A honeymoon with death, part 1 -- SpringMy name is Honeymoon, or at least that's what they started calling me a few years ago. For 5 years, I'd been running the greatest honey cartel in the history of dwarfkind. Also most likely the only one. My official profession as a wax-worker was merely a front, meant to disguise my illicit activities. Bee kidnapping, honey extortion, destruction of rival flower fields, and setting fire to disrespectful or cocky bee-keepers' boxes, nothing was out of our league. those who opposed us soon found themselves wearing a pair of wax sleepers. then we bludgeoned them to death because wax doesn't actually sink.
But like with any criminal operation, someone had to open their big fat mouth. When we stole too much royal syrup, the king put a bounty, and that damn Urist spilled the beans. Now I've been sent to this hellhole, as my punishment. execution, rather. everyone assumes I'l be dead within the month. I've heard the stories about this place. Icehold is a terrible place, forsaken by caravans and nature alike. Everyone expect me to die here.
I will prove them wrong.
I have no family or relatives here. Everyone i knew is back at home, either denying anything or suffering some time of their own. Maybe I'll see some of my cousins in a few season. Hopefully I won't. This place is a frozen turd. Thankfully, my years managing a criminal organisation, no matter how underwhelming it,s goods may have been, have given me some good social skills, and within a few months of being here, I've made quite a few friends. And I'm not talking about my pet boar, regardless of how awesome Mafol is.
I've been here since the end of last autumn. My charisma and ability to manage crap has not gone unnoticed, so one morning, the expedition leader comes to me with a proposition i cannot refuse. (i mean, hey, it's not like I can rely on my waxworking skills as a job in this place anyway).
''It's very simple, missy. I need someone here who can sort shit out. count items, keep books, deal with work orders. Most of the boys are useless bums and psychotic murderers, so you're the best thing i have that resembles a clerk.''
I'm not one to refuse, especially if the alternative is working as a fucking hauler. I immediately claim a meager corner of the dinning hall as my office. It will have to do, for at least this season. Now, I gotta keep tabs of what's in this shitfest we now call a home, so let's take a look around, shall we.
Welcome to Icehold, your home, your grave.
The place is a mess, but at least it's a simple one. There are 4 areas of interest, each separated by about a week's worth of staircase. At the bottom of the earth lies a small magma forge. I'm told we have an adamantine vein lying somewhere, but that somewhere is a magma sea full of death crabs and fiery doom, so we'll leave it alone for now. hey, I've heard the stories, those stories about nasty things happening to fortresses who grab too much of the stuff. I don,t know the details, but an awful lot of settlements in dwarven folklore disappeared after anouncing they found adamantine and started mining it.
About twelve kilometers above the forge, we find a walled in section of underground cavern. It links to a small section of river. Both blessfully and sadly, the area has been efficiently walled i off. this means we cannot get anything from the river, but nothing from the river can get to us. some crazy dude with a crutch has been screaming about crocodiles lately, so i assume it's something i don't want to see much of. We have a small farm, some plump helmets growing around, and a small wood stockpiles, from what I assumed must have been trees. there lie two beds, for some reason.
Before reaching the surface, one can find the general center of this ''fortress''. the main area consists of some stockpiles, a workshop or two, some dorms/hospital lacking any medicinal supplies, and a dinning room. We have no food, and a dude is sleeping on the floor next to the beds, which says a lot about the local carpenter's skill. There seems to be some general designations for stockpiles, as if someone naively assumed we'd get much of anything to store here before dying.
A few levels under the dining hall/storage lies a set of rooms which are being excavated. We have maybe ten of them for now, all of them cell-sided and terrible. No doubt, Black Pat inspired himself from the prison cells he spent much time in in the days, but somehow I'm not sure this is good for confort or morale. I tell the miners what I think of them, and quickly become their new best friend.
''So, guys, we have all the space in the world and there's 16 of us, how about we build ourselves the greatest bedrooms ever instead of reliving our soap-dropping days in the national jail?''
They drop their picks, and cancel their workplans. ''What do you have in mind?''
-Well, before I can designate anything efficient, i need an office that isn't full of barking dogs and death-starved donkey corpses. Let's start by making something that resembles an administrator section
-The area between the current dorm and the dinning hall would be good, and it contains some nice gem clusters
-Marvelous. You guys are wonderful.''
The last, or rather first section for anyone who arrives at Icehold, is the main and only entrance. Simple, yet stylish, it was carved from pure solid ice to protect against strange creatures living on the glacier. A drawbridge that's not large enough for any caravan leads to a small plateau hosting a trade depot and some basic workshops. Obviously they would be more suited closer to out stockpiles, but I guess they were built here in a rush when the first prisoners started carving this crapfest. There is also a small barrack, which is basically a closet made of snow filled with a weapon rack, in which the crazy crutch-guy trains with sometimes one or two other dudes.
What a great place to administer. The good news about shitty places, is that there's a lot you can do to make the place (and yourself) look way cooler.
First, I need to be able to move around this place quickly. I start by designating 4 main sections for a better management of this place.
HOTKEYS:
F1: The surface entrance
F2: The main stockpiles
F3: The underground farms
F4: The magma forges
There isn't much I can do with the forges for now, because we don't have metal. yet. The forge is set to smelt tetrahedrite, but i notice we found some hematite veins while digging the shitty bedrooms. I order that smelted in priority, and also a bunch of galena. Soon enough we'll have iron, silver, copper and lead to play with.
My future office has been excavated, but it lacks anything, including not being full of sharp dangerous rock boulders, and a door. Someone claims to be a decent engraver and terrible at everything else, so I put him and his friend on smoothing duty. Engrave some important parts of this shitnugget, guys, maybe it,ll motivate me to designate it in a less unfavorable fashion.
Next up is figuring out what the fuck we are supposed to eat. black Pat suggests that we rob nearby caravans for our main food income, but somehow I doubt this will work in the long run. Farming is good, but we have little workers, the farms are very deep underground and thus far away, and there's no safe way to fish without getting a crocodile invasion for the time being. Harvesting plants and trees is also very, very out of the question.
i spend some time keeping books and discover our exact count. 140 meat, 40 fishes, 45 drinks and a hundred of plants and others both. I dont put too much faith in those last two, as they mostly include leaves and strange things. What we need is a massive amount of food, something that is both easy to get and provide a lot of...
that being said, the miners did do what I asked of them, and neglecting to fullfill my part of the bargain would diminish my street cred in Icehold. As a reward, I spend some time designating some nice rooms. There are few of us and the entire glacier is ours, so nothing is too good. The miners ready their picks and begin work. This operation has an ulterior motive; I know for a fact that this diorite stone formation is rich in hematite, and hopefully digging out those rooms will simultaneously provide us with some of the ore.
Within the day, i am proven right. the miners locate some hematite formation.
Previously, they had been excavating some tetrahedrite ore down in the bottom of this place, but i think we can all agree that digging out bedrooms and getting hematite is a more rewarding endeavour.
At this moment another donkey dies. I order a butcher shop placed on the surface, but by the time it is done, the creature is long rotten. We only have dogs, and my precious pig Mafol, and by Armok are we not eating him. Dogs are tasty, but I'd rather let them breed a bit before eating some of them. Thankfuly, the ramblings of the militia tell me that there is another thing we can eat...
For reasons I absolutely cannot explain, our militia commander is outside the fort, fighting a fucking yeti. The drawbridge is raised, and has been for at least a season. Why is he there? Have he been outside this whole time, and if so, ihow did he survive the cold and the hunger? I guess he's thinking the same thing as I.
We are going to eat the
fuck out of this yeti.
Pull that lever and go help him. There is meat on the menu, and it,s not an unpastured rotting donkey! we'll need to get the fucking commander inside anyway, so there's that.
the soldiers, the whole three of them, grab their weapons and go assist the commander. Soon enough, a yeti corpse is being hauled toward the butcher shop. Yummy! Yetis will provide us with large chunks of meat. there are many of them, and few of us. It should be sufficient.
My real concern is to get barrels, in order to store the food. We have a limited supply of wood, which we'll need for beds. Thankfully, copper makes an affordable material wich can be smelted into containers. Glass and pottery would be ideal materials, were it not for our absolute lack of bags to store the raw goods in. Yes, copper is heavy, but it's better than letting our food rot.
While picking up some leftover items on the glacier, the dwarves meet another yeti, whom the militia quickly dispatch. More meat.
One of them claims to be a sworddwarf, despite clearly wielding a spear. ''They call me stabbin' Rovod. as long as it can stab some stuff, I'll wield it alright.''
I'm not sure i stand by Stabbin' rovod's logic, but I'll stand by his killing abilities. Icehold makes for strange bedfellows.
We have meet, but let's examine what else we have. Raw yeti chunks will quickly grow old, I fear, so it might be a good idea to obtain more types of food. Our drinks are low, so I'll order the cranberries to become booze. Without a good water access, keeping the booze stock high is crucial. Don't wanna have to breach the caverns and face crocodiles when we are desperate. The other leaves are not especially useful in their raw state, so I order a kitchen and a farmer workshop installed in the central area. I'd rather have those installed already once we need to process plants to replace yeti meat. A quern and a millstone would also be useful, but we have very little workers, so I don't think we should establish too many industries right now.
I check in on the bedrooms. Our workers have been hard at work during my first month in command, and slowly but surely we are carving out a nice set of rooms for ourselves. Maybe when this is over I'll try and set an underground tree farm, but that's something that will require a lot of planning and dwarfpower. Better wait for the rooms to be done...
Despite the hardships they faced, Asmel and rimtar managed to find love in this strange, forsaken glacier. A child is born of their unlikely union, bolstering our numbers to 18. Yesterday, we were prisoners exiled to die here. Now, for a brief moment, we are led to believe that life here can prosper...
On that same day, more prisoners make their way to Icehold. Strange and useless convicts, most of them, but I'll find a use for anyone here, because we cannot spare any help. They can reside in the small ugly rooms while we carve more bedrooms. Ha, just kidding, everyone is sleeping in the hospital because we actually don't have beds.
I count eleven of twelve of them. I greet most of them, and introduce myself as Honeymoon, chief overseer of this terrible place. Then I ask each of them what they can do to help this fortress not die. Geshud and lolor, I give to the commander because they seem dumb and somewhat well-built. And also overall useless. One of them claims to be a good metalcrafter, which I'll need for our copper works. Another is a decent tanner, so I tell him it's all he'll do, to avoid wasting yeti hides. They will provide us with warmth, and most likely they'll be our only source of clothing for the years to come. I tell another one he'll be exclusively doing butcher work. I want every carcass chopped and tanned the instant it hits the icy ground.
Another claims to be a gelder, which is counterproductive, but also knows his way around the kitchen, which is nice. one is a creepy 10 years old, which is saying a lot about the king,s sence of justice. Finally, the rest will be miners and engravers, or work on some hauling until I can find a good use for them.
Because we don't have any metal or barrels yet, most of those jobs are pointless. As such, I order a miner to excavate part of the old bedrooms to get hematite, and convert the place into a stone stockpile. Our old one seems poorly designated somehow. Quickly, our ten idlers leave the dinning hall and begin rolling boulders out of the way.
While they are at it, they'll also get a new set of bedrooms. As with the others, they are merely eye-candy so long as we don't have any beds, but once more I'm using this occasion to unearth hematite and gems. The place seems surprisingly rich with mineral clusters; once smoothed and engraved those rooms will be spectacular. I could even let people choose one based on their preferences, which could reduce suicidal tendencies in time.
I'd like to open the caverns for a moment and acquire more wood, but a dangerous helmet snake is guarding the area. I can hear him hissing through the constructed wall, predatory and stuff. Snakes are poisonous and dangerous, so I'll wait for it to leave instead of picking up a fight.
Anyway, the army is busy right now! I'm told every soldier is mobilizing on the main plateau. Yes, all
four of them who are not sleeping!
Our foe today is a polar bear, which could easily maul and destroy poorly-equipped and ill-trained soldiers such as ours. Too bad, people, I need this thing dead, chopped and cook by 5pm, because we now have 12 newcomers and a fucking baby to feed.
The new recruits lack classical army drilling, but they make up for it by being old school murderous thugs. I tell the butcher that he isn't even allowed to haul stuff, as he needs to butcher things as fast as possible. ''Can i still do some shearing on the side?'' he asks, naively. Why sure, you can shear all those absurd amounts of sheeps we have if you please.
More meat is good, but the drinks are dangerously low. I order 2 barrels just in case, and then a few drinks with what we can salvage from the stockpile.
Aaaaaaaand that's when everything goes to shit. People just killed the polar bear, and we're having it dragged to the butcher stand, when something incredibly fucking terrifying manifests nearby. It's a gigantic mammoth-like creature, except it stands on two feet and seems utterly bend on murder and bloodshed. What's more, it's not on the horizon, but just outside of our walls. Somehow this tremendous creature is trained in the art of stealth.
It is also very, very fast.
No, seriously, it truly is very, very fast. I ask the bridge to be raised, but it is too late. within an instant, this juggernaut of death and carnage has reached our entrance, and it starts attacking people.
In a legendary feat of courage, one of the inmates, punches the mammoth, then runs away from the fortress with the beast in toe. He's dragging it away. Quick, raise the bridge!
the militia captain begins to attack the creature, but saying he's not doing jack shit to it would be an understatement. People try to join the fight, but here's a thing about ice. It is very, very slippery.
Anyway, the ranger is fleeing with the beast giving chase. The militia captain tried to go ham on it to no avail, and that guy with the crutch is now suspended above the precipice using said crutch, because he slipped off the bridge. Like, he is 10 feet above the ground, suspended to a rough ice wall by a replacement leg. You can,t make that shit up.
Avuz the ranger falls quickly to the onslaught of the monster. Rimtar the commander is ready to give the beast a lesson.
Or not.
I point a random guy and tell him he's the militia commander now.
More importantly, I tell everyone to forget hauling and deconstruction and dumping and what the hell, in favor of activating the fucking lever. If we don't, we'll die. People tell me they have already used the lever, to no avail. Obviously they aren't trying hard enough, because the bridge is still there. All work orders are also cancelled, as well as smoothing.
Activate. The lever.
Rimtar is dead, and the beast decides to return to our base. Nobody is pulling the lever. The weremammoth advances toward Icehold.
As stated before, it is very, very fast.
Lolur arrived two days ago, and so far someone vaguely mentionned where the barracks was. That's enough training as far as I'm concerned. I kick the guy out and he slides across the bridge, absolutely willingly intercepting the weremammoth.
NOW ACTIVATE THE FUCKING LEVER OH MY FUCKING GOD.
Lolur wasn't lying when he said he had experience with an axe. i don't mind if his training dummy consisted of the baron's entourage, it's working nicely on the mammoth monster. Eventually, tho, Lolur loses momentum and the beast fucks him up good. I don't want to go into details, but at the end I'm pretty sure the weremammoth threw Lolur's own toe at him. The beast is maimed, which hopefully will prevent it from advancing further.
However, it is still very, very fast.
Hey, Stabbin' rovod, how about you go and uh, I dunno, stab this thing a bit? It looks like you could tooootally finish it up.
As soon as he's out of earshot I point at five of the new migrants, and announce that they are the militia now.
Stabbin' Rovod charges at the monster, but we soon find out why he isn't nicknamed Don't-Slide-Down-Holes Rovod.
Rovod finally makes it out of the hole, punches the beast, gets thrown down into the fucking pit three times, then finally lands a few blows before being killed, heroically (and quite foolishly) trying to wrestle a weremammoth. Miraculously, as soon as it kills Stabbin' Rovod, the beast reverts to a human person. A stunned, incredibly injured human person who is unconscious with both its legs broken. I dispatch the new military. It doesn't matter how absurdly incompetent they are, there are five of them, they can kill an unconscious bloodied peasant.
Against all common sence, the human thing regains consciousness, and begins to flee, creating a burlesque pursuit where 5 dwarves are slidding across a glacier trying to catch up and corner a battled down unarmed goon who'se both legs are shattered in many places. And they are losing.
The human is very, very fast.
Eventually, he collapses from exaushtion, and our raving lunatics unceremoniously bash his head against the solid ice until nothing but a gross pulp remains.
We now have a lot of corpses. Also, the bridge controls have apparently exploded when someone activated the lever with the weremammoth atop the whole thing. Flipping the lever does nothing, and also nobody wants to flip the lever most of the time. We don't have a mechanic. Correction, we don't have a living mechanic. At least everyone who braved the weremonster is absolutely dead, so we don't have to worry about infections.
While retrieving some of the corpses and weapons, the soldiers mus engage another yeti. Stakud gets his toe smashed, then promptly becomes a football player, throwing himself at the ground and claiming to be totally paralyzed.
We tell him to get some rest if that's what he really wants, but he fakes a coma two meters away from the bed, pretending to be permanently disabled. Someone doesn't like being in the military, it seems.
It is time for everyone to resume production. Some booze is brewed and meat slowly fills the stockpile. There is nothing more i dare ask, as everyone is currently busy gathring and storing things after the mess.
More yetis try to explore the place, but every soldier who isn't Stakud throw stuff at him until he ''leaves''. I designate some dogs for war training, just in case the yetis keep bothering us.
We also need to solve this stupid bridge problem. a yeti just walked right into the fortress. Buggers, all of them. At least he's very close to the butcher shop now...
I'm not really sure who's in charge of what anymore. The guys i drafted into the army, I have no idea what their jobs were. People are just hauling stuff around and mining and cooking stuff, and I have nothing to say about it. One particular guy seems incredibly weird, and he doesn't respond to anything I say...
He makes his way toward the craftdwarf workshop, and starts gathering crap. Hey, why are you there? We have no need for crafts! go make some food, or help with the smelting if you truly want to be useful!
His eyes are livid. he won't answer, or ackowledge that I'm here. He's just working, without even looking at what he's doing, his eyes empty and staring at the end of the room.
Fine, whatever. He creeps me out. I decide to simply go and do something else. It seems that one of the rooms is ready, and fully smoothed. Maybe I'll claim it as my own, but that would be a poor thing to do. If i want to be the most beloved person here, i need to pretend like I don't wanna be. Instead I order a bed moved in there, and tell Black Pat that his bedroom is now operational. He is, after all, the original expedition leader. I'll just take the next bedroom, once we locate more beds.
As I revisit the crafting dwarf, I notice that he's finishing a bed, made of cave crocodile bone. The first real enemy of Icehold is now a piece of furniture. The creator of this artefact-quality bed has no recollection of what just happened. Obviosuly, this was one of those so-called ''strange moods''. ''Thanks for making my bed.
-Your bed?
-Yes, I asked if you could use something other than wood to make more beds, and you just... started making me this.
-How... how do you know this is yours? Maybe I want this bed. I made it.
-Don't be silly. It has a picture of a very famous book on it. Do you know anything about books?
-...No.
-Can you read?
-...No.
-Well, i can. I'm the bookkeeper. Obviously the bed with a book on it is mine, do you not think?
-I guess... that does make a lot of sence, miss Honeymoon.
-Good now carry that shit to my bedroom.''
I'm not the only one who needs a place to rest. What we dare call a graveyard is low on coffins, so I tell masons to make a few more, so we can stuff our dead somewhere. Doesn't take too long, as stone is one of the rare things we don't lack.
With my bedroom complete and our dead buried, I turn my attention to the food supply. If it goes too low, we'll need a lot more coffins than we need beds. Thankfully, meat keeps us afloat, and our brewable plants have been turned to booze. the weremammoth attack somewhat lessened our booze consumption, albeit in a very rash manner. Spring is now over, not that you could really tell, and I'm confident that those current supplies should carry us through summer at least.
It's been a strange and eventful season, however, so I'm not sure I'm really eager to spend more time here in Icehold...
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Topic: Ice Station WereZebra (Read 57084 times)