My name is Shrimp, and I write for Dungeon Crawler Carl. I'm a 25 year old starting a new professional chapter of my life—this has been a great creative exercise for me, and I am so appreciative of everyone who takes time out of their day to read my works.
This is my temporary master list for my Dungeon Crawler Carl fics while I try to figure out how to make this thing pretty. Smuts have, well, smut written next to them.
Carl x Reader One Shots
Can we keep her?, less than 1k
Let Go, smut, 1.2k
Desperado Club Presents: 2000's Night!!!, 1.4k
Pink Hair Tie, less than 1k
Cold Water, smut, 1.3k
Crawl, Alpha Carl smut, 3.8k
The Good Life, AU, 1.7k
Carl x Reader Series
Primitive Information Device, Part 1, 5k
Primitive Information Device, Part 2, 11k
Primitive Information Device, Part 3 (in the works to edit in Book 8)
Carl Goes to Intergalactic Court, Part 1 (coming soonest)
Carl Goes to Intergalactic Court, Part 2 (coming soonish)
Carl Goes to Intergalactic Court, Part 3 (coming last LOL)
Hi!! never done a request before but love your Carl writing!! Could you write a fic where the reader is hit with a “horny” debuff and carl is a good friend(tm) - OR Carl needs some “stress relief” and reader helps out
Hiiii thanks for the request!! I'll add this to my list of ideas teehee
In the meantime if you're wanting to read a story like this (nasty debuff) I highly recommend itch by my friend @hullabaloons !! It slays 💋
Blurb: Carl and Reader keep up with each other after Odette's show.
Part 1
Thank you all for the love and support on part 1 it inspired me to keep going!! Thank you for the PATIENCE!!!!!!
This is uhhh a long one. I did my research (aka read) to make this as lore accurate as possible hahaha but there is obviously a lot of creative liberty with reader soooo. There is a part 3 in the works muahahah (last one planned... for now). Spoilers for every book after 2.
"Motherfucker," she groaned at the sunset above her.
Her Kindle had died right as she watched Biscuit trot down the stairwell to the fourth floor. She was so close to finishing the romance novel she was reading. She rubbed her eyes with frustration before placing the device in her inventory. She took one last look at the Over City, preparing to write a message to Carl, but stopping herself when she remembered he was already gone.
She pulled up their last exchange instead.
Carl: Donut and I are going down now.
Unc: Huh? But we still have three days.
Carl: I know. We got ourselves into a situation. Stay safe. I'll chat with you on the other side.
Unc: Okay. Take care, old man.
Carl: Take care. And I'm only three years older than you.
She smiled at the screen before minimizing it. She wondered what he was up to. She was grateful, sometimes, that she wasn't in Carl's party. That entire group seemed to attract disaster with a kind of reckless enthusiasm that she (and others, she was sure of it) found alarming. She had once messaged him that he seemed to be on a speedrun to an early grave, and he hadn't denied it. She later learned that his Game Guide, Mordecai, shared the same resentment.
"You can't save them all."
Ever since Odette's show, their messages had been coming with increasing frequency. She enjoyed talking to him and had started to crack through that tough exterior of his. He was smart, deeply loyal to his family, and kind. She couldn't believe the dungeon hadn't beaten that trait out of him.
They hadn't crossed paths again on this floor after the joint interview, but that didn't stop their chatting.
Biscuit had gotten them into all sorts of trouble on the third floor, his doggish nature meaning he was incapable of not being friendly to anyone—and unfortunately, that friendliness extended to danger, to the delight of mobs and harmful NPCs. On the bright side, she was getting plenty of skill practice on the mobs Biscuit kept dragging her way.
Her Situational Stasis skill had come in handy more times than she could count. All she had to do was hold one hand out, and whatever was threatening them simply stopped. It was like a pause button for catastrophe. Her Redirect skill had been equally useful, rerouting damage mid-flight when mobs threw things at them. This had been particularly helpful during an encounter with a mob of winged monkeys that hurled fire bananas.
She hadn't mastered any physical weapons yet, and she wasn't fond of the idea. The incessant violence of this place went against every instinct she had. But somewhere along the way she had become functional with a garrote—a long wire connected by plastic handles. According to the System description, this was an assassin's tool, which she found both funny and mortifying. Their strategy was simple enough: Situational Stasis to freeze the target, Biscuit's Advanced Retrieval to bring it to her, and then the wire. His bite was strong enough to finish most things on its own, but together they were more efficient. It wasn't elegant, but it worked.
Biscuit's Morale Aura helped buffer her before fights. She always felt steadier when he was near, calmer than the situation warranted. She was grateful for that more than she could say. Her real power, she suspected, would be best used in a party; energy redirection would be incredibly useful with powerful spellcasters. She had been gathering what information she could about Elysian from NPCs but hadn't found much beyond what the System had already told her. Her inner Catalogue was filing it all away regardless. Every detail, every face, every crawler or NPC she hadn't been able to help, was stored in her brain. She remembered everything. That was the deal the System had made with her.
She took one last look at the village behind her. An announcement cut through the air.
Hello, Crawlers!
As a reminder, this floor is set to collapse in six hours. Only a couple thousand of you haven't taken stairwells yet—I suggest you start wrapping your affairs up and getting down those steps. That's all for now. I'll see you on the fourth floor as you all get ready to kill, kill, kill!
She rolled her eyes at the cheerful voice and went down the stairs.
— ♡ —
Halfway through the fourth floor, in an empty subway car, she cried into Biscuit's fur while the train jolted and swayed around them. She had cried more times than she could count since the start of the subway-themed level.
Biscuit whimpered in distress because his emotional buffer wasn't enough to cheer his girl up.
She had never taken a subway in her life. This was not what she'd imagined it'd be like.
She had grown up, as most small-town teenagers do, with visions of moving to a big city like New York. She imagined herself taking the subway to some important job in an important outfit, fancy shoes; very put together, very adult. Instead, she was on the Winter Sky line in yoga pants, somewhere underground on a dungeon floor, completely alone except for her golden retriever. The line had been suspiciously devoid of monsters, which should have been comforting but was somehow worse because of how alone the two of them were. The loneliness was opening a gap for her depression to start poking around the back of her brain again.
She hadn't heard from Carl in a while either. She knew he was caught up in cahoots—he had told her that himself—but she felt an ache at the lack of communication. He was her friend now, and she missed talking to him.
Her only (and best) companion was Biscuit. There were literally no other life forms on this floor, save the Bopca Protectors that they'd meet in the safe rooms. The loneliness, even if it meant no hostile mobs, was sending her thoughts into overdrive. Her inner voice had not been as quiet as it was around other living forms.
She knew she should hold it together until they found a safe room. She wiped her eyes and watched the station number approach. 40.
She dabbed the last of her tears with her long sleeve and took a deep, shaky breath. "Come on, Biscuit. Let's get off here." He followed her with concern in his eyes but didn't say anything. The sound of his nails and her sneakers hitting the tiled floor echoed across the platform. That, and the buzzing of the lights, was all they could hear.
They found the safe room door at the end of the platform. "Mom, I can open my Fan Box now!" Biscuit's tail started going. "Same," she said, checking her interface.
Admin Note: Your Fan Box is ready to open.
"I hope you got some toothbrushes for that breath of yours," she told him, trying to lighten the mood. She knew it wasn't fair to Biscuit that she kept losing her composure like this. It felt selfish.
"What about a razor for your hairy legs?" Biscuit replied, tongue out.
"Hey!" She laughed as she pushed open the safe room door and was briefly blinded by the colors that assaulted her eyes.
The safe room was themed as a children's daycare, with bright paintings of rainbows and butterflies covering every wall and a Bopca Protector standing behind a small countertop. "Welcome," he greeted them. "Please let me know what I can do to help."
She settled onto a purple beanbag under a painted sunrise. Biscuit sat in front of her, eyes going slightly hazy as he opened his box. A light flashed. When it cleared, he was wearing a bandana around his neck—white, patterned with small bones and hearts alternating across the fabric. He looked down at it. Then back up at her. His tail went into overdrive.
"MOM. Do you SEE this?"
"I see it." She laughed.
"I look SO good. I look HANDSOME." His southern drawl thickened with excitement.
"You really do," she said. She pet him for a bit while talking to him about how she'd been feeling. Biscuit was the best listener, and laid on his back while she rubbed his belly.
At that moment, her guilt started eating her alive. "Biscuit, I—" She was trying to apologize to him, for the tears, for the persistent sadness, but he jumped off the ground and onto her lap and started licking her face until she couldn't stop laughing.
"Get off of me!" She clutched her stomach as Biscuit went back to the floor. "Mom, you don't have to be sorry. That's what dogs are for. I'm here to help you carry your burdens and make you smile a bit more."
"My sweet boy," she held his face and kissed him on his forehead.
She opened her own box before she could sink back into her emotions again. Then, she almost got emotional about the content of the box instead. Three complete series—her favorite fantasy novels, the ones she'd read in high school and college when things got really hard. She shouted a thank you at the ceiling.
Minx grinned as she watched the broadcast feed of their girl opening her box. The Marginalia had held an emergency fundraiser and spent a pretty penny getting these items into the dungeon. Biscuit's bandana caught the daycare lighting perfectly, and Minx cooed at how cute the dog was.
Biscuit snored lightly at her feet while she started reading. A few hours later, after finishing a dinner of beef stew the Bopca had made her, her interface lit up.
Carl: I know it's been a bit. Checking in. Donut and I just dealt with something absolutely insane. Would love a distraction.
Unc: My fan box arrived. I got sent complete sets of my favorite series.
Carl: That's really good.
Unc: Biscuit got a bandana. Little bones and hearts. He looks incredibly good and will not stop telling me about it.
Carl: Send him my congratulations.
Unc: He says—and I quote—"TELL HIM I LOOK GREAT! I WANT HIM TO KNOW!"
Carl: Noted. What kind of books?
Unc: Please don't laugh at me.
Carl: Promise.
Unc: Fae romance. I used to read them in high school when I was really sad.
Carl: No judgment. I've read A Court of Horny Roses.
Fuck, does he mean A Court of Thorns and Roses? She couldn't help but crack up, filling the safe room with her laughs. She chose not to correct him.
Unc: Color me impressed.
Carl: Are you sad now?
Unc: Yeah. I know I have Biscuit, and he's my best friend, but this is a different kind of sadness.
Carl: Fuck. Let me see if I can figure out how to get you here with me.
She stared at that last message for a long time. She tried not to overanalyze it, but she was just a girl. The way he said it, no softening, just let me see if I can figure out how to get you with me made her feel butterflies in her stomach—hope, she realized, which she hadn't felt in days.
This is not the time nor place for this.
She bent down and scratched at Biscuit's soft, golden head, trying to distract herself from her crush.
— ♡ —
On the fifth floor she had been assigned to the subterranean quadrant of Bubble 1,134.
It had been its own kind of hell, mostly—until Biscuit found the girls.
He had spotted the four crawlers on the first day underground and made the decision, as good dogs do, to go up and say hi to them. Lindsey, Nia, Piper, and Sofia had been at a fraternity party at their SEC school when the collapse happened. All four had stayed human, which she respected. They were smart, funny and brought a fun kind of bubbliness to the situation they were in.
She liked them enormously. The six had formed an almost instantaneous bond.
Together they had managed to free their quadrant. This had required all of their combined brain cells (Piper liked to make this joke) and Biscuit's enthusiastic, if chaotic, assistance.
"To your left!" Piper called from behind her, and she whipped her hand toward the Cave Viper mid-lunge—a small snake-like mob that spat acid venom. It froze. Biscuit launched himself into the air, grabbed it, shook it until its health bar emptied, and dropped it. He wagged his tail over the dead snake.
Lindsey led them up the ramp toward the surface, torch held high, her blonde hair catching the light. Nia moved beside her, protection spells cycling steadily over the group. Behind them, Piper and Sofia held the rear, Biscuit chatting cheerfully between them.
"Biscuit, shush," Sofia said. "We don't know what's on the surface yet."
"I know!" Biscuit replied. "That's what's exciting!" Sofia sighed, and the girls all laughed.
His tail didn't stop wagging once.
— ♡ —
Carl: Checking in. I'm catching up with your messages. You said you freed your quadrant?
Unc: Yep. Suck it.
Carl: Nice work. We've made progress but Donut is stressed about the time we lost.
For those five days Donut and Carl were missing (which she now knew meant that they had been in detention), no messages would be delivered to Carl's inbox, and the silence haunted her time underground. She had told the others about it around the third day of no messages in a moment of weakness, and they had reacted in a way that reminded her that they were in fact twenty-something year old girls.
"Oh my god, you have a crush on him," Piper had said immediately. "No, he's a friend." She insisted over the gaggle of girlish voices.
"Wait. Is this the buff guy from the recaps? With the underwear and the tattoos?" Nia had looked up sharply. "He's fucking hot! Why are you not with your man?"
"He's not my man. And I don't—I mean, I don't think I—" She had been very aware of her own face heating up. "We just check in on each other. Like friends." She tried once again to emphasize that word. It felt wrong for her to say.
That was when everything came spilling out of her. She told the girls about Odette's show, the weird intergalactic ship she now found herself in, and how that had jumpstarted her and Carl's friendship. Carl had told her about it towards the end of the fourth floor, in a moment where he thought he might not make it out. Everything clicked in place when she learned about #Cunc. She read the girls their conversation about it.
Carl: In case I die, I need you to know that Odette had you on the show because a bunch of horny aliens want to see us together.
Unc: Excuse me? What happened to hi, hello, how are you?
Carl: No time.
Unc: What do you mean by together?
Carl: Do you know what fanfiction is?
Unc: Carl I wasn't born under a rock. Of course I do.
Carl: Okay they're writing that crap about us. They call us Cunc.
Unc: CUNC?????? I'M DYING THAT SOUNDS LIKE A DISEASE HAHAH
Carl: Don't yell.
Unc: Are you actually being serious?? Why didn't Odette say anything?
Carl: Her intentions are her own. I need you to know in case I die and she brings you back to ask you how you feel about it.
Unc: Don't worry. I can work the cameras.
Carl: Actually, you can't.
Unc: You cheeky fucker!! Try not to die I'll miss you
Carl: Noted. I'll talk to you later.
"Wow. This is just like when I used to read One Direction fanfiction." Nia said, with Lindsey nodding in agreement. "I was always more of a Harry x Y/N." Lindsey whipped her head at Nia's comment. "Really?! I was always a Ziam girl. I wanted them to kiss"
"Of course you were," Nia said laughing. "I will say that Cunc is an incredibly tragic shipname. There's gotta be something better we can come up with. I'll work on it."
"Anyways, I feel like you talk to him a lot more than you're letting on," Sofia said calmly, pushing past the chaos of the bickering girls. "This is very romantic."
"He hasn't replied in four days," Piper added. "Has he blocked you?"
Sofia hit her arm. "Not the time."
"You guys have cute banter!" Piper blurted the compliment, trying to remedy her comment.
She had pushed her anxious feelings aside to focus on keeping everyone alive, which was the correct priority—but the feelings had been there. She had, however, let the girls add her to their group chat. They named it, after a brief and spirited debate, Girl Power! This was the kind of cheesiness she had needed in this desolate place.
— ♡ —
Somewhere across the galaxy, Minx pressed her hands to her face and rocked back in her seat.
She could not believe her luck. Her friends were going to freak out. She and her moderators were freaking out on their video call.
The girls had read the Cunc conversation out loud. The girls had clocked the crush IMMEDIATELY. The girls had named the group chat Girl Power!, which Minx had immediately added to the Marginalia's Cunc document under the subheading: in-game validation of ship; collateral characters arrive.
"They are doing our job for us now," said a moderator over the call. "Who would have thought that on-the-ground intelligence would outperform our analysis division."
"Lesser intelligence, may I add," another voice cut through. "It's genuinely humbling."
"They are doing it better," Minx quipped. "Look at them. Look at how quickly they got there. We took an episode of Odette's show and a hundred-page analysis with footnotes."
"To be fair, we did not have access to her in person." Someone added, and Minx heard collective hums of agreement.
"That is not a fair point and you know it. We should be ashamed of ourselves." Minx's serpentine voice cut through the hums.
The moderator sighed, in the way moderators did when they were being shut down by Minx. "I think you're being too hard on yourself. We found our girl quick—the romance came second."
"Carry on," Minx ignored them.
The Marginalia's moderator video call carried on, and the fan club's activities continued from there. The newsletter for that cycle was already being drafted. The artists were already taking commissions.
Somewhere on the fifth floor a girl in a bubble quadrant had not yet finished blushing about a man she had not yet admitted she had a crush on. The Marginalia continued to root for their girl, because they had a story to believe in now.
— ♡ —
Her and Carl's chat had quieted down as they each faced their own battles for survival. Towards the end of the floor, the girls had trouble helping to free their air quadrant. Of course, like a knight in shining underwear, Carl had managed to pop a majority of the bubbles to help guide crawlers to the stairwells, including theirs.
Unc: Carl, I'm not even going to ask how you did all of this. Thank you.
Carl: Don't mention it. Please get down ASAP. I'm about to face off some very angry gods.
Unc: Okay, maybe I do want to ask about that.
Carl: Go. Please.
Unc: Be careful.
Carl: I will be. I'll find you on the next floor. Take care.
Unc: Take care. We're going down.
— ♡ —
They descended to the sixth floor because of Carl's bubble escape scheme, which she had watched on the recap with her hands over her mouth. The crawlers couldn't believe the balls this man had. When Lindsey said that, her cheeks had flushed red.
Lindsey choked out laughter when she saw her blushing face. "Whoops, made you think of his dick." Nia smacked the back of her head and Lindsey yelped in pain.
She spent the next few hours anxiously checking her interface until a message finally appeared.
Carl: Hi. Missed me?
Unc: Carl. Oh my god. Are you okay? Is Donut okay?
Carl: Don't worry about us.
Unc: That is genuinely impossible for me to do. You are actually insane.
Carl: I promise I wasn't like this on the surface. What's your plan now?
Unc: The girls and I are going to try to scout a hiding spot before the hunters are released.
Carl: Good. We've gotten pulled into that TV show quest I mentioned. We'll have to deal with that first. Watch out when they release the hunters.
Unc: Okay. Talk soon.
She closed the interface and looked out at the jungle stretching in every direction.
"Mom," Biscuit said beside her, reading the worry on her face. "We're going to be okay! I really think so!"
"I know," she said.
Piper walked up behind her and started playing with the ends of her ponytail. "I know you're worried, but I think he's got it." Piper's tone was gentle. "Nia thinks we should follow the river and get as far as we can from the hunters."
"Come on," she said, snapping out of it. "Let's find somewhere to hide."
"Girl gang, girl gang," Lindsey and Piper chanted as they whacked a path through the thick jungle.
The group hiked for several hours, and not once did she stop thinking about Carl.
They finally approached a settlement occupied by Ursine NPCs and quickly headed into a bed-and-breakfast. The girls were all exhausted from the hiking, and ready for food and a bed.
A female Ursine wearing a nightgown stood behind a small counter. She looked up at the crawlers and smiled. "Welcome, ladies." She glanced down at the big ball of golden fur. "And dog. Our safe room entrance is located past the kitchen door."
Lindsey looked at the girls and told them that she was going to go kill the mayor to take control of the settlement. Exchanging glances, the group shrugged shoulders and sent her on her way. "Lindsey is literally not scared of anything," Piper commented. "She was like this in college too. There wasn't a keg she couldn't conquer." The group watched Lindsey beeline her way to the town hall through the window.
The girls all said their thanks to the attendant and headed towards the kitchen. After settling into their personal spaces, which they had all combined on the lower floor, Biscuit headed into his and hers room. She and Biscuit had decided to just share a room—he had slept on her bed ever since he was a puppy. He jumped on the bed as she stepped into the bathroom to wash off the day. When she stepped out of the shower, Biscuit was snoring in the middle of the pink comforter.
Carl: Checking in. Where are you?
Unc: We're in a Ursine settlement on the farther end of the floor. Lindsey killed the mayor.
Carl: Let me guess. She renamed it Lindseytown.
Unc: YES. How did you know?
Carl: Oh, shit. I'm good at this.
Unc: To be fair, that one's predictable.
Carl: Don't steal my thunder.
Unc: What are you up to now? We watched the recap episode. That took some real guts to infiltrate Zockau like that.
— ♡ —
"Carl?!" She screamed as Big Tina made her way around a corner. The giant dinosaur was showing no sign of stopping the chase.
"Holy fuck, MOVE!" Carl yelled her name, beckoning her towards him.
Big Tina ran after her as she sprinted as fast as she could. Cramps dug into her sides as she pushed past the pain. She looked back at the dinosaur, a mouth full of teeth staring at her. "Can you please for the love of god slow down!" She screamed as she ran.
She had gotten herself in this situation because of her own doing. Her team had made it into a safe room, and she had gotten distracted while collecting some of the local flora for medicinal plants. She hadn't noticed the sun setting until the dinosaur was already sprinting at her.
What she hadn't known was that Carl, Donut, and Mongo had made their way to this settlement earlier that afternoon.
Carl grabbed her into his arms as he pulled her into the safe room. They fell to the ground, Carl making sure she landed on top of him. They panted as they took each other in. Realizing what had happened, she scrambled to push herself off of him.
"What are YOU doing here?" They said at the same time. Carl pushed himself off the floor.
"Are you insane? You were about to be eaten by a dinosaur!" Carl said, angrily. "Don't you ever endanger yourself like that!"
"It's nice to see you too, Carl," she replied as she dusted off her pants.
His eyes met hers. The pale green eyes seemed to startle him the same way it had on Odette's show, like he was seeing her for the first time again.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have yelled at you like that, but don't scare me like that again." He walked up to her. They pulled each other into a hug. "It's good to see you. Alive."
She let herself hold onto the hug for as long as she could. He didn't move away either.
"Carl, that stupid dog is here again. We must leave." Princess Donut's voice was answered by Mongo's squawk as she rounded the corner of the safe room entrance. Her fur ruffled as she observed the embrace between the two humans. What on Earth are they thinking? The Princess thought.
She noticed the cat staring from the corridor and pulled away. "Hi, Princess Donut." Donut preened at the use of her formal title. "Finally, some respect. I like this one."
She walked up to pet the cat's back and to quickly pat the raptor, careful to avoid his teeth. "I'm glad to see all of you well. You're more than welcome to come into our personal space and catch up, if you have time."
Carl and Donut glanced at each other before Donut invited her group in. "Carl told me that Nia is interested in potion making. Mordecai will want to meet her. So, we insist you join us."
Internally, she freaked out at Donut's comment. He's been talking about my friends to Donut?
— ♡ —
Carl and Donut's personal space was a luxury compared to her group's. They had enough space to spread out, and she sat on the couch with Sofia and Piper while Carl sat across from them in a chair. Nia had gone off with Mordecai, Lindsey joining her best friend to keep an eye on her. Donut had declared that Biscuit had to stay off the couch, so he laid on top of his girl's feet.
Carl took his time explaining what he and Donut had been up to, and the rest of his family too. He detailed the damage he and Donut had done to Zockau, the encounter with Signet, the drama with Vrah, and everything else in between. He shared about Katia, Elle, and the others and what they had been doing. The girls couldn't believe how many crawlers Carl knew and cared for. Sofia had sent out a message to the group chat, giving her approval on Carl.
Sofia: Don't you love a guy who loves his family?
Piper: OMG, my heart is going to burst. Green flag!
Sofia: And his voice is sexy as fuck.
Unc: Can you guys not do this right now.
Lindsey: Fuck. Am I missing a chance to make you squirm?
Sofia: Just know that Carl is like the most chivalrous guy ever. Also, confirmed he has a six pack.
Lindsey: YUMMY.
Unc: GUYS!!
Carl glanced at her reddening cheeks but kept on talking. Piper then gave their group an account of how they came to be and where they had been. The girls had left the original Ursine settlement because they were trying to be proactive by killing hunters, but had run into this weird village instead. Big Tina had been an unaccounted for problem.
Everyone had been in the safe room except for her, who had been trying to create some sort of salve for a burn that Biscuit had gotten on his paw.
Carl listened attentively, but his eyes glossed over once in a while and the girls knew that meant he was sending messages.
"Okay. Our game plan is to take care of this dinosaur quest stat, then to start moving towards the Butcher's Masquerade castle." The girls nodded.
"What can we do to help?" His eyes snapped toward her.
"You, nothing. I have to deal with Signet first."
"Are you sure, Carl?" she said. "We're not scared."
"It's not about if you're scared." He looked at her directly. "I don't want you fighting my battles for me." Sofia and Piper side-eyed each other at this exchange.
"Okay." She acquiesced and leaned back into the couch. There was something in how he had phrased that that she didn't know what to do with.
"Are any of you invited to the Masquerade?"
The person he did not want to see raising her hand, did. "Goddammit," he muttered under his breath.
"I got the notification early on the floor. I'm pretty sure I'm the 50th top crawler. No one else has one." Carl nodded at the information.
"Okay. I'm going to take you with me, but your group will stay together and do as I say."
— ♡ —
"Mom," Biscuit's voice was quivering. "Do you have to leave me? I promise I'll be good if you let me come with you."
She held the dog's head in her hands. "Oh, my baby. I love you so much. We will see each other in a couple of days."
He licked a tear that fell down her cheek. "I need you to protect those girls. They will make sure you are loved on. Can you do that for me?"
Biscuit composed himself and held himself a little higher. "Yes, mom. I'll be a good boy."
"That's my boy," she said. "I'll message you. If we happen to be in our personal space together, I'll see you then." She gave him one last kiss on the forehead before hugging her friends in a group hug.
"We love you," said Sofia. "If at any point you want to back out, we will haul ass to get you."
"I love you girls. Take care of Biscuit, and we will see each other in a couple of days." She turned to walk towards Carl, Donut, and Mongo.
Donut and Carl had spent the previous couple of days taking care of several quests, but now needed to get moving to the castle because of the creeping branches. Carl had told her that Miriam Dom had died, and that they were in some other deep shit. But the overarching floor's theme was hanging over their heads, and they needed to get moving. Biscuit and the girls were going to circle another way towards the castle, but she was going with Carl because of her invitation.
The four of them began their hike towards the castle. She and Carl fell into a comfortable pace next to each other.
Biscuit: MOM I MISS YOU SO MUCH ALREADY
She jumped back at the screaming in her head. She and Biscuit had never thought of using the messaging function until now.
Carl laughed. "Biscuit just decided to message?"
"Yeah, how can you tell?" She answered, rubbing her temples.
"Donut also types in all caps. It seems to be a quadruped quirk. You'll get used to it." Carl told her.
She sighed. "There's no hope he'll learn how to type like a regular person?"
Carl's grin widened. "No chance."
Carl's voice softened. "I know it was a lot of us to ask you two to separate. I can't imagine doing this crawl without Donut."
He continued. "I don't want to sound crazy, but she's my best friend."
She chuckled. "You're not crazy. Biscuit's always been my best friend, even before he could talk." She took a drink from her water canteen, before continuing. "I had a hard time making friends during my first year of my PhD program. I would come home and just talk out loud to him. He remembers all of those conversations, which now mortifies me at everything he's witnessed me do."
Carl smiled, as he validated her. "You know, I almost stole Donut from my ex-girlfriend." Her eyes widened in surprise. "Bea was going to sell her, but I couldn't just let her do that to Donut. She's a special cat."
"Aww, Carl, you win cat dad of the year." She lightly pinched his arm. "That's so cute."
They kept on chitchatting before she changed the topic.
"So, I know we talked about it, but that interview we did was really weird. Have you been back?"
"On Odette's show? Oh, yeah. A ton." He answered.
"Damn, she must not have liked me. Do you guys still talk about—you know—the"
He cut her off . "That's probably for the best you haven't been on. And just so you know, she hasn't dared talk to me about Cunc again" He chuckled. "Which makes me suspicious that she's working something up behind the scenes."
She glanced worriedly at him. He tried to reassure her. "Listen, we've been through the worst. And hey, you didn't even know about this ship business."
She paused for a second before answering him. "So, you don't find that shit totally weird? That our images and likeness has been created into merchandise? That we have—what'd you call—those videos made—" She had been giving fanfiction a lot of thought since Lindsey and Nia's comments. A deep, hidden part of her would have loved to see what people were writing about them.
"Are you talking about snicks?" Carl raised an eyebrow.
She snapped her fingers. "YES! Those. It doesn't freak you out to hangout with me? They're probably making content of us right now." She looked around at the imaginary cameras she was sure were trailing them.
Carl sighed. "Is it weird? Absolutely. Is it any weirder than all of this shit?" He paused for a moment. "Actually, probably. But let me remind you I had a snick made of me and an orc alien prince." Carl rolled his eyes at the thought of Prince Maestro. "Carl's naughty little piggie, huh?!" He yelled into the sky above. "Fuck you, Skull Empire!"
She laughed at that. "Wow. I'm sensing some sort of history here."
Carl nodded and chuckled. "I'm glad the dungeon brought us together, even if it was through this. By the way, even Donut knew what a ship was." Carl said, looking at her.
"Well, she's the pop culture queen. I'm not surprised." She answered.
"Hey. Don't think about what's happening outside the dungeon, okay? It's going to die down eventually. No one's bothered you about it again, right?"
She shook her head no. "I just haven't stopped thinking about it. I don't want it to bleed over into real life."
Carl looked at her. "And would that be so bad?" His tone was light, and he nudged her with his elbow.
She froze in place.
"What do you mean by that?" Her voice came out steadier than she felt. Her eyes widened as so many thoughts raced through her head. Holy shit, is he about to confess his love to me? Her heart was beating out of her chest. She sucked in a breath while the girl brain part of her waited for him to tell her that she was the most beautiful, intelligent, special girl in the world and he needed her to survive the dungeon.
(Minx practically died when she heard them talk about Cunc. Her blog had about 500 new posts that day.)
Carl ignored her question. She deflated a bit, and snapped back down into reality. She cursed herself for letting the idea of a crush throw her off her game. Of course Carl wasn't confessing his love. Her feet started moving again.
His tone got more serious as he asked if she was doing okay.
"The sadness isn't something that really goes away, but the feeling has gotten a lot quieter since Biscuit and I joined the girls. It's just something I've dealt with since I was a teenager." She breathed before continuing. "For a moment, I got really scared on the fourth floor that I was going to die and that Biscuit was going to be alone without me. The voices just got a little louder. I promise it's not that bad, but it is something that I have to deal with on my own."
She swiveled her head. "I promise I'm not crazy—I'm not hearing actual voices." She laughed nervously.
Carl did not take her vulnerability lightly. He knew more than anyone about the constant stream of voices and thoughts that made doing anything impossible. He glanced down at her, and she had the odd sensation of being observed. He'd always been aware of that, that she was shorter than him, but standing next to her made it real. The fake sunlight through the thick jungle canopy seemed to settle around her differently than she expected—like a golden halo.
"I understand not wanting to disappoint Biscuit," he said.
She smiled sadly at that, knowing he was being sincere.
"I never want to disappoint him, but when it gets too loud in my head, there's nothing I can really do."
Carl nodded. They marched for a couple minutes in a comfortable silence.
Then, she spent the next couple of hours drilling him with questions.
"What's your favorite color?" she asked.
"Red." He answered.
"Where did you live on Earth?"
"We still live on Earth." Sarcasm laced his response. "I guess in Earth, now."
"You're such an ass. I mean on the surface, idiot." She laughed.
"Wow, resorting to name calling now. Seattle."
She stuck her tongue out at him and replied. "Okay, cool. You like the Seahawks?"
"Yes."
"Who's your favorite player?"
"Doesn't matter. They're probably all dead."
"Okay, edge lord."
"What did you just call me?"
"So, you were a boat mechanic. Is that how you got so ripped?"
"And a Coast Guard veteran. Show some respect." He winked at her while she shook her head.
"Okay, but is it like the police, where you can have fat police officers?"
He bit back laughter. "Hell no. I used to go to the gym too. Not to be like this, but… you gotta be fit for the sort of job I had."
"Weird brag on your part. Cats or dogs?"
"You know I can't answer that in front of her." He said, pointing at the cat riding Mongo.
"Okay then. A runaway trolley is speeding towards five people, but you can pull a lever to a sidetrack where it will only kill one person instead. What do you do?"
"Hold on, what the fuck. Are you trolley problem-ing me?" He snorted.
"Yes. What's your answer?"
He was quiet for a moment, thinking.
"I pull the lever," he said finally. "Every time."
"Most people say that."
"I'm not done." He kept walking, eyes on the path. "The one person on the sidetrack. I pull the lever and then I spend the rest of my life trying to figure out if it was right. I don't think you can be sure that it was the right choice, to pull it. I think you just have to live with the choice you made and not pretend it was clean." He glanced at her sideways. "That's my answer."
She looked at him for a moment. That was the most Carl answer she had ever heard. A better answer than she could have given. He truly was humanity's best.
She let out a low whistle. "Okay," she said, nodding her head in approval. "That's a good answer."
"What's yours?"
"I'm a philosophy student. I don't give answers. I just ask the questions." She waved her hands around as she mocked a pretentious tone.
"That is deeply irritating."
"I know."
He laughed. It was a real one, and she looked away before she could do anything embarrassing with her face.
— ♡ —
The castle disappeared.
One moment it was there—stone walls, torchlight, the distant sound of Donut's performance echoing through the ballroom—and then it wasn't. The Zerzura spell took it cleanly, the entire structure lifting and vanishing to the ninth floor, leaving everyone who had been inside suspended briefly in open air above a bramble-choked ruin before gravity took effect.
She dropped. Everyone dropped.
The exposed basement rushed up to meet them and she hit the ground hard, rolling to absorb the impact. Around her the chaos was immediate and total: mantis nymphs swarming up from every crack in the exposed foundation, hunters materializing out of smoke and shadow, elves regrouping around Imogen's crackling form, the brambles descending from above like a slow green ceiling.
Her Catalogue skill logged everything in the first couple seconds. Exit points. Threat vectors. The nearest crawlers. Carl, forty feet northwest, already moving.
She didn't have time to think about Carl.
"Stasis!"
Her hand shot out and the nymph mid-leap froze in the air in front of her face, its mandibles inches from her throat. She held it, redirected a bolt of elven magic that was heading for a crawler she didn't know, and kept moving. This was what Elysians did, what she did. Read the situation. Preserve what could be preserved. Keep people alive long enough for someone else to finish the job.
The garrote was in her other hand before she'd consciously reached for it from her inventory.
She worked her way through the nymph swarm using Stasis to freeze, redirect to reroute, the wire for anything that got close enough. Around her she caught glimpses of the larger fight, listening to Donut's voice rising in some kind of spell, the crack of Florin's shotgun, Imogen's lightning painting shadows across the pit walls.
She used Reluctant Mend once, on a crawler she didn't recognize who was bleeding out near the east wall, and immediately felt the familiar static blur at the edges of her vision when she used that skill. Her Catalogue ability dimmed. She hated that feeling. She pushed through it.
"Behind you!" someone shouted. It was Piper, from somewhere to her left. The girls had found each other in the chaos, after they'd been able to join the ballroom, well, when the party had ended.
She turned around.
The hunter was already there.
He wasn't one of the big names. Just a giant cockroach-alien-race in hunter's gear with a crossbow already raised, and she caught one second of his face before he fired. Something deliberate in it, something that said I know exactly who you are was etched all over his face. The bolt caught her in the shoulder and spun her sideways into the wall.
The pain registered a half-second behind the impact. She slid down the stone, hand going automatically to the wound, her Catalogue cataloguing it in her interface. Non-fatal. Serious. The bolt had gone clean through. She hesitated for a moment before pulling the bolt out of her shoulder. Blood gushed from her wound.
She couldn't quite move yet.
I know who you are, Bax's eyes, the hunter, seemed to say. She'd seen that look before and had become familiar with it ever since she joined Carl on this last segment of the dungeon. On the faces of people who'd watched the Marginalia content. Who'd seen the clips of Odette's show. Who'd decided that the easiest way to hurt Carl was through whatever she was to him.
She was going to be very angry about that later. Right now she was mostly focused on staying conscious.
"Oh my GOD" Piper was at her side, hands already pressing against the wound, spell cycling up. Sofia appeared on her other side a second later. She looked past the girls to see Bax fidgeting with his crossbow, tongue out in concentration as he tried reloading the weapon.
"I'm okay," she gritted her teeth as she spit the words out, her vision starting to go in and out.
"You are literally not," Sofia said.
Across the pit she caught a glimpse of Carl.
He was fighting, of course he was fighting, the man was always fighting, but his head had turned. She didn't know what he'd seen or how he'd seen it through the chaos but his eyes found her and for one second that stretched longer than it should have, she saw his face.
She'd never seen that particular expression on him before. It wasn't the fury she'd expected—she could tell that was going to come later. It was almost a look of despair, like seeing her like this was going to haunt him for a long time. That raw desperation was going to be dangerous.
She filed it away in her head before the static took the edges off her vision again and she stopped being able to think about it.
"Don't you dare use Mend on yourself," Piper said, reading her mind.
"I wasn't going to," she slurred, trying her best to not pass out. Bax continued fidgeting with the crossbow in the chaos of the battlefield.
— ♡ —
Carl was on top of a hunter he had just killed when he felt it.
That was the only word for what happened. Felt. Like a thread yanking at his chest, like a warm breeze drifting over the sound. His head turned as the feeling got louder.
He saw her against the wall.
He couldn't help himself from doing the math. He did the calculation that everyone in his life had been subject to—Donut, Katia, Louis, every member of his family—the calculation of who, where, how bad.
He didn't realize that that math now accounted for her.
She was bleeding. The bolt had gone through. Piper was already there. Sofia was already there. The girls were doing what girls did, which was the thing he had been counting on without admitting it.
Across the pit her eyes found his. He could see in her, feel her, that she was going to pass out.
His focus redirected. He saw the hunter past her, fumbling with a crossbow.
The rage inside snapped. He moved.
Everything blurred out around him. He only registered the hunter, a giant cockroach in hunter's gear, tongue between his teeth in the way of a creature concentrating on a thing he was not good at. He felt the ground beneath his feet, the gauntlet on his own hand, and he made the decision in an instant.
He punched the hunter once. The cockroach didn't see him coming, couldn't even try to put up a fight against Carl.
The hunter went down.
Carl put his boot on the hunter's head and pressed. The gore from the hunter's head was nothing new to him, but the tug of emotion was.
When it was done he stood there for a second, looking at what remained of the cockroach's twitching body. Gross.
He had neutralized the threat. And then, finally, in that moment of standing on cockroach brain matter and other body fluids, he stopped lying to himself about her. He cared about this girl in a way that lived deep in his primal nature, in that place where the river of noise he tried so hard to quiet down grew louder and louder. Yes, he heard. Her. Her. Her. Find her. Take her. She's yours.
He needed to put an end to this now. He tried quieting the noise and forced his eyes away from her. The girls had her. He trusted the girls. She was safe with them.
He turned around and went back into the fight, because there was still a fight. He tried to ignore the voice at the back of his brain. The alternative was crossing the pit to her. Putting his hands on her face. Doing nothing else for a long time.
The fight needed him more than she did right now.
— ♡ —
The hunter who'd shot her was dead minutes later.
She didn't see how. But of course, it had been Carl.
She came to propped against a section of collapsed wall while Sofia ran her Triage spell and Nia cycled protection enchantments over their small corner of the pit. The battle was still going. She could hear it, could feel the ground shaking with Imogen's area attacks, could see the flash of Donut's spells painting the smoke overhead.
She gasped when she saw a golden ball of fur run and launch himself at an elf. "Biscuit." She tried yelling, but it came out hoarse and soft. Her head was too fuzzy to use the chat. She prayed he'd be alive by the end of this.
She had to pry her eyes off of her best friend as enemies descended upon her and her girls. She used Stasis twice more, with her good arm, from where she was sitting, freezing threats she could see coming before they reached the others.
The brambles kept coming down.
When the arena finally declared a winner she was on her feet again, barely, with Piper's shoulder under one arm, and the survivors were moving toward the stairs in a ragged, exhausted way.
The girls had her. She didn't need to be carried exactly, but she wasn't walking without help, and they gave it without being asked. They set her down for a second, letting her catch her breath.
She heard Carl before she saw him. His voice cutting through the general noise of the aftermath, sharp and wrong in a way she hadn't heard from him before.
"Where is she. Where—" He panicked as he didn't find her at the spot she had collapsed at.
And then he was there, pushing through the crowd of survivors, and his eyes found her. They were wild, broken. Full of anguish.
He fell on his knees in front of her. His hands came up to her face and gently held her for a moment.
"I'm okay," she said, trying to reassure him. He didn't look convinced. He turned her face slightly, examining the shoulder wound, his jaw tight. His hands were careful as he looked.
"You're not," he said, flatly. Exactly what Sofia had said. "Non-fatal," she said. "I've had the report." She tried tapping her forehead to get the joke across. "It's in my noggin."
Piper shushed her.
He looked at her for a long moment. At the bolt wound, at Piper's arm around her, at her general state of having recently been shot. His jaw was twitching. His hands were still cupping her face.
"The hunter," he said.
"Is handled," she said. "I know."
"He targeted you because—"
"I know," she said again, quieter.
Whatever she was to him. She'd thought about it against the wall, and she was thinking about it now. She didn't know what the answer was.
He looked at her. She looked back at him. The stairs were pulling everyone now, the System nudging survivors toward the descent, and around them the battered remains of the battle's winners were moving.
"Carl." Donut's voice, from somewhere behind him. "We have to go."
He didn't move immediately. That was the thing she filed away, later, when her Catalogue came back fully online and she could think about it properly. He didn't move immediately.
"Go," she told him. "We're right behind you."
He looked at Piper. Something passed between them that wasn't words.
"Take care of her," he said.
"Obviously," Piper said.
He looked at her one more time. She held the weight of his gaze before he finally turned and went.
The stairs were as chaotic as everything else. She went down with the girls, Piper and Sofia taking turns with her weight, Lindsey clearing the path ahead, Nia keeping the protection spells running. Biscuit found them somewhere on the descent. She didn't know how he did, she'd told him to stay out of the battle hours prior, and she was going to have words with him later about following directions. He pressed himself against her leg and kept pace.
"I thought I said—"
"I know what you said," Biscuit replied. "I came anyway. I had to help."
She felt some guilt from holding him back. But she also didn't have the energy to argue with that. The girls limped forward into the stairwell.
Behind her, somewhere in the crowd of descending survivors, she was aware of Carl. She didn't look back. She didn't need to. She knew he'd be behind her.
The stairs took them down.
— ♡ —
Except, the seventh floor didn't happen. Prepotente had blown it up. The six of them teleported away.
— ♡ —
Before you enter the eighth floor, you must secure your starting location.
Warning: all parties consisting of more than five members will be automatically split into squads of five or less. You will remain partied with the other members of your team, but some challenges on this level may require you to interact only with your squad.
Your party consists of six members. It has been split.
Your squad consists of:
Crawler Unc (Squad Leader)
Crawler Biscuit
Crawler Sofia Gomes 4
Crawler Piper
Six spots remain.
You may not break squads on this floor. Boy, I hope you get along.
Squad Leader Unc, please proceed to the platform and choose your starting location. You have ninety seconds to choose, or a random location will be chosen for you.
— ♡ —
The System notification appeared at the same exact moment as his message.
NEW CHAT MESSAGE: Carl
Unc: carl are you okay
Carl: Are you okay
A pause.
Unc: ...we sent those at the same time
Carl: Yeah.
Carl: Shoulder okay?
Unc: Imani got to it before we went down. I'm fine. You?
Carl: I've been better. I've been worse. Where'd you end up.
Unc: Rio de Janeiro. I picked. We got split up from Lindsey and Nia. You?
Carl: Sorry to hear about that. We're in Havana.
Unc: Oh. We're practically neighbors.
Carl: Practically.
— ♡ —
Sofia had gone very still beside her. They were standing in the middle of an outdoor market in the Zona Sul area (or what used to be an outdoor market in Zona Sul) watching ghost-vendors arrange ghost-fruit in the early morning light. A ghost-woman with silver hair was picking through neatly stacked papayas.
"Minha avó," Sofia said quietly. "She shopped here every Saturday." Sofia told them that she'd visit her grandma every Summer. This market was a tradition for them.
She didn't know what to say. She put her hand on Sofia's arm and held it there.
— ♡ —
Unc: Carl. The ghosts.
Carl: Yeah.
Unc: They're just going about their lives. This woman just walked through Piper on her way somewhere. She was carrying flowers. She didn't even notice.
Carl: I know. It's eerie.
Unc: It's sad seeing Earth's last days. No one knew. Life went on.
Carl: Yeah.
Unc: That's so cruel.
Carl: I know.
Unc: Is Donut okay? Mongo, Mordecai?
Carl: Yes. They're shaken up from Prepotente's fiasco.
Unc: Tell them I say hi.
Carl: I will. Get some sleep. These floors don't get easier at the start.
Unc: Talk tomorrow.
Carl: Talk tomorrow.
She closed her interface and stood in the ghost-city as it went about its last beautiful ordinary day. Behind her, Sofia was still watching her grandmother arrange papayas. Piper had put her arm around Sofia's shoulders.
Biscuit pressed himself against her leg.
"Mom," he said quietly, which was unusual for him.
"I know," she said.
"It's really sad."
"Yeah."
"Do you want me to be extra cheerful tomorrow to make up for it? I can do that. I'm very good at that."
She looked down at him. "Just be yourself, babe."
"Okay," he said. "I can do that too."
— ♡ —
They had flagged four cards so far. The Curupira had been Biscuit's idea. He'd spotted the backwards footprints in the sand at Ipanema and tracked the creature three kilometers into the ghost-city. The Iara had been harder. The river mermaid had nearly drowned Piper before Sofia redirected her with a spell and held her with a binding long enough to flag her. The card was beautiful and terrifying and they were not entirely sure they liked her.
She'd been not thinking about her family since Chapel Hill. She'd gotten very good at it.
The dungeon undid nine months of careful not-thinking in a couple seconds for all of them.
Sofia had cried for hours after seeing her grandmother's ghost in the market. She'd held her through all of it. Eventually, the tears had stopped, and she felt like Sofia's eyes held a new, hardened glint in them. She messaged Carl from the floor of a ghost-apartment in Santa Teresa, well after midnight, Biscuit's head in her lap, the girls asleep in the next room.
— ♡ —
She had just fought and killed a three-headed monster. That three-headed monster were the heads of her family.
At least she knew they were dead if the dungeon was using their faces. That bought her some comfort through her sobs.
Unc: I saw my family today.
Carl: Tell me.
Unc: They were having Sunday dinner in my childhood home. My mom had made her spaghetti sauce. She made it every Sunday. My dad was complaining about something on the news, like always. My little sister was on her phone under the table thinking no one could see her. They were just… there. Being them. Not knowing what was coming.
Carl: I'm so sorry.
Unc: There was an empty placemat for me. They turned into this three-headed hippogriff thing and it was horrible. I had to kill them.
Unc: I've not been thinking about them since Chapel Hill. I thought I was okay, or that I was able to push all those feelings down. Seeing them alive and there and completely fine and just not knowing what was going to happen. That was horrible.
Carl: Yeah. If it brings you any comfort, they didn't suffer. The collapse was instant. The dungeon is trying to break you. You can't let it break you.
Unc: Have you seen anyone? From before?
Carl: Not yet. I don't think I want to. My situation before the collapse was… complicated.
Unc: You don't have to tell me.
Carl: Bea and I didn't end well. There's stuff there I haven't dealt with, but it's not about her specifically. More like being cheated on, over and over. I told you how Donut reacted to her on Odette's show?
Unc: Yeah, she made me proud. Fuck her.
Carl: Ha. I've just accepted that the dungeon has a way of making you deal with things.
Unc: Okay, random thought. I'm trying to make myself laugh here, but we should probably assume no body, no death rules. If we didn't see them die, they're alive. You should expect your worst enemy to pop up at any moment.
Carl: Ha. Don't be afraid to be sad, though. But you're right.
Unc: Are you physically okay? I know you've gotten into some fights.
Carl: I'm fine. I just don't know what I'd do if I walked around a corner and saw my family.
Unc: I think that's very human of you.
Carl: High praise from a philosopher.
Unc: I'm being serious.
Carl: I know. Thank you.
The chat went quiet for a while. The ghost-city of Rio moved around her, alive and bustling, even at this hour. Biscuit shifted in his sleep and made a small yipping sound she'd learned meant he was dreaming about chasing something.
Carl: Get some sleep.
Unc: So should you.
Carl: Yeah.
Unc: Carl.
Carl: Yeah?
Unc: Good night.
Carl: Good night.
She sat with Biscuit for a long time after that. In the next room she could hear Sofia and Piper talking quietly. She thought about Sunday dinners and trauma people don't deal with until they have to, and about a man in Havana who was practically her neighbor, and about all the new flurry of emotions her brain kept replaying over and over and over until she passed out.
— ♡ —
She'd been watching the recap feed loop, from a safe room, over and over again. She knew something had happened in Carl's Phase Two. The recap kept cutting away.
Unc: Carl. We've been watching the recap, but your segment is cutting out. Are you okay.
She was still watching when her interface lit up.
Finally, he answered.
Carl: Hey.
Unc: CARL.
Carl: I'm okay.
Unc: You're not. What happened in Phase Two. The recap keeps cutting right before—
His message came in before she finished typing hers.
Carl: The dungeon used my past against me.
Unc: God. What did it show you?
Carl: My dad. He was dying. I had to watch the recording. His whole—the end of it.
Unc: Carl I'm so sorry.
Carl: That's not the part I'm sorry about. He deserved to die.
She waited.
Carl: I have a brother. A half brother. His name is Asher. The dungeon put his face on the hydra, on this boss it built out of people from my life. That's how I found out he existed.
Unc: The dungeon told you about him.
Carl: Bea knew. She hid it from me. He tried to contact me before the collapse and she hid it.
Unc: I don't even know what to say. How old is he?
Carl: Young. Just a kid. Maybe 12, He was afraid of lightning. That's all I know. He was afraid of lightning and he tried to reach out to me and I didn't know he existed and now I don't know if
Carl hadn't finished out the text.
Unc: Carl.
Carl: I'm fine.
Unc: You don't have to be fine right now.
Carl: I know.
Unc: Is Donut with you.
Carl: Yeah. She's here. Mordecai too.
Unc: Good. Don't be alone with this.
She minimized the interface down and looked at the ceiling. She thought about Asher who was afraid of lightning trying to reach out to a brother who didn't know he existed. She thought about what it must feel like to find that out the way Carl had found it out.
She opened her interface back up.
Unc: For what it's worth, and feel free to ignore this. He reached out. He wanted to know you. Whatever happened after—that part was real.
She almost fell asleep when the notification came through.
Carl: Thank you. That means something to me.
Unc: Get some sleep, old man.
Carl: Working on it.
— ♡ —
A long time passed before they sent each other messages other than just short checkins. They were in the last days of the floor when she got the ping.
Carl: Something really bad just happened.
Unc: Carl? We're trying to get our key right now.
Carl: I hurt Mongo and Katia really bad. I did something to Li Jun.
Unc: Oh shit.
Carl: There's more. Shi Maria merged with me during the final battle. There's a spider in my chest now. She tattooed her eye onto me. The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, she's called.
Unc: Carl, are you okay? You're scaring me.
Carl: No, listen.
Unc: Who's Shi Maria? You're saying she tattooed you?
Carl: Yeah.
Unc: From inside.
Carl: Yeah. Right in the middle of my chest.
Unc: Carl, do you have a concussion?
Carl: I'm not kidding.
Unc: … we're going to come back to that. I've had to process the nipple rings and now this. Are you in pain?
Carl: It's not pain exactly. Mordecai is still explaining what it means. And I'm bald now. Donut doesn't like it.
Unc: You're bald!?
Carl: … That's what you're most concerned about.
Unc: Carl. I don't know if I'd like you bald.
Carl: Superficial. I'm being haunted by a spider demon and you care about that.
Unc: I'm glad you're safe for now. We will deal with this.
Carl: Yeah.
Carl: We're going into Faction Wars next.
Unc: I know. I saw the announcement.
Carl: Your group joining one?
Unc: The girls want to. We've been talking about it. Certainly won't be those Skull Empire fucks.
Carl: Princess Posse has room. If you want in.
Unc: Are you asking me to join your faction.
Carl: I'm asking if you want to join the faction. It's technically Donut's faction.
Unc: That is genuinely the least convincing clarification you've ever offered.
Carl: I'm asking. Please.
Piper grasped the key in her hand. "Hey, are you chatting right now!?" Piper kicked the crawler she was fighting in the groin. "Could use your help over here!"
Sofia knocked the last crawler out cold. They walked up to her, the beach scattered with unconscious bodies. "We should go before they wake up," Sofia said quietly.
They all knew what that meant. The group knew that it was death for the crawlers they had just defeated. The dungeon had pushed them to this.
They had spent the day refusing to fight back when the group first ambushed them. Piper and Biscuit had tried pleading with them, but it was no use.
None of them would forget this. It only made them angrier.
Biscuit sat by the doorway to the stairwell, tail not moving. He got up as Piper approached with the key.
"Wait." The two girls and Biscuit looked at her. "The next floor is going to be our biggest challenge yet. Carl has offered us a space in his faction. He wants to unite all the crawlers." She explained.
Sofia and Piper looked at each other and nodded. "We're in. Let's take these fuckers down."
Unc: We're in.
Carl: Good. I'll see you on the next floor.
Unc: See you on the next floor. Take care, old man.
Carl: Take care.
She closed the interface. Piper put the key in the door and unlocked it. She pushed the door open with her boot.
"Well?" Piper said to the group.
"I miss Lindsey and Nia." Sofia's voice quivered, and Biscuit pressed himself against her legs. It hadn't been the same without Lindsey's chaos, or Nia's decisiveness with spells. They had grown into their own sixsome, and now it was time to get the girls back.
She stared into the darkness of the stairwell, the warm draft rising from the cavernous opening beckoning her forward, encouraging her to venture to the next floor.
Piper was quiet for a moment. "Let's go find our girls."
The four of them entered the stairwell to the ninth floor.
— ♡ —
The Marginalia thread had been popping off since the start of the ninth floor and currently had more than nine hundred replies.
Minx scrolled through it like a scholar reviewing peer-reviewed work. And in some senses, she really was a scholar of her two favorite crawlers. The thread title was, in the Syndicate language, untranslatable to humans, but the closest English equivalent was something like: PROJECT CUNC — PRELIMINARY FINDINGS — ELYSIAN/PRIMAL PROXIMITY BEHAVIORS — COMPILED EVIDENCE.
Reply #303 was a frame-by-frame breakdown of Carl's facial expression when the bolt hit her shoulder. Reply #103 was a supercut of every time he'd said her name on the livefeed, with timestamps. Reply #217 was a six-thousand-word analysis of the trolley problem walk that drew comparisons to courtship rituals on four different planets. Reply #350 had simply read: HE DIDN'T WANT TO MOVE WHEN SHE GOT HIT. The reply had received nine hundred reactions.
She'd contributed earlier in the day, somewhere around reply #380. A clip from the Big Tina rescue, looped, with no commentary. It didn't need any. The video of her falling onto Carl spoke for itself.
But she'd stopped scrolling an hour ago, and returned to her research. The fangirling would have to wait. She'd pulled up the class data on her second screen and she hadn't been able to look away from it since.
Elysian and Primal. The Marginalia had access to the archives through channels Minx wasn't going to think about too hard, and what she'd found there had sobered her. Elysians were rare. Primals were rare. The two together, paired, in proximity—that was rarer still, and the crawl records were sparse but consistent.
Elysians stabilized Primal output. Primals amplified Elysians redirect. An Elysian near a Primal grew steadier. A Primal near an Elysian grew stronger. The classes were complementary in a way the System didn't announce but absolutely accounted for. They were, on paper, designed to find each other; not by intent, but by the way the universe was built.
Minx looked at the first screen, then to the second. Behavioral patterns on one side. Class data on the other. She minimized the first and replaced it with the Marginalia's social interface.
She was not surprised to see the thread had nearly tripled since she'd posted. Somewhere in there, reply #911 was a new compilation of every time Carl's eyes had found her in a crowd. Reply #912 was someone simply typing i cannot survive this someone make them kiss nowwwww.
Minx laughed. A real one, the kind that surprised her out of her seat for a second, because the Marginalia was nothing if not committed to the bit. She let the laugh run its course. Then she sat back. The dread started to gnaw at the back of her mind.
Her girl was on the ninth floor. Walking toward him.
Minx hoped they figured out their collective strength before the dungeon checked it.
Blurb: Canadian Mordecai and Canadian Reader deepen their friendship—takes place in Book 7.
I'm studying for the Bar exam this summer which is going to inhibit some of my writing time :'(. I'm going to try to work on some stuff to at least keep the creative juices flowing and to try to thank y'all for the love and support!!
She gasped as she took in the scene.
"Non." Was the first word out of her mouth when she took the Game Guide's appearance in.
She had walked into Carl and Donut's laughter. She realized why when she saw Mordecai. He was a caricature of a Canadian—her home country. His getup looked like the AI had asked an American what they thought a Canadian would dressed like. She smacked her face.
"You've got to be kidding me." Her Montreal accent thickened with her anger.
"Hi, lady." Mordecai greeted her with the thickest, most stereotypical accent. "Ignore these buffoons, eh?"
He was handsome like this—more handsome to her than that stupid Incubus look he had going on. Like a lumberjack, she thought. He had some scruff going on, and large glasses framed dark brown eyes. His thick eyebrows furrowed at the two crawlers laughing at him.
She glanced back to Carl and Donut. Carl was still wheezing, and Donut was literally rolling on the floor with laughter. "I quite like the hat, Mordecai. What a nice touch." The princess caught her breath and was using her paws to wipe a tear from one eye.
Mordecai grumbled something under his breath, and spent the next hour helping the crawlers through the next steps for faction wars ceasefires.
She learned over the next couple days that it was actually nice to have someone from her homeland with her. Granted, Mordecai's knowledge of Canada came from what the AI had fed him, but the accent and general look reminded her of home. She was from Quebec, but had been in Vancouver for school when the dungeon had collapsed. Her English had gotten stronger in that anglophone part of the country, but she missed speaking French. The dungeon's universal translator stripped her language from her, but Mordecai seemed to know some French-Canadian and was able to keep up.
These feelings of sadness and homesickness for her old life she had suppressed hit her when she saw Canadian Mordecai. She had gone to sleep that first night crying, allowing herself to grieve her family. She thought of her parents, who never had dinner without cheese and a glass of wine. She thought of her brothers, who were talented competitive skiers. She thought of never seeing snow again, never breathing in the fresh air of the countryside she called home.
They had developed a stronger bond on this floor. Mordecai knew how much it meant to be disconnected from a person's home, a person's culture. He had experienced that same loss when his home planet was wiped, and he lost his brother in the crawl. He would sit with her and let her rant to him about where she'd come from. "You know," she had told him once, "I was the worst skier I knew. I was so scared of everything." She laughed. "That was part of the reason I moved to Vancouver—I knew I could have a good excuse to not ski in the city." Mordecai had been particularly intrigued by this, because she looked athletic and strong. "I always preferred apres-ski culture. The drinking and sitting on my ass was more of my thing." And Mordecai couldn't help laughing.
And even though she could fit in just fine with the Americans because of her time in Vancouver, and especially Carl who was from the Pacific North West, it felt so good to just have someone understand the deepest stereotypes she felt close to her heart.
She had brought up a good point. "You know what's funny. I feel like you have all the facts, but none of the feelings of being Canadian. Maybe I should give you a lesson?" These conversations are where Mordecai became "Mordi," a nickname that secretly made his teeth grind, but he let her call him that. Only her.
Donut had said it once, and was surprised by Mordecai's uncharacteristically aggressive response to the nickname coming out of the cat's mouth.
"Jesus, Mordecai. I won't say it again." The cat acquiesced, offended by her friend's attack. She groomed herself while listening to Mordecai apologize profusely to the feline.
It was after that exchange with Donut that Mordecai knew he wanted to do something special for her. He spent time crafting birch syrup from a tree that grew in the Princess Posse's territory—something maple-syrup-adjacent, less sweet than what she had grown up with. Still, she had been grateful for his efforts in recreating something from her home. She knew he had spent that valuable time extracting the sap and cooking it on his alchemy table. She didn't have the heart to tell him that Bopca Protector's had already been able to replicate the maple syrup she liked.
She stood in the safe room as she added some of the syrup to her coffee. Mordecai had come into the shared space to catch up. "Loading up on the sugar, eh?". She looked at him after she was done adding what looked like a couple of tablespoons of syrup to her coffee. "Good morning to you too." She paused, before finishing her thought. "Your tone sounds a little judgy, Mordi." She patted at the cushion next to hers.
"Just worried about your health, is all. Dungeon doesn't have that free health care thing going on." She laughed at the terrible joke, and he sat next to her on the couch. "Carl and Donut caught you up on the happenings?"
"Of course. And, of course, I told them not to do it." She knew he was reading her mind, and he sighed. "But they're doing it anyway?"
"Bingo." She placed the syrup bottle (one of his repurposed alchemy bottles) on the coffee table. "I've been chatting with them, but it's too early in the morning for this crap," he yawned as he spoke to her. It was early. The cease-fire was ending soon, and the tension was felt through the Posse. She wanted to enjoy her coffee before having to deal with a life-or-death situation. Mordecai would make good company.
"Have you been practicing your French?" She turned to sit criss-cross style while facing him, both hands on her steaming mug of coffee.
"Oh, yes. Tabarnak." His brown eyes crinkled as he smiled. "How could I forget—cálisse." She giggled too. "Everyone knows the best words to learn are cuss words. Congratulations on knowing different ways to say fuck." She took a sip from her mug, the sweetness masking out the bitterness of the bad coffee the dungeon provided. "And, if you want bonus points, you can combine the two."
"Noted." He looked like he was thinking. "Je sais comment en dire plus. Peux-tu m'aider avec ma prononciation?" She nearly spit out her coffee. "Where'd you learn that?!"
He cheekily held out a French phrase dictionary towards her. She set her mug down and took the small book, flipping through it. "Carl picked it up at a bookshop in Larracos." He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Keep it up! I'm so impressed." She couldn't wipe the grin off of her face. "Even with these translators, you don't know how happy it makes me to hear you speak my language." Her voice caught in her throat for a second, and he knew she meant what she had just said.
"Donut told me to ask you to say this—a seal pushed me yesterday." He held up his hands as she raised an eyebrow. "I don't think it's a setup, eh?"
"I'm not a free translator," she joked, "but anything the princess wants, she gets." She laughed as she translated the phrase in her head. "Un phoque m'a pousseé hier." She said after a moment.
His laugh filled the safe room as he sounded out the words in English. Outside, the intensity of faction wars was only ramping up every minute—she was happy to forget about that mess for a couple more moments. In the safe room, it was only bitter coffee, bad French, and Mordecai.
My favourite book series! This is Carl and Princess Donut from the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. Amazing books and amazing audio books because the narrator is so insanely talented you completely forget it’s just one guy!
Information about the painting
References used:
Carl - based very loosely on Tom Hanks from Saving Private Ryan
Donut - Google image search for tortoiseshell Persian cats helped me figure out the coat pattern and smushed face look
Tiara - Google image search for plastic tiara, and then I combined a few of the results for something a little more unique
Glasses - Google image search for rhinestone sunglasses, and then combined for a gaudy look
Butterfly charm - couldn’t find anything I really liked so it’s more of a sort of fairy wing look than anything else 🤷🏻♀️
Leather jacket - Google image search
Brushes used (procreate):
Lilydale
Winkleigh
Lichen
Agrarian
Forester
Mintbrush
Canva used to add signature
Native Apple photos app used for post-processing colour balance
carl’s nickname for you is plain and simple. baby. other fancy nicknames never rolled off the tongue right to him, but baby is easy and so you. he’s a normal guy (debatable) and it’s a normal pet name.
it comes out so smoothly. “y’alright baby?” when you have that confused look on your face working on something in the safe room.
“that feels good, baby?” a low growl as he passionately fucks you into the mattress. wow.
“you’re amazing, baby.” soft words of praise and love whispered in fleeting moments of privacy.
babe definitely comes out a few times, especially in rushed conversation or questions. princess is strictly off limits for obvious reasons. he holds himself back in front of the ever present cameras, but sometimes he just can’t resist. and secretly, you love it when he tells the world he’s yours. 🤭
Blurb: Alpha Carl fucks Reader (using you pronouns this time, NICE!). His personality is heavily inspired by his behavior at the crab scene (YIKES!!)—so be warned, this is kinda freaky!!!! (content warning: it's all consensual but he does kinda just use reader (calls her a whore?!). Book 6 spoilers.
You had been in worse situations in the dungeon. Hell, you had almost gotten yourself incinerated by another crawler's spell a few hours earlier. You tried to remind yourself of this while staring at the totem blocking the only exit out of the bombed-out hotel lobby you'd both ended up in.
Solo crawling had always been your choice, not an accident of circumstance. You entered the dungeon alone and you intended to leave it the same way. You had watched enough group dynamics collapse in on themselves—alliances that curdled into betrayal, dead weight that got people killed, endless arguments over loot that made you want to rip your own ears off.
You worked faster and thought clearer alone.
The fight on this floor had been a mess from the start. A territorial skirmish between two factions of mobs had spilled into the streets of Havana you were cutting through. Keep moving, you told yourself as you ran. You used the chaos as cover, swinging your sword as you picked off stragglers at the edges of the fight. It had been working, too, right up until a crawler you didn't recognize (holy shit, was that a nun?) had lobbed a spell wide and nearly taken your head off along with half a city block. After that, the fight scattered, and you had maybe a split second to make a decision about which way to run.
You had seen the totem run in the midst of the fight. You sprinted after him without a second thought.
Alpha Male Carl. Level 69.
Nice.
He was leaning against the doorframe with a smirk. The resemblance was uncanny. He had Carl's face. Carl's shoulders. Carl's everything, technically, except the hair (this one wore it gelled back). Star-patterned boxers. The patch jacket with its two buttons—#1 Son and Brother of the Century—you had no idea what those were about.
You had met Donut, Carl, and Mongo in Havana. You knew who they were before that; how could you not, when their faces were plastered on every recap and at the top of the leaderboard? You crawled alone, but Carl had insisted you at least add them to your chat.
But something was different about this version of Carl.
He was sexy. Like a beefed up, frat guy kinda sexy. The kind of man who would text you at 3 AM "u up?" and then ignore you the next day. You had dealt with a few of these specimens during your college years. Really, the cream of the crop of the male species.
His tan skin was covered in a thin layer of sweat. His biceps popped with his arms crossed like that. The muscles in his thick thighs rippled under the heat, and you thought his abs were literally glistening. Had he oiled them?
"You gonna keep staring," he said, teeth sparkling white, "or are you going to tell me what your plan is to get us out of here?"
His voice was wrong. Not bad wrong. Just… not Carl's. Older. More certain of itself. Hotter.
"My plan," you answered, emphasis on MY, "is to wait out the skirmish and then leave. You're welcome to do the same." You gestured at him and the cat on his shoulder.
"Uh huh." His eyes lit up mischievously. "That your plan every time you run into trouble? Just run away and wait for it to fix itself?"
"Excuse me? It's worked so far."
"It's kinda cowardly, don't you think?" he said. "That's not the same thing as working."
You opened your mouth in shock.
His smile widened. It was Carl's smile, but with something underneath it that Carl didn't have. Cockier. Even his teeth looked fake, like the freakish veneers trending amongst celebrities on the surface.
"Solo crawler." You realized he recognized you. "Are you just that stupid to think that's a good idea in a place like this?"
"That's an extremely rude thing to say to someone you just met."
"I didn't just meet you. You've been running into my group on this floor." He tilted his head. "I know who you are."
"Your group?" You scoffed.
"You heard me. You think I'm an idiot?"
"They've… talked about me?"
"I heard that cat mention you." Something in his expression shifted as he noticed the momentary hope that flashed through your eyes. "Don't read into it." He snuffed whatever hope you had felt quickly.
Your jaw tightened. "I wasn't."
"Yes you were." He pushed off the doorframe and took one step towards you. "You do that a lot, I'm guessing. Must be exhausting."
"You're kind of a dick," you said.
"Yeah," he agreed. "My personality going to be a problem for you?"
The battle outside shifted. Something large moved through the street, shaking dust from the ceiling. Neither of you looked up.
"It's not going to be a problem," you said. "I'm just pointing it out."
"Uh huh." He took another step. "You know what I think?"
"I genuinely don't care."
"I think," he continued, ignoring you entirely, "that you ran toward this building on purpose. When the fight split. You had other options and you picked this one." He paused. "You want to tell me why that is?"
Your mouth fell open.
His smile widened.
"There it is," he sneered.
"That's—" you started. "Are you trying to say I followed you?" Your jaw went slack.
"Don't." His voice dropped. "Don't explain it. It's fine. It's actually—" he tilted his head, looking at you, "—kind of cute. In a pathetic way."
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me. You saw my hot bod and followed it like a moth to a flame."
You stared at him, and he stared back. King Croissant, on his shoulder, seemed to judge you with his cat eyes.
"You're a totem," you said. "You're literally a card. You don't get to—"
"To what?" He raised an eyebrow. "To say what I want?" Another step. Close now. Close enough that you had to make a decision about where to look. Your eyes went to the floor. "You were fine with me being a totem thirty seconds ago. Try again."
You didn't have a reply. This was starting to be really annoying.
"There you go," he said, quieter. "Just stop."
"Stop what."
"Performing." He said it simply, without cruelty. "You've been doing it since you walked in here. The attitude, the—" he gestured at you, vaguely, "—all of this. It's fine. It's a good show. But we're alone and the fight's outside and you already made your choice when you came through that door, so." He looked at you. "Stop."
The building settled. Outside, something exploded, far off.
You held his gaze.
"You're insufferable," you said.
"I know." He reached out and tilted your chin up with two fingers. "That working for you or against you right now?"
At that moment, an explosion rocked the building and sealed you, Alpha Carl, and his stupid cat in.
When the dust settled, the building was quiet. Outside, the battle had moved on. King Croissant had jumped to a piece of rubble and was cleaning his paws.
When the ringing in your ears stopped, you became aware of a giant mass on top of you.
"Get off of me!" The man complied.
You pushed yourself off the floor and sat against the wall, panting. Eyes wide, hand on your chest. Your chat notification binged.
Alpha Carl was leaning against the opposite wall, back to his doorframe posture.
"No 'thank you' after saving your life?" he asked.
"You nearly crushed me. How much do you weigh?!"
"200 pounds of pure muscle, baby." He flexed his bicep and kissed it.
You stood up and rushed towards the blocked entryway. "Oh, fuck." You tried to claw at the big concrete slabs, but your class didn't make you strong enough to move these on your own.
Your eyes welled with tears. "I'm going to die here."
Carl: Hey, you good?
Donut: ARE YOU OKAY THAT WAS QUITE THE EXPLOSION
You: Trapped in the apartment building! Ears hurt a little, but I'm fine.
You: Well I'm actually stuck with the stupid Alpha version of you.
Carl: Yikes. We're going to finish out this boss, then come dig you out. Hang tight.
"Calling for help, sweetheart?" he called from across the room. "I recognize that glossy look when a crawler is on their chat."
"I'm trying to do something about the situation. Why don't you put those muscles to good use and help move the rubble?"
"No can do, sweetheart. I think I'll just sit right over here and enjoy the shade." He dropped into a chair, leaned back, and sighed loudly.
"Are you serious? You're really just going to sit there?"
"Dead serious. Get on it, woman."
You spent the next hour trying to move debris around, to no avail. Your spells were weak, and you specialized in sword combat—useless here. Alpha Carl spent that hour watching and taunting you as you failed to shift anything.
You sat yourself on the floor and rubbed your eyes, fighting back tears. You were still catching your breath when he spoke.
"Didn't peg you for a crybaby."
"Leave me alone." Your voice came out smaller than you wanted. "I'm going to go insane being stuck here with you."
"I'll be in my corner if you get lonely, sweetheart."
You glared at him. His eyes lit up—he'd gotten to you, and he knew it.
— ♡ —
The heat was insufferable inside the lobby. Light seeped through cracks in the foundation, casting a yellowish glow over the dust that had settled across whatever furniture remained. You had stripped down to your bra and underwear, not caring that either of them could see you.
You'd been lying on the tile for hours, the cool temperature offering some reprieve from the sweltering heat.
On the opposite side of the room, Alpha Carl was in a similar situation. Except he had stripped himself completely—including his gauntlet and other equipment. This man had the gall to get bare ass naked in front of you. You had yelped when you saw his soft dick, but all he did was smirk at your shock. He had kept to himself, mostly, occasionally yelling at King Croissant.
The cat had eventually slipped into an air vent to get himself away from his annoying owner.
You kept your eyes off his body. This guy was being such an ass, but holy fuck was he hot. He looked like a cartoony version of a man. His abs still glistened in the dim light, and you thought you counted eight of them total. His muscles bulged when he paced in his corner. The more you thought of him, the deeper the heat between your legs grew. Christ, you thought. The tile was not cooling your desires.
You closed your eyes and tried to get your mind off him.
Alpha Carl cleared his throat. "I've decided that I want to ask you to have sex with me." The deep voice cut through the silence.
You turned your head to look at him, eyebrows furrowing in confusion. The question sank in and you started dying of laughter. "Are you being serious!?"
His eyes narrowed and he growled his response. "We've been stuck here for hours. What the fuck else are we supposed to do?"
You rolled your eyes. "How about you stay in that corner, and I stay in mine? You know, like normal people in a dire situation?"
His smirk widened. "But that would mean that I ignore that you were totally checking me out earlier. You think I'm blind, sweetheart?" His tone turned darker as you felt his gaze on your body.
You froze. Your cheeks burned pink.
"I wasn't—I wasn't staring." Your voice was quivering. Lies.
He laughed, and your stomach sank as you realized he was laughing at you. "I saw you ogle me. You think I'm stupid enough to notice when a chick stares at my dick?"
Your cheeks flushed a bright red. "What the fuck are you talking about?"
His eyes took on a predatory look. "Listen, sweetheart, we can both walk away from this with a good fuck. You in?"
"I wasn't staring at you!" But your quivering voice gave you away, and the slick pooling in your underwear was not helping your case.
A beat passed before he spoke. "Are you lying to me?" His voice dropped. "Don't be a bad girl. Tell daddy the truth."
Your head whipped towards him. He was standing in a power stance. You had never called a guy daddy, but my god was it doing something to you now. You sat yourself up on your knees.
"I'm lying." Your voice came out quiet.
You could cut the tension with a knife.
"I can't hear you, sweetheart."
You swallowed before speaking up. "I said I'm lying."
"I'm lying, what?" He smirked at your quivering voice.
"I'm sorry I lied, daddy."
"Good girl. Come suck my dick." His erection caught your eye from across the room, and your mouth started salivating. You went to stand up, and he yelled stop.
"I want you to crawl."
You gawked at him, but something in your mind made you want to comply. So, crawl you did. You crawled across the cool tile, hissing when you'd crawl on rubble or other shards of material. This was humiliating, but then why was it turning you on so much.
The closer you got, the sooner you realized what you were getting into. A small patch of light, curly brown hair countered his cock. You internally gasped as you took in his size—eight inches, at least, and girthy. A light splattering of freckles decorated his erection. His circumcised tip leaked with a bead of precum. The word pretty ran through your mind, but you didn't dare say that out loud.
You reached him after a couple agonizing seconds, grasping a hand at his cock. Your brain started slipping into some sort of haze as your senses honed in on him. You knew you wanted this.
He lightly slapped your hand away. "Did I say you could start?"
"No, daddy." The answer came out immediately.
"Good girl. Begin." You knew he was testing your boundaries. He had just humiliated you, and you had let him—you hadliked it. Fuck it, you thought, ready to lose yourself in whatever the hell this was.
You took him in your mouth, and he hissed as he felt your tongue circle his leaking tip. You took your time, running your tongue up and down his shaft, alternating between licks and kisses, trying to get as much spit on him as possible. Your hands wrapped around his girthy member, your two hands not even coming close to enveloping it. You closed your eyes as you moved your hands up and down, the spit lubricating your hands. At the same time, your tongue licked his tip.
You dropped your hands and took him back in your mouth. He cursed into the air.
"You're such a filthy whore. Do you just suck any dude's cock who asks?" He taunted as you gagged on his length. You tried to object to his question but he pushed the back of your head onto him, your nose tickling on his pubic hair. You hit his thigh as you choked, tears gathering in your eyes. He released you, and you gagged as you caught your breath.
"You're such a dirty girl." He took your messy state in. "Open up," he commanded, and you scrambled to open your mouth as he pressed his tip to your lips.
Confused when you felt him pull his dick away from your mouth, you realized what he was doing. You closed your eyes as he leaned towards your open mouth and spat in it. You felt your core slick even more, moaning as you swallowed. He nudged for you to take his cock back in your mouth.
Alpha Carl moaned into the air. "Oh, fuck yeah." You whined when you heard the sounds coming out of his mouth.
He grabbed your hair from the back of your scalp and started fucking your mouth at a fast pace. Your hands went to his thighs, and you tried relaxing your throat to take him all.
"Your mouth is only good for this. Swallow."
His thrusts faltered as he came in your mouth, and you swallowed as you felt his cum hit the back of your throat. You let his cock fall out of your mouth with a pop, wiping your watery eyes. He stared at you intensely.
"What a slut. You're not as useless as you seem—why don't you come ride this cock?" He sat himself by a wall.
You stood up and took your underwear and bra off under the scrutiny of his gaze. He whistled. "Your body is banging, babe." You dropped the black undergarments to the side, blushing at the crass compliment.
"Didn't expect you to be fully bald. It works." He commented on the state of your body. You cringed at his words, but cursed yourself as you felt your body react to the praise. "It's not my fault I got a Brazilian—the System froze me like this." Your attempt at a joke was quickly stopped as his face told you to be quiet.
"Be a good whore and just shut the fuck up." You obliged him. "Get over here."
He propped himself against the tile and you walked towards him. He flipped you around so that your ass was facing him. You straddled him and slowly lowered yourself onto his cock—but stopped when you felt a finger prod your entrance. One of his hands held up the underside of your thigh as you felt a long, thick finger slide into you.
"Just as I thought", he laughed, "you're fucking soaked from this."
Your thighs shook from the squat position you were in as he pumped in and out of you, quickly adding a second finger. You moaned in response, tilting your head and upper body back as you actively tried not to fall.
You were so sensitive—you needed him to fuck you now.
His fingers exited you with an obscene squelch, his hand still supporting your thigh up. Holy shit, he's strong. The thought left as you felt him circle your asshole with a finger. His touch was firm, but he didn't penetrate you.
"You ever been touched here before, sweetheart?" Your body betrayed you by moaning. "Let's save it for another time. I want your pussy tonight." You turned your head over your shoulder at him, a desperate look on your face.
"You've waited long enough. Get on daddy's cock." His hands moved to your hips as he guided you onto him. You grabbed his erection to help the aim as his tip slid into you.
Sucking in a breath as you adjusted to his size, you slowly lowered yourself until he bottomed out. Holy shit, how big was he? You heard him speak behind you.
"Move." He commanded. You leaned forward and started bouncing up and down on his cock, your hands each grabbing a thick, muscular thigh. His hands were all over your ass, palming and squeezing at them. You felt him spank you a couple of times, but you started to become lost in the feeling of the fullness of his cock. You rubbed at your clit as you kept up your pace. The heat in your belly grew at the stimulation.
But as soon as you felt yourself get close to your release—he picked you up off his cock. He stood up and ordered you to come to him. He hoisted you up in the air. Your arms wrapped around his neck, and your legs wrapped around his hips. He pressed you against the wall, slapping your clit a couple times with his cock, before slipping himself back into you. Your legs shook in his firm grasp at the pace he was fucking into you at. "Pathetic whore," he grunted in your ear.
Your moans filled the room, varying from pitched breathy sounds to almost screams. While both of his hands were occupied with keeping you supported up, his mouth went to one of your nipples. His tongue circled around and sucked on your rosy bud. You moaned and dug your nails into his shoulder.
He released his mouth with a pop, sneering as he saw your expression. "You like that, sweetheart?" He kept thrusting. "I like hearing these moans a lot more than your voice."
You moaned, even with your cheeks burning from humiliation. Your belly tightened, and you closed your eyes as you came closer to your release.
He recognized the look on your face. You heard him laugh in between grunts. "Don't come until I say so."
In a second, he managed to take you from the wall to the floor without taking himself out of you. Your back pressed into the cool tile, and he lifted your thighs into a mating press. Your lower back naturally came off the floor as he pushed your legs up. Your hand automatically went to your clit, and you started touching yourself. Your other hand grasped at the back of his neck as you lost yourself in his rhythm.
"Oh fuck, yeah. Daddy's close." He gasped out, and your lower belly tightened as your second orgasm neared. "I'm close," you whined into his skin.
He seemed to finally take some pity on you, and you heard him telling you to come over the sounds of him slapping against you.
Everything became too much. Your orgasm was fast and intense. Your eyes closed as the waves of pleasure worked through your body, toes curling in response.
He grunted and pulled himself out, cumming all over your stomach. Your body shook as he looked at his artwork, nodding in satisfaction. "You're a slut, but a good fuck. Let me know if you're down again." He leaned down towards his clothes and tore a piece of his cloak, offering it to you.
You were panting, and breathlessly thanked him as you cleaned yourself up with the piece of cloth. He walked to the other side of the room, gathering your clothes and boots. You were looking at him in disbelief, but he laughed as he thought he caught you staring at his ass. He dropped the bundle of clothes in front of you.
"Did I not fuck you hard enough? I'm down for round two, sweetheart."
You rolled your eyes and went to go dress yourself, pinching your skin to see if you really just had sex with Carl's douchey alter ego. Damn this guy for being a good fuck. Your legs shook as you slipped your underwear on.
You went back to your corner and tried ignoring him while you waited for Geraldo to arrive.
— ♡ —
Carl: Okay. We're sending Geraldo.
After half an hour, you heard the sounds of Kung-Fu while the seal was moving slabs of concrete off the doorway. He moved fast, clearing the door in no time. The seal stuck his head through it. "I've been instructed to free you."
"Hi, Geraldo." The monk seal nodded at you, and seemed to reach out a flipper in your direction.
You stood up and dusted yourself off. You stared at Alpha Carl before heading toward the doorway. This was not going to be a sad sendoff.
"Get out of here," Alpha Carl barked at you. "Before someone else comes looking."
You walked out into the light. You grounded yourself back into whatever the hell had just happened. Behind you, from the doorway, quiet enough that it could have been the building settling.
"Dance, baby." You saw him finger-pointing in the air—the disgust at him intensified as you watched the grown man dance around. Oh what the fuck is wrong with me.
There was nothing to do but go. You kept walking, a little shaky, but your only injury was your bruised ego. You followed Geraldo into the streets, Alpha Carl's laugh haunted you as you tried to put as much distance between you and the totem. This whole thing was between you and the rubble. Nobody else needed to know.
I wanna thank Matt Dinniman for writing Carl as such a good, good man. Yes I had to double it, that's how good he is. It is such a breath of fresh air.
Blurb: The dungeon never happens and Carl gets to live happily ever after with Donut and Reader.
I got inspired to write something fluffy to soften the blow of whatever Book 8 has planned for Carl and crew 😭 Carl and Donut deserve the world.
After he catnapped Donut, Carl had no idea where to go. It actually wasn't as dramatic as he thought—Bea couldn't give two shits about anything, really. All he got was a string of manic text messages where she cussed him out, but they stopped as soon as he asked if she wanted Donut back. Bea had blocked him on all social media by the end of the day, and he had to remind himself to change his passwords so she couldn’t access them anymore.
He ended up leaving Seattle, planning to embark on a multi-day road trip with Donut, heading South. He was thinking about California—his goal was to put as much distance between himself and that city as possible. So, he quit his job and gathered his things into a suitcase before Bea came home from the Bahamas. Donut sat in the front seat of his truck, her cat bed nicely laid out with an assortment of treats and toys at her disposal.
He drove until his car got a flat tire somewhere near the coast, about four hours out. He laughed the whole time on the side of the highway, looking like a maniac. He had only made it four hours. The tow truck driver towed him to an auto shop near one of the coastal towns. Hanging in the window was a job ad for a boat repairman position at the local marina. Carl called the number and was hired the next day.
He had to sleep in and out of his truck and motel rooms for the next couple of weeks, but he made sure Donut was comfortable and fed. She was his everything now, and he did not take his fatherly duties lightly. She still slept in the crook of his neck every night. He enjoyed the daily grind of his work and started making friends there and at a gym he worked out at. He kept up with his old friends in Seattle still—the guys he'd play video games with.
The small, coastal town was the kind of town that didn't ask questions about their new inhabitant. Quiet, a little grey, population small enough that everyone knew the new marina guy's name within a month.
Small town life suited him. He could grab beers with his buddies after work, go swim in the ocean, hike in the dense evergreen forests, and go back home to Donut all in one day. His neighbors were kind, and no one looked at him like he was a loser. Hell, he made the newspaper yesterday for rescuing his elderly neighbor's cat out of a tree. Donut wasn't happy that he'd used her treats for this—he'd gotten an earful of meows and hisses when he came back inside.
For the first time in years he felt like he could breathe.
After scraping together enough cash, he eventually found a one-bedroom on the outskirts of town. It was a third floor unit, with a balcony that looked out over a sharp cliff, the roiling waves keeping him and Donut constant company. Six hundred square feet, built in the 70s, the kind of place where the radiator made creepy noises and the laundry room was down two flights of stairs. He and Donut took to it immediately—she'd sit by the living room window and look out at the scenic pacific northwest backdrop all day. It was theirs.
For the first time in years, he felt true peace. He was calmer, happier. He'd even go out of his way to smile at people and ask them how they were.
And then he met her. About a year into living in the town, he had the day off and wandered across downtown. It was a beautiful January day, chilly and rainy, like he liked it. When suddenly, it hit him—literally. She had just moved to town, and had misjudged the walking distance from her apartment to work. She had run into him in her rush and spilled coffee all over him. Now he was wet from the coffee and the rain.
"I'm so sorry." When he looked in her eyes, he knew he was fucked.
And here they were now. Two years into a happy, healthy, safe relationship. She had only added to his peace, which is not something he had felt with any of his exes. Not something he felt like he deserved. She was kind, and interesting, and the biggest animal lover he knew. She bonded with Donut immediately, and had even gotten a silver butterfly charm to put on Donut's collar. Donut loved running around to hear its jingle.
They had moved into a bigger unit in the same building together—two bedrooms, seven hundred and fifty square feet, which felt like a palace compared to what he'd had before. The second bedroom was technically a home office but was mostly Donut's domain, occupied by her cat tree and an embarrassing number of toys. The irony that Donut still had her own room was not lost on him.
They scraped together their wages to manage the fifteen hundred a month rent and worked hard for the future they wanted. This domesticity had made Carl start to think about children, which had shocked him. He had never wanted to be a father, didn't want to screw up a kid the way his parents had fucked him up, but that fear diminished when they'd talk about it.
He used to have panic attacks at the thought of children, or marriage, and becoming stuck in the cycle and responsibility of what either meant. The idea of it would close in on him like a wall. But with her, he wanted a wife. He'd sometimes daydream of her pregnant, how she'd be as a mother—patient, and a little silly, the kind of mom who'd do the voices during bedtime stories. How he'd be as a father—he didn't have much of a blueprint for that one, but for the first time, it didn't scare him. He knew that, with her, he'd be able to figure it out.
He was even proposing soon, the ring tucked somewhere in a boot in their closet. He was planning a road trip to Yosemite—he was quite the outdoorsman now. Take her on their favorite hike, pop the question. He was still figuring out how to get the cat involved.
"Honey, I'm home!" Her bright, cheery voice cut through his headset. He paused his game, something with guns and fighting, and took the headphone off his ear. The cat on his lap shifted as she felt him move. He pet Princess Donut's head as a sign of apology.
"Hi, babe." He shouted from the living room. "How was work?" He knew her so well that he grinned as he imagined the steps she was taking right now. She was hanging her rain coat in the hallway closet, slipping off her scarf and boots at the same time, dropping her heavy purse on the hallway bench. She'd push her boots under the coats, never making sure they were properly straight—a habit that drove Carl wild—and was now moving towards the kitchen, where she dropped off her rainbow unicorn themed lunchbox. He grinned as he heard a thud and the clanking of her ginormous water bottle.
Her radiant smile greeted him as she moved to the couch to give him a hug. "What, no welcome home kiss?" He teased her. She rolled her eyes and pressed her lips against his. His hand moved to grab at her ass and she playfully swatted it away. "Not in front of Donut." She pet the flat-faced Persian on her head, on that one spot she liked between her ears. "Hi, Princess. Were you a good girl today?" Donut seemed to purr yes.
"Work was good. It's so slow now since it's the offseason, but I'm enjoying the quiet." She worked as a receptionist at one of the boutique hotels in town. "Actually, Stephen wanted to talk to me on Monday about potentially picking up shifts to train as a manager."
Carl perked up at the news. "That's great, babe! I'm glad they're finally recognizing what they have." She cooed at him as she kept scratching the tortoiseshell. "You're so nice to me. Boyfriend of the year goes to you."
She sat beside him on the couch, still in uniform, and touched the grey sweatpants he was wearing. "Thai tonight?" He nodded. "We haven't done that in a while. I'll order while you take a shower." She kissed his cheek.
Carl had just gotten off the phone and had engrossed himself back in his game when she walked back in with a big t-shirt on and pajama pants, a white towel wrapped around her head. She plopped beside him, scaring Donut out of his lap. "Sorry, girl," she tried apologizing to the cat, but Donut had already relocated to her cat tree in the corner of the second bedroom, visible through the open door, judging them from her height. She called another apology to the cat while cuddling into Carl's Coast Guard hoodie, the material soft from the years worn.
"The restaurant said twenty minutes for delivery—which you know means forty." He shut down his game to switch to Netflix. She tucked into his side, pulling a fluffy blanket over them. "Wanna watch the new action movie? It has romance, and guns!" She hit finger guns in the air and he laughed. "Sounds like a plan."
On Fridays, Carl usually worked in the morning, and she'd be gone all day. She'd come back home, they'd order takeout and watch a movie. After, Carl would make love to her, hold her close in the most intimate way. They'd fall asleep, Donut joining to sleep in the crook of Carl's neck.
And so they settled into their Friday night routine, the balcony door rattling quietly against the January wind off the coast, the cliff side dark beyond the glass.
Donut had finally forgiven them of their trespasses. She hopped down from the cat tree and padded out to the living room, then into his lap, and started making biscuits into the blanket. She cooed at the cat's behavior. "Thank you for forgiving me, Princess." She scratched Donut's back, her purrs increasing in volume.
Outside, the rain started up again, soft against the windows.
Carl tucked her closer. He thought about the ring in the boot in the closet. He thought about the second bedroom and what else it could be someday. He thought about a flat tire on a coastal highway and how sometimes the universe had better ideas than you did.
His girls were beside him. The radiator clicked on with its usual moans. The food would be here in forty minutes.
I am SO excited for A Parade of Horribles!! My plan for Tuesday is me, my Kindle, and absolutely nothing else. I hope y'all get the chance to just binge too, and I cannot wait to discuss!
A little life update—this summer I start studying for the an exam, so I know my writing time is going to take a hit. I'm trying to get as much posted as I can now just in case I go MIA more than expected.
If you want to see more of anything, have requests, or just want to chat, my inbox is always open. This community is so creative and your ideas genuinely inspire me.
I have two one-shots posting this weekend so I can go into book 8 with a clear head and let it inspire whatever comes next—an Alpha Carl x Reader and a Mordecai x Reader. I cannot wait to see what this community creates with the new material (thank you Matt for keeping us fed). Y'all never fail to amaze me and I'm so grateful for every one of you!! MWAH 💋
