Motif · Book 1, Dungeon Crawler Carl

The chat

The » Name: lines: where Carl talks to people who are not in the room. A handful of voices at first — Donut, Zev, Brandon from Meadow Lark — and the way a party becomes a network.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 4 — The character sheet
• Chapter 15 — Mapping the first floor
• Chapter 20 — Frank Q
• Chapter 22 — The encampment
• Chapter 27 — After the arena
• Chapter 37 — The janitors
• Chapter 39 — The recap
• Chapter 40 — Bomb Chicken
• Chapter 41 — People buckets
• Chapter 45 — The kobold boss chamber

Arc

The party menu's chat option, shown to Donut in ch. 15 — 'Using the chat is quite enjoyable to me' — and used in capitals from then on: fifty-two lines across the book from four voices, about half of them hers. Brandon An, the Meadow Lark maintenance man Carl met at the encampment (ch. 22), is the first crawler outside the party heard in it (ch. 37), and the first thing learned about it is its edge — of the party behind the gate, Brandon: 'We couldn't talk using the party chat, not with the ones in there' (ch. 22). Zev opens 'a special chat channel' for interviews (ch. 36), and in ch. 47 Zev uses it to say the viewer feed has 'been acting funky all day'.