[Weird Joykill, Ghostly necromancer has returned from the grave, and haunts the forums!]
[Actually, I have gotten new job responsibilities.... I am an actual NC programmer now, with all the "for the love of gawd! Get the part programmed NAOW!" That goes along with it. Things should settle down some though. One of the programmers that recently quit has been hired back. That means my workload should theoretically diminish. Over christmas, I went on out of state holiday. I haven't even played DF at all since last Nov actually.
being overworked suxxors.]
[Deciding to jump into the 3months later timeline.]
It was yet another titan attack. Monsters had been appearing in the viscinity of the crashed slashdiver's glowing radioactive wreckage. He had tried to suggest building a casson around the damned menace of a thing, and dumping an enormous of borosilicate glass over the top of it to seal out any radiological agents leaking into the environment, but that had been months ago. By now, it was likely the site had a lot in common with a nuclear regulatory comittee "superfund" site. The kind that makes dandilions grow 3 feet tall.
One of the survivors from that accursed wreck had been prowling, and stalking him lately, watching from the shadows, and setting off his now well honed sense of danger; this world did that to you after awhile, make you paranoid, or crazy, or both. Then again, it's only paranoia when things AREN'T out to get you, and frankly, things *HAD* been trying to get him.
Gods, the RATS!
Peepers had steadily grown over the autumnal months, and was now a viciously formidable size, about on par with a heavy St bernard, and had taken to hunting in the darkness of his bedroom and lab spaces, and the hallways between at night. Every morning, the picked over remains of disgusting, misshaped rat things would litter the halls and floors of his preferred haunts... no place seemed safe from the horrid little abominations, as they scratched, clawed, and chewed their way through masonry and under the earth. He could have sworn that they were after him personally. He cursed ever agreeing to help that asshole Askak. Nightmares of being torn apart by millions of angry rodents with hateful little beady red eyes, and mangy patchy fur haunted him almost nightly, and it had seriously impacted his work. Others had noticed the changes such stress can cause in people's behaviors, but most had written him off as inscrutible from the start, and considered his deepening paranoia and self-ostracism as being "normal", or as normal as they were willing to consider it.
He wasn't sure if it was the desperation, or budding insanity, that had started him down the very dangerous road he had reluctantly decided to embark down, given the unholy and dangerous risks involved, but SOMETHING had to be done about those rats! Nobody else seemed to notice or care about them, and somehow, every time he went to go get someone he felt he trusted to show them the mess that Peepers would leave for him every morning, with the scattered, picked over limbs, smashed ugly and misshapen skulls, and disgusting blotches of blood and horrid little rat footprints.. all the evidence would be gone, as if magically whisked away by some terrible force preying on his mind.
But he was almost done... those horrible little vermin; cleary leftovers from that bith Thari and her perverse "science" experiments gone horribly wrong... if her perverse research had created the foul creatures, then surely it could UN-make them as well, and that was exactly what he had been secretly working on. He knew he had agreed to not keep secrets, but he had tried and failed to get attention to this clearly growing threat to the fortress, and now people just thought him more addled than usual. He would have preferred to have had somebody, anybody really, listen to him about this, but frustratingly, every scrap of evidence he had tried to collect always mysteriously vanished into thin air as soon as he would walk away from it. Even remains placed into seemingly impenetrable locked boxes would be taken, the boxes immaculately clean, save for a newfound rathole dug through one side or another.
Even the lab notes he had started keeping on the creatures seemed to disappear, only to turn up stuffed into a corner or up inside a wall as chewed up bits of parchment and paper.... horrid bedding for horrid creatures!
He was very thankful for having peepers to patrol his room at night.. more than once in the past months, he had been awaked in terror to the sound of peepers shrieks, the flapping of wings, tables and chairs being knocked over, and aways that madness inducing scamping of monstrous little feet. The thought of what those....things... would have done to him in his sleep with out peepers around...... but dwelling on such things was where madness lived.
He was finding himself angry, and torn up over having so hastily burned so much of that crazy assed bitch's work, and for the past few months, had practically done everything he could to hermitically seal his bedroom and labspace areas against all forms of intrusions, trying in earnst, and failing in turn, against the pernicious intrusions of his four legged intruders, while pouring over every last scrap of data the crazy vivomancer woman had left behind, searching desperately for anything, anything at all, that would be useful against this malignancy plaguing the fortress, and his mind.
The consistent, and continuous destruction of his lab notes, the depridations on his mind, his lab, and his living quarters had enkindled a kind of manic, paranoid, and fervent resolve. Instead of keeping notes, he had been forced to keep huge sums of information and experimental data inside his head, and the result on his sociability, such as it was, was profound.... he had taken to almost complete isolation, and spending nearly every moment of every day furiously working in his lab space on understanding just what the creatures "were", and more importantly, how to kill them all.
Every last one.
The sounds of the titan outside came rumbling in through the sealed and quintuple locked, adamantine chained, (having resorted to true despiration, and having lifted the prized metal chain from the fortress coffers), and hermitically sealed portal to and from the stone room he had been given to use as labspace so many months ago.
"Always with the distractions!"
He yelled angrily into the air, at no-one in particular.
Peepers looked up from his roosting box weird had provided him with (he dared not leave his precious bodyguard's watchful eyes) and looked at him inquisitively.
"Not you Peepers... those morons outside! Can't they do anything right!? How am I supposed to deal with this mess, if they keep making a racket loud enough that a dwarf can't even hear himself think!?"
Peepers just tilted his head curiously at him, like he always did. Peepers was fast on the draw, but when it came to brains, was far from the sharpest tool in the shed. At least one thing had worked out in his favor from this "rat" business... it had kept peepers continually, and very well fed for this entire time.
But right now he needed to concentrate on the petri dish in front of him. Surely, it, and anything it contained would be desecrated the very moment he left the lab, as it contained cultured flesh from the scurrying monsters that had been casting their malignant shadow over him these past few months. More importantly, it was tissue he had subjected to an engineered plague. Something horrible. Something even thari would have approved of. Something truly horrible, and or, inspired depending upon whom it was you asked....
But it wasn't ready yet. Still not 100% lethal. Couldn't risk it getting out, and the monsters becoming tolerant from selective pressure. No. It had to be perfect first..... it *had* to be absolutely, 100% fatal. Nothing less would be justifiable. He just needed more time....
More loud noises from above ground rumbled his way through the sealed workspace walls.
"Goddamn it! Give it a rest already!"
So close... so, very.. very close......
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Topic: If Bay Forum were a Mountain Hall, continued... FULL DISCLOSURE (Read 267102 times)