I’m convinced that I’m a complete idiot. I let a good-for nothing crafter talk me into coming with him on an expedition he promised would have flowing rivers of ale, where the animals would have been docile and meaty, with iron and coal as far as the eye could see. The first red flag should have been when I saw he was loading the wagon with 30 machalite boulders. I can understand wanting to set up a forge early, but what kind of a madman would waste so much space on them?
Regardless, I’ve arrived, and the ruse is painfully obvious. The only resources this place has are red sand, black sand, more sand, and hoary marmots. We saw a cove of hematite veins exposed by erosion in the mountain, and naturally it seemed like the best place for the miners to start digging. Instead, he told them to carve a stairway straight down into the sand, and told everyone else to haul all the food right outside the stairs. He then told Inod to chop down trees (all ten of them), as he began an obvious ploy to kill us all by telling us to build our respective workshops out in the open. For me, that consisted of slaughtering the two male horses that pulled our wagon, training war dogs, and constructing beds out of the nine remaining logs we had managed to harvest.
Not long after that, Atir and Ushat began digging out the farm, and as it turned out, this patch of land is incredibly rich in gold and galena. He orders hammers made from silver, and the gold ignored.
Phew, It’s been a long time since I lost this journal. In the meantime, two waves of migrants came, and in the meantime, the exposed veins have been mined and dumped, and Thikut ha been replaced as leader by someone (hopefully less stupid) called Dumed. We’ve also run dangerously low on booze in the transition, and several more still have been ordered built in order to compensate for the shortfall.
The caravan came, and from what Degel has told me, it seems they had the audacity to bring sand for trade, in the end, he ended up trading a single native gold mechanism for a sizable amount of food, cloth, drink, and wood.
Farms are in full swing now, making massive amounts of quarry bushes, plump helmets, sweet pods, cave wheat, and pig tails. A series of exploratory rooms have been made, in the hopes of discovering a source of ever-rare fuel. Our trade of the immensely valuable gold mechanism led to an equally massive influx of migrants, the fort’s population is now just under forty. The stray animals they brought with them were all quickly slaughtered by yours truly.
Shortly afterwards, the elven caravan arrived, and with it, a wave of dark stranglers. Everyone was ordered inside, expecting the worst as our two hammerdwarves were stationed at the end of our trap corridor. They spent their first bit on time at our site slaughtering the elf merchants, and then chasing around their surviving animals. The hammerdwarves dispatched them easily after the traps, and I personally didn’t notice that there was any fighting at all going on. In the midst of all this, a weaver went into a fey mood and created a pair of llama wool trousers, decorated with llama wool, encircles with bands of llama wool, and menacing with spikes of sheep wool.
While the weaver didn’t go mad, it seems that Degel, our expedition leader has. He had begun babbling incoherently about “pillboxes” and “courtyards”, and has conscripted a great number of masons to build walls, though thankfully I was spared. I fear for what this may bring to Lenslashed…
As it happens, not a whole lot. He built a massive series of fortifications and towers for marksdwarves in order to better defend the fort. A wave of beak wolves came in the summer, but the human caravan guard easily dispatched them. The caravan itself brought wood, and several barrels of a mysterious liquid they called “liquid”. Shortly after this, a gem cutter was possessed, and produced a citrine bed with hanging rings of citrine, worth less than a native gold mechanism of decent quality.
As it stands now, most of us are doing nothing. We lost 3 men to a goblin ambush, and our forging is currently at a standstill due to a lack of fuel.
Author
Topic: Lenslashed [Story] [Mods] (Read 584 times)