I was working late in my office on the first of Hematite when I heard screaming come from somewhere in the fort. It wasn’t entirely unusual to hear screams in our fort, and I strained my ears trying to determine what kind of screams these were. Screams of anger? Bliss? General drunken obstreperousness? And then I figured it out.
They were screams of terror.
I grabbed my crossbow from under my desk and ran out the door towards the screams. The hallway was full of panicked dwarves, scrambling to get away from something. I rounded a corner and found myself in the under-construction Hall of Memory, where I intended to entomb the bodies of the fallen. There was a single dwarf in the room, but something seemed odd about her.
Maybe it was the fact that she was glowing faintly, or that I could see through her body to the walls behind her. Or the way she floated three feet off the ground and I couldn’t see her lower body because it was inside the wall.

“OoOOOooOH!” the specter moaned.
I raised my crossbow, warily, not sure if it would do any good against the wraith. “Who are you?” I asked, sounding more authoritative than I felt. “What business do you have here in Workclench?”
The ghostly dwarf turned towards me. “OoOOooOOOaaaaeooOOo!!!!” it moaned, waving its arms vaguely in my direction.
“Wait a minute….” Something about the apparition seemed familiar.
“Tekkud?” I asked. “Is that you?”

“Oh, hey Duck,” the ghost said, “how’s it go— uh, I mean OoOOOOooH I’m a scary GHOoOoOsT!”
I shot Tekkud with my crossbow. The bolt passed harmlessly through her ghostly form, but it still brought her up short.
“Hey! You shot me!”
“You’ll live,” I said. “Uh, metaphorically. What are you doing here, Tekkud? Why haven’t you joined our ancestors in the living stone?”
“Well,” she said, “after I was killed during the goblin attack last year, SOMEBODY forgot to properly honor my body.”
I wasn’t entirely surprised. We’d never had a good system for handling our fallen here in Workclench, hence the construction of the Hall of Memory. “So,” I said, “if we give you a proper burial, will that satisfy you and let you pass on?”
“Yes, that will do nice—“
She was interrupted as a
second specter suddenly burst through the wall, wailing piteously.

I rolled my eyes. “Quit whining, Libash. I take it we haven’t properly honored your body either?”
“Um, well, yes, that’s right,” the second ghost said, slightly taken aback.
“Fine. Well, can you tell me where your bodies currently lie?” It was a big fort, after all.
The ghosts looked at each other.
“No, we don’t know where they are,” said Tekkud.
“If you don’t know where your bodies are,” I said slowly, “how could you know that we haven’t buried them properly?”
“Um…” said Libash, looking confused.
“OooOOOOoOOoOh!!” said Tekkud.
I sighed.
Despite launching a massive, fortress-wide dwarfhunt, we were unable to find the bodies of Tekkud and Libash. I considered the possibility of simply letting them hang around indefinitely, but it was hard to sleep with all their constant moaning and people kept complaining to me about it.

Mayor Lor, up for re-election, was making it a campaign issue, so I agreed to bring her along with me when I gave the ghosts the bad news.
“Okay, we can’t find your bodies,” I told them.
“You must give us proper burriaAaA—“
“Shut up,” I said. “Is there anything else that will satisfy you?”
“Honestly, I can’t think of anything,” said Libash.
“Hm,” said mayor Lor. “What if we make a memorial to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, a nice piece of rock with your name on it. It can say nice things about you.”
“Maaaaybe that would work,” said Libash, with obvious reluctance. “If it’s a really
good piece of rock…”
“I’ll talk to our stonecrafters,” I said.

Libash and Tekkud clearly didn’t trust the stonecrafters to do a good job with the memorials, and floated over disconcertingly over the craftsdwarves' shoulders while they worked.

Honestly, I doubt that helped but I had come to really hate arguing with ghosts so I let it be.
While the crafters were working on the memorials, we had a visit from a group of human traders.

They were sufficiently unsettled by the sight of spectral dwarves wandering through the walls (as opposed to the halls) of the fort that they didn’t bother to argue when Rimtar gave them a gigantic pile of old rags in exchange for several boxes of cloth and leather.
By mid-Hematite, the two memorials were finally complete, and we set them up in the Hall of Memory.



The ghosts examined their memorials carefully, but after almost an hour they could find no fault in the exceptional craftsdwarfship.
“Well?” I asked. “Can you go now?”
“Yes, I suppose that we can,” said Libash, and she slowly faded from sight.

I turned to Tekkud. “What about you?”
“Well,” said the ghost, “I
could go now, but I’m not sure I want to. It’s kind of fun, being able to walk through walls…”
I took my crossbow off my back and began turning the crank.
“Fine, fine okay, you don’t need to shoot me again.”
And with that, she was gone.

Finally.
If I thought that would be the end of my problems with dead bodies, I was sorely mistaken. In early Malachite, Meng Gikutalath, our best carpenter, came into my office, tears leaving tracks through the sawdust on her face.
“I can’t take it, Duck,” she sobbed. “I just can’t!”
I tried to my best to sound sympathetic. “What’s the problem, Meng?”
“I can’t handle seeing goblins die,” she said, sniffling.

“I know they’re our enemies,” she said, “but any sort of violence upsets me.”
“But it’s been months since any goblins died around here,” I said, confused.
“But I still see them die!” she insisted. “Every time I see their bodies lying outside the fort, it’s like seeing them die all over again.”

I doubted she’d seen them die the first time, but I didn’t feel it would be helpful to point that out. Still, I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me.
“Well, what are you expecting?” I asked. “We’re certainly not going to entomb them the way we do our honored fallen.”
She wailed.

As I tried my best to comfort her, an idea came to me, and I began writing up the work orders with one hand as I patted her on the back with the other. It was a stupid idea, but then, this was a stupid problem.

In mid-Galena, I decided to check up on Led and Ingiz, the dwarves responsible for the underground human crops and magma-powered metalworks projects, respectively.
Led had good news.
“It works!” she said, triumphantly. “We channeled out a hole over a section of soil to expose it to sunlight, then covered it back up again with stone.”

“We constructed a farm on the soil below,” she continued, “and I was able to grow a potato in it! The sunlight has changed the soil!”

“Excellent,” I said. It really was. If we could grow human crops we could have a much wider variety of food and drink. “You have my permission to start planting crops in those fields at your discretion.”
Led nodded and left my office, beaming.
Ingiz, however, had worse news. He’d managed to construct a holding tank and fill it with magma, and he’d built an experimental smelter. But he was proving unable to produce a steady supply of the superheated air needed for the smelting process.

“I think the magma isn’t deep enough,” he explained to me. “If we had more magma beneath the smelter I think it would work.”
“Can we pump more magma into it somehow?” I asked him.
“We could,” he said, “but it would just flow right back out through the hole we used to fill the tank in the first place.”

“Well then we’ll just have to block the hole somehow, won’t we?” I said. I really liked this idea and didn’t want to give up on it so easily.
“Well,” Ingiz said cautiously. “We could try to use a cave-in to drop a plug into the hole. It’d be risky though.”
I thought about it. “Not if we take proper precautions. Can you see to it?”
“Yes, overseer,” he said, and left my office. I could hear him muttering something about proper placements of supports as he walked down the hall.
With that, I turned back to my own work. I’d been personally overseeing construction of the new bedroom wing, and the first set of rooms was complete.

I sighed, wishing I could claim one of those rooms as my own, but it wouldn’t be proper. I had, however, preemptively claimed a room in another section of the bedroom wing. It wasn’t quite ready, but would be by the end of the month, assuming nothing went wrong.
For once, nothing did, and by summer’s end Atis and I finally had a room to call our own.

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Topic: Parallel Fortresses Succession Game. | Finished (Read 87980 times)