The Wheel of Fortune's “Nothing” Slot

The crawlers' original route off Floor 11 ran through a casino game. Warlord Akuma argued that even with the Nothing destroyed, its slot would stay on the Wheel of Fortune's playing tables, and that hitting it on purpose would still open a portal — one that now emptied into a catchall holding area rather than the Nothing itself. Herot, working from inside the Pineapple Cabaret, had the permissions to reach into that holding area and pull people out, and Rosetta Thagra confirmed such areas exist and that the same mechanism had supplied the seventeenth floor's NPCs. Akuma rated it safer, more reliable and higher-capacity than the cleaner bot. Carl's worry was interference from liaisons or showrunners; Rosetta's judgement was that the showrunners now wanted everyone out by any means, and that the real danger was the AI. Pontiff found the slot back on the wheel in suspicious quotation marks, bought a portal-examination spell to read it, and then tested it with his own body.

Book 8 appearances

• Chapter 79 — Pontiff reported that the Wheel of Fortune now listed “Nothing” on the wheel in suspicious quotation marks, and Carl laid out the plan behind it: manually hit the Nothing spot, ride the portal into the catchall holding area the broken Nothing now routes to, and have Herot pull everyone out from inside the Pineapple Cabaret.
• Chapter 80 — Pontiff bought a portal-examination spell, waited at the casino for someone to open the new slot, and relayed the numbers to Rosetta, who turned them into a test with a yes-or-no answer.
• Chapter 82 — The test came back positive: Pontiff stepped through, survived, and was removed from Carl's employ, which under Rosetta's reading meant he had been lifted out of the holding area into part of the dungeon outside the playing field.

Related entries

• Warlord Akuma (Character)
• Herot (Character)
• Pontiff (Character)
• Rosetta Thagra (Character)
• The Nothing (Place)
• The Breaking of the Nothing (Event)
• The Pineapple Cabaret (Place)
• The Cleaner Bot Plan (Lore)
• The Desperado Casino (Place)
• Pontiff Leaves the Playing Field (Event)

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