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Yes

4 (14.3%)

No

1 (3.6%)

It was fun for a long time but towards the end it just started to drag

6 (21.4%)

I wish I could have joined in.

17 (60.7%)

Total Members Voted: 28

[Eric Blank]

"I haven't seen him in a week or more, but we could just have been working opposing schedules. If anything, he's probably involved, because he ordered that lab prepared specifically for his use just before the last siege, and I think it had a lock on the door when I came back to finish it the enxt day; he probably keeps it locked. Wierd, how did you get in there?"
[I have enjoyed the ‼fireworks‼, and am turning in for the night.

Funny thing those fireworks; the crew managed to set sometihng on fire back there with some flares that either burned too long or didn't launch high enough; about 1/4 of them hit the ground skidding and kept burning. They brought in a couple firetrucks with police escort about three-four minutes later, in the middle of the show. ]

[WillowLuman]

[Every year, when I get back from the municipal show, the neighborhood sounds like it's a !!exploding!! and fire trucks can be heard from all directions. Somehow I still manage to get to sleep with all the illegal rockets going off in the background.]

[Corai]

-They put a few crosses in my fireworks. Theres still a few fireworks going, I can never sleep. They sound more like guns then fireworks.-

[WillowLuman]

-They put a few crosses in my fireworks. Theres still a few fireworks going, I can never sleep. They sound more like guns then fireworks.-

Whenever possible I watch the fireworks to the full version of this song in it's entire glory

[Oliolli]

The only explosions going on around here are the ones at a nearby construction area. Fireworks shall be saved for new year.

[wierd]

Fireworks just dont do it for me. Meh.

when you know how to make real bombs, its like watching tellitubbies I guess.

LOL! Just kidding! ROFL!

In all seriousness though, making the fireworks is more fun than shooting them. At least, I think so anyway. Before the whole Sept 11 boloney, we used to make all sorts of fun stuff at mom's farm.

Oh, I remember the fountain that we put too much metal powder in... It melted through the metal plate we ignited it on like thermite.  But BOY was it pretty!

[Gizogin]

[My family only does fireworks on 5 November.  We build up a bonfire all year (we have four lightly-wooded acres, so it gets pretty big), invite all of our fellow expat families, and throw a huge bonfire night party.  Good times are had by all (until we have to clean up the next day).

Wierd, if you're going to call a crisis-recovery meeting, now's the time, before everyone gets too caught up in their various activities.]

[Oliolli]

Well, g'night everyone. Hugo, try to get something done with Oliolli. I'm interested in what's going on with him.

[wierd]

Weird slumped his shoulders, but relaxed a little too.  It wasn't what he had really hoped for, and Eric's 'damn-all i-dont-care-anymore' coping strategy worried him. He wasn't a psychologist, but that couldn't be a good thing for a healthy mind.

Nearly all the supplies for the fortress were buried under meters of rock, or were too dangerous to risk collecting. Even if the food and booze were to magically appear, they had nothing to store it in: all the barrels were in the furniture stockpiles.

And they needed shelter. Dwarves weren't really made to be outdoors.

Weird chewed his lip.

"If you think it would help, I can work a ceramics kiln." He suggested. "We can build the whole thing out of clay dug from the claybank. It won't be the prettiest, but it will give your masons something to work with."

"I don't care what you do, frankly." Eric said curtly.  "I don't even know why I bother anymore."

Weird frowned, but he really couldn't do much more than try to help out. Bricks were better than nothing, and earthenware pots could at least store food.

"I'll get on it then." He he affirmed.

"You do that. I've got heads to count."

First though.. he had his medical exam he needed to get over with. Concussion indeed.

---

Gizogin had taken his sweet time going over his melon with a fine toothed comb, and shining sunlight into his eyes, and generally manhandling his cranium before finally accepting that no trauma had occured and discharging him.

Now, he was sitting by the river bank, examining the nearby clay and sand banks, while washing the blood off his skin and clothes.  Mr Peepers was bobbing around in the sun chasing after dragonflies and moths, clearly enjoying his time out in the sun. He wished he could say the same. The sunlight was just too bright, and it made his head fuzzy. He giggled to himself about the ravages of cave adaptation, but shrugged it off. He'd just make some sunglasses later.

He was just finishing wringing out his socks, when the sploosh of a huge carp caused him to scramble away from the water, and lash out at its surface with a thin finger of lightning. He had removed the overdriven handware earlier when he stripped down to get clean, and the exertion of producing the magic by himself immediately hit him between the eyes.

But the fish was dead.

There on the surface, slowly drifting down-stream, several large fish were floating past. The lightning had killed or stunned them in the water, making them belly-up. With a smile, he fished them out of the water, and up onto the bank. Peepers reacted to the spectacle first by fleeing into a nearby copse of tall river grass, then by pecking and rearing greedily at one of the smaller carp lying in the mud. He didn't have anything else to feed the poor chick, so he let him have it. The others had a date with the fish cleaners.

Carp were bony little shit, and hard to cook right, but at least there would be *something* cooked tonight.

[Gizogin]

Gizogin was worried.  The dwarves weren't coping well with the outdoors.  Most were cave-adapted, and many were already severely dehydrated.  He'd been sending dwarves down to the river to get fresh water, but it was coming in far too slowly.  There weren't enough buckets or dwarves to carry them.  He'd have to ask Gizo X to make a few trips with the tank, now that he'd finished unloading all their belongings from it.

[Eric Blank]

Eric's team has made an attempt at digging out an infirmary in the soil level, but they determined it was too loose, even if held up with thick logs, and would be an unsafe replacement for the current triage. Instead, they entered the tower through the trade entrance, and dug out and smotohed down an area around the trade depot in the center. Once the floor was smoothed sufficiently, and cloth laid out around the space, the injured were hauled in. Those that Gizogin cleared to be moved, at least. Now it was time to see what the others had come up with in terms of getting back to their living quarters.

Most of the work areas near the soil level had collapsed at least in part, as evidenced by the many potholes around the compound. The main entrance was also badly collapsed, and they'd have to dig a secondary entrance somewhere. This was a very dangerous situation.

After determining that getting back inside and clearing any sort of living space would be more on the order of a few days than a few hours, Eric found the head farmer, some native bastard that was about as agreeable as a mother grizzly bear after getting a porcupine lodged up her ass and a half-mauled cub, and obviously blamed all of this on Eric and "that damn dragon" and "that creepy-fucking necromancer guy" and "those disgusting automations" and "those fake doctors." It took a fifteen minute arguement just to convince him that he wasn't going to get back to his bedroom any time soon to wake up on the right side of the bed for the first time in his life, and the farm crew would have to resort to some herbalism-sorcery to come up with food.

There were fisher berries in the forest, at least. Enough to keep the populace happy for the duration of their predicament, if they started soon.

[wierd]

Weird waddled up to the camp, his shirt's long sleeves tied together in a makeshift basket, carrying a load of stinky fish. His pants were hanging up to dry where he had been surveying soil and sand banks, forcing him into his hot black-rubber hazard suit. A small resource cache had been created to help organize things, and his approach with 50lbs of dead fish of varying sizes attracted some attention.

"Dems be CARP lad!" One of the haulers dressed in blue fisherdwarf attire commented. "Ye be daft catchin carp son! 'Ems be fish es what eats YE!"

"Fish and electricity don't mix." He said flatly, garnering a blank confused stare. "If you want a demonstration, i'd be glad to show you, but you'l get to haul em up. I JUST cleaned this shirt. I wasn't expecting to have to kill some fish to get some laundry done."

"Ye mean ye didn't go fishin?" Asked the fisherdwarf clearly confused. "I don ken..."

Weird just smiled at him.

"I was doing laundry, and the carp decided that I looked tasty. I let the boney bastards know their mistake, that's all. Since we're short on food, I thought I'd bring them in."

"Aye.. good cal tha'... do ye think ye could do what'er ye did again? I'd love tuh see is."

Weird rolled his eyes. He'd never get to work making bricks this way... but if they cleared all the carnivorous fish out of the river, he could work unmolested, so maybe it wasn't all bad.

"Sure. Get some friends to carry the nasty shits, and I'll zap some more fish for ya."

The fisherdwarf put 2 fingers in his beared mouth, and wistled loudly, causing a momentary lapse in the mumuring babble of the refugee center. "Lolot, Ducim! Get yer lard-lazy arses o'er 'ere! Dere be fish te clean!"

Weird shook his head. Even in an emergency, some things never changed. Lazy fisherdwarves were a staple of the universe, apparently.

"Noh', about catchin more fish.." the bearded old fool prattled.

Weird cloed his eyes to conceal his rolling them. "Follow me..." he sighed, throwing the fish-stink saturated pigtail shirt over his gleaming metal clad shoulder.

Heading back down to the river edge, where Peepers had found a nice quiet spot to hide in the rushes after gorging himself on raw fish, weird unsocketed the heavy rubber right glove of the suit, and replaced it with the enchanted pigtail one.

"Watch this." He smiled, before pointing upstream, and letting out a violent blast of crackling, high-voltage current into the waterway. As the loud bang subsided, pretty much every fish in the river floated to the top in either death or extreme shock.  The fisher dwarf's eyes went wide.

"Dat be CHEATIN!" He croaked incredulously, as the slow moving stream of fish floated by.

"Better get crackin..." weird chided. "You'll never live down failing to catch a dead fish."

The old fart smiled in a broad snaggle-toothed grin. "Aye lad! At I wouldn't!"

Weird resumed the laborious task of washing the filth out of his clothes, as his nameless companion whistled that deafening monotone note again, and bellowed back up toward the camp. "Lolot, Ducim, get yer skeever arses daown 'ere right naow! An brin a wheel barra'!"

There was an incomprehensible retort, but weird saw the two clearly displeased fishery workers put the shakedown on a hauler pushing one of the few handcarts that had been outside when the disaster had struck. Most likely the carts had been used ferrying materials to Erics perimter defense construction projects, now being used to ferry goods around the campground. The two figures waddled into view, pushing their comandeered trolley down the path, pausing momentarily to gawk at the dead and floundering fish bobbing listlessly in the water's slow current.

"Say wat ye will, but 'avin a wizard around taint all bad, ye see!" Shouted the snaggletoothed fisherdwarf. "Done a weeks fishin in just a few shakes! Seen it meself! Naow, hel' me get de scaly barstards, afore dey all float away!"

The two newcomers looked at each other, at the fish, then at weird incredulously, but at a scowl from who was clearly their workgang's boss, they snapped to, wading out into the now totally safe water, chucking fish up onto the bank, and piling them into the cart. Weird chuckled to himself, watching the spectacle, then commenced digging into the claybank just a few meters up from the river where it had been exposed, digging uphill at an angle into the bank.

"Naow what ye doin lad?" Asked the fisherboss, flopping a rather large molly up onto the groaning wooden cart.

"Making a makeshift kiln." He said between grunts, as he lobbed big chunks of clay downhill out of the hole. "We need pots and bricks. Fat lot of good getting those all dressed and cleaned will be with nothing to put them in to keep the vermin off."

"Aye... sat be true..."

He kept digging.

"Ye need anyone te help wit dat? Me drinkin partner rikosh be one o' em potter types... I could ask I'm te get daown 'ere ifin ye want..." offered the clearly pleased fisher, as fish continued to get thrown up the bank.

"That would help a lot..." said weird tiredly. This bank was made from old, decayed volcanic slurry. It would fire to a nice high temperature ware. Far better than the weathered feldsparic claybank further down. That would only give low strength earthenware. Good enough for bricks, but not for good pots.

"Aye. We'll be doin at den.." murmured the fisher between huffs and puffs. There was a veritable mountain of fish piling up around the cart. They were emptying the river before they all floated a way, even if there was no way the cart could hold it all. As long as they got those things up, cleaned, and smoked before they went rancid in the damnable sun, he didn't care.

Weird nodded approvingly at him, and kept at his hard work digging out the firing chamber of the primitive anagama style kiln.

[WillowLuman]

[50 lbs of fish? I'd think it would be more than that. I estimate that the carp species that attacks dwarves would be either Silver Carp or Indian Carp, or probably either depending on region. That's 41-50 kg each, per fish. Those would also be large specimens, but I suspect that carp in these worlds are somewhat larger on average. Perhaps they are a species unique to Dwarf Fortess? Anyway, though, there are many river fish known for attacking child-sized targets (or dwarf sized!). These would have to be fairly large (about 4-6 feet) to attempt it. That isn't to say that there aren't more than one species of carp in this world, though.]

[As for electrocuting the stream, well, usually fish just start jumping frantically. The wire (or your hands) would have to be placed under the surface to affect it that way, too. In the case of a jolt with the power of a lightning strike, Only fish near the surface (and only in a short area around the bolt) would be affected. Water, after all, does have a very high SHC, and lightning strikes lakes and streams all the time without depopulating them.]

[wierd]

[True that, but common... its a story here! Putting an alternator's coil ends in the water several meters apart to do it would take too long. we could make the argument that was a high ampere discharge, rather than just high voltage. (Sustained arc) lightning has a very high voltage, but comparably low ampere. The idea is that it was more like dropping a power line into said river.]

[The initial blast hit maybe 3 fish just near the surface, looking for snacktime. 50lbs of fish is indeed one big fish. One fish is now partially eaten on the bank, and for argument's sake, let's say one floated downstream. That leaves the dwarf eater in the shirt-sling being brought back to camp, eg, 50lbs. The depopulated heavy zap was much stronger. Lots of dead fish on that one.]

[OREOSOME]

I have Finished reading this Thread, and i am going to make a character of my own then, I will call him... Corvus Alquiar.