The day following the bold snuggling incident she received a rather large amount of bad news rather quickly. First, the Hairless Baboons were now deemed exactly as useless as initially assumed and Cerol's grand experiment was over. They would no longer train whenever it was convenient and spend the rest of their time however they liked. Positions would rotate daily so that at all times two dwarves would train, two would patrol, two would man watchtowers and the remaining four would function as civilians. Further, every member of the Hairless Baboons was restored to full duty as a laborer. This meant before and after their military duty they would spend each day working leaving no time for recreation and a scarce few hours for sleep. For the cavern dwarves this meant routinely returning to their own personal hell. For Inod this meant long hour of backbreaking labor and nauseating smoke burning remains. For Degel this meant an morning and evening of leisurely flower picking to unwind. For Dumplin this meant she was going to be run into the ground.
The second bit of bad news that Dumplin received was that she was once again deemed competent to haul stone. Not only was she capable of hard manual labor she was also fit for every other unappreciated, difficult, and unpleasant task in the fortress. She was now an oven operator serving beside Inod shoveling carcasses, a fish cleaner removing and disposing of the inedible bits of the fishermen's bounty, she was even named the new fortress hivekeeper. The position of hivekeeper, she was told, could be held by only one dwarf at a time so as to mitigate the damage done. Hivekeepers you see had a nasty habit of going insane from the neverending series of bee stings, standing in the forest, and waiting to die of thirst. Any time the manager came across a particularly miserable work order he smiled to himself and wrote Fumplin Logbonglers because he was an illiterate but the go-betweens always made sure that they found their way to Dumplin.
After hauling a wheelbarrow full of gold ore to the furances, burning more rat carcasses than a person of character ought to burn, removing the ickier parts of a few dozen fish, being stung several dozen times, and explaining to several dwarves that she was not in fact plotting her next bold snuggling she received her third bit of bad news. Her husband as it turned out as spouse of a bold snuggler was no longer considered important enough to justify his own room. Certainly a simple militia captain, his veteran wife, and their young son should gladly sleep in the dormitories so that Bemul Sheap-Shearer, the dwarf whose sole element of notability came from the fact his back was once broken by a wheel of cheese in a display of bad luck and stupidity, could have a bedroom all his own. As it turned out her sleep schedule for the dormitorieshad gone more or less ignored. After a day of nonstop labor the desire to adhere to an orderly schedule was overridden by the compulsion to collapse into a warm bed. After she was dubbed a bold snuggler the schedule had been outright abandoned and dwarves appeared to be going to bed early just to ensure she had to sleep on the floor. As she lie on one of the softer piles of dust surrounded by the cacophonous snoring of work weary dwarves she sought comfort in her dear husband.
It was at this point she received bad news number four. Her husband was not particularly pleased that the room he'd earned for them was stripped away, that he was being put back on corpse duty, and that five years of hard work had been undone all because of his wife's unilateral decision making. She tried to lay out the facts but Asen little desire to speak to her and less to hear what she had to say.
Dumplin stared at the ceiling. She'd always been shocked by the cruelty of Arrowstockades but she now understood that was simply the way business was done. The overseer did not work dwarves to death or subject them to immeasurable horrors because he despised them, it was just how he kept the fortress running. She had never actually seen the terrifying might of the dwarven war machine focused on causing her deliberate harm. She only appreciated now that the fortress was very, very large and she was very, very small. The cold, logical, efficiency was now abandoned. The Overseer saw her, the fortress saw her, and they were very angry.
She ran her fingers over her quiver. She had no choice but to hope and pray that the inscription was more than a lie she told herself to feel better. She had to believe that someday she would find something that made all these hardships worth facing. A feeling of illness overcame her as the warmth that drove her onwards left her body. For the first time she sincerely began to regret leaving the city, she lamented coming to the fortress, she began to seriously question whether these were trials to overcome or a series of parallel causes of death. For every dwarf that became a hero against impossible odds there were a thousand who quite in line with the odds accomplished little more than contributing in some small part to the filling of a mass grave. Any happy thoughts she clung to couldn't silence the sound of Feb One-Eye's snarling voice barking “Garbage Dwarf” over and over in her head.
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Topic: The Increasingly Tragic Tale of Dumplin (Read 79114 times)