"SPACE"
******
About one month ago, a good friend of mine died. The cause of death was noted as a spinal tumor, made apparent by his progressive loss of motor and sensory function over the duration of his last week alive. His last wish was that I should receive his laptop.
******
Jake's laptop came by mail. It was pretty unremarkable: An Inspiron brand Dell laptop with a well-worn keyboard and a large amount of key scratches on the case, including some forming the word "SPACE". Since I didn't have a laptop myself (only an old slow desktop computer that my father didn't need anymore), and also couldn't count on getting enough money in to buy myself a laptop in the next months, I decided that I would stick with this one for a while. Upon booting the laptop, I was presented with an Ubuntu 11.04 default login screen, displaying a single login account with the name "Simon". I have never heard Jake being called Simon before. The account was password-protected, but the password ("sefol") was easy to guess. I was presented with a very empty desktop. The background was a vertical black-to-yellow gradient, and the only desktop icon was a link to DF. Jake had always been interested in hearing from my fortresses, but every time I tried to persuade him to try playing DF himself, he always said that he just didn't have the patience.
I started DF by double-clicking the DF shortcut on the desktop. A window appeared and displayed the DF main menu. Two things immediately jumped into my eye: The version number displayed in the bottom right (v0.32.EK) did not correspond to any released version, and the only available menu options were "Continue Playing" and "Quit". I selected "Continue Playing". There was only one save, and it was a Fortress Mode save with a fort creatively named Usankogan. The world was currently in year 732. I loaded the world and scrolled around. The 6x6 embark contained a preposterously amazing above-ground fortress situated on a small hill. It was built mostly out of marble and obsidian and had little symmetry, because it was built out of multiple towers and walls in different shapes, sizes and styles. Multiple construction jobs were set on an unfinished tower. The framerate was a constant 10 FPS, probably due to the grand total of 235 dwarves running around doing dwarfy things. The fort was organized perfectly, almost every industry was implemented. There was a fully automated silk farm using lots of fluid logic, multiple automated livestock breeding and killing farms, and a magnificent main entrance with at least 10 autonomous invader killing devices. Almost all workshops had repeat jobs, and those that didn't were still brimming with manager work orders. There was also a massive graveyard underground, with approximately two thousand coffins and slabs. The unit list was crammed with thousands of dead goblins, animals and dwarves. The death records on the slabs went back to Year 127, making this fort over 600 years old. The 40-dwarf military was clad completely in masterwork steel and most of them were legendary in at least three combat skills. In fact, almost all grown-up dwarves in the fort had at least two legendary skills, which could not be explained solely by the 1000 or so artifacts that lay, surrounded by a magma moat, in a small room accessible only from above via a chute that ended in a 1x1 obsidian retracting bridge that formed the center of a mosaic covering the floor of the large throne room in the center of the fortress. The only dwarves currently occupying the throne room were the queen herself and two royal guards that were currently assigned to the main entrance. While I watched, the royal guards were replaced by two others, and the manager came in and proceeded to have a meeting with the queen.
Suddenly I was alerted by a birth announcement: Somebody had given birth to a girl. I zoomed over to look at its description, interested in its (probably huge) relationship list. Maternally, the baby had a decent list of aunts, uncles and cousins, but the father, nicknamed "Jake III" for some reason, had no blood relatives except for the baby. I zoomed over to "Jake III" and looked at his stats. He was interestingly not legendary, his best skill was Professional Miner. He was missing an arm and an ear, and his medical history showed that he had suffered multiple bone fractures in the past. His thoughts screen listed him as unhappy, despite him just having become a father. I searched the unit list for other nicknamed dwarves, and I found three: "Laura VI", a metalcrafter, "Simon XI", a fisherdwarf, and "Jonathan V", a mason. None of them were legendary in any skill, and their relatives and friends screen was sparse. "Jonathan V" was currently in the hospital because of arrow wounds. While I watched one of the two legendary doctors spend some time and thread on him, a message appeared: "Laura VI has burned to death". I hit the space bar.
Instead of pausing, the game spit out another announcement: "A migrant has arrived.". I tried pausing with the "v" command, but the game still refused to pause, and the new migrant (a weaver) wandered onto the map and under the yellow X. The migrant was called "Matthew", and I was puzzled for a while before I came to the conclusion that Jake must have named a dwarf after me in a previous fort in this world. Suddenly I remembered what had happened to "Laura VI". I zoomed to the announcement and found her still-burning body in a corner of the magma forge level. Next to it were the remains of a fire snake, but only until a miner came and removed them. An announcement came saying that a human caravan had arrived. Slightly overwhelmed, I quit DF, shut down the laptop and went to bed, resolving to actually start doing something with the fort on the next day.
The next day, I came down from my room to have breakfast, and repeatedly failed to pick up the spoon next to my cereal bowl until I noticed that my right thumb had gone numb. When my father gave me an odd look, I told him that I must have rested on it while I was sleeping, and massaged it for a while. When that didn't help, I finished my cereal with my left hand and went to school. When I came back from school, my thumb was still numb. I went into my room, closed the door, tossed my bag away, sat down in front of my desk and started up Jake's laptop. I started DF and loaded Usankogan. The screen was centered on the throne room, and the bridge in the center was retracted. An elf was standing next to the queen, and a blinking child went up to the hole and dumped a green bed inside. The child went out again and the hole closed again. I tried to catch the kid, but it was hard to keep the "v" cursor over the child while it was moving. It eventually stopped in the dining room, and I was finally able to view its description. She was one year old, born in 732, and she was the daughter of... "Jake III"?
At 10 FPS, playing through a DF year would take over 11 hours, and I played for at most half an hour. How could the game continue while I wasn't playing? Still, the announcement list showed a ton of new messages, such as the kid creating an artifact, a goblin siege, a few dwarves dying of old age, four births, and another migrant. The most recent announcement was that an elven caravan had arrived (dated Slate 734), and this very caravan was just making its way to the trade depot, which was busy being filled from the various adjacent stockpiles. I searched the unit list for the human traders that were announced last night, but they were not to be found. The elven diplomat screen popped up, but vanished again before I could react. I decided to screw that and build something for "Matthew" instead. Perhaps he would like a room in the unfinished tower? I scrolled to it, but the tower wasn't unfinished anymore. It had been given a conical roof with a black-and-white spiral pattern. Since "Matthew" had already chosen a small room in one of the other towers, I decided to give him a dining room instead. As I looked at his thoughts screen to find the best material for some awesome dining furniture, I noticed that his right thumb was missing. I looked at the combat logs and found out that it had been taken off by an enraged guard dog.
By now, the elves had finished unloading, and a broker was standing at the depot with the "Trade at Depot" job, but the trade option was disabled. After a while, some dwarves came to the depot and started carrying cages and bunches of berries away, and it looked like the broker was trading all that stuff by himself. I decided to stop this madness and deconstruct the depot. I pressed Q and hovered over the trade depot. Just as I was about to hit the "X" key, I felt a stinging pain in my left ankle. I yelped in pain and clutched my ankle with my hand. An announcement popped up that "Matthew" had been bitten by a brown recluse spider. Holding my ankle with my left hand, I zoomed in on "Matthew" and found him deep in the forest outside the fort, slowly walking back to the fort hauling some brown recluse spider thread. While I was watching him return, I started to feel really hot. Suddenly I doubled over and vomited all over the floorboards below my desk. When I looked up again, there was a patch of vomit behind "Matthew". But it was raining ingame, so the green patch vanished after a few seconds. My vomit was still there, so I stood up and hobbled to the kitchen to get a roll of paper towels. When I had finished, the pain in my foot was almost gone, but there was a patch of unresponsive skin around my ankle. I looked for "Matthew" to inspect his health tab to see what was up with his foot, and I found him lying in the sick bay, his foot having severe necrosis. I had looked up necrosis in Wikipedia before and had found out that it could be removed locally, and I dearly hoped that the doctor walking into the hospital right now knew that too. The doctor (nicknamed "Laura VII") wasn't flashing.
At the sensation of a bone saw cutting through my tibia right below my knee, I screamed for about a minute before passing out.
When I woke up again, I found myself lying on my bed. My mother was sitting in my deskchair reading a book. When she noticed I had woken up, she wanted to know why I'd been screaming. I glanced at my left leg, it was still there and didn't hurt. I explained that I had sprained my ankle in gym class, and when I massaged it, I managed to jam a nerve. My mother explained that there were two things wrong with that: First, my ankle would look very different if it were really sprained. Second, when she found me, I was apparently clutching my knee, not my foot. I said I didn't know why. Then I glanced at Jake's laptop and asked her if she had turned it off. She said that she'd never seen it running.
When I'd convinced my mother that I was (relatively) fine and she had left the room, I hobbled to the laptop again and turned it on. While Ubuntu started up, I felt my leg. Everything below the knee was completely unresponsive and my foot wouldn't move, even when I tried. I resolved to end this right now, before it could cause any more damage. It would probably involve a hammer or something. I logged into Simon's account and started up DF.
This time, the screen was focused on the main entrance. A whole goblin siege was busy being annihilated by the very long weapon-trap-filled corridor that it had been routed to by means of drawbridges. One of the goblin squad leaders (a goblin master bowman) fired an arrow off the screen to the left, shortly before he was neatly spread across the corridor walls. A few seconds later, an announcement popped up stating that a dwarf had been killed by a trap. I scrolled to the left, and one of the weapon traps near the end of the corridor now contained most of a dead dwarf. The dwarf turned out to be the wife of "Jake III", who had fallen unconscious after getting hit by the aforementioned arrow. I had a look at "Jake III", and his thoughts screen listed him as miserable, although his sprite didn't show the flashing red arrow. I wanted to do something about that, and finally decided that "Jake III" should have the room on top of the now-finished tower instead. As I scrolled to the room, I noticed a dwarf on the flat roof of an adjacent tower. It was "Jonathan V", and he was in the process of building a strangely asymmetrical floor pattern on the roof. From an angle, it almost looked like letters: "HEI", no, wait, now it was "HEL". Then a royal guard came onto the roof, grabbed "Jonathan V" and dropped him off the tower. I turned off the laptop and went to bed early.
The next morning, I went down to the basement to find a crutch, because I couldn't walk long distances in my current condition without tripping or making a fool of myself. I found one of my father's old crutches, given to him near the end of a ski trip having ended earlier than planned. My right thumb was still numb, making it hard to keep a hold of the handle. I tied my arm to the crutch with a piece of old clothesline lying nearby. At school, my gym teacher wanted to know what happened to my ankle. He had received a call from my mother asking for details about my injury. I said I had no idea, but I didn't want my mother to worry about me. He gave me a weird look, then continued down the corridor.
I came back home and fired up my laptop. DF was focused on an unrevealed underground area 87 Z-levels below the surface. I had another look around the fortress, this time with a focus on the underground parts. All three caverns were fully revealed and explored, and there were no forgotten beasts to be seen. Multiple pump stacks were pumping magma from the magma sea into four gigantic magma reservoirs with a volume of at least 10000 tiles each. Between the first two cavern layers were two large abandoned apartment blocks in different layouts. No room had less than 9 tiles of floor space. The forge area where "Laura VI" had died was now deconstructed and replaced with an animal stockpile containing tame exotic animals bought from the elves, but also wild animals caught on-site. A bowyer came along and picked up a cage containing a tame cougar. I followed him to a huge arena carved out of stone. The bowyer placed the cage next to two other cougars opposite a caged wild giant badger. A mechanic came along and linked up the cage to a lever on the east side of the first floor of the tribunes, opposite the spectator entrance. After the mechanic had finished linking, the entrance to the pit was sealed and four people entered the tribunes: The queen, flanked by two of her royal guards, proceeded to position themselves inside a specially-carved balcony in the north of the arena. The fourth person was "Matthew", who proceeded to walk to the lever and pull it. A fierce fight ensued, and "Matthew" walked back out along the southern edge of the pit, right up to the point where he fell in.
The battle had moved to the south-west corner of the arena, and the giant badger made a swipe at "Matthew" when he came close enough. "Matthew" dodged right into the pit, and I got the wind knocked out of me and fell off my chair. Moments later, an excruciating pain in my right arm, and a scratch over most of my face. I didn't scream, but I didn't lose consciousness either, lying on the ground for two hours, watching the clock, before the pain subsided to acceptable levels. I felt my right arm with my left, and found out that I could still feel something. I flexed my right hand, and my fingers still moved, with the notable exception of the thumb. My elbow was throbbing, and I couldn't contract it, feeling intense pain every time I tried to put my hand to my right eye, which didn't hurt anymore, but also didn't see.
By now it was time for dinner. I stood up, hobbled to the dining room without the crutch, and proceeded to eat dinner with my left hand. After multiple failed attempts to grab my glass of water, I managed to move my left hand close enough to spill it over. My parents exchanged worried looks before standing up and getting some paper towels. After dinner, I limped back up to my room. I started my laptop and DF, and was greeted by a message stating that the queen had placed a mandate.
The mandate was a production order, demanding the production of a single silver bed. I immediately discarded any thought of fulfilling the mandate, since you could only make beds out of wood materials. Instead, I browsed the rest of the fortress, looking for something else to do. In a roofed area outside were about 10 mason's workshops. Nine of them were idle, one was producing marble and obsidian blocks on repeat. The mason in the workshop was lying down, so I viewed his stats. It was "Jonathan V", who had survived his fall, although he had suffered a broken spine in the process. He was unable to stand, but he wasn't assigned any crutches. Outside the fortress walls, one single fisherdwarf was fishing at the river passing through the corner of the embark. Since all of the other fisherdwarves were fishing out of a pool safely created underground by means of the aquifer, I assumed that this fisherdwarf would be "Simon XI", and my guess was quickly confirmed by heaps of "Simon XI"'s fingers and toes lying in a small circle around the dwarf, probably removed one after the other by the two pikes currently idling two river bends away. At that moment, "Jake III" was announced dead of blood loss in the hospital, he had been caught in a cave-in and the trail of blood that went through half the fortress was quickly being cleaned up by dozens of children. I went to sleep.
When I woke up the next day, I found that I couldn't use my right arm anymore. I told my mother that I felt sick and wanted to stay in bed for the rest of the day. She left the room without any further questions, and I waited until I was sure that I was alone in the house until I stood up. I fired up DF and looked at "Matthew"'s medical history. Sure enough, "Matthew"'s arm had become infected after the badger bite, so it had been removed, this time by a professional doctor. When I left "Matthew"'s stats, I was presented with the noble screen. The queen's mandate marker was bright red.
If I wanted to fulfill that mandate, I would need to modify a reaction in the save's raws. I minimized DF and noted the address of the DF desktop shortcut. I navigated to the folder containing the shortcut's target, and landed in the DF folder. The folder was empty save for the DF startup script, which referred to a nonexistent ./libs/Dwarf_Fortress executable. I had the astonishingly painful impression of being punched in the face, and when I switched back to the DF window, I found out that "Matthew" had been punched in the face by "Jake III"'s daughter, who had just gone berserk in the main dining hall shortly before being taken down by a war dog assigned to her. A message popped up, saying that the queen's mandate had expired.
The hammerer left the throne room. I mashed the keyboard, but nothing worked. The viewport stayed focused on the hammerer as he made his way to the dining room. I grabbed a sticky note from my desk, wrote "For Christopher" in shaky left-handed writing, closed the laptop's lid and pasted the note on top. The hammerer raised his silver warhammer.
******
About one month ago, a good friend of mine died. The cause of death was noted as a spinal tumor, made apparent by his progressive loss of motor and sensory function over the duration of his last week alive. His last wish was that I should receive his laptop.
******
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Topic: Think a DF Creepypasta would be possible? (Read 21079 times)