Nightmare Express

This article contains unmarked spoilers for Book 3.

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This train is running on dead babies. Holy crap that’s fucked up. Carl^[1]

The Nightmare Express is a named train on the Fourth Floor Iron Tangle.^[1]

Description

The Nightmare Express is an old-school steam engine, painted jet black, with a wedge-shaped cowcatcher. It has about 40 cars, mostly open-topped livestock freight, of which 14 appear to be filled with monstrosities. It runs on Sheol Bricks.

The train has a single entrance in the caboose at the rear and a single exit in a passenger car at the front before the engine. Carl thinks that Crawlers are supposed to climb to the roof of the caboose and make their way across the top of the cars. This would be complicated by the ceiling, 4 foot above the top of the train, moving by at 100mph. The monsters and War Mage within the open topped cars would likely be troublesome too.^[1]

The train has a red tagged driver who holds a Steam Engineer's Key, granting access to Iron Tangle employee-only areas and actions on all 400 steam-type trains of the Tangle. It also has a fire (wo)man, Fire Brandy, three neighboorhood Bosses, and a War Mage.^[1]

When over-pressurised, the train becomes a Shattering Train Bomb.^[1]

Gallery

Route

The train runs an hour and a half loop, including two different Station 83s, two different Station 283s, and station 436.^[1]

Order of stops:

Station 83 - Red Line
Station 283 - Second Stop
Station 436 - Abyss
Station 283 - Fourth Stop
Station 83 - Fifth Stop

Story

The Nightmare Express is one of the trains that connects to Station #83, the first transfer station the Royal Court of Princess Donut uses as a base of operations on the Fourth Floor. The team decides to hold off on riding the train for a bit as the try to understand the level better. ^[2]

One of the challenges of the floor is that if they want to get an engineer's key, they have to derail a train; but if they derail a train, they can't use the key as the keys will only work on those lines. Donut suggests that they could crash a train, take the engineer's key, then take a train like the Nightmare Express to hop forward ahead of the crashed train to catch one of the few still running trains. Katia Grim comments that seems really complicated to expect all 300,000 crawlers to figure out and do. ^[3]

Stealing the Nightmare Express

The first time they see the train, Carl realizes that his original plan to hop on the first car and use his Protective Shell Spell to clear the train won't work, as the train requires crawlers to board in the last car and crawl over the tops of the open cars. The train takes too long for the protective shell plan to work as the train leaves the station, so Carl comes up with an even crazier idea. ^[1]

The plan is for Carl and Donut to go as far down the tracks as they can while Donut still has line of sight with the platform to casts her Puddle Jumper Spell back onto the station platform. Carl casts Protective Shell, Donut Puddle Jumps the two of them back to safety. Katia waits on the platform. ^[1]

The plan starts to fall apart when Donut informs Carl that the spell isn't entirely line of sight, where the spell informs her it can only go 300-400 feet before the platform. The train is barreling down on them, so Carl goes forward with the plan by casting Protective Shell, Donut casts Puddle Jump, and they run towards the platform. Donut runs and jumps onto the platform. Carl gets momentarily distracted and doesn't make it onto the platform. Instead, he is caught by the train. ^[1]

Carl is picked up by the front of the train, receives many injuries, and spams the Healing Potion and Heal Spell until he stabilizes. Since the engineers in the front cab died, the train is becomes unstable and shakes on the tracks. Carl breaks into the cab by punching through the glass and crawling through the window. A tool tip notifies him that that train is now a Shattering Train Bomb. Desperately pulling at the controls, Carl notices an NPC dot of Fire Brandy. She instructs him how to drive the train, earning him the Kept A Rollin' Achievement. Once he has the controls down, Carl asks how to get to the Trainyard.^[1]