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[Aquillion]

So a human guild-liaison arrived in my fortress just as I was closing my big gate.  I realized belatedly that there was now no way for him to get in, but I didn't want to open the gate (the Elven diplomat might sneak in, and my dwarves were giving her the usual runaround.  We told her the drawbridge was malfunctioning.)

So...  how to sneak the human guild-liaison in without that sneaky Elf cottoning on that we'd opened the gates?  Why, the Dwarven way, of course!  Noticing that he had wandered near a spot my miners were mining out beneath the surface before he stopped, I ordered a miner to dig to directly beneath him, dig a staircase up, then hollow out the ground from below...  causing the rather surprised human to suddenly fall into my tunnel beside the dwarven miner, where he sits stunned for a few moments until he catches his senses and dashes off to his meeting.

(Actually, he didn't snap out of it until I dug a bit of dirt next to him, which seems to have forced him to start pathing again -- was that a bug?  Of course, the path already existed.)

So anyway, I thought that this was a slightly funny story just to imagine the reaction of the human involved...  but it also gave me an idea.  When I dug the tunnel to drop this guy into my fort, I carefully remembered that he would fall through the stairs, and set it up so there was only one level to fall.

But I didn't have to do that.  I could have had a dwarf set up a fifteen-foot staircase, and drop anyone I wanted in.  I am planning on trying this on the leader of the next siege to arrive -- will it work?  Will he hit the miner as he falls, killing them?  Obviously, there will be cage traps set up right next to the stairs in case anything goes wrong, so only the miner will be in danger.

Can you use this method to capture any creature, though, by digging beneath them, and dropping them into a two-story drop into a cage trap?  (Make a double-staircase, with the area beneath it hollowed out with the trap; upwards is the channel that breaks the surface.)

PS.  As for the Elven diplomat, she refused to believe that the front gate was broken...  which is somewhat ironic, given that she was eventually killed in a tragic drawbridge accident.