The Princess Posse Base Camp is the Princess Posse's home territory on the ninth floor during Faction Wars. It occupies a rise on the Plains of Larracos near a small lake. The camp includes a fortified headquarters, a guild saferoom entrance, barracks, a field hospital, defensive works, and facilities for air vehicles. Its location makes it the point to which Posse troops and leaders return, as well as an objective for enemy armies advancing through the Posse's territory. The first assault on the camp takes place before its planned defenses are fully manned.
Establishing the home territory
When Carl, Donut, Tipid, and Florin arrive, the dungeon interface identifies the camp as their home territory and reports a red-alert incursion. It directs them to the flag room for details. They emerge from a small wooden bait shop that serves as the entrance to Carl and Donut's attached guild saferoom. Outside is a grassy plain under the floor's artificial sun. A lake lies nearby, and a stone stronghold is taking shape uphill from the shop. Workers are extending both buildings so the finished stronghold will enclose the saferoom entrance.
The camp is already crowded and active. Carl sees hundreds of people working or moving between jobs. On the slope, a crew builds a palisade while others test metal wall posts with a fireball. Several watchtowers are staffed, and another is under construction farther out on the plain. Workers also use trench-building scrolls to cut a channel toward the lake. These works cover more ground than the hilltop building: the Posse is preparing a defended territory, with observation and obstacles extending away from its headquarters.
The builders have little time. Tipid explains that the changelings and flesh golems chose the hilltop position before fully accounting for the value of the saferoom. The Posse subsequently decides to join the stone structure to the bait shop. The connection will protect access to the guild space and allow airships to dock from the stronghold. Thousands of former crawlers have chosen the Fortification Engineer race, which lets them gain levels through construction. Alchemists produce materials, while enchanters prepare protective work on the walls. The former enchantment-guild leader Langrim is among the specialists Tipid identifies. Construction had to wait until these recruits were formally converted for the war, leaving the crews under pressure during the remaining ceasefire.
The same labor is spread beyond the base. Tipid has crews working on the borders and on fallback positions, rather than concentrating every available builder at the hill. Some construction workers and crawlers receive ranks that let them alter the camp. The rest are organized as legionnaires, with corporals leading smaller teams. The unfinished works therefore reflect a command decision about where to put limited labor: the headquarters needs protection, but an enemy allowed to cross the sector unopposed would reach it too quickly.
The saferoom is valuable without being an unlimited shelter. Faction Wars brings back a blood-bar restriction that drains while eligible combatants remain inside a saferoom and requires kills to replenish it. Tipid also says most mercenaries cannot stay in guildhalls during the last two phases, apart from a small staff. These rules make the camp's ordinary accommodations and exterior defenses necessary even though the guild entrance is being built into the stronghold. During active fighting, support personnel who use the guild space also have to watch how much time they have left inside.
Medical and defensive facilities
A newly built field hospital stands outside the saferoom. Before the war's main fighting, Mordecai uses it for a treatment involving Katia and Carl. Katia must be unconscious and monitored, and Mordecai insists the procedure take place outside the guild space because of saferoom rules. Imani is present with another healer, an attendant from a previous floor. The hospital is intended to remain in use after fighting starts, when Imani and other healers will care for the wounded there. Its early use establishes it as more than an emergency shelter assembled only after the first attack.
Construction continues around the hospital while the treatment is prepared. Workers are erecting a layered anti-magic shell over the base, already behind schedule. Its framework has separate spaces where different mages can maintain protective spells. That arrangement is meant to strengthen the shield and avoid having all its protection depend on one caster: killing a mage can cancel that mage's active spells. Later events show why this matters. Enemy infiltrators target the Posse's mages and threaten both the outer protection and the defenses attached to the stronghold.
The hospital also functions as a return point. After a confrontation away from the base, Carl teleports back into the camp and lands on its floor, wounded. He uses a healing potion there. This arrival shows that the camp is a practical destination for a fast withdrawal, but the room's safety depends on conditions outside it. When the attack on the base begins, Bucket Boy later reports that the hospital has been overrun while helping carry an injured yenk toward the headquarters.
The camp's watchtowers answer a separate threat during the ceasefire. Florin explains that enemy scouts can cross sector borders before open hostilities; discovery sends them back to their own base, although traps can still kill them. The Posse has a limited number of scouts of its own. Tower crews using observation and Ping spells help prevent hostile scouts from approaching unnoticed. Florin says they have already found and expelled a Dream scout and a scout from the Prism. The system's red-alert warning on Carl and Donut's arrival comes during this ceasefire, before the large assault force is free to move in.
The physical layout also imposes tradeoffs. The lake near the base appears on the flag room's map as the Posse sector's major water supply, while the surrounding territory is largely flat with scattered hills. The main barracks is later placed at the lip of the hill. It blocks a direct shot at the stronghold's entrance from below, but it also blocks defenders' view of troops gathering at the bottom of the slope. Florin anticipates this weakness and tells crawlers with inventory access to carry a Jump scroll or ladder so they can reach a position above the obstruction.
The first assault
At the start of open fighting, Tipid's 104th Naughty Little Piggies are responsible for base defense. Many are still away completing scout towers and early-warning positions several kilometers out. The plan calls for thousands of defenders close to the headquarters, but the attack arrives while only a few hundred are immediately available. Enemy action destroys the home anti-air battery and the hangar, grounding parked aircraft until the hangar can be repaired. Transports then deliver Reaver paratroopers into the base. The advance from the northern border continues at the same time, leaving the camp to face an immediate intrusion and a much larger approaching army.
Carl identifies three threats inside the camp. Invisible Madness Monkeywrenchers fire on the defenders and help pin them near the stronghold entrance. Reaver troops gather below the hill beyond the barracks. Some of the Posse's own mages have been killed and their bodies occupied by gondii brain worms, which use the dead mages' access to weaken defenses. Rosetta searches within the headquarters for compromised personnel. Carl checks a purported helper against the casualty list at the entrance and discovers that Charles Andrew is already recorded as dead; attacking the body exposes the worm inside it.
The first stand takes place under fan-shaped magical screens at the stronghold's entrance. Their shields can catch grenades, but the Reavers' pulse weapons remain dangerous. Defenders including Splash Zone and Doctor Bones fire toward the mural-covered barracks across the way. Donut can partly locate the cloaked attackers with the heat setting on her glasses, enabling the group to pick off several of them. The anti-magic measures already placed around the base do not reveal the attackers because their concealment is technological. The defenders have prepared for magical intrusion and still find a gap in their detection system.
The attack on the mages is coordinated with a possible breach through the saferoom connection. One compromised mage, Lonnie, had maintained protections on the interior walls. After his death and takeover, those protections begin failing one by one while he moves among the Reavers below the hill. At the same time, an enemy saferoom door appears in the corridor connected to the bait shop. The Posse has brought that corridor inside its stronghold by building around the shop. What had been a protected route for allies has become a potential entrance for an enemy force. Defenders have to fight in the open camp while Rosetta prepares to stop anything emerging behind them.
Imani returns with other crawlers by way of the guild connection, adding defenders to the line. Kiwi initially keeps Tina inside, objecting to sending a child into the battle. Donut orders Tina out, and the dinosaur draws fire as she charges near the barracks. The defenders use that opening to move. Some run around the building while Carl, Donut, and others climb or jump onto its roof, gaining a view of the Reavers' position that the hilltop entrance cannot provide. Mages cast shields on Tina as she attacks below. Card carriers summon additional combatants, and Carl directs them to find the compromised mages and recover fallen allies' equipment.
From the roof, Carl sees Reaver cyborg troops holding a semicircular position with heavy guns and shields. His trap sense reveals explosive automatons being armed within their formation. He triggers the devices together with Tripper. The blast destroys the automaton position, knocks down much of the Reaver force, and shakes the protected barracks. Posse crawlers and allies recover quickly enough to finish the remaining troops. Lonnie runs back up the hill, but Carl intercepts him; Rosetta then reports that the immediate group of compromised mages has been eliminated and the enemy door has disappeared. The defenders have cleared the foothold within the camp, though their hangar, medical position, and protective forces have suffered losses.
The victory buys little time. Scattered members of Tipid's 104th and other Posse units return as the defenders reset their positions and try to restore air defense. Florin's force and allied units continue fighting the northern advance. Soon the enemy's main army forms up roughly half a kilometer from the camp. It includes Operatic troops and other factions' forces, with armor and siege equipment still arriving. The Posse can see the mass from its position on the rise. Its earlier fight has prevented an enemy beachhead from remaining inside the base, but it has not stopped the army approaching from outside.
The battle also changes how the Posse uses the saferoom entrance. Mordecai warns that an enemy able to exploit the extra door could send a devastating weapon into the headquarters. Carl and the others decide to disable the bait shop's entrance by collapsing its front while keeping the structure within the fortifications. They recognize that a repair item could reactivate it, so it still requires a guard. Closing this convenient route complicates access to the guild's supplies, crafting rooms, and air facilities. As the enemy gathers outside, the base's layout forces the Posse to sacrifice part of its own mobility to prevent another internal breach.