Character · Book 2, Carl's Doomsday Scenario

Carl

The narrator. Twenty-seven, ex–Coast Guard, a marine technician in Seattle, six foot three; on the night the world's buildings vanish he is outside in boxer shorts, a leather jacket and his ex-girlfriend's pink Crocs, coaxing her cat out of a tree, which is why he enters the dungeon without pants and soon without shoes. Crawler #4,122. He fights bare-fisted and barefoot, discovers a gift for improvised explosives, and gets angrier at the people running the show than at anything in it.

Segment appearances

Arc

The build

Book 2 is where Carl chooses who he will be for the rest of the crawl, and chooses the hard way. He refuses the AI's bait — a Sasquatch with sparkling size-24 feet — and takes Primal, a blank slate five levels behind everyone with every skill unlockable to 20, then Compensated Anarchist, a bomb-and-trap class that costs him seventeen points of charisma before he has spent one on strength (ch. 2). 'Was I an idiot? I knew some people would definitely think so.' The floor rewards the choice: Iron Punch to ten, strength to thirty (ch. 14), Freeballing boxers that double kicks and rule out trousers (ch. 13), a xistera that turns hob-lobbers into cannon fire (ch. 17), and the first entry in a playbook (ch. 12).

The circus

The floor's first half is Signet's story and Carl is the extra in it. He breaks his own finger to escape her charm (ch. 6), pulls a lion's heart out (ch. 7), wakes fifteen hours later with Donut hostage (ch. 8), fights a roller-skating bear alone (ch. 9), and walks into a city boss's tent with a ticket. The smell of the circus gives him back his mother and takes her away again in the same breath (ch. 10). What he does with the rage: not kill Grimaldi but poison him, sell his survival to the show's producers for a recurring role, eat the worms, and talk the vine and the girl it raised and banished into peace (ch. 11). 'The seeds were planted.'

The town

Then the quest he swore off. GumGum's murder makes it Donut's cause (ch. 17); Carl's method is the anarchist's: dynamite in the beanie-baby shelves (ch. 18, ch. 21), a bait-and-switch over a spy scroll, a Fireball that finally comes up Spicy, a level-75 guard punched to save a dwarf child (ch. 20), and a warehouse ringed with ten sticks while Katia holds the trigger against mind control (ch. 23). He becomes Magistrate Carl, and nobody acknowledges it. On live television he tells the Skull Empire's subjects to rise, and a singer dies in his place (ch. 19); in chat he decides Borant profited and says nothing out loud (ch. 20).

He ends the floor closing a glass case around a detonating soul crystal because he cannot leave Katia (ch. 24), running naked through the Over City with a city-killing bomb in his inventory (ch. 25), and hearing from Odette that the numbers on the leaderboard are bounties and that Donut will stay with him 'as long as you're still alive' (epilogue). 'This, I thought, this is my family' (ch. 12); the floor's last chapter puts a number next to each of their names.