SAVE:
http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=12941(rather long update, but an interesting year)
Welp, bad news. The second the undead appeared, MCreeper resigned as overseer of the fortress. This is no time to be without leadership!
None of the other dwarves around me seemed willing to take over. A few of them had been overseers in the past and obviously dreaded doing a second term, and the rest seemed like idiots. With nothing else to do, I took over.
Feeling the responsibility weighing down on me, I took stock of the fort's various problems.
First, the entire area in front of the fort was flooded. Second, we had no real defences of any sort.
And third, we were basically out of booze. This was not looking good.
I decided each problem would have to be dealt with in turn. I put in an order for more booze, and had the lever pulled to shut off the water supply. Of course, all of this would be irrelevant if the undead horde wasn't dealt with. Well, time to suit up.
The battle was long and bloody. Lord_lemonpie died early in the fight, and my poor husband as well. The dear was part of our marksdwarf squad, which basically got wiped out. The previous overseers had instructed the unfortunate bastards to only use leather shields, of which we had none. There also was a surprising lack of fortifications, meaning the marksdwarves were about as useful as peasants with clubs.
Our melee dwarves did much better, though we did suffer unfortunate losses. A few of our best - Nopal and MCreeper among others - basically skipped out on the fighting, but a few of our war pokemon stepped up to the plate. A Sceptile, a Garchomp, and a Charizard all held the line against the zombies, selling their lives bravely and bringing many of the dead with them. Then a Crobat belonging to one of the dead soldiers stormed onto the field in vengeance, lopping off heads and limbs left and right until the battle was won. I bestowed upon the now one-eyed bat the name of "Kadol Metbolt the Scorching Neutrality of Labyrinths" to honour its performance in battle, then went to the infirmary to have the wound on my arm stitched up.
A shot of the carnage.
In the aftermath of the battle I order the mausoleum greatly expanded, and have slabs and statues made of the fallen heroes,
Once the battle and the cleanup was finished, it struck me that I would now have to run the fortress. I volunteered as overseer because of the pressing emergency facing us, but the traditional term for an overseer is a full year. I don't know anything about leadership! I'm a soldier!
That said, this fort could use some improvements. Losses in the battle would not of been so bad if we had built fortifications, fixed the uniform orders, and maybe NOT PUT THE WEAPON AND ARMOUR STOCKPILES OUTSIDE THE FORTRESS.
SERIOUSLY.
So I go about my duties. Defences are built, weapons and armour are forged, adamantine mining expands in scope, and defences are built to protect our vulnerable fort.
In addition, I send parties to map out the caverns and set cage traps. Cavern pokemon are notoriously deadly, and I'd feel safer if we caught and trained a few.
Although to be honest... I've never heard of this pokemon before.
I consider catching it, but one of our more familiar pokemon beats me to it. Brutal.
I guess that's why they call it Skull Bash?
Anyways, work continues apace. I also expand the pokemon training area and let the caged pokemon loose - they can't be wartrained from inside a cage! It largely works, except for one unfortunate Totem Gumshoos who turns feral in the middle of a crowd of war pokemon.
A few months pass largely uneventfully. We begin catching large numbers of powerful cavern pokemon, and the militia are now fully outfitted and training constantly. Then, the earth strikes back.
A couple of geodude slip through a cage trap waiting to be reloaded, and go absolutely ballistic. The weaver dies first, then a diagnoser and a fish dissector soon after, along with a Froakie that bravely tried to protect them. This is nuts!
This one engineer who had arrived recently (a fine siege operator - it would be a shame to lose him) is locked in battle with one of the stoney bastards. In the middle of the fighting he takes on the name Glass, in honour of one of our fallen overseers. It just might have been Armok's blessing or the spirit of Glass reborn, but he does about twelve rounds with the geodude despite some serious injuries, and basically beats the crud out of it until the militia make it down to the caverns and finish it off. On multiple occasions he starts leaving to get medical attention, but then decides instead to get back in and keep punching instead.
As I put my spear through the troublesome beast, I give Alath - no, Glass - a respectful salute.
More traps are put in after that to stop it from happening again. There are more killings in the cavern throughout my reign - mostly by Eelektriks, which can both fly and swim to get around my traps - but nothing of the same magnitude.
Humans arrive for trading. They don't bring any pokemon, but I trade them some of Shidoni's fine meals for a pile of cloth and leather.
By around this point, I am starting to feel more comfortable as overseer. The militia has become a force to be reckoned with, adamantine equipment is plentiful, and there's plenty to drink. Numerous defensive improvements have been made to the fort, and I've even started work on several... projects.
Aw, maaan! Kadol! I wanted to catch that!
Kadol's mangled eye has largely healed, leaving the mighty bat with a really badass scar.
But the misdreavus wasn't the only mischievous lout to invade the fortress. Stungin the Kobold thief has returned!
Hey Stungin! How's it hanging?
He's so cute with those teary little kobold eyes that I can't bring myself to kill him. And he's been here enough times that, should the fortress ever fall, Stungin will be the only person to tell the tale of Pocketball's rise and fall.
He leaves after a little while without stealing anything.
Meanwhile, down in the caverns, another dwarf is killed by an Eelektrik. This loss is particularly tragic in that the dwarf was a mother, and her husband had already perished in the undead attack. Her son is now an orphan.
Poor kid. He seems to be taking it pretty hard.
A few months of work and training later, the outpost liason arrives. He meets with the mayor, offers to make Pocketball a barony, and asks if she has any recommendations for a baron.
The mayor makes the right choice and is spared a beating. I set the miners to begin carving out my quarters and tomb immediately.
In addition, we are blessed with a particularly useful artifact.
Artifact doors are indestructible, even to hosts of the Distortion World. The door is installed in the corridor leading to the adamantine vein, making me feel a little more secure in our mining. We are also blessed in another way - Kadol the Crobat, our fort's legendary zombie slayer, has sired a daughter.
Being a bit of a poison-type afficionado, and also the baron AND the overseer, I have the crobat war-trained and claim it as my companion before anybody else can open their mouths. I do, however, assign a good number of the other war beasts to the other claimants. The Galvantula that were caught in the caverns open up entirely new possibilities for defence with their electric webbing.
Merchants from the mountainhome came with the liason and set up in the depot. I take a break from my sparring to see what they brought and am immediately disappointed.
That's literally it. Even the elves brought more. Geez.
I buy their stuff and send them hurriedly on their way.
Later, much to the chagrin of RedMageCole (a Mimikyu enthusiast) Ryukan really drops the ball. He had told everybody that he was going to train the war Mimikyu, but just sort of stood there for months. I didn't notice until the Mimikyu turned feral and started attacking people.
The Mimikyu didn't do much damage before being torn apart by the other pokemon, but I hate to lose such an awesome war beast.
This is on you, TheImmortalRyukan.
Meanwhile, a Muk in the caverns kills a mother and then mauls her baby. Despite everybody in the fortress being too lazy to help out the infant, it manages to crawl on its own all the way out of the caverns and into the fortress proper. It then just sort of sits in the entranceway to the fortress, an orphan with a destroyed foot. The little sweetie later grows into a child there on the front lawn, with some permanent injuries and an awesome story to tell.
Meanwhile, my project is all but complete. All I need is some intact corpses. Also, I'd like for the marksdwarves to get a little more training. If only there were a bunch of humans trapped in a single room that didn't do any work to benefit the fortress.
Oh wait. The tavern.
The marksdwarves level up quite a few times shooting all the bards and poets in the tavern. I can't believe we didn't do this earlier! One of the visiting swordsmen gives us some trouble, killing a child, a fisherdwarf, and the fortress's only two planters. But all things considered this was a great way to get marksdwarf XP!
Future overseers - I'd recommend against attacking any visiting melee warriors, the poets give just as much XP and are way less deadly.
The many corpses created in this revolutionary new training regimen are hauled into the arena I had created over many months. A necromancer captured right at the beginning of my reign dwells in a small office in the middle, surrounded by fortifications and drawbridges. At the flick of a lever I can give him line of sight to the arena or block it. The militia are deployed in front of his chamber and the lever is pulled.
It's awesome! The terrified dark wizard animates all the corpses, leading to a huge zombie-slaying party. He raises the bits almost as fast as we hack them apart, leading to no end of quality military training. Eventually every corpse has been desecrated and mangled to the point where no amount of magic could make it move again and the necromancer is banished back into darkness.
Great training session guys! Feel that pump!
As my reign now begins to wind to a close, I put the finishing touches on the things that will be my legacy. My arena, my office, my magnificent statue garden, and the opulent tomb I constructed for myself out of garnierite and solid gold. And, you know, the awesome defences I built.
I'm almost sad that my reign is going to pass without them being put to use.
Wait, what? Crap! I thought my turn was basically over!
Ok, well, I can deal with this...
Wait, what the hell? Already?
There's like two weeks left in my year as overseer, let's not botch it all now.
The titan charges towards the fortress, though thankfully everybody has managed to get inside already. A Blaziken belonging to Glass (the old Glass not the new Glass) intercepts it but is beheaded after a brief struggle.
Blaziken has... fainted?
But after killing the Blaziken, instead of attacking the fortress, it jumps into MCreeper's derelict water tower. I really don't know why.
He seems happy to just chill there. He broke a few axles and things but now he's just treading water. I build walls around the floodgates to make sure he's never accidentally released, and I guess that pretty much solves the titan problem.
The forgotten beast, meanwhile, brutally murders a Squirtle and then just sits down in front of the door leading to the staircase. The beastie isn't even trying to break the door down, it's just sitting there. What's wrong with these monsters?
Still, its presence there is very inconvenient. It's basically shut down our metalworking industry and blocked off the caverns for us. It's standing on a cage trap though... if I could only web it...
Closer to the surface, a web trap is constructed. However, even when I unlock the door, the beast doesn't do anything. Well, if Acik Nomargalka won't come to the Galvantula, then the Galvantula will come to Acik Nomargalka.
I tunnel across from the beast, pasture a Galvantula, and then carve fortifications in the wall separating them. The Galvantula throws webs all over everything... but the damn beast doesn't get caged! It doesn't even move or spew dust or anything. I don't understand it. The trap is loaded and the webs are definitely hitting it.
Annoyed beyond belief, I tell the fortress marksdwarves to stand where the Galvantula is and shoot their crossbows at it. The geniuses instead use MCreeper's unfinished minecart track to avoid the defensive position I'd built them and run at the monster head-on.
That gets its attention! For the second time in my reign, marksdwarves are butchered like mareep. Brilliant.
The Galvantula takes this opportunity to run away, even though the webs now seem to be working on it. Unfortunately there was no webbing left on the trap, allowing Acik to begin pounding at the fragile borax door.
Ah, screw it. The full militia, led by Beirus (our first legendary warrior, congrats!) are deployed to fight it.
The thing is dispatched quite quickly, though its dust got all over everything.
On Christmas day, Beirus and many of the other militia soldiers begin bleeding profusely, fainting, and suffering from body-wide advanced rot. Crap.
They're rotting so much you can barely see the hospital.
And then, in an anticlimactic (but relieving) end to the year, the rot suddenly goes away and they wake up and leave. The surgeons for some reason chose to start the surgery process by excising the rotten tissue from everybody's upper lip, so I guess having no upper lip is now the mark of a great warrior.
With the crisis solved (besides the titan relaxing in our water tower) I polish my magnificent statues, take a fond look at my opulent tomb, give a pat to my mighty Crobat companion. and pass the reins of overseer on to the next taker.
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Topic: The World of Dwarvemon - Succession Fortress of Pocketball (ENDED) (Read 63674 times)