Team Meadow Lark is the crawler group formed around the residents and night staff of the Meadow Lark Adult Care Community in Wenatchee, Washington. Unlike parties assembled solely for combat, it enters the dungeon with a large number of elderly people who use wheelchairs or walkers and cannot travel at the pace of its younger members. Brandon An, Chris Andrews, Yolanda Martinez, and Imani C initially organize their protection. The group later loses several of those caregivers, while former resident Elle McGibbons and Imani become its most visible leaders. Its story begins as an effort to get vulnerable residents to the third floor, where race and class selection might give them a chance to survive on their own.
Evacuation and the first floor
The Meadow Lark staff are working at night when a fire forces them to evacuate the care facility. Agatha, a woman camped near the building, has started a fire outside that spreads to the structure. Approximately 250 residents are brought into the cold as firefighters and other emergency personnel respond. A dungeon entrance then opens in the street amid the evacuees. Agatha pushes her shopping cart toward it, and the stairs become a ramp that wheelchairs can use. Brandon moves residents into the warmer entrance intending to shelter there temporarily, but the dungeon prevents him and Chris from retreating. When the warning about remaining in the stairwell arrives, they take the residents inside.
The evacuation saves people from the collapse without delivering them to safety. By the time Carl and Princess Donut follow signs to the group's position, only 38 people remain there, including the four staff members and Agatha. Brandon explains that some of the original evacuees never entered, some vanished after falling into the entrance, and others died within the dungeon. Several police officers, firefighters, and other capable companions have also been lost. Four mobile staff members now have to feed, move, and defend the residents who remain with them.
Brandon and Chris are brothers and maintenance workers, present that night because they were repairing an oven. Yolanda is a certified nursing assistant armed with a bow; Imani carries a sword and is already the group's highest-level fighter. Her crawler-killer marks have a grim explanation: after an attack on residents near their tutorial area, she killed people who otherwise faced a more agonizing death. Carl sees her continuing to escort, feed, and tend the surviving residents. The marks therefore record an emergency within the group's care work, rather than a campaign against rival crawlers.
Most of the residents remain level one. Dungeon healing has relieved many physical ailments, but it has not restored their youth, mobility, or impaired memories. Brandon's objective is to reach the third floor, where the residents can choose races and classes that may change those limitations. He rejects abandoning them even though a nearby borough boss blocks the most obvious stairwell. A separate safe room is occupied by a group from a Waffle House; some more mobile residents have been taken there, but its capacity cannot solve the larger transport problem.
The Ball of Swine and a route downward
Carl and Donut join Brandon's four fighters against the borough boss guarding the stairs. The enemy is the Ball of Swine, a rolling formation of tusklings that can crush an exposed party. Carl proposes an improvised shelter, but Brandon and Chris provide the practical construction skill to make it work. Using looted goblin tools, tables, weight equipment, bolts, and braces, they build a portable, angled redoubt Brandon calls the Speedbump. Its sections must be placed in a rehearsed order once the arena seals, with Imani and Brandon carrying pieces aided by their strength-boosting equipment.
The boss fight is a joint operation rather than a rescue performed by Carl alone. Brandon, Chris, Yolanda, and Imani enter the chamber with Carl and Donut; Agatha forces her way in separately. The construction buys the fighters a defensible position as the ball charges. After it breaks apart, the group defeats the remaining tusklings. Yolanda is injured when part of the defense fails, and Imani gives her a health potion. The victory opens the route through the boss chamber, allowing the caregivers to bring the residents toward the stairwell. Agatha's presence in the room does not make her a member of the Meadow Lark party: Carl notices that the fight display identifies her separately.
The group does not simply disappear into the next level. Carl and Donut descend first, while Brandon's people remain to gather residents and consider those still in the Waffle House. On the second floor, Carl helps move Elle McGibbons, a 99-year-old wheelchair user, into a safe room during the floor transition. Brandon, Chris, Yolanda, and Imani continue distributing food and helping residents with ordinary needs. The immediate boss obstacle is gone, but every long movement still requires a plan for dozens of people who cannot run.
The second-floor convoy
The team eventually builds a wheeled convoy for the journey to the third-floor stairs. Chris and Imani pull linked wooden platforms on which wheelchairs can be secured; residents who normally use walkers ride on the boards. Brandon designs ramps for boarding, while a temporary enchanted chain joins the cars. Salvaged wheelchair wheels and goblin tools make the construction possible. The arrangement shows the group's methods changing with its circumstances: its strongest fighters use their strength and equipment to move people, while Brandon adapts his maintenance skills to the dungeon's available materials.
The convoy exposes everyone to a danger that an individual crawler could escape more easily. Jack, an elderly resident, urinates against a dungeon wall despite a recently announced prohibition. Yolanda shoots him when she realizes what he is doing, but the penalty is already triggered. A level-93 rage elemental appears behind the moving convoy. Randall is thrown from one of the cars, and Yolanda's arrows cannot stop the creature. The group's attempt to bring its slowest members through a hazardous hallway becomes a sudden evacuation into a nearby safe room.
Yolanda and Randall die in the attack. Chris and Imani carry residents through the doorway while Carl and Donut delay the elemental. Carl saves Mrs. McGibbons from the rear of the convoy, and Brandon helps her drink a healing potion after they reach shelter. Imani is visibly grieving Yolanda, yet resumes treating injured residents. The losses are especially severe because Yolanda had been both a caregiver and an effective archer; her death reduces the small set of people able to protect the residents while moving them.
The elemental remains outside the safe room, preventing an ordinary departure. Imani suggests exploiting the room's rule that teleports a monster away if it comes too close to an opened door. This gives Carl and Donut short windows to execute a trap rather than forcing the entire group to fight in the hallway. They destroy the elemental, but the convoy is unusable afterward. Brandon, Chris, and Imani then assemble three rougher carts from chopper wheels and wood for the 36 residents still with them. The group reaches the third-floor descent, where Carl and Donut part from them. Imani is the last of Meadow Lark's people to go down the ramp.
Race selection and loss of the original staff
The third floor gives the residents the choice Brandon had worked to secure. Mrs. McGibbons becomes a Frost Maiden and Blizzardmancer, gaining flight, cold magic, and a far sharper command of her memories. She later explains to Carl that Brandon encouraged the choice because its manager benefit would help the group. Imani becomes an Obsidian Butterfly Fire Spiritualist, with wings that can confer beneficial effects when they touch allies. Their new forms change the group's fighting capacity without erasing the relationships formed during the earlier rescue.
Those gains come amid further deaths. Chris selects the Igneous race and begins pushing for more aggressive hunting. He quarrels with Brandon, leaves with several men, and ceases answering the others' messages. Imani later tells Carl that Brandon and resident Henry die protecting the group's escape during a disaster involving shade gremlins. When Carl reunites with Elle and Imani on the fourth floor, Elle reports that 20 members remain and that Imani is the only surviving member of the original younger staff still with them. Elle also makes clear that Imani continues caring for the former residents even after many have acquired powers of their own.
Elle and Imani give the reduced team complementary strengths. Elle's cold magic and flight can disable large groups of enemies. Imani supplies healing and protective support while organizing the survivors. The former residents are no longer all passive passengers: a later recap shows them joining an attack on a monster, and their transformed abilities make the party more capable than the wheelchair convoy had been. The group's continuity lies in its shared history and mutual obligations, not in keeping everyone in their original roles.
The Iron Tangle
On the fourth floor, Meadow Lark must navigate the Iron Tangle's rail system. Imani's group rides a conveyor route to Trainyard D and arrives amid ghouls. The crawlers take shelter in an administrative building while Elle floats above the attackers and freezes them by the hundreds. The survivors then plan their next move from the building. Their experience of moving a mixed group through danger has become an advantage, although the new floor substitutes rail transfers, breached gates, and ghoul attacks for the narrow corridors of the first two floors.
Team Meadow Lark later joins the defense at Station 36, one of the stairwell positions receiving other endangered crawlers. When a much larger body of survivors arrives, ghouls begin converging on the station. The platforms provide chokepoints that defenders can hold, and an employee route helps them keep supplies moving. Meadow Lark thus becomes part of a wider rescue effort: the party that once needed Carl and Donut to clear its own exit helps maintain an exit for hundreds of others. It also prepares a flamethrower kill zone against the possibility of Krakaren creatures reaching its position.
The water quadrant and Safehome Yolanda
The fifth floor places Meadow Lark in a water quadrant. Its 20 members initially struggle to sail an unfamiliar vessel among dangerous rocks. They secure a galley crewed by fish-people and investigate an orc-held oil rig that attacks approaching boats. The group develops a plan to fire oil toward a flying castle, with Elle's powerful Graupel spell available if the cannon cannot bring the structure down. These operations require the residents and staff to learn new transport and siege methods rather than relying on a single powerful crawler.
The danger of the bubble worlds eventually forces most of Meadow Lark down the stairs. A feral god near their world makes it unsafe for them to remain; Imani and Elle stay behind for the continuing rescue operation. Their decision separates the two leaders from the rest of the party for that operation, without making the other survivors expendable. The original goal of getting every available person to the next floor still governs their choices even after the team can fight its own battles.
On the sixth floor, Meadow Lark's identity becomes the controlling party of a new guild, Safehome Yolanda. Imani is its guildmaster. At the point Carl and Donut join, the guild contains six parties and 63 crawlers, including the Royal Court of Princess Donut. Its name commemorates the caregiver killed during the second-floor convoy attack. The guild formalizes an alliance that now extends well beyond the original care-home survivors, while its leadership and name preserve the group's history. Team Meadow Lark has grown from a desperate escort for residents into an organization able to coordinate other crawler parties, without losing sight of the people whose survival first brought it together.