Ah, that would explain the sudden lack of available logs; I'll correct it when I can.
--Storytime--
My name is LMeire Shack, and I'm an animal dissector. I've always loved peeling the skin off of creatures and seeing how they tick, how their muscles interlock and work with their bones. I also love to to illustrate and detail my findings for both pleasure and scientific inquiry. I do not love mussels.
When I first heard of this place, it was described as a luxurious safe-haven for entrepreneurs and scholars alike. A mountain of untold riches where gold and silver flowed like wine and all were welcome to the wealth so long as they could earn it themselves. I had heard that any with an interest to do so was free to join any guild of their choosing, free of charge; and I knew then, this place was the home of my destiny, I would travel to (Forgot ingame name) and become a professional surgeon of the Healer's Guild. It was the perfect
excuse to cut people open for fun way to use my skills
without going to the hammerer for the people! Plus, nobody here knows who I am so
it's unlikely that they'll see me as the lunatic that framed Dagger McAlwaysfriendlytoeveryone like they did back in Murderkilldeathtown it's like a fresh start free from the stigmas of my "useless" hobby. New home, new job, new name, new wife. (If you'd've met her you'd understand why
she I had to go.)
My first experience of the fortress was being informed that I was a stoneworker now. No "hello"s, no "how do you do"s, just "here's a pile of bricks, there's where we're putting the wall, get to work!". It wasn't hard, of course, I am a dwarf, afterall; but the vision of (name) that I had in my head and the reality of the grueling workcamps to which I had been assigned just didn't match up. Eventually, I worked up the courage to address my concerns with the manager/bookkeeper/overseer that seemed to run things despite the presence of a mayor; I guess it sort of worked, 'cause he immediately assigned me to stone detailing after hearing that I like to make art. I still had to stack bricks though.
One day I didn't have to stack bricks anymore. I was wandering around while on break when I guess I wandered into the right room as the Jimboo was there, leaning on a barrel of the good stuff while bemoaning the responsibilities that came with holding 3 different clerical positions to the mayor and liaison, who were also there. The manager/bookkeeper/overseer was so distraught that he declared that the first person he saw other than them would have to take some of the load off of him. They had noticed me by this point and started to warn against this but the moment he glanced at me from the corner of his eye it was an official succession with both a fortress official and the King's emissary to witness it. So I'm overseer now.
The first thing I did as overseer was to take myself off of the hauling and masonry duties, while assigning myself to butchery, bone carving, animal dissection, and fish dissection. The manager/bookkeeper looked at me rather strangely at that order so I explained that fish and small animals were so wholly different that taking them apart required different jobs, he didn't look too convinced for some reason.
The second thing I did was order some 90 or so cages to be completed, as the screams of "CANNOT LOAD EMPTY CAGE TRAP!!!" from the mechanics was starting to give me a headache.
My third order was to wall off some of the gates, as I couldn't think of a reason we would need to pull seven different levers each time we were attacked, especially if we were going to be attacked by elephants on a regular basis.
I was about to order a fourth when there was a commotion outside, other than the mechanics, who still had no cages. Thieves! Oh just glorious, it had been a while since I'd been able to cut open a kobold; the moleweasel kits were a close second but was just something about the skulkers that really delighted the senses,
cutting up a kobold was almost as fascinating as cutting up a real person!. I had gotten outside just in time to see him drown in one of the courtyard pools- these were no kobolds.
His surviving cohort, a worldender, snuck out through a gap in our wall that everyone in the masonry work crew thought I was going to do. Whoops. They were pursued by a pair of guards and later caught in a cage trap, so it was fine. We'll have to drain that pool some time though, bifrost is a terrible thing to waste.
After that excitement, I took a stroll to abuse my privileged as overseer to examine some of our fort's most valuable treasures, among the usual treasures was this newer addition:
Fascinating.
Suddenly there was a cry from one of our sentries: "What in Oblivion is that?!?"
Oh for the love of...
I briefly considered closing the gates, until the monster swooped up a dozen z-levels and began flying circles around the northern edge of our forests. Obviously, closing the gates wouldn't affect much.
I was in the middle of saying my prayers and wondering how far I'd be able to run from this gold-baited death-trap if I ordered everyone to distract it, when the same sentry informed me that the dragon had bloodily dismembered several of our civilians too dumb to stay out of sight.
My curiosity piqued in a wish to decipher the beast's behavior and get it to leave peacefully, I asked the sentry which ones had died and how. He didn't want to answer at first but eventually I gleaned that the following had occurred:
The
unobservant fool traumatized hero failed to
properly describe how the tissues appeared after being doused in acid save the child, but I'm sure after we weather this assault that there will be plenty of
research material patients for my new practice.
--
I've never actually gotten a dragon before, do they eventually go away? Or am I gonna have to move everything underground until I've got a decent military to kill/trap it with?