Eric was climbing out of the pit for the night, along with the five dwarves who had spent their day clearing rubble with him. The first z-level of the fort wasn't in as bad of shape as they'd initially thought. the main hall had of course suffered not one but 4 different collapses before the next rampway down to the second level, but the majority of the rooms up there besides the farms were small and well-supported. However, they'd been lucky in one sense of the word; there was a medium-sized room that had lost about three quarters of the floor, leaving about 6 feet of space on one wall on which a doorway had rested. A massive hunk of rock that had existed there under the room, covering three z-levels of solid earth, had simply fallen, and crashed through several stories, before falling into the cavern lake hundreds of feet below. This was particularly bad for anyone that happened to be anywhere near it when it fell, ufortunately.
Tomorrow, the fun would start; They would first make a ladder, and then a stairwell down into the abyss, from which they could access the remnants of the fort.
After sitting down for their alotted meal of a few fisherberries and nasty-ass fish, all the dwarves and forumites-still-present spent their last waking hours chatting it up. Unfortunately the main topic of discussion, and a very controversial one at that, was whether or not they should just give up and leave. Out of the 60 or so dwarves left alive, about half of them were fed up with the constant disasters, the deaths, everything. Wierd tried to talk some of them out of it, but everyone he talked to, no matter how respectfully or sanely, just inexplicably became angry. Recalling his own conversation with Wierd earlier, he noted that he had suddenly gone from entirely jovial to fighting the urge to impale Wierd's head with a pick, for no reason whatsoever. It was almost like Wierd was causing some sort of emotionally-compromising effect on everyone around him but that Rikod fellow. Regardless, nobody else could really negotiate with them either.
In the end, about 25 dwarves swore they'd be packing their bags in the morning, and hoofing it out to the nearest human town - a three day hike, and a month-long exodus from there to the mountain homes if they managed to secure a ship. But they'd probably just build it. Many of them were farmers, and they claimed a portion of the food stocks and barrels, almost equal to the portion of the populace that was leaving. It was looking bad, but the last thing they needed was a real fight. Tonight, the excavation team and quite a few of the loyal dwarves, including Eric, would be sleeping in the excavated portion of the first level of the fortress. Some jackass outside was banging on a hunk of metal.