Chapter 2 of 48 · Book 1, Dungeon Crawler Carl

Chapter 2 — The staircase

Book: Dungeon Crawler Carl · Part: The First Floor · Previous: Chapter 1 — The transformation · Next: Chapter 3 — Da Tutorial Guild · Floor: Floor 1 — The Tutorial · Series: the series

Opening

An ornate staircase led down into the light.

Summary

The staircase leads down to a door carved with a giant fish-man, and through it into the tutorial: a torchlit tunnel, tooltip boxes he can close with his mind but no menu that answers, and a level-3 goblin engineer driving a steam-powered 'murder dozer' out of an alley. Carl's first fight in the dungeon is with his bare hands, against a goblin with a pineapple on a stick whose head he smashes on the stones; walking in with a cat has already earned him a Legendary Pet Box for Trailblazing Crazy Cat Lady.

The world's rules arrive as pop-ups: crawler numbers (Carl is #4,122, Donut #4,119), a Kua-Tin carved on the door for the Borant Corporation, a countdown to the collapse of the floor, and a wall of achievements and boxes he cannot open. Donut, still a cat, has a crawler number of her own. At a plain door signed Tutorial Guild a rat-like guildmaster, Mordecai, argues through the chain that he cannot open with mobs outside, and lets Carl in only after the cat has wandered through the gap.

Characters

• Carl — First kill, first loot, first achievement — and the goblin's dozer misses him by inches.
• Princess Donut — Crawler #4,119, three lower than his; she wanders into the guild first.
• The System AI — First heard reading item descriptions and achievements: 'You are so dead.'

Locations

• The First Floor — The entry corridor and the goblin alley.
• The goblin workshop — The alley the dozer came from — revisited in chapter 15.

Motifs

• Borant — Named in the welcome text as the season's operator.
• Loot boxes — Six boxes for walking in, among them a Legendary Pet Box for Trailblazing Crazy Cat Lady.
• Carl's bare feet — Both pink Crocs fly off as he runs from the dozer.