I recently had a giant fire breathing eyeless tick make its way up through a hole to the caverns that I missed plugging up in my shaft down to the magma forges. Luckily, it only toasted one mason but made its way outside, where I locked it outside my airlock until I could get my meager defense force together.
The outside of the fort is now a field of scorched earth and feather trees (which seem to survive fire quite nicely). Two puppies are permanently flashing red but don't seem to have suffered any wounds (a bug I'm assuming). I'm hoping they grow up to be flashing red helldogs, which I will train for war and leave at my gates. The tick died from one crossbow bolt but took out 3 marksdwarves with it.
The interesting part though, is that during it's initial assault, it set a good chunk of my furniture stockpile on fire, as well as my crafts. The fire seems to have gone out, but smoke continues to billow from two areas, then subside to nothing and billow out again.
I noticed a few tiles of stone were flashing as hot, so I bulldozed those down but the smoke continues to billow out. As far as I can tell, both smoke clouds are centered on artifacts that were in storage.
Currently I'm trying to confirm that this is what's happening (by assigning a stockpile to take the artifacts away and see if the smoke is centered on the new tile).
If it is, the question is: how do I weaponize/use/do science/create !fun! with my new eversmoking artifacts?
My first thought was to create a goblinite collection area, drop the artifacts in, then drop the raw goblinite in and wait for them to pass out and let my melee dwarves in for easy practice. But there must be something more interesting to do with an unlimited source of smoke...