Chapter 17 of 35 · Book 3, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

Chapter 17 — Station and Repair Hub E

Book: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook · Previous: Chapter 16 — Babababoons · Next: Chapter 18 — The PVP coupon · Floor: Floor 4 — The Iron Tangle · Series: the series

Opening

When we entered the portal, every car on the train made it through.

Summary

Through the portal into Station and Repair Hub E — one of at least twenty yards, Carl guesses, for 9,375 stairwells — a mile of fenced ground under spotlights, thousands of shuffling figures, and watchtowers. They are not zombies: Festering Ghouls, level 18, what an addict becomes when it dies in stage one of the DTs — 'not undead […] a new lifeform reborn in the shell of the old,' born knowing the way here, waiting for enough of their kind to arrive 'before their purpose becomes clear.' The train is shunted into Service Bay 32 under an awning; a chain fires from the nearest tower and a hairy goblin the size of Zev slides down it in a purse. Widget, Grease Gremlin, level 19, with a wrench three times his length: the station is closed, the ghouls are near critical mass, a cheap combined conveyor system broke down and the cages spill; 'Where's CrackJack?' — the engineer they killed; 'I hope for yer sake ye didn't hurt Brandy.' Silly crawlers: the Escape Velocity train from Tangerine 89 goes straight to the stairwell stations. He flirts with Donut (a wife at station 60 who cooks stew, a drop of fresh fish), unhooks the wrecked cars, and is beheaded and eaten by a ghoul Donut had already killed once. 'Well that's going to be a problem.'

Donut runs up the chain into the tower — lotion containers everywhere — topples a freight car with the wrong panel, spins the turntable, opens the gate by accident, and Puddle Jumps back. The engine steams out past Substation E, a brutalist building on fire, its dwarves and grapples dead in their queue, new ones still materialising out of the wall. A human in a sooty white dress and one heel runs for the train: Madison, Human Resources Associate, level 10, whose description is a divorce, Pilates and a book club, and who tells dwarves overtime is mandatory. Carl suspects she has never seen her apartment and that there is no Yard A; she can only say 'I… I don’t know.' Herot's sixteenth-edition Worn Path Method: break the NPCs out of their reverie, kindly but firmly. She is also benefits manager for the Kravyad and the six Station Mimics — 'Terminus' — which get cranky if too few passengers are sent into them. Carl, to Bautista: 'Do not get off at the Terminus Station.'

Characters

• Carl — Drives into the yard; reads the ghouls' description; interrogates Madison by the Worn Path.
• Princess Donut — Shoots ghouls off the engine; the tower controls; 'It's racist!'
• Katia Grim — Spears ghouls through the window; suspects the soccer mom is a trap.
• Widget — Grease Gremlin technician; the Escape Velocity tip; eaten mid-wave.
• Madison — Iron Tangle HR: mandatory overtime, the Kravyad, the six Station Mimics.
• Daniel Bautista — Warned off Terminus, too late.

Locations

• The trainyards — Hub E: service bays, a turntable, towers, a fence that falls, Substation E in flames.
• The employee line — Stations 11 to 60 in minutes, service entrances at each; the Homeward Bound locked up.

Motifs

• The Rev-Up Vitamin Shots — Festering Ghouls: the third state of withdrawal, gathering toward a purpose.
• The mobs are victims — Widget's wife and stew; Madison's apartment that does not exist; Brandy 'to be a mum.'
• The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook — Herot's Worn Path Method.
• Terminus — Station 433 is a mimic; six of them; 'a goddamned trap.'