Carl's Doomsday Scenario, Chapters 8-11

commissioning this episode. Yeah. Look, I think that in terms of storytelling this is valid and works really well and all of that. But I also would like it registered with everybody that anytime characters are made to eat something alive and wriggling, I won't be here for it, and it will never change. I will never suddenly be like,

you know what, this time it was great. Nope. There is a point in the Red Rising series where somebody brings in a bucket full of cockroaches into snake and it's a hazing ritual and they have to eat them. And the woman grabs the snake right away and just bites its head off, and as they are scooping up handfuls of cockroaches, bros, Like she was smart to grab that fucking snake. Immediately she knew what she was doing, because these cockroaches are not it. And you know, when

you're jealous of the snake, that's pretty bad worms. And then they take over his body and it's all so horribly uncomfortable, and I really what I liked about this, And I know I'm jumping ahead, but you know how I do. I think that's why we're here at this point,

So I'm not apologizing anymore. But the way that it is described how it feels when they make him talk is really effective because I feel like so much of the time, the physical feeling of it is overlooked and it is just focused on the overall like violation of a feeling, you know, of like they've taken over and I can't believe I'm not in control, but it's very much like they are wrapped around my vocal cords and this hurts so bad, which I kind of appreciated.

But yeah, so I don't care for it at all. I don't like it. Let's start with chapter eight, where we get an update from Brandon, and this was so interesting. First, just a touch base with the state of the cat tree. It is assembled. So I thought that shit was going to hang around her ages and that he wasn't going to assemble it. But it's done, and I must say, I'm a little impressed that you took care of that

so quick, buddy. I'm a little bit proud of you. Also, I could see, after what he said about we don't risk our lives for our pets, that perhaps he might feel a bit guilty and be jumping on assembling that cat tree a little sooner than usual, just because he feels like he sort of bows or something. But I don't know that that's true. It's not mentioned. I also lit the cheap candle for her. It filled the small

rented room with the scent of home. I watched Donut for a bit, and I could tell what she was doing. She wasn't really asleep, she was just closing her eyes and pretending that she was back home in her favorite spot. This really got me, you guys, there was like just that closing your eyes and pretending a thing. I think all of us, at some point in our lives do this because scent is such a particular you know, it's so closely linked with memory more than any other sense.

And I know that for me, there are moments where, like my mother used to burn this particular type of balsam pine incense when I was a kid, and she burned it in the winter in general, but on Christmas especially, and also at Christmas every year she would make this gorgeous walnut stuffed cinnamon braided bread that she would get up and put in the oven before anybody else was awake, so we'd wake up and it would smell like cinnamon and that balsam incense, which has a very wood smoke

sort of smell, and the combination of those fragrances is

so embedded in my brain and the other. Like a few Christmases ago, I baked cinnamon rolls and I had lit the incense, and I just had a moment of like, oh wow, you know, and if I hadn't already been awake and busy, I could definitely see myself climbing back into bed and closing my eyes and pretending that I'm six years old and just for a second, somebody else has taken care of all of the cooking and baking for the holidays, and somebody else is out there getting

me oven started. You know, just let yourself be there for a moment, and especially, you know, having that sort of feeling of nostalgia just because you'll never be that age again is hard enough. But having that sort of nostalgia because that place is gone and you will never see earth again in like the same way, that is a kind of loss that it's impossible for me to even really understand. So I feel like I'd be doing this every night. I feel like I would be, you know,

going in very hard for the dissociation treatment myself. So they go out and they meet Gordo, well they have met him before, but like I'm saying, meat, because like this is the real Gordo. Don'ut says, I need my breakfast and you need to brush me, and he says, hold your horses, you blow hard. I need to freshen up a bit. I'll get you fed, don't worry, and you can brush yourself. Princess, Well, I never Carl do something. Mordecai teach you the finger breaking trick. Finger breaking. No,

he made me a potion. I told him I didn't quite feel myself since you two arrived, and he offered to makes me a draft using a few things behind my bar, something that allowed me to regain my dignity. It's not right taking advantage of my kind nature like that. And Mordecai, as they find out later, that potion apparently like did kind of bring him back to himself. And I don't know if he did that on purpose to make it seem like, yeah, that's what it was for,

or if it accidentally worked or what. But the purpose of it was actually to knock Gordo out so that he could go and get the newsletter they get and Bopka's and shopkeepers don't have access to the feed, so they get a physical newsletter to each recapp Once he passed out, I went into the back so I could read the brief. I also stole a few items for potions.

I don't have an inventory like you do, so take this and he hands them over a bunch of herbs and stuff and he apparently this is not technically against the rules. They can't engage in direct battle with mobs, but everything else they want to do as a manager is fine. The brief is regional and it warned of a potential major battle event happening in this area today or tonight. And he's like, it's probably an elite friend. I need you guys to eat and get the fuck out,

and Carl says okay. And as soon as he says just okay, I was like, Yeah, this isn't gonna happen. I was just like, Carl is agreeing to do what he has told. They are about to leave, and it's too late already. I said it last episode, and I I was like, you're in it. I don't know how, I don't know what she's going to do, but you're part of it, and there's no backing out. And I know that we're just getting to see you agree without arguing, so that we can see you caught up very shortly,

so the update from Brandon. None of the residents can choose human lest they remain in their current condition, and there is a lot of pushback. The ones with cognitive issues have to pick some really weird races in order to remain viable. I'll tell you all about it later. I stayed human, Chris and Immani did not. Most of the residents are still level one, but you would not believe the loop boxes they got for hitting the third

floor without killing anything or dealing any damage. They are all getting legendary pacifist boxes, along with a ton of other ones. It's ridiculous how much magical gear we now have. Some of these bastards are going to be more powerful than Immani pretty soon. Anyway, Mistress Tiata says, we're likely pretty far from you now. I just wanted to thank you again for your help. I hope we see each other again. And you, guys, this is so incredibly fascinating

to me. Do you understand how much I want to see them choosing their races?

hoping that we are going to see them again. I don't feel like all of them would still be alive and that we would be hearing from them if we weren't going to be getting an update, and I mean an in person this is an update, but like an in person moment with them to I'm imagining this is like sort of preparing us for when we meet them and realizing like, maybe these aren't enemies, even though they looked like a very weird motley crew of extremely powerful people.

But yeah, this is just really Can you imagine being older and in an aging body to a point where you're thinking you're like definitely gonna die because of the situation that you're in, and then you are given the opportunity to change race and jump into a brand new, completely otherworldly body and drop all of the struggle that you've been having with your regular human body, like the drive to stay human, as we have heard, is pretty strong in most people. So I get why there's pushback

on that. But I also you know, I was saying how it would be difficult for me when I was making the decision. I don't know what I would choose, and like, it didn't occur to me that the body you pick is going to be I'm assuming immaculate to start with. You know, if you're ninety seven years old, but you pick a dragon born creature, I'm assuming you aren't in the shitty ninety seven year old equivalent of

a dragon born body. Now granted, I'm assuming a dragon born body would be like still in prime shape at ninety seven, but you get what I'm saying. It never really entered my mind that if if you start, like, if you choose to remain human, you're staying in the human body you have. You're not getting upgraded to like prime version of human. So if you pick another race, are you getting the best option for that race, the

best possible model? I would assume, so, right, So you know, like I said, I was really really struggling with what would I pick. I now thinking through this aspect of it, I would definitely not remain human. Like it would be very hard to get to step away from the body that I've been in. But I'm at an age at forty where I'm just starting to really see the like wear and tear and the effect that it has on

my overall performance anymore. And it's sobering. So to ACTU be able to pick a different body and start from like a really good solid state. I mean, I just don't think that's something I could resist. And like, there are plenty of races that are close enough to human that I think I would still feel okay, and it wouldn't you know, I don't have to do something as incredibly bonkers as what's her name Lucita Lucia. I don't

need to do something that intense. Obviously, there are going to be things that are a temptation to do for the stats, but like, I don't know, this just didn't enter my mind, and I really I'm just riveted. I really am. So this is when he uh, and here's here's my thought here. I think that maybe Carl has made a little mistake. First, he says, I thought about telling him about Agatha, but decided I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to put anything in writing fair,

smart move agree. I also gave him a piece of advice, the same advice Odette had given us. If they weren't done yet and somebody had the manager ability, he needed to talk them into choosing it. Now. I don't know if he phrases it in the writing as Odette told us that we should do such and such, or you need to talk them into it or find a way, you know. I don't know. It's not we aren't shown the message from Carl verbatim. We are given the little

summary that he chooses to share with us. So when I say that, I'm worried he might have made a mistake. What concerns me is whether or not this message could be seen by Mordecai, and if he will find out that he was tricked into this. I genuinely do not know if that's of concern, but it gave me pause. I'll just say that. So this is when they take off. They are heading out of the city. We need to stay far away from those assholes. Is you have been stunned,

you have been paralyzed, you have been rendered unconscious. Why do you gotta get killed? You ain't so little as mice I didn't bounce you hard. And later on he mentions that that was a quote from of Mice and Men. I genuinely get my of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath mixed up terribly. But Lenny, is this quote right?

When it was read in the audiobook? I thought that it was the actual person who had stunned them saying that, And I was sort of like, this sounds familiar, And then I thought maybe because you know, the whole thing is supposed to be basically that the human world Earth got seeded by aliens with all of our like the content that we now think of as ours wasn't really ours. It was like put there, you know. So I was sort of like, is this meant to be a reference

to the fact that that story isn't ours? You know what I mean? Like that that dialogue got put in the mouth of a character, and once I see it written down here, it's clear that was the saying it to him in his head. And he wakes up and he calls out for donut and she is not responding,

and he is beginning to freak out. Immediately, No, I don't want to be alone, And I just that was like one of those that hits you really hard, because as a reader, I am confident she's fine, you know, like I'm coming at this from a she has got lot armor and is probably not ever going to die in this series. And I might be wrong about that, but I feel confident enough that I'll just say it.

But putting myself in Carl's shoes, there is absolutely no reason why you would assume that she's still alive, you know, in this universe, Like, why would you think they'd keep the cat around? I really understood that panic when I thought about it. From that perspective, the AI seemed to think I was about to die. It was kind of a fucked up seemed for the AI to quote, but it almost felt like it was supposed to be soothing. Carl Mordecai, I just woke up. I don't know what happened.

I don't know where Donut is. I don't know where I am. Oh, thank the gods. You tied up in a cage in a web. I'm on a couch. I'm not tied up, and I still have all my stuff. It's dark in here, though I can't see anything. Okay, I can see Donut is alive. I can't see where she is, and if she's let's see when I checked the notifications, and I'd received three achievements, one forgetting stunned,

a second forgetting paralyzed, and a third new achievement. Lazarus, you have been hit with and survived an offensive spell that was higher than level fifteen. The fact that you are not a quivering stain of meat on the dungeon floor right now is testament to your sheer luck. It's either that or you're banging the producer reward. You've received a platinum Lucky Bastard box. And here's signet and she's got her hand on his thigh, which startles him quite

a bit. And she says, you were leaving, but you told me that we were going to meet. You promised that you were going to come back, and you were running away. I've got donut. She's asleep, and I even saved the dinosaur. I will let you see her on the way out, but you are going to participate in this the way that you promised. I was ready to just kill you, but I'm gonna give you another chance. I felt her palm rustle unnaturally as something moved by just under her skin. You guys, that is the most

unnerving shit I ever heard of my life. It's like, it's not just that something is under her skin moving around, which I'm trusting is one of the tattoos, but it's the fact that, like it's under her palm, which we have all seen the special effect of something under somebody's skin, but I feel like it's usually reserved for under the arm, like the forearm, or maybe even under the face, you know,

someplace near the neck. There is something about it being under her hand that took it to a different level for me and made it just And then there's the fact that it's dark, so he can feel it, but he can't see it. And even if it weren't dark, her hand is on him, so if it were on her palm, he couldn't see it then either. And that it reminded me of being like in murky water and you feel something around your ankles, but there's no possible

way to tell what it is. You just are aware I'm not alone in this water and have to fucking trust that it's just a carp and not an alligator, you know. Oh my god, I hate it. I hate it so much. Oh, Michael says, I want to commission The Wandering Inn, but I would be worried Natasha wouldn't enjoy it. It takes like three thousand pages to really get going. My god, Rob says, I think she'd have to tough it out the first book, but by the time you get to the Horns and Rioka, it's pretty engrossing.

My wife's just finished the last audiobook and she's dying for more. Does feel like it would be of Natasha's Alley, but it is so long and it'd be tough in this format. Michael says. Andrea Parsnow is stepping away as the narrator after books sixteen Jesus, which is devastating. Hope her successor can step into those massive shoes. I hear Andrea's voice even when I'm reading the future chapters on

the web. There are also a lot of chapters where not a lot happens, so I'm not sure how Natasha would handle that in the fifty pages per episode thing. But inability to talk isn't really her issues, so I might be worried about nothing. Thinks that's what I'm good at. Well, you know, I'm game to try whatever you want to try. But I also reserve the right to hate it and sure money, so let me know. So she talks about the spell that she cast on Donut, being called water lily.

It puts you to sleep and you don't wake up until I cancel the spell. If I die, she dies too, which is extremely awful. When she said that, I was just like, oh fuck. So he goes and sees Donut and is struck while she is asleep here at how completely helpless she looks. Mango is wide awake and jumping around in the cage and freaking out. And he goes and like sniffs over her and tries to wake her up, and of course she doesn't move. We can't leave Donut here.

She will remain. No fuck you, I said, reaching to pick her up. A health bar appeared. The moment I lifted her, it started quickly falling. Karl, I would return her immediately to her place. A water lily must not be removed lest it die. And he puts her down

and it begins to go up again. This in particular, You know, there are all sorts of properties I have read or watched where there is a person who is struck by a sleeping spell given a sleeping, draft, to drink whatever, and almost always it's possible to move that person. They get carried along and brought to somebody who can help, or brought on whatever journey they're on until they can

find somebody who can help. It was there was just something about the fact that not only is she asleep, not only is she tethered in life to signet, but that she has to stay in this location particularly that felt so limiting that I was just like, this really fucking blows. And he tells Mango, you have to stay here and protect her. Do you understand me? And it seems like he does, I think. So he checks in with zeb here and is like, I need you to help. I explained what I wanted her to do. She told

me it was impossible. I told her to try anyway, And I had a suspicion that it was going to be something about talking to the producers and writers of the show, which is what it ends up being. So let's see, why are we doing this? Why do you attack the circus every day? And she says, I'm the only one that wasn't altered by that poisonous cloud. And Grimaldi got the worst of it and he's like I thought, you loved him, and she's like I do. And he saved me when I was a child and raised me.

And then eventually, as I got to be older, I started to see him as more than a father, and I was like, ew, I hate it. You have to understand how horrible it was. The cataclysm Scolependra's poison cloud was a nine tier attack. It attacked you in nine different ways. The lucky ones simply died, the others were transformed, all in different ways. Grimaldi was more than just the owner. He was also the circus's ring leader. We were nearing the end of a show and the cataclysm came. He

stood in the middle of the center ring. The others were all out there taking their bow. He transformed into the vine. All the others in the tent, no matter how they transformed, were soon infected with the mold covered parasites. This put them under Grimaldi's control. They do as he says, and if they die, the spores returned to the vine and they are reborn the next day. So why did you survive and the others didn't? She didn't answer my question.

Last night I cast my spell expecting you to perish tonight, I am putting my faith in you. So the fact that he asks why didn't you get caught up in it too? And she doesn't answer, I have to assume is because the writers don't want her to ask that question, because that leads to answers that they don't want, they're not ready for yet. So she tells him the whole point of me capturing Heather was because she would kill

who I was going to use as a sacrifice. But I think that tonight you will be able to kill her, and we get the most horrific description you guys. She appeared to have once been a black bear. She wore a tattered pink clown hat and a pleated clown rough around her neck, both of which appeared to be physically attached to her body. She had no skin on her face, Her two front paws had been transformed to white worms, like her claws had been replaced with mobs. Even in sleep,

they moved and undulated. But most absurd of all was the bear's two back legs, which had a pair of roller skates attached to them. She also wore a pink tutuo. I really can't the way that I felt sick like the whole. I really appreciate the fact that Carl is just as horrified and like gut sick about this as I am. And we get the you know, description of her somewhere in their deep, deep down as a spark of the old Heather, the beloved Bear had moments of

lucidity as she runs down her terrified prey. In those brief moments, she thinks, good, I've always hated all u assholes anyway. Which, Yeah, anytime that you've got like animals that are trained for the circus, I always get my hackles raised because, like, it's perfectly possible that animal was

treated well when it was trained. But most people are lazy and they want immediate results and they want to make money, and they will be really awful, and sometimes they will not think that they're being awful, which is also a difficult part where you're watching and you're like, this is clearly mistreatment and the person's like, what what do you mean? So her just wanting to kill human beings?

After that fair he gets in touch with Mordecai about this and he's like, look, the females are really they're more dangerous. Use your shell as much as you can. Don't let her hug you. I don't know about the worm clause or what the fuck that is. And the worms, as he begins to face up against her begin to get longer and longer, and then spread to the ground. I caught glints of actual bear claws at the end of the pause. I sense the forward movement before I

saw it. I'd only looked over my shoulder for a second, but the bear had had the distance between us. And eventually there's this point where the worms touch his skin. I felt them start to burrow into my body. Yes, yes, this is new flesh, primal flesh, delicious, flesh, strong, he is Do we taste this? He will feed our clowns well. The clowns hunger primal. They are ravenous, and now they know of your flavor. Uh no, okay, denied. Mm hmm, thumbs down. And this invasion begins to like It freaks

him so bad. It's felt like someone had taken their dirty fingers, sunk them directly into the meat of my brain and dragged I would die before I let that happen again. Which you actually step into doing that voluntarily, buddy, But that's for later. Long story short, he decides that he's going to use this, this weapon that came in the Lucky Bastard box, and it either turns into a level fifteen fireball, which will kill Heather, or it will

splatter her with strawberry custard, which will heal her. It hits and it's custard, but instead of healing her back to her possessed worm form, instead it heals her back to the way she looked before being possessed, and the roller skates fell off the bear's feet as she struggled, so did the hat. The skin on the bear's face formed. She remained on all fours like a normal bear. Her tattered black fur held a silver sheen, especially evident around

her muzzle. By healing it, I'd killed the worms. The bear let out a howl. Mournful and afraid. She sat down and lowered herself painfully to the ground. The last of the boiling custard sizzled away. The bear looked at me, all of the fight out of her. This was Heather, the real Heather, free of the parasites that had been controlling her. She looked at me with her newly formed eyes ended. Those bitter eyes said, I should never have lived this long. She made a quick, pained whimper and

her eyes closed. I really like how this there makes practically every victory feel like it isn't one at all. It's not a win. It's very sad and awful. And it says without the worms and mold, her body was breaking down fast and her health bar is lowering because she's like aging in catch up time. He forms a fist and smashes in her head with two punches. I finished her off by pressing my foot against her skull and crushing her skull caved in easily. He gets winner

some achievements. He's gone to level fifteen. But it's just all so awful. It really does not feel like a victory, you know. And the blood goes to Signet because she was the sacrifice. Carl when talking to Mordecai, is like, for sure she wanted me to die, and that she'd cast that sacrifice spell on me again. She probably did, Like I said, the system lets some fudge with reality when you're dealing with the leads, which is why we

stay away from them. I thought that was interesting. The idea that she is claiming Heather is the sacrifice does she believe that when she says it, do the writers just make her say that, Like, I don't. I wonder how much she even gets to how much is she lying and how much is she just being played because she's a character, you know. And he is looking into a way to break the water Lily curse. But there's like specific ingredients he needs that he has to travel

to get, so he lootes her. There's a map upgrade, and he begins to see a bunch of other red dots gathering around. Signet appeared. Wow, I said, taking in the sight. She's got her summoned minions with her. The smallest of the monsters, a floating head thing, was about ten feet tall. And what he starts to realize is that all of the creatures that are her tattoos are two dimensional and is sort of like, I don't know if these things are really going to be able to

do anything. They look like paper, you know. And all I could think was, like, Carl, it's very clear that this bitch is nobody to fuck with. Do you really think that her guys can't fight? Get real? Come on now, please, Blood and Ink elemental summoned minion of Serena's signet level fifty. Their potential realizes heavily on too many factors to list here, kind of like humans. If you have to guess, odds are good. The one you're looking at right now is

probably hot garbage. Oh god, So let's see. I'm trying to jump ahead. Oh right, follow, or you get smash. The middle head said, you can talk. I can smash too. I do enjoy that they can talk. I have to assume it's going to be only in like little fragmentary sort of speech like that, but it's very fun. So she tells him, I think you freed Heather, like she was stuck in this loop and I, you know, getting

to see her released from this. Thank you. And she says, we usually push through the defenders, and this is the strongest we've been in a while. It's the final defense I need help with. And the spell Mordecai describes as ink marauder, and he gives a description of it. I don't see the producers allowing her to blow that wad early and blow that wad this early in the story,

assuming that is her most powerful spell. So I'm going to jump into because you know, I've only got like twenty minutes left, and there's kind of a there's kind of a lot here that we get into. Mordecai says, I know the recipe now. It's just satchtowed extract mix mixed with a standard healing potion. I should have known. Negates all niad sleep effects and curses. Simple. Do you have that stuff? Not in this town, but it's common enough I can buy in an alchemical market in a

medium or large town. So I'm assuming that Carl just does not believe that Signet is going to be able to I think that it's like he's trying to just have a backup plan in case he dies, that Doughnut will at least still have a chance. But I think more than anything, he is just suspecting that, like Signet will keep her word about bringing Donut back. Maybe I was just surprised that he was trying to find another way to save her when I was like, you were

told how to save her, do that, you know? And then I was sort of like, Natasha, you are very confident because you are reading a book and this is the main character, and you're like, yeah, you'll do it because you're the main character. But he doesn't know that. He doesn't know he's in a book. So Zev then gets in touch The producer didn't want to speak with me.

He's waiting to see how this plays out. My boss made me run your request past the syndicate AI referee, and it said they'll only allow this under very strict circumstances. I can't and they can't give you any help whatsoever, Believe it or not, though this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened. In fact, later Zev stay tuned, I'll need you in a bit. I was like, ah, look, you are busy. I completely appreciate that, but also I really wanted to know what she was about to say,

very very badly. So they get into the tent and there is a mist around them, and Signet says, damn. I'd hoped that we would be able to overcome the protection this time. This is where our fight usually ends. There's magic here protecting the exterior. I've been banished, so I can't go in. My minions can't go in. The outside is impenetrable, but not the interior. If we break down the tents, the spell will disperse and we can finish this some of these clowns will carry big top tickets.

Find one and brandish it. It will allow you to go inside. The tickets are magical. They will promise you safe passage within the tent as long as you don't enter one of the three rings. You need to go in there and collapse the tent. There are three poles. You must break each one in turn. I take it these poles are in the middle of the rings. What about the vine also in the ring, the center ring. This setup was designed to be completed by a group

of at least three crawlers, not a solo player. There was no feasible way I could do this, not with a straight up fight. So he's already got a big top ticket in his inventory and he's like, all right, here we go. He goes in and it's just a you know, the I don't want to say typical because I always feel like that word sounds insulting in a way that I don't really intend. But you know, like the spooky circus thing has been done, the decrepit, fucked

up circus thing. We've seen this sort of thing before, So that's what we're getting, except that there's the added vine aspect. With everything being corrupted by this mind control worm vine thing, and he's walking inside and thinking about how much he hates clowns, holds the ticket out in front of him, and he wore a brightly colored but filthy pink and blue gown with a dirty white ruffle around his neck. Clammy the clown level nine, and he

was a tumbler. Kids always love the fat clowns. They're jolly, they're happy, they make you laugh, and that he doesn't do any of that, but is happy in jolly when he's eating you. So he holds up the ticket, gets Clammy to back up. As a kid, one of my earliest memories is going to the circus with my mom on my fourth birthday. She temporarily left my dad and run away to her parents' house all the way down

the middle of nowhere southern Texas, dragging me along. It was during that time she'd taken me to the circus. It hadn't been one of the major traveling circuses like Ringling Brothers, but a small ghetto one. Anyone who has ever lived in the America Southwest knows exactly what I'm talking about. Even little kid me had registered that this

was a low rent version of the real deal. They'd had clowns and acrobats, plus a bunch of other weird attractions, like guys on motorcycles riding around the inside of a sphere, and women juggling chainsaws. They had also had animals. I remember camels and dancing poodles, and a clown who walked

around with a small monkey on his shoulder. They had an elephants or giraffes, but the the main attraction had been a crusty old tiger who'd sat in the middle of the ring while a woman in a leotard twirled firesticks around it. Most of these memories came back to me years later from photos. I'd found the shoe box with those pictures more than a decade later, hidden under my parents' bed. This was after another birthday of mine, the one when I was left alone in the world.

The box had been my mother's, her secret, filled to the brim with photographs and ticket stubs and a deflated balloon. The items were only of that time, the few weeks of our lives when she'd run away. You guys, this got to me so bad. I am not trying to

say that my father was like Carl's father. But my father married my mother when she was sixteen years old and he was twenty eight, So right there, I think you can see the power dynamic was very off, and when I was little it was he was extremely controlling. He came from a very misogynist upbringing, and the expectation was that my mom keep house and stay home and

live to serve him. And in the early years of their marriage, they didn't even have a phone, never mind a car, so my mom was completely cut off from the entire world. Combined with the fact that my father was a coke dealer so he had very questionable friends, she was really lonely and isolated. And it wasn't until I was older that I really began to look back at some of the outings that I had with my mom, and I began to realize she was squirreling money away.

She was like expected to give him her whole paycheck, but she had opened a bank account secretly, and she was having some of each of her paychecks siphoned into that account. Because my dad was so controlling about money, and so there were times where we would go out and do things and I was told not to tell him about it afterward, and I didn't. I was a very careful kid in that way. I think I understood the danger of it, you know. And like I said, my dad wasn't like Carl. He wasn't a bully, and

he didn't hit me. He broke down a bathroom door when I was eighteen, and that one was really scary trying to get to me. But that was the really bad time, and otherwise there was no hitting. It was just always the threat that he might hit that was held over our heads kind of, you know. But he had grown up in an abusive household, and I think

he was trying very hard not to do that. But this concept of a woman desperately attempting to find and hold on to joy and it always having to be a secret and something that she does against the wishes of her husband is just a really really familiar thing for me, and it just struck a chord, like you know, it just it's one of those that you look back on once you're older, and you can't help but lament how many things could have been done differently that might

have kept everybody from being so unhappy. And if my dad had been different and if my mom had been different if either of them had made different choices, if my mother's parents hadn't allowed her to get married at sixteen. You know, like they're just.

of not being afraid. Over the years, I'd catch similar sense in places such as the country fair, county fair, sorry, or carnivals, or whenever I visited a place with livestock. But this was a different, oddly specific aroma that had been indelibly imprinted on me as a four year old, a I'd sometimes remember as the path I could have taken, the world I could have lived had my dad not found us and taken us back. It was a scent I'd been chasing all of my adult life. It's funny

how this happens. Sometimes we associate smells with memories, and when that memory is triggered, we're momentarily pulled away no

matter the current circumstances. That's exactly what happened here. As I stepped into the most fucked up circus in the history of the universe, I was surrounded by bedlam, by unorganized chaos and clutter, by one what the fuck after another, and that smell just came out of nowhere, smacking me like a goddamn baseball bat and making me think of my fourth birthday party, when I had been with my mom and visited the circus, and I'd laughed and clapped

and dropped my hot dog onto the dirty bleacher before picking it up and eating it, even though it tasted like dirt. My mom had cried, had been crying, and up until that very moment when the smell hit me for the second time, I'd always thought she'd been crying about the Tama hot dog. And it made me mad, so fucking mad. I had so little of my mom, so little memory I could call my own. It was one of the few things this fucking place couldn't possibly

take from me. Yet that was exactly what had just happened, and it was so unexpected so violent, so final, that I no longer cared about the stupid plan or of trying to save my life. I just wanted to tear it all down. And then it gets interesting. But you don't want to hear about any of this shit, do you.

It's not important, Not when we were weeks past the Earth's expiration date, not when I was standing there like an idiot as I watched a unicycling woman clown roll past me while greedily devouring what looked like a goblin leg, and I was just like, no, I really do want to hear about the shit. This is exactly what I want. I want way more about the details of your life before you got here. It is important, This is it. This is the whole thing. I was like, completely like, no,

Carl wrong, incorrect, And I found it interesting. The idea that he's angry at this place for yanking this memory out. It didn't occur to me, because again, it's hard to put yourself in his place in such a bonker situation. But something that is one of the most beautiful, joyful moments of your life and a very very like tiny handful of your mom and a place like this manages to pull it out of you. It is obscene. So yeah, no,

I get it. And it made me think of, you know, earlier we had donut with this candle, and it just is interesting how much scent and memory were a theme in these chapters. So he's looking around trying to get oriented, and he finally spots the vine, which he had thought was like part of the tent, and when he turns and sees what it is, he's just like, how did

I just fucking not even see this thing? Because it looks more like a shrub And it goes all the way to the ceiling and swallows up the whole center pole, and he's like, as he's standing there, an achievement pops up. You can't fight city Hall, but you can sure die trying. You have discovered a city boss. Just an FYI is of at this moment, not a single crawler has faced a city boss and survived reward. A lot of people are probably gonna watch you die. That's a better prize

than most of us get. And he's thinking to himself, like, you can do this. You've got a fucking plan, ring Master Grimaldy pastiferous Vine. This is an elite level eighty five city Boss, and we get the story about Grimaldi and his family being so important to him and how he is using his power to keep his family safe and alive. And after the description ended, nothing changed. Nobody

moved to attack. The vine didn't move at all. He comes across an ogre called a Pallen the Mighty, and he's supposed to be scooping ice cream, but he holds out an ice cream cone filled with worms, and Carl like when he says, like I try not to be sick, I walk away. All I could think ice was, oh boy, oh no, he's gonna eat these fucking worms. Like I just knew as soon as they showed up. I was just like, he's gonna fucking do it, or somebody's gonna make him do it. Either way, he's eating that cone.

It's happening. I just you know immediately it. Yeah, so Chekhov's worms, And what we find out is that the pactiferous line thing is, first of all, it's a trope that Mordecai doesn't think much of, and they're easy to kill if you know the trick, and they like to drink blood, and basically, you drink poison, you let it drink your blood and it poisons itself, but it does take something like twenty minutes for it to die. And if you drink the antidote and it drinks more of

your blood, it doesn't die. So you've got to find a way to like poison it, revive yourself, but be out of its reach so that it can't heal itself. And let's see, I'm trying to find does it kill all the other mobs depends. Some immediately go insane, some drop dead, some don't realize anything is changed. So you poison yourself, dribble some blood on it, and it's dead. It won't know, but if it suspects, you need to

be careful, or it can save itself. If you've given yourself an antidote and you give the plan an equal amount of the same blood, it will cure it. You can't just pour an antidote potion on there. It has to be the same blood, so be careful. If it knows you poisoned it, it'll try to get monsters to bleed you. So he has to lower the guard that he has against poisoning by taking off the cloak that

he is wearing. And so when he drinks the poison, It's like, has a really immediate, awful effect that he was not prepared for, really, and he pours it onto the vine the blood, and then sits and waits and gets in touch with Zev and she says, oh, my god's Karl, the net is going crazy. Only a few people understand what you just did, but word is getting out. Your numbers are going up and up. It's amazing, both of these dramas playing out at the same time. He

responds with Zev, are you listening? And guys, when I tell you that in that moment, I was like, you need to ask her what she means by both sir, the way that I zeroed in on her saying that, and he just didn't seem to care. It is so funny how in the moment I will be obsessed with a weird detail that really just probably it's smarter that Carl doesn't get distracted this easily and immediately is like, are you listening to me? Zeb, I have a thing

I'm doing here, Please help. He's focused, but my ADHD brain was like, what does she mean and immediately started to veer off on this other whole thing, which, h yeah, so this is when he basically talks to the producers of Vengeance of the Daughter and just like I am going to hold your whole shit hostage if I let this thing die and Grimaldi dies and everything goes to hell, assuming that that is like your plan, and that you have set this shit up, that that poll the third

pole is going to fall and maybe even break on its own, because you don't need all three broken. You just want singing it to get in. And that's my purpose, is that I die on behalf of her getting to where she needs to go. But I think you should listen to my proposal. You can't help me because that's against the rules, and that's fine. But if we happen to be on your show and make it to the sixth floor, you know we are bringing your ratings way up. I think you could look at your numbers right now

and see how high they are. We will sign an exclusive agreement to only complete elite themed quests on the sixth floor that are directly associated with Vengeance of the Daughter. I'm told new programs such as yours rarely receive anything like this. Most fail right out of the gate. You probably went out of your way to place the circus near me and donut in the hopes we'd stumble upon it. Now, imagine the ratings if we continue to participate in the storyline.

And he's like, if you don't agree, I'll heal this vine and I will just chill and do fucking nothing, and your eager viewers will watch me do fuck all and just talk out loud about what I think might be going to happen on the show, and that's it, and everybody is going to be real pissed. And he says it'll be Heraldo and al Capone's vault all over again. I have no idea what this is like. Obviously, Haraaldo got a hold of access to Capone's vault. It was a big build up, and maybe they opened it and

there was fucking nothing in it. That's the best I can come up with. But the idea that they would like be unaware of what's in the vault and hype it up is so hilarious to me, Like nobody decided to check first, Nobody decided to make sure it was anything bonkers. They would never today like that would just it would just not happen that way. Maybe on a TikTok, but on like a fucking syndicated TV show, like absolutely never.

Oh my god, Michael Haralda had a special where he was opening Copone's fault and yes, there was nothing inside. I absolutely cannot I would crumble to Dust. I would absolutely fucking die. Oh my god, Michael. It was like an hour of him awkwardly trying to fill airspace while going from empty area to empty area. Oh my god, they opened it at the beginning of the episode. Honey, that is not how you do things, oh my god.

Like what you do with something like that is just in case there's nothing good, You get like a Capone scholar in the place to encase there is stuff for them to inform you what each thing is or the significance of it. And if you don't, then you can talk through with them why it's empty, what possibly could have happened, who could have emptied it, go through the theories like you need some Oh my god, that is just reorganizing anyway. I'm so sorry, I'm overtime and I'm

like not even quite at the end here. So long story short, they agree, like basically, if you can get your ass out of this, They're not really agreeing, but they're like agreeing tentatively, and he's like, that doesn't sound good enough. I feel like I really need something on paper, and she's like, no, it's official, and he's like, h okay, okay, fine. So he heals the Boss. He uses the Wisp Barmer spell book and we get the description of it again.

The spell negates seventy five percent of incoming damage from magic based attacks, provides temporary immunity to mind control effects. Higher skill levels increase both effectiveness and duration. And this is what he dawns before he eats the worm cone. I love it. I met eyes with the Ogre who just looked at me even he seemed shocked. I've just done that, which is very funny. So he has the worms speaking in his head as he runs to go and talk to Signet. Well, first to Grimaldi. My bad.

He's talking to Grimaldi as he's making his way and he says he's thinking to himself, this is what it's like to go crazy, to lose control. No, Grimaldi answered, no, son, this is nothing like that. And there was something about that thought that like was sobering for a moment. I was just suddenly like ugh. So he goes out there Signet can tell immediately that he is possessed and thinks like,

oh God, who did this to you? And he's like, look, I took I have a spell well so that I can get you to talk to Grimaldy, And he's like, I know you want to kill me, but you need to have a couple minutes of conversation. You keep attacking because you love this place and you're trying to free them, and Grimaldy, his brain is a jumble. I can only imagine, Grimaldy,

what you were going through when this thing happened. But everybody was taken except Signet because you protected her, And now you're trying to murder each other even though you want the same thing to protect your family. The worms in my throat surged into my mouth. The sensation was like I was suddenly vomiting. She hurts the family, she has turned her back. I croaked, fucking hell. They'd physically forced me to say it. I felt blood start to drool down the side of my mouth. My throat felt

as if I'd swallowed razors. Don't do that, I gasped, Holy shit, just think it and I'll say it out loud. Ooh horrible. So he tries to plead with Grimaldy. You saw my memories, and that bear was grateful. Every time they kill somebody and eat somebody, their soul is dying. This whole thing is hopelessness. And you used to be kind. The whole thing here was that you wanted to bring joy, and you're damning the people that you wanted to protect

and love the most. And she is supposed to be down in the hunting grounds taking care of her fucking business, but she can't leave until this is done, and you can fix this for her. I have unbanished you, my love, I growled. I slammed the potion, and then I fell to my knees and started vomiting and never ending stre of dead and dying worms onto the ground. Oh my god, what's worse, the eating or the vomiting of them? The eating?

The eating's gotta be worse. So she tells him Doughnut will awaken when the sun rises, and goes into the tent. I lost something today, But if this story with the circus had a relatively happy ending, I knew I'd gained something as well. I suddenly remembered something else about that day at the circus with my mom One of the items we'd taken home from the show had been a pair of little sapling trees with the roots wrapped in nets. That was something this circus always did. They gave little

trees to all the kids. My mom and I had planted those trees in my grandparents' backyard. Years later, long after my grandparents had died, I'd looked up that house on the internet and I found the satellite images of the backyard. The trees were still there. They'd grown huge. All it takes is a little seed, my mom had said that day as we planted the trees, Just little seeds here and there, and soon enough you have a forest. And I felt a slight pang that I'd missed out

on my chance to so local a city boss. But I was also certain I wouldn't have survived the experience, which I was like, Yeah, I'm glad that it wasn't. Hey, everybody's died up until now, but you, Carl, you're going to be the first one to be. I was just waiting for it to kind of be that moment, and I was very relieved that it wasn't, even though I wouldn't have been mad about it, But it's just so

played out, you know. So he gets a quest completed and he is at level eighteen and he keeps throwing up worms, and then he thinks about Zev saying, both of these dramas playing out, and Mordecai donuts health just dropped below twenty percent. Go go now. And I had to stop reading because you guys are very mean and terrible. So I hope you're happy. I hope you're enjoying yourselves,

you sick fucks. Ah, alright, everybody, I'm over time. I've got to go, but I appreciate you all very very much, and I hope that you all will be here at the next episode.