city of stairs pg 87 to 215

Ch 5 pg 87 to do what he does best

There's a party some people, assuming these are members of the shady organization we assume killed the old man, do a terrorist attack. I think they want to capture Shara's college boyfriend Vohannes, who she just calls Vo.  But that doesnt work out for them as Sigrud kills them.

Ch 6 pg 118 a memory engraved 

KOLKAN is a good listener. 

They're at the police station. 

They have one the restitutioners in a cell

Shara drugs him to get info

It works pretty well in that she finds out theyre trying to build an airplane and they need metal to do so and Vohannes has plenty of metal.  So the plan was to kidnap him and get him to give them metal.

This questioning is in darkness

The boy says he needs light

She opens the prison door food slot and when she does theyre transported to another place and someone is telling her to come closer and she walks the way the voice is coming from and the next thing she knows she sorta snaps out of it as the boy is on fire.

Why did the boy light on fire?  Divine possession.  So there must be at least one divine still alive.  So thats really scary.

Ch 7 pg 143 dangerous honesty

After Saypur killed the divinities and before it started colonization there was a twenty year period on the continent where every country suffered from plague, famine, etc.  It was hella bleak before they came back to rebuild.

Shara calls her aunt to talk about her investigation.  Her aunt admits she knew about the where house and that Emit had been sent there to resesrxh the deviniti3s and fogure out how to kill one if a new one sprung up.  

Shara doesnt tell her aunt about the divine possession or admit that she wants what emit put in the bank's self deposit box even though her aunt seems to know what's happening there.

Ch 8 Pg 164

According to the Kaj's lutenent there wasn't much fighting on the continent. The gods were already dying. The kaj was the only one that knew how the weapon he used to finish them off worked.  The most fighting was against the demigods. But they died and their boddies burned just like normal people.

Shara kidnaps the old maid they think might have been involved in the murder.  She tells her that she would copy his papers and show these men copies.  She does t know what they said.  She doesnt know how to read.  Shara is pretty sure from the description that the papers the men were interested in were warehouse inventory papers.

They were followed.  Ernest Wilcov shows up and demands she be released.  It's a whole thing. 

Ch 9  Pg 180 what history tells us.

In 1700 the Dreyling people, Sigrud is Dreyling, were sad about their dead king as he was the glue that held their society together.  Now, they've all resorted to savage piracy.

Shara doesnt know what to do so she cooks and they talk about history. Primarily the killing of the gods and the two gods they dont have a record of the killing.  They specifically talk about kloshan and his antiwomen bullshit. The beliefs that most in this city, which is right smack in the .middle of the co tinent, follow to this day. 

Ch 10 pg 198

Vo is homosexual in a place that's basically fantasy world Moscow. It sucks.  He wants it to suck less.  Giving Shara the info necessary to destroy Ernest Wilcov will help do that.  Even if it ends up hurting Vo when it comes out he helped a foreign power against his rival.

This section really ends on page 213

city of stairs pg 1 to 86

Ch 1 someone even worse pg 1

People are doing war in Avlos's name and Avlos does not approve.

We are in a land that Avlos's followers have taken over.  It is against the law to make any mention of the religion that was previously practiced in this land.  A hat maker has a sign that's similar to the old religion symbol.  He is fine 15,000 drekels (which my tablet autocorrects to sheckles)      for this crime.

A messenger comes to tell them court there's been a murder.  At this point the judge feels like this case is stupid and let's the hat maker go with warning.

Who was sent to investigate the murder?  A tiny lady with a HUGE assistant. 

Ch 2 pg 19 We must civilized them.

The guy in charge is a dick about d the tiny lady here to investigate the murder, named Shara, tells him she's truly in charge here and he can go ahead and fuck off forever. 

Shara investigates the body of the murdered man and finds a secret message in his tie.

  Shara uses magic to video chat with her aunt, named Vinya, who's the minister of foreign affairs.  Shara is hoping one dau Vinya can one day become prime minister and if that happens shara can come home.  There was some sort of scandal 16 years ago and since then shara has continued to be a foreign operative and not been allowed to come home.  Turns out Shara is the one that trained the murdered man and its a big time comflict.of interest for her to investigate his murder.  Vinya says she has a week.

Ch 3 pg 41 unmentionables

"Anything is possible "

Kevin Durant

Shara is talking to the governor, a lady named Mulaghesh..  The governer agrees to help Shara if shara can get her a nice tropical beach appointment. Mulaghesh is sick of all the violence and politics and wants to spend her last 20 year somewhere nice and peaceful.  Shara says she can do that.  Mulaghesh drops a some real dangerous knowledge about the murdered man Yamgyui.  He was here to access something they call the unmentionables warehouse.  It's where they store all sorts of forbidden knowledge and magically items and whatnot.  Stuff the public is sure was destroyed hundreds of years ago.  That's probably what got him killed.  

Also, there's some rich guy Shara is familiar with that might be useful. 

Shara's assistant  Sigrud is a very large man.  He's following a guy.  I personally wouldn't have had someone so remarkable try to follow someone, but he feels like he's doing a good job.  The city is still very war torn.  Specifically there's a bunch 0f staircases that go to nowhere because the building they went to was destroyed.  The man Sigrud is following goes up such a staircase and appears to jump off.  There's no sign of him.  But just for a millisecond out the corner of his eye Sigrud doesnt see a city of bombed out buildings.  He sees a city of emense slender white and gold sky scrapers.  

Maybe we're getting to some magic stuff.

Ch 4 pg 67 dead languages 

When Saypuri developed a weapon that can kill a divinity they kinda figured it would be smooth sailing and advanced to colonizing. But before the ships even landed they killed another divinity. Turns out that divinity was the one that built most.of the country.  So when he died everything he built disappeared with him. 

Shara and Sigrud talking about strategy and what not.  I didnt really get a sense that there's a firm plan, but maybe I just didn't understand. 

Flashback to when Shara was in college.  She and this rich guy were an item.  They're both wicked smart and good at board games and they end up doing lots of sex.  Lots of cultural differences that make that relationship really hard 

the dungeon anarchist's cookbook - Matt Dinniman ch 1 - 17

Forward: the fourth floor is a confusing maze.  So if you don't understand stuff, don't worry about it.  There will be a map at the end that explains it all.

Ch 1

We really get off to a running start here.  Our 3 member band is on a moving subway car.  They are on car 20.  The newest member of or team has advanced mapping skills and can see that things don't get interesting until car 15, which is marked with a big question mark.  They dont do anything at first. But then they pull into a station, which is packed with horrible little monsters.  They decide to go into car 15.  It can't be worse than being devoured by a bazillion horrible monsters.  It's not.  There's two monsters and they kill them easily.  But now they have the problem of a train full of horrifying little monsters. Carl uses his protection spell.  It ends up smooshing everything behind them including trains 16 through 20 and all the mobs within. 

Ch 2 pg 19

They make it to a station and they buy a safe room with all sorts of cool stuff.

Ch 3 pg 42

They go into more detail about the cool stuff in their room.  Brandon,  you remember Brandon, the guy from the old folks home. He's dead and he sent Carl a message telling him to find his brother and tell him he's sorry,  he was right and he loves him.  One of the cool things their room has is a training area where you can actually level up abilities just like you're fighting monsters,  you can do this for only 1 hour a day.  So it's not nearly as good as going out into the world and fighting mobs.  With the news of Brandon's death,  Carl decides he will use his time to punch things as hard as he can.

Ch 4 pg 56

They get back on the train and they fight some monsters.

Ch 5 pg 69 ( well done Matt )

More subway monster hunting.  But also they talk to a train engineer about stuff.  And they accidentally kill him via a fire ant trap.

Ch 6 pg 86

They fight more mobs, it goes pretty good.

Ch 7 pg 

They make it.to the safe room.  Mordekai has upgraded their potion making table to level 3.  He made some cool potions.  They have fan boxes.  Donuts is a saddle she can put on Mongo that ups both of their stats when she's riding.  But they probably won't use that because of Donuts very sad constitution score. 

Carls fan box is much more drama.  It's a bit of a mini game show where Carl gets to pick his prise.  On one hand its pretty great.  On the other hand it.sucks shit because the host is someone mordekai hates and he throws a chair at the guy.  He gets put in timeout for 7 days.

The prise Carl picks is THE anarchists cookbook. 

Together,  they will burn it all to the ground. 

Ch 8 pg 121

The book tells Carl that it must be kept secret.  If he doesn't it will, disappears. 

They go to da club and meet up with some old folks home people.  Chris is still alive and hes a lava monster.

Something happens with donut on the dance floor.  She killed a guy.

Ch 9 pg 134

Turns out it was a lady and a guy that attacked donut.  The lady did some sort of explosion to knock out the guards and the guy stabbed donut with a back stabbing knife that was supposed to instantly kill from behind.  But donut has the cockroach feature that kept her alive and of course killed him in self defense.  Then one of the old folks home ladies kills  the explosion lady with an icicles to the head.

Carl does a gamble and wins an upgrade to his toe ring.

Ch 10 pg 146

They go back to their safe room and work on stuff.  The main plot stuff is land mines to derail a train so they can get at the engineer and get their key so they can go all sorts of places they currently cant.

Ch 11 pg 153

The derailment works.  The engineer gets out.  It's a ManTauR.  Half big man, half small man.  It's like a Shaq giving Peter dinklidge a shoulder ride except that the bottom part doesnt have a head.

At first things are cool with the ManTauR.  He greets them as fellow warriors and goes to da club they dont go to.  But things go real bad in a matter of seconds as he comes out of Da Club intent on killing them as he must have learned they were the cause of the derailment.  This guy is hard-core.  He's like giant wolverine.  He nearly kills Mongo with a glancing blow and cuts what's her faces arm off. To make matters worse, he's a follower of the god that carls gauntlet has a 1.5 percent chance of summoning if used against one of his followers.  Making matters even worse, the 1.5 percent adds up.  It procs when it gets up to 11.5 percent.  There is now a 20 second countdown to god summoning. At great risk to kinda everyone, Carl kicks the mantaur in the chest onto the third rail.  The mantaur is dead and Carl is electrocuted a lot.  But donut is able to pull him up to safety and as of the end of this chapter they are all alive.

Ch 12 pg 167

They make their way to the dismemberment limited to shortcut.  The enemies are flesh monsters that desolve your body and steal your bones.  It ends up not being that big of a deal because they block off the end of the train and there's a little scary thing with a war mage but they end up using donuts hole spell and curt pulls the war mages head through the hole and then donut ends the spell and it cuts the war mages head off.

Ch 13 pg 184

The anarchists cookbook is paying serious dividends. There's a whole thing about backpacks and explosive stability that ends up being useless to Carl cause they changed the rules and it got Forkith's sister killed.  That's the downside to having a book written by people from previous iterations of the thing.  You use some else's idea and they change rules and your sister pays the price.

But to the part that's useful for them, anything you have in a backpack counts as being equipped.  So Carl makes basically a dumpster and puts a bunch of metal into it and Katia "equips" it and she can absorb all the metal into her body.  When she reforms as a human sized entity, she's 10 feet tall and hard as a rock.

Also, they all get sponsors and carls sponsor gives him the ability to see through doors.

Ch 14 pg 201

.

The nightmare train truly horrifying. It's a cargo train and each cargo carrier holds horrifying monsters.  The only entrance is in the caboose with the idea you have to fight your way through all the monsters to get to the front with the engineer and the keys you need.

So Carl's plan to start up front and bash through monsters with a protection spell isn't gonna work.  Instead they have the insane idea to try to execute that plan in front of the oncoming train.  Then use donuts teleport to get back to the loading zone. How do I know this is a crazy bad plan?  Carl literally just told me.

It works for donut as she makes it back to the platform. Carl isn't so lucky.  He gets hit by the train but his indestructible feet keep him alive.   

Through a series of fortunate events he is able to take control of the train.  He successfully stole a train.  Pretty neat.

Ch 15 pg 218

Carl take this stolen train to the end of the line to see what's there.  What's there is a bunch of portals dumping the old train cars into a HUGE pit.  The engines start over again but they get all new train cars every run.  

Carl take his stolen train and picks up donut and Katia

Donut gets a pair of enchanted sunglasses from her sponsor.

Also she has a love vampire skill it allows her to use an enemy as a shield kinda in that any damage she takes, it does it to that enemy instead of her, until they die.

Carl gets a fancy toothpaste that makes him do tons more damage against bosses.  So hes gonna save that till a day when they're sure to fight a boss.

Also,  the one guy that got super powers is going around blowing up trains and so there's a bunch of stops that people are just kinda stuck at cause no more trains are coming. 

Ch 16 pg 233

They talk about a new spell donut has now that her intelligence is above 50.  It's called minion army.  It takes 5 minutes to cast and the effect is that there's a 2 percent chance that it will make an enemy join your team.  Seems like a bad spell.  But mordecai said it was good.  So I guess we will find out why when he gets out of timeout.

They fight a bunch of monsters called babababoons. 

They get back on the train and head back to the end of the line.  Carl takes a look at all the different portals a train can go through and decides repair is the only good option.

Also, the train is powered by a demon lady npc and Carl specifically didn't tell donut or Katia about it cause he feels guilty and he feels like they're gonna think hes a jerk.

He gets back to the train and donut and the demon lady are having a conversation about how hard it is to be a mom.

Ch 17 pg 243

They go through the portal and immediately they see zombies heading their way.  A repair npc comes to help.  It seems good and there is hope.  But then a zombie kills him and now they gotta figure out how to get out by themselves.

Donut goes up to the control room and Carl drives the train and they are able to drive away.

On their way out they pick up and npc that's an HR lady.  I'm looking forward to her dying. 

The fun thing that Carl tries to do is make her realize that she's a bit part in a simulation. The idea is once you do this NPCs are super helpful.  He does not accomplish that goal in this chapter.  But he does get useful information about a hopeful escape being a trap and informs others about it.