Princess Donut develops from a newly intelligent cat with one attack spell into a long-range caster whose changing specialties can reshape an entire battle. Her permanent class, Former Child Actor, is the organizing feature of that development: its Character Actor skill lets her adopt another class on each new floor without discarding the abilities she has already learned. The choices are consequential rather than cosmetic. Some strengthen her spells or Mongo, some compensate for her fragile body, and others add abilities that only become useful after sustained practice. By the ninth floor, her reach, spell levels, intelligence, and battlefield position matter as much as the original power of Magic Missile.
Enhanced growth and the first spell
Donut begins the crawl as Carl’s pet. An enhanced pet biscuit from a legendary pet box gives her speech and crawler status while leaving her a cat. The transformation also gives her an unusual attribute pattern. Carl sees that her strength and intelligence have risen to eleven and her charisma to twenty-five, but her constitution is only two. Mordecai identifies an Enhanced Growth condition: subsequent levels automatically add strength, intelligence, and twice as much charisma, while Donut does not receive the ordinary pool of points to assign. Her exceptional social and magical potential is therefore built into her advancement, but so is a lasting need to protect her limited durability.
The combined attribute total initially makes Donut the party leader. She names the party the Royal Court of Princess Donut and changes Carl’s party title to Royal Bodyguard. That control comes directly from the system’s comparison of their statistics. It also establishes an early difference between their roles: Carl can physically shield her, while her growing intelligence and charisma make her capable of directing the party and using powers he does not possess.
Donut receives a Tome of Magic Missile among her first crawler rewards. Her first use is imperfect: one bolt strikes a wall before a second reaches a target farther down an alley. She learns quickly enough to kill several clurichauns with accurately placed shots later on the first floor. Magic Missile gives a small cat a way to fight beyond claw range, and it becomes a skill she can improve repeatedly rather than a temporary trick supplied by one floor’s class. The spell remains a central part of her offense through later changes in specialty.
Former Child Actor and the cost of versatility
At the third-floor class selection, Donut chooses Former Child Actor. The class is available because of her earlier acting achievement and enormous audience. Its permanent package includes more charisma, faster growth of charisma-based skills, immunity to poisons and diseases, the Manager benefit, and Cockroach. Most significantly, it grants Character Actor, which allows her to choose a new specialty when she descends to another floor. The floor-specific class can answer an immediate problem without replacing Former Child Actor as the foundation of her build.
Mordecai warns that Character Actor copies do not guarantee every advertised feature. A class may also impose a temporary penalty on an existing spell. Donut must select quickly at the start of a floor, often before the group fully understands its terrain or enemies. That makes the apparent freedom to change classes a recurring risk: the benefit she most needs might be the one she fails to receive, and the selection remains fixed for that floor.
Cockroach supplies a different sort of protection. During the third-floor fighting around Signet, Mordecai tells Carl that Donut’s health has reached zero but Cockroach has kept her alive at five percent. This is an observed survival event, not merely a promising class description. It also shows why a caster’s high damage cannot replace defensive safeguards. Donut can defeat enemies from a distance, but a single close encounter can still exhaust her small health reserve.
Her spell list has already broadened by this stage. Carl records Torch, Puddle Jumper, Second Chance, Heal Critter, and Clockwork Triplicate alongside Magic Missile and a limited Heal spell. Torch is a frequently used light source whose level rises as she keeps it active during travel. Puddle Jumper supplies movement; by level five it lets her reach a higher landing without seeing the ground above it, helping the party enter a town hall that lacks ordinary access from below. Its lengthy reset time prevents the group from treating that route as freely repeatable. Heal Critter and the emerging duplicate magic also give her means to support Mongo, the young Mongoliensis she chose and bonded on the second floor.
The Iron Tangle: team support and unconventional control
On the fourth floor, Donut uses Character Actor to take Football Hooligan. Mordecai recommends it for the Iron Tangle’s tube and train environment because of its momentum and team benefits, especially Mascot’s bonus for Mongo. Donut receives Mascot and a ten-point constitution increase, but misses Group Chant and Moving Riot. The result illustrates both halves of her class system: she gains a useful combination of pet support and protection, yet the selected class does not deliver its complete advertised package.
She also trains magic that does not resemble her direct attack. Her new Hole spell initially produces only a shallow, temporary indentation in a wall and cannot target a monster directly. Donut practices it while the party fights through Banshee Station. Its unimpressive first form matters because later tactical options require time spent advancing apparently weak abilities. During the same stretch she works on Second Chance and Clockwork Triplicate instead of devoting every cast to Magic Missile.
The confrontation following Hekla’s death demonstrates how far those spells can depart from ordinary damage. Donut casts Second Chance on Hekla’s corpse and then Clockwork Triplicate on the resulting minion, producing three Hekla copies. She orders them to drive the remaining daughters back. The action briefly changes the balance of a chaotic fight and shocks Katia and the daughters. It is a specific example of Donut creating combatants and controlling space with spell interactions, even while Carl worries about recovering Hekla’s body and Katia tries to prevent further harm to the daughters.
Glass Cannon and the growing spell core
The fifth-floor transition strips away Football Hooligan’s constitution bonus and forces another quick specialty decision. Mordecai recommends Glass Cannon partly because its listed fifteen-point constitution increase would more than replace what Donut lost. It also promises faster spell training and lower spell costs. Donut obtains the other benefits but fails to receive the constitution increase. Mordecai responds by warning that she must be kept out of harm’s way and should no longer ride Mongo into battle until she has better protection. The missing defensive benefit changes the party’s tactics immediately.
Glass Cannon nevertheless advances her magical foundation. Mordecai later says she retained improved Hole, Magic Missile, and Puddle Jumper as she entered the following floor. Her spell growth is cumulative even when the specialty that helped produce it has expired. She also receives Wall of Fire from a platinum sponsor box on the fifth floor. Mordecai describes its first-level form as a short-lived barrier and cautions that flames can spread when cast near combustible material. It gives her a means of denying an area rather than simply hitting one enemy, but the fire introduces danger to allies and surroundings.
Legendary Diva and Laundry Day
For the sixth floor, Donut takes Legendary Diva, a bard specialty whose songs cast spells. She had the option to make an earlier class permanent and declines it, preserving the Former Child Actor progression. Mordecai says the new class gives her enchantment spells, a constitution boost, and a song-based spell system. Her improved Character Actor skill grants the listed starting abilities and additional upgrades. He also explains that practice may allow her to keep useful gains after the floor. The choice therefore adds a performance-dependent channel to a spellcaster who already has reliable direct attacks and movement magic.
That channel has limits. Carl finds that the strength of some song effects depends on Donut’s singing, and the offensive songs are initially difficult to use well. The benefit is broader than a single damage number: enchantment can affect opponents in ways Magic Missile cannot. Her established spells remain available while she experiments with the new system, so a poor performance does not erase her earlier training.
Donut separately gains Laundry Day through her spellbook club. At low levels it removes one piece of an opponent’s armor; higher levels expand the type and number of items it can strip away. Carl urges her to train it rather than dismiss its comic name. He and Mordecai use the Magic Workshop and later boosts to push it toward the level required for the Masquerade plan. In the crisis with Circe Took, Donut casts the trained spell after the group has spent weeks preparing it. Its value depends on the target’s equipment and exact spell level, making it a specialist tool rather than a universal substitute for attack magic.
Psychic specialization on the eighth floor
On the eighth floor, Donut refuses Agony Urchin because it would alter her appearance and chooses Master Telephone Psychic instead. Mordecai expects the psychic option to enlarge her mapping ability and add offensive charm spells; it also suits her high charisma. Donut receives the listed abilities and extra spells. She reports that her map can now cover an entire building, although it does not show monsters there. The gain is therefore valuable for layout awareness without replacing every other form of scouting.
Her new spells include Brain Freeze, Bad Attitude, and Why Are You Hitting Yourself? Mordecai explains that Bad Attitude drains intelligence and lowers resistance, making it potentially useful alongside Carl’s Fear. Brain Freeze focuses on one target and can cause temporary blindness under the right conditions. These are control and debuff effects, distinct from Magic Missile’s immediate damage. Donut also retains a reduced Venom Spitter skill from the preceding floor, another reminder that a former specialty may leave a diminished remnant rather than disappearing entirely or remaining at full strength.
Laundry Day continues to produce tactical possibilities on this floor. Carl outfits Bomo with many loose metal pieces arranged as armor, then asks Donut to cast the spell on him. The pieces fly outward through the room. This maneuver turns the spell’s item-removal rule into an environmental attack, but it requires deliberate preparation of the equipment and positioning. It does not mean Laundry Day can automatically damage any armored enemy in the same way.
Deathbed Hellcat in Faction Wars
Donut chooses Deathbed Hellcat for the ninth floor, a sniper and assassin specialty. She tells Carl that it quadruples the range of her existing spells, raises dexterity, increases the chance of an instant kill, and allows invisibility at will. It grants relatively few new spells, but she retains most of her previous floor’s magic. This is a decisive change in how she can apply an established arsenal: her trained attacks and control effects can now reach distant targets instead of requiring her to approach them.
The Nest tower makes that range operational. Carl’s group first considers assigning the tower a sniper synergy for Donut, then finds that her tiara and Deathbed Hellcat abilities already let her attack anything in sight from its elevated position. They assign another synergy to the structure. The decision shows the build’s components working together: class range, equipment, a clear line of sight, and a defended position can be more valuable than stacking another bonus onto an ability that already meets the battlefield requirement.
Late in the ninth-floor fighting, Donut selects Brain Trust after crossing an intelligence threshold. The benefit makes her spells act one level higher. Her Magic Missile is already at level fifteen, so its effective level rises to sixteen; one shot destroys a security sentry dog outright. The first spell she learned in the dungeon is still central, but its later effect depends on many intervening gains: persistent training, improved attributes, class choices, and a new threshold benefit. Donut’s evolution is thus a series of accumulating interactions, with each floor testing which parts of that accumulation she can actually use.