Carl

Part 1 — the tutorial floor

Carl enters the dungeon as the least-prepared person in it: in boxers, a leather jacket and a pair of borrowed Crocs he loses in minutes, carrying a cat that hates him, ch. 1. The book's first move is to make him competent by accident — walking in without pants earns him a Gold Apparel Box in ch. 2 that holds the Nightgaunt Cloak and the Trollskin Shirt (ch. 5), and the tutorial in ch. 3–ch. 6 tells him that his Coast Guard fitness and his fists are worth more than any weapon on the floor. He is nearly out of the party by ch. 8, and stays because Donut says she needs him and because she knows, as he did not, that he had been planning to steal her.

What the floor teaches him is what the game costs. He beats a begging woman to death in ch. 11 and fights not to vomit afterwards; he goes after the goblin chieftain although it would be 'the ultimate dick move' after the goblins helped him (ch. 16), bombs a boss room that turns out to hold goblin babies in ch. 17–ch. 18, and the AI rewards him with You Monster! in ch. 19. That is where the mantra starts: 'You're not going to break me.' He also discovers his two real gifts. The first is reading people — the 9.8 experience points, the twitching finger, the apple core that tell him Frank is lying in ch. 20, which Donut contrasts with his failure to notice Bea's three boyfriends. The second is explosives: the dynamite, the funpowder cart, the IED skill, and eventually a Codex entry with his name on it.

The Meadow Lark encounter (ch. 22–ch. 27) is the floor's moral hinge. He covers the signs so no one will farm the elderly for experience, cannot answer Donut's 'So which one are we?' (ch. 23), builds the Speedbump with two maintenance men, kicks a confused courtesan to death 'maybe crying' (ch. 26), and chooses the residents over speed because 'what was the point of living, if I couldn't live with myself?'

Part 2 — the second floor, and the show

The second floor is where Carl learns the game is television. Odette tells him loot is not random (ch. 29); Zev tells him he is part of a machine and asks him to repeat a line without coughing (ch. 36, ch. 37); a focus group calls the residents dead weight. His response is a temper he rarely loses — at Zev in ch. 36, at the Maestro in ch. 42 — and a discovery about leverage: 'We were expensive.' The Death Watch episode is the first time he uses the show against itself, and the Pork Boy Snick that follows makes him a name across the tunnels for something he did not do.

His fights get smarter rather than stronger. Krakaren is beaten by a recipe card and a zombie with a jug (ch. 34); the Rage Elemental, seventy levels above him, is beaten by a rule about stairs that a goblin told him (ch. 39–ch. 41); Ralph is beaten by a pet biscuit (ch. 45). Mordecai's 'there will always be clues' (ch. 25) is his method by the end. The cost is still there: Yolanda's obituary is his (ch. 38), and he does not know whether keeping the residents alive was a kindness.

He ends the book with boots he will not wear, a raptor that bites him, a vow from Maggie My, a challenge to a prince, three Valtay items in his inventory history, and a look from Agatha that says stop now (ch. 47). The last thing said to him is that there is something hidden among Donut's class choices that will make someone very angry (epilogue).

The build

Book 2 is where Carl chooses who he will be for the rest of the crawl, and chooses the hard way. He refuses the AI's bait — a Sasquatch with sparkling size-24 feet — and takes Primal, a blank slate five levels behind everyone with every skill unlockable to 20, then Compensated Anarchist, a bomb-and-trap class that costs him seventeen points of charisma before he has spent one on strength (ch. 2). 'Was I an idiot? I knew some people would definitely think so.' The floor rewards the choice: Iron Punch to ten, strength to thirty (ch. 14), Freeballing boxers that double kicks and rule out trousers (ch. 13), a xistera that turns hob-lobbers into cannon fire (ch. 17), and the first entry in a playbook (ch. 12).

The circus

The floor's first half is Signet's story and Carl is the extra in it. He breaks his own finger to escape her charm (ch. 6), pulls a lion's heart out (ch. 7), wakes fifteen hours later with Donut hostage (ch. 8), fights a roller-skating bear alone (ch. 9), and walks into a city boss's tent with a ticket. The smell of the circus gives him back his mother and takes her away again in the same breath (ch. 10). What he does with the rage: not kill Grimaldi but poison him, sell his survival to the show's producers for a recurring role, eat the worms, and talk the vine and the girl it raised and banished into peace (ch. 11). 'The seeds were planted.'

The town

Then the quest he swore off. GumGum's murder makes it Donut's cause (ch. 17); Carl's method is the anarchist's: dynamite in the beanie-baby shelves (ch. 18, ch. 21), a bait-and-switch over a spy scroll, a Fireball that finally comes up Spicy, a level-75 guard punched to save a dwarf child (ch. 20), and a warehouse ringed with ten sticks while Katia holds the trigger against mind control (ch. 23). He becomes Magistrate Carl, and nobody acknowledges it. On live television he tells the Skull Empire's subjects to rise, and a singer dies in his place (ch. 19); in chat he decides Borant profited and says nothing out loud (ch. 20).

He ends the floor closing a glass case around a detonating soul crystal because he cannot leave Katia (ch. 24), running naked through the Over City with a city-killing bomb in his inventory (ch. 25), and hearing from Odette that the numbers on the leaderboard are bounties and that Donut will stay with him 'as long as you're still alive' (epilogue). 'This, I thought, this is my family' (ch. 12); the floor's last chapter puts a number next to each of their names.

The engineer

Book 3 is the floor where Carl's class finally has a workshop. He starts it with an opening-line achievement, a leaderboard rank and a bounty (ch. 1), and the AI's answer to Borant's veto hands him a level-three personal space, crafting tables and a training room (ch. 2, ch. 3). Everything after is built: a Gangway Chock from a thinned breastplate and door wedges from weight benches (ch. 5), fifteen tons of robot scrap (ch. 6), Jelly Bomb landmines lowered onto a track with a fishing pole (ch. 10), Banger Spheres for the xistera (ch. 16), an Ugly-Ass Backpack that turns Katia into a ton and a quarter of armour (ch. 13), a train bomb on a pole trigger (ch. 27), a five-legged crane (ch. 31). Strength 41 in chapter 2; Powerful Strike 13 by chapter 9; level 41 at the end (ch. 34). The Cookbook, chosen on a glint of light from nine prizes (ch. 7), is the reason: read in toilet stalls, its recipes disguised as his own discoveries (ch. 8, ch. 10, ch. 13), its earlier authors becoming company (ch. 13, ch. 15).

The dispatcher

The floor's second half is Carl as a switchboard. He fist-bumps every crawler he meets into his chat (ch. 14, ch. 19), broadcasts the four ways down (ch. 15), warns Bautista off Terminus a minute too late (ch. 17), and when the trains stop he collects seven hundred souvenir hats from strangers in twenty minutes — 'There is hope for us. Not a lot. But it's there' (ch. 25) — and sends six singing portal carts to the pit (ch. 27). 'You can't save them all' is Mordecai's line and Carl argues with it for thirty chapters (ch. 15, ch. 18, ch. 21, ch. 24); fourteen hundred people at the end of the line say who won (ch. 28). The cost is in the same ledger: Growler Gary killed fourteen times for his hands (ch. 26), a mantaur dismembered as a vessel (ch. 33), a train sent into the abyss with two NPCs who chose to ride it (ch. 34).

The god-baiter

The Grull gauntlet's cumulative counter is the book's fuse: 10.5% on Gore-Gore, a ten-second timer and a drop kick onto the third rail (ch. 11); then, having asked Mordecai the rules, a summoning on purpose into a portal — and a hand around his numb foot (ch. 32). The Death Challenge that follows is the Maestro's debut as a god and Carl's survival at fifty to one, on an invisibility potion, Mordecai's Special Brew, and four friends who came through the wall (ch. 33; the odds, epilogue). 'Glurp, glurp, motherfucker.'

What he carries out

His father's motorcycle on a carousel and the day of the belt (ch. 7); the Grand Canyon and his mother's hand on his wrist (ch. 15); Frank Q's ring and the girl who wore it (ch. 19); Mordecai's slap and 'Don't touch me ever again' (ch. 30); Brandy's whistle and 'how much I needed other people' (ch. 34). And his signed entry in the 25th edition, written for whoever finds the book next: 'They will not break me. Fuck them all.' (ch. 34). Number three on the leaderboard with 400,000 gold (ch. 25), and a new PR agent who takes away the snacks (epilogue).

The bomber, the pilot, the acolyte

Book 4 gives Carl fifteen days, a bowl of sand, and a floor built to make him run out of time. He opens it third on the leaderboard with a bounty doubled to 800,000 (ch. 1), and the AI's mood toward him is the floor's weather: the fourth floor's achievements shower him with a Legendary Deity's Box and Pawna's Tears, the best loot he has had (ch. 2); days later every gnome corpse reads 'Bitch Boy Carl' because a gerbil missed him, and he steps on one to end a siege — 'Good boy' (ch. 13). He builds the Royal Chariot with Katia in two hours (ch. 4), rockets that reach a mile (ch. 9), depth charges, chum bombs, burn gel, a disco ball, and learns to fly a biplane off the edge of a house (ch. 30).

The trickster

The air castle falls to a con: a duct-taped 'hostage' who is Katia, a resurrected head, a vial of Mountain Dew and a forged watch, and then twelve rockets from the ground and eight from a hijacked balloon (ch. 11, ch. 12). He kills a goose in a garbage disposal with one second left (ch. 16). He punches a mage for a box (ch. 21), hangs upside down over a living floor with a bag of fire (ch. 22), stops an eighty-two-level city boss dead with a shield spell and cuts her brain in half with a landscaping tool (ch. 27). He is buried alive twice and drowned once.

The first step

Watching a gnome girl sob into a changeling's arms, he decides to do the thing he had dismissed as too risky (ch. 17). In a shielded trailer, with Coolie's notes as his manual, he leaves a self-destructing toy beside Loita with a fingernail as a shim under its panel (ch. 19) and talks her off the couch; she dies, and his note in the 25th edition reads 'One.' (ch. 18). A Syndicate liaison applauds and cannot prove it; Carl refuses a Legendary box rather than name the Cookbook (ch. 19). Five days vanish. Donut drops a friend and the enemy in his head into a tomb rather than let him kill them (ch. 14), sends two men to their deaths for a cable (ch. 29), worships a god to throw him at Quan Ch, and tears Quan's arm off on the ground (ch. 31). He uses the Gate to save fifteen hundred people, and then — with a decoy in the sand and the real box on the sea floor — floods the faction market of Larracos with sharks and seawater, killing tens of thousands of NPCs he tells himself are better off (ch. 34). He ends the floor number one, an acolyte of Emberus with two god-quests and sun tattoos on his hands, in a patch jacket, holding a ring up to the sky: 'One by one, I will break you. I will break you all.'

The lawyer's client

Book 5 opens with Carl summoned to a Syndicate liaison's office over the item in his inventory and answering with four words he does not expect to work: 'I want a lawyer' (ch. 1). What follows is a different kind of crawl. A Null attorney in a hula-girl tie negotiates four rock-monster mercenaries and two spells as collateral for the Gate (ch. 3), calls a pending suit over private messages at fifty-fifty (it wins), gets an injunction against the hunters' outside help (ch. 8, ch. 21), bluffs a secondary program into a licence (ch. 13) and, by the end, has turned a fan club into a corporation that owns a Faction Wars spot (ch. 56, ch. 63, ch. 77). Carl specialises as an Agent Provocateur in a booth with ten minutes on the clock (ch. 1) and spends the floor being, in Herot's Cookbook phrase, the pebble on the path (ch. 56).

The hunt

He does not arrive with the others. Paralysed by an invisible weasel and carried in over a burning shoulder (ch. 2), he goes to the hunters' city before they are released, marks a drunk as bait, kills Vrah's sister with rockets and bleeds out at the border (ch. 5); thirty-four Hunter-Killer Boxes open in a row (ch. 8). He builds the biggest bomb he has ever made on purpose, for Bomo to roll into Zockau, and asks the crawlers to knock down every bridge but one (ch. 9), arms an Ursine town's guards (ch. 11), turns a sex doll's head into a guided missile (ch. 22), teleports a boss to himself and launches it into the sky (ch. 27). The ring from the third floor is on his finger again — 'Not anymore', he says when Signet calls him still soft (ch. 13) — and by the party it pays five points a kill (ch. 61). He kills a frightened orc for two stat points and throws a head into a river (ch. 25); he kills a man he had started to like with his foot (ch. 53); he kills a merchant in a bathroom and hides the body with a towel (ch. 58). 'Congratulations, Murderer' (ch. 23).

The river

The book names something Carl has always heard: a stream at the back of his mind, louder in heat, muted only by rest (ch. 8). It roars in a Point Mongo sandwich pub — 'The water is running' — and something breaks: his mother's hand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, his father waiting in the car, and a promise made to Donut on the spot, no matter what (ch. 12). He sees Earth from orbit and hears that Bea is alive (ch. 17); he says goodbye to her hologram (ch. 19). The river tells him to jump into the rapids and embrace the chaos (ch. 34); a drugged war council tells him the same, and he goes back to Alucarda with no protections and makes chaos to hide in (ch. 35). 'The sink is running' (ch. 36). It roars at the name Ferdinand (ch. 51) and screams when Gideon's team dies because he asked them to stay (ch. 73).

The party

The plan for the masquerade is committed to the Cookbook in case it is a record of his death (ch. 64). He lies to Signet to hold her in reserve and feels it (ch. 63); he tells her the truth about the people who control her world and then uses the truth as a tool (ch. 68). Sealed in with a queen who has him on her dance card, he decides to kill Eva and go into the Nothing so the others have a chance (ch. 73) — and is offered a better idea by an elite he had taught to see the strings. He hands her the knife that was once meant for Donut (ch. 74). His arm snaps as the queen reels him in (ch. 75); in the pit he takes two arrows, head-butts a mantis to death, casts a trap spell that halves the last hunter, and watches Donut strip a god from the woman driving it (ch. 76). Level 63. He finds the Popovs under the gore, tells Donut about the mask she is wearing, addresses the universe with photographs until the feed is muted (ch. 77), and buys a Book of Lore for the Bahamas that Donut does not pick (epilogue).

Squads and ghosts

Book 6 opens on a floor that is not a dungeon at all: a recording of Havana three weeks before the end, with intangible people whose clothes fall off when Carl walks through them, and a card game he did not ask for (ch. 1, ch. 4). Donut is squad leader; Carl is, by the rules' own word, a minion (ch. 42). He spends the first weeks doing what he does — flagging a monk seal on the beach, vaporising a fleeing duende with his first Daughter's Kiss, building a crab trap out of a U-Haul (ch. 6, ch. 7, ch. 24, ch. 25) — while the floor works on him from three directions at once: a divine back patch left by a celestial box, charged with the essence of the fallen (ch. 3), a god's messages he must copy before they vanish and may not repeat (ch. 17), and the river, louder every day, that a spider's fifth eye finds through a simulation's safeties (ch. 28).

The bargains

He flags a god at the blink and gets SlugPox for it (ch. 15); a goddess in a hidden channel offers Katia's life for Odette's presence on the battlefield and he scratches his left arm (ch. 17); a high cleric who may be the AI washes his feet on the sun and makes him a martyr (ch. 18); a church lends him a million gold for a ring against the slugs and calls the loan interest-free with an asterisk (ch. 56). He accepts a contract from a hidden guild to kill the Desperado Club's assistant manager so that Katia's box will open, and does it — tears her wings off as she moves to shield him, and hears 'I was almost done' (ch. 31, ch. 32). He lies to his friends at a kitchen table with Bautista in the room (ch. 18), and to Donut about being fine (ch. 28).

The trailer

Phase two puts the key in a trailer in Iowa, spliced in from a summer: a motorcycle with a dent, flower pots in a woman's handwriting, a bicycle cut in half at the property line (ch. 44). Inside, his father in a hospital bed, and a six-year-old brother he never knew he had, and a stepmother with morphine in the alliums (ch. 45). He whispers in the dying man's ear, loots the bedroom to the dresser, promises the boy he will not be forgotten, and burns the drapes: 'This was pretty much exactly what I needed to see' (ch. 45). The boss the AI builds from it — nine heads, most of them people he knows, Asher among them — pisses him off more than it breaks him (ch. 46); what breaks him a little is learning afterwards that Bea knew about the boy (ch. 47). For the first time he is angry at her, and not at himself.

The homestead, and the river

He rides his father's Panhead alone to a homeless shelter on Christmas morning because a vanished sponsor circled a breakfast, hears half of a Residual's speech, and is yanked to Orren's office (ch. 49–ch. 51). He names, on a church lawn with twenty friends, the darkness since the Masquerade: loneliness (ch. 63). Phase three costs him a key to a hand swap (ch. 56) and gives him Ren's flamethrower, her pet and her oath to make them pay (ch. 59); he teleports by pushing spider automatons into a doll's head (ch. 57), and, when three squads in four have no key, reasons with a goat into a way out that means making a Demon Prince as strong as possible and being sucked into the sky (ch. 61, ch. 62).

The Missing Piece

He runs between a demon's legs, hands the deck to himself for three minutes, coaches a crab to fertilise an ocean, and teleports head-first into Samantha to burn his own health down to the Martyr's Path (ch. 68, ch. 69). A Golden Combo meant for a totem lands on him instead, and Shi Maria wears him for three minutes: she reads his inventory, eats his friend's eye with his hand, and tattoos herself above his sternum (ch. 71). He wakes bald in Louis's arms, level 73, having hurt Mongo and Katia, with an eye in his chest that blinks and hides (ch. 72). His last act on the floor is an Emergency Action Item phrased politely, which hands the Faction Wars votes to the audience: protections off at 98%. 'You wanted a slaughter? […] Don’t worry. It’s coming' (ch. 72). Then the patch speaks — a centipede in the skulls — and the sky opens, and he swears to a brother he never met (ch. 72).

The button, and the other button

Book 7 opens twice on Christmas morning. In the prologue a homeless man who is a Residual, with the AI slowing time over a cup of coffee, hands Carl a bootleg interface with the mantids' 'fuse' on it — a failsafe that would send the star nova and kill everyone, the AI included (ch. 0). In the Christmas Morning interlude he sits beside a sleeping dog in a Florida gas station with the page open, wants to press it 'more than anything', decides the AI is not in pain but having fun, and presses the only other button: Disconnect Containment. The red dot over Earth begins to grow (ch. 20). He tells no one until an orc king describes his daughter's plan to trip the failsafe by hand, and then only Donut, by chat: 'Call it a hunch' (ch. 34). Orren's team learns it from five words — 'Welcome to the party, pals.' (ch. 36); Orren, who begs discretion, calls him the one who let this happen, and Carl does not answer whether he would rather have died (ch. 39).

Warlord

The ninth floor makes him a warlord of a team that fifty thousand former crawlers have come back into the dungeon to fight for — 'This is for you. This is what you built' (ch. 11, ch. 12). He plans with veterans who are better at war than he is and learns, slowly, to let them: he hands the southern front to Boomer (ch. 25), Larracos to Rosetta, and is told by Boomer over a private band and by three women and Splash Zone with crossed arms to stop running everyone else's operation (ch. 63). What is his is the personal war: the Prism's empress marked with the Ring of Divine Suffering and killed while three of his eyes burn white and Donut asks him to step back from the edge (ch. 26); the Sultana's temple stormed with a thermobaric bomb in a cannon barrel of a room, his own body turned inside out and held together only by ninety seconds of a god's immortality (ch. 52–ch. 54); the Madness castle entered with a stripper, a slug and a shark, and Architect Houston kept alive with a healing potion so the dead man's switch will not fire (ch. 67, ch. 68).

The river

The spider in his chest tries to cast through him and fails against Mind Balance, rising a level with every attempt (ch. 14); Katia's dream potion binds him into her mind and, in the backsplash, into everyone's (ch. 16, ch. 69); a god named Hapanzi traps Shi Maria in her own worst memory and hands him the key (ch. 17, ch. 19). Under the Madness's psionic barrage, feet stuck in an All Tree root, he hears the river for what it is — souls, always down, always loud — and a dwarf's voice tells him he is family now; Mind Balance reaches 16 and 'the realm of gods' (ch. 65). A goddess bites his ear, snaps his pinkie and says he is already married (ch. 76); a lawyer, at the end, tells him who to (epilogue). The ring he swore he needed a little longer he holds up to Donut's nose and lets her swallow, having refused to farm three hundred stats from a few thousand mercenaries: 'Fuck you all' (ch. 85). Eris's laugh stays in the river anyway (ch. 86).

What he refuses, and what he does

'No. Not like that. Never like that' — he puts away a Conscription potion rather than use it on Prepotente (ch. 48), and then smashes a hell-kissed one on Lucia Mar's head to stop her killing Donut (ch. 71), sits beside her with the Ring of Divine Suffering on his finger, and cancels the mark when a child's voice named Diah asks him to wait (ch. 72). He learns from Zev that 120,000 children are bound to her (ch. 73). He drops an inventory folder called Shit Just Hit on a theatre and turns a city's towers on everyone in it because Donut is alone (ch. 71). He nukes a castle with the bombs in an unconscious friend's pockets (ch. 80) and is nearly assassinated mid-sentence by the Syndicate's prime minister, whom the AI stops for him (ch. 81). He holds Louis's ribs open while a naiad's heart goes in (ch. 84), throws Samantha at a god to buy Katia's ceremony its minutes (ch. 86), and walks into the stairwell with Donut on his shoulder, level 81 to her 135 (ch. 77, ch. 87). In the zero zone he tells Quasar he could live in a room where nobody is dying, and declines every deal (epilogue).