Chapter 3: 252-253
The struggle to achieve anything...
I really should get to updating this more often, write up as you go along, my old supervisor used to say! I didn't listen then and seems I'm not know oh well.
Another year has passed and we are still good! If we count run about like people fleeing a burning building, only that the building is our fort and even on fire is still safer than the dreaded outside!
Most of the year was spent trying to build a set of caravan entrances to allow trading. As we have still found no useful metal ore this is of great importance, trade could be our only access to metal! A forest haunted by zombie animals was hardly a place to send a prospector ahead of us!
These entrances where to run to the map edges to allow any caravans to get under ground quickly, however, it was proving so difficult to maneuver around aquifers and ponds that I ordered only one built! It was to focus on one part of the map and provide a completely cut off route to the edge of our claim! I don't care what happens to the crazy intrepid traders after that but their visits are too important to risk!
Sadly a caravan arrived before this was complete and we could only trade for the goods the individuals were carrying! But I'm getting a head of myself!
The first caravan to arrive was the pointed eared, ecco freaks! I had several nightmares just before they arrived, of them getting trapped, going mad and eventually turning to zombies! This spurned us all on to great works! As the only entrance to the fort was via a single, floor hatch, not even airlocked!
The merchants make it in! However, one of the last wave of idiots migrants had been killed on their way in and so I ordered the hatch sealed.
I bought all the wood and seeds I could from the pointy ears, in return for just one pot of prepared food! Hehe, They are crazy! I then set the chippy to building cages and the mech to building cage traps. Once they were ready I let in the Zombie, we all hid in the butchery until we heard the far away click of a cage falling! Hurrah! The merchants could then leave!
The memorial to the fallen migrant was engraved and then we had a couple of moods, using some wood from the pointy ears, which made me smile, I set up a makeshift meta lworks to produce the bars for the moody dwarfs!
Manthulbetan Shar Kakdal, Deviancecalm the Mile of Brims was born! A native silver bracelet!
Which was also followed by
Itatsumun Gorrothetost, Chilledgriffon the Disemboweled Container! A native silver weapon rack!
The single caravan route was not ready when the Dwarven caravan arrived. The wagon didn't turn up!
The merchants made their way inside and that is when the problems started. I redirected the caravan route once again! This time to stay on stone as much as possible to reduce the number of roads needed to keep the trees down! Because the route moves us and down to avoid the accursed beautiful aquifer, once I started removing the walls behind the old ramps the merchants couldn't find their way out!
I bought all the merchants picks, metal and food/drink. Sold them a Silver Spiked Ball! They loved it! Mwhahahahaha..
However, disaster struck! The merchants went berserk, and even though we were yelling STOP the caravan guards easily killed both the Dwarf and the crazy horse! The other merchant fell into melancholy as his friend turned into a brain demanding, decomposing horror!
My brave dwarfs quickly grabbed the corpse and dragged it to the atom smasher on the surface. This was then operated! The horse's corpse was then being dragged up there too when it came back to life, the cowardly sensible dwarf dragging the rotting corpse, ran for the wind rather than pulling the atom smasher's lever! So there is now a reanimated horse corpse in the atom shasher room on the surface, held back only by a floor hatch! I have now ordered a new atom smasher built near to the trade depot after all that is where all the trouble always happens!
My brave dwarfs, went to work sealing the melancholy dwarf up in a room of his own, it has a single cage trap in there but I doubt he'll walk into it. As a nice measure I had the walls engraved into fortifications so our visitor can see us all! We hoped he'd cheer up, but instead he starved, so we now have a wonderful marksdwarf training gallery! It is just a pity that the dwarfs will be forced to shoot at a twisted version of their own kind.
Another migrant dies! This one ran off to go fishing when I tried to let the merchants out! I let the zombie in and the cage traps take it!
However, another set of migrants utter idiots have arrived 35 in total! However, they again have chosen to arrive near a herd of zombie boars and a zombie cavvy sow is living just outside our floor hatch! I've no idea how to get them inside!
All this just as I was beginning to plan to move us into a proper healthy stone environment. The tree farm has been enlarged too but now I have to save these migrants and build more migrant entrances! I've no idea if the caravan entrance will work! I hope so!
At some point we also need to breach the magma sea! We need fuel, wood wont work forever!
All in all, two years in and only four/five deaths, two of them being merchants! I count that as a great start!
However it is so annoying that we get interrupted all the time and can never achieve anything that we have planned!!! Such is life as a Slave to Armok!
Any requests for screen caps?