Motif · Book 3, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

The Rev-Up Vitamin Shots

How you make free-willed monsters keep a timetable: addict them. Every fifth station is a den where a Pooka hands each mob a race-specific opiate brewed by a Krakaren borough boss, and the portal home is the fix. Stop a train and the withdrawal begins — stage one kills half and makes Festering Ghouls of the dead; stage two doubles strength and empties the mind; stage three is a tentacled hippo with a round mouth; and what hatches from stage three is the point of the floor. Blue control sigils, visible only to Escape Plan, gate the ghouls' rooms.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 6 — Banshee Station
• Chapter 12 — The Dismemberment Limited
• Chapter 16 — Babababoons
• Chapter 17 — Station and Repair Hub E
• Chapter 18 — The PVP coupon
• Chapter 21 — Brynhild's Daughters
• Chapter 22 — The kebab plan
• Chapter 24 — Brynhild's Daughters is no more
• Chapter 25 — Seven hundred hats
• Chapter 26 — Growler Gary
• Chapter 27 — Physical
• Chapter 28 — Plan C
• Chapter 30 — The Syndicate logo
• Chapter 31 — The Iron Tangle, signing off

Progression

Empty vials at the cornets' feet (ch. 6); Imani's report of the Pooka dens and the race-specific Rev-Up Vitamin Shots (ch. 12); Carl's theory that a floor of free-willed monsters can only be run on addiction. Then the withdrawal, stage by stage: Babababoons in stage two inside a transit station (ch. 16); Festering Ghouls, the dead of stage one, gathering in the yards for a purpose (ch. 17); Wrath Ghouls; a province boss of tied-together ghouls at every 48 (ch. 22); Blister Ghouls born at 72 for every mob that dies (ch. 22); stage three, tentacled hippos with a skull inside (ch. 27); and what hatches from them — Krakaren Crotch Dumplings, thousands, growing by the hour, all heading for 24 (ch. 27, ch. 29). Growler Gary: they turned the whole system into a Krakaren nest instead of declaring bankruptcy (ch. 26). Mordecai: a cartoon (ch. 30). The system: 'betrayed by the Krakaren' (ch. 31).