Speaker 1: This is an Unspoiled Network podcast. This is spoil Me
covering Dungeon Crawler Carl book seven, this Inevitable Ruin chapter
sixty eight through Rosetta. In these chapters we lose me
June and it's really a bummer. It bums me the
fuck out. Y'all. Welcome to spoil Me. Welcome to the
show everyone. I am Natasha. Thank you very much to
Michael for commissioning this episode. I almost said Jeff because
Jeff just popped up in my like, but Michael isn't
here yet, which is unusual. But thank you Michael for
commissioning this one. Uh. I guess every time I hit
a really sad moment, I'm like a sort of am
I grateful? Am I glad that somebody commissioned this? Or
am I asking why they feel the need to put
me through this trauma? And I think it's both. You know,
the whole point of Unspoiled really is to watch somebody
else go through the trauma regarding a property that you've
already gone through. Like that's the spirit of it, right.
I just had this. I just had this yesterday live
reading a certain chapter of the Dress and Files to
Rashaan and knowing, oh, this is gonna be a moment.
So anyway, let's begin with sixty eight because like the
previous chapter ends with Carl realizing that like nobody in
the room they're about to go into has in vulnerability
while he and Dong do. And so when we start
the next chapter, they have absolutely like fucking wrecked these people.
And there's an interesting thing. So I had forgotten that
when Dong kills people, they like turn into coins sometimes,
and I don't, like, I don't remember if this happens anytime.
I feel like I remember there being like a you
have a ten percent chance of this happening or something.
But the coins are being picked up sometimes by Dong,
who then drops them into the sock, which is causing
the sock to grow and grow. And I am really
curious about exactly how all this works, because it should
I be concerned about the sock growing. Is this simply
like the weapon powering up? I know that there's like,
essentially this sock is possessed by a spirit. Does this
spirit gain strength by him adding coins into it? Is
it possible that the spirit gets a little too powered up?
Can that happen? I don't know what to be worried about.
It feels though like it's significant. It feels like I
don't know it just it keeps being mentioned in a
way that seems like we are our attention is being
drawn on purpose. So I don't know. I just wanted
to say something about it, because, like I don't, I
feel like there is so much going on that there
are times where I hesitate to spend any of my
precious hour talking about real side character stuff, and then
later I'll really regret not having brought it up because
It'll turn out to be something. So I have a
difficult time, upon occasion deciding what's worth it and what isn't.
But this feels like we got a enough references to
it that it's something, you know. So we have these
two crawlers who had been what's the word, They were
under the conscription spell, so it marks them as enemies,
which means the fucking the what do you call it?
Biggs is seeing them as like, oh, I want to
kill you just for the fun of it, and Carl
keeps having to tell her no. I really hope that
she actually listens to him, because at one point she
says something like, well, when he leaves, I'm gonna chop
one of you two. And I was just like, can
you imagine this crawler is like on your side and
yet one of his weird little NPC minions is still
maybe going to kill you, and that's how you go out.
I would be so pissed outside Little Red Corvette by
Prince blasted now question because donnat ask everybody to send
in their song requests, and we obviously had like a
dick theme going on, and then when it's mentioned Little
Red Corvette, I was like, oh my god, is that
song about a dick? Is it just like a slightly
classier metaphor than a lollipop? And I missed it this
whole time? It very well, maybe guys, I've never read
read the lyrics. I've heard the song a million times,
but you know how that is. You can hear a
song and not really hear it. So I just had
to like mention that too, because it was one of
those like galaxy brain moments of like, oh my god, yeah.
And also the fact that like when Dong puts that
money in, Carl says something like I thought they were
all nickels in there. Dong was muttering to himself and
didn't answer me. Like, there's something about that as well,
the fact that like Dong is so obsessed here that
he doesn't seem to even clock that Carl's talking to him.
I feel like, I don't like that. It may just
be that he's preoccupied right now, but it could also
be something else. So let's see, I'm trying to find
the bit here where we move on. Yeah, here it is.
We turned and hurried down the hall in the opposite direction.
The surgical theater and the throne rumor right next to
each other, just around the corner. I could hear the
screaming as I stepped into the hall, though as soon
as I heard it, the sound cut off sharply. The
hallways here were wide and unadorned. The floor is a
white speckled tile. Everything was crisp, clean, well lit. I
was reminded of a hospital. So as they're heading over there,
eventually there's a moment of him being like that sounds
like Houston screaming what is happening? And eventually we see
that that is indeed what's going on, and that Houston
is totally willing to undergo a horrific procedure himself. For
the sake of finding out what he wants to find out,
which I must admit, as much as I do not
care for this at all, I can't help respect that
a little bit. But here's somebody who's willing to put
the money where their mouth is, you know what I'm saying.
But anyway, we're not there yet. So Louis he says,
I'm stuck level six Hallway C. I stepped on a
snare trap and I can't move for a few minutes.
I filled the area with a poison cloud, but it
doesn't work on them. They have these little dog robot
things that shoot darts. Guys, I'm in trouble. I have
some no disassemble robot killers, but the explosions are too big.
I can't do it where I'm stuck. I don't know
what to do. And Samantha says, Okay, I have an
idea to save you, but you've gotta trust me. Now,
I am going I'm going to say something here. Samantha
saying I've got an idea, but you gotta trust me
is so much more worrying than anybody else saying that sentence,
because Samantha does bonker shit a lot, and never says
you gotta trust me, because that bonker shit doesn't seem
bonkers to her. It's just it's just the you know,
if she thinks it's bonkers enough that she knows you're
gonna have a reaction, and so she has to just preload.
You gotta trust me. I feel like it's gonna be insane,
like to a level that we I look. It could
go either way. It could be she is coming at
this with a caution that she hasn't before because she
is growing and evolving as a being and has better awareness,
or even has had better awareness than she let on
and has been so sort of playing dumb, you know.
Or it could be that whatever it is she's about
to suggest is truly unhinged in a way that we
have not yet encountered. Either way, I don't love it.
I'm worried about it. So then we go into the
surgical theater. Now, guys, I am on the record throughout
many different things that I have covered as hating medical horror.
I have a real difficulty with it. It's partially just
body horror stuff in general, where you know, like there's
a movie that came out recently called Together and it's
a horror movie that's a metaphor for like codependent relationships
and just the preview like I couldn't I couldn't get through,
you know what I'm saying. So I it's the actual
like pain and blood and guts, but also it is
the coldness as well. When it comes to medical stuff.
We have got a history that is littered with sociopaths
who are like the madness, willing to do whatever it
takes to find out what they need, and they do
not care who they're causing to suffer to find out
what they need to find out. And I mean this
is an issue, a huge issue with like obstetrics and gynecology.
There was a statue up until recently of the quote
father of obstetrics and gynecology who subjected slave women to
some of the most hideous things you can imagine with
no anesthetic and you know, just to see what was
going on. And it's unsurprising that so much medical research
has not even been done with women in mind, considering
that it's all about like, oh, we need to know
as much as we can, but not about women though, Okay,
but anyway, I just I know that this is a
real thing that there are people out there who are
in medicine not because they want to heal or care
about people, but because it's a great way for them
to leverage the fact that they don't really care about
the suffering somebody is going through, and they are able
to set that aside and fully focus on doing a surgery,
you know, which in a way I see that, but
I don't. I just can't. I just can't. So this
was difficult, and you know, when he goes in there,
first of all, we find out that there are a
lot of traps that have all kinds of special things
going on where they can't be tripped by the tripp
or spell, or they have a dead man's switch and
if he dies they will go off, or if you
hit this one, then the other ones will also go off,
or or there's like it's really set up with like
a very is somebody who is experienced and knows how
to do this right. The fourth table was empty. It
appeared as if twenty gallons of blood had been dumped
on it. From above. The first occupied table contained the
corpse of Crawler Zanep. They had done something to her,
something unspeakable, something I won't describe I couldn't bear to
look at her for more than a cursory moment, and
that just like I'm not even gonna tell you consider
wading that the next person he describes looks like they've
been peeled open. Is how how bad is it? How
bad is it? And I really, for some reason, was
imagining something gynecological here. And I don't know if that's
just because of my aforementioned baggage that I have mentioned,
but I there's something about this that felt like we're
on another level. The second table contained Burku, who was alive.
She opened her mouth to say something, but no words
came out. Dried blood ran down the front of her
badger face and throat tears streamed. And this is so awful, guys, because,
like burku It later on, it seems like if he
had simply not tried to help, but also the fact
that he tries to help is what we want. It's
really tough. And there were two forms on the table.
One was the blank dead corpse of the changeling whose
name had been tomko It said. His cause of death
was died on the surgical table, which was the same
as Zanep. The changeling had suffered a similar but not
as thorough fate as Zanep. It appeared as if he
had been peeled open. He wasn't truly on the table,
but upside down, hovering ten inches over the other form,
clutched in the mechanical arms of the machine hanging from
the ceiling. And we get a description eventually of the machine,
and it's nicknamed grease Monkey, and we find out about
the fact that these guys don't care about healing. They
want to know how everything works, and that they don't
do shit for free. So I'm trying to find the
bit here. Yeah, here it is. What a lot of
people don't know is the surgical repair is actually the
secondary purpose of these machines. Vice Roys have no passion
for healing. Their passion is science. They'll gladly operate on anybody,
but it's still ain't free. The good news is if
you can't pay right away, that's okay. The Viceroys have
multiple payment options and opportunities available for you don't like that,
And if you want to sign yourself over to their
post biological form Studies CORP, all your bills will be
wiped away. I really wonder about that because that's the
sort of thing where I feel like you're going to
be assuming you're dead when that happens, and then you
find out there's some fine print and actually you don't
have to be dead, and they still get to do whatever.
Architect Houston is the prime not because he was elected,
but because he's made the most scientific discoveries, most of
which were made with the help of this very machine
you see before you. And Houston is talking to Carl
and telling him to stay back because he's almost done,
almost completing his life's work. And this was sort of
interesting to me because like, there are times where I'll
be listening to something and just marveling at how incredible
a audiobook narrator is, and then every now and then
they'll deliver something in a way that I'm like, mm,
I think you missed on this one a little bit.
And for me, the way that the narrator did Architect
Houston's voice here doesn't work for me. I imagine this much
less as the kind of screaming, desperate sounding voice and
more a voice of like really carefully controlled pain somebody
who is not letting that through willingly and can't help
bit because to a degree that pain is not controllable,
but this is just there's a sound to it in
the audiobook narration where it's almost shrieking, you know. And
this dude to me, he strikes me as like very
in control in this scene. Still so oh sorry, there's
a bunch of chat, Rob says Samantha's writer or Die.
Saraphim says, this is Samantha. It could be all of
the above true. Jeff says, it's really horrible how much
awful shit men will do if the government lets them.
I'm reading any robot right now, and it's way too real.
I haven't heard of that one. Saraphim says, sun Be
a dentist starts playing repo the genetic Opera vibes. I
have never seen that because of the aforementioned hatred of
medical horror. No thank you, thumbs down. So then we
get Donut interrupting everything that's happening here. Her poprate's ripped
the giant robot in half and through half of it
at me. It didn't fly far enough to get to me,
but he's coming in my direction. I turned the music off,
but he's still coming. I'm thinking I shouldn't have said
so many mean things to him. Guys sure are sensitive
when you make fun of their wieners. He even marked
me for death, and Carl starts yelling for her to
get out or for somebody to go get her, and
she's just like, I have time still. The ball is
almost there, and I can't leave the tower until they
get to the corpses. If I don't stay, everyone is
in trouble and everyone on our team might die. And
I'm thinking that this is going to turn into an
argument between her and Carl, But then Lee June chimes in,
He's going to get to you before the ball reaches
the other field. I have an idea. Speaker number eleven
is still on the back of a cart. Mute all
the speakers except that one play the song I just
sent you. And this is when Lena says June, no, no,
and Lee June says, sorry, little sister, I'll jump before
he catches me. He doesn't manage that. Now. The thing
that gets me every single time during these moments is
that Carl has his own shit He's in the middle
of right now. You know, this is like, this is
such a crisis and somebody is basically saying, I'm falling
on my sword, and he can't even give it his
full attention because he's got a whole other thing, which
just I could never look. My Adhd would have me
dead in this dungeon way way too soon. There's just
no fucking way. And then he sends a message to
Burku and he says, to my surprise, this time it
was delivered. And I'm really curious about why that is.
My assumption is now that he is in the room
with her, that the AI is sort of going, well,
if Burkh still had their tongue, you would be able
to speak directly to each other. So I'm going to
let you do the messaging thing simply because you like
as a means of you too communicating because she can't speak.
But that if it were messaging in the normal way
where you are nowhere near one another, that's cheating. But
this is this is purely headcanon on my part. It's
just what makes sense. And honestly, even if it were
what I said, that's the AI kind of being nice,
Like the AI doesn't have to let them communicate at all.
So that's interesting. So Burku says, he tortured my mother.
He killed her right in front of me, free me
so I can kill him. These bindings won't let me
cast magic. You owe me, Carl, you killed my father.
Free me now. And Carl doesn't know who she's talking about.
I don't either. I'm not remembering this. I don't know
if I'm supposed to remember. If i'm not, don't tell me.
But this is Yeah, this was not ringing a bell
for me. You know, Carl's killed on this point. So uh,
he tells don keep an eye on Houston and kill
him if he starts to cast anything else. And then
Carl uses walk on air, and I just want to
mention this is the skill that he got from Lee June.
So in a way, Lee June is saving everybody's asses,
you know, Like I don't know, there was just something
about him using this right now while Lee June is
preparing to sacrifice himself. That felt really like underscoring and circling.
Lee June gave his all, you know. So he takes
the cleaner bot that's cleaning up all the blood, which
I'm super curious because I know that we can't pull
liquids into our inventory that are not in a container,
but I'm wondering if this cleaner bot is out here
cleaning up these rooms. How much blood is in the
cleaner bot? Now, I don't know what kind of like
interdimensional storage it has, but I'm willing to bet there's
a lot of blood in there if it's like a
bag of holding. So so yeah, So anyway, and here it
is across the way. Houston was crying in pain as
the machine appeared to start removing some of his lower guts,
letting them slop onto the floor. So now he starts
crying for real. So the narrator maybe they had a
point earlier. I feel like now's the time where it
starts to get into that sort of voice. I also
was like, why wouldn't you just like use drugs to
numb yourself through this? But the point is that he
has to be like fully conscious, I think, in order
to see what he wants to see. The changeling starts
to vibrate, and he realizes that they are actually physically
being connected by the grease monkey, and he tells Berkele,
I'm gonna remove the bindings, but don't leave the table.
We'll get him, but let me get you out of
the room. First. Uh let's see. Oh god, yeah, I'm
landed on the second table, landing amongst the gore of Zanep.
The body fell apart when I landed, much of it
slothing to the floor. Guys, there's something about him like
landing where the body is. That's so it's not just
the grossness of it. It's the fact that like that
he's willing to do that. That we've gotten to a
point where it's not even really mentioned that he hesitates
to do this. Do you know what I'm saying? I
don't know. That just felt like, oh god. So this
is when Houston is saying, Carl, you don't understand. I
can stop it all. I can get there. The change
things are the key. Why do you think we come
here cycle after cycle? You've helped make the greatest discovery
in history and you don't even realize it. It was
here all along. And it's so woh curious to me
why he thinks that this is like true? Look, I
can think of no better way to trick the madness
into going down a certain path then by showing the
beautiful place weird, unknowable of crafting and creature and acting like,
oh yeah, it exists and we know about it and everything.
Because they're going to get completely caught up in that.
So it's interesting to me that he really doesn't seem
it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that he's
being played or anything. It's just like all of this
is like a created place, and yet he's taking what's
in this created place seriously and I don't really understand
it fully. The created place is run by an AI
that apparently was like connected to the creation of the
planet and is part of a greater scope than we
even understand. Like part of the point of it is
that they started using these supercomputer ais without fully understanding
what they even are. So just because it's in this
fantasy world thing doesn't mean that it's not real. But
the reverse is also not necessarily true. There's just a
I just have a lot of questions, that's all I'm saying.
So m Dona is yelling at this point, go fasterly, June.
He is catching up, and then we get Rosetta chiming in.
Eris is awake, but she's still in the middle of
the ball. She's trying to escape, but she can't move.
She turned off her witness spell and just removed everyone's
in vulnerability, but they're still invulnerable anyway. The rolling Battle
Formation spell keeps them immobile and invulnerable, but they'll be
exposed the moment the ball breaks. And when she said that,
I was just like, oh shit, because Karl is here
and he doesn't have his in vulnerabili anym or and
he literally just looks down at himself and it's just
like fuck. I heard Mordecai's voice at that moment. You
can't save them all, kid. I didn't even know this
Berku person, and by all accounts, she was kind of
an ass. And now I was in serious trouble because
I hadn't simply let her die. I could have ended
this just by stepping into the room, and now it
was too late. And then we get lee June sister.
Tell Zang, I'm sorry I didn't get to say goodbye
to his face. Tell him I won our bet, and
you protect him. I want you to be kind to
the others. This was my decision. I had to do it.
I know you get angry. If you must be angry
with me. I love you with all I have. I
love you with the moon and the sun and all
the stars in the sky. I will see you soon,
and I will tell mama, you said hello, Oh my god,
you guys, because like, literally, one of my first thoughts
when he was about to sacrifice himself is like, oh no, me, No,
might be a fucking nightmare after this. Like him saying
don't be angry, I know you get angry does not help.
I am hoping that she will hear and internalize this,
But it may be that this simply washes over her
and that it does not make any impression at all.
I am going to be really interested to see how
she reacts, because there's a part of me that believes
that she has been sort of restraining some of the
more upsetting parts of her nature because of him. Zang
is still around, so that may not completely go away.
But ugh it, I don't know. So the changeling started
to change despite being dead. Tentacles or roots actually grew
from its lower half. Yes, Houston called as he died.
He was sobbing. I found you. I found you after
all this time, you were right here all along. It's
really you, isn't it Not just an avatar. It's you.
It's you. I took a fine healing potion and I
threw it at the Warlord. It crashed against the man's
alien head. When Carl did that, I swear, guys, I
gasped out loud because, like you know, admittedly, a part
of me is also low key interested in what Houston's
doing right now. So Carl was completely like going, Nope, no,
you don't. I was just like, oh, but I sort
of want to know. Above him, the creature that used
to be the change started to scream. Vines appeared out
of nowhere and wrapped their way up the machine. A
high pitched, shrill, bone shaking scream came from the creature
who remained in the clutches of the surgical apparatus. I
ignored this as I jumped across the way. How how though,
how did you ignore this? Things are becoming a little
too normalized around here, kids. I reached down to pickbur
Who up and pull her over my shoulder, and that's
when the table tipped over. I met her eyes as
she fell toward the white, clean floor, and like her
dead mother, I saw accusation there. At the same moment,
I sailed over her and hit the floor with my
bare feet. You don't know what you've done, was all
Houston said in the moments before the traps fired for
my part. I activated gloom Wraith phase. The very moment
my feet touched the ground, I shot forward, which was
toward architect Houston, still under the creature surgically attached. I
pushed through them as fire descended on the room from
all directions at once. I passed through the naked Houston,
unraveling him. My shoulder felt as if I hit a
solid wall, and I was suddenly spinning. The creature looked
into my eyes. It said nothing. It pulsated with black
energy regarding me. It just looked at me, and then
it leaned in as if to kiss me. And in
that moment, we still spun, and it changed, turning momentarily
into a face I recognized, Lee June. I couldn't understand
what was happening, just that it was important. We were
moving and frozen at the same time, spinning yet stopped.
It was like that moment with Paulie, frozen in time,
moving at incredible speed all at once. Thank you for
giving me more time with my sister and my best friend,
Lee June said, as roots wrapped around him and suddenly
whisked him away. So the all tree thing seems to
be part of this, like like almost a spiritual core
of the dungeon, but also perhaps everything because again we
don't know what we're playing with when we use the
AI to create the dungeon, so the whole thing with
the tree and the roots. And this is not the
first time that that kind of imagery has been mentioned
with Caral in his you know like it's something about
this also comes up later with Katya. So then we
the next like section is everybody like all of these
different messages about who has been defeated, who's winning, who
has what, and the war lord message a full quorum
adjudication has determined no cheating has occurred. And then we
get some changes from a war lord Agatha of the
war Made Rebellion, and this is wild shit because apparently
they are like an actual there are enough of a
real group to be a warlord. Action Item one war
Made Rebellion be given full resources and access, and the
AI is like, well, you already had that, so that
was a waste. War Mage be given full access to
conscription and that request is granted. And three, during the
pealing phase, revert to the rules of the original faction
wars warlords and all soldiers of a defeated team should
automatically die if they lose during the pealing phase, and
the AI agrees. Now, I this is first, this is
bananas and Agatha, what are you doing? But also we
are dealing with thousands and thousands of people on different teams,
and as an author, if you are going to pare
things down, you gotta have a way that huge groups
of people are dead. There's got to you have to
do something, you know to make it manageable. And it's
a tried and true like kill the queen, kill the mother,
and the rest of the hive will die sort of thing.
I'm not mad at this for the record. I'm just
saying like this trope makes sense to be brought in
now at this point in the story. But also the
fact that it works the way that it does keeps
it from being a trope that feels tired, because now
everybody is at risk in a way that they weren't before.
And it also means our people and team attribution aren't
very much at odds in a way they hadn't been
before they were able to fully team up, and now
it's going to be a team up until we don't
which could happen much sooner than we expected, and that
is such a fucking bummer. Finding a way to turn
everybody against each other just makes total sense and is
low key like Agatha is an evil genius right now
for this or not evil, I don't know what she's
trying to do. Just from that like flashback that we
had of her, it seems like she basically wants everybody dead.
So I'm putting it down to like I'm gonna say
evil as a shorthand for just like I think that's
a horrible idea. No. But so let me go into
several days earlier, and we are in the memory that
Karl went into with Kacia when they had this treatment thing.
It's crazy when I realized as I was reading this
that that was only several days earlier, because it's just
like we've had chapters and chapters since then, and it
just feels like ages ago, and to be reminded, like, no,
that shit kind of just happened is very disorienting. So
we get a more a closer look at the memory
that she had, and like, before we fully go into it,
we have this moment where as Karl is going under
I'd connected with more than just Catia. I'd caught the
briefest glimpses of everyone nearby, of Mordecai and that deep,
bottomless well of sadness within, of Rosetta, and the tired rage.
I love that line of Mordecai or no sorry, of
Edgar the Tortoise, and the strange sense of fear and
wonder at all the things he was suddenly remembering from
his hundreds of past lives. Of Bucket Boy, the crocodilian
NPC who wondered why he didn't remember the things the
other strippers said they did, and the shame he felt
because of it, because it like it meant he somehow
wasn't worthy. I'm wondering if he's new, and that's why.
And Imani oh Godi. Most of what I saw with
the others was emotion and maybe an inkling at what
caused it. But with her and Katya, I saw more.
I saw what Immani carried. It was just a glimpse,
but it was so so much. She'd fled her home
in Detroit, and her older brothers and sisters blamed her
for leaving the family, but she had to. She had
to get away. She'd earned her nursing certificate and found
a job in what she considered the middle of nowhere,
a relatively small, beautiful town where drugs and violence and despair,
which is something one saw on the news. She was
always chasing peace, despite the overwhelming guilt she carried like
a heavy sack she couldn't put down. She was sick
of being looked at as the one in charge, the
one who had to make the tough decisions. She didn't
want that responsibility, yet it always fell to her, despite
her always being the youngest one in the room. She
was in love with Chris, and I had no idea.
She loved his simplicity, his quiet kindness. It felt so private,
so dirty for me to have learned about this in
such a way, like I had broken into her house
and spied her utterly naked, all without her knowing. Ugh, y'all,
if EMMANI doesn't remind me of Rashan, it is crazy.
It is crazy. Like you know, I'm not going to
get into it because I don't need to be telling
her business. But suffice to say, I think Rashaan would
get quite emotional reading this, because yeah, and he's actually
Carl is like, thankful that donut isn't in the room.
Because the way he's able to see all of this
in just an instant with Emani, he knows that he
would see a lot with Donut, and he doesn't want
her privacy violated in that kind of way. Now, guys,
I'm going to say something here that I don't I
hesitate to do because I feel like I sound bananas,
But I'm really like worried that Donut isn't Donut anymore fully.
And I don't mean like, oh, she's changing because of trauma.
I mean like something's happening that is an outside influence,
or did she get replaced with a changeling or what.
I don't know. I don't know how that works. I
don't know if they can imitate abilities, you know, I
really don't know how that works. But the fact that
Donut's not in here and there's clearly been something going
on with her, it could simply be that the author
doesn't want to delve into that yet because they want
that to be a different thing, a conversation, rather than
simply an inspection and exposition. Or it could be there's
a twist going on with her and this would reveal
it and we don't want that yet. I'm just worried
about it and the whole way that all this happens
as he's going under I'm thinking is related to this
odd all tree situation, like he is somehow getting in
touch with it and thus able because everything is connected
through it, able to sense more with the folks, especially
that he has gotten to know better assumption. But I
do not know if there's I don't know if that's it,
and that's true. Sarah him is saying, I doubt a
changeling could use her chat true. Jeff says, I thought
maybe him being a primal gives him this ability. It
would make sense that, like the the ability, because I
still think like this weird tree imagery has something to
do with it, but that Carl can access it when
maybe others can't would make sense if they are kind
of the same level of being now because he's he's
primal and the AI is going primal and I don't
know how long it takes before it really is that,
you know, is it by now? It may be, but
I'm wondering if that's part of life. I don't know.
I don't know, guys, but I really got to get
through this because your girl is getting in the weeds here,
so we get to see again the scene of like
Kotcha facing off with her shitty ex who tells on
her regarding this kid. And it's just so awful because
what she wanted was to adopt this baby who did
not have a good prognosis, and because Kotya herself is sick,
they don't want her to get to adopt this kid.
So it's better for the kid to simply die in
the hospital alone than for Ktya to take on the
care of this child in the meantime. And like, you know,
a part of me understands the position of the hospital
being like she's unwell, she will not be able to
care for this child. I really, like, you know, there's
the possibility if she going really wrong with Kotchya long
before this little girl passes away, who knows what could
happen then, So in a sense, I get that, but
it also just feels so incredibly cruel for no reason
other than bureaucracy, you know, And we get the full
story of the fact that like she when she didn't
even like get notified that the little girl died, she
just ran into one of the nurses who casually mentioned it,
like it was nothing, and it's part of why this
last moment of her holding the baby is her worst
and best memory, because she knew it would be the
last time. And Kotchya says, at this moment, I was
so sure I was going to kill myself after this
that I actually felt this calming sense of peace. But
then I thought to myself, what if they changed their
mind then who would she have and the fear would
come back. They never did change their minds. And then
when I saw the nurse at the park and she
told me Annie was dead, as if it was nothing,
I lost all the hope I had all over again.
And Carl says, I recognized that moment of finality for
what it was, the last moment of the crash. Come
on now, the woman had said to me, come on now.
That I really like this part of the story, specifically
that a really awful period in your life, you would
think that there would be you would think you would
be able to pinpoint what moment it really was at
its nadier, and it isn't the moment you would normally choose.
And how difficult to explain it is if you're trying
to talk to somebody about it. That it's like, no,
it's not even getting sent to like the boys home
finding out that my dad had disappeared. It wasn't even that.
It was the woman saying come on now, and how
it just doesn't make sense to anybody but you. And
there's something that feels very real about this, even though
I can't really like compare it to anything in my
life that I can think of specifically, but it feels real,
you know. And Carl says, she knows you couldn't be together,
but right here, in this moment, she knows. I know,
gotcha said, That's why it's my favorite memory. And then
she says, I'm worried about Daniel. And you guys know,
I've been saying something's up with Batista and I'm kind
of starting to think that he's going to do something
crazy and evidently, and she says, I love him, but
I love you two more than him, and we touched
heads again. I thought of Asher, of my father, my mother.
I mourned what could have been if we stick around
long enough, you can see me almost get arrested. Katcha
finally added, and she says, you know what, I think
Mordecai's stupid plan is actually, and then they get cut
off and I'm just like, God, damn it, what what plan?
But this is when she Maria busts in and is
saying I didn't kill him, and a new voice says, bitch,
you swallowed me whole, which that is so funny, the
starting off with just bitch, yeah m hm. So that's
so depressing. I didn't even really need to see the
whole memory because I kind of suspected that this was
how it was. But the conversations about what else was
going on were also very interesting and like a separate deal. Ah.
The fact that Batista suspected that Carl might try to
kill Katya and take that flower. The thing that gets
me about that is Carl's saying like that hadn't even
occurred to him, but it did occur to Batista, and
that's to me a really dangerous thing that he thought
of it, because that indicates the kind of person he
is actually. And I have run into this before of
somebody just kind of leaping to a conclusion about something
that is so out of left field to me, and
I'm like, how the fuck did you even get there?
And then I have to take a step back and
be like, oh, because they're projecting, because they're kind of
a shitty person, and so they assume everybody thinks the
way they do. And it just I have been very
willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because
Kostya likes him, and I want to be like, if
she likes him, she has to really see something about
his character. But the fact that he has this concern
that he thought of this at all, and that he
misjudges Carl so much that he actually believes Karl might
do something like that, he's going to be a problem.
He's going to be a problem, and I'm not looking
forward to that. And when somebody thinks the way it
seems he thinks, trying to convince them that you don't
think that way is next to impossible. They genuinely don't
believe you and think that you're trying to be like
holier than thou or like righteous in some way, when
it's like, it's not even about that, it's simply that like, no,
I'm not doing that, you know. It makes me think
of the way that people who are cheating will start
to get real weird and accuse their partner of cheating
about little stupid things. And it actually is kind of
a tell that the fact that they're behaving weirdly about
stuff all of a sudden often will indicate that they
have started cheating, and so it's on their mind in
this weird way that begins to manifest and become accusation. So, okay, Rosetta,
we start with Baroness Victory. I was able to check
the financial feed during the adjudication while we waited for
that idiot Ferdinand to come down out of the rafters,
which I'm just lol. It appears the money has reached
the intended destination. Obviously, we can't see what's really happening
out there anymore, but we can still see transactions and
their amounts. I can't decipher what the gods is happening
in the Naga system, but there was a transaction more
than big enough to suggest your people were able to
purchase two ships despite the apparent chaos in the system.
Assuming your homecoming Queen Starship follows your orders and shoots
down that yah, our transaction is done. Our transaction is done.
So did she explain to Rosetta how to get this
money like I? And Rosetta says, okay, So what about
the war mages and barreness. Victory says, just because we
have dealings together outside the dungeon doesn't mean I am
not taking my duties as adjutants. Seriously, I told you
before I will not cheat, nor will I help you cheat.
Any information I give about indungeon rulings must go through
Warlord's carl or donut. That said, everything is fucked. That's
what's going on. We're all going to die because the
AI is insane. Rosetta side with relief, no matter what
happened next. Her primary mission was complete. If it all
fell apart now, it wouldn't be her fault. And honestly,
there's something about that that is very freeing. I understand this. Still,
despite her absolute hatred for the Orcs, she felt ill
about the transaction. The yacht they'd agreed to kill. Oh
that's right, I forgot about this obviously. The yacht they
agreed to kill in exchange for the pin number contained
several children or children, yes, but children nonetheless, and now
that Stalwart was dead, one of those children was the
new king of the Skull Empire, assuming York actually did
his duty and didn't decide to write a poem or something. Instead,
once he shot down the ork yacht, that would leave
Princess Formidable in charge of the Skull Empire, assuming she
was still alive somewhere on Earth's surface, and if she
was dead, then it would be the Maestro, despite him
being supposedly disowned by his father. I was just like,
what do you mean supposedly? I thought that that was
like an official thing. I think that if you get
disowned like that everybody and everybody knows about it, you
can't inherit after that, how's he going to rule? After
what happened. Nobody's taken this guy. Seriously, that's not great anyway.
There were no circumstances in which baron is Vic would
end up in charge of the Skull Empire unless she
first killed about a thousand other nobles spread across the galaxy,
so her motivations in helping the Pacifist network were a
mystery to Rosetta. This deal had been broken between Porthos
and Victory long before Victory was even chosen as an adjutant.
Once again, he seemed to be a few steps ahead
of everybody else. Ah, so interested, so very fucking curious
about this. If all was going to plan Porthos, along
with all the others, namely the families of those who'd
entered the dungeon, would be boarding the generation ship they
just bought with their stolen funds and hauling tail to
the Plenty system, where they would give one of the
expensive ships, along with the rest of their money to
the goats in exchange for passage to the forbidden gate
of the Impetus Point, the tunnel node that reached the
furthest point in the known galaxy, and from there they
would set out and get as far from the Center
system as possible, only to return when and if the
inevitable wars and chaos settled. Huh. I mean, as far
as plans go, I guess it makes the most sense.
It's not like you can hide out nearby. Shit does
not work. So it just is sort of funny though,
how much, even at this scale, it like a plan
just amounts pretty much to and get the hell out
of dodge, you know. But I mean that's what it's
gonna come down to mostly, So yeah, that makes sense.
So far, everything had occurred exactly as Porthos predicted. Everything
Outside the dungeon, it was that woman Rosetta a knew
the witch, the apothecary, and this is the being that
Krakaren represents in the Dungeon that we are told by
Mordecai way back. This depiction of her is propaganda. Essentially.
Porthos insists that she's on their side, and Rosetta is
just like, I do not know about this, and he's
been right about everything, so I'm like letting it go,
but it does fucking bother me. And when she's like,
what is the reason behind her supporting us? And he
won't tell her, but he has this like smug expression
like he does know something. So yeah, uh. He killed
Brooks with that goddamned whip of his faction. Wars had
been over and the Orcs had made the transfer to
the School of Pendra club and even then, standing on
the other side of the glass, they'd mocked them, the
crawlers who had given everything to survive those horrible days.
And he just lassoes him and pulls him through the
glass and cuts him in half. And it's this very
casual thing that he does while laughing, and it's a
friend of hers and she that's what she is using
as her motivation. Doesn't even feel adequate, you know, it's
like her engine when she has to go and kill him.
So she gets a message here from Tippid should we
be doing something, and Rosetta saying, there's nothing we can do.
I've ordered Lee not to assist the NPCs, but she
is currently in a fit of hysterics over the death
of her brother. And there is something about the fact
that she is in hysterics over his death that I
appreciate because like it indicates something about emotion with her,
which I wasn't sure if she experienced emotion at all
or what, and it seems like it's just a very
limited thing for her. Justice Light is continuing to talk
about the gate, and he says we need to move
on the war made threat immediately they have the gate.
I don't understand why they're not onlied with the other
NPCs or why that residual is their war lord. And
Rosetta is like, yeah, bro, I know, but we knew
when we came into this we were likely going to
die here, so I understand your urgency. I want to
figure this out too, but also please do keep in
mind we are unlikely to get out of this, and
you have got to hold the big picture in your
mind a little bit more, and Justice Light is like, yeah,
I am holding the big picture. That's what I have
a thing I'm trying to do here, and we need
to fight. And then it's her thinking about Agatha and
what the fuck her deal is? Why she's here? Is
she connected with the apothecary somehow? Why is the AI
allowing this? And she's thinking back to the fact that
there had been a point where maybe they could have
taken Agatha out and should have, but that mostly residuals
are totally harmless, and they just didn't see it coming
that she was going to be doing anything, so Justice
late Finally, Rosetta, you are the most stubborn person I
have ever known, But I need you to trust me
in this. We need to get that gate back. We
need to win this day. We need to move fast.
Once those defensive towers spin up, we will be in
dire trouble. And I'm trying to find this bit. She
thought again of that moment when she decapitated Rust. She'd
almost missed the opportunity because Tippet, unaware of the plan
with the bank, had tried to hide the orc's presence
from her. Their original plan had been to get what
they needed from Stalwart, but Rust's presence had made everything
so much easier. Yet no amount of revenge would ever
bring her mother back. It would never bring Brooks back.
No matter how many Orcs and Orc children she killed,
her people would still be dead. She hadn't even known Brooks.
She'd seven hundreds and hundreds die before that point, Yet
that single death had broken her in a way she
just didn't understand. And yeah, it'd be like that. Sometimes.
She'd watched Karl's speech to Dona about masks, and she'd wept.
She'd wept at how hopeful it was, how cynical she
felt in that moment, at the pity, thinking how naive
it was that he thought he'd ever be able to
remove that mask. Was she wrong? Maybe so, Rosetta's job
was done. No matter what happened here, it didn't matter anymore.
But Justice Light was her comrade, and so were Karl
and Dona and all the other Crawlers. And in the end,
she trusted Porthos. She more than trusted him. She loved him,
despite his unhealthy obsession with finding a missing crawler from
his own Minerva. That name is hidden. I don't remember
if we've run into Minerva or not. But and if
Porth has trusted this apothecary, then maybe Rosetta should fight
against whatever this creature's enemies were planning. Maybe it was
a mistake, but nobody could ever fault her for fighting
for her friends. There was poetry in that too, So
she sends out an order. The fight has moved to
the city. The enemy has changed and they have taken
the castle of Larrocos. We don't know how many there are,
but we fight with all we have and we get
the summary of her Crest worked as a game guide
upon Dungeon Exit, became a journalist and filmmaker of Some Renown.
Eventually became host of the documentary series Shadow Boxer. Eventually
returned to the Dungeon to fight for the Princess Posse,
author of the ninth edition of the Dungeon Anarchist Book.
And that is the end of Rosettes chapter. So there's
just like it keeps feeling like somehow Matt Dinneman is
managing to open the universe. He's built up more and
more with each passing section, and I'm starting to get
to a point where I'm like, bro, i don't know
how much more of this I can keep track of.
It's a lot now. I know that the Apothecary isn't
exactly a new thing because we were told about, but
like it didn't matter, it wasn't factoring in for us,
us and ah. There's a part of me that's like,
is the Apothecary connected to this weird the beautiful place?
Because it's like a kraken, you know, that thing had
all these tentacles. I'm just sort of like, is this something?
But it may be nothing. I don't know how literally
to take anything. A lot of questions. I have got
to wrap them over time. But thank you guys again
for hanging out with me. I appreciate you all very
very much. Thank you to Michael for commissioning this one,
and until next time to the Loo motherfuckers. That was
an Unspoiled Network podcast