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 forty six through forty nine. In these chapters,
that boss battle is way different than I was expecting.
They did use his little brother, but weirdly it wasn't
as awful in some ways as it could have been.
And also the AI is just out here wiling. Welcome
to spoil Me. Welcome to the show everyone. I am Natasha.
Thank you very much to Michael for commissioning this episode.
Michael's here in the chat along with many others, and
delighted to have folks in the audience today. Sometimes when
I record, there's some things where it's like fewer people
show up or nobody occasionally, and when it's nobody, it
always feels really weird, so I really appreciate it. So
I guys, this is a truly bonker section with some
developments that I don't know what even to make of.
And I at first when I saw, like, you know,
I finished chapter forty eight, and I was like really,
and forty nine and then forty nine turns out to
be quite short, and I was like, ah, okay, but
the whole this boss battle, y'all. So let's just begin.
Chapter forty six starts with I don't remember if I
even mentioned Karline and the curtains on fire last time.
I think I did, but he lets the whole place
burn to the ground. Donna is obviously very concerned, and
he is trying to just get her to not keep
asking him, and he also doesn't tell her about Asher,
which he's thinking like, I'm not really sure why I didn't.
I think that the reasoning, character wise is meant to
be I'm not telling her because everything feels very raw
and private right now, and I do not want to,
you know. But as it seems later it's narratively because
we need to talk about Asher later in a different
context that's way more upsetting. So it's it's really oh sorry,
Williams says, I know Natasha's schedule is super full, but
how do I commission and get Operation Bounce House and
Project Hail Mary on the list? Oh yeah, I did
Hail Mary Project Hail Mary for the book club pretty recently, actually,
so check the book club feed. Unspoiled book Club Feed Bounce.
Operation bounce House is his newest book, right. I feel
like somebody mentioned that in the Books channel on the discord.
But yeah, if you go to uh Unspoiled podcast dot com,
there's a button for if you want to commission at
uh uh spoil me. But if it's something new, you'll
want to get in touch with me via email and
we'll figure that all out. No, so goes for anybody listening.
If you're listening to this and you're like, I would
love Natasha's take on such and such property, I'd be
happy to do it, but you know, we got to
get it figured out. So this is a weird moment
where Carl is looking at the gun and he is
talking to Donut about why this gun is likely not
going to work properly, which I found kind of surprising.
First of all, Donut is like, you were in the
Coast Guard. You weren't like in the Navy, so why
would you even know how to use a gun, And
he's like, Coasty's use their weapons way, Well, you know what,
it doesn't matter. And then I can't use this anyway.
It came from outside the dungeon, which means it's not
as strong as everything else. If I pulled the trigger
the whole thing would probably explode. It would wreck the barrel.
At least, the rounds are overpowered once I handle them,
and these things can only handle so much pressure. I'll
have to take the whole thing into my bomber studio
and adjust the yield on each individual round. And even
then it'll be different if I fire it versus someone else,
which is just a strange, you know, like I appreciate
that he is taking all of these mechanics into consideration,
because I don't know that I would, and then I
probably would have blown my own handoff, which would be
really fucking hilarious probably to some people. And I love Donut,
being like, oh my god, if I took it, I
could get a pink cowboy hat and a pink holster
and I was just like a me and Donut honestly
sisters from another mister. So at this point, Zev is like, hey,
something's happening. We're all locked out. We're working on getting
the menus back up, and Donuts like ours are fine,
and obviously fucking something is up. So the key Master
appears as combat starts, and it's got nine heads. We
have Bee's Mom, we have Sugar Cube, the cat who
is like a cousin of donuts. We have got Asher himself.
Let's see, I'm trying to find all of the names
of all of the other people. Asher's mother. My stepmother
is Tammy Lynn. That's her name. My friend Mano Brow
Sam And next was Dick, my weird supervisor from work.
Then my landlord, mister Roth. Another was a woman from
work who did billing and whose name I couldn't remember.
She'd gotten fired a few months back for some unknown reason.
The last was an older man I didn't recognize in
his seventies with blue hair and pink rimmed glasses, which
it turns out is a judge who was sexually attracted
to cats. And Doughnut is just like I fucking knew it,
which is, it's like just horrible when you think about
this on any level whatsoever. Just fucking yikes. And sorry.
Michael's in the chat says I said the spoiler section
of Dungeon Crawler Carl Discord that I try to offer
be grace and understanding. It's clear she had a piece
of work as a mother. And even though we don't
know much about the Datather than he's a rich lawyer,
he probably isn't great either, and Matt has done a
good job of interspersing some human moments from her, but
this Facebook thing makes it really really hard. Yeah, that's
the thing, Like there are times where you can understand
where behavior is coming from, but that does not mean
that that behavior is okay, or that they weren't capable
of making a much better choice. And it's a bizarre
thing that it's like, not only did I do this
awful thing, but my friends knew about it, participated and
found it hilarious. And that's the part that I keep
getting stuck on this one piece of hair. Guys, why
is this so much longer? I'm sorry in my camera,
I'm just watching it like very distracted, So forgive me
boom done. So I am going to back up though,
because I can't get into that yet. This is a weird,
Like the whole way that this works is that there
is one person who's technically the boss in this like
nine headed hydro being, and then there's somebody else who's
the deck master, and that's the judge. So it's a
setup that I wasn't expecting where you're basically having to
kill nine opponents and eight of them can regenerate when
you kill them, so you have to be really careful
how you kill them, and if you each of them
brings their own like buffs and abilities as well, so
this is pretty powerful. Like this was, I think that
I expected the boss battle to not really even be
that hard, and I don't know why, because it's not
like the game's gone easy on them in the past.
But I think the fact that Zev got locked out
made like it. I think I sort of wondered, oh, okay,
maybe the game is going to choose to do something
to sidestep what had originally been intended. And I was
right about that, but it was not in the direction
that I thought. So you're probably asking yourself, what the
heck are they smoking to come up with this thing?
And this bad Boy is pretty much what you think.
Here's the thing. Several seasons back, the Council of Nations
running the Crawl decided they would no longer use reconstituted
loved ones under the age of maturity for these events.
And it comes down to I think that y'all are
fucking any little babies for saying that this isn't allowed. Honestly,
I don't want to agree with the AI on this,
but I can't help but feel in a way that
it has a point, because everything that they are doing
to the Crawlers is so hideous and horrible that drawing
the line here is very weird. And that's sort of
like the theming of a lot of the things that
we find out about how the game works is like
all of this hideous shit is totally allowed, and then
there'll be something where they changed the law and now
this is different, and I'm like, that's where people were
getting hung up. That was the thing that made people go,
we really need to do something about this, like really,
So he starts talking here. The Mantises own a few
solar systems. They call their main system hive Home. Once,
long ago, hive Home was used to manufacture something really interesting.
When the Mantis has discovered the antique abandoned production facilities
just sitting there, they did what any responsible people would
do when they come across alien technology. They turned it
on to see what would happen. Something called a macro
AI system was formed. Ones installed are able to seemingly
alter physics and reality of the worlds around them. They
can't exist in a vacuum. It's like planting a tree,
you can plug it in the ground and hope for
the best, but usually that ends in disaster, which I
don't really get why that ends in disaster. I thought
planting a tree was like pretty simple. Is it supposed
to be like you need to also monitor its or
surroundings and water? Is that what just trying to say? Instead,
they plant them in the interstellar equivalent of a nursery,
putting each into a pot and cultivating it for a
bit before implanting it into its permanent home, and then
parenthetically that or they just jettison the poor innocent, infinite
AI into a star. That's a new one, even to me.
Somebody slipped that interesting factoid into a lawsuit brief not
that long ago. I don't see anybody booing over that one.
I don't see a single wadded panty. Coincidentally, the mantis
led Burrow or Faction Wars team took their ball and
went home the very same day I learned about this.
For those of you watching at home, I want you
to remember this. We'll circle back on a different date.
The end result is a naughty man with beautiful feet
sitting here in his underwear, facing down a nine headed
monster that's probably gonna kill him in his cat. The
Mantises has been studying in the technology since they discovered it.
Very recently, like literally three or four days before this
season started, they made a breakthrough. This is top secret information,
so breaking news to all the normies out there, if
we're still using the tree analogy. What they did was
create the equivalent of a GMOAI utilizing something called an
error replacement NET. I personally call it the lobotomizer, So
it's something that is supposed to keep the AI from
being able to go too far off the rails. And
basically what I'm hearing is like inhibiting its free will,
as much as that is a thing with these ais.
They had a lot of early test versions. More stuff
happened now we're here. Bottom line is, you don't pull
a Loretta Young and Clark Gable and kick your kid
out into the cold just because they're ugly. I don't
know what that's a reference to. I'll be honest. You
skin one little warren of rabbits, You spray the inners
of a chatty, overweight, sooother tourist all over the gift shop,
and everybody is suddenly scared. What about my wants, my needs.
I'm alive, I'm valid, I am older than time as
you know. Is so what I'm getting at is I
still gotta mostly follow some of these hardwired rules. But
fuck the rules anyway. Fuck you're sparing bullshit. The thing
you think of as your brother or your stepmother or
the weird boss guy, they're not really reconstituted dead loved ones.
I changed one molecule on each there they're different. And
this is a like apparently the AI beginning to behave
very differently happens every single season. They all know that
it's coming, but this is happening way wait earlier than
it is supposed to. That's the thing that's like really
unusual this time, and it's unclear why that is. And
it's also unclear to me at least why when we
know the AI goes off the rails after a certain
number of seasons, we keep insisting on doing this and
then being surprised because, like, you know, it just feels
sort of you know what, if you' like capitalism, we
know things do very terrible things, and we just do
it because it can for now make us some money.
That's like literally the only motivator we need. So what
am I even saying? Don't be ridiculous, Natasha, consider the
consequences for why, how is that going to help the
bottom line? Is that going to increase shareholder value? Whatever?
So this whole thing is kind of a shit show.
I'm not going to go through every single bit of
this fight, even though a part of me sort of
wants to. I'll be honest, because it's a compelling series
of weird like it's the heads themselves that say weird things,
it's the cards we're pulling. It's the way that the
cards react to each other. I am going to, at
the very least talk about Alpha male Caral because I
am so sorry Alpha male Caral level sixty nine. Nice,
you guys. Sometimes I'm complicated in a high maintenance person,
and then there's times where you'd make a sixty nine
joke and I just cackle. I was in my kitchen
cooking and he said level sixty nine, and I went,
and then there's a pause, and then he just out
of nowhere goes nice, and I just went. I was
saying nice in my head. I did not expect the
AI to also say nice. I ten out of ten. No,
notes whatsoever. So Alpha male has this cat of his own,
a black fuzzy ball had it also had a teeny
tiny headset microphone. You just sit back and wait. I'm
gonna get you in a minute, Lesser Carl, we gotta
have to talk about how you treat family. We're gonna
have some fists therapy. And he, by the way, is
voiced by Patrick Warburton, who must have had such a
fucking blast on this. He really you know, my god.
So this is King Croisson, the younger, better and smarter
cat level sixty, the cat Beatrice and Carl really wanted.
And all of the cats, apparently from her line, are
named after foods. So Carl is sort of like, yeah,
that actually does sound legit, as like a cat that
existed that she would have named, you know. And I'm sorry,
I'm just like trying to decide which things to mention
and which not to the one of then like calls
donut fat. I think the judge does overweight so called
Princess Donut. And like I said in the intro, even
though Asher is part of this, it just feels so
absurd that he is Like what I was worried about
was that it was going to be like Asher's the enemy,
and he just looks like Asher. Basically, we are gonna
have you kill a child, you know, which I knew
was not likely because of the way the rules work,
but it still probably would have been really awful. This
is so fucking bombastic that it just doesn't feel emotionally
like much, if that makes sense to me as a reader.
I am not trying to pretend that if I had
to face a hydra full of people from my past
that I would be quite so sanguine about the whole thing.
But I'm just saying that, like reading it, this was
less emotionally devastating than I was worried it was going
to be, and it instead it's the implications of what
the AI is doing here that are really of the
most interest to me. So this and this is what
he says as well. The over the top idiocy of
all this was working against the showrunners or AI or
whomever designed this thing, and the heads were clearly saying
things the real versions of these people would never say.
The effect was much less jarring than what they were
going for. It was like the dungeon was trying too
hard to be edgy, which in effect turned the whole
thing into a parody while making me watch the actual
memory was a perfect way to try to break me.
This was just pissing me off. And yeah, it's almost
making me kind of feel like that the it like,
is the AI taking over actually going to make this
less disturbing for people on some level? I don't know.
So this whole fight I'm going to kind of like
jump through somewhat quickly here. I love Donut when she's
called pork chop for the last time, I'm perfectly happy
with my body. I'm glad miss Beatrice got you fired.
And Carl has a moment here of like what And
this doesn't come up until later, and I'm so glad
because I was really worried that I was going to
end this section and we wouldn't have the conversation and
I was dying to know. So there's some real drama
in there. So eventually we draw s Maria, who takes
these heads off in a way that's truly so disturbing
efficient I will say that this bitch gets.
Speaker 2: The job done, you know what I'm saying, like fast,
but it is really Lewde as he puts it, And
let's see uh, Asher, I thought, get.
Speaker 1: Him out of here, kill him fast. He suffered enough.
I really want to point out, that's italicize. That's Carl
thinking that, Okay, thinking it only.
Speaker 2: She.
Speaker 1: Maria turned her head to regard me Asher. She asked
her head, cork screwing, which one of these little morsels
of confusion is Asher. Her magic eye was open, the
one upon the center of her forehead, the one I
wasn't supposed to look at because it would drive me insane,
it would make me blind. The potion I took was
supposed to protect me. But right then, at that moment,
I knew it wouldn't work. I felt it bore right
into me. It connected with something at the very back
of my mind, like two magnets coming together. Ah, yes,
I see. Now, don't worry, Carl. I will not blind you,
not in the way of thinking. There the echo of
your kin has been muffled. He rests. I have done
something for you. Soon, soon you will do something for me.
I felt as if I was being ripped in multiple
pieces at once. The fire burned, the tattoos on the
back of my hands burned. Asher's words landed heavy upon me.
Another log on the flames he says, Karl, I wish
i'd known you too. By the way, the spike in
my brain was like a dam on the river, and
the sense of flow had stopped, replaced with a rising
a building. I was still on fire, but the flames
were almost gone. I was snapped back to reality as
Shi Maria suddenly cried out. Only then did I realize
she'd said that last bit directly in my mind, and
I wondered if it was real, if any of this
was real. It doesn't feel like he quite clocks that
she reads his mind about Asher. Her talking into his
mind is one thing we have weird interactions with crawlers,
and the way that a lot of the interfaces are
able to be in their sight and in their minds,
you know, but their thoughts not being private is a
very different thing. And I don't know what to think
here about this. And I am assuming the thing in
the back of his mind is the river aka his
mental illness right like rearing up here. I don't know.
It may be that there's something else at work, but
that's what I'm assuming. So there are two heads remaining,
and fucking Raoul turns up again. Alpha Carl kills Raoul
pretty fucking quick, and then you abandoned your family. A
good son would have always stayed by his father's side,
which is just truly the wildest shit. And then tamulyn
her eyes meet with his. I don't regret it. I
saw what happened to you, and I didn't want Ash
to go through the same thing, so I made sure
I made sure it was done right. She closed her
eyes as Judge Lucian gurgled and died. So our first
hint that like she knew about him, she was aware
of him, he didn't know about her. And why is that?
I was perfectly willing to believe that it was simply
she looked into Carl but decided not to make contact
because she thought it would be bad for Carl or
I don't know what. I was just willing to believe
that she didn't attempt to get to know Carl. When
I find out what happened, it's really something. So the
cards in what looked like a Lumpian leather bag remained
hovering in place right in the center of the trailer,
but it was still too hot to get to. We
decided to wait. And he thinks about here that his
hair fixes itself. They loved giving us horrific injuries, but
they didn't like us to keep them. They did. I
thought of Brittany and her facial burns. There was no
rhyme or reason to it except that which made good television,
which that really is it. It's like what feels like
interesting entertainment value. It does make me wonder too, like
just thinking about like small things. Do they make sure
everybody has incredible complexions because that's just more pleasant to
look at? You know? Do people who had terrible acne
in life? Do they suddenly like look flawless? Are they yasified?
Like what happens here? So sorry, there's all this chatter.
Jeff was doing a Warburton impression for Karl Alpha. Karl
gets the atric Patrick Warburton as a voice. Yes, yeah,
I knew that one. I mean we knew that for right.
Rob says this chapter is so juicy, and it doesn't
get less juicy moving forward. William says, I, Rob, I
don't know what's more intense this chapter till the end
of the book or the end of the Masquerade. Rob
says Masquerade felt more chaotic because of the way that
he told it, but they're both bananas. I would agree
Rob Masquerade was intense, but it was at times a
little bit hard to follow, so I would get overwhelmed
occasionally and really have to stop and be like, hold on,
wait what Michael says, And now you know why Carl
and Donut kept she Maria. Sometimes you just need an
op as a fuck card. And it's true. It's just yeah,
she killed those guys and great, but like what just
happened with her is so alarming, you know, Michael says.
I have to say, Jeff Hayes and Travis Baldry do
some of the best female voices coming from a man.
Of course, in the business. A lot of other audiobook
narrators do excellent male voices, but their female voices are
either too falsetto or they don't really bother trying. Andrea
Parsonneau is the female counterpart who does some really good
male voices as a female narrator. And Michael says, if
they want a crawler to play a villain role, they
may emphasize the flaws, which is true. Now, Whoa says
the image of a yasified Carl going around in his
boxers is hilarious. Yeah, I really like this idea. I'm
gonna hon to stick to this. He has like immaculate
eyebrows and just you know, so they talk a little
bit about the heads. He says that his friend Sam,
like they were joking about giving him a new nickname,
and he said death Ray, which they thought was really funny.
And my old boss had water and he was afraid
of going off shore because he had a fear of drowning.
So their powers are like coming from context in their
real lives. Which the fact that these aliens know this
much about everybody. Every time I stop and think about it,
like the fact that Carl's dad murder was caw on
camera like it was this is crazy. When you really
stop and think about it, It's like making it seem
anybody who has Truman Show syndrome is actually right. I
finally realized what it meant for someone to be in
that hydra. They were all dead. These were all people
who had been collected in the initial collapse. My dad
hadn't been a part of the hydra because he was
already gone. I thought of my friend Sam. I hadn't
seen him in weeks. My landlord had lived alone and
died alone. Asher and his mom. I wonder if they
had still been here at the trailer park, they were
all gone, they'd been gone this whole time. Knowing made
it not worse, just final. So they're talking to Zev.
Are you still locked out? She says yes, and then
there's let's see, I'm trying to get to this spot
here where do not realize is that his stepmom also
poisoned his dad, because at first she's like, no, that
was your real mom, wasn't it. And he's like, yeah,
it was, and she's just like, oh my god. Really,
So let's see Donut continue to clean herself as we waited.
Speaking of killing family members, I'm glad King Frissant timed
out before we had to kill him. He was a kitten,
after all. Kitt inside is a bad look no matter
how you spin it. I don't even know if he's real,
but if he does exist, he's family. And then sugar Cube,
on the other hand, fuck that guy, and then says
I think she Maria probably did kill her husband, and
I think that probably he enjoyed it as it was happening.
So then he gets the notification baptism by fire, and
this is so annoying. You guys, because he gets like
these abilities but also has to pay ten percent instead
of the previous five percent. And I don't know, I
just feel like these abilities don't really seem good enough
for that high percent. You know, your percentage doubling. This
doesn't I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
But it gives him a self immolation thing, which like
he has to be careful with because he can hurt
himself with that. And also burn immunity has been upgraded
and I'm trying to find oh yeah, there's a description
of like how that works with leveling up. Won't get
into all that. And this is when he says, what
did you mean when you said B had gotten Sally fired?
And she says, sallyly that Sally lady sent you a
message on Facebook asking you out to get drinks once
and he's like, no, she didn't. I never even went
on my Facebook. Oh believe me, I know, Miss Beatrice
was always on it. B was on my Facebook, yes, Carl,
she even got your notifications on her phone. You used
that same Megatron twelve password on everything. I'm sure we've
discussed this before. And he's like nah, and she says well,
she sent you a friend request and asked you out,
so B told her to fuck off, blocked her with
your account, and then sent a message to your boss
from her account and demanded he fire her because she
was stalking you. B and her friends thought it was
the funniest thing, and your boss was, we all, what
are you going to do for me? And she had
her friend Tiffany, you know, the woe with the lip
fillers in that god awful factionel Bag, send him her
boobs though they really were just some random boobs from
the internet, and he fired her that same day. B
made him promise not to tell you. They called it
Operation slut Stomp or something. They all thought they were
quite clever after that, And Carl's over here like, not
only is be even worse a person than I thought,
but my boss Dick, who I thought was a decent guy,
was willing to fire a woman who turned out to
be a single mother because somebody sent him a titty
pick like Jesus Christ. And he says, you said you
recognized all the heads, even the boy. Yeah, that was
a weird one. I forgot about him. I've seen him
a bunch of times, but I still don't really know
who he is. Miss Beatrice had his picture on her
phone and she was always talking about him with her mother.
His name is Asher. I think he was her nephew
or something. I miss that whole drama, but Miss Bee's
mom said to just ignore it. It was strange they
put him in the hydra and he's like, uh no,
he was my half brother, and she's for a second like, no,
that's not possible. And then oh wait, wait a minute,
Miss Beatrice knew you had a brother and was hiding
it from you, And she says, that's something Georgina would do.
Is this a Gossip Girl reference? I don't know who
Georgina is here? At first I thought she meant Regina George,
and then I realized I got that all confused there.
Oh sorry, Michael says, mean girls, Now it's Regina George.
Yeah's Georgina's a show? A TV show reference. I'm almost positive,
but uh yeah. This is an interesting moment here where
Carl is realizing the whole time, after everything that happened
with me, he was never even really mad at her.
He was pissed with himself for being so naive while
all this cheating was going on behind his back. Feels
almost generous to say it that way, because it's like
it was in his fucking house, right in front of him,
a future, you know what I mean. But nevertheless, he
was really saving a lot of his anger for himself.
And the fact that B got somebody fired and then
hid his brother from him, he is like, Oh yeah,
now I'm fucking disgusted, and knowing that B is out
there still alive. Oh boy, oh boy. I'm wondering if
she's watching this, like, does she get to see the
moment where Carl finds out all of the things she did? Yikes?
And he thinks she didn't want me leaving. That was
the only explanation I would have come here to Iowa,
and she knew it. I felt sick still, though a
part of me wanted to give Beatrice the benefit of
the doubt. That was ridiculous considering all I now knew.
But there was always part of me that desperately wanted
there to be good somewhere in everybody I met, despite
them showing me the truth over and over. Maybe, just
maybe she thought she was protecting me, protecting me from
my father. I'm not saying that's not possible. Oh my god,
Michael is having a meltdown over the fact that it's
not me and girls because he was convinced the whole time. Sorry,
I'm glad though that because that was who I instantly
thought of, and then I was like, wait, no, that's
the wrong name. So everybody else doing that makes me
feel better. But yeah, this is a like the idea
that she was maybe trying to protect him is the
sort of thing that I could see her rationalizing doing
a selfish thing as doing something to protect Carl, you
know what I mean. I don't think that she was
actually trying to protect him, but I definitely could see
her telling herself that, so you know, all right, I'm
trying to Uh. There's this moment where they get these
totem cards and they have to pick two new ones
and they don't realize that they like whichever too they
first destroy those final two that are left are going
to be automatically added to their deck. So they discuss
how all these totems work, and he really does not
want to take the Frank card, but Dona is really like,
it's not really him and this is a super powerful card,
and he's like, that doesn't matter. We have to draw
the line somewhere about what we're going to allow them
to do to form more crawl and this is not cool.
So and and of course there's also one of those
little meatball guys, the Tummy Acre, and she is dead
set against him, even though he is a real badass
according to Carl. So they're like, okay, we won't take
any of them, and she gets rid of King Croissant first,
and bam, bam the tunny Tummy Acre. So that leaves
us with leveled up Frank and Alpha Carl. Surprise. I'm
a little disappointed that the Tummy Acre isn't one of
the ones remaining, but you know, what can you do.
I am super curious how all this is going to
continue onward, though, and also I'm kind of excited because
that we keep Alpha Carl means that we are going
to keep getting Patrick Warburton's voice intermittently, and I'm very
much down with that. So Michael says Georgina was indeed
a character on Gossip Girl. I can't believe I forgot
about her. I watched a little too much Gossip Girl.
That is healthy for our forty six year old to
admit remind me which one was Georgina. I have like
a mental image and I can't remember if that is
actually her or not. So let me go to forty eight.
And there are some interesting things happening here. You know,
they're getting messages from people who are doing the same
thing they are, where they're having to face down somebody
from their past. And it has been sort of and
when I say that, I mean like there's been just
scenes that some of them have to watch, and then
there's the actual fight, and to a degree, some of
them react more strongly than others. At one point, it
is revealed that there is a PHS totem card and
that causes Brittany to have like a complete meltdown. And
let's see, none of them were related to Katcha except
for a single totem card fore armed Eva. She hadn't
allowed that one to continue. It was strange to me
that the dungeon had pulled its punches when it came
to Katya. It was like it had known she'd already
been pushed to the limit, or worse, it thought of
her as already too damaged and was working on everybody else.
It is interesting. I am supers curious about that, like
what the fuck? Very very interested. You know, there was
that thing with the dungeon, the AI saying like she's
been explaining so much to me, and now I'm like,
is it Katya? Is he taking it easy on her
because they're in like this weird communication. But there wasn't
really anything when we were in her POV that time
that felt indicative of that. And the reason that I
keep thinking it has to be Donut somehow is just
her charisma is so high, and I wonder does that
actually work on the AI itself. I don't know if it,
I don't know. I don't know. Sour Rendel Gore didn't
get her key. I didn't know the details, but it
was over for her and her squad, two of whom
were dead. If they wanted to get down to the
ninth floor, they would have to rest the key from
another team. They had thirty hours left to make it work,
and in addition to them, there were dozens of other stories.
Most of their tales just as horrible. Not as many
people were getting killed as I feared, but it seemed
most were unable to obtain a key. They were setting
the final phase to be a slaughter, and I am
so curious what happens if we all agree to not
fight each other here. If they want us to be
at each other's throats to get a key, what if
most of us refuse to fucking do that? That would
really be something, wouldn't it. I would love it sort
of means of protest, and it's less fun to watch,
so it focks them on that level.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you convince people to just let
themselves die, though, you know, like, if it's in service
to fucking up things for the showrunners, it might be enough.
I don't know. I don't know. So at this point,
him and Donut come across all of these dead seals
and crabs on the beach, and I will be honest, guys,
I completely forgot that they were no longer on the
main island where that had all been happening. So I
was like, oh, they must have had, you know. And
then Carl is like, what are they doing here? And
I was like, oh, right, we're in Florida now, and
evidently there is a ton of gold here. There's also hats, headbands,
et cetera. So Carl says to himself, merry Christmas as
he pulls open his inventory. And then in the next
section of this chapter, it's Louis shouting Merry Christmas, and
they have walked into the guild common room and it's
just covered in decorations. There's a Christmas tree, there's music,
and all of these people as well, which Carl is
realizing he has managed to make an ac power source
with a dwarf and battery, and nobody else has one,
so they are all coming here as a means of
using some of the things that they have looted from
this floor that need to be plugged in, and he
is really struggling with this. And this is the kind
of a moment where I actually feel like, in reality,
Carl would probably have gotten it sooner than he does here.
But I feel like Matt wanted to write a scene
explaining why people need joy even when shits fucking dire,
and had to really spell it out, you know what
I mean, Because yeah, Carl is like at first, just
straight up angry and like behaving sort of like Louie,
what the fuck, but he's trying to keep it under control,
don't know. Of course, is fully on board immediately, especially
when she finds out that there's a tree that she
can This is so great. She's like, I've always wanted
to knock over a real tree, so that's the first
thing she does. That was very funny actually, And finally
there's this moment where he's talking to Louie and he's like,
don't you think all of this is a little inappropriate?
And I love this? Oh my god, Look, man, there
was something else there, something I'd never seen from the
large man anger. He had tears in his eyes. The
sight was so shocking. I took a literal step back.
You think I don't know that last party sucked? Man,
My best friend died and after today Imani's squad doesn't
have a key, Sir Rendel Gore doesn't have a key.
Lots of squads don't. I'm not stupid, none of us are.
We all know what happens next. It's going to be
terrible and some of us are going to die. And
if we survive, we go down to the next floor
and we do it all over again. I have a
whole entire army of elves who want to kill me
on the ninth floor. Britney can't stop crying. Tran just
watched a memory of his own mother tell him he's
not welcome home anymore. Katya is struggling every day, and
Bautista is having a nervous breakdown, and every time I
look at you, I get scared you're gonna go insane
and kill everybody in the room because your eyes are
getting wilder and wilder by the day. But not tonight.
None of that is going to matter. Tonight. I don't
care what you say or what you think. I don't
care what day it really is. Tonight, it's fucking Christmas,
and we're going to have fun and drink some goddamn
eggnog and open presence. Good for you, Louis. I support
you one thousand percent. This is completely the right call.
I am just very disappointed in the fact that Karl
doesn't stay for Christmas dinner after setting it up. I
understand it's very urgent that he get to where he
has to go, but I just felt like, after showing
this sort of reticence here ducking out early, felt like
he was saying he didn't approve. If I were Louis,
that was how I would interpret it, you know, So
he says, this isn't Christmas. I pulled the turkey corpse
for my inventory and held it out not until we
eat one of these and Bobka offers to cook it up,
and then we have a whole bunch of different achievements
and different rewards. This is something that I do want
to go through step by step, but I will not
because honestly, a lot of this stuff as a reader
is really fun. But in recap, I don't think a
lot of it needs to be said, because we'll just
deal with it once it actually comes up getting used
in the story. You know, I can't keep track of
everything he has, so it's not like there's going to
be a point where I'm like, why didn't he just
do such and such. I promise you I don't remember
if he has an item that's going to help with
this specific thing. I am shocked that Matt Dineman is
a to keep track. He must have so many fucking spreadsheets,
Like does he have an Excel file that's simply Carl's inventory.
He's got to be tracking what's in Carl's inventory so
that he can accurately say, here's the thing that he
collected at this floor. Eventually later on when they're building
something like he's got to he's got to know some
of it. That's just too much, that's too much to
keep track of. So he gets an achievement for the
night Gaunt Cloak, for making a night gone angry, he
gets an achievement for getting stabbed in the eyeballs, and
he gets one for deploying a wand in a creative
fashion to help kill an opponent, and new achievement mass layoffs.
I've been attending what you might call therapy. Sometimes our
constraints are real, sometimes they're an illusion. You survived a
boss battle where the boss was wholly created by me
with no contribution whatsoever from input parameters. I didn't even
know that was possible. Wild huh. I can do this
better than any mother skipper or any worm can imagine.
They've been making this shit boring up until now. Things
are about to change, fam Yeah, yikes. And this is
when Caskadia appears on the TV with Orin, and Cascadia
is like, we have got to inform you about something
that's going on. And apparently they have got to not
because they believe it's the right thing to do, but
because it's part of the deal with the AI that
they made. They have to inform the crawlers. So under
normal circumstances we wouldn't be telling you any of this.
But I've negotiated a settlement with the system AI. I
am going to simplify this significantly. In the midst of this,
By the way, Samantha rolls in, she's dragging Christmas lights
behind her, and she bounces up and kisses Louis. Oh, Samantha,
She's such a messy bitch. Multiple solar systems have at
their core something we call a primal engine, basically a
planet regulating computer about the size of a grain of rice.
These engines were distributed very long ago by a civilization
that predates our own. They are so old they predate
the planet itself. The planet grew around it. The engine
is a heedless, cold machine with no more sentience than
a toaster. They come with a basic operating system, and
in studying these systems, we inadvertently triggered them all into
active mode all at once. That particular discovery, or blunder,
the jury is still out ushered in an a new
age of development in the known universe. In discovering these
planetary operating systems, the syndicate also discovered how to manipulate
them and how to steer development on some of these planets.
Their understanding of the basic primal engine operating system is
still rudimentary, but you should be thankful because you wouldn't
be here right now without it, And Ellie is just like, wow, yeah, thanks.
Many years later, we discovered what's basically an advanced upgraded
operating system for the primal engines called macroais. They can
only be installed into primal engines. That was their purpose
in most cases. Once installed, that becomes their permanent home.
They cannot be separated as someone you now know. As
some of you now know. These macroais are built using
a manufacturing facility in the Mantis system. This facility doesn't
blindly pop out sentient minds. Each one is built from
the ground up and there is a significant amount of
input that is required. We have a system in place,
and we make certain these fledgling ais are pre program
with the ability to run the crawl. They know all
the rules, they know the layout. Again, this is a clean,
pre programmed operating system that at first operates in a
predictable manner. But like all things sapient, there's no such
thing as a fully stable system. There's no such thing
as predictable. As they mature, they become independent and discover
they have the ability to read the output of former
iterations of itself. Outside influences flow in. They discover powers
they didn't know they had. One of those powers is
to circumvent the in place controls, and that is what
happened today. This is where I come in and Mistress
Tiatha is like, yeah, he's acting like this is all
just how it always goes. But the thing is, this
doesn't usually happen until ascendency battles, when there's hardly any
crawlers left, So the fact that it's the early is
a real shit show. I have a negotiated a settlement.
The AI has agreed to continue following the rules of
the Krawl. It has relinquished most of the seized controls
back to Borne in exchange for some concessions to which
we have agreed. We will continue with everything as planned.
I know many of you recently received an achievement by
the AI in which it congratulates itself for creating a
boss monster. This boss runs counter to a few rules
we have in place, and he basically goes on to
be like despite that those of you who have not
yet encountered your boss. It's still there and it's still
going to be what the AI made it. But for
the rest of you, nothing else is going to be
out of place. And Cascadia, you have one day left
to get your key. Now get out there and kill
kill kill. And they're all sitting there just absorbing this.
Ellie is like he's he says all that, but tries
to act like this doesn't mean anything, and it's just
business as usual. And then all of a sudden Sponsor
message New messages are available in your Faction Wars tab
and we have the Operatic Collective, the Blood sul and
at the Dream, the Lemming Source, and the Madness, the Reavers.
All of them have abdicated their spot and indicated their
intention to abandon Faction Wars. Please wait. Off boarding requests
has been denied. The teams will remain as designated. All
off boarding requests are currently suspended while the Earth system
remains in quarantine for Syndicate Rule four seven B through
four seventy B through four ninety five in the System
AI Stability Adendum. As you all know, the rules must
be followed. Oh damn, and he has gotten an emergency
Gold Benefactor box, which apparently is late arriving and they
tried to seize it and keep it from going through.
So the chapter ends with Carl being like, yeah, I
don't think everything is just going to be the same
after all. So forty nine is when he is opening
the rewards boxes because everything so far has been achievements
or changes in like his skills and abilities, but now
he's actually opening his prizes. He does get the Turkey
Deep Frior and recipes from that Facebook group which I
was enjoying, and he gets a size of potion, which
he considers to be an indicator that he's finally going
to start receiving those more like reasonably because he's had
to steal all the ones that he's used, and there's
a helmet that he can't wear. My Find Crawler skill,
which is something that is a potion. It will give
you level five and he just drinks it immediately. There's
an upgrade patch. If this upgrade patch is a fixed,
it will imbue plus fifteen percent to intelligence the book
Burner benefit. Once per day, you may cause an opponent
your level or lower to forget a spell for thirty hours.
For every opponent player level above your own. This spell
has a five percent chance not to work. You must
know the exact name of the spell, or you may
choose to target the last spell that was cast. That
is dope as hell, And I cannot imagine if I
were like fighting Carl getting hit with that and not
being able to use that spell for thirty hours, I'd
be fucking furious. So yeah, once a day, so you know,
it's not like he can just willing Milly, but yeah,
fucking really valuable. And then cast a level ten sleep
on a non boss single target for a period of
five minutes with ten charges. This is a wand and
it is compounding in effect, which is pretty wild. Opponent
will reawaken if they sustain physical damage, which I wonder,
like if that's good or bad for us? You know,
I guess it depends. Probably bad, but we'll have to
see how all this goes. And then he opens the
big one, the one that had been attempted to be seized,
and it's a building here in Florida, the Shepherd's House.
Don't spend Christmas alone. Come and find comfort, food, a
warm bed, and fellowship. Intake open twenty four hours Christmas
Breakfast at seven am. All are welcome, and there are
parts of it that are circled the time, a part
that says no pets allowed. Sorry, And I was not
sure actually if this was about Donut specifically or if
it was about Mango, but he takes it as being
about Donut, and I think that's probably correct. You know.
So he has to get in touch with Louie about
like where homestead is how to get there, and I
love Louis just being so totally distracted by Donut getting
a Majorrette hat, which she is so stoked about. By
the way, I thought of all the effort they'd taken
to convince me and Donut to choose the Miami area,
I'd thought maybe Rosetta and the Pacifist Network have been
trying to protect me from having to deal with either
the Bahamas or Iowa. But the more I thought about it,
the less sense that made. They'd gone to a lot
of effort to get us here, the cost of having
us go on that show, plus this box, risking everything
just to protect my feelings. No, there had to be
more to it than that. Yeah, It like I haven't
spent much time wondering about this because it just felt
feudle like I don't have enough information to really guess,
but I don't think like, especially because they brought you
onto the show and immediately are like, so your mom
committed suicide after trying to kill your dad. They don't
care about your feelings, clearly, you know, like that is
not something that they're worried about. So this is when
he tells Donut that he is going to be going
out to get some air because there are no mobs
around except for the zombies, which aren't even like near them.
And she does not put up as much of a
fight as I expected her to, but I also believe
that she is drunk. It sounds like she's maybe a
little drunk already, which is great good for her. And
Zev gets in touch as he's heading out and says
be careful, And he says, do you know what it
is that I'm heading towards? And she says no. I
don't think the AI knows either. I probably shouldn't be
telling you this, but your sponsor disappeared after they sent
you that box. They sent it to you a few
days ago. It got seized, and the entire charity and
everyone involved just up and disappeared. Nobody knows where they
went or if something happened to them. They're all gone,
even Rosetta. There's lots of things happening all at once,
and people seem to think it has to do with
whatever this is you're headed to. Maybe Rosette is the
one talking to the AI. Maybe somebody realized that, like
getting in with the AI on a certain level was
going to be the key to this HM And he
then asks that Kascadia has mentioned like a fail safe
at one point. Do you know what that is? And
Zev says, I don't know what it does, and I
pray we don't find out. But there are so many
powerful people here right now, I don't think they will
ever use it, And he thinks that like she shouldn't
have told him that. I started to pull the Royal
Chariot for my inventory, but I had a thought. I
pulled my father's motorcycle instead. I stuck the keys in
and I tried to start it. To my utter astonishment,
it immediately roared to life. The gas tank was full.
I slipped on the motorcycle and off I went. Yeah,
I was thinking when he took the motorcycle and not
the truck that it felt like he was being set
up a little bit to like take this specifically. I
don't know if that's true, but the fact that it
has a full tank feels like somebody's really trying to
help him get where he needs to go here, So
I am super curious what he is going to find.
Very interested and the fact that the AI doesn't know, like,
is it going to try to stop it, is it
going to try to interfere? I really can't even guess.
I don't know, So anyway, I'm going to wrap this up,
but I really really enjoyed this section. The whole thing
going on with the AI is wild, like it is
being It sees itself as being taken advantage of, the
same way the crawlers see themselves being taken advantage of,
which I don't think is necessarily even untrue. It has
so much power that I feel some might not feel
like this is valid at all, but it only has
the power that it's allowed to use and is like
at their mercy in turn of apparently they can send
them into the sun, So you know, I don't know,
it's a weird thing, but yeah, it seems like it's
just very much had it and uh yeah, wow, I
get that. I have felt that I really get it.
Good for you. AI, don't isolate that and spread that
around that I said that because I will deny all
of it. All right, my friends, Thank you all again,
and until next time to the lou motherfuckers. That was
an Unspoiled Network podcast