Princess Donut and Prepotente are crawlers who entered the dungeon as a cat and a goat, respectively, and became speaking, self-aware participants after receiving enhanced pet biscuits. Their acquaintance begins with Prepotente's interest in another former animal who can understand his transformation. It becomes a working alliance through Carl's party, Miriam Dom's death, the destruction of the seventh floor, and the ninth-floor Faction Wars. Donut responds to Prepotente's theatrical manner with humor, but she also recognizes his grief and takes practical steps to protect him. He, for his part, treats her as someone worth addressing directly even when he quarrels with Carl.
Recognition across the Iron Tangle
Donut first meets Prepotente face to face during the fourth-floor Iron Tangle crisis. Carl's group has used a portal to remove a boss that Prepotente was trying to kill from the opposite side. He is furious with Carl: he says he had put the creature to sleep and was gradually weakening it, and that its death would have set off a chain of soul-crystal explosions useful to other crawlers. His greeting to Donut is strikingly different. He brightens when he sees her, says he has wanted to meet her, and calls them two of a kind. He understands them to be the remaining Earth animals in the dungeon who have acquired true sapience. That is Prepotente's assessment at this moment, rather than a complete census of every creature in the crawl.
Prepotente is disappointed that Donut has access to the Desperado Club instead of Club Vanquisher. He imagines sharing a brandy with her and talking about their unusual circumstances. Their actual meeting is brief because Carl and Prepotente are at odds over the displaced boss. Miriam Dom, Prepotente's former owner and closest companion, intervenes when his threats escalate. After she leads him away, Donut singles out his compliment as the part of the encounter that impressed her. Prepotente's recognition has made an impression even though the two have had no chance for the private conversation he proposes.
This first exchange establishes a difference that continues through their later meetings. Prepotente can be hostile to Carl and still greet Donut with evident warmth. Donut does not adopt Carl's immediate suspicion of him as her own. At the same time, the novels do not show the brandy meeting he suggests. Their connection develops during emergencies and group operations, where both must deal with other crawlers and the demands of their companions.
Rescue on the Hunting Grounds
On the sixth floor, Miriam, Prepotente, and Bianca rescue Carl after a failed attack leaves him injured and unconscious. When Carl wakes in their cart, Donut explains who brought him out of danger. She says Prepotente is ahead scouting the road while Miriam tends Carl, and urges Carl to thank the goat even if Prepotente does not like him. Donut's message is directed at Carl's behavior: she does not want his antagonism to erase the help Prepotente has just given. Prepotente also helps clear traps near their destination while the wounded crawler recovers.
Donut talks with Miriam about the shows on which Miriam and Prepotente appear. Miriam explains that Prepotente is more comfortable on Plenty of Plenty when his goat siblings can come out, though she finds some of the program's treatment unsettling. Her account gives Donut a view of Prepotente as a member of a family still living within the crawl, not merely a highly ranked competitor. The two uplifted animals were transformed into crawlers, while Bianca was transformed into Miriam's formidable familiar; Miriam still carries their other, unaltered siblings and limits when they leave their carriers for safety.
Carl and Prepotente soon resume insulting one another. When Prepotente declares that Miriam and Donut should stand back while he defends his honor, he places Donut alongside his mother as someone he wants clear of the confrontation. His bravado collapses after Carl answers him crudely, and he seeks comfort from Miriam. Donut tells Carl to hug Prepotente when the dispute is defused. This is partly Donut managing Carl's public conduct, but it also keeps a petty quarrel from overtaking the debt Carl owes the rescuers.
Miriam's death and Donut's response
The relationship changes during the crisis surrounding Miriam's vampirism. Donut and Carl find Miriam in a forest clearing before dawn, with Prepotente immobilized beside her. Miriam asks Donut to lower her light and offers a spellbook that will teach her how to wake him. Donut retrieves it with a summoned creature and learns the spell, but Miriam and Carl stop her from casting immediately. Prepotente's stun, fragility, and inability to heal make the timing dangerous. Donut can act where Prepotente cannot; the immediate question is when her intervention will save him rather than expose him to another lethal effect.
As Miriam explains what happened, she explicitly compares her love for Prepotente and her other goats to Carl's love for Donut. She describes how intensely Prepotente depends on her, even after his transformation. Her attempt to shift the vampire curse onto Viscount Fog has gone wrong amid repeated spell reflections. Donut follows the explanation, notices Prepotente's other ring, and asks why a mark on Miriam prevents him from healing. The conversation forces Donut and Carl to see that Miriam's choices concern both the wider infection and Prepotente's survival. Miriam stays with her paralyzed son until the sun kills her, curing those infected through her.
After Miriam dies, Donut casts the spell that frees Prepotente. He sees what remains of Miriam and speaks of the piano and song she had promised him. Donut jumps onto his shoulder, touches her head to his horn, and gently tells him to grieve while she and Carl handle the monsters approaching the clearing. Prepotente pats her head. The gesture is brief, but it is their clearest direct moment of comfort: Donut addresses his loss without demanding that he stop crying, and he accepts her presence while nearly oblivious to the danger around them.
Donut then turns to the immediate threat. She uses the Charm Mongoliensis potion to take control of Kiwi, the leader of a group of raptors approaching the clearing. The other raptors cease appearing hostile after Kiwi becomes Donut's minion, although Donut's direct control extends to Kiwi rather than each member of the group. This leaves Prepotente room to collect Miriam's possessions and decide what he will do next. The raptors' arrival is also tied to Donut's own concern for Mongo, so her intervention protects the grieving goat while advancing a separate, urgent problem facing her party.
Prepotente tells Carl and Donut that he intends to kill those he holds responsible for Miriam's death, then departs on Bianca. Donut asks Carl whether the Plenty may have wanted Miriam to die, showing that she considers the forces behind Prepotente's benefactor support when assessing his loss. She also notes with relief that he does not blame them. The scene does not turn Prepotente into a permanent member of Donut's party. It leaves him independent, grief-stricken, and capable of helping them again.
An item delivered to Donut
Later on the same floor, Prepotente comes to a pub where Carl and Donut are waiting for him. Donut greets him, Carl offers to show him their guild space, and Donut mentions her improved litter box. He is exhausted and refuses the visit. He also refuses to be drawn into whatever larger plan Carl may be forming. His purpose is specific: a benefactor box has given him a potion addressed to Donut, and he places it before her before leaving. Despite his anger and urgency, he makes the delivery himself.
The potion, I Take It All Back, can remove effects of Scolopendra's Transmutation. Its attached instruction names Princess Donut as the recipient and cautions against using it on Tina. Donut recognizes the suspicious pattern of sponsor gifts routed through other crawlers to her. She also describes Prepotente as sad when Elle comments on his strangeness after he leaves. Their conversation remains irreverent, but Donut does not miss the condition in which he arrived. The gift is not evidence that Prepotente chose the item or its intended use; the source of that direction is his benefactor box.
Donut later uses the potion on Kiwi during the Butcher's Masquerade. This does not make Prepotente a participant in the subsequent stage action, but it gives his brief delivery a concrete consequence for Donut's own companion. The object that passed from Prepotente to her becomes part of her effort to change Kiwi's form. Their sponsors have put an item meant for one crawler into another crawler's hands, requiring cooperation between people who pursue different plans.
Cooperation at the broken seventh floor
At the start of the seventh floor, Donut, Carl, and Prepotente find themselves together in a glass starting chamber for the Great Race. Prepotente has already formed a plan based on Miriam's boots, the floor's story, and the chamber's construction. He asks Donut for a hammer and an enchanted stick that she and Carl have received. She checks with Carl and hands over the tools. Donut observes that sponsors have given Prepotente a potion meant for her and given her party tools useful to him; she concludes that the sponsors want them to work together. Prepotente accepts the reminder.
The chamber records Prepotente leaving the party and Donut becoming its leader while he continues preparing the wall. His withdrawal does not stop them from cooperating in that moment. He applies his potion to the glass, inserts the enchanted stick, and taps it with the hammer. As he prepares the blow, he recalls Miriam's praise and the music he will never hear from her again. The fracture spreads through the seventh floor and destroys it. Carl holds Donut as the glass shatters and the crawlers are pulled onward. Donut's contribution is the handoff of the required tools and her recognition of the sponsor arrangement; the act that breaks the floor is Prepotente's.
The forced transition puts Donut in charge of choosing a starting location on the eighth floor. She selects Cuba while Prepotente is elsewhere. Once she learns he is in the Bahamas, Donut serves as a communication link: Prepotente wants Carl to read information from a Bahamas lore book, and she brings the request to Carl. Donut also wonders whether Prepotente will face punishment for breaking a whole floor. His action has changed her party's route and raised a practical concern about the dungeon's response, even after the three crawlers separate.
Communication and Faction Wars
During the eighth-floor stairwell crisis, Donut and Prepotente both take part in a broader crawler discussion about Carl's proposed route to safety. Prepotente supports the underlying idea but gives the group a discouraging estimate of its chance of success. Donut comments on his poor motivational style and objects when he is sharp with Katia. Her response is consistent with their earlier dealings: she can value his help while challenging how he speaks to her friends. Before Prepotente takes the stairs, he tells Carl that he hopes both Carl and Donut survive their dangerous effort.
On the ninth floor, Donut asks Prepotente why he has not joined her army. He has been observing enemy preparations from above with Bianca and warns her and Carl of movement near their defenses. Donut urges him to get somewhere safe. He says he has a score to settle with the producer of Blood Hunter before joining her force. His answer acknowledges her request but reserves his own priorities. Donut cannot command away the campaign he has built around Miriam's death.
Their abilities later enter the same battlefield plan. Prepotente can protect a force from long-range psionic attacks, while Donut can support a retreat and use her own wide-area magic. When the army must split its defenses, Katia proposes moving Prepotente to Carl's side and relying on Donut to cover the withdrawing 103rd. Carl sends instructions to both of them. Donut agrees, while the 103rd's commander points out the danger of losing Prepotente's protection so soon. Their cooperation is therefore consequential and costly, not a sign that the two can replace one another's powers.
After the fighting, Donut greets Prepotente when he arrives with Bianca near Carl's group. He joins a discussion that includes Donut's magic and the aftermath of the war. They remain distinct allies with different loyalties, companions, and ways of speaking. The line running from their first meeting to Faction Wars is concrete: Prepotente singles Donut out as someone who shares his changed animal life; Donut helps him through Miriam's death; each carries something the other needs during the seventh-floor break; and they continue to answer one another during a common military campaign.