The Nothing Spot Portal
The escape Carl buys instead of fighting for. The Wheel of Fortune's two-space Nothing slice is back on the board and now printed in quotes, and the croupier will manually walk the wheel to the last click of the first wedge and hold it there for a fee, opening a black portal in the floor under the marked standing spot for about fifteen seconds. Everything about it reads wrong and reads right at once: Bucket Boy swears the spot was not on the wheel when the strippers looked for it, which suggests it was added to bait the crawlers back; Carl senses none of the real Nothing's mental pull, and his neural implant — degraded into incompatibility mode by recent changes to his wetware — calls it an Unknown Manufacturer Enhancement Zone Subspace Portal, one-way, open access, passable, leading to a stasis chamber. Lucia and Donut both read magic flowing to that single wedge and to nothing else on the otherwise enchantment-empty table. Carl pays a thousand, then two thousand a head plus a twenty per cent tip, then five thousand for a single test run, then five thousand again when Britney cheats. Chris goes through; Britney follows uninvited. The haggling over the remaining twenty stops when Donut looks at the chairs.
Book 8 appearances
- Chapter 85 — Mitch walks the wheel to the Nothing spot and opens the portal for a test run; Carl's implant reads it as a one-way route to a stasis chamber, Lucia and Donut confirm the single magic strand, Chris drops through and Britney jumps after him, and the price for the remaining twenty doubles.
- Chapter 86 — The ambush that follows suggests what the spot was really for: Mitch's people needed crawlers for the Cabaret, and the portal was the bait — but Pontiff and the two who jumped went somewhere real, because a fake would not have survived a post-transfer check.
Related entries
- The Nothing (Place)
- The Breaking of the Nothing (Event)
- The In-Between (Lore)
- The Desperado Casino (Place)
- Mitch Fiorelli (Creature)
- Chris Andrews 2 (Character)
- Britney (Character)
- Pontiff (Character)
- Bucket Boy (Character)
- Splash Zone (Character)
- Valtay Neural Enhancer (Item)
- Carl (Character)
- Herot (Character)
- The Casino Mimic Ambush (Event)
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