Finally gotten enough reed paper to put a notebook together. Hopefully here I can keep a confidential log.
I don't know the date - haven't adjusted to this dwarven calendar yet, and I don't know what day we arrived in relation to the home timeline. It doesn't matter. All that matters now is the experiments.
I am quite dismayed to learn of the death of some the elven traders. Back in the old days, elves were often the butt-end of jokes, but I never hated them. I thought they would be quite valuable allies to us, and I only wanted a few to remain behind for the experiments.
Those damned experiments. On the most disturbing note, I seem to be developing a split personality. Ever since we... arrived, I have been hearing these voices. In my head. The voices of kittens. At least, there are always the images of the faces of kittens when I hear them.
I have always considered myself to be a compassionate person. The thought of inflicting pain fills me with disgust, and even when necessary I believe it a mistake. When the kittens are talking, though, it changes. Initially it began with a warped kindness. In preparation for science, I had drafted some experiments. In the game, civilizations seemed immutable substances, as no action of any sort or magnitude could change how they worked, how their politics ran. I wanted to see if it would be possible to induce communism, socialism, or capitalism by spreading ideas to passing caravans. It was the idea of the kittens, though, to forcibly condition unwilling prisoners to these ideas through the suggestive power of crafts.
One of my first scientific discoveries about this world was that, in certain circumstances, crafts can posses the power of hypnotic suggestion. This can be observed in the fact that traders may exchange wagonloads of goods for just 2 bins of figurines; even elves, who normally would have no care for such things. The whispers in my head told me to use the crafts to induce new political beliefs in the prisoners, and send them out to seed these at home. This sounded eerily familiar... something else I'd seen before. Then it hit me:
Liberal Crime Squad.
Somehow, ideas from yet another world began to bleed into my mind through these voices. It is my belief that, in some way, in being brought here I (and possibly the others) were also affected by other worlds that we also thought fictional. When I observed the space-bending properties of cage traps, I was struck with the idea of building a TARDIS. This idea was entirely my own, set about by my old interest in the show (oh how I miss the old world). Upon dwelling on the show in such a way, and I suspect especially because I thought of emulating it, the voices in my head began suggesting I begin developing daleks, and eventually create them from KodKod, who seemed the most like them.
It was then that I realized the incredible truth: this universe is powered by narrativium. The cage traps work because we expect them to; when we actually became part of this world, they gained space-bending powers to conform to these beliefs. I further posit that whatever brought us here has established a sort of connection with other fiction; if I were to find a way to exploit the laws of narrativium specific to Dwarf Fortress, I could create technology beyond our wildest dreams. Seeing how these voices provoke me to misuse such knowledge, I decided to do a crude psychoanalysis of myself. With theoretical techniques I manages to transcribe part of what I believe to be my RAWs.
The real me:
[SECRET_GOAL:ESCAPE]
The other me:
[SECRET_GOAL:WORLD_DOMINATION]
On this note I close the first page, hoping that that new kobold we've acquired doesn't steal this book, thus revealing my private thoughts to the rest of my comrades.