Carl and Samantha are allies whose relationship begins when Carl takes custody of the severed vessel containing the minor deity Psamathe, commonly called Samantha. Carl initially regards her as a dangerous source of information who must be kept inside a saferoom. Samantha regards him as a means of recovering her body and reuniting with her child. Across the fifth through ninth floors, this arrangement develops into a contentious but durable partnership. Carl supplies protection, transportation, and a place within his group; Samantha contributes knowledge of gods and demons, reconnaissance, near-indestructibility, and an increasing willingness to endanger herself for Carl's allies.
Samantha frequently describes Carl as a lover or former lover, but Carl never treats their relationship as romantic. He responds to her advances, threats, and invented history by setting practical limits. The more consequential change is that he stops treating her only as an object to be contained or deployed. By the eighth floor he calls her part of the team and admits that he would take exceptional risks to recover her even without a tactical reward. On the ninth, he entrusts her with missions that depend on independent judgment, although he continues to intervene when her obsessions threaten the rest of the group.
Taking responsibility for Psamathe
Carl first speaks directly with Samantha near the end of the fifth floor, after the crystallization affecting the Lika love doll is broken. The surviving head is possessed by the Withering Spirit of Psamathe, whose earlier attempt to escape the Nothing divided her essence. Part of her took refuge in the unoccupied naiad-shaped doll. The rest of the doll is shattered during the fifth-floor crisis, leaving the spirit embodied in a severed artificial head. Carl adjusts the head's jaw until her speech becomes intelligible and introduces himself. Although the item description identifies Samantha as a name Psamathe's friends used, Carl immediately adopts it because he finds her divine name cumbersome.
Their first conversation establishes their competing aims. Samantha wants Carl to recover the scattered pieces of the doll and help restore her physical form. She also remains concerned about the sand ooze she calls her child. Carl refuses the impossible search for fragments that have washed into the ocean and initially rejects her request to travel with him. He already has several dependents, and taking a displaced deity outside a saferoom could attract the beings that pursued her from the Nothing. Mordecai nevertheless argues that her knowledge could be valuable. Carl accepts that reasoning, puts the head in the training room, and hires her as a member of the saferoom staff so she can communicate by chat.
The decision makes Carl responsible for a being he neither understands nor fully controls. Samantha's standard response to frustration is a threat against someone's mother, and Carl answers her outbursts with rules, confinement, or the possibility of withholding help. Yet he also begins consulting her almost immediately. When Emberus rampages after Orthrus emerges from the Nothing, Samantha explains the connection between the fire god, his dead son, and the dog. Her account is disorderly, but it gives Carl a framework for divine events that neither he nor his manager possesses.
Carl also discovers that Samantha's presence can be weaponized. When the feral demon Slit comes in search of Psamathe, Carl carries Samantha outside despite Mordecai's warning that doing so may draw another supernatural attacker. A sponsor box provides an attachment for Carl's xistera, allowing him to launch her. Samantha welcomes the confrontation, while Carl treats the combination of her durability and his throwing skill as an emergency tactic. Their alliance is therefore dangerous from its beginning: Samantha attracts threats, but the same properties that make her a target allow Carl to use her where an ordinary companion could not survive.
A mobile weapon and reconnaissance partner
On the sixth floor, Samantha insists that Tsarina Signet can help restore her body. Carl promises to bring her to Signet if she stops screaming and follows instructions. Samantha, in turn, offers to become his permanent combat companion. The bargain is crude, but it moves her out of the training room and into Carl's field operations. She travels with Carl and Donut, supplies information about the Nothing and divine families, and gradually learns to roll, bite, communicate at a distance, and eventually fly.
Carl adapts his equipment to those changes. During a moon-elf artillery attack, he tapes miniature seeking missiles to Samantha and uses the xistera to throw her toward the enemy position. The first test launches her prematurely and sets her hair on fire, but she is unharmed. On the successful attempt, Samantha activates the missiles above the hidden elves, survives the blast, bites the remaining attacker, and brings him back when Carl recalls her through the xistera attachment. Carl receives credit for the kill, while Samantha demands ownership of the prisoner. The episode makes their tactical interdependence explicit: his detection, construction, and throwing abilities give her range, while her Withering Spirit vessel can endure the delivery and retrieve a living target.
Carl does not treat her invulnerability as permission to ignore her. He monitors the speed at which she gains new abilities because Mordecai believes a Withering Spirit should not be able to develop in this fashion. He repeatedly retrieves her when she becomes trapped while rolling through undergrowth and directs her away from dangers or allies she might antagonize. During the hunters' attack around Lucia Mar, Samantha relays enemy positions and movements through chat even after the mantises torture and carry her. Carl uses that intelligence while recognizing that the hunters are exploiting Samantha to feed him misleading information. He orders her to roll away once he is ready to enter the saferoom rather than leave her in the fight.
Their arrangement remains partly transactional. Samantha expects progress toward a body, and Carl values her as a scout, a divine informant, and an unusually resilient delivery system. Even so, the regular acts of retrieval matter. Carl does not abandon her after an operation simply because she can probably survive, and Samantha repeatedly returns to the group rather than using her growing mobility to disappear.
The rescue from Shi Maria
The eighth floor tests whether Carl considers Samantha a companion or merely useful equipment. He appoints her as a reconnaissance specialist in Havana and promises to search the regional monster information for a mage capable of animating the flesh-golem body in his inventory. Samantha leaves the planned route, becomes attached to the unique monster Shi Maria, and is swallowed by the enormous spider. She continues chatting from inside the monster and describes Shi Maria as a new best friend who has offered to restore her body.
Mordecai recommends leaving Samantha where she is because Shi Maria possesses attacks capable of permanent blindness and insanity. Carl refuses. He initially frames the mission as an opportunity to flag the monster for Donut's card deck, but after reaching the webbed territory he confronts the real question directly. When Samantha asks whether he came only for the card, Carl concludes that he would have attempted the rescue even without that benefit. He tells her that her unpredictable new powers frighten him, but that she helped them survive the prior floor and is part of their team.
That assurance changes the emotional terms of the relationship without making it gentle. Samantha responds to Carl's hand on her cheek by biting him lightly, then deflects the moment with a claim that she will not have sex with him. Carl does not argue about her invented romantic premise; he focuses on removing her from danger. Samantha then refuses to leave Shi Maria, forcing Carl and Donut to manage both the rescue and the spider's demand to accompany them. The encounter ends with Shi Maria incorporated into Donut's card deck, a tactical gain that also creates a later danger for Carl. His promise to Samantha therefore has costs beyond the immediate rescue.
Carl continues looking for a way to fulfill his side of their bargain. After learning that Larracos is flooded and the mage Samantha hoped to find may be dead, he tells Donut that they will find another solution. He does not tell Samantha immediately because Shi Maria is already manipulating the group and he needs her cooperation long enough to escape the floor. This mixture of protection and concealment is characteristic of Carl's care for her: he accepts responsibility for her goal, but withholds information when he believes her reaction could endanger everyone.
Divine danger and mutual survival
Samantha's history repeatedly draws enemies from the Nothing toward Carl's operations. In the Desperado Club, the feral demon Minge arrives calling for Psamathe and kills guards while pursuing her. Samantha keeps the demon occupied with insults and defiance as Carl and Katia continue their separate operation inside the club. Carl could attempt to distance himself from the target of the attack, but instead remains involved in the escape and aftermath. Her vulnerability is unusual—her vessel is extremely difficult to destroy, yet her presence exposes everyone nearby to enemies far stronger than the crawlers.
At the end of the eighth floor, Samantha participates in the attempt to stop Ysalte and free Amayon. Carl sends her back to enhance Donut's magic rather than keeping her beside him, showing that he now uses her as a mobile member of a larger plan. Amayon later seizes both Carl and Samantha. Carl bargains and tries to direct the confrontation while the demon recognizes Samantha despite her altered vessel. They survive the collapse of the city and Amayon's return spell together. Soon afterward, Samantha announces that she is ending her supposed relationship with Carl and returning to her king. Carl simply accepts the declaration. The exchange confirms that the romance exists in Samantha's narrative, while the actual bond rests on shared survival and teamwork.
Boundaries during Faction Wars
On the ninth floor, Carl's management of Samantha becomes a balance between command and recognition of her independence. He chastises her for leaving the saferoom to pursue Tish and repeats his prohibition against threatening allies. He also understands that commands alone do not stop her. When she hides aboard Louis's aircraft, Carl first orders Louis to remove her because an unauthorized passenger crossing a faction boundary could tear through the vehicle and crash it. He then realizes that Samantha boarded deliberately because she believes the mission is suicidal and wants to protect Louis. Carl still enforces the order, but he no longer dismisses her behavior as meaningless chaos.
Carl later makes Samantha an officer so she can use a targeting spell during the war. He gives her precise instructions and invokes Louis's safety when she resists cooperating with Bomo and the Sledge. In another operation he positions her near a gate in hopes that a powerful entity emerging from the Nothing will pursue her through enemy territory. The plan depends on a pattern established by Slit and Minge, but it also puts Samantha at risk of capture. Carl repeatedly orders her to keep moving rather than fight the summoned being, recognizing that her survival and mobility are more valuable than her bravado.
During the assault through Club Vanquisher, Samantha's history in the Nothing becomes an access mechanism. The Damned status applies to beings who entered the Nothing and survived, allowing her to pass a protected religious door. Carl carries her through the fighting, checks that she has not altered the portal controls, and places the crucial act of opening the door in her mouth. Samantha follows the instruction without her usual argument. The scene reverses their earliest dynamic: the head Carl once locked in a training room is now trusted with a step on which an entire operation depends.
The rescue of Louis
Their most independent collaboration occurs after Louis is paralyzed and bound inside the Reaver castle. Carl cannot leave his own battle, so he contacts Samantha and tells her Louis needs help. She searches the castle alone, navigates its shifting passages, survives attacks by explosive robot dogs, and reports their movements to Carl. Her information is incomplete and often distracted by her desire to keep one of the machines, but Carl continues treating her as the operative closest to the missing crawler.
Samantha does not personally extract Louis; Juice Box reaches him after he has been possessed by Epitome Tagg. Nevertheless, Samantha's scouting occupies the castle defenses and helps the rescue party understand the threat. When the surviving group later faces the problem of keeping Louis alive after Tagg's defeat, Samantha supplies the practical solution Carl and the others have missed. She remembers that Carl carries Princess Lunette's incomplete flesh-golem body and proposes transplanting its heart and lungs into Louis. Carl immediately stops her accompanying plan to attack Tish with a stolen explosive, but he listens to the medical idea. Mordecai and Edgar confirm that it can work within the dungeon's rules.
This episode captures the mature form of Carl and Samantha's alliance. Her impulsiveness still requires containment, and her account of any situation may include threats, romantic fantasies, or concealed weapons. Yet Carl no longer assumes that the disorder makes her useless. He separates the danger from the valuable observation, imposes a boundary, and acts on the workable part of her proposal.
Nature of the relationship
Carl and Samantha's bond is neither a conventional friendship nor the romance Samantha describes. Carl acts as custodian, field commander, transportation, and reluctant advocate for her restoration. Samantha acts as scout, weapon, source of divine history, and fiercely independent ally. Each has leverage over the other: Carl controls access to saferooms, equipment, and the flesh-golem body, while Samantha possesses knowledge and supernatural traits his group cannot reproduce.
The relationship endures because both repeatedly act beyond that exchange. Carl refuses to abandon Samantha to Shi Maria and explicitly identifies her as part of his team. Samantha returns from opportunities to leave, risks herself to protect Louis, and performs critical tasks when Carl cannot supervise her directly. Their constant arguments therefore measure a real change. Carl's restrictions shift from containing an unwanted object to protecting a volatile teammate, while Samantha's demands for a body coexist with loyalty to the people who have given her a place among them.