Speaker 1: This is an Unspoiled Network podcast. This is spoil Me
covering Dungeon Crawler Carl Book six, The Eye of the
bedlam Bride, chapters sixty through sixty four. In these chapters,
Carl has come up with an interesting plan that somehow
is manipulating the AI, is manipulating the system. I'm not
totally clear on how all this works. I don't think
I'm supposed to be quite yet, but I am very
very interested to see how this shakes out because I
feel like the implications are kind of major. Welcome to
spoil Me, Welcome to the show everyone. I am Natasha.
Thank you very much to Michael for commissioning this episode.
Michael isn't here today, but he may show up eventually.
And at the moment we've got Saraphim and Rob with me,
so appreciate you guys being here too. These are some
really interesting like there's a lot of stuff happening here.
That's so. I don't want to say that it's in
conflict with what we have been told, because that's not
really it. It's more that there are additional levels to the
situation that we haven't been aware of, and we're getting
a lot of information what's compelling. And I'm really curious
about when this idea occurred to Matt Denneman, because there
is a very clever method of having these little like
intros to each chapter be entries from the cookbook that
give you a heads up about certain things, and he
doesn't use them the same way every time. It's not
like they're always if you read about a thing that
it's going to be oh, okay, we're about to face
that thing, or that if we learn about how something works,
then that is to inform us because it is still
how it works. If anything. Sometimes he does it to
sort of like fuck with us and get us thinking
that a certain thing is standard and it's not, or
to let us know that a rule has been very
obviously and specifically changed because somebody has just told us
that this isn't supposed to be possible. And due to that,
there are some implications that I didn't quite pick up
on initially, because I was sort of thinking that this
intro is being used in a way that I, looking
back now realized was supposed to support what it was
that Karl was saying, but I thought was meant to
indicate that the rules had been changed somehow, and we'll
get there. I swear I'm getting to the point here,
but I just wanted to mention it because it's a very,
in my opinion, interesting use of these intros. And I
wonder how it was like, because so much of what
this story is is us finding out about changes in
standards for a variety of reasons. Some of them are
allegedly I'm gonna say humanitarian, even though not everybody's human,
but you get what I'm saying, like to be a
sort of like civil rights issue. Some of them are
business issues. There's just a lot of different reasons why
certain changes are made, and I can't help but think
that maybe having Mordecai tell us everything was just starting
to get like, one, a little boring, and two, it
was unlikely that they would allow Mordecai to tell them
all that this is giving us or to know in
the first place, so he had to find a bit
of a way around it and also find a way
to give Carl information that he shouldn't have access to.
And I still really wonder what all the deal is
with the cookbook, because it feels like something that shouldn't
even be allowed in the game, and it is being permitted,
and there's even things that like the AI is saying
that he can't copy paste, so there's like there's something
going on here with what all he is like, you
know what I'm saying. And I just there was a
whole thing in the last section with him talking about
how I really need to keep in mind that the
AI isn't my friend, that it's not like on our side.
It is against the same people that we are against,
but that doesn't really mean the same thing. And yet
I am so sorry, guys, I can't help but still
a little bit fall into the trap of feeling like
maybe the AI is kind of on our side, and
I don't. I don't really think it is. I don't really,
but there's a bit of me kind of being like,
but what if it is? Though? What if it is?
And it's simply on your side in a way that
is not you can't cluck because it's doing it in
such a weird way because it's not a person and
it doesn't feel toward you, and so it's doing things
that are in the long run best for you as
a crawler, but that in the immediate moment feel cruel
and terrible. You know, what I'm saying. I don't. I
don't know, guys, I might just be making it up,
but I just want I want the AI to be
on our side so bad. I think that's really what
it is, is just this sort of sense of like
I want to feel like there is we have some
kind of advantage, and maybe I'm just fooling myself with it,
you know. So Chapter sixty starts with him say Kwan
had more crap in his inventory than I did, And
as soon as I heard that, I was like, oh shit,
because Carl basically picks up everything he comes across that
is pickable, ubbable, and he's got all of these different weapons,
and instantly my thought was like, oh, he took all
of this off the crawlers he killed, Like every weapon
that he's got is really weird and specific. And Carl
gives him like lets him keep the ring on his person,
but we don't. He keeps Kwan's arm and says that
he's not really sure why he did it, and I
am not sure either. I am not mad at it,
but I like, I feel like this is the time
to put his arm down and be like, all right,
you're all in one piece again. Rest in peace, lol,
But you get what I'm saying. I feel also that
not enough has been mentioned about what happens to their
bodies after they die, Like we have had crawlers that
are brought back and recycled in different parts of the game,
and you know, not crawlers. Actually, I think that's against
the rules that they can't do it with crawlers, but
they can do it with people who were in the collapse.
Technically not supposed to, but like, right, you're if you're
on the surface, you're not supposed to. But I think
if you died in the collapse, your fair game. So
I don't know if this like what I keep imagining
is in the Hunger Games when there's just a hovercraft
that comes along and scoops their body up and takes
it away, you know, and just realizing, like, I don't
know what happens to these bodies, because it pretty much
seems like folks are just sort of left where they
fall and then the level collapse and you know whatever,
it's like not nobody cares about it. So Carl mentions
here about how he had thought about putting on the
Ring of Divine Suffering in order to gain some points
from Ren or Kulan, but that if they, like were
notified that he had marked them, maybe they would change
their minds about how to handle the whole thing. I
tend to think that they would not have changed their minds.
In fact, if I were one of them, I think
I probably would have told him to do that. If
I'm doing this in the hopes that he's going to
make it through, I think I'd probably want to give
him every advantage. The only reason that I might not
is the suspicion that this ring is doing him harm somehow,
and I don't have enough to support that, so I
think I might just tell him go for it, you know.
And this is when Wren is saying goodbye and Donah
is just like, wait, what are you doing? And later
Donut makes a few comments about the fact that Ren
like confessed to her misdeeds as a cheater, and it
was just it's kind of hitting for me, like Donut
Knowsren was just saying that, like, Donut's not a fucking idiot,
you know. And I think she's a little bit flipped
out and is using this as a as a mask
to cover how she's feeling, because she's feeling kind of complicated,
you know. So he uses Samantha to grip ont Donuh
and bring her to him, and Donut has the Golden
Player killer skull because Quantad made it back onto the
top ten. I don't remember how much gold she gets
as a ward, but it's got to be pretty substantial.
Between that and the fact that he had like five
million gold on him, they are doing pretty well gold
wise right now, which only means that Embrus is going
to get an even bigger cut and she's going to
be very very pissed about it. But we don't talk
about that right now. The whole thing with all of
these zombies proliferating and the demon thing is beginning to
spread across the world. It's definitely worse where they are,
but everybody is starting to like encounter weird shit, and
they have Emani and she is watching this club Vanquisher
entrance and seeing the way that the guys in there
are sticking their heads out and like occasionally they're firing
off at like with their various weapons at some of
these these demon zombies, and eventually she sees a few
of them get ragged down and it's just like, holy shit,
and what I thought was interesting is Carl says that
Mordecai told him there is a sort of collected collective
mind with the zombies, so if just one spots you,
they all start to come in your direction, which is
it's the sort of thing that isn't specifically really like
always mentioned in uh, what's the word I want? When
you have like zombie properties, Usually what it'll be is
that like other zombies, notice one zombie changing course, and
it will be a sort of like tidal reaction, the
way that a school of fish all turning in a
certain direction happens. But this being explicitly they share a mind,
is very specific. It's I don't know. I think that
that's kind of a cool idea, and by cool, I
mean terrible because I don't like it and I don't
want it. But this is probably something that we can exploit.
I feel like the more information we have always is better, right,
So let's see, he truly had a lot of weapons
on him. I wondered if his class sergeant at arms
had something to do with the reason why he kept
it all, which is a really interesting idea. I'm curious
about that. I don't think we'll ever find out, And
This is when he's talking to Mordecai about these Eye
in the Sky scrolls and whether or not he should
use them, and he's like, well, I would keep them
in your inventory because they're pretty rare, and he's got five,
which is sitting pretty for right now, and also says
to keep the tummy acre in his inventory. You couldn't
down the stairs with Mango before because you didn't have
a pet carrier. This guy will be fine as long
as you keep him boxed up. You can try bonding
with him later. He'll be a great pet for you
should you decide to keep him. But you have too
much on your plate right now to deal with trying
to keep a level one pet alive, especially if it
has an undid weakness. And Wren made a mistake by
saying what his weaknesses are out loud. The faction guys
aren't going to be spying, but we aren't supposed to
be spying. But we both know that's bullshit and that
didn't even occur to me. That's just saying what all
of his current weaknesses are was a really bad call.
And it's like a part of me wants to be like, oh,
maybe she was a misdirect, but she says what one
of them is and then stabs him with that thing
made out of that weakendess. So like at least one
of them she was telling the truth, and I suspect
she was telling the truth about all of them, which
does really suck. I will go on record as saying personally,
I really want the tummy Acre to be part of
the team. I love Mongo, y'all know I do. He
is very doglike and that's fun. I feel like the
Tummyager could bring a really different energy, like a toddler,
which can be very funny. It's like, I understand the
danger because apparently they want to eat dinosaurs. Samantha suggests
that maybe if they grow up together it won't be
like that. I tend to agree with Samantha, which means
I feel like that's got to be wrong, Like that
was where my head was at as well. But I
find herself unreliable in terms of her judgment that I've
got to think that that can't be it. It can't
be that simple. I don't know, though, We'll see, we'll see.
And there's also this moment where Mordecai says, have you
thought about what you're gonna do with the key, Carl says,
once again, I'm going to give it to Imani, and
Mordecai says she's not gonna take it, and Carl's says,
Ellie will convince her, and Mordecai doesn't answer, And later
on I really enjoyed Imani being like Karl, Donna told
me about your fucking dumbass plan to use a bone.
We're not doing that. You need bones for they're there
for a reason. And honestly, considering that she's like a healer,
which I had forgotten, it does make very much sense
that she would be like, no, you're not voluntarily giving
up a random bone, are you fucking high? So yeah,
this is when sister Innees reaches out and she says,
I know you have the last key. The door you
seek is ni Iglesia de Jesus dee Miramar. It's a
holy place. I've preyed on it, and I know what
I must do. I can't let you in. If you
open that door, it will be the end of everything
they told me. So this hell you see is only
a sampling of what awaits us because of our sin.
This sucks. It's you know, it just I said this before,
but the fact that she's like, everything here isn't real
until it's demons, which I already think are real and
therefore that's the real thing is the most annoying confirmation
bias sort of shit. And then there's this like somebody
out there who seems to be exploiting her mental illness
and her like kind of paranoia. You know, it's just
a really gross tact to take, and it's really interesting because, like,
I don't know how many of y'all remember in I
feel like in the very first book there is a
moment where the concept of gods is brought up, and
Mordecai has a sort of urgency when he's telling Carl,
whatever gods you meet are not real. There are no
gods in this game, which, considering what happened in his
uh to his brother the relationship of a quote god
in that that makes sense. Feeling really intensely about that,
But also there was a feeling when he said it
of like, don't be fooled, which at the time I
was very much like, who would be fooled? We know
none of this is real, and I sort of like
that we have actually met someone who is fooled in
this very specific way where it's not that she thinks
this is real like up until this moment, and that
this is somebody who already had been dealing with a
mental illness that led her to think that she was
being given signs like that. She she says something about
how like I have to show you the way I
showed my sisters, the way you know, all of the
nuns that she had poisoned. So she has already been
this person and the way that she's being played right
now is it simultaneously makes a lot of sense and
is really upsetting to see because this is what I
feel has happened to a lot of very religious people
with a tendency towards untreated mental illness in our country
as well. And when I talk about untreated mental illness,
this is not even really laying blame on the people
who have it for not getting treated. Our country does
not make getting treatment easy or affordable or like even
accessible at all. So it kind of metastasizes into this
weird manifestation that is a in some places can be
like rooted in something that's real, but then turns into
this boogeyman kind of scenario, you know. Anyway, So, you know,
we find out about those the people, the Nebula that
sponsored her, who are those weird guys are They are pacifist,
but they also want the annihilation of whole groups of
people who are eligible for the krawl to you know
what I mean. So they would like kill all of earth,
a real contradiction, which is sort of the name of
the game for a lot of religions. And Carl tells
Sister Nez yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll meet up with you,
which of course they will not be doing. He has
to keep her distracted for as long as he can.
And we find out after this that she has got
control over some of these demons in a way that
is not in line with what we know of her abilities,
and they think that there is somebody sponsoring a god
that is giving her some kind of of access, you know,
which really really sucks. I really hate this. It's also
I don't know how long she can hold this. And
once she breaks free, if she is near the church
that she is threatening to destroy to keep them from
reaching the door, then is it possible that she could
inadvertently get that church destroyed and that door destroyed because
she loses control over them, because as things go on,
Carl really begins to suspect that her control over the
situation is beginning to deteriorate. So I'm sorry, guys, there
are so there's so much chat. But Michael says Imani
has also consistently been one of the most self sacrificing characters.
There was zero chance she'd take Carl and Donut's key,
exactly the idea that he really thought she would, like,
come now, sir, please, so's the add is the problem
with riding a tiger's back is that you better fucking
not get off. I never heard that, Michael, but I
really do like that. That's a good one. So this
part sixty one is the part that I was talking
about in the beginning of the episode, where I was
like thinking that this was to point out something had changed,
and it wasn't. Even though you can sometimes move the
platforms upon which the stairwells sit, you cannot put the
exit portal in your inventory. You can't bring a stairwell
into your safe room. I watched one get hit by
an utter annihilation wand and it remained unscathed. I believe
that means they are indestructible, and somebody confirms this and
says in the rules manual stairwells may be gated until
certain conditions are met, but the stairwells themselves are not
allowed to be removed, and then rosetta. The only way
for a crawler to move from one floor to the
next is via a stairwell. It's an unbreakable rule. At
the end of Faction Wars, after the Viceroy was pulled
out their last minute victory, a portal appeared and several
of the remaining fucks stepped within. It was all of
them together, laughing as if they had weren't just bathing
in each other's entrails the day before. It appeared. It
was taking him to another part of the dungeon, some
sort of nightclub on a different floor. They dragged several
unwilling NPCs. A crawler tried to jump through the portal
to save the NPCs, and he was stopped like it
was a wall of glass. The Orc step back through
into the remains lasted the crawler, and returned to the portal.
The rope pulled itself within and it cut the crawler
in half. We watched as the orc and his friends
laughed just there on the other side of the glass.
It was the last crawler they killed of the thousands
who fell during that pointless game. And this is a
hint of what we find out about the portals later,
which at first does not seem like it makes any
sense why somebody is bringing it up, and then it
turns out there's a really good reason for it. But yeah,
this I thought it was like kind of being like, oh, yeah,
the the way to get to the stairwells. The stairwells
themselves can't be damaged, and since that has happened, the
rules are changing or the AI is doing something that
previously wasn't allowed. And then I finally realized that this
is simply saying the door to the stairwell can be
destroyed because it isn't in itself the stairwell. It's just
a way to get to the stairwell, which is part
of what is at the base of Carl's idea is like,
what if we bypassed the door and just didn't try
to go through it that way? What if the stairwell
exists even when the door is destroyed, and we can
find a way to it. And that is something that like,
I don't know how much of a giveaway it is
that he has figured this out or if this is
considered pretty much common knowledge that the stairwells can't be destroyed,
and so the fact that he has put this together
is just him connecting dots with information everybody already had
access to. This is always the thing that I find,
really like, something that I get caught up on is
how likely is it that whatever Carl does at a
given moment using information that he got from the cookbook,
that somebody is going to put it together. That he
got that information but via means that are against the rules.
He is not an idiot, so I have to assume
that he knows exactly like how far to push it
and just what to say. We don't get to see
a lot of that, to be honest. The way that
he sort of will dance around some things. We'll see
him dance around things when he's talking to Donut, really,
but a lot of times the conversations with like Mordecai,
specifically where he has to manipulate Mordecai into like showing
him how to make a different kind of explosive that
he shouldn't know about this stuff is sort of done
off page, so anyway, it's just something that always gets
me a little bit concerned, but I think he's mostly
been I feel that that's going to be ultimately something
that really bites him in the ass, though, is that
there will be a point during which he has the
choice to hide what his source is and allow some
people to die, or make it very clear that he
has access to something he shouldn't and save people's lives
and then take a hit due to that and potentially
lose the cookbook. I don't think that the cookbook that
he is allowed to be like, you know, executed for
breaking rules, because that's part of the way the game works,
is that he has this thing. But I can imagine
that there would be some kind of severe consequence, you know.
So it's absolutely ridiculous. They can just break the doors
don't set as we ran, And this is like what
I was originally thinking, is her pointing out, oh, the
rules are different than what they were when those people
made those entries. So I was just really not understanding
initially what was going on here. And as they're running
past all of these weird zombie fish and stuff, we
are getting some information from Karl about the various people
across the world and the way that they are killing
each other to try and get access to certain keys.
That some of them were fighting a little too close
to the actual doorway, and so while one of them
did win and get the key, the battle actually damaged
the door so badly that the door disappeared anyway. Like
just it's just really really unfair. And Carl is also
realizing that because we skipped the previous floor, there are
way more of us left alive than they were intending.
So probably what's going on with this seeming so unfair
is the AI having to get back to the projected
numbers that it was supposed to be at by killing
a bunch of us off pretty ruthlessly on this floor.
So when we started this floor, there'd been over thirty
eight thousand crawlers left alive. Mordecai hadn't said anything about it,
but sometime in the past few weeks he turned off
the surviving number of crawlers from displaying in the personal space.
I deliberately didn't look at it when we entered regular
safe rooms. I didn't want to know. And yeah, this
was actually something that I had sort of clocked myself
as a reader that we used to get updates on
how many remained and that we weren't. But I just
sort of like my mental explanation was simply that Matt
Denneman didn't want to engage on that level anymore. And
I don't know why I thought that. I just figured,
you know, and maybe that is the explanation for why
he chose not to write that in you know what
I mean, like an in world explanation, and he really did,
as a writer, not want to engage with any more
of that. So let's see, fewer than one thousand crawlers
usually made it to the tenth floor. Sometimes it was zero,
for the eleventh the average was less than ten. Very
few chose to push on instead of making deals. That's
the thing that I am the most interested in later on,
is how we are going to convince people to stop
taking deals, because that, I think is going to be
at the core of how we begin to break things
is we don't let them buy us off somehow. And
it's a really easy thing to fucking say, but when
it comes up down to it, a lot of us
are going to be so exhausted and so angry and
done that taking a deal. Of course, we're going to
want to do that, you know. And it makes me
think a lot about like our justice system system in
the way that plea deals work. It's a really insidious
thing because on the one hand, I can understand the
need for it. If somebody confesses and makes it easy
on all of us by not requiring a jury trial,
saves us money, saves us time. If we can get
them to do that, it would be so much easier.
But then there are so many people who take plea
deals who are actually innocent because it's either do this
and be guaranteed less time at sometimes a lower security prison,
or risk going to trial and possibly getting a lot
more time for something that they know they didn't do.
And they're going to serve either way, even if they
didn't do it, they know they're nailed to the wall somehow,
So taking the deal is the least of two evils.
And it's really terrifying when you begin to look into
the numbers how how prevalent plea deals are in our
system for incarceration of innocent people and basically railroading folks
in a way, you know. Anyway, there was an essay
in the Cookbook by Harrot, who posited the focus of
the fans shifted once faction wars finished. While top tier
crawlers would have die hard followers, much of the attention
shifted to the intrigue in scheming and positioning of the
individual elites preparing for the ascendency game. The crawlers themselves
were treated more like sands in an hourglass. The moment
the last one died or took a deal, the ascendency
game would start, and the timing of that moment could
change everything. So this is the key, is like, how
do Carl and Donut find a way into the game.
That's clearly what they have to do. They have to
make themselves part of that in some way. And I
don't know if the stake that they have bought into
the ninth floor can be leveraged into something regarding that.
I don't know how a lot of this stuff works yet, obviously,
but for me, that sounds like are in potentially, and
I don't know how any of that would work. So
ooh sorry, uh, Michael says. The problem with him trying
to tell anyone about the Cookbook, even to save someone else,
is that it vanishes without a trade. That's yeah, no,
I know that. So it's very probable people would think
he was lying about it to protect his real source.
But that's the thing, like, if he just tells them,
whether they think he is lying or not, it's not
really so much about me saying like does he tell anybody?
It's more does he do something that absolutely reveals for
sure he has access to info he shouldn't, because right
now everybody is thinking that he does, but they don't
have any real solid proof. Everything is just borderline enough
that you could explain it by him putting pieces together
and being like, you know, familiar with gaming and exploiting
those sorts of loopholes and stuff. It's just enough on
you know. But what happens when he decides he's like
got to really put himself out there as like no, yeah, okay, fine,
I shouldn't have this info. But if I don't make
this move, somebody's gonna die, you know. Michael says, I
don't think you can. Even the cookbook contributors either died
or took deals, and they're among the most hardcore of crawlers.
Hard to see a way to convince less hardcore people
to not take deals as soon as they can, even
if intellectually they know that a deal is a bad one,
that's exactly it. It is hard, but I think that's
what we've got to do. Like this is the thrust
of what I feel is happening in these books, is
that Karl is trying to find a way to give
the Crawlers the same access to certain levels of power
that they haven't had access to in the past. And
in order to do that, you have to convince people
to have faith in something that it will go right
for them. And we see that on a smaller scale
in this series of chapters where he has to tell
everybody to stop fighting each other because there's a whole
other way that we can accomplish this thing. And they
don't know for sure. It is purely a hypothesis that
they have got to all work together to begin before
the AI will give them the corresponding quest. So they
have to to a degree take it on faith that
this will work. That's the thing that's so devastating to
me about Like in the United States, there are so
many things that we could be doing, but in order
to do that, we have to, like all as a group,
decide to have faith that everybody else is going to
have our backs, and that if we all are in
this together, you know, and understandably, there are many people
who just aren't there yet. And I get it. I'm
not even saying I'm really there yet, you know. But
when you are trying to overcome a really fucked up
unfair system, and you're trying to do that by like
the force of your numbers and leveraging whatever position you
have means of production, for example, you have got to
be united to a certain percentage for it to work.
And there are always going to be some outliers who
refuse to participate, and you have to bank on the
fact that those that particular group is going to be
small enough that you will still succeed. And it's a
really difficult gamble to make when if you lose literally
lose your home, you know, you lose everything that you
that you associate with, your safety and stability, and it
just it sucks, man, It's really scary. So let's see,
he's casting a spell to get home. This is a
demon that's just launching fire into the air. It's a portal.
They try casting it a lot and then nothing, but
it doesn't work because he needs to suck a lot
of souls in for it to work, and she says
like he's a big boy. A big boy needs big
doors and lots of souls. It'll be in the sky above,
not the ground, and it'll suck everything up like that
cute but sad metal guy you have floating in your
house that slurps up bags of potato chips and cleans.
When Mango tinkles on the couch, he's trying to cast
the spell, but sister in Is is controlling him. Also,
I don't understand is she making him cast this? No.
I think the doughnut looking lady isn't strong enough to
control him. I think she's trying to stop him, but
he's casting it anyway. She's not strong enough to be
even doing what she's doing now, so she's got to
have some help. And this is when there's the conversation
with Mordecai where it becomes clear that somebody is likely
sponsoring this particular god that is, you know, working with
her somehow. So let's see. Oh yeah, this is the
part where Carl's talking to Himani and he says, a
while back, I locked the stripper guys in the training arcade,
but probably pretty pissed about it. By now. They're helping
me with something for the next floor, and I had
wondered about that, but I don't remember if I even,
like really, I think I read the dialogue where he
says something about locking the door, but I don't think
I actually stopped and questioned why he was doing that.
I don't remember I noted it, but there's so much
going on that if there's not an immediate explanation, I
just let it slide and figure I'll find out eventually.
It turns out that they are locked in a place
where they just they don't actually really fully die, and
so he infected them all with this slug pox thing,
which means that they are all birthing, so to speak,
these slugs that are getting like bigger and bigger as
they're training up as well. If I'm not mistaken, or
maybe it's like a combo, because I know that the
more you have coming out of you, like, the longer
it goes on, the bigger they grow. It's really fucking
He says it here like they're helping me with something,
as if they like consent it to this, And I
don't get the impression that they did. Maybe I'm wrong,
Maybe carl Abs asked and they were like, that sounds
really horrible, but okay, I don't think he did. But
you know, this is horrifying. So this is when we
get somebody, uh named Reson Masude is dead. He got
touched by a zombie pole cat. It just touched his foot.
It was possessed by a demon, and it tried to
pull him through a portal. The demon went through the hole,
but Massud exploded when he touched it. He blew up,
just like my mother did when she went into the
bathroom on the first floor. And somebody replies, if it's
like the bathrooms, you don't explode. All of your equipment
is sucked through, but you aren't allowed to pass, and
everything you're wearing passes through you to get into the
hole like a portal trap. And this person is just like, okay,
I just lost somebody. I don't give a shit about
the technicalities. The point is you touch it and you're dead.
And this guy replies, not if you're naked. And I
was like, oh, because it very much felt like a
well actually for no reason. But it's a well actually,
And here's the reason. That's important, which is always maybe
lead with that, Maybe lead with that. That's all I'm saying,
man lave. So this is when he says, what happened
when the portal closed? Uh, he's everywhere. All his gear
got sucked into the hole, and he exploded so much.
I can't even loot his inventory. He had most of
our gold too, which really fucking blows. He was the
one who bought the Saferman. Now it's gone. I'm really
in trouble here. But the demon still went away, and
the hole went away immediately. It sure did. It only
took the stuff the guy was touching. Yes, holy shit,
any more questions, I'm running for my life here, which
a reasonable response, to be honest. If they were zombie demons,
they only needed one soul. If they touched a person,
a portal open and the demon returned home, the portal
closed immediately. If they were the full powered level one
forty demons, the portal lasted a minute or two, sucked
in everything nearby, and they needed two souls in order
to punch their ticket home. The demon, stuck in the
body of the possessed City Boss loomed over us, still
pouring fire upward. I still didn't know what Sisterinz had
to do with any of this, but an idea started
to percolate, and he says, what had Ren said, three
out of four teams hadn't gotten a key. I'd been
wrong before. The game was trying to balance the unfairness
of the doorways breaking. I saw it now. It was
just doing it in a really, really fucked up way.
So this is when Carl gets in touch with everybody
and is like, hey, has anybody been getting absolutely hammered
with these build trench scrolls. I've gotten like fifty, and
a bunch of people are like yeah, instantly, tons of them.
Let's see, I'm trying to find the bit where Katcha
is talking about the chamber. It's a rectangular room. It's
like a shipping container. But when the magical door broke,
it just left a straight wall and no way to
get inside. One has a whole spell like donuts, but
it didn't work. Another tri day phase through wall spell
and it didn't work either. It's like the walls are
made of the same stuff as the magic doors. Carl
gets a message from Amani here about you know what
the fuck is wrong with you and explains for us
the readers really about what was going on with the
strippers in that room, and she says something about how
they're plunk punk rock and he says they're not their sluglos, which, guys,
did we know that they were slug alows? I didn't
rememb remember this, And is that why one of them
said something like I'll get them daddy, Like, I don't
know what the sluggolo culture is, to be honest, slugglo think, guys.
So for those who don't know, this is like a
pun on juggalos, and juggalos are very particular. It's a wild,
insane clown posse fandom. That is, it has a particular
aesthetic of like black and white makeup and is very chaotic.
I am so sorry, guys, but it's really funny in
a lot of ways. Like I there was an episode
of Snapped that I could not stop laughing because this
woman was basically opened her home to a bunch of
Juggalos to like come and stay with her. She was
an older woman who, it's it seemed like, wanted to
be part of a younger, cool crowd. And I put
cool very heavily in quotation marks there. And eventually she
convinces one of the Juggalos to like murder her husband,
and it was she like, lets them spend all her money.
And there's a point where they're talking about this like
awful murder, and then the narrator for Snap, who has
this bizarre voice, is like and then it was revealed
the Juggalos had stolen all her money, and it was
just it was so ridiculous. And I don't like to
laugh during one of these because it's like about somebody
who was murdered horribly, you know, but I did cackle
at that because it was just a bonker sentence. Seraphim says,
it's more upun on Jigalo since there's slugs that came
from male prostitutes. Is that true, because I don't feel
like punk rock, Like, why would she think they're punk
rock if it's that feels like a musical thing that
she's assuming, And so him saying it's not punk rock
they're slugglows feels like a reference specifically to like a
musical fandom. And also slugglo is a way better pun
because jigglow it doesn't even have the same first yeah,
Michael says, I had no idea I Jugglo was even
a thing if you look it up. Michael, it's really something.
And there's like a Juggalo Christmas CD that. Look I'm
not I can't, I can't do this, but it's wild.
It's a really it's it's something. Mister says, I also
thought juggalo. Rob says it's an ICP thing, and Michael says,
I googled it and they have a hat and they
have hatchet man tattoo apparently, so Natasha is definitely right here.
Oh right, because he's got a hatch. Okay, okay, Missie
says Christmas and yeah, yep, it's supposed to be pretty bad,
but you know, it's just a really it's a wild culture,
not like wild, like it just strange to me, you
know what I'm saying. Rob says. Juggalos are also apparently
super friendly and welcoming, probably like a lot of fandoms
are like that. You know, they're gonna be total weirdos
that go way too far, and then they are gonna
be people who just want to have a good time.
Like I will say that this snapped episode, it did
not seem like the Juggalos were really the problem. They
like stole a bunch of her money, but it felt
very much like she let them have access to it,
so stealing felt like kind of not really the right
way to frame it. It was the lady that was
the one trying to commit murder and just convinced somebody
to help her. But that does not mean that the
music is not god awful, though I will stand by that. So,
speaking of regenerating, I had to cure the mercenaries of
the sled disease the room. He'll refused to do it.
She said that bucket boy kid said you told them
not to. And he's like, oh, you can cure it,
and she's like yeah, which you know, it's not like
that would have done him any good to know before
because she was nowhere near him. But that is convenient
at least. So this is when he gets in touch
with Prepotente, and we have like a thing where we
find out later they have talked, but we don't get
a lot of that here. And there's some information from
Mordecai about shale and how the uh, the myth goes back.
I don't really want to go into all of this
because honestly, I don't feel like I need to know
if something that's relevant here, I'll find out, and then
we go into sixty two. I'm starting to believe I
have the ability to manifest my own destiny after a
certain fashion. The more unstable the AI running the system becomes,
the less predictable it is. Yet at the same time,
it's even more predictable in certain ways. I made a
quip about being hungry, and I suddenly received a random
achievement notification about my hunger level. I discussed with my
friend how I wished we could kill more gas and
not one hour later, I received a quest to hunt
down a certain number of the very same monsters. Beware, however,
that same quest killed my friend. The AI is always listening, thinking, plotting,
changing the game to suit its desires. At the higher levels,
it is not nearly as rigid as it once was.
That pliability can be an asset or an extreme danger.
And that's when I was thinking with like the sort
of you know, attempts to sort of manipulate it. Saying
it's pliable, I think, is pretty much the same thing,
and it's not necessary, Like saying that you're trying to
manipulate does not necessarily mean that you are in perfect control.
It simply means that you have a means of affecting
an outcome, and you are attempting to do that, and
you know it may or may not work out for you.
We will see so uh. He uses his fine crawler
skill and he can see that Sisterinas is basically in
the same spot that she had been, which is like
kind of you know, unnerving for him. I know a
way to get into the stairwell chambers without a key.
Pony and I came up with the idea together. I
need you to start spreading the word. We need to
stop fighting each other. Do everything you can to convince people.
Everybody who has lost keys needs to start clearing the
stairwell chamber of debris. I know most of these rooms
have a whole lot of infrastructure, but we got to
get them to isolate these chambers as fast as possible
if you can. You want nothing on it, or above it,
or even around it. Don't be gentle. Blow that shit
up and do it fast. Find one of those build
trench scrolls and use it to tunnel underneath the chamber.
You need to be able to fit everyone in your
party underneath the room. Mordecai, go into my bomber studio
and take the pile of satchel bombs and stick them
on the market. That'll help people with the demolition. I've
been making them in preparation for the next floor, so
they're safe for regular crawlers to handle. Those with keys
need to get out as soon as possible and clear
the way for the people left behind. Tell them not
to waste their time fighting. There's no point we can
get out all of us. And you know, there's the
usual like pushback of like, what do you mean this
isn't enough information? I wish that you'd come up with
this sooner. And this is when Ellie mentions the slug
alows is that a pun? You know how I feel
about pun based names. Carl, And then am I yells
out and this is not the first time Amion had
yelled out before, and is like, Carl, come here, and
this time he yells out Carl again, but then starts
yelling I believe it, sister, and is let me go,
you fucking bitch, is Saul, I will flay you again.
I will get free of this shell, and he growled Carl,
come now, so Carl, like assault is a name that
he remembers, and this is the thing with the Goddess,
with Sister Inez. Meanwhile, he is trying to convince everybody
that they can work together and make this happen, and
a lot of people are not interested. It really takes.
It takes a motivational speech from him, basically as he
first tries to get prepatentes to support his assertion, and
Prepotente is just really not convincing. He is just you know,
you know how he is. And he says it's a
long shot, but for a lot of us, it's literally
our only chance, those of you who are fighting each other.
What's the point If there's not enough of us alive
on the next floor, we won't have a chance to
make it to the tenth where we can start earning
our freedom. The more of us who set foot on
the ninth, the stronger we are. It will take a
fifty percent chance to survive with all of you. I
will take a fifty percent chance to survive with all
of you over a one hundred percent chance to survive
alone any day. And this is when Prepotente has to
chime in again that, like, the odds aren't great, but
you know, and they continue to go back and forth,
being kind of childish to a degree with each other.
And this is when he has to be like, God,
damn it, everybody stop it. Earlier I was thinking about
how hopeless all this is, that we're They're whittling us
down to nothing. There's a death quota they have to meet,
and no matter how hard we fight, we're stuck inside
that box. No, fuck them all. I was wrong. We
are not like those who came before us. This is
our chance. This is our chance to show them how
hard it is to kill us. We will not die
by their schedule. Every person who gets through will be
one more. The real assholes will have to fight on
the next floor. We need each other, I need you,
so stop fucking fighting. And finally this gets through. This
is when, all of a sudden, a new quest where
the sidewalk ends. This is a regional quest. All crawlers
within the area of Cuba have been added. Your squad
has been designated as host. I've been debating on whether
or not to allow this, but now that so many
of you are hell bent on dying in such a
spectacular manner, we might as well make it official. Amayon
has been betrayed by one of his brothers. After being
unceremoniously expelled from the Kingdom of Shield, the demon Princes
managed to just barely hold on long enough to pull
himself onto the equivalent of a very small ledge. The
level two point fifty demon Lord now inhabits the body
of a lesser deity. In order to return home, Amion
must simply must cast a spell, but nobody rides the
river for free. A tithe of souls is required to
pass back downward, and for a demon of his power,
the tithe is pretty steep, So he has cast his
spell a wide area of portal that will inhale all
the souls within Cuba. This will be enough barely to
send him home. Unfortunately, his expulsion has not gone unnoticed.
Other entities have noted and are doing what they can
to stop him from returning. He is being thwarted. Here
are your options. Do nothing. In two hours the porta
will cast. All of Cuba will be sucked upward. This
may or may not be good thing, depending on where
you're standing. Two free Ameon from his shell. This will
cause Ameon to take his true form. The timer will reset.
This quest will reset into a World Quest. We've never
had a full powered, on tethered hell princes on leash
on a lower floor before. I'm sure it'll be fine.
Three kill ameon, good luck with that one. He's invulnerable
on this floor. And then Carl says, Pony, holy shit,
you were right. We got the quest just like you
said we would. And Prepotente, how many times must I
tell you not to call me by that name? I
side with Prepotente on this one, Carl. He has asked
you very politely not to do that. Just call him
what he wants to be called, sir. It's rude, okay,
just you know. So this is when he has to
have a chat with Donut because she is coming to
terms with the fact that, like this is all or nothing.
You know, if we do this and it doesn't work,
we may not be able to get down the stairs
because we will destroy the door. And she says, how
do you know the demon's spell will cover the whole planet?
And he says, I don't. I just have a hunch.
The stronger the demon is, the bigger the spell needs
to be in order to get himself home. So I'm
going to make him as strong as possible, and she
says how, and he says, I dodged the question because
she was not going to like the answer. Don't love that,
but he does say we should have killed sister, and
as when we have the chance, you had the chance,
you were right earlier. This is one of those things
where I kind of appreciate the fact because, like so
often there will be things where it's like, oh, you
should have you think that, like intellectually that you should
have killed somebody at a certain point because it would
have prevented this damage, but actually that person wound up
being sort of like instrumental somehow in another way, where
it was your mercy toward them that saved you in
the end, which I do understand why. That's like a
nice tidy storytelling beat, but I do think is really
not facing the fact that some folks are so damaging
that they genuinely the world is better off without them
in it. And I don't know if maybe we're going
to get something where it turns around and it is like, hey,
maybe we will, But at this point I appreciate us
just being like, yeah, no, we should have like it.
Once she fucking got pass and made him into a card,
I feel like she pretty much just that was her
surrendering her human card. You know, probably you could argue
that killing her entire convents were worth of sisters was
really the one and I would agree with you on that.
I'm just talking about since we entered the dungeon. It's
all so let's see. Uh. Of course, in the end
Karl agrees or don't agree with Carl where the Princess
Posse and the Princess Posse doesn't leave anyone behind, and
he says that was a cheesy line, and she's like, yeah,
I'm working on it. I still have from a movie.
So sixty three it's chapter sixty three. I had to
cover this, and sixty four and it's already three thirty. Oh,
I'm thinking, we me, you need to cut down on these
sections again, Michael, because this is I've really I've been
like moving as talk about this, I feel like and
it's still I am just so behind. I may have
to put off some of this for the next episode.
But okay, So Sister Inez has got like not sent
more demons after Carl despite threatening to, and like I said,
it's him suspecting that she can't, that maybe she doesn't
have control over whatever. Her ability is the way that
she thought. And let's see. This is when Carl says
we're going to move in. We're in the alley on
the other side of the grass squhere he's talking to Imani,
and Imani says, stay put, we're coming to you. And
then all of a sudden, a bunch of blue dots
appear and all of his friends arrive and Carl is
genuinely so moved at this moment, and it's really sweet.
She says, how did they get here? And Ellie says,
the look on his face makes this suicide mission all
worth it. It was Imani, Kachya, Battista, Louis, Britney, Tran,
Lee June, Lee Na Zang, Chris, Ellie, a few Metal
Lark Crawlers I didn't really know, and a handful of others,
most of whom were Asian. It totalled over twenty people,
and I love Ellie just being like, yeah, you don't
like it when people leave you out of the planning
phase for a big move, do you so? Lee June
explains it was Lucia mar They're calling it the Battle
of Beijing. Lucia she never really collected any cards. She
refused to play. She got the six totems they automatically
gave her, but they were low level, and whenever a
battle started, she discarded the first one and she played
the rest until her hand was empty, which allowed her
to use her spells in magic and inventory. She and
her dog went in and killed. When she showed up
at the Soho building, it turned into a big fight
amongst all the people without keys. There were monster traps
set up too, and it was chaos. She killed so
many people. She set up a teleport trap and Fang's
team got caught up in it. He had a key.
She killed him and his wife and took it. After that,
we thought she'd already gone down the stairs, but when
we got there, she was waiting for us. She can
hide her presence. Now. I do not like to hear
that at all. She said. Florin had messaged her before
he'd gone down the stairs and told her to help us.
She dropped five of these on the ground and went
back down the stairs. We already installed one of them
in and Moni's room. We don't know how she got these,
where she got them from, or why she has so many,
and there items that are too high levels. She really
should not. These aren't available to anybody to like buy
on this floor. It was a personal space upgrade module.
If you bought one of these from a Bopka, they
installed it directly in your room. But if you got
it from a box it had come like this, you
had to put it in your inventory and then enter
your personal space tab on your interface to use it.
Mordecai says they shouldn't be available till the ninth floor.
He thinks Lucias stole them when she went on a
show or something. I am going to guess somebody gave
them to her. I feel like something's going on with her.
I'm so curious. It's a Tier three doggy door, upgrades
the door in your personal space to allow a selectable
exit via any door you have previously utilized on this
same floor, effectively creating a fast travel waypoint system allows
shared gated access amongst guests and party members. That's bonkers.
That is an insane, like holy fucking shit. So now
with it in in Imani's safe room, anyone in the
guild can go out that door into the church, or
into Washington, or into Detroit, or into Belgium where Ellie's squad.
It works for the whole Meadow Lark party. Can we
upgrade the entire guild to use it so it works
on my door too? We can, but it's pretty expensive
Tier three twenty five million to give it to everybody.
I think it's doable based on how much gold we're
accumulating here. I feel like that's doable. We already pooled
all our money to buy that Barracks upgrade. And this
is when she says that she's never going to take
that key from them, and then le June chimes in
on Carl privately and is like, hey, so we mentioned
that Lucia was like friendly, but there did come a
point where she suddenly became mean again, and she said
that she was saving something for herself that was special
because she was determined to kill Donut and Mango. So
that's why a fight almost broke out between her and
my sister, and Carl is just like, thank you for
not saying that out loud, which you know, considering that
Donut was responsible for killing the good dog out of
the two dogs. I have a hard time being mad
at Lucy and Marr for that. I love Donut, but
the number of times that she has talked about how
she really wants to kill a dog. I can't lie.
It always hurts me a little bit, and I just
don't like animal and animal violence. It's just that simple.
And this is when he is looking around and seeing
Britney smiling, when I like Mongo snuffles against her, and
Tran is smiling, and he's realizing he's never actually seen
Britney smile ever. I felt it, the change in the air.
Things were not looking up for us, but somehow it
didn't matter. Ever since the horror of the Butcher's Masquerade,
there had been this feeling coming over me, an extra
layer of darkness on top of everything, which I think
all of us today in twenty twenty six can really
relate to. I thought of Ren and the hopelessness that
had broken her, of the crawlers who'd been forced to
confront their own personal nightmares. It was loneliness. It had
always been loneliness, the river in his head he's talking about.
Nothing had changed. We were likely fucked, but we were
all together again, and there was hope. Finally, clarity filled
me for the first time. It was isolation that would
break us. We couldn't let it happen. And honestly, this
really hit me because I feel like this is something
that a lot of us didn't really see coming but
has recently we've begun to realize more and more about
the way we live is how isolated a lot of
technology has enabled us to be. And it's very comfortable
to stay isolated in some ways because you can predict
what's going to happen, and you don't have to have
weird encounters with strange people, and you know, you can
to a degree control your environment and make everything exactly
how you want it. But also that leads to this
like weird stasis. You know, growth and comfort cannot coexist,
as I have in my background here on the Live,
So I think that isolation. It's like we that comes
hand in hand with comfort for a lot of us
because of our anxiety, and it's something that we really
can fall into a trap with. I know, I can,
you know, but yeah, it's just a really it's the
sort of thing that can be kind of sobering when
you step back, and it's something that I have appreciated.
They built houses across the street from me, and like
when they started building, I was super sad because it
was a forested area and cutting down all these trees
and everything. But I will say that, like yesterday I
took pippin for a walk and I waved and called
out to a couple of my neighbors by name, and
like they have come to us when they needed a thing,
we have come to them when they when we needed
a thing. And so there is a little bit of
a feeling of community in my neighborhood that I didn't
have before. And it is nice, you know. It's just
the sort of thing that's like kind of difficult for
a number of reasons. But I think that this is
really true about loneliness. And I think that a lot
of the goals of bad people out there who are
making like bought accounts and stuff, is to reinforce to
us everybody out there is terrible. Look at these comment sections,
look at the posts that people are making. I don't
want to be out in the world because everyone is terrible.
And it's not like that's completely untrue, but I do
think that our perception is manipulated, and there's more good
people than we think there are. It's just that that's
never what's highlighted. You know, like everything online, the whole
point of a lot of it existing is purely to
generate money, and Positivity doesn't do that. It's unfortunate but true.
So that's never going to be what the focus is
on when there's profit to be made. That's just not
how it works. So anyway, that's the end of chapter
sixty three. I am going to have to do sixty
four next time, not a like chapter sixty four is
a little bit just getting into position and also a
conversation with Katya. There's other things as well, but I
think it'll be all right to fold that into next time.
And oh, Michael says, I was thinking I might need
to adjust the schedule for book seven since the last
episode only covers like twenty pages, So I guess I'll
try to find time to adjust the episodes to cover
maybe forty or so pages or less and see how
that works out. I'm still booking episodes for the still
to be released book eight, so maybe there will be
some leeway there too, where coverage can slop over onto
those extra episodes if needed. Yeah, that makes sense. Rob says,
there was that excellent article that someone posts in the
discord about everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to
be a villager, and it was such a good article.
It's like, I don't even want to say that nobody
wants to be a villager so much as like we
have created a we have created a world in which
being a villager isn't feasible with the way that the
rest of our lives are set up in terms of
how much energy we have left in the day, how
much like income we have to spare to help people.
It's just we have as a hyper individualistic society. The
United States has made it so that if you can't
take care of yourself, how can you tell help take
care of anybody else? And they have made it that
one we can't fully take care of ourselves on what
we are making in terms of income, and they have
kind of imparted this shame at the fact that we
can't take care of ourselves, so we don't want to
even ask for help a lot of the time. It's
a very gross self perpetuating thing that only benefits certain people,
you know. Yeah, So anyway, on that bummer note, I
do have to wrap because I am way over time,
But thank you guys again for coming. I appreciate you
all and I will be seeing you Thursday. Until then
to LU Motherfucker's That was an unspoiled network podcast.