Carl's timeline follows his progression from a civilian survivor of Earth's Collapse to a warlord of the Princess Posse during the Ninth Floor's Faction Wars. He enters the World Dungeon with Princess Donut and initially concentrates on keeping the two of them alive. Each floor enlarges that responsibility: first to the Meadow Lark residents, then to a network of allied parties, and eventually to an army of crawlers, former crawlers, mercenaries, and awakened non-player characters.
Carl's methods remain recognizable throughout that expansion. His Coast Guard engineering experience supports his use of machinery and improvised explosives, while his suspicion of official explanations leads him to test the dungeon's physical, legal, and commercial rules. His partnership with Donut supplies the continuity between these stages. She begins the crawl as the cat he goes outside to rescue and becomes the party leader, public representative, and fellow warlord whose decisions carry the same strategic weight as his own.
The Collapse and the First Floor
Before the Collapse, Carl lives near Seattle with his girlfriend, Beatrice, and her show cat, Donut. His relationship with Beatrice is already failing when she leaves on a trip with a former boyfriend. Donut has been put outside on a freezing night, and Carl leaves the house in boxer shorts, a leather jacket, and Beatrice's Crocs to retrieve her. That choice leaves both of them outdoors when every roofed structure is destroyed. With lethal cold closing in, Carl carries Donut to a newly opened dungeon entrance.
The First Floor forces Carl to improvise before he understands the crawl's rules. He loses the Crocs while fleeing a goblin murderdozer, fights barefoot, and learns to turn the goblins' vehicles and explosives against them. At the tutorial guild he meets Mordecai, whose instruction in levels, loot, skills, and safe rooms gives Carl a practical framework for survival. A prize box supplies an Enhanced Pet Biscuit. Carl gives it to Donut, whose transformation makes her intelligent, able to speak, and eligible to participate as a crawler.
Donut's new status changes their partnership immediately. Her attributes make her the formal party leader, and she names their group the Royal Court of Princess Donut. Carl becomes her Royal Bodyguard. The titles are comic, but the division of labor is consequential: Donut develops ranged magic, social skills, and an instinct for audience management, while Carl handles close combat, devices, and battlefield preparation. His continued protectiveness no longer gives him sole authority over her choices.
Carl's destruction of the goblin facility establishes the moral problem that follows his use of large weapons. The explosion stops an immediate threat and brings rewards, but it also kills goblin noncombatants. The dungeon converts the casualties into achievements and spectacle. Carl consequently learns that an effective solution may still create guilt, and that the crawl will encourage violence before mocking the crawler who carries it out.
The same floor broadens his definition of an ally. Carl and Donut encounter the Meadow Lark group, whose elderly and disabled residents are being protected by Imani, Brandon, Chris, and others. Carl helps construct the Speedbump and defeat the Ball of Swine instead of abandoning people who cannot travel at his pace. The decision costs time and exposes his party to additional danger, but it creates relationships that survive across later floors. Imani and the other Meadow Lark leaders eventually become part of the command structure Carl depends upon.
The Second Floor and the first permanent alliance
On the Second Floor, Carl helps move the Meadow Lark survivors toward the stairwell while facing the Rage Elemental and the floor's reversed-gravity crisis. The rescue demands coordinated movement rather than a single boss kill. Zev's warning to Carl also reveals that even a liaison assigned to manage the crawlers can be punished for giving them useful information. Carl begins to understand that the people working inside the production are not politically united.
Media appearances become another survival system. Carl dislikes interviews and resents the conversion of deaths into entertainment, but equipment, sponsorship, and political protection depend on continued attention. Donut is more willing to perform for the audience, and Carl gradually accepts that their public image can produce material advantages. Their differing approaches become complementary: Donut manages the presentation while Carl uses the resulting access without trusting the institutions that provide it.
Late on the floor, Donut chooses a caged Mongoliensis from a pet room. Carl expects the aggressive chick to become a liability, but he helps Donut feed and bond with it. The creature is identified as a velociraptor and joins the party as Mongo, Donut's Royal Steed. Mongo gives Donut a mobile combat partner and gives both crawlers another dependent whose safety influences their plans.
The Third Floor: build selection and the Grimaldi crisis
At the Third Floor's race and class selection, Carl chooses Primal. The race leaves him outwardly human but gives him unusually broad access to skills and the potential to train them beyond ordinary limits. He selects Compensated Anarchist as his class. Its bonuses to explosives, traps, unarmed combat, stealth, and audience-related attributes formalize the style he had already developed. Its penalties to bladed weapons and damaging spells further favor prepared environments and close-range force over conventional weapons.
Katia Grim joins the Royal Court as an inexperienced Doppelganger. Carl initially takes responsibility for training her because Hekla asks him to do so, but Katia becomes a full partner rather than a temporary recruit. Her ability to absorb material and assume mechanical forms expands the party's transport and engineering options, while her judgment begins to shape plans independently of Carl's.
The Grimaldi circus quest gives Carl an early opportunity to attack a storyline rather than its designated enemy. Signet is presented as the threat, but Carl discovers that Grimaldi's body is controlled by a parasite and that Signet's actions are part of an attempt to recover her transformed family. A direct confrontation with Signet would be disastrous. Carl poisons Grimaldi and uses Zev to bargain with the outside company producing Vengeance of the Daughter. He offers future participation in exchange for an outcome that allows the present conflict to resolve without the expected boss fight. The agreement preserves Signet as an ally and binds Carl to a storyline that will return on the Sixth Floor.
The floor's final crisis leaves Carl with the object later named Carl's Doomsday Scenario, an unstable explosive formed from an overloaded soul crystal. He escapes with Donut and Katia, but carrying the device turns his own inventory into a danger. The bomb remains both a potential last-resort weapon and a burden he must prevent others from discovering or detonating.
The Fourth Floor: the Cookbook and the Iron Tangle
During the Iron Tangle, Carl receives The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook as an apparently comic prize. Its concealed text contains observations left by earlier crawlers who tried to resist the crawl. To spectators and administrators it appears to be an ordinary novelty book; to Carl it is a record of recipes, exploits, warnings, and failed rebellions. Exposure would destroy its hidden contents, so possession requires secrecy even from trusted allies.
The Cookbook changes Carl's understanding of his own resistance. He is not the first crawler to identify weaknesses in the system, and survival alone will not preserve what he learns. He begins adding observations for a future owner while using earlier authors' work to refine traps and interpret dungeon mechanics. The resulting compartmentalization is useful against surveillance, but it also increases the number of decisions he makes without giving Donut or his other allies a complete explanation.
The Iron Tangle itself forces separated parties to share information about rail lines, stations, portals, and trains. Carl, Donut, Katia, Li Jun, Imani, Elle, and other leaders coordinate around Station 36 while more than a thousand crawlers search for a route down. Carl's role grows from party tactician to organizer: he compares reports from distant groups, assigns parts of larger plans, and uses trains as weapons and transport rather than following their intended routes.
The reunion with Hekla exposes the coercion within Brynhild's Daughters. Her crossbow benefits from the deaths of followers, and Katia has previously been used as bait. When Hekla targets Donut, the confrontation ends with Katia killing her. Eva survives and becomes Katia's continuing enemy. Carl's alliance with Katia is strengthened by the choice to protect her from the organization that had treated her as expendable, but the conflict also creates a threat that follows the party to the Sixth Floor.
The Fifth Floor: portals, Samantha, and Larracos
The Fifth Floor divides the surviving crawlers among separate bubble worlds. Carl's party obtains the components of the Gate of the Feral Gods, whose paired watches and winding box can open a portal to a selected location. Katia records coordinates, and the coalition uses shared knowledge to turn a dangerous quest object into an evacuation network. Every opening carries a severe cost: a feral god emerges into the bubble being left behind, so a successful rescue may create a new disaster.
The underwater operation involving the Akula and Lusca completes the gate under extreme pressure. Carl repeatedly chooses portal timing by comparing immediate deaths with the destruction likely to follow. This is a larger version of the dilemma he encountered with the goblin facility: the dungeon provides no harmless option, then makes the crawler responsible for selecting who faces the consequences.
Carl also acquires Samantha, a talking doll head inhabited by a powerful and unstable entity. Samantha has knowledge of gods, the Nothing, and relationships extending beyond the floor's apparent scenario. She is neither a conventional pet nor a predictable quest item, but she remains with the Royal Court and becomes involved in later divine plots.
The gate allows Carl to attack infrastructure far below the active floor. He sends water, bombs, sharks, and other dangerous creatures into the faction market in Larracos, the Ninth Floor's funnel city. Katia's calculations keep the upper residential levels from taking the main force while the lower market is inundated. The attack damages the economy and supply system used by the future Faction Wars armies. It occurs during the Fifth Floor, not during the Iron Tangle, and its consequences are still shaping the Ninth Floor when Carl finally reaches it.
Carl also helps free Chris from the organism through which Maggie My has been controlling him. Restoring Chris's agency confirms a distinction Carl repeatedly has to make: a person's body may commit violence while someone else is directing it. That principle later affects how the coalition responds when supernatural forces use Carl's own body against an ally.
The Sixth and Seventh Floors: the hunters become the hunted
The Sixth Floor's Hunting Grounds allow wealthy off-world hunters to kill crawlers as sport. Carl helps reverse the premise by organizing traps, intelligence sharing, and coordinated attacks against the visitors. Captured equipment and defended settlements reduce the hunters' technological advantage. What begins as another attempt to isolate crawlers instead strengthens the coalition that will become the Princess Posse.
The Butcher's Masquerade concentrates several of Carl's obligations in one battle. Signet's campaign against Queen Imogen, the hunters' plans, Katia's conflict with Eva, Donut's confrontation with Beatrice, and the effort to gain a Ninth Floor faction slot all converge at the high-elf castle. Katia kills Eva, but Eva succeeds in placing the Crown of the Sepsis Whore on her. Because Donut once wore the same crown, its succession rules create a future condition under which both women cannot simply descend from the Ninth Floor.
Signet sacrifices herself during the assault, completing her attack on Imogen but ending the alliance Carl created on the Third Floor. The remaining hunters are eliminated, and resources associated with Donut's supporters secure a Faction Wars position for the crawlers. Carl and Donut emerge as warlords of the Princess Posse. The victory therefore creates both their first formal army and the crown crisis that threatens to divide their party.
The Seventh Floor does not become a normal campaign. Prepotente exploits the floor's structure and causes it to collapse, advancing the surviving crawlers to the Eighth Floor. Carl treats the bypass as proof that an entire floor can be attacked as a system. It also deprives the production of a planned stage and sends the crawlers forward without the usual sequence of play.
The Eighth Floor: cards, Alpha Carl, and Shi Maria
The Eighth Floor converts combatants and abilities into cards and summoned totems. Carl and Donut must build a deck, manage temporary manifestations, and discover interactions among card effects. Carl applies the same habits he used with explosives and rail lines: he studies timing, combination rules, and unintended consequences rather than judging a card only by its stated strength.
A hydra encounter produces Alpha Male Carl, a hostile totem constructed from Carl's appearance, equipment, aggression, and family trauma. Defeating the manifestation does not erase its card. When Carl later summons Alpha Carl himself, the totem behaves differently because it is aligned with its summoner. The contrast demonstrates that a card copy is not the same person as its model and that allegiance can change how the copied personality is expressed.
Carl and Katia also carry out the assassination of Astrid inside the Desperado Club as part of their effort to escape the crown's forced choice. The operation requires hidden routes, Katia's transformations, Carl's traps, and Samantha's intervention. Although Astrid dies, the wider effort does not remove the crown from Katia. Carl's refusal to abandon her increasingly conflicts with allies who believe every possible solution will expose Donut or the coalition to unacceptable danger.
The greatest personal change comes through Shi Maria. During the final card conflict, the Shi Maria totem combines with Carl and gains control of his body. She removes and consumes one of Li Jun's eyes while using him, leaving Carl responsible for harm he did not choose and cannot undo. Li Jun survives and does not treat the act as voluntary, paralleling Carl's earlier recognition that Chris was not responsible for actions committed under Maggie My's control.
Shi Maria leaves the Eye of the Bedlam Bride tattoo on Carl's chest and remains a presence inside him after the card battle ends. The danger is therefore not confined to the Eighth Floor. Carl reaches the Ninth Floor carrying the Cookbook, the Doomsday Scenario, and an entity capable of challenging control of his own body—three secrets that can affect everyone around him.
The Ninth Floor: command of the Princess Posse
Faction Wars transforms Carl's informal network into a military coalition. The Princess Posse includes current crawlers, awakened NPCs, mercenaries, and tens of thousands of former crawlers who voluntarily return to the dungeon. Among the veterans are previous Cookbook authors, making the resistance recorded in Carl's hidden book an active force rather than only an inheritance. Carl serves as a warlord and planner while Donut, Imani, Elle, Katia, and other commanders retain authority over their own units and operations.
Carl cannot direct the war as if it were an enlarged party fight. He delegates battalions, coordinates intelligence, protects infrastructure, and accepts plans designed by people whose information or abilities exceed his own. The coalition assaults established factions and pursues the Blood Sultanate's royal line, whose destruction is required for Donut to survive the floor. His earlier attack on Larracos has already deprived the faction armies of part of their expected market and supply base.
The campaign also demonstrates the cost of Carl's expanding influence. Former crawlers return knowing that they may die again, and thousands are lost. Li Jun volunteers to draw a hostile god into position so that Donut's large-scale War Crime spell can complete its attack. He dies creating the opening. The act is his decision, but Carl again survives because an ally accepts a fatal role in a collective plan. Victory does not make that sacrifice interchangeable with a game casualty.
The crown conflict is resolved without forcing Donut and Katia to fight. Katia chooses pregnancy, names Louis as the human father, and is restored to human form before being transferred to the kinder facility on Earth's surface. The outcome saves both women from the crown's immediate condition, but it removes Katia from the active crawler coalition and separates Carl from one of his longest-serving partners.
Near the campaign's end, the Zerzura spell transfers Larracos and Shanty Town to the Twelfth Floor. The move carries many surviving dungeon-born inhabitants and allied forces away from the Ninth Floor's destruction and into the territory of the Celestial Ascendancy. When the opposing warlord positions are forfeited, the system declares the Princess Posse the winner of Faction Wars.
Carl leaves the Ninth Floor alive beside Donut, but the conclusion is not a return to the crawl's earlier pattern. The coalition has moved a city, defeated the established factions, and made the resistance of previous Cookbook owners visible. Shi Maria remains a contained but unresolved presence, Katia is on the surface, and the survivors have paid for victory with current and former crawler lives. Carl's chronology through the Ninth Floor is therefore a progression in scale rather than a simple rise in power: the same survivor who once altered a single boss encounter has become responsible for plans that move armies, economies, and cities.
Continuing changes across the timeline
Carl's relationship with Donut develops from protection into shared command. He carries her into the dungeon and initially makes decisions as if her safety is solely his responsibility. After her transformation, Donut repeatedly asserts her own authority—as party leader, performer, tactician, and warlord. Their strongest plans combine Carl's engineering and structural analysis with Donut's magic, social reach, and willingness to challenge his habit of assigning himself the most dangerous role.
His tactical development follows a similar widening pattern. First he repurposes objects immediately around him; then he exploits quest ownership and media contracts; later he attacks transportation networks, markets, floor structures, and faction rules. The Cookbook gives that approach a history, but it does not replace his judgment. Carl continues to distinguish between winning the crawl's stated contest and changing the conditions under which the contest operates.
That expansion also increases the consequences of secrecy. Hiding the Cookbook protects its authors and future owners, while concealing the Doomsday Scenario prevents panic and theft. Concealing Shi Maria's access, however, places allies at risk if Carl loses control. By the end of the Ninth Floor, his central problem is no longer whether he can devise a destructive plan. It is whether he can share enough authority and information for the people around him to survive the effects of one.