The school robots are drafted into playing a sport named mutilation ball, which, like everything else on Insanus, is hugely and pointlessly violent. In order to power themselves up and become school stars, Blastus and Thrasher start drinking performance-enhancing fluid.
Examples
- Calvinball: "Mutilation ball" is very vaguely similar to American football, if it was made to be as nonsensically violent as possible. Playing involves potential situations such as burrowing underground, having airborne jousting tournaments, and the playing field turning to lave. Additionally, aside from the opposing team, everything — your own teammates, the coaches, the field, the ball, and random monsters — will try and kill you. Not even being a benchwarmer, a fan in the bleachers, or the announcer keeps you from getting mutilated. It's not clear how one "wins" the game outside of causing as much destruction as possible; despite having over seventy-three thousand rules, it's completely allowed and even actively encouraged for players to cheat. There's also "Professional Mutilation Ball", which is explicitly a pointless Forever War masquerading as a "game".
- Continuity Nod: At the start, one of the butt monsters from "El Presidente" is seen crowing at dawn like a rooster.
- Crack in the Sky: When doped up on the tonic, Blastus ends up tearing open the fabric of reality and creating an ominous dark portal in the sky over the mutilation ball field, which promptly starts sucking people into the sky and out of existence.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The school janitor offers Thrasher and Blastus a tonic (which is made of a gross yellow slime that comes out of a pipe by the playground) that is treated similarly to a performance-enhancing drug like steroids. Later, the duo come down with serious side effects from drinking it. At one point, a character says to them "real alpha dogs don't need to drink stuff that comes out of a pipe at the playground."
- Forever War: Professional mutilation ball is simply an endless, pointless massacre against the adults of the living balls used in regular games.
- It Tastes Like Feet: The janitor gives Thrasher and Blastus a performance-enhancing serum that "tastes like gasoline and feet" and comes from a pipe down by the playground.
- Metaphorgotten: When trying to convince Thrasher that he needs to act like an "alpha dog", Blastus tells him to bark as a way of hyping him up. This then leads to him criticizing his barking, then telling him to sniff the ground, and finally the both of them forgetting what they were doing and just going around on all fours, barking, and sniffing things.
- Press-Ganged: Since mutilation ball is such a violent and dangerous sport, Mr. Dreadnot resorts to kidnapping students from their homes and forcefully drafting them into the team.
