Recently, I had 44 elven warriors come to my 30-dwarf-strong fortress,
allegedly looking for some place called Mistclunked or something.
I might have tolerated their presence - they did, after all, have more legendary warriors on their side that I had warriors
at all - but then I saw them read poetry to my dwarves.
Poetry. And my dwarves
listened to it.
I was not about to permit free dissemination of hippie art, and direct assault was out of the question. After a bit of consideration, I decided to give them
permanent wooden lodgings, where they could recite their poetry in a controlled environment.
Unfortunately, I did not think of confining them first. Building a king-sized cage-in machine for forty-four customers took longer than they had deigned to remain, and so they departed, all forty-
three of them. Didn't even bother to say goodbye so I could lock them in one of the trap corridors.
But that's not the
weird thing. As you probably noticed from the number discrepancy, one of them had
stayed behind. An elite bowelf, she was unwounded and unencumbered(no sentient bone trophies on her, just the wooden "armor" and "weapons"), and yet she moved with the speed of a palsied turtle. Literally. I'm pretty sure turtles move faster than she did.
Unless leaving their stroke victims in dwarven fortresses is the traditional elven method of senicide, I thought, she must have had a
special mission. So I had her motives checked by sending her to my artifact vault. She didn't grab any of the things in there, so I concluded - maybe incorrectly - that she
wasn't left behind to execute the slowest heist in the world.
Since there could only be one other reason for a suspiciously legendary,
suspiciously slow-moving elf to stay behind in my humble deathtrap, I had her vampire-checked by testing the aforementioned king-sized cage-in machine on her and all the other moochers that spent their days distracting my dwarves with fine arts and liberal thinking.
Surprisingly, the test came back negative: she got knocked unconscious and ended up in a cage. Now she is decorating my dining hall, permanently stuck in a state of
Socializing.
Now, the strangest thing is that while the other guests I had caged received water and food(as evidenced by the buckets next to their cages), the elf herself did not. While I applaud my dwarves on their surprisingly good judgment in this regard, it's been half a year and she
still didn't die.
So, I have an elf that moves like a terminally sober dwarf, decides to stay in a dwarven fortress when all of her buddies have left, has no ulterior motives that I could prove, is not a vampire, and needs no food or water to survive. Anyone have any idea on what she might be and why she decided to stay?