*Spoilers through This Inevitable Ruin. Crawler alliances in the Earth dungeon range from the system's formal parties to agreements among separate teams, survivors, and nonplayer characters. Party membership can disclose a companion's condition and organize shared action, but it cannot guarantee affection or agreement. Conversely, crawlers who never join the same party repeatedly exchange warnings, shelter one another, and accept danger for people outside their immediate group. The Royal Court of Princess Donut begins with Carl and Donut; its ties to Meadow Lark, Katia's later team, and other crawlers become a much larger coalition. The term found family* describes the relationships formed through those choices, especially when loyalty persists after the people involved cease to travel together.
Party membership and its limits
The party interface makes companionship visible in ways ordinary friendship is not. When Carl meets the Meadow Lark survivors, Brandon explains that he could see earlier teammates die through the party menu. The information confirms losses he could not witness directly. Yet the same encounter shows that a party's roster is narrower than the people its members feel responsible for: the surviving care workers are trying to keep elderly residents alive, and Agatha remains outside the Meadow Lark party. A menu can identify members and report deaths; it does not settle whom the group should protect.
The dungeon also distinguishes teams during encounters even when they are cooperating. In the confrontation involving Meadow Lark, the Royal Court, and Agatha, Carl sees three separate groups displayed before the fight. Carl and Donut have been working with the care workers, but the system still classifies them separately. That distinction matters to the course of their relationship. Donut tells Odette that she and Carl intend to stay with Meadow Lark for the moment, while leaving their decision about the next floor open. Their commitment is real and deliberately limited. Neither party has to surrender its identity to assist the other.
Carl and Donut's own partnership changes when Donut gains speech and access to the crawl's systems. Carl entered after going outside to retrieve Bea's cat, but Donut soon makes decisions about their public appearances, magic, and companions. Their Royal Court name supplies a recognizable team identity; it does not reduce Donut to Carl's dependent. She speaks for their immediate plans with Meadow Lark, and her concern for Zev later differs from Carl's reaction to the same producer. Their loyalty consists partly of continuing to act together while taking these differences seriously.
Meadow Lark and an obligation to the vulnerable
Team Meadow Lark enters Carl and Donut's story as a group organized around care. Imani and Yolanda have nursing responsibilities, while Brandon and the other survivors must move residents who cannot travel like a small combat team. The people they protect alter every tactical calculation: clearing a route is only useful if the residents can reach the stairwell, and a delay that a healthy crawler could survive may destroy the evacuation. Carl and Donut therefore help a community with its own duties rather than merely recruiting extra fighters.
The first-floor crisis makes that obligation costly. Jack's act triggers danger for the group; Donut tries to stop him, and Yolanda shoots him, but too late to avert the disaster. Yolanda's death leaves Imani and the residents to continue without one of their caregivers. The crawl then packages the event as entertainment. Carl sees how the broadcast's treatment of the tragedy affects Imani even as the survivors still need to descend. Their later cooperation has a history of shared loss, practical labor, and a public account that fails to represent what the people present endured.
The Meadow Lark connection survives its first-floor emergency. On the next floor Carl receives news of the survivors' changed circumstances, including the residents' development as crawlers. By the Iron Tangle, he can coordinate with Imani and Elle even while they are moving on another route. The older residents are no longer simply the people Carl once helped escort; their team has continued to make choices and acquire capabilities without him. Imani's later authority comes from that continuity. When she raises a painful concern about Katia, she approaches Carl and Donut as someone responsible for another person's welfare, not as a subordinate seeking permission to speak.
Separate teams on the Iron Tangle
The Iron Tangle forces allied crawlers to work across broken routes and incomplete information. Bautista passes along warnings about bounty hunters and station dangers, while Carl, Katia, and others try to connect stranded groups to usable exits. During one evacuation, Bautista and other crawlers wait as Carl changes a cart's line and Katia eases it forward. Each group has a different position and task. The rescue depends on reliable messages and timing, rather than a single party marching together.
Li Jun, Li Na, and Zhang provide a sharper example of voluntary cooperation. When Imani is about to seek help for a dangerous plan, the three present themselves before she can ask. Carl checks on their remaining teammates; Li Jun explains that those people are needed to guard the exits and that the three volunteers intend to return to them. Their choice gives Carl help without transferring their team's obligations to him. The agreement is specific to a risk they have judged worth taking. It also leaves a route back to the people who depend on them.
These operations produce trust through witnessed conduct. Bautista's warning has value because it can change another team's route before the threat arrives. The three volunteers' arrival shows what they are willing to risk, while their stated intention to return defines the limit of that promise. Such exchanges give the crawlers a working knowledge of one another that a party invitation alone could not supply. They can coordinate again on later floors because they have seen how the others behave under pressure.
Katia's changing place in the Royal Court
Katia Grim first joins Carl and Donut's immediate work through Hekla's circle on the third floor. She is present during their escape from a disastrous spell and soon appears with them in public as part of their group. On the Iron Tangle she helps navigate the carts and trains. Her usefulness does not remove the uncertainty of her earlier affiliation: when Hekla appears to know about Carl's contacts, Carl considers whether Katia has passed information along. Trust grows while the team still has to reckon with loyalties formed elsewhere.
Katia eventually builds a life with a separate team and with Bautista. Carl's response is not simply to treat her departure as disloyalty. When Bautista worries that Carl might have romantic feelings for her, Carl describes Katia as like a sister. That description expresses a family bond without claiming a right to keep her in the Royal Court. Bautista and Katia bring their own people and resources to later operations, and the relationship remains consequential precisely because it continues across that separation.
The Crown of the Sepsis Whore turns a family relationship into a possible lethal conflict. Donut had worn the crown earlier; on the eighth floor Eva places it on Katia just before dying. Katia privately tells Carl what has happened and seeks a solution before Donut learns the full danger. When Katia explains the crown to Donut, Donut recognizes that the dungeon is pushing them toward a fight and says she does not want one. The scene does not permit a simple equation of party loyalty with obedience. Katia must speak for herself, Donut must confront the threat to her own survival, and Carl's desire to save both cannot by itself remove the crown's condition.
Katia's substance use creates another limit on protective secrecy. Imani reports that Katia has taken something in a drug den and is incapacitated by a dangerous debuff. She later makes clear to Carl and Donut that Katia needs help. Donut's distress and Carl's determination do not give either of them control over Katia's recovery. Their family bond supplies a reason to remain involved, while Imani's intervention requires them to acknowledge a problem Katia herself must face. The crown and addiction crises both test whether care can leave room for Katia's own decisions.
Allies who are not crawler parties
The alliance network extends beyond crawlers. Juice Box is a changeling whose relationship with Louis and other members of the group cannot be explained by ownership or by a crawler party menu. At the Faction Wars meeting she objects when a sponsor representative calls her part of Carl's team. She asserts that she has her own team and demands recognition for the NPCs on the ninth floor. Carl then submits a proposal for a tenth faction with the same protections and voting rights as the others. He supports her demand, but she supplies its political claim and insists on the terms.
That exchange marks a consequential boundary. Juice Box can share an enemy with Carl while refusing to be absorbed into his organization. Her position also exposes the difference between treating NPCs as useful assets and accepting them as participants able to make demands. The proposal does not depend on calling her a crawler or a member of the Royal Court. It instead seeks a place for her people within the floor's rules. The alliance is strongest at the moment Carl recognizes a separate constituency rather than claiming to speak for it.
Former crawlers also enter the Princess Posse. Porthus, identified as an author of the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, holds the rank of colonel in its Faction Wars force. His position links a survivor of an earlier crawl to an army raised around the current contestants. It is a different bond from the daily intimacy of Carl and Donut's party: the alliance gives an experienced outsider a defined command role and makes his participation part of the present war.
Rescue returned as chosen aid
The eighth floor offers a direct reversal of Carl's usual role as rescuer. During a crisis he expects to face with too little help, Katia arrives with Bautista, Imani, Elle, Louis, Li Jun, Li Na, Zhang, Chris, Britney, Tran, and others. Carl is surprised; Elle describes the attempt as a suicide mission. The group includes people from different teams and with different histories. Their arrival cannot be read as a formal party order. It is a collection of choices by crawlers who understand the danger and still come.
The scene also keeps the alliance's boundaries visible. Louis remarks that Florin has already gone down the stairs, so even this large rescue group lacks one of its frequent partners. The moment is more specific than a claim that everyone has become one family: some are close to Carl, some are closer to Katia or to another teammate, and some have accepted a particular mission. Their cooperation works because these ties can overlap without becoming identical.
From coalition to Faction Wars
On the ninth floor the Princess Posse must operate as an army. Carl's first Faction Wars notices report an understrength force, unapproved recruits, and no officers. The system requires assignments, territory management, and command decisions that an intimate party never needed. Donut's public identity gives the faction its name, but a name does not approve recruits or move soldiers. The coalition's earlier habits of sharing information and assigning distinct tasks become the basis for a much larger organization.
The battle repeatedly separates people who trust one another. Florin reports that his forces have stopped enemy armor and captured equipment, while also sending news of complications. In another operation Donut works with Elle and Imani at the Blood Sultanate stronghold as Carl moves toward a temple with Prepotente and Katia. Prepotente asks why Donut is absent, prompting Carl to explain the separate contingency. Louis is tasked with making the exterior dangerous to approach. Bautista, Li Jun, and Zhang hold other positions. Their ability to act apart gives the plan reach; it also means each group must rely on information from people it cannot immediately see.
The coalition does not dissolve individual grief or judgment. Near the floor's end Florin, Jurgen, and Imani try to persuade Lucia Mar to accept a deal while Carl hopes they succeed. He leaves the conversation to people better placed to reach her. Bautista later tells Carl that repeated family losses have made him frightened and angry, yet calls Carl a brother and warns him about a dangerous figure. His admission gives the family language a precise meaning: affection has survived fear and disagreement, and it still leads him to pass on a warning. Across the crawl, loyalty is most visible in such actions—escorting vulnerable people, returning to help, respecting a separate team's purpose, and trusting allies to make decisions beyond one's own party.