"Carl!" Donut shouted, charging down the steps. Mongo gave his war shriek and bounded after his mother.

I walked over, the world feeling dream-like around me, and picked up my severed fingers.

A lifetime of being right-handed caused me to reach for them with my stump. I arrested the motion and gathered them with my left hand instead. My knees suddenly felt like jelly, so I sat down in a controlled fall.

I told my body to reabsorb the missing parts. That was a thing that shapeshifters could do, right?

New Achievement: Powerfully Clueless!

That's not how your powers work, dummy! You can only absorb things that you can equip, and fingers ain't equippable. I guess we should call you Stumpy from now on?

Reward: Nah.

This is one of the rare achievements that can be received more than once. Mostly because it amuses the crap out of me.

Apparently not. They were simply sitting there, severed as cleanly as if it had been a scalpel. There wasn't even a lot of blood on the fingers, and an unthinking application of Heal caused the flesh of my hand to close up before I had spurted more than a few dozen milliliters.

It shouldn't have bothered me. I was a doppelganger now; I could simply recreate the fingers.

I did it, making them out of metal from the forearm protectors worn by that crawler Donut murdered. (The AI had labeled them 'vambraces', which was an odd thing to remember right now.) I tested the new fingers. They had the full range of motion one would expect from human fingers. They also had a tactile sense. It was wrong. It was like touching through a thick glove.

The metallic clinking I had heard when my fingers were chopped off was from the rings. Carefully, I tugged them off the severed fingers and put them on the new ones. I couldn't feel them go on so I had to visually check to ensure that they would stay in place. They were loose, so I enlarged the fingers until they weren't.

"Katia, what are you doing?" Carl asked. I looked up to see him limping up the stairs, Mongo and Donut trailing behind.

I looked down at the severed fingers and then up at him. I couldn't make words come out, so I just held my hand out, the severed digits cradled in my palm.

He came over, frowning. "Where did those...oh." He stopped talking as I unmade my fake, mostly-numb fingers so that he could see. "God, I'm sorry. I didn't realize he'd gotten you or we would have come back sooner."

Something dripped on my arm. I looked down and saw that it was a tear. I touched my face and found that it was wet. How strange.

"Hey," Carl sat, squatting down in front of me. "You okay?"

Dumb question, but words were missing right now.

"Right, of course not." He started to put a hand on my shoulder, then pulled it back. He squatted there silently for several seconds. "Look, I get it. It's a shock and you've got every right to be upset—"

Thank you very much for your permission, Carl.

"—but you can't let it get to you, okay?" He tapped me on the forehead. "You're still you. No matter how much they change, even if they carve everything else away, you're still you. You can't let them break you."

I stared at him in disbelief for a moment and then started laughing. I couldn't help it, it just bubbled out of me. Suggesting that the dungeon could easily end up carving off the rest of my body? There probably was a more insensitive, unhelpful thing that Carl could have said at that moment, but I couldn't think what it would have been. Strangely, that helped. I couldn't stop laughing, the sound shaking my body until I couldn't breathe.

"Katia?" Donut said, padding over to sit in front of me. "Honey? You're scaring Mongo."

A beak like a meathook nudged me gently in the back and the dinosaur peeped in my ear. I recreated my fingers, using actual flesh that I borrowed from my thigh, so that I could reach back and scritch under the feathers on his jaw. He leaned into me, demanding more pressure and warbling a noise that sounded remarkably like a purr.

I could feel his warm skin and the softness of his feathers, but it felt like they were touching my leg, not my hand.

"Okay," I said, getting myself under control and swiping the tears away. I stood up. "Did you at least get the key?"

"Yeah," Carl said, holding up a thing that looked like an ice cube tray.

Ochre Line Engineer's Key

"What next?" I asked.

Carl shrugged. "First thing, we take you downstairs so you can get the neighborhood map off Gore-Gore's corpse. There's a lot more in it than we usually get, and we'll need—"

Admin Notice. Congratulations, Crawler. You have been sponsored!

Viewers watching your feed will now occasionally see advertisements produced by your Benefactor.

Benefactor's Name: Princess Formidable of the Skull Empire.

Additional details available in the Sponsorship Tab of your interface.

"Huh," Carl said, light flickering across his eyes as he got his own notification. "Well, that's a thing."

"Carl, Carl, I hit level 28 and I got a Benefactor!" Donut said. She gasped. "Carl, guess what? It's Princess D'nadia of the Prism Kingdom! I love her!"

"Who?" he asked.

"Carl! She's probably watching right at this moment and you're being very rude. You should apologize."

"For what?" he asked, baffled.

"For forgetting who she was! It's very rude to forget people, Carl."

"Sorry for forgetting who you are, Princess D'Nadia of the Prism Kingdom," he said. "It's been a day. A bunch of days, actually. Now who is she?"

Donut sighed. "You talked with her on Ripper Wonton's show. She was the Saccathian with all the beautiful face tentacles."

"Oh," he said, nodding vaguely. He clearly wasn't paying attention to the conversation, since he was too busy looking at me the way one looks at a child who skinned their knee and hasn't decided if they're going to shrug it off or melt down on the spot. "Yeah, I remember. Thanks for sponsoring Donut, Princess."

"I got one too," I said. The words felt far away and I wasn't quite sure why I was saying them. "Princess Formidable of the Skull Empire. I don't know who that is, but thank you Princess."

"Princess Formidable?" Donut said, cocking her head. "Carl, wasn't she the sister of that orc who tried to kill us while we were on Ripper's show? Prince StillWarty or something?"

"Prince Stalwart," Carl corrected. "Yeah. His yacht got blown out of the sky right after."

"Yes, but Zev said that he wasn't in it," Donut said, confirming my suspicion that she had known Stalwart's name. "His mother supposedly was."

"Princess Formidable would be his sister?" I asked.

"Yeah," Carl said. "Katia, you need to come down here and get the neighborhood map off of Gore-Gore's body. After that, let's get back to the personal space."

Carl: Fair warning: We don't want to get mixed into space politics any more than we already are, and this is definitely space politics. You've got Stalwart's sister, who is probably now the heir to the throne since her brothers are both either dead or disowned. Donut is being sponsored by one of the guests that was on the show with us when Stalwart's yacht got blown up. I'm being sponsored by the Valtay; they're the ones who blew up Stalwart's yacht, and they're also the ones with multiple fleets hovering outside the Borant system waiting to collect debts at the barrel of a gun. Don't mention them out loud, ever.

I was so glad that I was traveling with Carl and Donut. It definitely made my life simpler and safer.

I looked once more at my severed fingers and around the space at the top of the stairs. There was nothing to do with them. Nowhere to bury them, not even a garbage can. I let them fall and went down the stairs to get the neighborhood map. After that I was going to my bed. I wanted to sleep. Not because I was tired. Because I wanted the world to go away for two hours.

o-o-o-o

Good Rest buff applied! Physicality and psychology rebalanced, +10% to base stats!

I sat up and stretched. I felt good. Loose, limber, ready for anything. I hopped out of bed and went into the shower, knowing that the bed would clean itself behind me. I had fallen into it without even bothering to scrub the blood and sweat of the fight off.

I took my time, relaxing my hair back from the purple mohawk into the shoulder-length blonde waves that I preferred. The shower—sorry, 'Super-Cleansing Bathing and Restoration Device'—provided all the amenities, so I made liberal use of the shampoo, soap, and loofahs. The shower would actually scrub me itself if I wanted it to, but I preferred to do it manually. It was relaxing, right up until I remembered that pervy teenagers were probably masturbating to my feed right now.

I sighed and unbuckled my left shoe so I could wash my feet. The cords and ribbons refused to get wet, choosing instead to remain pristinely elegant despite physics. They released immediately when I touched them, falling in a tangle on the bottom of the tub.

Bonuses deactivated! Debuffs activating in 30...29...

With the Surefooted debuff gone I suddenly found myself balanced atop unstable tilted platforms with high-pressure water blasting down on me from multiple directions. I wobbled and sat down quickly—well, more 'sprawled' but at least I didn't hurt myself. I grabbed the soap and hurried.

My feet were soaked in blood and it was under my nails. The timer was down to eight seconds before I gave up and put the shoes back on.

Error: You can't put these lovely shoes on feet that filthy!

Moments later shooting pains went through my heels, knees, hips, and lower back. My lungs stopped working for a moment in shock and then I forced myself to breathe and went back to satisfying the psychopathic AI's fetish.

Eventually, the AI allowed me to put the shoes back on. The pain disappeared like a popped soap bubble and its absence was a moment of bliss.

I emerged into our personal space's common area to find Donut and Mongo playing tag while Carl was bent over the map of the Tangle that Mordecai had been assembling. He looked up as I came in and smiled when he saw that I was smiling.

"Feeling better?" he asked.

"I am, yes. How's the map coming?" I pulled up a stool next to him.

"It's not," he said, pushing the paper to me.

The neighborhood map that we each picked up from Gore-Gore had filled in far more than neighborhood maps usually did. It gave us the entire Ochre line—every stop, every train, every mob, all of it updating in real time. Carl had been adding all the stop information to the map so that we knew where various lines intersected. The map currently showed everything that we had learned from Vernon and Tyrese, the dwarf conductors, as well as what Hekla had sent me and what Carl's friends Bautista and the Meadow Lark party had sent him. It was starting to be a pretty significant structure.

I traced my finger across the map, studying the connections between the various trains with color names such as 'yellow' and 'cyan', and the ones with colorful names such as 'Murder Line', 'Nightmare Express', and 'Exsanguination Special'. The named trains universally ran in closed shapes—usually loops or figure-eights—while the colored trains ran in lines with varying degrees of squiggliness.

Huh.

Katia: Hekla, are you there?

Hekla: Great timing, I was just about to call you! How are you doing? Are you on your way?

Katia: Not yet. We derailed a train so we could get a key. We'll get moving soon, I expect. We've been putting together a map. Are you still on the gold line?

Hekla: Yes, why?

I chewed my lip nervously. She wasn't going to like this.

Katia: I think we should go to stop 435 and meet you there instead of at 409.

Hekla: Why?

Katia: We all need to get back to the stairwells at the low-numbered stations. We talked to one of the engineers, and 435 is a big station while 436 is a portal leading back to the depot at 4. The engineer was a neighborhood boss; we killed him for the map and it shows where all the ochre-line stations are and how far apart they are. At the start of the line it's less than a kilometer between stations, so if we could get to the depot we could walk to the stairwell at 12 easily enough.

Hekla: And...?

Katia: The stations get farther and farther apart as you go up; it's almost 20,000 kilometers from where we are to station 436, meaning nearly three days if we took the ochre line directly. We don't have that kind of time. On the other hand, the named trains run in tight loops that the colored trains wiggle around, so you can use the named trains to shortcut past big loops of the colored lines. If our map is right then Carl, Donut, and I can get to station 436 in a couple of hours with the right combination of transfers. By the time you get there we will have figured out how to get back and we can all go together.

Seconds ticked by with no response.

"Katia?" Carl said. "You okay?"

"I'm fine, just give me a sec."

Hekla: How long would it be from where you are to 409?

Katia: Something like...15,000 kilometers? Actually, more like 16,000. That far along it looks like the stations are a little more than a hundred kilometers apart. I really think we should do it this way. If we can't make the portal work then there's no point to any of this.

Hekla: You said you derailed the train. Are there still trains running on that line?

I checked the map.

Katia: Yes, several. We wrecked one, four more have crashed into it already, there's three more on the way from behind us, and there's a few more ahead of us.

Hekla: There can't be an unlimited number of trains. At some point the line will shut down and with no trains running we could simply walk down the tracks. You said the stations are closer together as you go down, right?

Katia: True, but from where we are now it's 2,000 kilometers to the nearest staircase station. I don't think it's practical. Plus, there's the crawlers who have already gone to higher-numbered stations. If we can make the portal work then we can rescue them as well. I really think you should bring the Daughters and meet us at 435. Plus, it means Carl won't have the chance to dig in his heels. Donut wants to meet you, I want to be back with the Daughters again, but Carl seems reluctant. If we decide to meet up at 435 then I simply won't tell him. He won't have a chance to worry about it and work himself into a lather, so it's likely to go more smoothly.

Seconds passed as Hekla considered her answer.

Hekla: Fair. Plus, it means he wouldn't have invested as much of his ego in not meeting us. All right. Go to 435. We'll hold off on going up more than we have to until you find out what's up there; keep our options open for walking back down the line if we absolutely must. Stay in touch.

Katia: I will. Thank you.

"Look at this," I said to Carl as I pointed at the map. "We're here, station 149 on yellow, ochre, and purple. If we get back on the yellow line and ride to 157, we can get on the Dismemberment Limited. Your friend Bautista said that the Dismemberment Limited stops at 281 on the mauve line. The Nightmare Express also stops at 283 on the purple and mauve lines, meaning if we take the yellow from this stop to 157, Dismemberment to 281, and mauve to 283, we can be on the Nightmare Express and check out this mysterious stop number 436 in a couple of hours. Maybe less."

He looked at me in surprise. "I did not follow any of that but I believe you."

I prevented myself from blushing. "It's not as hard as it sounds. I rode the Tokyo subway when I was a kid. I only spoke Icelandic, German, Russian, and English, no Japanese. I couldn't ask for directions, understand the announcements, or read any of the signs. It was a nightmare, but I figured it out." I pointed back to the page. "If it turns out that we can't use the portal at 436 then we should go to the rosso corsa line here and kill another engineer. Then do the same on..." I considered, checking through various stops, then nodding. "Do the same on the bone line. Given all that and some decent schedules for the named trains I think I'll be able to get us to any stop number 83 or higher in no longer than an hour or two. If we can get a map that shows the positions of the named trains that would be even better."

He studied the map, still clearly lost. "That's fantastic," he said. "Tokyo or not, I don't know how you did that but I'm glad you did."

"Thanks. Shall we?"

He gestured grandly towards the door. "Lead on, Virgil."

"Oh dear," Donut said. "He must have hit his head again." She hopped up on Carl's shoulder and patted him gently. "Her. Name. Is. Katia. She is our friend. Friend, Carl."

Carl rolled his eyes at her and then shrugged hard, tumbling her to the floor in a spraddle of feline indignation.