Literature / Carl's Doomsday Scenario

"If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way." - Mark Twain

Mordecai: The Over City levels are a tradition in Dungeon Crawler World. There are hundreds of small, scattered villages surrounded by wide swaths of abandoned city. It's all connected. As far as you're concerned, these urban areas appear every three levels. Most of this is just window dressing. You're still below the surface of your planet. That isn't really the sky of some distant world. There isn't really a massive volcano under our feet.
Carl: Volcano?
Mordecai: We'll get to that.

Carl and Donut have reached the third floor. The tutorial levels are over, and the real game can begin.

The third, sixth, ninth, and so on floors are all unique. Rather than being something new every season, they're essentially the same every time, a multi-floor storyline about a beast that sleeps beneath a volcano and once unleashed an apocalypse. Floor three is the Over City, once a massive city spanning an area the size of Arizona. Now, most of that city lies in ruins, with pockets of civilization carved out where it can.

Carl and Donut, having selected their races and classes, continue their crawl. They have been separated from the Meadow Lark team, but they managed to keep hold of Mordecai because Donut took a class that made him her permanent manager—something that Mordecai is not happy about. While Carl and Mordecai just want the team to grind against monsters, this is also the first floor where quests become common. Carl and Donut quickly find themselves embroiled in a story involving a circus of monsters, an elite NPC who will kill them if they don't help her, and other crawlers find themselves trapped in similar quests.

But no matter what happens, no matter how stupid the story or how contrived the events are that get them involved, the Royal Court has no choice but to continue.

Dungeon Crawler Carl: Carl's Doomsday Scenario is the second book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. It covers the third floor of the Dungeon. The sequel is The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook.

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This novel provides examples of:

• Blood Magic: Signet's tattoo spell is powered by blood. She brings two contestants together, guesses which one will win, casts her spell and, if she's right, their death will bring her tattoos to life. She's more than happy for this to be Human Sacrifice, but a powerful non-sapient NPC will do.
• Bomb Throwing Anarchist: Carl, thanks to class selection. Officially, he's a Compensated Anarchist, meaning employed as an anarchist. Carl grumbles that that doesn't make sense.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: Because of her size and minimal constitution, Donut gets completely shit-faced within a minute of receiving her dirty shirley.
• Chekhov's Gun: One of the races Carl notices during his race selection is a mind-parasite worm called an Intellect Hunter. That gun won't be fired for a few books.
• Circus of Fear: Grimmaldi's circus was once the brightest part of the Over City. Then Scolopendra's nine-tier attack turned them all into monsters, infested by spores from the vine that Grimmaldi had become. Now, every individual member of the circus is an immortal monster, sent out over and over to kill, without even the possible release of death.
• Deadpan Snarker: Donut is stepping up in this regard.
  Carl: Cats don’t drink cocktails.
  Donut: Cats don’t shoot lasers from their eyes, either, but here we are, Carl. Mama needs a night off.
• Disposable Sex Worker: Women are being trafficked into the Skyfowl city to be used as manual labor and sex workers. Then they're brought to the dark cleric to be shredded in an attempt to create undead and undying minions called Krasue. Those that don't manage the transformation have their corpses dumped in random locations around the city.
• Foreshadowing: Mordecai tells Carl that there's a way for Signet's tattoo spell to bring the tattoos to life as flesh and blood rather than 2D images. This will be revisited in a later book.
• Hypocritical Humor: Carl's surprised that 80% of humans remained human; Donut isn't, because she thinks humans are cocky assholes. Then she's confused why she would ever want to change from cat.
• Indy Ploy: Carl admits to Zev that he has know idea what he's doing during the showdown at the circus, but the showrunners don't need to know that, now do they?
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Carl, in a flashback, remembers Bea's mom giving her the advice to never, ever let a man know how smart she is. Smart men will never remain in a relationship with her and dumb men won't let her control them. Carl believes Donut learned this from Bea and, because she's always on camera, will never be able to take the mask off, like Bea did with her mom that night when they thought he was asleep on the couch.
• Off the Rails: Carl saves himself and Donut from certain death at the hands of the writers by taking the Circus Quest storyline off the rails and rewriting the ending after negotiating his survival through Zev.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Carl notices that everyone is staring at him in horror like he stared in horror at a Goblin Bomb Bard when he casually juggles a Hobgoblin Hob-Lobber Lobber like the goblin casually juggled a more delicate goblin explosive.
• Punny Name: "Street Urchins" are spiky balls like sea urchins that roam the streets, eating trash and corpses.
• Refuge in Audacity: Carl knew he was marked for death by the writers of the Circus quest, but struck a deal with the writing team (through Zev) where he would get to live and give them a better ending to their story.
• Retirony: Heather the Roller-Skating Bear was weeks away from retirement when Scolopendra hit.
• Self-Poisoning Gambit: Carl does this twice in a manner of minutes. First, he drinks a second potion before his timer has run out in order to poison himself so he can spill poisoned blood on the Vine, killing it. Then, after he strikes his deal, he heals the Vine, then voluntarily infects himself with mind control worms after protecting himself from most of their effects in order to write a heartwarming story to that quest.
• Shout-Out: After Carl gets stunned, paralyzed, and rendered unconscious in quick succession, we get a quote from Of Mice and Men.
  Lenny: Why do you got to get killed? You ain’t so little as mice. I didn’t bounce you hard.
• Tempting Fate: When Donut objects that the Disposable Sex Worker quest only rewards a silver quest box instead of gold, like the last one, Carl replies that "The last one involved a couple elites and a city boss. This one must be easier.".
  Carl: Don’t worry. We had a good day today. I’m not going to let it get derailed by a quest.
  Donut: That’s what you said last time.
• Understatement: After Carl thoroughly attacks the leadership of the Skull Empire and calls the king a pussy, then tells the people maybe they should rise up and rebel, leading to an assassination attempt on him and Donut by Prince Stalwart that leads to the death of a valuable Valtay asset, followed by the deaths of Stalwart and the Skull Queen at the hands of the Valtay, Carl and Donut return home.
  Mordecai: I distinctly remember saying you should be subtle.
  Carl: I may have gone a little overboard. It gets worse.
• Unwinnable by Design: The end of the floor involves many large-scale quests that are designed to break and kill everyone involved. For example, multiple crawlers might get a quest to kill a specific NPC, unaware that she's the only thing keeping a bomb from going off. It takes a lot of effort for Carl to save everyone from the exploding soul crystal. Even after he sticks it in his inventory (which required an extremely rare item just to be possible), the AI still decides there will be another, smaller but still dangerous explosion.
  • And Carl's quest was a Morton's Fork. Kill the Big Bad and a nuke will kill everyone within a forty-five mile radius. If you don't, she'll successfully summon her own apocalypse to kill every non-skyfowl in the area and create an unstoppable army of the undead.
  • Ultimately, all of this is subverted because the AI expects everyone to go full murder hobo on everything and thus doom themselves. The way you get out of it is to collect clues, connect the dots, and be clever. Carl manages to salvage everything using the glass case of the plushie he collected from Miss Quill's office. It survived multiple sticks of hobgoblin dynamite unscathed. He realized he could use it to contain the magic nuke.