It was the first of Granite, the start of the year 129, and I was uncharacteristically nervous.

“You’ve got this, honey,” Atis was saying. “Everybody knows you’re the one who got alcohol production back online. There’s no way they’ll choose anyone else as overseer.”
“Rimtar’s got way more experience than I do,” I replied. “He’s been broker for years and everybody knows him.”
“Yeah, but nobody likes him very much,” my wife pointed out. She had a point. Rimtar was great at sweet-talking merchants, but had very few close friends.

“Still,” I said, “every—“
“Duck!” somebody shouted from behind us. I turned around and saw Mayor Lor running down the hall towards us.
“Madame mayor,” Atis said, “what are you do—“
“Duck,” the mayor said, ignoring Atis, “I need better rooms.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked her.
“As mayor, I’m entitled to private rooms, fully furnished. Make it happen, please.”

I still wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but Atis seemed to have some idea. “Isn’t that the overseer’s job?” she asked. “We’re still waiting on the election results so we don’t know—”
“Oh, yeah, that,” the mayor said. “It’s not official yet but Duck won. By, like, a
lot of votes.”
I blinked at her. Was she saying that I was now the
overseer?
“Don’t forget that I need two chests to hold all my mayor stuff!” she said over her shoulder as she walked away.
“Told you,” said Atis, before kissing me on the cheek.
The official victory celebration was later that evening. My sisters were there, with their children, and of course Atis and the kids. Several of my squad mates were also in attendance. Even Rimtar had shown up, good sport that he was. About an hour into the party, I heard something I’d been dreading all evening.
“Speech!” somebody shouted.
“Damn it Cog,” I hissed, glaring at my squad mate.
“Speech! Speech! Speech!” other dwarves were taking up the chant now.
“Oh Armok please no…” I muttered. Somebody was pushing me towards the front of the room.
And then I heard something. “What was that?” I asked. “Everybody quiet. I said quiet!” The babble died down somewhat, and I heard it again.
War drums.

At least I wasn’t going to have to give a speech.
“Okay, so these are the orders we’ve prepared for use in a siege situation,” Fath said. We were in her office while the militia assembled in the courtyard.

“What’s DEFCON 1 mean?” I asked.
“In a DEFCON 1 situation,” she said, “all non-military dwarves are to assemble in the dining room.”
“Is that really necessary though?” I asked. “As long as we hold the gates, it should be safe enough anywhere inside the fortress.”
“That’s not my department. All I can tell you is that we have three orders, DEFCON 1 is the only one that applies to civilians, and it orders everybody into the dining room.”
It was time to exercise my newly-acquired authority. “As my first official act as overseer,” I said, “I am hereby creating a new order: DEFCON 2.” Fath started scribbling in her notebook. “In a DEFCON 2 situation,” I continued, “all non-military dwarves must remain inside the fortress, but they are not confined to the dining room.”
“Alright,” Fath said, continuing to write. “Would you like to declare this a DEFCON 2 situation?”
“I would. Give the orders, please,” I said, before leaving her office to join the militia.

I joined the rest of my squad on the battlements, while the melee dwarves assembled by the gates.
“Doesn’t look there’re too many of them,” Momuz observed. “No more than forty, I’d say. We almost outnumber them, for once.”
“Cut the chatter, Momuz,” Captain De said. “They’ve got bows, so they can engage us even up here. Stay frosty. We’ve got to soften them up before the melee squads ma—”
“CHAAAARGE!!!!!!!!”
Below us, the melee squads surged forward towards the approaching goblins.

“Or, you know, we can just watch from a safe distance,” De sighed, as the two forces clashed at a point well out of bowshot.
We settled in and watched body parts flying through the air for a good five minutes before the goblins decided they’d had enough.

“Okay, we’re done here,” De said. “Doesn’t look we lost anybody. Duck, you need to get back to overseeing. I can tell you from personal experience that it takes a lot out of you.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said, before saluting and heading back into the fortress.
“One tree would be all it takes,” I explained to the mason. “The goblins climb up it, and before you know it they’re over our walls and into the fort! We need to pave over the ground near the walls, and to do that we need blocks.”
“Understood, Mr. Overseer,” he said. “I’ll pass word on to the others.”
It’d been a long day — an election, a party, a battle, endless work orders — and it wasn’t over. I still had to talk to Commander Udibibesh about cutting back the training schedules.

He wasn’t going to be happy, but the soldiers were getting worn out and after their performance against the goblins I figured they’d earned a break.
I yawned. De was right about overseeing. I just wanted to curl up in bed with Atis.
But, of course, we didn’t even have a bed of our own.

But… that could change, now. I still had half an hour before my meeting with Commander Udibibesh. I began drawing up orders for the miners.

A few weeks later, as I was getting used to being overseer, a party of elves arrived for trading.

As they were unpacking their goods, they mentioned that they’d been followed here by a large group of ‘short, dirty humanoids’, as they put it.
“Do you think it was goblins?” I asked their leader.
“Maybe?” she said. “Short people all look the same to me.”
“Seriously?” I asked, annoyed. “Goblins are
green. Their eyes
glow red.”
“I’m sorry, I just can’t tell goblins, dwarves, and humans apart from far away.”
“Humans aren’t even… you know what, never mind.”
Stupid elves. At least Rimtar managed to trick them into giving us barrels and fruit in exchange for our dirty laundry.
I had the militia keep watch for the group the elves mentioned, and sure enough, they arrived just three days later. It was an absolutely massive party of migrants, thirty-four in all.
“Look,” I said pointing them out to one of the elves as the newcomers approached the fortress. “How could you think those are goblins?”
“Are you sure they aren’t?” the elf asked nervously. “They’re about the right height to be goblins…”
“They’re dwarves,” I said flatly. “No green skin, no glowing eyes, lots of beards.”
I’ll be really glad when these tree-huggers leave.
Despite my position as overseer, I still had duties with the guard. On the tenth of Felsite, I was called out to a domestic disturbance.
“He’s been in there all morning, quietly muttering to himself,” Alath Nokimmezum said, gesturing towards the bedroom where her brother had barricaded himself. “He needs to be working!”

I nodded. “Alright Oddom,” I shouted, banging on the door. “Come on out. There’s work to do.”
There was no response. I pressed my ear to the door and heard only a faint muttering. “I don’t want to have to break the door down, Oddom,” I said. “Come on. Your sister’s worried.”
Still nothing. I sighed.
“Okay, somebody get a hauler to pull this do—“
The door abruptly swung open, and Oddom raced out, past his shocked sister. I chased after him, and he led me to a craftsdwarf’s workshop, where he immediately began grabbing rocks and chiseling furiously.


Alath caught up to us, panting. “Where’d he go?”
I pointed to the workshop.
“Oh. He’s working, though?”
I nodded.
“Well, um, I guess that’s okay then. Thanks, guardsdwarf. Or, um, overseer, I guess.”
A few days later, Oddom emerged from his workshop.


Other than suddenly being preternaturally good at stone crafting, he was back to his old self.
A few days later, I heard two crazy ideas within a few minutes of each other.
“I’ve figured it out!” shouted Led Kirarendok as she barged into my office. Led was our chief farmer, and I was pretty sure she knew more about plants than any other dwarf in the fort.

“Figured what out?” I asked. I probably should have told her to come back when she had an appointment, but truth be told I was getting sick of the day’s paperwork and welcomed the distraction.
“Human plants!” she said. “I know what makes them grow!” That last was whispered, like she was telling me a secret.
“Fresh air,” I said. Even a novice planter like myself knew that. “Human crops can’t breath the close air in an underground fort.”
“Ha!” she said. “That’s what they tell us, yes, but it’s not true. It’s the sun!”
“The sun?”
“The sun. Sunlight makes human plants grow.”
“So you’re telling me,” I said, “that
light somehow pulls human plants up out of the ground? That they get warm and rise to the surface or something? Or that they somehow make use of the sun’s energy? Led, this is ridiculous, I’ve got wo—“
“No no nothing as dumb as that,” she said. “They pull essence from the earth just like our plants do, BUT they can only pull it from soil that has been exposed to the sun.”
That…that actually kind of made sense. Sunlight has a lot of mysterious effects. It could well affect the properties of soil.
“So why are you telling me about this instead of writing a paper for a botany journal?” I asked.
“Don’t you see?” she asked “We can grow human crops underground! We’ll just channel a hole above a patch of soil to let the sunlight in, then we can cover it back—“
The door to my office slammed open again and a soot-covered dwarf pushed his way past Led to stand in front of me. It was hard to tell under all the charcoal dust, but it looked like Ingiz Titthalkol, one of the furnace operators.
“Magma!” he shouted.
“Hey, calm down,” I said, “You nearly knocked over—“
“Magma!” he shouted again.
“Is that supposed to be some sort of new slang?” I asked him.
“Magma,” he said, somewhat more quietly, “is
hot.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Very hot.” Was he having some sort of strange mood?
“I work with hot things.”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “In the furnaces, you burn charcoal to melt…”
Suddenly I saw it.
“You want to use
magma instead of charcoal!” I exclaimed.
He nodded excitedly.
“Interesting…” I said. “But, how would we transport it to the furnaces? I don’t think we can carry it in buckets.”
“We’ll have to bring the
furnaces to the
magma,” he said.
That would be quite a task. Our miners had discovered a great magma sea, but it was very, very, very deep beneath the earth.
“We’d have to almost build an entire outpost down there,” I said, to nobody in particular. “Stockpiles, bedrooms, food supplies… otherwise the workers would spend half their time commuting.”
“I know it’s a big project,” Ingiz said, “But, well, I’d really like to stop working with this charcoal. It’s hell on my lungs.”
I thought for a long time before speaking.
“You,” I said, pointing to Led, “want to grow human crops in underground farms by briefly exposing some soil to sunlight.” Led nodded.
“And you—“ I pointed at Ingiz “—want to use magma to smelt ore.”
“Not just smelting, overseer,” he said. “We could power the forges and a kiln and a—“
“I’ve got the idea.” I looked at them both. “You two are crazy, but I think you might also be geniuses.”
I began drawing up the plans for both projects as spring rolled into summer.
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Topic: Parallel Fortresses Succession Game. | Finished (Read 87952 times)