Chapter 42 of 48 · Book 1, Dungeon Crawler Carl

Chapter 42 — The Maestro's show

Book: Dungeon Crawler Carl · Part: The Second Floor · Previous: Chapter 41 — People buckets · Next: Chapter 43 — The Maestro explains himself · Floor: Floor 2 — The Second Floor · Series: the series

Opening

“I’m going to vomit,” Donut said as the floor heaved.

Summary

A rental trailer the size of a closet, a floating robot called Mexx-55, and Death Watch Extreme Dungeon Mayhem: the Maestro, a gold-tusked orc in a pink shirt, and an audience of twelve-year-old boys chanting 'Glurp, glurp.' Two crawlers, Li Jun and Zhang, have been frozen out of a hallway between hornets and troglodytes to guess who dies on video and earn teleport points to spend on Li Jun's sister and their manager.

Carl walks off the set. A gruff voice, an orc's by Carl's guess, threatens to drown them; Mukta threatens to 'accelerate' them; Carl establishes that they have paid for his appearance and nothing else, and goes back on early. Li Jun and Zhang refuse to choose; Carl demands their two points be used to transfer him in, dares the Maestro to do it, and whispers the real plan to the two men: run through the lizards, leave the sword. They live. 'Glurp on that, motherfucker.'

Characters

• Prince Maestro — Introduced; loses his own audience.
• Li Jun and Zhang — Refuse to choose; escape with Carl's plan.
• Li Na — Li Jun's sister, frozen on screen reaching for the sword; runs with them when the scene unfreezes.
• Mukta — Threatens acceleration; concedes the limits of the contract.
• Carl — 'We were expensive.' The bully theory.
• Princess Donut — 'You sit there and look angry, and I do the talking' — not this time.

Locations

• Production trailers — The Senegal Production Systems rental closet.

Motifs

• Entertainment as machinery — Death Watch as the game in miniature.
• The Skull Empire — The Maestro himself; his family and its Skull Clan come in chapter 43.
• The show — 'for the very first time—coming to you live'