Chapter 14 of 35 · Book 3, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

Chapter 14 — Stealing the Nightmare Express

Book: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook · Previous: Chapter 13 — The Ugly-Ass Backpack · Next: Chapter 15 — The Abyss · Floor: Floor 4 — The Iron Tangle · Series: the series

Opening

» Time to Level Collapse: 6 days, 23 hours

Summary

At the Nightmare Express landing Donut trains Hole to level three and finds she can send Clockwork Mongos through it. In the club The Sledge has bought a protection spell for Donut with his own money; the Dodge guild costs 20,000 for level nine and 250,000 for ten; Carl fist-bumps twenty-two crawlers into his chat and starts an information exchange that immediately floods with people who cannot tell a colour from a name ('Then Fulvous is a color'). The portal sight works only on real portals, and only where he is allowed. The Nightmare Express itself: a black 666 steam engine pulling forty cars, fourteen of them open-topped cages of tentacled and clawed monstrosities under chain-link, one with seawater and spikes; the front car is exit-only, the caboose the only way on, and the only way forward is the roof. 'Yeah, fuck this.' Plan B: run up the tunnel, cast Protective Shell as the train comes, Puddle Jump clear. Donut, on the way: 'You keep telling her to be herself, but you're the one making her change the most of all.' 'You know what, you’re right, Donut. Next time I’ll ask her.'

Puddle Jumper's range is shorter than the description says; the shell scrapes every cage clean and the train, its crew dead, accelerates; Carl does not make the platform and is caught by the cowcatcher. He lives on his foot buff and a heal spell, on a ledge under the headlamp, and climbs the boiler's gangplank into a cab full of gore and gauges in the red — Shattering Train Bomb, 75/1000. A face in the firebox: Fire Brandy, a level-75 Lesser Demon MILF, sealed in the boiler, birthing a baby every five minutes for sixty days, the failed ones becoming the Sheol Bricks the train runs on. In a German accent she talks him through the valves, the throttle and the two brakes (Kept A Rollin'), and tells him about the track switch to 'Station Repair' before the next stop. He takes a box of fifty bricks, a Steam Engineer's Key good on all 400 steam trains, three levels (32), three boss boxes and a Platinum Big Daddy Box for Three Cheers for Slaughter!. The cars behind are flatbeds now. 'I had stolen a goddamned train.' Donut: 'DON'T EVER DO THIS TO ME AGAIN.'

Characters

• Carl — Hit by a train; drives it; level 32; a key to every steam engine in the Tangle.
• Princess Donut — Hole level three; outruns the train; calls Carl on Katia; sent to ride Mongo down the track.
• Katia Grim — Left on the platform; 'Hekla warned me that you were crazy.'
• Fire Brandy — The Nightmare Express's fire(wo)man, a Lesser Demon in the boiler; two viable babies so far.
• The Sledge — Buys Donut a protection spell.
• Bomo — 'He buy spell with own money': his longest sentence.

Locations

• The Nightmare Express — Engine 666: forty cars, fourteen cages, a firebox with a demon in it.
• The Desperado Club — The Dodge guild's prices; twenty-two new contacts.

Motifs

• Achievements — Kept A Rollin'; Three Cheers for Slaughter!
• Staying human — Donut's rebuke about Katia, and Carl's promise.
• The mobs are victims — A train fuelled by the corpses of a mother's failed children.
• Sheol Bricks — Sheol Bricks: 'The 15th floor will be lousy with them.'