Literature / The Butcher's Masquerade

"Surviving is winning... Everything else is bullshit." - Michael de Santa, Grand Theft Auto V

Orren: Do you remember what I said the last time you were in here?
Carl: I don't really remember.
Orren: I said if it were up to me, I'd have you removed. At the time, the kua-tin wanted to keep you, and the Syndicate council was indifferent. After this last little stunt, nobody is indifferent anymore.

After Carl's exploits at the end of the last floor, the Gate of the Feral Gods is taken from him, but due to help from his new lawyer, he is given collateral and a promise that he will get it back on the ninth floor. Once again, Carl leaves a meeting with a liaison alive.

Now he just has to survive the hundreds of hunters gunning for him.

The sixth floor is the Hunting Grounds, a vast jungle where tourists from outside the dungeon are allowed to come in and hunt the crawlers for loot. Carl attacks them in their own city early and spends the entire floor whittling them down to size. He even ends up in a personal vendetta with Vrah, the lead hunter, after he kills her sister.

At the end of the floor, hunters and crawlers will be drawn together in a single party, where they will keep the peace under threat of divine retribution.

That party is called the Butcher's Masquerade.

Dungeon Crawler Carl: The Butcher's Masquerade is the fifth book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. It covers the sixth floor of the Dungeon. The sequel is The Eye Of The Bedlam Bride.

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This novel provides examples of:

• Actually Pretty Funny: After Carl stabs the shitty reporter in the neck with the magic pen, the room is flooded with gnoll security guards. When Carl says, "Come on, you have to admit, that was pretty awesome.", one of the guards bursts into laughter and has to be shushed.
• Aerith and Bob: Vrah's sister is named Xindy. Cindy.
• Alas, Poor Villain: While some of the Hunters absolutely are pieces of shit, we get to meet a few who aren't, people who were coerced into it by more powerful groups, for example, or the homeless or refugees with no political rights just desperately trying to help their families by risking their lives in blood sport. Crapsack World indeed.
  Carl: Yet, how is it fair these rich assholes can just sit back and send other people to die? They sent hunters onto this floor knowing they were walking into a grinder. A lot of these guys were people just like you, struggling to survive.
• Always Identical Twins:
  • Ifechi, Florin's dead girlfriend, had an identical twin sister. The showrunners use her as the final boss of the floor, making the crawlers briefly think that they resurrected a dead crawler.
  • This is averted with the Popov brothers, who were fraternal twins before becoming a nodling.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Donut is surprised to learn that the crawl is using a used AI.
  Donut: Some things shouldn’t ever be purchased used. Like underwear and mattresses and jigsaw puzzles.
• As You Know: At the Dungeon Crawl History panel, Drick and Uptown Hal spend some time discussing Carl's situation (with Sydnee the historian somewhat confused sitting between them), knowing that the mudskippers will have made it so Carl can hear and they can off-handedly give him information and advice while pretending to just chitchat.
• Ass Shove: Or vagina shove? Cloaca shove? Samantha pulls four soul crystals into her mouth rolls into Diwata's/Circe's whatever and blows up all four crystals.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Bea was a bitch, spoiled rotten, but honestly totally under her mother's thumb. She loved Donut with all her heart and hated the competitions, as evidenced by Donut's song, the song Bea used to get drunk and sing to her, the first song Donut sings on key.
  Donut: Good girl, good girl, you're a good girl, my princess.
  You're like a root beer float. Oh yes, oh yes.
  I'd take it all back and never let you win. I wouldn't do it all over again.
  I love you. I love you. I'm sorry, my princess.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Donut used her message board to engineer the overthrow of a government.
  Carl: What the hell? What just happened? Did you have anything to do with this?
  Donut: Viva la revolución, Carl.
• Bittersweet Ending: A lot of innocent people died, a bunch of assholes, too, and the survivors made it to the seventh floor. Then Pony destroyed the seventh floor with two innocuous magic items, sending all of the survivors to the eighth floor. And Eva's last act was to stick the Crown of the Sepsis Whore on Katia's head.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: Carl and Donut finally get back to Clarabelle about the money she scammed out of them on the third floor when they first hired security, because not they have something they want from her and they have leverage.
  Donut: I wanted to say something about the discrepancy, but Carl here has a kind heart, and he thought we should take the matter up with you privately. [Beat] This is us, taking the matter up privately.
• Blatant Lies: Aw, Katia, of course Carl's going to do something stupid.
  Katia held my eyes, "Don't do anything stupid."
  "I won't," I lied.
• Brain Bleach: Donut's time on the fan boards lets her know there are Carl/Donut sexy-time snicks out there. Carl immediately decides he doesn't want to know.
• Bullying a Dragon: Smooth move, Naga reporter guy. Threaten notoriously non-compliant Crawler Carl while he's sitting inches away from you holding a magic wand.
• Chekhov's Gun: Signet explains that a Nodling will split into multiple new individuals when it dies, with the number of new people equal to the number of heads on the original Nodling. Importantly, the new individuals emerge as toddlers, though they grow quickly to adulthood. The Popov brothers get killed as a twin-headed Nodling, turn into toddlers, then get teleported out of the dungeon because children aren't allowed in dungeons. Their guide talked them into the race in order to save their lives.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Carl finds a drunk Hunter known for talking a lot when he's had too much to drink. The Hunter is too depressed and too drunk to do anything but laugh about the AI screwing him over. "I'm supposed to be teleported off to some random place. What're the odds that 'random' means right into your lap?"
• Comfort Food: Bea's was apparently root beer floats, judging by Donut's song.
• Conspiracy Theorist: There's a small but growing contingent of people in the galaxy, including Nihit, the Naga journalist who got scooped by Odette and then stabbed by Carl, who believe that Carl is an anti-christ figure who's been sent from the heavens to bring about the apocalypse.
• Corrupt Bureaucrat: Quasar lets Carl know that his 150 million credit plan is going to be difficult, and not just because of the money. Bribery is a way of life under the Syndicate, but also a crime. It'll be hard to hide, so he has to find some way to make it look okay.
• Crapsack World: There are hints as to just how shitty the universe outside the dungeon really is. Multiple people note that if you're not a citizen, you're not guaranteed land or air. Half of the Hunters who make it to the final fight are noted to be homeless or refugees.
• Damned by Faint Praise: Carl congratulates the Burrowers on dropping out of the Faction Wars, saying "They're cowards, but they're smart cowards".
• Due to the Dead: Imani names the new guild Safehouse Yolanda.
• Elite Army:
  • The Crawlers who have made it to the sixth floor are a Found Family of Fire-Forged Friends, united in purpose and unwilling to betray one another (barring a few outliers like Eva and Quan Ch). As a result, they tear all the Hunters apart and all of the Hunters are dead before the floor collapses, and they beat a Country Boss.
  • This is inverted with the Hunters. Even though many of them have experience across multiple crawls, the fact is that they don't work together and most of them are just accountants there to help their faction make some cash, mostly for the games on the ninth floor. Even when their families on the outside start sending them overpowered gear, they still get torn apart by the Crawlers.
• Everyone Has Standards: After Samantha suggests really kinky shit to Louis involving Juice Box changing into her mother, Carl tells her not to be weird and chucks her off the table. She bounces onto the couch and starts swearing at him... but stops when she sees the two Ursine cubs sitting nearby.
• Fixing the Game: The gnoll security guard who vets Carl for his first Crawl-Con appearance asks him to throw the drawing contest for his granddaughter, in return for some favors. Carl asks the other judges, who don't give a shit, and they oblige.
• Flawed Prototype: The seventh floor was created in a hurry after the Valtay took over the crawl. As a result, though Cascadia did an excellent job on it... it's got a real flaw based on its history that Prepotente, with help from his sponsors and the AI, can exploit to destroy it minutes after entering.
• Foreshadowing:
  • One of the items Chaco is selling at the Masquerade is Pole Position (Seventh Floor), some sort of item to help on the seventh floor. It's sold out. Too bad for the crawler who shelled out thirty hands for that one. Oh, wait, it was Prepotente...
  • The Popov brothers complain that their game guide tricked them into picking the nodling race, which combined them into a single body. He told them it would give them an "extra life." Later, Signet explains how nodlings work to Carl: Once the nodling dies, it splits into smaller ogres that quickly grow into adulthood. When the Popov brothers die in the final battle, they are reborn as ogre children... and promptly teleported out for being ineligible. They escaped. They're safe.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Zabit's trapper's bandolier detonates while he's still wearing it.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Miriam is caught in a trap. During a fight with a reverse vampire and vampire hunter named Viscount Fog, there was a sort of counterspell cascade that left Pony and the vampire hunter both paralyzed and with only one hit point. Fog died at nightfall, and Miriam was stuck because Pony had been holding her when he was paralyzed and she couldn't extricate herself without risking him dying. Worse, the debuff cascade had caused Pony's Ring of Divine Suffering to fire, giving Miriam (the only Crawler or Hunter in range) the Mark, so he'd never be able to heal until she was dead. On top of that, she's now the source of the vampire infection running rampant through the Hunting Grounds and her death is the only way to stop it by disinfecting all of the infected animals and players (the plan had to transfer the curse to Fog and then kill him, solving the problem). With no other option, Miriam asks Carl to kill her in order to save Pony.
    Carl: Miriam, I am not going to kill you. But I will stand watch with you. I'll keep you safe and Prepotente safe until the sun rises.
  • During the climactic battle at the titular Butcher's Masquerade, Carl knows someone needs to break the seal, which will send that person to The Nothing, the place of mumbled screams. He prepares to do so.
    I closed my eyes for a second, just a second, and I pretended like everything was all right. The world had never ended. My mother and I had never left Texas. I was outside right now, sitting in the shade of a tree I’d planted years before. Everyone here, all my friends, never met each other under these horrific circumstances. Donut was fat and happy, sitting in her cat tree somewhere warm, growling at a cocker spaniel.
    I'd never heard the water running through the pipes. Or gone down into the basement to investigate the noise. I’d never found the note followed by my mother a minute later.
    I let the dream live within me. Just for a second.
  • Signet does it instead, as she's come to understand that her life has been a lie, but it wasn't a lie to her, so she's determined to flip the script.
    Signet: She told me she was sad that you weren't going to survive this evening, because she'd been looking forward to meeting you on the battlefield outside of Larracos. I want a favor from you, Carl. I want youto show her exactly how real my family is. I want them all to see.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Zabit owns a trapper's bandolier. Carl uses his Trapper spell to detonate it in the final fight, ripping him in half.
• Hollywood Tone-Deaf: Donut is overjoyed to get a class that allows her to cast spells by singing. No one else is happy about it.
  Carl: She has to sing? Have you heard her sing yet?
  Mordecai: Everyone has heard her singing.
  Carl: Oh god.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Carl tells Katia to be careful about gathering former Daughters to her party and the Guild. She points out that he's the one setting up a base of operations a few miles away from Hunter central.
  • Donut finds it annoying that Samantha only talks in all caps in the chat.
• Internal Reveal: We learned Beatrice was alive in the epilogue of Gate of the Feral Gods. Here, Carl and Donut learn it from Odette.
• Irony:
  • At one point, Cascadia, the Kua-Tin in charge of the crawl (for a given level of "in charge") notes that the death rate among the Hunters is, instead of the typical 2%, a surprising 25%... She promises they're going to get a helping hand. None of them will survive.
    Cascadia: Meanwhile, the hunter casualty rate went from a two percent average to over 25 percent. Those hunters who are listening to this, don’t worry. Help is on the way!
  • Cascadia designed the Great Race on the seventh floor as a mockery of various Earth myths and a folk-tale from the wider universe outside the dungeon. Instead it becomes a race between her and Pony to see whether she can finish her description of the level before he can finish destroying it and sending everyone to the eighth floor without having to face her grand design.
    Carl: She was talking much more quickly than usual, going so fast it was difficult to understand her, like she was trying to get through it.
• Kick the Dog: One Hunter was this close to convincing Carl she might deserve to live...
  Hunter: No, no. Please. You can’t do this. I’m a real person. Not a crawler or an NPC. I’m a real person.
• Lampshade Hanging: Taking advantage of the magic coffee book thing Carl got, everyone communicates with each other in the safehouse bathroom, with everyone signing their comments. Carl reminds Donut she needs to sign her comment so everyone knows who's talking.
  Donut: IT'S QUITE OBVIOUS WHO IS SPEAKING, CARL.
• Like a Son to Me: Prepotente was one of Miriam's goats before he got a Legendary Biscuit that turned him intelligent, like happened to Donut. Her affection for him has only grown stronger in the Dungeon.
  "My beautiful boy," Miriam whispered as she turned to dust. "My beautiful boy."
• Logical Weakness: Anyone can throw any equipment at Katia and she'll automatically equip it. Eva uses this to give her the Crown of the Sepsis Whore, forcing her into a death-match with Donut once they reach the ninth floor.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Turns out that there's no rule saying that crawlers can't own a spot in faction wars. After multiple parties drop out, Carl uses an out-of-dungeon fangroup to buy a spot so that the crawlers will be able to participate as equals.
  • It's mentioned over and over that crawlers cannot skip floors. The only way to exit a floor is through a stairwell; even if a portal to another floor is opened, crawlers can't leave through it. But there's no rule that they have to stay on a floor for long. Pony exploits flaws in the design of the seventh floor to destroy the entire floor and send everyone flying through the stairwells within minutes of arrival.
  • During Carl's panel, Drick and Uptown Hal realize it's likely that, even though they can't see him, Carl can probably see them and hear everything they're saying, so take advantage of that to slip him as much information as they can about his upcoming fight.
  Syndee: I don’t understand any of this.
  Uptown Hal: Hopefully Carl will. [shares a grin with Drick] I just wish we were allowed to tell this directly to him. We’ll see.
  • Turns out the System AI even got in on the act. By awarding Carl a single share of stock in the corporations owned by the people who sued to keep him from getting the Gate, it also made him enough of a citizen that he could demand a lawyer and get help to fight back outside the Dungeon.
• Mad Bomber: Carl, natch. Mordecai told him to take the melee upgrade to his class. Instead, he took Agent Provocateur, a bomb class that gives a boost to intelligence. He's not interested in punching or kicking people to death. He wants to break them all. Also it gives him a boost to his intelligence. But mostly the breaking thing.
• Meaningful Background Event: Signet spends a lot of time at the judges' table talking with Empress D'Nadia. That conversation finally breaks the fourth wall and convinces Signet to change her plans for the evening.
• More Expendable Than You: Carl plans to break the peace at the Butcher's Masquerade, which will drag him into the Nothing, in order to start the final slaughter of the hunters. Signet, who has just realized that she is an NPC in an artificial world, does it instead.
• Morton's Fork: Without really intending to do so, Carl forced the male Mantis, Edict, into a nightmare scenario. Carl knew that Vahl, as a future brood queen, would opt to pass the Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea on to Edict rather than remove her genitalia, so offered the man a choice: we'll protect you in exchange for all your gear (he was the Hive's merchant). Unfortunately, the gear was already contracted out and giving it to Carl would destroy Edict's family, so he passed it along to a contact immediately, leaving him nothing to bargain with. The alternative, mating with Vahl, would also destroy his family, because Mantis matings are carefully contracted and it would be seen as a disgusting betrayal for him to mate with Vahl. On the other hand, refusing to mate with Vahl would be seen as an insult and her family would take revenge on his. So he takes a fourth option.
• Nice to the Waiter: Carl decides to throw the drawing contest to a guard's granddaughter, because 1) he doesn't give a shit about the cruel galaxy and their appreciation of the monstrous games and 2) hey, maybe it'll help. Given that his second appearance sees him drugged by the mercs who guide him to the stage so he'll go way off book, he's not wrong. The guards inform him that drugging him was business, but this next bit is personal. The guards set it up so he could steal a very valuable crafting table during the last few minutes before he got sent back to the dungeon. That probably cost the girl's grandfather a few credits.
• No Honor Among Thieves: At best, the Hunters only work in small groups, because they were all sent in to work as part of the Faction War on the Ninth Floor, where most of them will be pitted against each other. They come into the conflict with no concept of cooperation and, thanks to the general chaos of this particular crawl, die alone, running from fights that they could have turned into contests.
• Not Completely Useless: Benefactors gift Katia and Donut with a magic hammer and a magic stick to go along with Pony's magic solvent. They don't have any use, they don't have any stats or bonuses. It's just a regular hammer, a long metal stick, and a tube of solvent, all marked magic. At the end of the book, Pony puts the clues together and uses all three to completely destroy the seventh floor before it even begins, sending everyone to the eighth.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Carl notes that many of the Hunters have jobs like "refugee" and the like. It doesn't stop him, but he does pause a moment. One hunter even uses this to try and appeal to him for mercy... until she makes the mistake of calling herself a "real" person.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Carl shits a brick when he first meets Imogen's pet (Ferdinand, the semi-stray cat Donut fell in love with once upon a time) and another when he spies Imogen herself (Florin's love...'s identical twin sister).
  • The announcer begs Pony not to do it once she understands what the magic items were that were given to him, she worked so hard on the level. He tells her that they took his mother from him and does it anyway.
• On Three: Carl tells Donut he'll put in her nipple ring on three. We cut away after "one". A few chapters later, she still hasn't forgiven him for not doing it on three.
• One-Man Army: At the start of act three, Cascadia notes that the Hunter death rate is at 25% instead of the usual 2%. When Carl jumped Zockau at the start of the floor, he single-handedly killed 3% of the Hunters.
• Pet the Dog: Britney, the plastic surgery patient from the previous book, is quiet and pissy. However, she spends most of her screen time here being kind to Mongo, who adores her.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Carl learns that one of the hunters is basically a white collar douche who won a ticket to the big playground that is, for citizens, the dungeon.
  Accountant: I... I think I saw a thing. You fix boats.
  Carl: No. That's what I used to do. I don't do that anymore.
  Accountant: Please.
  Carl: I had a world. A whole world. A world filled with people. Some good, some bad. But most of us just wanted to work a little, live a normal life, maybe fall in love, have an adventure or two. And that was it.
  Accountant: Please. I can pay you. I don't have a lot. But I'll give you everything I have.
  You have marked Akland.
  Akland's highest stat is Constitution.
  Carl: I'm going to show you what I do now.
• Properly Paranoid: The Hunters are reasonably concerned about Carl, and can you blame them? Vrah finds a way to summon Emberus so that she can get the town guards to worship him and thus prevent Carl from staging another attack on Zockau. A number of Hunters do likewise.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Donut delivers an epic one to Beatrice once they're off the air.
  Donut: You vile, disgusting bitch. You danced with me. You sang to me. You made me feel loved. I didn't do anything wrong, and you were going to give me away. I didn't do anything wrong. Nothing. You were the only person I ever knew. I was born, and you were there. You and Carl. I loved you, and you were my world. My whole world. I know you had a bunch of cats growing up, and maybe I was just nothing to you other than a way to win more ribbons than your mother, but you were the only human I ever knew, and to me, you were everything. And I was so stupid, because I thought since I loved you, that meant you loved me. And you were just awful to Carl. And even though he's big and dumb, he didn't deserve that. He's not perfect, and I know he snores and has all these disgusting habits and smelly friends, but what you did to him is not okay. I know I make fun of him sometimes. I can't help it. I'm a cat. That's what I do. Plus, I mean, let's be honest here. He walks right into it most of the time. But you actually betrayed him. We don't do that to people we love. And you know what, Miss Beatrice? You don't deserve how sad I feel right now. I still love you. I still miss you, and I hate myself for it. You don't deserve to get to explain your side of the story. You lost that chance. But I'm glad you escaped. Because if the world ends and none of us survive except for you, I think that's an even more fitting fate. Because you're going to be all alone, and maybe then you'll finally understand how you made me and Carl feel.
  The silence hung heavy in the air.
  You're not my person anymore. Carl is. He's always been.
• Refuge in Audacity: What's the first thing Carl does? Teleport into the town the Hunters aren't allowed to leave and cause slaughter and mayhem while they're all drunk off their asses. He kills hundreds of NPCs, ruins the front of the Desperado Club, trapping any Hunters who were partying in there, and gets thirty four Hunter kills. And then he survives. Part of the success of his gambit is due to Miriam and Prepotente being there, too, trying much the same thing. Prepotente was casting debuffs with Miriam supporting him, but the only one that worked was the one that got the Hunters all monstrously more drunk than they intended. Carl ends up killing a little over 3% of the Hunters. Donut gets a kill, too.
• The Reveal: Lucia Mar is actually multiple children being controlled by one of her dogs. They really, really screwed with the game when it came to making her.
• Rule of Drama: The final boss of Signet's quest is Imogen, her half-sister, the high elf queen and the final boss of the floor. Carl immediately realizes there's no way that the dungeon showrunners are going to let some no-name side program get the kill on the final boss, so he works to keep Signet from springing her ambush early. The System AI drags her in anyway so it can watch the fireworks.
• Rule of Symbolism: Carl's PTSD manifests as flashbacks when he's confronted with something specific. When it's not something specific, it's roaring water, like a creek, or a river... or the water rushing through the pipe on which his mother hung herself.
• Running Gag: Carl gets yet another tattoo, this one a prison ink spiderweb on his left elbow as a result of using the Night Wyrm's Ring of Divine Suffering to mark and kill a hunter.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After Carl wins the confrontation with two sets of Hunters who all want him dead, in which he's thrown into the situation with no ability to prepare himself, and gives Vahl Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea then removes her ability to remove it... A lot of Hunters decide they don't much want to try and trap Carl that way again.
• Serial-Killer Killer: Katia leaves Carl and Donut to go join the Daughters and hunt down Eva. Likewise, before they got dragged into the convention, the Popov brothers were hunting a group of Polish mercs who had turned into player killers (even killing their former leader when he objected to them turning into player killers).
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Carl is starting to be troubled by all the experiences he has had, and it manifests as flashbacks to specific events and a roaring sound like a creek or river when it's not specific (it's the sound of the water moving through the pipe his mother hung herself on after she failed to kill his father. On Carl's birthday. As a present to him.).
• Shown Their Work: A Prince Rupert's Drop is what happens when you drop molten glass in water. It creates a teardrop-shaped bead of glass with a really long tail. You can smack the bead with a hammer and it won't break, but the smallest nick in the tail will cause the whole thing to shatter into glass dust. That's how Prepotente destroys the seventh floor. He took the Pole Position boost so he could be certain he'd be in the proper position to do so with the useless magic items the sponsors gave Donut.
• Shout-Out: Donut gets a complicated one when she complains that she thought the All-Tree was "like that tree from that weird, blue alien movie with the Ghostbusters lady and that Scientologist guy who married Eric Forman’s mom on Friends".
• Skewed Priorities: Louis really loves his car. Even if that car is a flying house that's been turned into a convertible.
  Sledge: Guard turrets get good. Twister house blow up. Got both.
  Louis: Nooooooo!
  Sledge: Surviving is winning, Louis. Everything else is bullshit.
• Spanner in the Works: Normally, Carl is this to the Syndicate, while the AI is this to Carl. This time, the climax features everyone screwing up everything for everyone until Signet steps in to screw it up for the powers that be and set the dungeon crawlers free.
• Stealth Pun: Big Tina's backstory is that she was once an Ursine girl who was cursed for learning to dance. A "dancing bear" is an expression referring to something that's amazing, but not for being good. "It's not amazing how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all."
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In contrast to the thinking NPCs, who Carl pities, he's far more willing to torture and casually kill the Hunters, because they chose to be here, whereas the NPCs are slaves like himself. This is despite the fact that he recognizes that many of them are low level employees of great powers who don't themselves necessarily have that much choice in the matter, since they live in Crapsack Universe.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Off-screen, and not really understanding the implications of what she was doing, Donut helped smuggle Valtay worms to Zev and the Borant Liberation Front, leading to a revolution that overthrew the Bloom party and helped Valtay stage a hostile takeover of the Borant Corporation. Now the Valtay are retooling the show by killing off most of the popular characters, including Carl and Donut.
• Villainous Incest: Honestly, exactly what you would expect from these Syndicate fucks. Circe sponsored the god Diawat so she could fuck her own daughter to cure her of Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea.
• Wham Line:
  • "I certainly would never have smuggled all those Valtay secret agent guys to Zev and the Borant Emancipation Front if I'd known this was going to happen."
  • Carl apologizes to Donut for what's about to happen. Then, "Bomo. Cast your spell. Send us to the stairwell in Zockau. Do it now."
• What the Hell, Hero?: Carl goes above and beyond by immediately teleporting into Zockau, the capital city full of Hunters. Donut and Mordecai both rip him apart for it. But it works.
  • In a darker example, Carl beats a person to death resulting in Donut getting scared and a couple of werecastors to share a disturbed look.