Place · Book 8, A Parade of Horribles

The Great Race

The seventh floor, a new level Borant finished just in time with Valtay capital, so that the planned seventh floor became the eighth; named after a fairy tale about a boy in a maze whose tunnels seal behind him: crawlers wake in glass pods on a spiral over a string of portal stairwells, to be slid one by one into hundreds of kilometres of tubes with pitstop saferooms, danger ratings and paths that close behind a party. It lasts ten minutes. Prepotente, holding Pole Position and a hammer and a stick from the masquerade's sponsors, cracks the resurrection chamber and every wall on the level explodes.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 19 — One Fine Pig; Penelope
• Chapter 23 — Plenty of Plenty; Zev reads the script; a note from C&W&U
• Chapter 38 — Akuma's account: Herot, Menerva and the Pineapple Cabaret
• Chapter 43 — The cannibals; Great Rusty; Pasty Inferno
• Chapter 73 — The Garden of Deliverance; the ducts
• Chapter 88 — Interlude: Quasar; the eleventh floor — twenty-three crawlers; Chaco's parade

Arc

The floor the party skipped, present as the AI's regret: Penelope's curse came from 'this whole succubus storyline' on 'the seventh floor we didn’t get to use' (ch. 19), and a ginger storyline was lifted 'from the never-realized seventh floor' (ch. 43); Donut got robbed of her spell book of the floor prize when they skipped it (ch. 88).