The Iron Tangle
The fourth floor of trains and stations, now behind the team, remembered as complicated and unusually deadly.
Story so far
The Iron Tangle ends with the team's exit interview. Odette reports that the audience was split on the floor's layout, with many complaining about how complicated it was, and promises that nobody will be able to make that complaint about The Fifth Floor. She eulogizes the floor's great stories: the epic battle with Grull, the contested Province Boss kills, the tragic three-way fight involving Lucia Mar, the Dmitri and Maxim Popov feud, and the rise of Team Flamengo.
The floor also taught Carl its own lesson. It proved they really needed to pay attention to symbology, which is why he now intends to add a symbols section to the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook. It ended with the Death Challenge! that nearly killed him, cost Borant Corporation a fortune, and produced the snick that humiliated Prince Maestro. Odette's parting note is that she will miss crawlers banding together the way the Tangle forced them to.
Role
The completed fourth floor, whose alliances and rivalries Odette memorializes as an era ending.
Relationships
Sources — 11 recorded facts, by chapter
- The fourth floor — a vast, moving subway/rail network of colored lines, monster-filling trains, and safe transfer stations.
- The floor's true shape emerges: a spirograph of looping coloured lines with trainyards on the rim and a single pit at the centre.
- A bankrupt rail system that sold its own staff out by becoming a Krakaren nest, and never trusted the crews who could save it.
- Two days and twenty hours left on a floor that turns out to be a nursery, with its own lines being sealed one at a time.
- Under two days on the clock, and the floor's map has quietly reorganised itself into a handful of places worth standing.
- One day and sixteen hours, 275,000 crawlers who cannot be located, and a floor plan that does not add up.
- A simplified map of the galaxy, a Syndicate history lesson, and a racist political cartoon — all in one rail system.
- The management thanks you for riding with them, initiates the self-destruct, and drops the floor out from under everybody.
- Seventeen hours from the end, the whole rail system is a patchwork of sieges, dead chat names and unreachable rumours.
- The rail-network floor, its ghoul system finally broken and its stairwells opened, five hours from collapse.
- The fourth floor of trains and stations, now behind the team, remembered as complicated and unusually deadly.