Do you feel that?
You don't?
Are you sure?
It's that
slipping sensation when everything is going great but that you feel like it is slowly slipping out of your grip.
Kinda like holding a slab of meat soaked in grease, feels icky and it slips out of your hooves very slowly.
Lapse:
We came off with a very very bad start.
Turns out that the Steel Rangers have been secretly spying on us all along, the bastards.
They sent a small squad of soldiers to test our defenses, they managed to sneak all the way up to our walls before the alarms went off.
In the meanwhile 3 black radscorpions displayed aggressive behavior, the 7 of us went out and killed them all, just like old times.
The steel ranger scouts kept showing up one by one and retreated as soon as they were spotted, as the last steel ranger escaped a squad of slavers showed up, the first ambush in over 3 years.
This is it guys, the beginning of the end of Lemon.
While their main squad rushed up to our entrance (the bridge was lowered) one of the sneaky bastards got up from behind us, our entire damn army chased after her and beat her to death.
But a black radscorpion happened to be there and it took down one of our soldiers before being cut apart.
They ditched their dead comrade and galloped back to our perimeter just before the slavers got up to it.
Slavers were murderized, it was a 6 v 35, they were utterly destroyed, but managed to wound some of our guys in the fight.
The wounded were brought to the hospital where we got to test the new Mrs Redheart bot.
Lycaeon was amongst our wounded, he lost his lower left hindleg in the fight, ouch.
No idea where his leg went.
A ghost appears below our well, the one closest to the fishing area.
Yeah, I shit you not, a fucking ghost.
Everypony freak out about it and get their water from our second well, everypony save for one of our priests, one of the two snipers, who calmly goes to talk to the ghost.
The ghost reveals that it fell in the well in an accident involving a soapy floor and that it drowned there, nopony missed it and this made the dead pony very upset.
To make it happy again we crafted a stone slab and engraved a memorial in it's name and placed it by our well for it to see, the ghost appreciated this and it's soul came at peace.
The ghost's body however must still be down there in the well, slowly disintegrating under the strong water current... luckily only me and a few others know about it, there is no need to tell the others about it, we wouldn't want panic to break out, got to remember to fish it out somehow using grappling hooks or something.
Prophecy Prairehawk suffers from the same crazy symptoms as Corai and the other ponies with strange projects.
He goes into a secretive state where he drew us creepy pictures of what he wanted, after some time and passing the pictures around the stable we managed to figure out what he wanted and he immediately set about creating whatever insane project he had in mind.
At this point we might as well just muse these crazy ponies and let them do their thing, the results of their strange works is very pretty, even if they are not always of good use to us.
Nothing really happens during the time he works on his project.
He completes it and proudly shows me FOCUSTAMED THE NOBLE OF CROWS, which in non-crazy translates into "a mug made of gems".
On the mug is an image of Pudding Mobdrink, that earth pony who created that awesome statuette, being "accepted" by the ponies of Lemon.
That's great, we'll just... uh... put it with the rest of our gifts, with the... bracelet, scepter, earring and statuette...
Kinda feels like Hearts Warming Eve where you ask for a bunch of awesome crap but end up getting books and socks.
We place more hives.
That's... basically all there is to that.
An earth pony girl was born, I like her, she is a funny foal.
Let's see if she thinks building in the irradiated wasteland is funny when she grows up.
The wounded all recover (this happens barely 15 minutes after the ambush), everyone return to their work as if nothing even happened.
Lycaeon insists that the loss of half his lower left hindleg is "just a flesh wound" and that he wants to keep training his armor using, fine by me, here is a crutch, use your unicorn voodoo magic to figure out how to walk properly and we'll see you at combat training tomorrow.
To reduce unhappiness and increase workforce morale we place some aluminium chests in the remaining bedrooms, designate more bedrooms to be dug out (many more), order more beds to be constructed and give free milk and honey biscuits to everypony (LIMITED SUPPLY ONLY, GET YOURS TODAY).
We build MAS & Arcane Terminals in the RobronCo machine shop (for lack of a better place).
Running the terminals I see programs about spells like "Implosion", "Time Dilation", "Torment" and so forth.
Fucking crazy, is what it is, can't believe our frail unicorns would be capable of doing such evil.
Still it might be worth checking out, maybe we can use some of this
unatural fuckery against our enemies.
The list of terminal reactions look like this.
We build some extra workshops, namely a Loom, Clothier, Sawmill and Plywood Workshop.
Many of our more veteran Lemon citizens clothes are showing serious sign of wearing out.
Crazy Cow's jumpsuit is showing off more than it should, this would be just fine if it was just us, but with 124 other ponies seeing half her flank this is not okay in my book.
Crazy Cow is assigned a brand new jumpsuit and some socks, the only pair in the entire stable.
This only drew more gazes towards her, I immediately regret giving her the fucking socks.Edit: Oh right forgot, I am not supposed to do that, my bad.
In the meeting hall (which is turning out to look pretty good now that our builders are almost done smoothing the entire place) we build a bar.
To celebrate this we open up all those hundreds of year old sparkle-cola, sparkle-cola RAD and sunset sarsaparilla bottles we have been saving up for a rainy day, everypony wants to be friends with the new barista, so much in fact that absolutely nopony can be arsed to move
that one stone table out of the damn way like I asked them to do so long ago.
Stockpiles are overfilled, two new areas are designated for digging, but our builders (also responsible for mining) are busy doing more important stuff, like making the kitchens and meeting hall look pretty.
Good to know that we have all our priorities straight.
The sensors we installed in the caves have detected hellhounds in the caverns.
All our technician spotting this said when leaned back in his chair was "Cool story dawg, it's not like we even want to go down there anyway".
Some plywood is made using wood, I wonder what we'll make, I don't really know what we even want to make out of plywood, we sort of already have everything we need, almost.
We order some new mechanisms, many of our new workshops require mechanisms, and the only mechanism I got is one made out of plasteel which I accidentally ordered a while back, and I don't want that to be used for building (preferably I'd like to be used in the construction of a
deluxe ripper or chainsaw rifle).
We have been having some issues with the hives, nopony knows what to do and there ends up being more workers assigned to figure out the hives than necessary.
All of our farmers (including me) are relieved of beekeeping and we ditch out worst farmer (some stupid kid who killed some of our crops last season) to do it instead.
Turns out the bees love him so much that they don't even get aggressive whenever he destroys one of their hives and kills thousands of their children.
An earth pony boy is born, tests show that he has no remarkable skills whatsoever (I don't question the tests, I don't even know what the unicorn doctors say, I just nod slowly and agree to whatever nonsense they say), so he is assigned to become a craftspony once he comes of age.
An unicorn girl is born, she on the other hoof has some type of special future skill, so she becomes a profession of her own, we create a new list labeled "Ammo Crafters" who will be responsible for crafting ammunition and guns, and assign her to it.
We don't really need ammo right now, but I imagine we will by the time she grows up.
Cloud Frog has another stroke of genius and figures out how to build a minigun turret, that thing looks badass (seriously the sprite is fucking cool as hell, yes I know hell is hot, just roll with it).
With no risk of it's bullets catching fire to our entire damn construction site we move it to our entrance.
Shortly after this a black radscorpion wanders in looking for revenge and the turrets open fire.
Zero effect from the standard turrets, the bullets just pling off it's armor, the minigun turret on the other hoof has a pretty good effect, some of it's bullets penetrate it's carpace and lodge in it's tasty soft flesh.
The minigun turret doesn't kill the scorpion, we had to send our military to kill it (the lucky winner was P(ony)SI who gets super excited whenever she hears "Go kill X!"), we take no injuries.
We expand the surface farms slightly.
Our indoor surface farms look like a complete mess, they are really in need of some serious infrastructural improvements.
Another Virtual Reality sim is built down in the training centre (well not
built, we are still setting it up), now we can train two ponies in serious things and let two ponies play videogames all day.
The training of our 4 specialists is going good, P(ony)SI has almost caught up with Lycaeon in armor using (Lyc level 3½, P(ony)SI level 3).
Training for our two snipers is also progressing well, Humble Friendsound is almost at level 7 while Motherworship is almost at level 4.
Once Humble Friendsound reaches level 11 he will be deemed fit for combat duty and will be assigned to a squad of his own which will regularly patrol our walls, scanning the surrounding area with his damned anti tank rifle.
Lastly, we find Lycaeons hind leg.
Right in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of all the sick sludge, vomit and blood that has been mixing on it.
We really need to get that cleaned up, it's starting to look pretty disgusting.
Other:
*Too lazy to report overall progress, objectives and such, going to ditch the objectives section (as I have a hard time keeping track of everything I do as it is) but will be including a more extensive status of things in the next report (such as what all our skills are at, what our stocks are at right now, our militia skill levels and so on), this wont be in every future report mind you, but I figure I might as well fill you in next time so you get an idea of what we have going.*
I want to tell you about two things,
1. Be careful with beekeeping, only assign ONE beekeeper, if you assign more, much of your workforce will be standing around trying to pick up and move the same hive, this is a DF bug mentioned in the beekeeping wiki entry, so keep that in mind (and consider beekeeping now that you know that you only need a single pony to reap the rewards).
2. Irradiated storm ghoulification.
I noticed that I haven't had a single "natural" ghoul despite my biome, BUT that I do have one ghoul casualty in my area.
Judging by the profession I am guessing that one of the trade caravan guards of a caravan that showed up several reports ago turned into a ghoul when subjected to an irradiated storm, and that it killed one of his own friends before being brought down by the rest of the guards.
So if you embark in biomes with irradiated storms be sure to protect your trading partners in some way, build them a small house connected to a tunnel or something.
This doesn't happen often, but when it does it can end up being really bad for you, especially if you are being a coolguy who plays DF the dwarven way with no DFhack to save your ass in case of fatal amounts of fun.
Y'all dismissed.