Beatrice

Beatrice, usually called Bea, is Carl's former girlfriend and Donut's original owner. Her concealed Bahamas trip with Brad ends the relationship immediately before the collapse, but the care and harm associated with her remain central to both crawlers. After surviving on Earth's surface, she is hunted as potential dungeon material, extracted by Odette's organization, and made a full Syndicate citizen before a disastrous televised reunion closes her direct relationship with Carl and Donut.

Biography

The Collapse and the First Floors

Before the collapse, Beatrice lives with Carl in Seattle and devotes their second bedroom to Donut's show ribbons, trophies, and photographs. Her family raises and competes with Persian cats, and Bea takes Donut to events almost every weekend. The attention gives Donut a disciplined show identity and a home in which she is brushed, sung to, dressed, and treated as valuable. Later testimony reveals the limit beneath that care: Bea planned to give Donut away once the cat became older, a betrayal Donut experiences as abandonment rather than an ordinary ownership decision. (Chapters 1, 41, 54, and 163)

Bea travels to the Bahamas for New Year's with friends and conceals that her former boyfriend Brad is present. Brad persuades an intoxicated Bea to post a photograph sitting on his lap; Carl sees it, treats the lie as decisive whether or not sex occurred, and ends the relationship by phone. Bea cuts the trip short and returns toward Seattle with Brad. A snowstorm delays them in Atlanta, and the group reaches the airport parking structure shortly before the collapse. A disturbance draws Bea, Brad, and four dentists outside, allowing them to survive, but they decline the nearby dungeon entrance and remain on the surface. (Chapters 1 and 144)

During the early floors, Bea exists for Carl and Donut chiefly through memories. Carl recalls rules, arguments, domestic habits, and moments of shared laughter; Donut quotes Bea's sayings and uses her grooming, show, and entertainment knowledge. Those memories contain affection as well as warning signs—financial fads, prolonged silent anger, vanity around competition, and a pattern of walking over Carl. Because neither crawler knows she survived, they initially process her as one more person lost in the collapse, and their partnership grows partly by repurposing what Bea taught them without recreating her authority. (Chapters 8, 13, 20, 30–45)

The Circus and the Iron Tangle

Beatrice remains physically absent while the crawl repeatedly turns her tastes into reference points. Donut compares new clothing and equipment with Bea's style, remembers candles and television, and recognizes tools from watching her grooming routines. Carl recalls the litter-box birthday argument, the boxes of unsold multilevel-marketing leggings, and the labor involved in Donut's cat-show life. These details keep Bea present as the person who organized their old household even after survival has made that domestic world impossible. (Chapters 53–67, 89, and 103)

The memories also reveal how Donut's identity formed around Bea's approval. Donut's diction, interest in fashion and performance, competitive pride, and assumption that love is demonstrated through elaborate attention all come from the show circuit and home routines. Yet Carl increasingly becomes the person who performs the practical care Bea once controlled—brushing Donut, understanding her habits, and treating her as a partner. The contrast prepares the later rupture: Donut can miss Bea and emulate her while gradually recognizing that reliability, not ribbons, makes someone her person. (Chapters 41, 53–67, 89, and 99)

The Gate of the Feral Gods

While Carl and Donut continue downward, Beatrice lives in the New Queen Anne surface settlement with Brad. She has nursing training but, according to Brad's hostile perspective, contributes only when someone needs medical attention and otherwise spends much of her time crying. She insists on returning to the destroyed apartment in search of Donut, finds the neighbor's orange cat Gravy Boat instead, and calls him Ferdinand. Her nightly songs to the cat repeatedly apologize for refusing to let him inside before the collapse, suggesting that guilt about Donut and the lost household has become the center of her grief. (Chapter 144)

Illegal Walk-On bounty hunters target Gravy Boat and Beatrice because the production can use people and animals connected to prominent crawlers. When they breach the tent, Lexis intervenes on Odette's orders. Brad reaches for a weapon and is shot; Odette orders Lexis to let him die, stage the scene as a bounty dispute, leave the cat for Borant, and remove Bea. Lexis knocks Beatrice unconscious and places her in a capture cube. Bea therefore survives the extraction but has no meaningful choice in leaving Earth, and the official story later obscures both Odette's operation and Brad's fate. (Chapter 144)

The Hunting Grounds and the Masquerade

Odette initially intends to conceal Beatrice until the crawl ends, protecting her investment in Carl and Donut and preventing Borant from turning Bea into a country boss. A security leak and a rival program's planned ambush force an earlier disclosure. Odette also uses control of Bea's story to negotiate a larger revenue share from Borant, while the public narrative falsely describes a black-market exchange followed by a noble Borant rescue. Beatrice becomes a full-rights Syndicate citizen and is moved toward the inner system, but her safety is inseparable from institutions monetizing her connection to the crawlers. (Chapters 161–163)

The televised reunion finds Bea thin, traumatized, confused, and apparently heavily medicated. She tries to hug Carl's projection, is astonished that Donut can speak, and repeatedly says her memory of the kidnapping and supposed market exchange has holes. On air she can offer little beyond shock. After the broadcast ends, Donut confronts her for planning to give her away and for betraying Carl. Bea cannot formulate an answer before Carl says he is glad she survived but ends their relationship permanently and orders the connection closed. (Chapter 163)

The encounter gives Carl and Donut closure without giving Beatrice a successful defense or reconciliation. Donut admits she still loves and misses Bea but declares Carl her person; Carl refuses to let their old domestic conflict compete with the crawl's larger stakes. Odette keeps Beatrice sequestered after the interview, and the plan to repurpose her as Queen Imogen is abandoned because she is no longer available to Borant. Bea survives the phase with legal status and physical safety, but also with Brad dead, her former family rejecting her, and her future controlled by an organization that has already used her as leverage. (Chapters 163–164)

The Eighth Floor and Bedlam

Beatrice does not return to the dungeon narrative directly on the eighth floor. Her connection to the Bahamas makes Carl suspicious when a seemingly useful lore book points toward the same location, and Donut reads the coincidence as a possible trap. Their caution reflects what the reunion taught them: the production will build mechanics around private memories and exploit any emotional association it can identify. They ultimately choose through the floor's geography without treating Bea herself as someone they can rescue or contact. (Chapters 220 and 222)

More private recollections clarify the household Bea shared with Carl. Donut remembers that Bea spoke constantly about her parents, in contrast with Carl's reluctance to discuss his family, and memories of Bea's relationships help Donut press Carl to acknowledge his own past. Other scenes use Bea's mother and old social circle as templates for threats and illusions. Beatrice's development is absent—her current life remains off-page—but her remembered openness and volatility continue pushing Carl and Donut into conversations they otherwise avoid. (Chapters 228, 232–234, and 260–268)

Faction Wars at Larracos

Beatrice appears only as a comparison during Faction Wars, but the moment shows the lasting shape of Donut's abandonment wound. When Donut believes Carl has chosen a new best friend, she says she expected such treatment from Miss Beatrice but not from him and withdraws before hearing the explanation. Bea has become Donut's shorthand for being replaced by someone she trusted. (Chapter 302)

The comparison also marks how completely Carl's role differs from Bea's. Donut expects him to explain, repair, and remain, and the larger coalition depends on the same reliability. Beatrice takes no action in this phase and receives no new status update; her narrative consequence is psychological rather than operational. The supplied corpus therefore cannot establish how she responds to the reunion or the war, only that the fear associated with her still surfaces under pressure. (Chapter 302)

The Parade of Horribles

The tenth floor repeatedly reconstructs Beatrice's domestic world as race infrastructure. A GPS personality is modeled after her unlicensed alternative therapist, Dr. Metcalf, and later appears in a body with the same large red glasses. Carl and Donut recognize the resemblance but confirm that the GPS is not the actual therapist. The imitation shows the System using details drawn from their memories while giving no access to Bea herself. (Chapters 411 and 468)

Other races revive the cat-show rivalry and the apartment building. Carl remembers Bea becoming despondent when kitten Donut loses a pet-festival contest to a hedgehog and angry when a milkshake soils Donut before another show. In the L'Engle building, Donut recalls Bea demanding action when police briefly blocked their apartment and complaining that they lived in a crime-ridden area. These memories present Bea as competitive, status-conscious, and accustomed to calling family or authorities when inconvenienced, but they are retrospective snapshots rather than evidence of her current conduct. (Chapters 442 and 471)

No supplied chapter after the sixth-floor interview returns to Beatrice's location, health, or decisions. Her latest verified state remains off-planet, a full-rights citizen kept at an undisclosed location under Odette's protection. The absence is materially different from death: Carl and Donut know she exists and deliberately continue without her. By the endpoint, her principal role is the remembered boundary against which their chosen family defines loyalty. (Chapters 163–164, 411, 442, 468, and 471)

Appearance and personality

At the televised reunion, Beatrice is thin and has lost substantial weight. She has long straight hair, freckles, pouty lips, very pale skin, and a hollow, shell-shocked expression that makes her appear much older than Carl remembers. Production dresses her in a glittering open-backed red gown and extremely high heels, exposing the poorly drawn Persian-cat tattoo on her lower back; she also wears her usual Aries anklet. Scratches from Gravy Boat had covered her face and arms during the surface extraction, but the interview does not specify whether any remain. (Chapters 54, 144, and 163)

Beatrice is affectionate, image-conscious, emotionally volatile, and accustomed to having others accommodate her. She invests enormous effort in Donut's show career and daily care, yet plans to give the cat away and betrays Carl's trust by concealing Brad's presence. After the collapse she becomes withdrawn, guilt-ridden, and largely unable to function in the settlement outside occasional nursing work. Her stunned reunion behavior may reflect trauma, medication, memory alteration, or all three; the corpus does not support reducing it to her ordinary personality. Later chapters provide no evidence that she either changes or refuses to change after Donut's confrontation. (Chapters 1, 32, 41, 53–54, 103, 144, and 163)

Skills, class, and abilities

Beatrice never enters the dungeon and has no crawler race, class, level, statistics, spells, achievements, or formal power progression. Her established competencies are ordinary Earth skills and social roles. The supplied corpus gives far more evidence about her importance to Carl and Donut than about any independent professional capability.

Nursing background

Beatrice is identified as a nurse in the New Queen Anne settlement and is expected to work when someone needs healing. This establishes medical training but not her specialty, license level, or demonstrated procedures. Brad dismisses her contribution because four dentists are also present, but that judgment comes from a resentful partner and does not prove that she lacks useful skills. No scene shows Bea treating a patient, so the article cannot credit her with specific emergency, surgical, pharmaceutical, or combat-medicine expertise. (Chapter 144)

Her nursing background offers only situational value on the surface. New Queen Anne has scarce infrastructure and expects every survivor to fish, forage, farm, build, or provide another service; Bea's grief prevents consistent participation outside possible medical need. Once Lexis removes her, she is sedated, transported, and sequestered rather than shown working. Her latest professional status is therefore unknown, and nursing never becomes a dungeon-derived ability. (Chapters 144 and 161–163)

Cat showing, grooming, and domestic knowledge

Beatrice has extensive practical experience raising, grooming, presenting, and traveling with Persian show cats. She trains Donut for frequent competitions, maintains a dedicated trophy room, teaches Carl how to brush her, and exposes Donut to clothing, cosmetics, television, travel planning, and performance routines. Donut later converts that background into self-presentation and recognizes grooming tools and styles because she watched Bea use them. (Chapters 1, 30, 41, 53–54, 89, 103, and 220)

This expertise is specialized rather than supernatural, and its emotional use is mixed. Bea's care helps Donut become poised before audiences, but her fixation on ribbons and frustration after losses suggest that competition serves Bea's identity as much as the cat's welfare. The planned transfer of an older Donut exposes the limitation of treating show value as love. By the latest chapters, the same skills persist only through Donut's memory; the corpus does not show Bea handling animals after leaving Earth. (Chapters 1, 144, 163, and 442)

Surface survival and legal status

Beatrice survives the collapse because a disturbance brings her out of the airport parking structure. She travels with the small airport group, reaches New Queen Anne, and lives there for more than a month. These facts establish endurance and access to a community, not wilderness mastery: Brad and other survivors perform most described labor, and Bea is shown relying on the settlement while grieving. She also insists on a dangerous return to the old apartment to search for Donut, demonstrating attachment and determination despite the unsuccessful result. (Chapter 144)

Odette's extraction changes Beatrice's legal access rather than granting a personal power. Once carried off Earth, she becomes a full-rights Syndicate citizen and may choose to remain in Syndicate space under the official account. In practice she is knocked unconscious, moved inside a capture cube, medicated, and sequestered, so the degree of informed choice is unclear. Citizenship protects her from immediate repurposing as a boss, but it does not give her combat ability or independence from Odette's organization. (Chapters 144 and 161–163)

Publicity value and institutional dependency

Beatrice's principal leverage comes from her relationship to Carl and Donut. Producers can use her as a prospective country boss, a surprise guest, blackmail material, or proof supporting a corporate narrative. Odette protects her partly to prevent a crawl-ending psychological attack and partly to improve a revenue contract. Beatrice herself does not design these strategies and is too disoriented during the interview to control the story. (Chapters 144 and 161–164)

That publicity value is a vulnerability rather than an ability she commands. It draws bounty hunters to her, contributes to Brad's death, permits Odette to dictate the official account, and threatens Carl and Donut through no deliberate action of Bea's. The latest corpus does not show her gaining media training, political authority, sponsorship, or a channel to the crawlers. Her safety still depends on concealment. (Chapters 144 and 161–164)

Relationships

Carl

Carl and Beatrice share a home until her concealed trip with Brad destroys his trust. He remembers genuine affection and ordinary happiness alongside silent treatment, arguments, and the sense that she walked over him. When they reunite, Bea reaches for him and asks whether he can come to her, but Carl refuses to resume the relationship and ends the subject. Her betrayal remains part of his history without controlling his later choices. (Chapters 1, 41, 122, 128, and 163)

Donut

Donut is born into Bea's household and understands Bea as her entire world. Bea supplies care, performance training, and affection, but plans to transfer her once she is older. Donut's post-broadcast confrontation makes the emotional consequence explicit: she still loves Bea while choosing Carl as her person. Later comparisons show the abandonment fear persists even after that decision. (Chapters 1, 41, 53–54, 89, 103, 163, and 302)

Brad

Brad is Beatrice's former boyfriend and secret companion on the Bahamas trip. He persuades her to post the photograph that precipitates the breakup, returns with her to Seattle, and remains beside her in New Queen Anne while privately resenting her grief and dependency. During Lexis's intervention he reaches for an alien weapon and is shot. Odette orders that he be allowed to die and the scene be staged, so Beatrice loses him without the public account acknowledging what happened. (Chapters 1 and 144)

Odette and Lexis

Odette orders Beatrice's removal to prevent Borant from using her against the crawlers, but also turns her custody into financial and media leverage. Lexis performs the extraction, kills one hunter, incapacitates Bea, and constructs the false scene under Odette's direction. Their intervention saves Beatrice from likely boss repurposing while denying her control over the means, the cover story, and the reunion. (Chapters 144 and 161–163)

Ferdinand / Gravy Boat

Ferdinand, originally Gravy Boat, is the neighbor's cat Bea once tried to keep away from Donut. After the collapse she finds him at the ruins, brings him to New Queen Anne, and repeatedly apologizes to him as a substitute for the cat she believes she lost. Odette leaves him behind to be claimed through the Walk-On bounty rather than extracting him with Bea. The relationship records remorse but does not repair what happened with Donut. (Chapter 144)

Items

No generated item article is assigned to Beatrice in the frozen inventory manifest. Her recurring personal objects include the Aries anklet, formal interview clothes supplied by production, and the Princess Chonkalot tattoo, none of which is shown granting a mechanical effect. She carries no verified dungeon loot, and the supplied corpus does not inventory possessions retained after extraction. (Chapters 54, 144, and 163)