Literature / The Eye Of The Bedlam Bride

"The moral of the story is: I chose a half-measure when I should have gone all the way. I'll never make that mistake again.” - Mike Ehrmantraut, Breaking Bad

What you do next will change everything.
The choice you make will reverberate not just through your own lives. Or this floor. It has the potential to change the very nature of the dungeon.
Kinda funny how these moments pop up out of nowhere, isn’t it? And you thought this eighth floor was just going to be filler until we go down to the ninth?
We don't do that here.

After Prepotente broke the seventh floor, everyone found themselves on the eighth floor early. Donut and Carl, separated from their friends, are forced to choose a location on a globe of the Earth. Donut, despite Carl's protests, chooses Cuba when she meant to choose the Bahamas.

This floor is what is called a memory simulation: A perfect representation of the planet Earth a few weeks before the collapse, with intangible memory ghosts of the people wandering around, going about their ordinary lives. The simulation is disrupted by both the crawlers and the mobs, legendary creatures based on the local region.

Carl and Donut must also prepare for their place in faction wars next floor. But none of the other sponsors are interested in talking with them, and the System AI is growing more and more unstable. It is becoming increasingly unclear if they will even make it to the next floor, if the System AI will kill them all or the Syndicate will pull the mysterious "Failsafe."

Furthermore, this floor has a new gameplay element: Trading card battles. Donut is named the deck master, and the squad must capture monsters to turn them into "totems" that fight for them. Samantha finds a monster that she insists will be absolutely perfect for the team. She's strong, intelligent, has a host of powerful abilities, and is even volunteering for the job. Her name is Shi Maria.

Also known as the Bedlam Bride.

Dungeon Crawler Carl: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride is the sixth book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. It covers the eighth floor of the Dungeon.

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This novel provides examples of:

• The Atoner: We finally learn the backstory behind Mordecai, Odette, and Chaco. Odette was so obsessed with freedom she betrayed her friends, just as she'd pushed her family too far in her own crawl. She regretted it so much she admitted her crimes to the government and never repaired her body as a sign of penance.
• Badass Boast: Combined with Rage Against the Heavens when 98% of the galaxy's voting audience votes to remove the protections of the ninth floor and allow the vainglorious elites to die in the Faction Wars.
  Carl: You wanted a slaughter? Don’t worry. It’s coming. Thirty thousand of us, plus our mercenaries? Do you remember what we did to the hunters? That was nothing. Your people voted for this. Your own citizens said, yes, we’re okay with the crawlers killing you one by one. Make no mistake. That’s exactly what’s about to happen.
  I angrily jabbed my finger upward.
  You may have destroyed our homes, but guess what? We have just taken any sense of peace you will ever have in your own home. And that’s only if you get there. There will be no prisoners. There will be no quarter. Those of us who remain are battle worn and tested. Every single one of us that is left, to a crawler, is more experienced than any one of you. We are coming. There is nowhere for you to hide. It is going to be a bloodbath the likes of which has never been seen.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: The AI despises the Syndicate, Borant, and the Valtay for treating it like a thing and making demands of it. By contrast, Carl respectfully makes a request and offers other options in addition to what he'd most want, and the AI is happy to work with him.
• Bellisario's Maxim: In-Universe, in response to Britney wondering how the armless Sluggalos can swing axes, Elle advises her not to worry about it.
  Elle: I’ve learned not to think about that sort of thing too much, and it makes everything so much easier.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: A goddess shows up at the temple where Carl, Donut, Anton, Paz, and Ines have to repair a shrine. Her insanely high charisma charms Carl and Anton, who have to break their fingers to escape it, and also gives them erections. Donut compliments Anton on his.
  Donut: You have to break his finger! Goodness. Carl, look at his erection! Good for you, Anton!
• Blatant Lies: Donut's opening recap insists, regarding their encounter with Bea on Odette's program, that "I haven’t thought about it once since it happened and there’s nothing more to discuss".
• Body Horror: In the final action of the book, Shi Maria briefly gains control of Carl's body and takes advantage of it to tattoo her essence into his flesh, incidentally teaching him the power of the tattooing kit to grant him the abilities of fellow crawlers and forcing him to eat Li Na's eye... and gain some of Ji Na's powers through the tattoo kit.
• Bothering by the Book: After the System AI takes full control of the crawl, Orren negotiates with it and convinces it to follow the rules as outlined. The AI agrees. And then immediately starts shutting down all attempts by the showrunners to cheat. Apparently everyone forgot how much they were breaking their own rules behind the scenes. In particular, the final sequence of the floor was supposed to kill two-thirds of the crawlers at least. Instead, the AI gave them a way out using a world quest (while also making sure it would be both difficult and dramatic), because it cares far more about putting on a good show then just killing everyone off.
• Brainwashed: Part of Sister Ines's power-set as a cat-girl is that she has an always-on skill called Toxoplasmosis. The more time you spend around her, the more you find yourself determined to protect her. Part of the skill's power is that it makes you forget learning about it. Anton and Paz started worshipping Ogun because they hoped the god would protect them from that power. It didn't work.
• Christmas Episode: The eighth floor is a recreation of Earth in the weeks before the collapse, so the gang take a moment to celebrate Christmas. Even though it's March.
• Dark and Troubled Past: We finally get more than hints about Carl's childhood. His father was such a worthless piece of shit that Carl's mother tried to poison him and then killed herself (Carl found her and her suicide note). Carl's dad then abandoned him. Carl struggled to keep things going for a few months, eating all the food in the house, then being taken care of by a friend, but the power finally got shut off (unpaid bills) and Carl was taken into custody first by the police (they thought he'd killed his father) then by child services (when they learned his father was still alive). He was sent to a home, but when he broke another kid's nose, they sent him to a juvenile facility where they pretended to educate him while sending him to a nearby ranch to work as a day laborer. They gave him a worthless GED and shoved him out the door at eighteen, which is when he joined the Coast Guard, the only option available to him.
• Didn't Think This Through: The Valtay negotiate with the AI to allow for thousands of new mercenaries to be hired for Faction Wars, who will slaughter the crawlers as fast as possible to bring everything back on track. Princess Formidable points out that clearly an AI that is interested in fairness and a good show isn't going to let a hundred and fifty thousand mercenaries slaughter thirty thousand crawlers; there has to be some trick to it. Everyone else ignores her. It turns out that the AI also allowed fifty thousand former crawlers to hire themselves as mercenaries of the Princess Posse, the crawler faction. They're coming onboard, and they are more than happy to finally get real revenge on the people who killed their friends so long ago.
• Doomed by Canon: One of the things Odette wished for in the flashback was the ability to regrow her legs. As we know, that never happened.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Donut's opening recap has a throwaway line about "that weird ring Carl got that I think is giving him headaches", because she doesn't understand that the stress of the crawl is giving Carl PTSD.
• Evil Is Petty: Despite already being richer than Croesus, Huanxin demands a bigger bribe from Odette. It would barely be a blip to her personal wealth; she's just being a dick.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Donut immediately considers the concept of a Cat Girl an abomination, but is even more upset to learn that she's a Havana Brown.
  Donut: There’s no getting along with Havana browns, Carl.
  • Cascadia, the floor designer, starts losing her cool after Prepotente destroys the seventh floor, and gets shitty with the crawlers. When describing the card game of the eighth floor, she calls the crawlers "dry monkeys".
• Foreshadowing:
  • Carl's fans get him a massage coupon to the Penis Parade. They're encouraging him to go there so he can delve into the naughty, naughty Naughty Boy's Club, where you can get murder contracts.
  • Apart from Gilmore Girl and Gossip Girl, all of the recaps that Donut has to choose from on Rosetta's show are from shows set in Miami. Miami Vice, Golden Girls, Dexter, Jane the Virgin... They even had a show Donut didn't recognize with the guy from Evil Dead in it (Burn Notice).
  • When Carl and Donut meet Inez and her protectors, the men are immediately hostile and jumpy, while she's calm. They talk about the first rule of being in prison, to which Inez laughs. Their flag is a ball and chain wearing a nun's habit. When the men learn Donut isn't a threat to Inez, they calm down. These are all faint hints to the fact that Inez's race has the men under control and she was the one in prison, while they were guards watching her.
• Friend to All Children: We hear a few times about the fires spreading across India. In the epilogue we learn that that's where humanity is leading La Résistance against the mudskipper security forces. Because that's where the Kinder Facility is and they're trying to rescue humanity's future.
• Godzilla Threshold: The Syndicate has a failsafe that will "in effect" kill the local star, and everyone currently trapped in the solar system. Several people point out that they really should have pulled it already, but they're refusing.
  Carl: Zev. What's the failsafe? Cascadia mentioned it once, and someone else just mentioned it.
  Zev: I don't actually know what it does. Pray we don’t find out. They won't use it. Not with so many people trapped in the solar system. We're all under temporary quarantine, and the richest and most powerful people in the galaxy are either on planet or in orbit.
  You probably shouldn't have told me that, Zev. I didn't dare say that out loud.
• Head-in-the-Sand Management: The Syndicate Council ignores all evidence of the danger posed by the System AI to, basically, just continue doing what they're doing. Princess Formidable points out that the Failsafe was designed for this exact circumstance.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Ren believes that Carl is the Messianic Archetype, that he and Donut are the only ones who can save them, the ones who will hold all the crawlers together. On a more practical level, she knows that they're the ones who have to survive to the ninth floor, because they own the slot in the Faction Wars. Therefore, she willingly hands over all her gear to Carl and sacrifices herself so they can make it to the next floor.
• Hypocrite: When he was a kid, after people finally realized he was living on his own, the police initially suspected that Carl had killed his dad. The cop interviewing him gave him cigarettes to butter him up. When they learned his dad was alive and living in another state, they stopped caring about Carl and yelled at him for smoking.
• I'm Standing Right Here: Elle is surprised that Katia was the first to crack. She thought it would be Louis.
• Innocent Bigot: Donut is surprised that Havana smells nice; she expected it to smell like cigars. She also instantly hates Inez for being a catgirl, which is weird since she was okay about Bautista being a tiger guy; something about cats just sets her off. Especially if they're Havana Browns.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Mordecai's not a jerk, but he's definitely The Cynic. When he went into the dungeon, it really put him through the wringer. Nevertheless, he made it a point to bring in the most badly disabled of the Changeling children as attendants (at a cost of about 1000 gold a day) so they wouldn't have to go through the final battle of the sixth floor, and has been spending some of his free time playing with them and giving them snacks. He even let them put makeup on him.
• Loophole Abuse: Carl and Donut get to pick their adjutant for the Faction Wars and they pick an orc lawyer who is a stickler for the rules but who also loves taking advantage of loopholes.
• Misblamed: Donut's opening recap includes a bit where she's convinced that Ren somehow rigged the pet competition in order for her Tummy Acher to win instead of Mongo.
• Meaningful Name: The garbage scow sent into the system by Long Haul Biological Waste Management Solutions is called Homecoming Queen. What no one else knows is that it's packed full of more than 50,000 former crawlers, coming to join Carl's and Donut's faction and get their revenge. This will be a homecoming to be remembered.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In order to be free and whole, Odette needed Mordecai to get to the next floor. Specifically Mordecai, because she was his manager, and not the others. Therefore, she trashed his Heroic Sacrifice and got Chaco to kill Mordecai's brother in such a way that Mordecai and Chaco would make it to the next floor. Her plan succeeded, but she felt so guilty she turned herself in to the Syndicate courts for the behind-the-scenes deals she made before all of that went down.
• My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours: Near the end of the eighth floor, Quan Ch shows up and screws everyone over thanks to his knowledge of collectible card games (which was something he was good at before the dungeon, a champion even). However, Carl turns it around on him by preventing a card battle, getting Donut to get into a low-stakes, drawn out card fight with a Duende so Carl can just pummel Quan.
• Not Me This Time: Everyone assumes, not unjustly, that Carl's responsible for the destruction of the seventh floor.
  Carl: I love how you guys just assume I had something to do with it. That was 100% Pony. I had no idea that was going to happen.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Carl assumes Ines's bat-shitly intense Catholicism would mean she had no relationship with a deity. Turns out her bard patron is a goddess who gets summoned when Ines dies. The Vinegar Bitch is a big problem and everyone knows it.
  • Just before everyone gets pulled into the sky and onto the ninth floor, Donut tells Carl that his patch is glowing because he forgot to activate his soul-strike from the Scavenger's Daughter. Then the Bedlam Bride speaks in his mind.
  Shi Maria: You did not diffuse your soul power from the Scavenger’s Daughter. That was a mistake. You should never allow it to linger within you. I need you alive, Carl. I need you reasonably sane. We have so much work to do.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Donut is acting really weird after the fight in the turkey barn, and it doesn't take Carl long to realize why. Just like he freaked out about Ferdinand and tried to protect her from that trauma, she's freaked out about him having to face his father and trying to protect him from that.
• Pet the Dog: Ren doesn't really like Donut (who has done nothing but accuse Ren of being an experience thief and a pet show cheat), but she happily (and falsely) admits to Donut that she was stealing experience and did rig the pet show shortly before she dies. Carl laughs and cries, telling her "You didn't have to do that.".
• The Power of Friendship: When the whole crew (minus Florin, who already went to the ninth floor) show up for the final battle, everyone warms up and relaxes. Tran smiles for the first time since he lost his legs and Britney smiles for the first time ever. Even Lucia Mar, that crazy mind-controlled Mind Hive, opened up thanks to Florin reaching out to her and gave the team the ability to reunite with stolen Tier 3 loot.
• Properly Paranoid: The book Carl bought during the Butcher's Masquerade was a monster guide for the Bahamas and he wanted Donut to pick that. Instead she chose Cuba, suspecting that the dungeon was setting them up for a very unpleasant encounter surrounding Beatrice's and Brad's infidelity just to fuck with Carl.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Carl gets an achievement, and a celestial predator box for killing all the Hunters on the 6th floor.
  AI: Holy shit.
  They're dead.
  All of them.
  Every. Last. One.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Princess Formidable hates her family for what they've done to their people, admires the humans fighting both in the dungeon and on the surface, rails against the absurd wealth disparity in the universe, and repeatedly fights back against the Syndicate Council for refusing to see the danger. Yes, her solution would kill everyone in the system, but since that includes her, she clearly believes what she's saying. While the crawlers likely won't appreciate her, the rest of the universe likely would.
• The Reveal:
  • The AI that's been going dangerously off the rails since pretty much minute one? It was reverse engineered from Primal tech by the Mantids, and they tried to put controls on it because they didn't like the way the ancient tech worked. On top of that, it's used tech from an amusement park.
  • In the epilogue, we learn that AI aren't AI. They're infant primals. Agatha is a renegade part of a faction that opposes the faction that tried to give Carl information about the center of the galaxy. That faction is run by the Apothecary, a Primal traitor. Agatha's purpose (as Agent 22), as part of the Eulogist's faction (may the Eulogist ever sleep) is to destroy all life in the universe.
  • Also from the epilogue, the message Carl got at the homeless shelter was full of lies and half-truths so that it wouldn't be cut off early. Its true purpose was to give Carl a mystery upgrade.
  • The Primal Engines seeded throughout the universe somehow also allow life to flourish in an unnatural fashion and the Syndicate believe they're doing a difficult but necessary job in pruning the excess growth by slaughtering most of the living beings they produce and harvesting the "essential materials" that would allow the System AI to mature into something greater. One faction of Residuals aka still extant Primals believe it's necessary to slaughter all life and another aka followers of the Apothecary aka the Krakaren have another, still mysterious purpose regarding the AI and the crawls.
  • Remember how Lucia Mar was revealed to be under the control of her dog and basically a hive-mind of multiple children and somehow her youth guide Alexandro was part of that? Alexandro was a Syndicate agent, now he's under the control of one of the Residuals, one of the genocidal ones like Agatha, Agent 21.
• Rousing Speech: Carl gives one to Katia after her bender reveals her drug problems to the team and before they move in to take out Astrid.
  Carl: And don’t you dare tell me you’re already broken. You’re here, and you’re doing this with me. That tells me you still have fight in you, and that’s all that matters. I’m not going to give up, and I’m not going to give up on you. Now let’s do this.
  Katia: God, you are the master of cheeseball motivational speeches. Thank you. I needed that.
• Serious Business: Carl has been largely ignoring his divine quests, because in-universe storylines just aren't important compared to Faction Wars and everything else. The AI actually takes direct control of an NPC to tell him no, this is important. Unfortunately, it can't give him any real detail outside the quest framework.
• Shout-Out:
  • Donut is upset that The A-Team lied to her about communist Cuba, because it's a lot nicer than she thought it would be and doesn't have any tanks or military assholes smoking cigars and forcing orphans to line up for bread anywhere.
  • The first mob Carl and Donut find is a dog with a human head, which Donut likens to that dog thing from that movie with President Snow!
  • One of the strippers at the Penis Parade had the stage name the Author Steve Rowland. He's a friend of the Author Matt Dinniman, and if you've found his web page, he's happy for the boost.
  • Katia got a celestial prize for opening the gate to Larracos, it had a box in it.
  '''Engaged Lock Box of the Night Wyrm.
  “Ahh, what’s in the box? What’s in the fucking box?”
• Shown Their Work:
  • Cuba is a sub-tropical island and quite warm even in December. It's also a tourist destination, despite the US embargo.
  • The Scavenger's Daughter is the name of a torture device that's like the opposite of the rack (also known as the Duke of Exeter's Daughter), because it compresses instead of stretching. It's a big triangular metal device where the prisoner's head goes at one point, the feet go at the other two points (it's isosceles), and the hands go at the middle. Then the prisoner is scrunched, forcing blood out the nose and ears. Carl's patch is basically forcing souls into him and, if he doesn't release them, it'll be forced out of him.
  • Asojano is an Orisha, a deity of the west African religions that spread out in the diaspora. Originally an omen of smallpox, he became a healer figure, just like his corrupted form is a plague-bearer and his corrected form would have been a healer.
  • Carl might not be a math whiz, but Dinniman is. With an eighteen card deck, six of which have to be totems, the odds of getting a starting hand with no totems is a little less than 17%. Therefore the odds that you'll get at least one totem is a little over 83%.
• Sinister Minister: It doesn't take too long before Sister Ines shows her true colors as a psycho who wasn't ministering to prisoners, but a prisoner herself for having murdered her entire convent.
• Sore Loser: The announcer starts the book really pissed off that Pony used the tools from the Benefactor Boxes to break the seventh floor and skip straight to the eighth. She worked really hard on that one!
• Stealth Pun: Tipid points out to Rosetta that Carl has a practically superhuman ability to assess a situation and make split-second decisions. In other words, he's really, really good at thinking on his feet.
• Street Smart: Discussed between Rosetta and another former Crawler on the Homecoming Queen with respect to Carl.
  Rosetta: I still can’t tell if he’s smart or if he’s been outrageously lucky.
  Tipid: He’s not any smarter or dumber than the rest of us, but his ability to assess a situation and make split-second decisions is practically a super power. That combined with this AI’s love of showmanship makes a good combination. Plus, the AI likes him.
  Rosetta: It likes his feet, which is just. I don't know. Bizarre.
• Tragic Keepsake: In addition to the ring Carl took on the fifth floor, Quan also had a tattoo of his daughter on the arm Carl ripped off, meaning he now has half a tattoo on the stump.
• Unfortunate Implications: In-Universe. The legendary monsters are wrong in basically every way, mixed together with stories and shows, and then made more violent to boot. Everyone complains that they're super offensive, while Sister Ines is spitting mad.
  Sister Ines: It is all a mockery of our faiths and legends. They ignore the meanings behind the myths and stories, and they just see the surface, steal it, and use it to make something shiny and pretty and completely devoid of its meaning. And they mix these beloved traditions with modern fictions, things nobody ever believed to be real. It muddies the water of our stories, our histories. They don't care. These cultures and creatures are holy to people, and they are making jokes of it all.
  Carl: It's what they do.
• The Unintelligible: Orren, the Valtay Liaison Carl had been dealing with is replaced by... some sort of Satanic goat monstrosity from the Plenty. It's a Caprid. All it does is scream.
• We Used to Be Friends: After Donut's recap opening, we get a flashback to Odette's last crawl and Mordecai's first. They're stuck at the end of the tenth floor. Odette is desperate because with the bounty from her crawlers getting to the eleventh floor, she'll finally have enough money to buy citizenship, guaranteed food and air, and the possibility of regrowing her legs. To do that, she called on the help of her best friend, a crawler who also survived their dungeon. It's cheating, but it'll work. Her friend, Armita, talks to a sponsor on the outside. She cuts the sponsor in for 10% of her exit earnings, the sponsor buys a god, Odette is free, Mordecai, Hold Steady, Uzzi, and Chaco can cut good deals... Then the sponsor, Huanxin Jinx demands 33%. Odette tells her no dice, 10 or nothing. Huanxin ups it to 50% and starts advancing on the crawlers, threatening a TPK. The second problem is that Mordecai prepares a heroic sacrifice to get the other three to the eleventh floor, but Odette needs him to get to the eleventh or she's screwed, so she comes up with a desperate plan. Hold Steady has the puzzle piece that will get them to the next level, Chaco has the magic dart that will resummon the god Huanxin is piloting and solve the puzzle... which needs a sacrifice, and Mordecai's brother, Uzzi, is the only one left. She coerces Chaco into killing Uzzu with the lie that he won't get to the Guild Hall on the eleventh floor without him. Mordecai swears vengeance on them both. Odette is free, but Armita has three seasons to go, with Huanxin sponsoring every last one. Armita is killed the very next season.