I meant to end this long before today, but life threw unexpected things in my way, in the form of some unexpected family business I was not informed of beforehand. I won't be able to finish the writeup of Obok and Kadol's story for a week or so due to further IRL things, so I'll summarize it here. Obok and Kadol gradually journeyed around the mountains, arguing and fighting and debating, slowly getting to know each other better, until after a climactic fight with a pack of wolves which almost killed the dog Olin and left her crippled for life, they began to become friends. When they reached the tundra of heroes, Kadol offered to look the other way whilst Obok went across the mountains back home and tell the King that Obok had escaped in the night, but Obok decided to continue north with Kadol willingly, since he had privately come to a conclusion: He liked to build and design things more than anything else, and this could very well be the last time he was ever given such an opportunity. After discussing it with Kadol, he made the ultimate decision that under the condition that there was an emergency escape route for him, above or below board, getting to design something like Duskhome again was worth the occasional Royal Restriction placed on him. I wasn't sure if I wrote the friendship in a way that didn't come across as abusive on one level or another, so until I'm back at my PC again to do a proper writeup imagine that something magical and entirely natural happened on the way up that made them completely stop hating each other. Might not be nuanced enough, but it's as much as I can manage for now. When Obok finally met the King, he gave a single command: Build a new Mountainhome for the Walled Dye. Obok spent the next
decade doing just that until finally leaving for Boltspumpkin once the King was done with his services, where he retired and has for now settled down.
After all was said and done, I went to the mountains, found the monarch, found a suitable site on the world map, I started the Fortress, and the suffering began almost immediately. I'm almost ashamed to admit this, but in the end DFhack became a very close companion during the nightmare that this Fortress was. I didn't think I would be doing that when I started, but when I started, I didn't think I'd end up with the following screenshot.
As mentioned previously, I genuinely did originally intend to be done by friday/saturday, but then Family Business happened and the rest is history. I apologise for the inconvenience caused, I didn't intend for this to play out the way it did.
As a last note, originally the Museum submission was a wolf skull, being a part of the development of Obok and Kadol's friendship, but in the end I decided that since I wasn't going to be able to write up the whole story before IRL got real busy and at the time I didn't expect myself to so thoroughly summarize the Adventurer story in this post, I decided to replace it with something else. Was this the right move? Or the wrong move? I don't know, it's three in the morning and my brain hurts. There's a story behind the steel, it's a part of Obok and Kadol's adventure, it has greater meaning in and across Orid Xem, and the wolf skull was a random wolf skull. If I went too far outside the rules by doing that, I apologise, it won't happen again, but I just really wasn't satisfied with that wolf skull.
Also, last little note here; Bizarrely enough, two brand new Hillocks got founded in the lowlands near the Fort and were economically linked to me. I genuinely didn't know that was possible in the circumstances. You learn something every day, I guess.