End of the Line Rescue

This article contains unmarked spoilers for Book 3.

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“We have some more friends who are trapped all the way at the end of the line. We’re going to save them. Each and every one.” Carl^[1]

The End of the Line Rescue is a Fourth Floor rescue of a group of crawlers stuck at the last station of the Iron Tangle. This takes place after the Vermillion Line Rescue.

Story

Station 75

While on the way to station 101 for the Vermillion Line Rescue, the train passes station 75 and Carl realizes this must be where the crash interdiction teams were supposed to be based.^[2] After the crawlers are rescued from 101 and headed back to 36, he has Li Jun drop the Royal Court of Princess Donut off at station 75 to figure out a plan. ^[1]

Situation and Plan

When the rescue starts, there are about 500-600 people trapped at the end of the line, with more showing up as time goes on. They are stuck at station 435, unable to take the employee portal because the Kravyad is dead and are unable to take a portal on the wall of the Abyss to a Train yard without the Train Conductor's Souvenir Hat. Crawlers search for hidden portals on the walkways of the Abyss, fighting with the Wall Monitors, causing some of the interior walkways to start to collapse. This nixes Carl's plan to grab the Nightmare Express and bring it to station 436. Instead the Royal Court of Princess Donut plans to take the Vermillion Line train to the end of the tracks and distribute as many hats as possible.

“It was a terrible idea, and I knew Mordecai would have a coronary if he knew we were even thinking about this. Still, what else could we do? We all agreed that was the plan for now unless someone came up with something better.”^[3]

The 'Carl' Plan

Before heading down the line, the Royal Court checks out station 75 to see if any of the Interdiction Crash Response teams would have anything useful. All the Hobgoblin engineers and the Gnoll security forces were massacred by Ghouls, but the station still has the Interdiction Rapid-Response Railway Repair Cart, a mobile portal that does not require Train Conductor's Souvenir Hat's to pass through to a Train yard. The cart has two settings for the portals,a unique train yard or a portal to the Abyss Station. The carts require two Gnolls to turn the portal on, and the only living Gnoll on the platform is the bartender Growler Gary. ^[3]

Bautista messages Carl, saying that all the crawlers at the Abyss Station have grouped into a couple lines, (the Sinopia line, the Mindaro Line, the Grullo Line) separated due to the collapse of the interior walkways.

The new plan is to send the Interdiction Rapid-Response carts to the end of the line along the lines that have crawlers grouped on them. Each cart requires two left hands. The team first tries to farm hands from the dead Gnolls at the station, but all of them have been chewed to the point of uselessness. Katia tries using her Walk in Their Shoes Skill to turn into a Gnoll, but even a 98% accuracy won't allow the cart to turn on.

“It was a “Carl plan” as Donut called it. ”^[4]

The plan has a couple kinks. The carts need to travel down lines that might have debris on the tracks. If all the debris is scooped into the Train yard, the crawlers will be dumped into a pile of debris and mobs suffering from stage 3 DTs. The solution is to send two trains down the line, the first set to the Abyss Station to dump all the debris and mobs into the pit. A second train is then sent a couple minutes later set to the Train yard for the crawlers to step in front of.

The Interdiction Rapid-Response Railway Repair Cart needs two hands from a Gnoll to operate. They check all the corpses at station 75, but then conclude that none of the bodies will work to turn the contraption on. The gnoll bartender Growler Gary is the only gnoll at the station but he can't leave the bar. Katia tries to turn into a gnoll with her Walk in Their Shoes Skill, but even at 98% accuracy the cart won't turn on. Carl and Donut kill Gary to use his hands to turn the carts on, but realize they will have to kill the regenerating gnoll again as the cart requires two left hands. Upon taking the two left hands off the controls, of the first cart, they realize they will have to kill Gary several more times. ^[4]

“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Mongo,” Donut said. “Back to the bar.”^[4]

After the first few times, Gary stops fighting back. Carl explains that they need the hands to get back at the people who killed Gary's friends. Gary is more cooperative and Mongo kills him a total of 14 times. ^[4]

Since the carts are so quiet while on the tracks, Carl adds an Alarm Module to each cart. He sets a 30 minute delay on each of the traps before sending them through the portal. ^[5]

Plan C

The cart plan worked for two groups of crawlers (over 800 total), but the second cart of the Mindaro Line doesn't make it to the end of the line, leaving Bautista's group stranded. The Mindaro Line carts most likely had the first cart get stuck on something, allowing the second cart to catch up and throw the first cart into the Train yard.

The Royal Court hops onto a cart and heads to the end of the line. This cart is tuned to Train yard E. At station 432, Katia sees some crawlers on the track and Carl flips the portal from the Abyss Station setting to the train yard setting. As they come up on station 433, there's a railroad crossing in the middle of the tracks. Carl realizes too late that he teleported the Station Mimic to train yard E.

Reaching the end of the line, Carl greets Bautista and about 600 other crawlers. He tells them what happened with the Station Mimic, and Bautista is distressed with the thought of fighting it again. Carl had already checked his Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (Item) for information on Mimics but doesn't find anything. He asks Elle McGibbons to check with Mistress Tiatha how to kill a mimic.

Elle: Are you about to do something really stupid, or have you done it already?

Carl: Both.

Katia and Bautista start talking as Carl looks for another plan. The Station Mimic establishes itself in Train yard E. Carl finds a portal to yard H instead, distributing the Train Conductor's Souvenir Hats to the 600 crawlers. He leaves a few hats scattered about station 435, just in case there are any stragglers.

The Royal Court drives the interdiction cart through to yard H. The mass of crawlers breaks out into applause, then, to Donut's delight, start piling the hats in front of her, thanking her. Carl suspects that the shop keepers won't give them 5,000 gold each now that the crawlers aren't trapped at the end of the line.

I didn’t know what was going to come next, or if we’d even done anything here today other than delay the inevitable, but it felt good.

By god, it felt good.

References