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[Arcticil]

Gnomes are awesome. Just played them but only lasted a year due to a caught by surprise siege that wiped out my animal warriors xD.

[zach123b]

great story lol
i like the wife :p

[HooliganintheFort]

If you have an opening as a military gnome. Please gnome me.  I haven't played the gnomes and i'm eager to see how this plays out.

[Timeless Bob]

Legendary Engineer as "Doc Brown", please. 

Do not open these spoilers if you want to be pleasantly surprised later.  Instead, listen to this calming melody and skip ahead to the next post.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKDtUzRIG6I
Not your cup of tea?  Try this one then:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLrnkK2YEcE

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You couldn't resist it, could you?  Ah well, read on.

   In his spare time, he should start working on The Omega Gate -see Exhibit B- of the machine he will eventually invent a few years from now.  (He knows, because he left a note for himself under a piece of cheese last week -See Exhibit A- saying that he should come out to this place to start the Omega Gate and he knew that could only mean one thing:

Exhibit A:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Cheese.


(Note the note under the Camembert -See Exhibit C-)

Exhibit B:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Omega Gate

Exhibit C:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Dearest gnome, my favorite person in all the worlds:

When the Druid makes his move, gather your family and move out to the site.  Bill Throckbottom and his thugs want their flubonium back and will break your arms if you stay.  You know he would.  Anyway, things will be "adventurous" for a bit, but it will be the site of your Great Work:  The Timeloop Device

Once I invent the machine and build the Alpha Gate, I will simply enter the Alpha gate and exit the Omega gate.  Since the Omega Gate will have been active during the intervening period, (remember to build this first - it's important to aim it back and not forward, and most certainly not orthogonally, no matter how much you'd like to know what traveling "left" in time would be like! It's not worth the experiment, but don't say you didn't warn you!), I will be temporally relocated back to the activation of it on a slightly divergent temporal continuum, as the entropic chonorippling theory will state when you finally figure it out a few years hence. Look, you're not crazy - where do you think I got this note from?  I left it under the Camembert where I first found it of course! (Reminder: bring this with you the second time and ask Auntie Filbert about her begonias - you won't remember the first time and the resulting Tangent is quite dreary! But the one to the Left of time is much worse!  I warned me, but maybe this 'loop' it'll stick!)

With the warmest regards,

You (Doc Brown)

p.s.: keep those kids in shoes or you'll rue the next three years, I know I did!

[IndigoFenix]

Shh!  They're not supposed to know about the <redacted> yet! 

Now I want to retcon Palu as the original tinkerer and make the Mad Inventor Doc Brown instead.  Is that kind of thing acceptable?

[Timeless Bob]

Shh!  They're not supposed to know about the <redacted> yet! 

Now I want to retcon Palu as the original tinkerer and make the Mad Inventor Doc Brown instead.  Is that kind of thing acceptable?

How do you know that Palu isn't his "cover" so the Throckbottom Boys don't know where to find him?  <wink wink nudge nudge> 

[IndigoFenix]

Moonstone 30

Someone had the bright idea of digging a shortcut to the dining room that passes right behind the waterfall.  The cool mist is quite pleasant, but it's a long way down, and goblins have been sneaking in lately.  So far we haven't lost any gnomes, but the guard animals have been accumulating injuries and some have become infected, so we built an animal care area to patch them up.  Mostly, we've been using the thread from unraveled kobold clothing for the stitches.  We've also made some adjustable armor items out of pond turtle shells and have fully equipped Dogmeat the wolf with them for extra protection.

Meph and Stras have been training and sparring more or less constantly, and are now fairly proficient fighters.  It might be time to put them back in charge of animal training soon so that the war animals can benefit from his training.

8 Obsidian

I was coming back from the river with a handful of fish when our mad inventor called me over excitedly.  "Drop those fish and come inside!" he was shouting.  "Come and see what Palu and I have put together!"

"I thought you were Palu?" I asked as we walked down the corridor, past the bedrooms and the dining halls.

"Oh, let's not get all caught up with petty details," he said, waving my question away with his free hand.  "We're about to revolutionize production in this little hole.  REVOLUTIONIZE!" he shouted, making me jump.

We entered the back room.  The sound of rushing water informed me that we were almost directly below the river.  Was this where our tinker had been directing power from those water wheels?  It appeared to consist of two large machines, connected to each other by a series of smaller machines set up between them.  A pile of rocks were stacked up at one end.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Is this the Factory?  Where does it get the power from?"

"Underneath us!" said the mad Doc.  "And it's just the beginning of the Factory.  Believe me, it's going to get a lot bigger!"

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"So tell me, expedition leader, what kind of furniture do we want more of?"

"Oh!  Well," I thought, slightly taken aback at the unexpected question.  The first thing that came to mind was our crowded dining area, where I had been unable to find a table the other day.  "We could use more tables."

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Phenomenal!  One order of tables, coming right up!" he said as he adjusted some switches on one of the large machines.  "Materials are loaded?  Then stand back, everyone!  Seriously, stand back.  Okay!  THROW THE SWITCH!"

"Switch?"

"The lever.  I mean the lever."

"Oh," I said, and pulled a large lever at the entrance to the room.  Within seconds, the pile of dolomite vanished into the depths of the machine in as it clanked and whirred.  A stack of perfectly cut blocks popped out of the first section of the machine and were almost immediately pulled in by the second.  After a few more moments, a brand-new dolomite table emerged from the other end.  And then a second.  And then a third.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Impressive!"

"Indeed!  This device will keep on producing tables until it runs out of raw material or the power is cut off, whichever comes first!  Not only is it fully automated, but it's more efficient than a mason, too: the stonecutter can cut a regular boulder into sixteen blocks, and the assembler takes five blocks to make most kinds of furniture, so..."

"About three point two items per boulder, yes, I got that," I said, not wanting the Doc to think I didn't know basic arithmetic.  A small crowd had begun to gather in order to watch the wonderous machine.

"And it can do more than tables, too!  All you have to do is adjust the assembler's settings and you can make chairs, weapon racks, cages, corkscrews, et cetera... just make sure to turn the machine off before you adjust the settings, it can be -"

The doc was suddenly cut off by a sickening crunch accompanied by a scream.

"Great Rimlik, it's got Mugodar!"

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I stared in horror as the gnome trader's mutilated corpse disappeared into the machine.  A bloody severed arm flew free of the grinding gears and landed on the floor with a thud.  "GET AWAY FROM THERE!" I shouted as Prodergin approached the place where Mugodar's body had vanished, presumably to grab her now ownerless socks before they were pulled in as well.  "NOBODY TOUCH ANYTHING!"

A few agonizing seconds later, the unnatural noises stopped.  We all stared at the gristly item the machine had produced.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Clawedgears had claimed its first kill.

[Arcvasti]

I'd like to be one of the black caimans. Because apparently you can do that.

[Meph]

Clearly revolutionary. Maybe we could bury the arm together with the table somewhere. I certainly wouldnt want to eat from it.

[jaxy15]

I like how the table is "encrusted with muscle".

[Arcvasti]

Clearly revolutionary. Maybe we could bury the arm together with the table somewhere. I certainly wouldnt want to eat from it.

B-B-But it adds flavour...

[Innocent Dave]

Hmm... so if I devised a way of feeding unwelcome visitors into the furniture machine, I can have it spit out grisly trophies to line the trap corridor with?

[IndigoFenix]

In earlier versions of the machina script, it would actually rot them into bone first so that the items would be properly decorated with bones and include the species that the decoration came from in their description.  Somewhere in the constant rewriting that bit must have been lost.

Muscle still counts as a cheap decoration, so the table will actually be slightly more valuable than a baseline table without it.

You can't make furniture entirely out of soft materials, they can only be used to decorate items that would be produced anyway.  It is also worth noting that such items will never have more than baseline quality, unless you create a more complex machine that builds the furniture first and decorates it later using an item decorator machine... but that's for later.

[Timeless Bob]

Ah yes - line a corridor with such machines to instantly turn invaders into objet d'art.  Linked to a pressure plate that only activates when non-citizens pass by and forbidding it to be used by citizens: Beautiful!

[IndigoFenix]

Granite 26, 101

Moods were strained for a few days after the accident.  Doc was excited for the chance to show everyone how quickly his machine could mass-produce coffins, but this suggestion was quickly shot down by everyone else present, and our mason decided she was going to make the final resting place of Mugodar's arm the old-fashioned way, by hand.

Meph ran outside in a blind rage and immediately tackled the nearest foul blendec, which would probably have resulted in his own death had it not been for the assistance of Dogmeat, even so, he took a nasty gash to the leg.

We decided to dig out a new room for the Doc, right next to his machines.  And far, far away from everyone else.  As for the grisly table, it seems to have vanished.  Nobody complained about this.

Despite the revulsion I felt at the new contraption, I am still a pragmatic gnome, so I told Doc to produce a set of new stone barrels to deal with our fish stockpiling problem.  Our food storage area has been getting filled up lately, which has resulted in a fishery full of unstockpiled fish and a great deal of miasma.

Slate 17, 101

Our population nearly tripled last week as a group of around forty migrants showed up unexpectedly at our front door.  There was a rapid scramble to dig out some more bedrooms in order to accommodate them all, and I ordered the Doc to produce a lot of beds.

In order to feed the machine more efficiently, we made a small passageway leading over the machine room, with a hole positioned directly over the machine's input tile and a garbage dump designated right next to the hole.  By mass-dumping all of our non-economic rock, we will carry it to the hole all at once and throw it directly into the machine's mouth.  It's safer, too: since nobody has to actually touch the machine, we can load it even when it's still running.

A pride of dire lions showed up on the horizon.  According to Stras, dire lions are among the 'unnatural' creatures of the wild and, despite their resemblance to regular lions, are a threat to gnomes and are therefore considered fair game.  Hearing this, a number of the new migrants who happen to be hunters set off and shot the beasts one after another, then brought the corpses in to be butchered.  We have no great need for the meat, but their fat, hides and bones could potentially be useful.

Also, we found the table.  It was in Doc's room.  That guy has some serious problems.