Chapter 4 of Carl’s Doomsday Scenario follows Carl, Princess Donut, and Mongo through their first sustained encounter with monsters in the Third Floor’s Over City Ruins. A knife attack by former circus lemurs opens a quest tied to Grimaldi’s Traveling Circus, but the group has no chance to investigate it safely. Carl uses an explosive to break the ambush, then leads the party through a pursuit that ends with a fight against a Terror the Clown and a retreat into the Belly-Rubbed Pug. Mordecai’s arrival at that saferoom exposes a practical problem with the manager arrangement: he can be brought to the party, but he is in no condition to advise them.
The road through the ruins
The chapter opens with Carl’s displayed audience figures at 371.5 trillion views, 7.8 trillion followers, and 1.1 trillion favorites. Those numbers precede a comparatively ordinary stretch of travel. Donut works on teaching Mongo to wait before fetching a stick that Carl throws. He mostly understands the exercise, but excitement makes him disregard commands. When Donut enters a restroom, Mongo scratches at its door and cries until she returns. His attachment to Donut is clear before the chase tests whether he will obey her under pressure.
Carl also studies the setting as they walk. Some buildings rise four stories, and others loom higher in the smoky distance. The ceiling is high enough to create the impression of an open city, but reflected light lets Carl see that the sky is an illusion. The party has left the guarded village that Mordecai showed them in Chapter 3 and is traveling among ruined buildings, where scattered saferooms offer shelter. Their immediate plan is to continue toward a larger settlement with better shops. They have not yet settled into a pattern of fighting on this floor.
Zev contacts Carl and Donut during the walk. She says their latest appearance on Odette’s show went well and that most viewers approve of the race and class choices they made on entering the Third Floor. Donut’s Former Child Actor class attracts some concern because it offers limited growth, while Carl’s more demanding build appears to balance that choice in the audience’s view. Zev adds that both classes are still unique among the crawlers she has seen. There are a few other Primals, though relatively few crawlers have completed their choices, and she has seen no other ordinary cats. Donut is less pleased to hear that other crawlers have become were-cats or cat girls.
Carl asks whether viewers can now see Mordecai because he introduced the group to the Third Floor. Zev says that introduction was visible, but his ordinary activity as their manager remains outside the audience’s view. She has found no nearby VIP crawler and advises them against recruiting the local crawlers she knows of. Donut asks about another show appearance. Zev is handling numerous interview requests but has not fixed a date; she thinks an appearance may fall on the fourth night of the floor’s eight-day limit. The exchange ends just before the first attack. Audience interest is therefore growing at the same moment that the party must learn how to survive the ruins without a guide beside them.
The knife attack and the circus quest
A thrown knife strikes Carl in the chest. The attacker had aimed at his head from a second-floor window, but the blade flies low and bounces off his protection. Carl sees a red-furred lemur wearing a painted human skull as a mask. The system identifies it as a level-eight Former Circus Lemur. It does not appear on Carl’s minimap until after it attacks, making the first knife a warning that nearby enemies may remain hidden until they reveal themselves.
Four more lemurs join the one at the window, and knives force Carl and Donut into an alley. Mongo wants to charge back into the street; Donut orders him to stay. Carl prepares a smoke bomb while checking the map, then hears calls from elsewhere in the ruins that suggest a much larger group. The visible attackers are part of a mob formation, not a small isolated encounter. Carl puts away the smoke bomb and takes out a boom jug as he considers how to reach the lemurs above them.
The system opens a Quests tab and assigns The Show Must Go On. Its presentation is theatrical, with a brief fanfare and visual effects, fitting the circus theme. According to the quest text, Grimaldi’s Traveling Circus had been a popular Over City attraction before the toxic disaster in the city’s backstory. Its transformed descendants still occupy the ruins. The assignment asks the party to learn why the circus persists and end its attacks; the promised reward is a Gold Quest Box. The lemurs’ system description identifies them as descendants of a juggling act that once entertained children with balls, pins, and knives. Their present use of knives and human remains turns that history into a direct threat.
Carl has heard Mordecai mention quests but has not received a useful explanation of how to handle one. He messages him to ask whether they should stay and investigate. Mordecai’s replies are incoherent and personal rather than tactical. Carl realizes that their manager is drunk, despite having left the group only a short time earlier. The new quest offers a potentially valuable reward, but the party cannot pause beside a building full of knife throwers to study it. Carl identifies a saferoom about three blocks away and chooses escape over immediate investigation.
Breaking the ambush
Carl initially intends to throw the boom jug through the window. When he steps out, he sees additional lemurs on the roof and throws it higher instead. He ducks back into the alley as knives hit the street. The explosion shakes the building behind him, ignites its upper portion, and kills several attackers. A burning lemur drops into the alley; Carl kicks it across the street, farther than he expected. The force of that kick is a brief measure of how much his physical abilities have changed, but it does not end the encounter. More lemurs are still approaching.
The party crosses the street while red enemy markers gather behind them. Mongo breaks away to pounce on the dead lemur Carl kicked. Carl has to alter his own route and pick him up as another knife strikes close by. The dinosaur’s eagerness to attack a corpse costs the party time during an active pursuit. It also makes the earlier training scene consequential: Mongo can fight, but Donut has not yet taught him reliable restraint.
Carl then sees a giraffe running toward them with lemurs clinging to its neck. It snaps its neck and launches a group of them through the air. One flies high enough to hit the cavern ceiling and falls to the street; the others land nearer the party with knives ready. This is more than another wave emerging from windows. The circus group uses a large animal to move and deploy its smaller attackers rapidly, extending the threat down the street that Carl had hoped to cross.
Carl lights a smoke bomb and drops it as they turn into an alley. Donut jumps onto his shoulder and fires two Magic Missiles backward while ordering Mongo to follow. Mongo protests but keeps pace on Carl’s left. The group crosses another street and enters a narrower passage, using the turns between buildings to put distance between themselves and the lemurs. Donut’s commands now keep Mongo moving with the group, in contrast to his detour toward the body moments earlier.
Terror the Clown
The last street before the saferoom shows a single hostile marker. Carl throws another smoke bomb ahead, but a breeze carries the smoke the wrong way. He tells Donut to attack the creature as they cross and remembers Mordecai’s earlier instruction to use Fear frequently. Carl casts it on entering the street. The system immediately warns that frightening monsters are immune to Fear, and the spell has no apparent effect on the enemy ahead.
The obstacle is a level-ten Terror the Clown, a tall figure in bloody clown clothes with elongated limbs and a large butcher knife in each hand. The system describes it as a transformed stilt-clown from Grimaldi’s circus. Its legs are genuinely long rather than supported by stilts. Its position between the party and the saferoom means they cannot simply keep running through the open street while the lemurs close from behind.
Donut’s first full-strength Magic Missile strikes below the clown’s knee and topples it. The hit takes roughly a fifth of its health, leaving the monster alive and armed on the ground. Carl checks the minimap and sees that the pursuing lemurs are still about a block away. He rushes the clown while Donut fires again. She then calls Mongo into the attack. Carl lands on the monster’s chest and breaks it under his weight as Mongo tears at its ankle. Donut hits an arm that the clown begins to raise, and Carl punches its face repeatedly until it dies. Their combined attacks keep the fallen enemy from regaining control of the fight before the lemurs arrive.
Carl has only seconds to collect the loot. The clown’s inventory contains Clown Meat, a Big Top Ticket, and 35 gold. He also takes its two oversized butcher knives, red wig, and small hat. The ticket is acquired here, but the chapter does not establish its use. Mongo is still biting the corpse’s ankle when Carl turns to leave; Carl notices that the young dinosaur has grown larger. After Mongo objects to being picked up, Carl puts him down and has Donut call him forward. The party moves again before the pursuit reaches the street.
The Belly-Rubbed Pug
The route to safety winds through an alley that branches around doors and stone walls. The saferoom lies about fifty meters down a dead end. Its sign names it The Belly-Rubbed Pug and depicts a formally dressed pug. Carl watches the pursuing markers enter the main street as he opens the tavern door. They do not appear to have seen the party enter the alley, and they do not follow into the room during this scene.
Inside, the saferoom resembles a pub rather than the simpler rooms Carl and Donut used on the previous two floors. It retains the familiar three television screens, and a Bopca protector named Gordo stands behind the counter. Only five sleeping rooms are available. Each costs ten gold per night, while food also carries a charge. Carl considers those prices modest compared with the nearly ten thousand gold he and Donut hold together. The change makes rest and supplies an explicit expense on the Third Floor, even though this particular stop is affordable for them.
Mordecai teleports into the room as Carl approaches the counter. He arrives with his trousers down, apparently interrupted in the middle of an intoxicated encounter elsewhere. Gordo demands that he cover himself. Mordecai struggles to fix his clothing around his incubus tail and smells strongly of alcohol. He complains that the party was not supposed to reach a saferoom for another couple of hours, matching the delay he had requested before they entered the ruins. The ambush has forced them to seek shelter after roughly twenty minutes instead.
Mordecai’s arrival confirms that the manager arrangement brings him to a saferoom when the party reaches one. It does not make him a dependable source of help during the crisis that led them there. His messages during the attack were useless, and in the pub he vomits, sits in the mess, and passes out. Gordo doubts that Carl and Donut can survive with such a manager. The chapter closes on that judgment. The circus quest remains open, and the party has reached shelter with loot from the encounter, but without an answer to why Grimaldi’s transformed performers still occupy the ruins.