The Gate of the Feral Gods

The book’s namesake: a legendary lost artifact buried in the Necropolis of Anser, sought for centuries by the Dirigible Gnomes, the Mad Dune Mage, and the dead bugbear Shamus Chaindrive. When Ruckus’s lore names it, the System glitches: a “gameplay timeout” to reconcile rule conflicts over loot this powerful appearing on the fifth floor, four levels before artifacts should drop. Carl deduces it’s in three pieces, each a mirrored pocket-watch held by a faction leader: Henrik, Commandant Kane of the Wasteland, and the Mad Dune Mage. He resolves to collect all three.

Book 4 appearances

• Chapter 9 — Ruckus’s description names the Gate and triggers a System rule-reconciliation pause.
• Chapter 12 — The gnome sniper Crixus lets slip the Mad Dune Mage holds only a third of it; Carl pieces together the three-watch theory and decides to take all three pieces the hard way.
• Chapter 15 — Juice Box reveals the truth: two watches and a winding box; closing the opened gate tears a hole to the Nothing and looses a mad feral god on the OPENING side. A formal quest to collect all three pieces drops.
• Chapter 16 — Carl loots Kane’s watch (the second of three pieces) from the corpse in the floating house.
• Chapter 26 — Henrik’s watch turns out to be aboard the sunken Akula, not the tomb; Carl loots Henrik’s corpse for the third and final piece: he now holds both watches and the winding box. A Syndicate suit to lock the pieces away is tossed for “lack of standing.”
• Chapter 27 — Assembled and fired for the first time (“Quest Complete”) teleporting Carl’s team out of Lusca and loosing a feral god.
• Chapter 28 — The tossed-out lawsuit pays off seven “Summary Judgement” boxes: stock shares and photos of each plaintiff’s mother, unmasking seven of the Floor-9 faction-wars nations.
• Chapter 32 — Becomes the engine of a mass evacuation: ferrying ~500 crawlers out of eight bubbles, loosing a feral god in each.
• Chapter 34 — Kept rather than spent: Carl floods Larracos with it via a facsimile swap, holding onto the artifact for future floors.

Related entries

• The Necropolis of Anser (Place)
• Ruckus (Creature)
• The Collateral Code (Lore)
• Commandant Kane (Character)
• Henrik (Character)

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