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[AwesomenessDog]

I was building a fort that was well on its way to lasting millennia. It was on year 7 after just becoming a metropolis 2 years earlier. It had a 40 dwarf strong military comprised of 4 squads; 1 squad of elite archers, 2 squads of elite soldiers, and one trainee squad. The nobles were a nuisance but easily met with the rapid production and smelting of copper chains, cages, and bracelets (the queen was pretty kinky). The treasurer told me we had just reached 30,000,000 dorf-bucks worth in goods: we were literally sitting on a gold mine, raking in diamonds of all colors, and producing the finest silks for the world to see only 6 years after the forges were activated. There was only one adamantine spire and it remained untouched due to something unforeseeable.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 Once it had been breached, it let out a horde of demons as always, but one of the Moose Demons' bites caused the dwarf it bit to immediately gib and crash my game because my weak laptop couldn't calculate the force. So once I got my savescum back I just decided it wouldn't ever be opened. 

Just as I broke the final cavern between the sweet dwarven honey and the forges, I received a message "Blah, Blah, Blah forgotten beast, blah, giant worm, undulates rhythmically, blah, blah, has a shell, blah, Beware its Deadly Dust!" This was the 14th (I think) FB at that point and I have only lost one dwarf to them before and it was because a web spewing maggot (<-literally) ambushed the swords dwarf and crushed his skull (Armok bless him). I sent just my Legendary Hammer dwarf after him thinking this will be too easy, and the dust will only knock them unconscious if anything. After the week of climbing the spiral stair case comes to an end, the hammerdwarf and shelled worm, skirmish for a few seconds after he sprays dust (only sending both of them flying momentarily (neither were injured because it was on a staircase pillar)) I figure that with all the hits the hammer dwarf is getting on him, I don't need to micro the fight and go back to making more sex toys for the Queen. Once I've queued everything up I look back at the combat reports and notice there is nothing new but it doesn't say either is dead. I look down where the fight was and find Urrist's corpse covered in his own blood. I check the combat logs again and it didn't say he ever took a hit, so I find the little worm fucker and about a couple frames later send the entire army after him (minus the lazy bastards that are still fetching supplies). Once the army meets the worm, he is in the top cavern (about half way down to lava) and he is chasing random dwarves around spraying everywhere, launching himself all over the place. I keep seeing him take one or two hits from every dwarf that gets close enough to him, and then the dwarves just fall over dead like flies. 10 minutes of agonizingly checking logs to see what's going on later, and there are 12 dwarves (including the Queen) left out of the 189 before the incident, and the queen just got hit with the gas. The beast has fallen into water and is just blowing smoke not doing anything anymore (due to broken water physics) and he has lost his shell and has a bruised brain. I look at the queen frame by frame checking to see what has been killing everyone. After 15 steps past infection, she begins to spray blood out of every part of her body (checked using v>z) and dies 3 steps after that. Since there are other items in the water with the worm, he keeps shooting them up to hit himself and ultimately bruises his brain again (fatally) and he kills himself. during that time 3 more fall victim to what has just now been named "Super Ebola" leaving me with 8 dwarfs to start anew. I'm guessing that the beast's syndromes were just causes internal and external bleeding as the short term effect and the long-term and chronic effects are irrelevant and untestable. What's your take on this?

[Melting Sky]

 "Beware its deadly dust."

No matter how weak a FB may look, if it has deadly dust I always treat them like they are radioactive. I usually pasture some animals in the caverns as test subjects. If they melt, I won't involve my military if at all possible.

[Swonnrr]

"Beware its deadly dust"
That means bring the masterwork steel ballista bolts.

[neblime]

careful of any dust left behind.. if I were you send a cat out into the areas where the action occured and see what happens, keep the dwarves locked away in their own little bit of the fort for now.  Deadly dust is bad, and gas can be pretty bad too, I once had one that caused instant paralysis (causing suffocation if the FB couldn't be bothered to walk over and crush their skulls).

[AwesomenessDog]

He is dead now, just any ideas on what to call the "disease", comments, or similar stories to share?

[Steb]

I had a clear glass quadruped with paralysing gas recently. I wish I'd sent a cat as a test subject rather than a squad of hammer dwarves. The effect was like a GCS bite - inevitable death - but inhaled in gas form.

[Rendell]

I've recently had a story similar to this, like your giant worm with deadly dust I had a similar unwanted guest that came to visit my fortress.
It was a demon in the shape a humanoid gecko which was the leader of a nearby goblin race who decided to invade with his goblin army, after slaying the demon and winning the battle my dwarven soldiers returned to the fort, I proceed to forget about the demon and his ill lead assault.
 
Soon after I received a message about a stray cat that had been found dead, I ignored the message since there was a after all a battle, and it was properly strangled to death by a goblin or something, plus its only a cat who cares right? However then I started receiving more sinister messages about chickens and other stray poultry appearing up dead, as well as more cats. I started looking into combat logs, no nothing there. I was starting to get perplexed, until my first dwarven victim appeared. After seeing the message "Urist Mc-somthing-or-other cancels job because of external hemorrhaging" I zoomed in on my makeshift hospital, and as it appears he was doing just that. I watched as blood flew on the bed,walls, hospital floor and close to nearby solider's on medical leave from the previous battle, I like to imagine that those drawves were screaming, trapped to their beds as there close friend and colleague a few feet away was interrupting a stream of poisonous blood that would infect and kill them on touch.

As he proceeded to die, I proceeded to look at dwarf's equipment section, and yes he had the blood of a stray cat touching him somewhere, indicating that the dead animals and this were related somehow. After looking around I went and found what appeared to be demon extract littered over the previous battlefield, the source located I proceeded to issue a quarantine, no one allowed outside the fort. I set up a dwarf wading pool to contain the disease plus round up every free roaming animal I had to either (a butcher them or (b throw them in a pit to make sure they wouldn't spread the disease.
Two more dwarves died from the disease, one being an armourer, while not being legendary he was acceptable in his craft. The Hospital beds littered in blood were dumped as well as any stray animals corpse laying around. After a few more animals dying as well as another dwarf the disease began to die out, and the quarantine was lifted. As it turned out the disease caused enough hemorrhaging to kill anything smaller then a dwarf, and was not 100 percent lethal towards dwarves as one of my dwarf's managed to survive it somehow, either with the help of surgeons or by shear luck. 

While not as deadly as your super Ebola, this did give me a bit of a scare at the time, as it was only my second experience with a disease that spread throughout my fortress, that other being some symptom caused by some deadly dust that made miasma appear from and follow dwarves around but no other result then that. Anyway I hoped you enjoyed that story                      

[AwesomenessDog]

I had a clear glass quadruped with paralysing gas recently. I wish I'd sent a cat as a test subject rather than a squad of hammer dwarves. The effect was like a GCS bite - inevitable death - but inhaled in gas form.

As far as I can tell, Paralysis should stop on people who were infected (but not dead yet) once the source of the bite is dead. Had this happen just yesterday with a GCS: an engraver (really just someone I wanted to lure the spider into the trap) was bitten and moments later, a random patrol dwarf sniped the spider and the engraver received in combat logs "The engraver has fully recovered from the paralysis." I'm going to do some Science on it to be sure but that seems to be what's happening.

I've recently had a story similar to this, like your giant worm with deadly dust I had a similar unwanted guest that came to visit my fortress.
It was a demon in the shape a humanoid gecko which was the leader of a nearby goblin race who decided to invade with his goblin army, after slaying the demon and winning the battle my dwarven soldiers returned to the fort, I proceed to forget about the demon and his ill lead assault.
 
Soon after I received a message about a stray cat that had been found dead, I ignored the message since there was a after all a battle, and it was properly strangled to death by a goblin or something, plus its only a cat who cares right? However then I started receiving more sinister messages about chickens and other stray poultry appearing up dead, as well as more cats. I started looking into combat logs, no nothing there. I was starting to get perplexed, until my first dwarven victim appeared. After seeing the message "Urist Mc-somthing-or-other cancels job because of external hemorrhaging" I zoomed in on my makeshift hospital, and as it appears he was doing just that. I watched as blood flew on the bed,walls, hospital floor and close to nearby solider's on medical leave from the previous battle, I like to imagine that those drawves were screaming, trapped to their beds as there close friend and colleague a few feet away was interrupting a stream of poisonous blood that would infect and kill them on touch.

As he proceeded to die, I proceeded to look at dwarf's equipment section, and yes he had the blood of a stray cat touching him somewhere, indicating that the dead animals and this were related somehow. After looking around I went and found what appeared to be demon extract littered over the previous battlefield, the source located I proceeded to issue a quarantine, no one allowed outside the fort. I set up a dwarf wading pool to contain the disease plus round up every free roaming animal I had to either (a butcher them or (b throw them in a pit to make sure they wouldn't spread the disease.
Two more dwarves died from the disease, one being an armourer, while not being legendary he was acceptable in his craft. The Hospital beds littered in blood were dumped as well as any stray animals corpse laying around. After a few more animals dying as well as another dwarf the disease began to die out, and the quarantine was lifted. As it turned out the disease caused enough hemorrhaging to kill anything smaller then a dwarf, and was not 100 percent lethal towards dwarves as one of my dwarf's managed to survive it somehow, either with the help of surgeons or by shear luck. 

While not as deadly as your super Ebola, this did give me a bit of a scare at the time, as it was only my second experience with a disease that spread throughout my fortress, that other being some symptom caused by some deadly dust that made miasma appear from and follow dwarves around but no other result then that. Anyway I hoped you enjoyed that story                      

Actually yours sounds worse. Assuming you didn't quarantine it, that would have spread to your entire fortress after the fact. Mine didn't appear to spread to others due to the blood touching them and it didn't actually spray everywhere, it just stayed as a puddle in the square where they died at. Yours would probably just get transferred from dying dwarf, to healthy dwarf, then to the next and so on.

[Merendel]

I had a similar syndrome as a blood rain on one of my forts.  It was a bit slower acting, takeing about a week to kill its victem but was a death sentence to anybody who got cought in the rain.  Instead of external hemorageing though it worked on the internals.  The dwarf would first develop bruising of the entire body that got progressivly worse untill prety much everything but their skin and hair liquified.

[Button]

One time I had a bleed-out syndrome beast which I put down with marksmen; but I must have reclaimed one of the bolts, because years later, I found a small pool of FB extract in my main entryway, with trails of blood to either side.

Which is to say, yep, that's normal and Fun.

[nanomage]

yeah you certainly didn't beware its deadly dust

more seriously, I had almost the exact same situation once: a gigantic titmouse or whatever sprayed deadly dust all over the fort before I managed to kill it. Luckily, in my case the dust proved "not so deadly". Well, dogs seemed to die easily, but an affected dwarf would just drop down with bruised everything and rest for a week before proceding with his business (right until he step into the next pile of dust). Few years later, they managed to make the forress reasonably clean, so that there were like 2-4 dwarves bruised and resting at any given moment (down from the initial hundred or so).

[Quietust]

As far as I can tell, Paralysis should stop on people who were infected (but not dead yet) once the source of the bite is dead. Had this happen just yesterday with a GCS: an engraver (really just someone I wanted to lure the spider into the trap) was bitten and moments later, a random patrol dwarf sniped the spider and the engraver received in combat logs "The engraver has fully recovered from the paralysis." I'm going to do some Science on it to be sure but that seems to be what's happening.

I'm fairly certain that it doesn't work that way - it's more likely that your engraver had high enough disease resistance (or was sufficiently large, as it has SIZE_DILUTES) that the toxin was weakened to the point of no longer being lethal.

[jcochran]

"Beware its deadly dust"

Looks like I'll have to magma flush the minercart grinder after forgotten beast is dead.

The magma flush also applies to secretions, toxic blood, or anything else the FB leaves strewn about itself during combat that induces syndromes. As for the grinder, it's rather remarkable how much damage a platinum minecart will do when running around a 2x41 tile region of impulse ramps. And of course, after getting past the 1st grinder, the beastie still has 8 more to go assuming I don't open and close the drawbridges to mess with it... "Aw... You've almost made it out. Too bad that bridge just closed and the only way back where you entered just opened ..... Guess you'll just have to go back that-a-way. Perhaps it'll still be open when you arrive...."

"Hey Urist! Looks like the beast is dead. Left a lot of crap all over the place. Gotta seal off the entrances and start the magma flush cycle."

Of course, useful forgotten beasts (those that shoot webs) get the path to the silk farm (tastefully baited with a few destructible doors) opened to them.

I wouldn't even bother with any military dwarves except for the bad thoughts about not enough protection. You would think that the dwarves would realize after the Nth siege or FB being destroyed without any dwarven fatalities would indicate that there's more than sufficient protection. Oh well, at least having a fair number of archers means that kobolds die quickly instead of getting to run away.

[Quietust]

I wouldn't even bother with any military dwarves except for the bad thoughts about not enough protection. You would think that the dwarves would realize after the Nth siege or FB being destroyed without any dwarven fatalities would indicate that there's more than sufficient protection.

Last I checked, the "not enough protection" thought was only experienced by the Tax Collector, and it only happened if he didn't have 2 Royal Guards to escort him. There's also a DFHack script which reuses the thought for forcefully ending Breaks, but other than that I'm not aware of any other in-game source for that thought.

[jcochran]

Well, I've seen that bad thought all the time with an established fortress with a baron or higher noble whenever I don't have any dwarves in the military. But once I create a squad, the thought no longer appears.  Version of DF I'm using is 0.34.11-r3 on linux.