¥

There is no ¥ in ASCII!

¥ does not exist. There is not any monster in NetHack that appears onscreen as a. The character ¥ is not part of ASCII, but requires Unicode or some other character set that supports it, so it cannot even appear in most curses library software, such as the typical tty-Unix game.

Now since ¥ is the symbol for Japanese yen, analogous to how $ is the symbol for the dollar, one might guess that ¥, if it existed in the game, would be a currency, as $ is the zorkmid; but twice now in Dudley's dungeon has ¥ appeared as a nonexistant monster.


 * 27 June 2006: The ¥ is one of the failed candidates to be Dudley's sidekick.
 * 30 November 2006: The ¥ is "Vlad the impossible", a rejected attempt at improving Vlad the Impaler.

Even earlier, one strip had ¥ being in the name of an object:
 * 22 September 2005: A dead marilith drops a ¥-shirt, not a T-shirt.

At 10 May 2004, Dudley mulled using Chinese characters to open more inventory slots. No Chinese characters ever appeared in the strip; by 18 May 2004 that idea became out. This makes ¥ a very rare instance of non-ASCII in Dudley's dungeon.