Speaker 1: This is an Unspoiled Network podcast. This is spoil Me
covering Dungeon Crawler Carl Book four Gate of the Feral Gods,
chapters twenty one through twenty three. In these chapters, this
is a really weird quest. We wind up in a
glass castle, then we're underwater. There's a guy who wants
to bring his fictional girlfriend to life, and there's a
dog in the living room barking even though she knows
I'm recording. It's chaos. Welcome to spoil Me. Welcome to
the show everyone. I am Natasha. Thank you very much
to Michael for commissioning this episode. Rob says Dungeon Crawler
Carl at its best. Yeah, this was this was This
was weird. I cannot decide what happened to this guy.
At the end, I just think he can't be dead.
He turns into sand, and it seems as if sand
is just like a default medium that then things can
rebuild themselves from around here. So I don't know about y'all,
but I expect to see him again. There's something weird happening.
I do not know. I don't like it though, I
don't like it, so let's uh, let's start with chapter
twenty one, where we're just entering the sand Castle, and
you know, it's called the sand castle, but it is
glassy and there is sand all over the place, which
we eventually find out is an ooze. It is like
a sentient creature that can basically never be killed completely
because if you leave any single bit of it alive,
it can regenerate from that eventually, which reminds me of
like the spore monsters with the circus. You know that
it's just basically they're unkillable somehow. So they're looking through
the map as they're going, and at one point, Doughnut
see a mouse on the ground made of glass, and
when when she touches it, it just breaks away into dust.
And Carl is theorizing, like, I think that all the
stuff in here used to actually be like real regular things,
and some kind of spell made them like this, which
makes sense to me. Everything in the room is made
of glass, frozen in time, including the fountain. I stepped
forward to examine it, wary for monsters or traps. There
was no movement. The statue was human size, And eventually
he realizes that this is a Niad, a half Naiad,
I think, and The reason that it's sort of ringing
a bell for him is that she looks like Serena Signette.
This robed creature depicted before me was also half Naiad,
a water nymph, a fairy type creature that lived in
the water. But instead of being half elf, it appeared
this one was half human. This one didn't have the
same horns on her head as Sarena, but even in
glass form, I could see she was very similar. And
we find out that she is this like fictional character
that is very popular for half Naiad actresses to play.
And there's a plaque underneath that says, Leka, my love,
my son and stars my wife Milady. He couldn't help himself.
I will move the heavens so we can be together.
I will burn and bury and destroy any who try
to stop our love. And later on they're all like
making fun of this guy for believing that this sex
doll was a real thing that was trapped. But I
maintain that something more than what it sounds like is
definitely going on here. I I know that like it breaks,
well not the whole thing. Carl takes her head, which
is lucky because I feel like you're gonna need to
talk to her. At some point, the whole thing wobbled
when he sniffed, surprising him. The dinosaur screeched at the statue,
scrambling back. We all hopped back as it toppled over
and shattered. The shattered glass mostly turned to dust. The
glass head remained mostly intact, though part of her chin
was now chipped. I took the head into my inventory,
along with a few of the larger intact pieces of glass,
which the inventory called fulgar. Right for the head, the
description read decapitated glass head depicting Laika from Troubadour's Bounty.
It's sticky, and I don't I think I might know
what that might mean. I hope I'm wrong. I hope
it's something else, but I think I might know. So
this is is when Gwen comes through on the line
and Carl gives Gwen some further instructions and is like,
you know, if we fuck this up, it might open
the release valve and you guys are probably gonna get flooded.
And Carl says, yeah, I get that, so don't do
it unless I ask, And later on he does ask,
but he doesn't tell Kotya that he is asking because
I'm assuming Katya he's like thinking that she would try
to save him, assuming that what he's asking for is
like suicide probably, But as we see, he gets out
of it okay, as he often does. So they go
through several rooms, lots and lots of glass stuff and
a lot of it like when they touch it, it
winds up crumbling away. And finally Carl is like, you
know what, we got to stop touching things, Like there's
a possibility, if we fit whatever's going on, all of
these things could return to usable items that we could loot.
So we're going to be potentially fucking ourselves here, and
also it's just slowing us down. I really like this
as a frame of mind, you know. I am somebody who,
as we all know, wants to make the most of
all items, and wasting it when it's potentially maybe you like,
really really useful and unique would be a bummer. So
eventually we get to this door and it's just like
a regular door. There's flashing light coming out from underneath
the door, and at first I was thinking like this
was going to be some sort of distraction, you know,
and it kind of winds up being but not the
way I was thinking. Eventually we find out that it's
just a TV that's got some sort of anime playing
on it, and they use a tactic called peeping Mango.
Carl calls it peeping Tom but that's incorrect. Just so
that we are all on the same page, it's peeping Mango,
and the point is to have her make a hole.
I waited a moment and then peered inside. I couldn't
see much, and he's looking around and he sees that
there are piles of clutter around the room, and most
of it was clothes. I don't know if I was
the only one, but y'all, I was fully prepared for
those piles of clothes to turn out to be creatures
that stand up and were just like limp and lifeless
on the floor until somehow triggered and activated. I was
genuinely startled when that wasn't the case. I thought they
were for sure something, and they're not. They're absolutely not.
So I don't know if that was a purposeful red
herring that I was supposed to be suspicious of, or
if that's just my stupid brain, but there it is.
So they had planned that they were going to send
Clockwork Mango into the room. But Carl is getting a
really strong vibe here that there is something that's going
to react to them coming in, and if they are
able to trigger that before they go in, maybe they
will have some kind of advantage. So she uses her
astral plot to knock some magazines over, and there is
somebody in there who notices and is just like, hey,
is somebody there. And when he appears, he's a white dot,
So he's not like an enemy, at least not right away.
And I don't think his dot ever changes even after
everything that happens. Perhaps it changed when he started fighting
with Cottia later, but uh, this was an unkempt, overweight,
twenty somethingter guy with long, stringy hair. He moved to
the middle of the room and looked down at the sand.
He grumbled something I couldn't hear, and turned back toward
the television. Before he could leave my field of view,
I examined him. GHATSI Human level forty three. Glass mage
Gatzi came to the area for the same reason as
the Bugbear submarine captain to seek out the hidden treasure.
As a glass mage. Ghazi told his colleagues at the
Loroccos College he was seeking the Gate of the farh
Gods to study its potential use in long distance teleportation.
That was a lie. He wanted to in fact, converse
with a god that lives in the Nothing named Arrillo
to find a way to bring a fictional character named
Lika to life to be his girlfriend. And apparently there
are a lot of things that live in the nothing
that can pretend to be all sorts of other shit.
So when he summons something that he thinks is the
god that he wants, he gets tricked into a whole
other situation that honestly still is kind of confusing, and
we will get there eventually. So long story short, they
managed to sort of like sidestep the way the Boss
is supposed to be triggered, but they do end up
triggering it eventually. And it's the whole sand ooze which
acts as quicksand and basically if you touch it, it will
flood into your body through every orifice and explode you.
So the first thing, of course Karl wants is the
winding box, and as soon as he finds out that
Gatsi has it, he punches him in the face and
knocks him out and just drags him with them and
let's see donut. Can you imagine you're a famous, beautiful
adventurer and suddenly you're in some smelly scientist guy's basement.
Just bringing them to life isn't enough. You have to
make them like you. And let me tell you, if
you're the type of guy who's living in a putrid
seller trying to bring fictional people to life, making them
like you is a tall order. It's weird and it's creepy,
and she is dead on. This is the sort of
thing that's like one of those really it's a recurring storyline.
And I'm not talking about like Frankenstein, because that was
done purely as science, like a scientific exploration in a
way that was separate from weird sexual gratification and hang
ups like that. But there is, like, you know, the
let's assemble the perfect girlfriend from different parts, whether or
not it's like we're doing it with actual pieces of
real girls like in a certain Buffy the Vampire episode,
or whether we're making like a program on a computer
using like photos like in uh whatever that eighties movie
is that the name I can't remember. This is a
This is very much a thing, you know, and it's
the kind of trope. That is a really good illustration,
even though a lot of people think that it's like
exaggerating to say this, but it's a really good indicator
of the way that girls are objectified, where it's very
much not about us as people. It's we want all
of these different parts because we don't care about who
you are as a person. We just want the individual
aspects of you to be exactly what we like. You
just don't see this kind of thing as often with
women creating a man, and there's a really good reason
for that. So anyway, he gets this winding box and
later on he's concerned about keeping Ghatsi alive. But it
turns out he's got like a letter with instructions on
how to use the winding box on his person, which
Katscha is able to get from him. And the thing
is it is incomplete. So it seems like we've got
pretty good instructions, but you know, I can't fully trust them,
so we'll have to wait and see what happens here.
And I've got to be honest, I don't even really
I don't get why you would want to even open
this thing. It's so odd because the AI is like
egging him on, and Carl seems to be very much
approaching this place of like, all right, well, I'm gonna
use it. I just have to figure out the best way.
And I have to admit, guys, my anxiety is putting
me firmly onise side here of just just don't just
don't do it, as he says, put it in your
inventory and fucking don't use it. But nobody asked me.
So he uh reads this letter that is from the college,
and this is honestly really funny because the college is
low key, like, uh okay, so you sent us this letter.
You really thought you did something, and we're pretty concerned
because it looks like you fucked up roe real bed
and now everybody's gonna have to pay for it unless
you decide that you are going to handle your shit.
So either you fuck all of us or you take
the l You must use the winding box to banish
yourself and the entirety of the Necropolis into the nothing.
You must not let keutsel Coi Less gain corporeal form.
If it were to happen, Samith will be fully resurrected.
Samith is the actual deity that he summoned without intending to,
and the true gods would be forced to react. That
would bring a level of chaos and death not seen
for an age. Your failure has caused your name to
be removed from the Tome of Scholars. May the gods
have mercy on your soul. And it's signed by twelve
different people. And then there's this sort of PostScript. GOATSI
you fucking idiot. I told you this was going to happen.
The second I found you with that thing, I knew
you were beyond saving. You have ruined everything. I hope
it was worth it. Scolopendra will never be defeated. Now.
We needed that artifact, and all you could think about
was your cock. I will never forgive you. I was
here the whole time, but I guess I wasn't enough.
Fuck you. I hope you die in pain. Do the
right thing, Tish. Spoiler, he doesn't do the right thing again.
Maybe it's not the right thing. Maybe they just think
it's the right thing. I don't know, but suffice to say,
whatever they thought, he didn't do it. And I love
that donut. The first thing that she latches onto is
the way he disrespected Tish. She can't get off this.
It's very good. It's so interesting to me, and I'm
kind of wondering if we're ever really gonna reckon with
this Donuts thing. Is really turning out to be very
much loyalty above all, right, and yet she always just
very offhandedly makes comments about the variety of people Bee
was cheating on Carl with, And I kind of want
to reach a point where Carl's like, hey, why did
you like miss Beatrice so much when she was like
completely betraying me all the time? Or at least Carl
points out, Hey, when you bring that stuff up, it's
a real bummer to me, you know, like because it
just points out what an idiot I was for so
long not noticing, or just anything to link back the
way she clearly feels about being betrayed and replaced to
Bee's behavior with everybody in her life apparently, and by
everybody in her life, I mean, Carlin Donut. So I
just feel like I want there to be a conversation
about those things and the way that Don't usually reacts
versus the way that she talks about it so casually,
you know, And I know that like it's likely this
won't happen because the point of her offhanded remarks is
always supposed to be a joke. It's always supposed to
be like, Haha, isn't it funny about how she's confusing
Karl with the litany of other men going in and
out of his apartment. But it's the kind of joke
that I think it would make it funnier if we
dealt with it and then did a different thing. I
feel like it's getting old, and if we don't start
to like actually address it, it's gonna stop being funny,
you know. I feel like we're really on the edge
with it here. So anyway, let's see Donat immediately jumps
on him and starts hissing at him about and like
you left her for Lika and she's not even real
And eventually like this guy brings up that Leka is
trapped inside this like glass thing and they realize that
that's the thing that they broke, and so they really
have to make sure that he doesn't see it because
he's going to lose his shit. Which correct, And the
sand that is in there is the slime that is
it's an ooze not a slime. There's a difference. And yes,
the ooze is my wife, and uh, they are like,
I'm sorry, You're really going to have to elaborate on that.
So carl, let me see this up. You came here
to summon the lust god and have him turned some
lady into from a play into your sex slave, and
you got tricked into summoning Samaith. And now Samith is
inside the necropolis hitching a ride within the body of
that pterodactyl ghost. If she gets out, the guys who
are now in charge might take issue. We also know
the winding box I stole can be used to suck
all this away, but you haven't done it, and now
you're never gonna get the chance because I have it,
and I want to know everything I can about that.
Ooz Leka isn't just some lady from a play. She's real.
I wasn't turning her into a sex slave. I brought
her with me. It's not like the others say. She's
trapped frozen in her body. She speaks to me, She's
the one who told me to come here and do this.
I'm trying to save her. Tish didn't understand. Nobody understands.
I'm so curious because I believe that he thinks this
is happening. I don't think he's crazy. I don't think
that this is some delusion. I think something is tricking him.
And I don't know if it's just like the AI
doing this for the sake of the storyline, because it
has to make certain things happen. I don't know if
there's a larger deception at play here that he's being
that he's a pawn in I don't know. When I
thought i'd summoned Urillo, he made Lika reel. He told
me I had to marry her for the magic to
keep her alive, so I did right away. It was
only after the consummation did I leave the chamber and
find that Leka was still in her cleaning pod. The
entire castle had been crystallized when I used the spell
to summon Urillo, but it hadn't been enough power. I
screwed it up, like I screw everything up. But that's
how I knew I'd been tricked. Leka hadn't been saved
at all. She was still there, crystallized like everything else,
and everything outside my protection spell was turned to sand.
The deity I'd summoned made me a wife, but it
was a wife of sand. That's why the Ooze remains nearby.
After consummation. It fell in love with me, and apparently
this ooze doesn't even talk, so it didn't strike him
as odd at all when Lika said nothing and just
wanted to fuck him, because why would he care. He
just wanted to fuck Lika. And so there it is.
And I returned to my human form only during the sandstorm,
but she is in her leaka form the rest of
the time, so the only real quality time you spent
together was right after the wedding. She remains buried in
the castle and consumes me every day. She eats me
while I am made of sand. That's how UZ tells
you they love you. I don't even know when she's
in the Leka form. She literally eats sand. That is
just so odd. And he's tried to kill her a
few times. Never works. He mentions in Uyasha, which I
know is an anime, but I feel like it's a
specific type of joke we're telling with that, and I
don't know anything about it. So if anybody is insight
into that, i'd be interested. And then the Ooze doesn't
let me leave the room very often. It's jealous of
the real Lika, and Katcha's like, when you say you
found her in her cleaning pod, what do you mean?
And he's like, oh, yeah, well that you know she's
kept in that room. How are you gonna undo the
spell if you spend all your free time watching nerd cartoons? Wait,
so she's in the fountain. We saw her before. We
thought she was a statue. She's a personal companion device
made in the likeness of Lika, but she is real.
There's a soul trapped within her. And that's how I
came to be here. And this is when Dona is like,
oh my god, she was a fucking sex doll, and
that's exactly it. But again, I believe that something in
there is talking to him, so I think that he's
like he's being duped somehow. I just don't know how
this works. And that is why when Carl picked up
picked up her head, it said, it's sticky, and I
hate it, and I hate it and hate it. So
then we have to deal with this ooze and every like,
the whole thing with this ooze is that it has
feelings for somebody that doesn't have feelings for it back,
and it doesn't really know how to cope with these
emotions because it's not even designed to have emotions, and
it's happening happening anyway, and it's just like kind of
a sad story. And then we find out that that
there's like a central Carl calls it like a yoke,
like the ooze is an egg, and the yoke is
its actual central part of its like brain and body
that you have to aim for to kill it, which
is underneath the recliner in front of the TV. And
so the only way to get to it is for
Carl to use his sticky feet power to climb into
that room off the floor because the floor is and
drop fire onto it from above, which eventually he does
onto the recliner itself, and it's using a gel that
is reminiscent of napalm, really really hard to put out
and burns super hot. So later on, when the ouze
tries to defend itself and break up the chair and
put the fire out, it simply spreads it. And it's
almost distressing, like I want this thing to be taken
out because I want our friends to be okay. But
I find napalm to be one of the most like
evil inventions ever, and anytime that I see something dealing
with that, it's just so horrifying, you know, anything that's
like we have to set this thing on fire. It's
always difficult. I just you, guys. I don't know how
many of you even heard of the movie Novacane, but
it was on Prime and my husband and I watched
it last night, and it's about a guy who has
this disorder that causes him to his like pain receptors
don't work, so there it leads to a lot of
like problems in his life because pain receptors are important.
They tell you when something is wrong, and they tell
you even simple things like when you need to get
up and go pee, and he doesn't have it, so
he has had to learn to adapt in a lot
of areas of his life and be kind of reclusive
due to the myriad of dangers out in the world
that he isn't really equipped to fully handle because he
can't feel. And there is a fair amount in the
movie of this guy getting horrible burns and he doesn't
feel them, so it's not like he's screaming when it happens,
but it's just even watching it, and whoever did the
folly work on this movie. It's visceral. It's really hard
to watch some of it, but I will say that
him and the girl that is his like main love
interest have excellent chemistry. The stunts are on point, and
the whole movie is really creative and has a plot
that actually had a twist that caught me totally off guard,
so I recommend it. It's fun and silly and really
really gory, So if you aren't into that before, warned,
I had to look away a lot, a lot a
lot it was. It was tough sometimes, but it's all
done in a very almost funny way most of the time.
So anyway, this is what Carl has to do, and
like the sticky feet thing, he can't have both feet
off the ceiling at the same time or he'll just fall,
so he has to like shuffle really weirdly, and Donut
has to use her whole spell to like get him
into the room from up above, and he lowers himself
in using a rope that's tied to this huge chunk
of dwarven metal, which later on, thank god he put
that there, because it holds the space up enough just
so that they don't get instantly crushed by the sand.
They run out of air pretty quickly, but it saves
their lives, I think, and it was just a shame
that now we have to lose that Dwarven metal, which
probably would have been handy for other things eventually as well. Ooh, sorry,
I just saw that there's a bunch of chat that
I missed. Seraphim says, I also think Donut doesn't realize
how cheating can be seen this betrayal. Her issue with
loyalty is leaving Slash getting rid of someone else. Rob says,
I feel like Donut knows, but I think it's part
of her Dungeon persona to banter with Karl and have
Carl play the straight man. Okay, Michael says, Inuyash's about
a girl who falls into a well that transports her
a few hundred years into the past, where she meets
a half demon named Inuyasha who was trapped by her
ancestor in a battle for a crystallized soul of power. Well,
all right, I see, Michael. None of what happens in
Inuyasha has much to do with what's happening here, so
I think it was just a pop culture reference and
not an in joke that feels like it's pretty like no.
But I think though, Michael, the description of the ooze
made me feel so sorry for it or is it
a her unclear, but agreed, it seems really sad, like
this ooz didn't really want to be here. It was
just being used by some unhinged god somehow. And Michael
says that the dude in Novacane is Meg Ryan's son,
which I didn't realize. Rob says, the idea of the
demon stuck in the crystal seems very relevant and if
this guy is a bit of an anime fan slash
not very discerning, that seems like it might play into
his actions. Yeah, agreed, Rob. So the plan actually works
somewhat well. But here's the problem. The way that oozes
function is that they are very sensitive to vibration. Thus,
if Karl is going in there, he needs to find
a way to distract this ooze or it is absolutely
and one going to know that he's there. So he
creates one of those balls with the like really loud
music in it, and he wants something with heavy bass
and winds up, jump around, And I really liked the
fact that Doughnut points out that that's not even that
heavy of a base. It's actually more bouncy. This was
actually low key inspiring for me, and I'll tell you why.
A lot of times, as a writer working on her
stuff for the first time, I will get very hung
up on like whether a thing that I'm going to
be addressing in the text as of a certain category
really quite qualifies for that category or really works as
whatever I'm saying in the scene, and I will obsess
over picking the exact right thing, because I feel like,
if I am specifically naming that it does X y Z,
I have to be right about that. However, this is
like act usually just don'ta addressing it in the text,
and thus it just cuts out the opportunity to criticize
in the same way and be like, what is this
author an idiot? You know? Instead it turns into like, oh, okay,
that's the joke is potentially that people aren't going to
agree with this choice necessarily, And this just gave me
a real like it gave me the sense of like
a nice get out of jail free card of if
there comes a point where I'm obsessing over like which
of the things to say or whatever, I can just
lampshade it with a character specifically mentioning it, and then boom,
we're done and it's fine, you know, like we addressed it.
I'm not claiming it was a perfect choice because I
actually had another character say it and we're good. So
I just wanted to mention that as something that I
genuinely found kind of like, oh, that's a really good
way to handle that, because I just, you know, there's something.
I don't know how many of you guys experience this,
or if it's something that I particularly am sensitive to,
just because I do what I do, and so what
I say is simply out there for people to have
an opinion on and respond to. But it's odd because
it's not necessary. It's not in real time. So I'm
recording in a sort of vacuum, and then somebody listens
to it way later and they respond to me in
a kind of vacuum, and oftentimes it will be like
ages after I've recorded it, sometimes years later, and there's
a lot of opportunity in there for words to get misconstrued,
for intent to be misunderstood, for a particular aspect of
an issue that I didn't know about, to like become
more understood, and thus I wouldn't have said the same
thing now, but at the time I didn't get x
y Z. And so what this results in a lot,
at least for me, is trying to preemptively address the
issue someone might take with whatever I'm saying. And due
to that, because it's a function of both desperately wanting
to be understood and also having anxiety, it can result
in being absolutely stymied into complete inaction because you're so
concerned that people are going to misunderstand you that you
just freeze up and so you don't do anything at all.
And it's it's not a great way to function, but
it's definitely like I see it in myself sometimes and
I'm trying to like cope with it. And there are
a few other podcasters that I like. They will start
to say something and it's like they read my mind.
Where as soon as they start to say a thing,
I'm thinking, yeah, but somebody's gonna say x y Z
about that, dude, And then immediately the dude will be like,
and I know that some folks are gonna feel x
y Z about this that I'm about to say, And
it's sort of reassuring to know that I'm not the
only one that's like attempting to argue with. One could
say straw Men, but it's like these people are really
out there and they will really say something. I feel
like straw Men is like nope, but nobody's saying that, dude.
But the thing is, when you have done this sort
of thing long enough, yeah, somebody is saying that though
you know like they absolutely are. So anyway, I I
just sometimes this will happen with my writing as well,
and it's much harder to cope with in writing because
if I'm on a podcast, I can say, look, I
get what you think, but that's not what I meant.
But when you're doing writing fiction, you can't handle it
that way. It doesn't work. So anyway, I just appreciate
any little moments like this where it's sort of giving
me like a tip on how to get past a
kind of like mental creative block that happens, you know.
So anyway, it's just something that I I know that
you'll never anticipate everybody's argument, everybody's point of view, but
there are times guys where I thought I was really
clear about how I felt about something, and then a
person will come at me with this energy where they
took what I said in the opposite way, and I
am baffled because I am like, how could I have
said any more clearly, that is not what I meant like,
So it just can feel sometimes like there's no winning
because no matter how I say it, somebody is going
to feel a way about it. And to a degree,
you just have to accept that. That's like the reality
of creating for the Internet. You know, that's just how
it's going to be. But it's difficult to let go
while you're in the moment of potentially being able to
control that and keep it from happening. It's an illusion
that you can control it at all, but you can
very easily get tripped up into believing that you are
able to manage it all all the time. So anyway,
Carl goes in there, like I said, he drops the
napalm on the thing. It really begins to take off,
and we also find out that this is like a
gel recipe that he had to kind of lead the
conversation with Mordecai. Again, this is something that's continuously happening
with Carl where he has to behave as if I
just stumbled across this recipe but actually it's something that's
already in his cookbook, and he just has to like
handle the chat with Mordecai to make it seem like
everybody saw the moment where he was struck with inspiration.
Now I'm gonna tell you guys something, and don't yell
at me, because I didn't go any further. But while
I was listening to this, I was making meatballs, and
so my hands were covered in raw ground turkey. I
was making turkey meatballs. And so the next chapter at
the end of this section begins, and I didn't have
a way to stop the audio book. It took me
a second to realize I could just say out loud, hey, Siri,
and then, you know, do the whole thing. But it
starts the very beginning of the next chapter, and I
just got to the part where Carl gets a notification
that there's something in his inventory that he's not going
to be allowed to keep, and I didn't get any further.
That's exactly where I managed to get it. To stop.
The paranoia I am feeling that they found out about
his recipe book is killing me. If that's what it is,
I am going to be so upset. I am going
to be so upset, So I just might if I
get to the end of this and still have some
time left, read just like a little further live on
the air, just to see, just for myself, just as
a little treat. But yeah, tip to all of you.
If you're using audiobooks and you have the Hayes Siri
option enabled, you can use that to pause, fast forward,
rewind or uh yeah, rewind whatever without touching anything. And
it's very helpful if you're frequently doing stuff where your
hands are full, or you're super gross because you're cooking,
or you're like out gardening and you have gardening gloves
on which I've also run into. It's really saved my
butt a few times, and I was very grateful for
it in this moment. So everybody's saying, yes, you should
do that in the chat, okay, noted. So this is
when the metal that he is using to hold up
his rope begins to slide and move because the ooze
has figured out that's what he's using to get in
and is going after the rope. So he's like, okay, fine,
just close the hole and open one somewhere else, Like
you know, it's not going to know where to go
right away, and I will get out that way, which
is fair. And then it begins to collapse. Things begin
to really all the sand is pouring down, Kotcha' is
freaking out, Donut is freaking out. Donut manages to pull
Carl out of the depths of it in that room,
back up to the spot where the metal is holding
the roof in place, and Koya wants to come back
and help them, and Carl has to be like, girl,
don't you fucking dare get this guy out of here.
You need to handle this shit, and then is privately
messaging Gwen and is telling her like, I'm gonna need
you to open the spigot, basically let that water out,
And at first she's like, I don't think that's what
you mean, and he's like, yes, it is. Do it.
So they wind up getting kind of washed away, and
at one point Gwen is saying to him, you know
it didn't have to be like this. If you just
let me do this from the start, you wouldn't be
trapped in there. But you probably also wouldn't have wound
up with a winding box, which is the whole thing
problem is it's unclear why the winding Bux matters because
we just still don't really know what the fuck the
point is of it. So I appreciate Carl being obsessed
with getting it, and I think I would also be
that way, but I want to acknowledge it's sort of
potentially just the same as the fucking Lemonade, where it
does nothing, or it's just you're being tricked into thinking
it's going to help and it's going to do the opposite.
I don't know. I just think that we should look
at that Lemonade as a cautionary tale, that's all. So Dona,
he told her to like take Mordecai's special brew, and
she fucking doesn't, soa her health keeps bottoming out and
he has to keep healing her, and he gets messaged
by Mordecai, who's like, what the fuck is going on
out there? She keeps bottoming and Carl's like, shut up,
leave me alone, and he takes some uh underwater breathing potions.
They both have eight of them, and it's so interesting
because like it just works like magic at the time,
but then later when he actually gets out of the water,
he vomits so much water up that I'm really wondering
exactly how this worked, because it didn't keep it from
it would keep his body from flooding it physically, the
water got in, but it just made it so that
it didn't matter at the moment, you know. And while
they are underwater, there's this fucking huge shark that's eating
the dead bodies that are around him, and that really
gets his ass moving. That's when he starts to be like, okay,
here we go. Unfortunately, as he is holding donut, she
freaks out and we get a pretty fun flashback of
him when he was first moved in with b and
he was trying to get used to being with like
a woman in the house and doing something nice, and
so he gets up early to make pancakes and I'm sorry, guys,
it's funny. So he decides that he's going to make
these and isn't used to there being a cat around,
so he doesn't understand the dangers of leaving things out
on the counter. Now, I will say that, like you,
I have two cats, but they aren't really the type
to get into stuff while I'm in the midst of cooking.
They will fuck my entire kitchen up when I'm not
in it. But if I am like at the moment
doing something, they tend to stay out. And he leaves
the flour and the eggs and milk out, and she
comes and knocks them over and basically looks like she's
about to be battered and deep fried by the end
of it. And since she's a show cat, he's like,
b is going to flip out. So he decides I
had better give her a bath. And anybody out there
who has dealt with cats and heard that phrase being
uttered probably knew exactly where this was headed. Some cats
are fine with water. I've seen it myself. They just
they don't necessarily really like it, but they deal with it.
And then there are cats that do like it, that
fucking like climb into bathtubs and shit. You know, there
are freaks in every breed, but as far as most cats,
water is genuinely like danger zone for them. They do
not cope well. And I have never personally had a
pet cat that was okay with water at all, not
one time. And I've had a few cats in my day,
So I'm sorry if you get My dogs are outside now,
but they're still quite audible. It's great. So he wound
up having to go to the emergency room and get
stitches in his arms and his hands and his ear,
and was telling the lady, the nurse who was like
sewing him up, about the sound that Doughnut had made.
And he describes that as being what happens here when
she kind of comes to and she's underwater, and she
is losing her shit, not just at being underwater, but
at the consideration that Mango might be scared, might like
if she dies not ever come out of his little carrier,
which honestly, that is genuinely so sad, like just the
idea of that got me like a little for clemped.
I'm not even gonna lie. I was like, I wish
you hadn't even put that in my head, Dona. I
never considered and if that happened, I would be so bombed.
I would be so bombed. We would never know, you know,
like so but yeah this, uh, I just don't want
that idea even anywhere in my head. And Carl the
only way to like get her to stop flipping out
and focus on the task at hand. The only way
that he manages to do this is by saying, Mango
needs you. You have got to focus, and so she
finally does, but you know, it's it's focused technically, but
it's very much like I, I'm just barely keeping my
your terror at bay. And it's not like she's really
actively very helpful. It's just that she's not holding them
back necessarily. So he is having to swim as fast
away as he can from this thing that definitely is
like beginning to vector towards them, as he puts it.
And I love that this shark has swallowed the thing
that was playing jump around, and so it's like very
vaguely sort of playing down in the water, giving them
a sense of it. It's like the alligator in peter
Pan that swallowed the clock I'm wondering if this is
going to come in handy later at some point that
we can hear this thing. And they use the clockwork
triplicate on a Beluga second chance on the Bluga corpse,
and then clockwork triplicate, which is what she had done
to Hecla. So they call this Hecla now, which is
fucked up, but also like of course you would, I mean,
I do get that it's fucked up, and I get
way Katcha wouldn't like it, but come on, I mean,
come on, you know. So eventually he had gotten a
kayak at that house that he looted when he fought
the goose, and he uses that and manages to climb
into it. I will say this author very much hand
waves him climbing into a kayak from like basically underneath it,
and I am going to just assume that because he
has this bonker's strength ability at this point, it means
that he can move in ways that maybe a lot
of people wouldn't ordinarily be able to do or that
would be really difficult. But also, like he does have
national what is it National Guard training, So perhaps there's
like training that about getting into lifeboats from the war
that he has. I don't know, I don't know, but
it like I expected the whole sequence of him trying
to get into the kayak to be a bit of
a thing, and it wasn't at all, which was fine.
It's fine, but I just did want to acknowledge it.
And I love when he says that was pretty awesome,
and don' it just says, go fuck yourself, Carl and
coast Guard, thank you guys. I almost said ghost guard,
which there has to be something out there that's got
a ghost guard. Right. Oh, I hate coming up with
something that feels really clever, and then a second later
I realize it's so obvious that it's got to be
in like multiple things actually, So later on, she is very,
very indignant to find out she didn't get a boss box.
She's super pissed, and it's because they didn't technically kill
the boss. It's still alive out there, and I get it,
but also that does seem really unfair. I side with
her on this. He has gotten some achievements, one about like,
you beat the boss without killing it, and he gets
a Pacifist box, and the other is you were I
was in the pool, You've received a bronze ey'm wet box.
She got a buoyancy belt. The silver Pacifist box contained
a skilled potion for Doughnut that raised her dodge skill
by one, taking it to ten. That was a big
deal because she'd been training it for a while and
so the skill had been stuck on nine. Now that
she'd hit ten, she had a permanent deflection buff and
it means that it's going to make shooting arrows at
her and stuff half as accurate, which is a huge deal.
Carl gets some potions that Mordecai instantly says not to use.
And it's a potion of bloodlust that causes you to
get faster and stronger, but also you forget where you
are or who anybody is and why you're here. And
like he says, last time I saw someone drink that potion,
they accidentally killed half of their party. And honestly, this
is obviously something that Mordecai has firsthand experience with, like
he's dealt with this. I don't know if he's the
one who drank it, or if he made a potion
incorrectly and thought it was going to be helpful and
it wasn't in the way he thought, or but there's
just something about the reaction he has to it that
I was like, Okay, this is hitting a nerve, same
way that like earlier on in maybe the first book,
when he says something about there are no real gods
in the Dungeon, everything is like made. He says it
with this intensity, like I have run into a problem
before with people believing in the gods. You need to know,
you know, in a very personal way. But we still
haven't gotten the backstory on him yet, so who knows,
And let's see oh yeah. He looks at the note
about the winding box and the clock, and basically this
dude is saying, like what they told me to do
about sucking the island into the nothing is a mistake,
because then all of the items would wind up in
the nothing near where the feral gods are, And even
though they're split into pieces, I still think that's too dangerous.
So if samth Samaith ever leaves before I can implement
my fix, I will be forced to destroy myself. But
I hope it will never come to pass. And he's
like talking about the ooze loving him and how he
can use that, but he doesn't really know how the
gate is complicated and simple, and he describes the way
it works. I'm not going to get into this because
I really just don't have time, but suffice to say,
the way that you use the timing to like set
it up, he doesn't fully understand. So this isn't a
how to manual that's super detailed that they can use
to operate it. It's like close but not quite and
emphasize is about like the dangers of opening it and
what will happen on the side where it's opened, and
even people who are near the portal, are going to
go crazy if they are, if they don't have high constitutions,
which that's really scary. I have also discovered the winding
box itself as a conduit to the nothing. All one
must do to open a passage is open the lid,
wind the box, and send a stream of charged energy
into the device, and a portal will open directly into
the nothing, and explains like, this is how I did
the thing that I have done. Here's what I'm going
to do to defeat her. If I'm successful, I will die,
but you will receive this letter along with a winding box.
Then you can send another expedition to seek the remaining
two artifacts I believe they are. And then it ends
and they talk about the possibility of opening a gate
directly to the ninth floor, But Mordecai is very much
of the opinion you can make a gate all you want,
but you're not going to be able to fucking go
through it. They will not let you. It will physically
not let you. Katchya isn't really like taking his word
for it. She says maybe also in response to like
whatever comes through the other way will kill everything in
the entire bubble. I think it's interesting that she's not convinced,
and I'm wondering why. And she's got some different illustrations,
and she says, if it looks like if we do
it this last way, we'll lose the box, but no
monsters will get out, it'd be a waste. You ain't
using this thing to hop floors no matter what. I
barely heard him. I was focused on the second to
last scenario. Holy shit, Holy fucking shit. The first depicted
three items on one side of the gate, and the
second depicted just the winding box on the far side.
It went on from there with each possible combination. I am,
let's see all but one of the scenarios ended with
a monster emerging emerging, so we don't get to know
what the second to last scenario is. And I am
so curious why Karl is freaking out. I'm wondering if
there's like a way out of the dungeon itself. But
I feel like there's no way they'd make that, you know, Yeah,
I don't know, Michael says, I'm not even sure how
useful it would be to hop floors. Even if they could,
that would be a lot of leveling and that's exactly
what I was thinking. Michael was just like, you're gonna
wind up with you know, mobs that are higher level
than you, and they're gonna be higher level, and there's
gonna be you know, twenty of them. Right now. The
mobs are like fifteen levels lower, but you can it's
still a challenge because there's fifteen of them. What happens
when they're you know, like, I agree that. It seemed
like why would we even want to do that? But whatever,
let's see. And then it ends with Mordecai saying, if
you need me, I'll be in the crafting room. I
think I'm onto something with that yam you received earlier,
which I'm real curious about that. And then Carl says,
is there a Desperado club in this town? So I'm
gonna do real quick live read twenty four. Before Kotch
you could answer me, I was interrupted by a message.
When we've done at the stairwell, something odd happened when
we entered. The whole room was made of black, but
the moment I sent tran in, it all flashed and
everything turned to a loud error message blocked out the
rest of her note, warning an item in your catalog
is no longer eligible to be held in inventory. It
will be forcibly removed in five seconds. And this is
where I managed to stop. So Carl, what the hell
I said? I immediately thought of the last two times
that had happened, both times to Katya. The first was
when all the blood in her inventory had exploded out
of her because of the container patch. The second time
I hadn't seen it was when she'd placed the whole
house in her inventory and Born had changed the rules.
It had destroyed a tavern when the house appeared, and
effectively got her band from the town, which was why
we'd had to trek an extra mile to get to
this settlement. Both of those had happened immediately after the recap,
which was when Borne applied their updates and patches. We
still had a few hours until the episode, so I
had no idea what was going on. I gritted my
teeth and waited for it to happen. The crystallized head
of Gazi's sex doll popped out of my inventory and
splatted on the floor. Only it wasn't crystallized anymore. It
was still the decapitated sex doll head of a half
Naiad named Lika. The chin had chipped badly when Mongo
had knocked over the statue, and the frozen, lifelike head
of the doll had a big chunk taken out of
its latex chin. Uh Karl Katcha said, you dropped a
head on the floor. I have seen a few sex
dolls in my time, Though I wouldn't consider myself an expert,
I knew, at least on Earth, they ranged in quality
from the cheap inflatable kind all the way to the
AI controlled real dolls who could talk and move and
looked at least moderately realistic. This was about halfway between
those two extremes. It was a latex like dummy head
that was clearly once attached to a sex doll, and
not just a run of the mill mannequin. The head
was stuck with an open mouth and wide eyes. It
was slathered with hooker tear makeup. Two sharp looking fangs
hung down from its mouth, vampire like. The head had
a full head of bone white, silky looking hair. Its
full lips were painted bright red. A half set of
gills cleaved either side of its neck, cut short right
at the point of decapitation. Giving the cut an extra
jagged appearance. The bottom of the neck hole was just
solid latex. It had a sparkly barret in its hair
that red wet for you. I'm filled with regret. This
was a terrible mistake. Oh god. You guys though the relief.
I thought it was gonna be his cookbook, thank god,
Oh my god. But why wasn't he allowed to hold it?
I really want to know what was the problem. I
guess we'll find out, all right, guys, appreciate you all
so much. Thank you for joining me, Thank you Michael
for commissioning this. And until next time to the loom. Motherfuckers.
That was an Unspoiled Network podcast.