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Red Line.

Welcome, Crawler to the fourth floor. "The Iron Tangle"

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Holy god, my social numbers were through the roof! I'd been scraping along in the hundreds of thousands and now I was at 10 trillion?!

Apparently Carl was onto something. People really did like cataclysmic explosions.

Katia: Hekla, are you there? I'm on the fourth floor and my social numbers are huge!

Hekla: That's wonderful! How are Carl and Donut doing?

Katia: Doing well. Carl is naked. :)

Hekla: Ha! That sounds like a story. Are you safe?

I was jolted out of my conversation by the world around me shaking and rumbling. I stumbled and grabbed onto a floor-to-ceiling metal pole to keep my balance as I waved away the system messages and looked around.

We were on a subway car. Lights flashed by outside the windows. The lights in here went out, then fritzed on again. Bench seats facing inwards ran down the walls. They were beat-up, scuffed beige plastic with stained brown cushions that had been tagged in Russian using marker and spray paint. 'Abid was here', 'Ivan Semenov fucks pigs', 'Marry me, Irina', and more. The place was rank and smelled like something had died. A lot of somethings.

New achievement! I'm on a train!

Choo Choo, Motherfucker.

Reward: You've received a Train Conductor's Souvenir Hat! Wear it with pride!

Something plopped onto my head. I picked it off and studied it: A blue-and-white striped stereotypical train operator's hat with the words "I rode the Iron Tangle" embroidered on it. Examining it showed no special properties or magic. Apparently it was merely another bit of dungeon whimsy.

"It's a subway car," Carl said.

Something moved at the end of the car; I felt my heart start to speed up but relaxed when I realized it was simply an electronic sign across which scrolled the words: Red Line Train 15A, Car 20. Next stop: Sirin Station (81) in 12 minutes and 32 seconds.

That sounded useful.

Katia: I'm safe, but I need to let you go. Talk later.

Hekla: Real quick: We're on the indigo line. You?

Katia: Red. Gotta run.

"It's a Metro car from Moscow," I said. "I spent a summer there. But the ones I rode were in much better condition than this. And cleaner."

"Everybody get dressed," Carl said, pulling his boxers out of his inventory and trying to step into them without falling over or touching any of the filthy surfaces around us.

I shrugged into my magical jerkin, which promptly faded back into my body leaving me apparently unchanged. It finally dawned on me that in my case 'dressed' meant something more personal: I pulled out the chunk of mirror that Carl had given me and checked my appearance.

My shapeshifting powers were back. I once again looked like the blonde-haired mostly-human that I had so painstakingly sculpted myself into back in The One-Eyed Narwhal before the world went crazy. I did some quick tweaks to my face, ensuring that everything was in the right place, and then put the mirror away.

"Carl, it says I have to pick a new class because of my Character Actor skill," Donut said. "I only have six minutes to choose, or I will get a 'random' one. The list is full of new stuff. Not the same as before."

Carl: Mordecai. Help Donut pick a class. She's going to read off some choices. We're in a moving train car. I think it's a subway system-themed floor.

Mordecai: Welcome back. Donut, hit me with the suggested list.

Donut: I DON'T LIKE THESE CHOICES, MORDECAI.

I stepped over to Carl who was looking out the window at the wall of the tunnel barely a finger's length away. "Why is she typing in all caps?" I whispered. "She didn't when I first met her. Is it because she's four-legged and it's easier that way?"

"No. It's because she's Donut."

"She's quite the handful, isn't she?"

"More than you know," he said with a significant tone that I did not understand.

Suddenly and far later than it should have, it dawned on me that we were moving quickly and I got a bonus based on moving quickly. I checked my stats with a feeling of excitement.

"Wow," I said. "My Constitution is double what it normally is. I'm at 102. I have an active momentum bonus from the train."

"Good," Carl said. "I hope that's by design. Otherwise, I wouldn't get used to it. If the showrunners didn't mean for that to happen, you can bet it'll be patched out tonight."

I really hoped they didn't do that. I was much more survivable like this, and therefore more useful to Carl and Donut, and therefore less likely to get abandoned. I wasn't sure they would abandon me but Carl clearly didn't want me here. He barely even looked at me when he spoke.

Donut: SO, SHOULD I DO THE FOOTBALL HOOLIGAN OR THE FIRECRACKER CLASS? QUICK, I'M ALMOST OUT OF TIME.

Mordecai: Hooligan. If you're going to be stuck in a series of tubes, it's the best choice. It comes with a momentum bonus and several team buffs. Plus the Mascot skill, which gives a bonus to Mongo.

Donut glowed and then cocked her head.

Donut: I DID IT. I GOT THE MASCOT SKILL! BUT I DIDN'T GET GROUP CHANT OR MOVING RIOT. I GOT THE 10 POINTS TO MY CONSTITUTION THOUGH.

Mordecai: Damn. Chant would've been good. Okay you three. I just peeked my head out of my room, and I am in what appears to be a train station settlement. It looks as if the stores and inns are placed at these stations. This is a bigger one where you can switch between three different train routes. One of the trains is a subway like you described, but another is much larger. Like a regular transcontinental railway train. Get off at the next station, and see if you can find a saferoom or inn.

"What's this about choosing classes?" I asked.

"Her class is 'Former Child Actor'," Carl said. "At the start of every floor she chooses a new class just for that floor and the AI rolls the dice to see how many of its abilities she gets. Sounds like for this floor she's a Football Hooligan."

I mentally envisioned Donut in a human-sized football jersey, running out onto the field to beat up the visiting team and struggling not to trip over the excess material. She couldn't carry a beer in her non-existent hand but maybe she could wear one of those silly beer hats that I'd seen in American movies? The picture made me laugh.

Carl: 10-4. By the way, thanks for telling us about the bounty.

Mordecai: So you made the top 10, huh? Find a saferoom and we'll talk.

Oh, lovely. "Does he do the 'only tell you what you need to know right now' thing too?" I asked. "Bannon did that. I hated it."

Carl shook his head. "He's usually pretty upfront but there's only so much time and he knows a lot." He stepped over to Donut and held out his arms so she could jump into them. "What do your new skills do?"

"I only got a couple of new ones," she said, butting her head against his chest for a moment before taking her place on his shoulder. "It came with a skill that would've raised my damage if we were moving, but I didn't get it. The best one is Mascot. If Mongo deals damage to an enemy, everybody in the party receives a bonus to Dexterity and Constitution. If he kills a mob, the bonus lasts for a couple hours."

"That is a good one."

"Also, my Constitution went up by 10 points. Oh, and I got a skill called Guinness that doubles my strength if I'm drunk."

"Are you serious?"

"Quite," she said, rubbing her head against his in absentminded affection. "So if we're going to be doing any fighting, we'll need to stop at the club first so I can get another dirty shirley."

The idea of Donut drunk seemed like it might be a very bad one. She was a powerful mage and she had the body mass of a toddler. Visions danced through my head of random magic flying around the bar as a drunken kitty stumbled and slurred across the dance floor.

Carl: Mordecai, is it me or are these classes better than what we were offered before?

Mordecai: It's an unintended benefit. A lot of these rarer classes weren't available because she didn't meet the minimum requirements. But as her stats increase, the classes she's offered on each level will be better. There's another benefit I hadn't anticipated, too. She'd received a level-5 Negotiation skill with that Artist Alley class. Before you guys left the third floor, she'd raised the skill to level 7 thanks to all that selling you did on the last floor. When she lost that class, the five levels went away, but she retained the two she'd received, including the skill experience, so it actually bumped itself up to four on its own.

Carl: Wait, I don't understand. So if she gets a temporary skill, she keeps it the next floor down? What about the stat point increases?

Mordecai: She won't keep the stat points. But as long as she uses a skill enough to level it at least once, it looks like she'll keep it, minus the levels she received as being a part of that class. Use Mongo as much as you can, because if she levels that Mascot skill she should keep it.

Carl: That seems like a bug.

Mordecai: I think it might be. So don't talk about it out loud or bring attention to it. Now get to work. I'll look for a map, but you should too.

"Katia," Carl said. "You have the Pathfinder skill. Do you see anything?"

I checked my map. We were in Cabin #20 — Passenger Car and nineteen cars stretched before us, currently bending through a shallow turn. Other tunnels wound around us, coming in and out of the range of the map as we moved. Cars 5, 10, and 15 were oddly shaped but the others were all normal tubes of metal. "I can zoom my map out really big, but when I do, I don't see much. There are tubes everywhere, like a mess of noodles. A minute ago I saw another train rush by on another track on the other side of this wall, shooting off at an angle from us. As for this train, there are twenty cars and we're on the last one."

"Can you see any mobs?"

"No. It usually doesn't show monsters outside the range of the normal minimap. If we're close to a stairwell or a saferoom, I'll get a notification. I can see car number 15 is shaped differently than this one. I can't see what it is. It's not a passenger car like this one."

"What does the label say for that 15th car?" he asked.

"It just has a question mark."

He nodded in thought and glanced around. "Okay, guys. Let's go check it out."

Carl clenched his right fist and a spiked metal gauntlet shimmered into existence around it. Thus armed, he headed up the car.

Well, there was one mystery resolved. Now I just needed to know about this 'summoning an angry god' problem.

Mongo trailed after Carl and Donut; the velociraptor was now the size of a pony and had to squeeze around the support poles. I hurried after.

"I'm going to pull the door open," Carl said. "Katia, your Constitution is four times mine, so you go in first. You okay with that?"

Fear clutched at my throat but I swallowed it away and nodded. "I guess that's my job, isn't it?" It was like Bannon had said: My job was to stand in front of my teammates and get hurt so they didn't have to while they did the work of actually killing things.

"Don't worry, sweetie. We got your back," Donut said.

It wasn't my back I was worried about, it was my face. Specifically, getting stabbed in it, or having it eaten, or whatever horrific thing might happen on the other side of that door.

"No problem," I said, trying to sound brave as I pulled Juan's axe from my inventory and prepared for battle.