John Dough

John Dough is baked for an Independence Day celebration and comes to life when an elixir, prepared by a character described as a 'mad Arab' and intended to confer human immortality, is accidentally mixed into the gingerbread batter. The accidental admixture animates the baked figure; the presence of the elixir within his dough motivates others in the story to seek him for the elixir's supposed life-giving properties.

Described as a life-sized gingerbread man (a human-shaped baked confection). In the narrative he is baked at human scale, loses his coat-tails to birds at one point, sacrifices a hand during the story and is later fitted with a replacement hand by one of the Los. Illustrative expectation is of a human-shaped cookie made of gingerbread.

Animated by an immortality elixir mixed into his batter, John Dough displays humanlike mobility, speech, moral agency, and political capacity: he travels across fantastic locales (carried in a rocket to the Isle of Phreex and visiting the Palace of Romance and Mifket Island), befriends companions (Chick the Cherub and Para Bruin), sacrifices a hand to save a dying princess, resists repeated attempts by an antagonist to eat him for the elixir, and is later installed as King of Hiland and Loland where he enacts laws (including a prohibition on eating gingerbread more than two days old).