This is an Unspoiled Network podcast. This is spoil Me covering Dungeon Crawler Carl Book five The Butcher's Masquerade chapters five, six, seven, eight, But but them, Sorry, guys, I just got away from me for a second. In these chapters, for once, Carl's plan wasn't great. He really overestimated himself this time. There are plenty of times where his plans haven't worked out, shit's happened, But this is the first.
Time that I was like, really, dude, come now. Welcome to spoil Me.
Welcome to the show everyone. I am Natasha. Thank you very much to Jackie for commissioning this episode. The saraph EM's got a comment here in the chat. This opening bit summed up, get out there and kill kill kill Wait, no, not them. The thing is, though, it seems like they want them to do this because of the thing with the hands, so I can't even say that. It's like they go wait, not them, because they seem to be
fine with it. Michael says, imagine being donut. She thinks she's in for a nice day of relaxing grinding, and she suddenly dragged smack dab into the middle of a thousand hunters who want to kill her, and like, this is exactly what I was so worried about last episode, guys, when I said, I love that she's willing to trust Carl, no questions asked, and I'm really worried that this is
going to result in him losing the trust. And it literally she says, I am never doing one of your plans again until you explain to me what it's about to be that goes down. And I'm not mad at her for that, For the record, she is right to react this way. It just makes me really sad because I loved that that was their relationship and it's so it's like it just sucks to.
Me that it's over already.
You know, I just didn't want this for them. So let's just start at the beginning. So chapter five we get an opening, and that's like pretty much been the theme in the past couple books is that the chapter opens with like an entry from a crawler in the cookbook. I think it's sort of interesting that what we're getting into now is a little bit.
More of.
Uncertain and t where there's a mention of like they say that these are all the same floor, but it seems like that can't be true because folks previously have mentioned such and such, and we don't have those here.
There's always.
Points in the entries where they're like, things may vary, you know, your results may vary. But this is the first time that it's like we're being told a thing that is untrue. And I find that pretty interesting personally, just because why would they lie about it. This is not my saying I don't believe you, because why would they lie about it. I believe you, but I don't understand why they would lie about it.
Both of those things.
It just feels like, what advantage do they get by pretending it's the same floor design every time? And I can't think of what it could be. I really can't. I I don't know, I don't know. I'm not coming up with anything. So that has got my attention a little bit. And he mentions that the political landscape is the same, and that like the general setup is often similar, but it's just that they're details that are very different.
And he mentions Elves and also Naiads and how both of them fucking suck and if you approach them.
They will attack.
They don't give a shit, and that you know, it's like a sort of free for all with them, so it is advised to.
Leave them the fuck alone.
And the idea of like, well, these things are as bad as each other.
Why do I feel like our guys are.
Going to make the fucking Naiads and or Elves the center of some plan at some point? There's just something about this warning that had me personally going, ah, jeez, oh boy, what is that? What are we gonna do? I just I got a bad feeling about this. Michael says, I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I appreciate Matt being willing to put in characters who are more competent than Carl. Too many series in this genre feel the need to slabber all over their main characters
as the greatest genius ever. I'm so sorry. It took me a moment to understand what Michael meant by slabber all over and I get that now. You mean like they suck their main characteristick, which is very funny considering
Carl tell somebody to suck a stick this chapter. Michael also says Miriam Dom and Pony are really, really good, and I agree, Michael, this is something that I'm not sure sure if I meant to agree with them on this or not, But for the record, there comes a point in these chapters where Carl is like, it became clear to me that we needed to get away from
these weirdos as soon as possible. And I was very much like, they're just as weird as you and donut like there's a weird dynamic here for sure, but there's nothing about them that made me feel like you aren't safe with them or they don't have your back. So for me, their weirdness was extremely uninteresting and very secondary to their competence and their abilities and all of that. And the fact that Carl was just like, well, we
need to get away from these guys. I was like, Carl, all the thing is considered for somebody who is as bonkers as you are, you've got a really low threshold for weirdness in other people. Like it just felt weird to me, how because he was like this with them last time. This is not an isolated reaction for him. He just has a very extreme sort of revulsion from
all of them. Like there's Miriam at one point smiles at him, and he had been having that like warm feeling of Mom's here to save me kind of, you know, and then she smiles and reveals her teeth and he is repulsed by her, and I just kind of wanted to be like, Bro, they did this to her, though, you are being framed in a way that isn't fair on all of the wrap ups, because they have an agenda in making you not appeal to certain crawlers as
like somebody that they want to cooperate with. This is a thing that they do on purpose.
And I just.
Felt like the fact that he reacted so strongly to her teeth with like, this isn't something that she wanted. This isn't something that is like a race that she chose, and she only drinks blood from things that Prepotente has already killed because she clearly like just feels a way.
About having to do this.
I just didn't understand the intensity of his reaction to them overall, and I know that I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm sorry, but since Michael brought up Miriam and Prepotente, I just like there's just something about how harsh Carl is toward them that I was genuinely puzzled by, because they feel like really good allies to have and they have like been there more more than once for you.
And as is said later when he gets in this stupid argument with prepotente A, Miriam's like that wasn't very nice, Carl. We did save your life, and she was like dead right, you know, I I don't know. There's just Karl occasionally will have priorities in who he deems like cool to hang out with or rely on that I don't really understand because I thought it was going to be about competence and variety of abilities and whether or not they are decent people who want to do the right thing,
and these guys check all those boxes to me. So it's weird, you know it Just like I don't even know if I want to say that it's out of character exactly, because a part of me kind of wants to say it feels out of character, but he has done it consistently enough that it doesn't actually seem out of character. It's just more a strange aspect of his
character that they don't really understand. Sarah him says, maybe he just has an issue with goats, but yeah, this is Carl being a bit of a dumb dumb Michael says, maybe related to what he said about Lee, Nah, he recognized how driven incompetent she was, but he didn't think they could party together because they drive each other to murder the other. Maybe maybe that's what he meant about, just like we have to get away from these guys or else I'm gonna kill them.
Maybe it's that simple.
It just it felt much more like a judgment on their personality, like that they aren't safe. And maybe I'm just like reading that into what he said and that's not really what he meant. That's definitely possible, So okay, sorry, sorry, sorry, let's back up. Donut as we arrive in the city is just like what the fuck is going on? And
again Carl is like not telling her. I really, look, I get that part of what's happening here is that the way that they monitor the plans that the Crawlers have, Carl feels like he can't tell Donut because there's a possibility that he will be stopped, that zeb will get involved, that they'll tell him you can't do this, you know. So it's it's that there is like this difficulty in communication that means that they have to work in such a way that they don't talk out loud to each
other about it. I maintain though, that if he had really prioritized it, he could have figured it out. They have that whiteboard on the inside of the bathroom. He could have gotten Donut more on board with this plan, and frankly her like, I feel like if she had known, there's a possibility things might have gone more smoothly somehow,
you know. But I just it bothers me that he decided it felt it felt more like he was using the fact that it's difficult to communicate to make an excuse for not communicating, rather than that actually being a valid reason. It felt like he just didn't want to be bothered and kind of just wanted to do what he wanted to do. And she deserves a lot better
than that. Especially, I will remind you all, bitch is low level at this point, Like she is not in a place where he should be excluding her from the plan and just dragging her along as an accessory for somebody who has repeatedly mentioned how low level she is and that it concerns him. He's not acting like it concerns him. He's just not you know. It bothers me a lot that he keeps claiming this is something that they need to work on, but also continues to treat
her like a child. Really, either this is a priority that you really feel like you need to work on, or you don't, and it feels like you must not. It feels like that can't be of interest to you if this is still the way that you're behaving with her. So I just think that, Look, I'm just gonna say it, donuts low levels are partially Carl's fault. That's just a fact. And I'm not saying they're all his fault. I'm not,
but they're partially his fault. And the plans that they come up with often do not seem to involve utilizing her particular skill set in a way that might be like, she has her charisma at this bonker's level, and perhaps there was a way that we could have utilized that in this mix somehow, you know, But instead it just sort of feels like she didn't even have a job to do here. I correct me if I'm wrong, guys, but it seemed like he came in, he had his whole plan, and he was just sort of relying on
her as a backup for defense. But she didn't really like the one role is within the move of Predator where they both go invisible and she uses her feet her heat vision goggles.
But other than that.
It was very much like he even says, if things go bad, just go down the stairwell to the next floor. That's really shitty, bro, that you would put her in the position where if this plan that you didn't inform her of goes left, she has to skip this whole floor and go to the next one without having gotten to level up or do anything before arriving there, and you're putting her in that spot where these are her
only options. I just think that's kind of like remarkably shitty, and it just I will say, there was a moment, you guys after the episode, the podcast episode, after I wrapped on recording it, and I was thinking about what is it that Carl could possibly be wanting to go to this city for, and he asks specifically like, go take me to the stairwell.
In this city.
I was almost wondering, is he just trying to get to the stairwell to skip the floor entirely, which would have been fascinating to do as a storytelling exercise, you know, we're expecting that this floor there's going to be a whole bunch of stuff that goes down, that the story is going to go a certain way, and then maybe we just skip it entirely. I don't think that's necessarily like a good idea, but it would certainly be fascinating and there's a lot of potential within that, you know.
But it's a very different thing for him to put Dona in the position where she would be the only one doing that and possibly either leaving Carl to die or leaving Carl on this floor alone leveling up and doing a bunch of stuff. He's already i think, more than ten.
Levels ahead of her.
You know. It just it just bugged me, man. I just did not like any of this. It's really the first time that one of his plans, from like top to bottom. I felt like I was just crossing my arms and staring at him, like, this is your big idea? Are you fucking serious? And it's not like nothing in this plan works out. It does somewhat still work out. So I'm not trying to say that this was a complete disaster, but it would have been had they not been rescued.
He would have died.
I don't know what would have happened to Donut, because it seems like they were far enough away from the stairwell at that point that I don't know she could have gotten there in time.
So even the fact.
That it worked out seems like it was low key, not because of his plan.
It was despite his plan, and.
Just the I'm not used to having this kind of like doubt for me in his mind, or in.
Carl's mind.
I mean, like I expect that he has thought things through to a good degree, and it just seemed like that had not happened here at all. And I don't really know what to blame for that. If it's just that he's getting he's letting himself get so angry that that's sort of overriding his better judgment or what, you know what I'm saying, I don't know. Michael says Donut would have just joined Katya. No, Michael, I mean that Donut wouldn't have lived if they hadn't been rescued and
Carl got taken out. I don't think Donut would have made it to either the the stairwell down or out of there right then.
Maybe she would, but like they were in a really bad spot. Man.
You know, I just I am not impressed, Carl. That's what it comes down to. I am not impressed. So and the whole plan is basically that he wants to sneak in and set some bombs up. They are going to be like, He's going to be able to detonate those when he needs so he thinks he does not count on the interaction of other people in the environment with the bombs that he has to leave unattended, which it turns out lowers their stability significantly and makes them
liable to go off at a time that is not ideal. Also, what Carl does not bet on is that there are going to be traps everywhere. It's really kind of like
obvious when you stop and think about it. Of course, all of these hunters are going to be aware that they're going to be crawlers who try and come at them, So of course they have traps in place around like the main city where all of them hang out where they are drunk and completely have their guard down like of course, you know, but it doesn't occur to Carl, and he isn't good at adapting. Once he realizes that
the traps are in place. Later on, they are fleeing and he winds up running right into one of the traps, and despite having that ability that warns him, he's going too fast and he's not able to stop, so they
set one off right away. And this is the sort of thing that it's just like he just got a little too cocky and really seemed to think that he knew every bit of how this all was going to go down and didn't like consider how the people who have done this, probably many times, these hunters, how they would be prepared for exactly the kind of assault that
he's attempting to pull off here. Seraphim says, I do think it's mostly him just focus on focusing so much on hurt the people who are trying to kill us that he's overlooking a lot else, And I agree Seraphim. Michael says, they were already out out of the city right. If I recall, Carl collapsed once they got outside. He collapsed, but they were like people converging on them, so like it it could he they were not in the city proper, but like if it maybe maybe she would have been fine.
I don't know. It just feels like considering how close they came.
It just it is.
Whether or not she would have survived in the end is sort of a moot point in just that it would have been very bad for her, and he just doesn't seem to really care. Yeah, Michael says he was very lucky. The trap he set off was an alarm trap and not one of the immobilization ones. The people converging on them were Miriam Domin prepotente, right, that's what I remember. Well, there was somebody firing on him with
bolts that was like under an invisibility spell. And I can't recall if once they leave, once they get outside of the city limits, is that person not able to pursue them further or I don't remember exactly how that works. But anyway, so he sets this up and what he has, what he decides to do is he wears the Ring of Divine Suffering, which I genuinely was a little startled by. I don't know about you guys, but I I didn't think that his plan was going to involve that ring as.
The first step.
I was expecting if he ever had to use this, that it was going to be something he got pushed to and did against his own better judgment, knowing that it was maybe a mistake, but that he was in a really desperate spot, sort of like with the Gate of the Pharaoh Gods, where it's just like I have it if I absolutely must, I'd rather not, and so I will mostly discount that as an option unless there's
not a better way to do this. But instead the whole plan revolves, it seems, around him wearing this ring to begin with. So, okay, everybody's telling me that the hunters can't leave the city yet, and I think that there's because like when Karl gets out of the city and looks back, he can't see them, and he can't
see the road or anything. So I guess because what I was thinking is if somebody is firing on them with crossbow bolts, that they could keep firing on them even after they have left the city.
But I guess that's not.
Their vision is occluded the same way that Carls is, and they can't see outside the city to shoot him either.
So okay, that makes sense.
So he uses the ring, and the way that it works is that you mark somebody for death, and until they are finally killed, you suffer a d buff and there is a foot like a toe ring that he got as a prize earlier on that uh does a it's a super spreader.
So what he.
Does is puts on the ring marks somebody gets the de buff and then uses the ring or uses the toe ring. I'm having to really differentiate between my rings here, so that when somebody comes and attempts to attack him, he kicks them, hits them with the de buff and that will, in his original plan, spread to a lot of different people, right, and unfortunately there's only one person who gets.
Hit with it.
My assumption is that the super spreader thing, it infects them with the same version of it as him. So once he kills this guy, their de buff also goes away.
And there's just a lot.
About Carl in this scene that's really unnerving.
The way that he taunts this dude about like you want to know a secret, your.
Bait, The gleefulness of it, it was really upsetting. And I'm not saying that Carl hasn't got the right to be angry or to do all of this.
I'm not arguing.
That it's simply the excitement he seems to feel about it is. It's just extremely creepy like I wasn't ready for the joy of it that he is clearly feeling, and it's it's again one of those things where.
It's like that is not.
Unreasonable when people have done to you what they have done, and these folks are here to treat it like a vacation. They are here for the fun of killing you, guys, actually killing you. That is a really really it's the kind of thing where it's difficult for me to even wrap my mind around how I would feel about people doing that, because it is so monstrous that I can't even fully comprehend it. And thus, again I am trying
not to police how Carl is feeling. However, I can't help my reaction to it, and I was a little revolted by it. If I'm being honest, it may just be kind of.
An issue that I have to deal with.
That like, if you are trying to take down an enemy, doing that is going to involve no small measure of satisfaction in certain ways, you know, and that the people that you are partnered up with to do this sort of thing might take more pleasure in it than you do. But it's hard to see it coming from a person who has for the most part, it feels like been so guarded that when he has let that down in this scene and just like is jubilant at killing these people,
it's jarring to see. This is the first time that he's going up against folks that he considers complicit in all of this. Everybody else that he's gone up against, the only exception being Loita, who doesn't care out because she wasn't in the game. She was an appendage of the game, and him taking her out like there was a particular satisfaction because of the way that she was going.
She was fucking with him and Doughnut specifically, she was party to the torture of Zev's family that was really really personal in a way that being jubilant at her death felt like I got it and I was one hundred percent there with.
Him and behind it.
With these people, it's there's still one hundred percent complicit, but it's it's an indirect sort of thing in certain ways. So the vibe of him going at them with this energy is really different.
And again.
That indirectness is very temporary because soon these people are going to be explicitly going after Crawl, So right now, coming at them, this way.
There's just a part.
Of me that's sort of like, oh, this feels really icky, but is it?
Is it? It's really not. You're doing what the game.
And this is the argument that he has with himself later, where he's like, I am playing the game as they built it and set it up. I am doing the thing according to all of their rules. And if they feel a way about it, then they had better go in and change those rules, which they will do probably in a lot of cases.
But it just it.
There are certain things that I think many of us in this day and age are trained to clutch our pearls over and I like to interrogate that reaction because I think in many cases we have been trained to clutch our pearls so as to discourage any rebellion or revolt of any kind. It is a tool of the oppressor to have us like be like, you shouldn't be violent,
Yes you should. Any revolution that succeeded like it was a result of violence, with the exception of like one, and it is held up often as like proof despite it being objectively an outlier. So when I have this response to Carl and I'm just like, yikes, dude, I really do like to step back and be like, why why am I feeling this way right now? Is this even valid? Then I'm reacting like this, Like do I have.
The right to react like this?
You know? And honestly, I don't think I do. I don't think I do.
I think what Carl is.
Doing is right and his reaction is fair. It's just it turns my stomach a little bit.
It just does.
And probably were I in his shoes, it would not at all anymore. If I were any crawler, I would probably be fucking fist pumping right along with him and loving him, taunting them and all of that. I think it's just really hard for me because we have dealt with so many other characters that he has been up against earlier in these books. It's just hard for me to differentiate that these aren't NPCs, these aren't victims. They are part of the regime doing.
This to crawlers.
And so I think I'm having difficulty making that switch in my mind and not seeing what he's doing as cruelty. It's justice in response to you know. So I think that's kind of just where my hang up is. Is like we've literally never encountered any of the people who are part of the party in power here in the game. And so I'm having just a bit of like a stumbling block to processing what all this means and the fact that these people are like genuinely dying. This is
not an in game dying. This is dying dying.
So yeah, it's the.
Whole way that like this winds up going down is it's in combination with the traps that he was not prepared for, and the there are spells that are going off obviously in response to him and donuts presence, like people are tracking them, and I thought that was particularly interesting. This is evidence of the fact that somebody is sharing outside information, just as he complained, and he complains loudly
and often, as he puts it. Later on we find out that he talked about this with his lawyer and they wind up getting rid of the h being able to see the chat because probably it was just way too easy for people to share information and cheat using that. And but there's still of course going to be other ways to cheat and share information, and you know, fuck somebody's entire time up. So yeah, there's no way that anybody should know they're here, know to cast this spell.
To find them, but they do somehow, and that's also something that really winds up like eating into the time that he had planned on being able to utilize here, because the point is to get this one guy, use him as bait, and then get everybody coming at him, because his goal was to find the mayor and take that person down and then he would be the mayor, which not a terrible idea in theory, it's just the plan itself on how to accomplish this is just really
not thought out well. And the way that it works as well, with like the safe room and the personal space.
There's like one bar. This strip is.
Filled with pubs and stuff, but there's only one that's a proper safe room, so they have to flee there when the bomb goes off, and the doors to the personal spaces are like in a hallway of that bar, so the hunters could in theory just like camp out outside the door of their personal space and wait for them. So they can't just go hide out. They have to go in to escape the bomb blast and then immediately leave again and relocate to somewhere else where the hunters can't find them, which hadn't.
Occurred to me.
I really kind of thought, Oh right, they can just flee to their personal space. That's nice forgetting that there's like a physical door that exists that people can come knock on, you know. Yeah, it's a real moment when they flee in there and Donut mentions the city name, I can't remember it, and Mordecai is just like, wait,
we areware and loses his entire tiny little mind. So when they flee is when Carl winds up setting off a trap because he's running too fast to catch it with his ability, and somebody it's him.
With a crossbow bolt.
They are using an invisibility spell, and when they hit him, that bolt has a spell on it that slowly drains his health and also leaves a trail behind him of blood.
It makes it so that.
Even if his health goes back up briefly, it just continues to drop back down again, and the trail of blood will make him easily trackable, which at this moment isn't super helpful to them because they can't leave the city. But nevertheless, and they wind up getting rescued by Prepotente and Miriam because they once again interrupted a fucking spell that these guys were working on, but Prepotente is the one who's pissed about it. Miriam is really like it
wasn't going to work anyway. Somebody was already noticing and and intervening, and I think that we were going to have to split any second as it is. So, Yes, it's annoying that you interrupted a spell again, but it's really not a big deal actually in the end.
And I'm trying to jump ahead to this point. Sorry, guys, I.
Forgot how to stop doughnut sweetie, do not touch the bolts. Oh my, that is a lot of de buffs. I will help, he will be okay. We are safe here, trust me. Somebody screamed, which is of course Prepotente. Chapter six opens with the the entry about the mercenaries and that they are there are so many like appendages to the contract and so many like rules about where they can be located and not that it makes working with
them almost not really worth it. And I found this compelling in light of the fact that we have our mercenaries now that work with us, that we don't have to deal with those particular difficulties with necessarily, at least when it comes to like payment and stuff. But there are certain ways that they function that I'm like, I don't know if that.
So let's see.
If they die, you can't loot their bodies, and our contract stipulates you have to pay their daily rate for the rest of the floor, which is kind of bogers. Second, it's easy to lose them. If they leave with me, it's fine, the door opens and we walk out together. Otherwise it automatically defaults to the last place they entered, as if they were a regular crawler. So if they're not right there with you when you exit, they could end up three or four safe rooms away. One of
our guys left and never came back. He's still alive and I can see him in the chat. But the prick is just wandering around some town having a good old time. And I can't even fire him because you have to bring them back with you to let them go. Oh, plus, their levels mean next to nothing. My forty orc is a better fighter than my fifty dwarf who is now dead. By the way, twenty two more days at fifteen hundred gold a day.
The whole thing is a scam.
I have to agree.
That's bonkers.
Like this is very much we are pretending that this is an advantage to you so that we can continually.
Rip you off.
And as we see a little bit later with the way that they have changed up how big your party can be and this guild thing. Every time the Crawlers begin to figure out a way to have some sort of advantage, they find a way to take it and make it so that you have to pay for it, which is also exactly how things always work. We can't have people outsmarting the system. The system will always adapt to capitalize on whatever it is and exploit it, you know. So let's see him trying to find the spot where
him and Prepotente get in this argument. Oh and there's a moment where he's looking at Bianca, the goat that's gotten to the size of a cart horse, and it gets bigger and bigger every time it levels up until it reaches level fifty. Eventually it will grow wings, It will be scary as shit. It will also be one of the most powerful badass pets available within Dungeon Crawler world. And Doughnuts like they make her sound mean, but she's sweet and I really wouldn't mind spending a little more
time with Bianca. I think she seemed kind of dope.
But and.
Let's see new achievement. You cross the line you didn't even know what was there. You used an artifact of divine suffering for the first time. Hopefully there aren't any unintended and unadvertised side effects of using such a powerful and eas magical item. Which when Dona is telling Carl how mad Mordecai is that he used this, she says, Mordecai has mentioned that it is addictive somehow, and I don't remember if that was mentioned before. I think it was,
but I can't fully remember. And Carl is just really not taking that seriously enough in my opinion. I get that it's just like extremely inconvenient to his plans and everything, and that sucks. But I don't know if you think you're going to be able to outsmart the results of this device, Carl. I don't think it works that way. I don't think that this is like a willpower thing. I think that they do something physically, probably to your body chemistry, like heroin does, and I am concerned about it.
And there is a whole thing later with this, like sound in the back of his mind that he acknowledges having been there. His whole life basically that I was sort of, hey, what's that about, buddy, And it's just he like barely looks at it before turning away, you know, it's just barely mentioned and then.
Sort of yikes.
And there's also a moment when he's sort of like, I can't remember if it's here when he's down and trying to like wake wake up, or if it's later, but he has a sudden memory of like going into the basement on his birthday that day and finding his mom. So we knew that she had killed herself, but I don't think I realized that, like she had killed herself and he had found her. Everything about his story gets
worse and worse, y'all. And it's like just the fact that it's on his birthday as well, like why it what you thought this was like good for him, ma'am?
Did you really? Did you really?
Or did you just want out and told yourself what you needed to tell yourself to make it so that you weren't inflicting hideous trauma on your son, Because it feels to me like it's more that second.
One more than likely. But yikes.
So here here's the achievement that I did really like the delivery from the audiobook narrator, You've permanently killed a non crawler biological. They ain't just dead, they dead dead their children and are now orphans. Their mothers are gnashing their teeth and cursing your name, and you're just sitting there all alive and shit and girlfriend, I am all in.
That was pretty good. That was pretty good. It's rare that the AI gets me to like genuinely laugh, and that one got me. So yeah. A lot of the.
Like achievements are just about how many people he has just killed, the volume of people, you know, all of that. He finds out about how many were NPCs, and that was more than two hundred, and he's like, it doesn't bother me, and that's probably fucked up that it doesn't bother me, But I genuinely believe that these NPCs are better off dead, so, you know, like it is what it is, and he thinks, this isn't on me.
They started this.
These are their rules their game, which I find interesting that he's like, they started it, and later when he's arguing with Prepotente, he says something about how like, well he started it, and then immediately is like I sound like such a little shit. Is that what we're like kind of trying to say here that it's is saying, yeah, well they started it justifying all this. I mean, it would be one thing if you were targeting people at pubs in the real world who are just living their lives.
These people are here to kill crawlers explicitly though, So I feel like it's like that those things don't really compare to each other, and maybe the author didn't mean to compare them, and it's just a coincidence that those things sounded so alike to me. But I just wanted
to acknowledge it because it got my attention a little bit. Uh. So, let's see Zev chimes in here and is saying that their numbers are crazy right now, and she says there will be additional security protocols put into place before you're transferred.
This was not my doing, and.
It applies to all crawlers. As long as you're not attempting to assassinate me or a member of Odette staff, you shouldn't have to worry. Also, I'm being asked to tell you ventions of the Daughter is still active and that you shouldn't participate with other elites. You figure out a way around it if you make a good faith effort to extricate yourself. I don't see it being an issue. And they talk a little bit about the shows that they go on with Miriam, and she goes on something
called Plenty of Plenty. Pony doesn't do too well on these programs, but he's okay when there are other goats around. Pony likes it because they allow his brothers and sisters to come out, and they have new plants for them to try each time. The last time they had no treats. I find the program a bit unsettling, but it helps
Pony relax. I have ten unaltered boers and pet carriers in my inventory, and I thought in the audiobook that she said bores, But I'm realizing like this, looking at this, it's spelled brs And when I am looking it up, I'm getting Dutch and Huguenot population that settled in Southern Africa in the late nineteenth century. I feel like, that's not what this author meant.
So if anybody wants.
To inform me what that means, let me know. But she says it's unsafe, and so she keeps them in pet carriers all the time until they get into like their personal spaces.
So this is the.
Point where him and prepotentai in an argument. He sets off all the traps in one shot, which, uh, it just lets them know where traps are, but it doesn't actually like disarm the traps, as we know from the.
Description of it.
And after they get in this argument, Miriam insists that they like hug and make up, and Prepatente is one down to do this and actually comes up and hugs Carl and then afterwards behaves like.
They are besties.
And I really love this a lot, guys. I love that Prepitente has the abilities of like a two hundred year old age but apparently like the emotional capacity of a.
Six year old.
It's just such a weird cas and that he like obviously looks at Miriam as mommy in a very literal way.
It's just very funny to me.
And you know, done up being in his chat being like you better hugim more else you're gonna look like real asshole.
She's not wrong, So.
Let's see. I'm trying to get to the because there's like all kinds of stuff to talk about that I I could.
Spend a bunch of time.
They wind up in a safe room that's actually a Whata Burger, which, uh water burger is good, but it's wildly overrated. It's one of those things that like it's talked about.
Like, oh, you gotta go, man, but if you go, you.
Are going to be kind of like, I mean, it's good.
I guess it's fine.
It's not earth shattering by any means.
It's just like.
Just different and mostly not that different. But I understand whenever you hear about a place that's like familiar, being in one of the safe rooms, that you'd instantly go, oh my god, get me blanklyink blank you know.
And there's a.
Conversation between because like Katya has come back and she has brought Lewis and for Us with her, and they talk about like him getting engaged. Chris and Clayton were not there. Katya said they were outside in the bar waiting on Team Metal Luck, who was still making their way to the town. And when Donut is heading to the bathroom, she's like stopping Mordecai and she says, look, we all know what you're gonna say. I've told Carline pissed and I just want to get this out of
the way. Yeah that was fucking idiotic, and yeah it was suicidal. I'm not abandoning him. Yes, he's gonna tell me the plans from now on. We are not going to split up or have some storyline where we.
Have to get back together.
You're just gonna have to get over it. So don't say you don't know what you're dealing with. And I did enjoy this very much. So then we go to chapter eight where Carl is realizing that he this is the part where he's talking about this thing in his mind. So I'd run out of books to read. I needed a new outlet. But more importantly, I needed to rest, not sleep, rest, like really rest. Most of the time while I was idle, I was actually writing in my
third scratch pad, composing thoughts for the cookbook. It just dawned on me that I was spending every free moment working. Even when I was playing Frogger. I was really just on autopilot and writing stream of consciousness words straight into the draft section of the scratch pad, planning scenarios, theories, recreating others, recipes and comments from memory as an exercise to make sure I could recall them. My brain was always working, turning everything over and over, which is frankly
also how I am. It's just when I heard that there are people whose brains can like kind of just go into idle mode, I was astonished because I just never thought that was something anybody could do. I thought everybody was like I am. And it turns out like there are plenty of people out there who are like I am. I'm not alone in that. But I just thought this was like just how it is, and evidently not. I am very jealous. Recently, I'd been noticing something hidden
in the back of my mind. It was difficult to explain, almost like there was a bubbling, meandering stream hidden back there in the weeds of my brain, nestled deep deep down. It had always been there, which meant I was so used to the quiet murmur of the stream I never noticed it. But recently that sound was starting to get louder. Only it wasn't a sound, not really. It wasn't even a physical feeling, just a sense of flow, and that
sense was changing, rising in volume. It had gone up just a hair but it was enough for me to finally notice. I'd only found one way to mute. It only when I was completely calm, fully at rest, when we were in the heat of it all, like when we'd been fleeing 's a cow. It was right there the street getting louder. Okay, a lot to unpack.
He is this.
Rage because it feels like Carl has had a particularly traumatic past that he has not really dealt with.
It's possible that he.
Has seen a therapist, but I don't feel like he's ever mentioned it, so I'm going to assume no.
I am genuinely like.
Unsure the fact that being calm makes that sound kind of die down. What I find so unnerving about this is how relatable it is because I had this conversation recently on a True Blood episode with my friend Miles.
But like we were talking about how.
One of the things that aids with having ADHD and this overactive mind is complete silence and lack of simulation. Not listening to music, not listening to a podcast, not reading a book, not having a game to play, just sitting and maybe eating a meal, sipping on a cup of tea, or just sitting in the yard looking at the clouds and the trees. And that's all. But how particularly difficult that is to make yourself do because you
have ADHD. That's the thing, the very thing that's best for you is also the thing that's the hardest to do. And that being something that I understand with Carl. I want to be like, oh, it's just something like that, right, But like Carl's whole situation is so much more extreme and exaggerated that I feel like it can't be just that.
I don't know, and.
Describing it as just like a bubbling stream makes it sound not exactly really dangerous, just.
Innocuous.
But if something like that gets big enough and overflows, it can be very dangerous. And I'm just not sure how much to worry about this, you know what I'm saying. And it's also interesting that this is coming up now in book five, but he never mentions this.
In other books.
And if this isn't like kind of supposed to be the result of the increase in anger, you know, because that's the reason I kind of went for, is it rage? This being the first floor that he can access hunters and people who are complicit in what's being done to him and everyone else on earth, that.
Would make sense.
That he feels a real particular way about it here on this floor when there's something to be done about it.
You know, I don't know.
I don't know how to interpret this anyway. This is when they open their boxes and every Hunter Killer box has a hand in it, which at first Dona is disgusted by, until the announcements come on later and talk about the Butcher's masquerade and she now suddenly wants way
more of these hands. Carl winds up getting five hundred and ninety five thousand gold from all of his boxes because he gets thirty five one of them he didn't earn here, but the AI is just like, yeah, but you know you deserve that last one earlier.
I just didn't give it to you then.
And let's see, he gets a sigil of night Worm's Nasty Little Web of Suffering, which is a spider web tattoo on his elbow, which I noticed on the cover and I was like, he didn't have that tattoo before, so that must be something he gets in this book, and it gives him access to the Guild of Suffering, which is actually not a real guild and not a real religion.
It's just like this cult.
So we don't get a lot of information on that, and then we get a description of like turning in arcade tickets. It's a very long thing that I actually did really enjoy. But what it comes down to is every hunter's hand that you get, you get to turn in for like a reward at this party later. And then we get the highlight and it sort of interrupted because a part of it is redacted. But when they come back, Murderer Dimitri or Max and Popov screamed on
the show. The screen was now showing things that had happened at the very end of the Last Floor, and it had returned in the middle of a scene the two headed Crawler fought with another human I didn't recognize in the final moments of the Last Floor. The guy they fought was a big guy, leather clad with a shaved head and a war gauntlet similar to my own.
They would have brained the guy, but they suddenly all flew off their feet as a giant foot crashed into their world and then jumped away, which he notices as the demon Slit's foot. And unclear what exactly they were fighting for in the first place, whether or not the fight has ever been resolved, that's all we get. We have Kacia flooding lorocos. It portrayed Kasia's stoic face at what she'd done, and then it cut in a shot of me laughing from some other time, which I thought
was particularly funny. This does not that seem to bother Carl here, he's just sort of accepting that they're gonna be doing this and is like, what can do well? You know, And there's a mention here of the build that Ellie is doing, called a four seasons build, which Mordecai says has never been completed. People have gotten to three, but not four, and he's just sort of interested to see if she manages to make this happen. Finally, then we get the leaderboard. Carl is still number one, Donna
is still number four. She is level forty one and he is fifty four. So yeah, she's just crossed over into the forties. We really need to get things going for her. And then we get the announcements and the description about the uh what do you call it? First of all, getting rid of access to private chats. However, Barrent reserves the right to take your conversations and play them during any and all non live broadcasts. Party members
share certain quests and will share experience. All personal space upgrades are shared. Party members may examine each other's properties, but you know, and then they say, we're breaking up any parties larger than thirty people. But we're implementing a guild system. And I won't get into all of this, but suffice to say there are tiers to how much how many like different benefits will come to your guild that you start. One person is supposed to be like
in charge and they can kick people out. There will be guild only upgrades. Some of these are pretty spectacular, so you'll definitely want to check it out. And I'm super cure about that. For a small licensing fee, may share most pre existing environmental upgrades, and there's an option to change sharing experience for a fee. There are many more rules and exciting upgrades. The BOB because will have
all the information you need to get started. And this is like one of those things that just is another advantage to people who can afford it. You know, it's just anything, and none of this is necessarily based on who deserves. It's who can pay, who has friends who can pay, Just like now, it's just the way it fucking goes and then at the end of this floor,
we'll be having a party. Isn't that exciting? Only the top fifty crawlers in the dungeon will receive an invite, but all invited crawlers will be able to bring a plus one. Don't worry about your safety. Need to know is there will be music, dancing, a costume contest, a pet beauty contest, a talent show, and prize is available to all who attend. And I really thought that it was going to be Donut in the beauty contest, forgetting that she is considered a crawler. So she is going
to enter mongo and is fucking thrilled. And I love Carl starting to say Donut, we are not and don't even think about saying we are not doing this.
Donut.
She paused, I have very little and this is something we are going to do, and you are not going to stop me. I just stared at her, look, I said, trailing off, Mordecai, don't worry.
I'll talk to her, will come up with a compromise.
And so what Karl winds up saying is just we won't even get to the party if you don't focus right now.
And she admits that this is true. But uh, I just love of.
How all of like she goes all in on. We need to start training, We need an extra hour a day. We need to find a seamstress, a walk coach. We need to purchase the upgraded pet shower to get all the bloodstains off. How many more MPCs can we hire? We have to see the standards manual immediately, all of this like she is so on it, and I can feel how comforting it is to be like planning for something that you've done a million times that you have real experience with.
I understand why.
You would be like, oh, absolutely, we're doing this. Fucking shut up and just let me drive just this one time. You know, I'm not mad at it.
Go for it, donnut.
I don't trust this Butcher's masquerade thing. They say, oh, you'll be safe. I don't know why I should believe you at all. And then the chapter ends with I could hear it again, that river in my mind, rushing, tumbling, crash and getting fatter and louder by the moment it was starting to hurt.
Just a little.
That was okay, I'd rest later. So like, is this related to the ring of Divine suffering. Is it not that the ring does something to you out of nowhere, but that it amplifies something that's already in you? Possibly just very worrying. Just don't like any of the implications here, you know, thumbs down. I just don't like that you're
using it, Carl. I get why I do, but like, I don't necessarily feel like it was really worth it what it did just now, that advantage felt very minor, and I don't know, man, it just I wouldn't be willing to do it. I'll just say that I wouldn't, but you know who the fuck am? I all right, I gotta wrap up, But thank you guys again for joining me, and thank you to Jackie for commissioning this episode. I hope you all are enjoying the coverage, and until next time.
To the loom. Motherfuckers.
That was an unspoiled network podcast.