parents had refused to pay him the promised fee. The Mariner is likely a reference to the title character of the ballad "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both the mariner of the book and the one of