29th Galena, 667:The orders came to flood the farm, no matter what."Flaming crocodile be damned, this room is gonna get muddy, or we're all going to starve!" "Uhh, can't we can just farm on the surface? Like we've been doing for a year and a half?"
"I need MUD and I need it NOW!'"O-okay. ."
I'm not getting paid enough for this shit.We sent two of the newer dwarves to start the pumps. Sure they had to climb over two dead dwarves, and one dying one, but they made it in one piece so what do you care? They began working furiously to turn the waterscrews, and soon enough the water flooded the stoneway, flushing out the hapless Tholtig, who was busy being paralyzed from the waist down. In fact, he had been about to gasp his last gasp, when the cold water hit and sort of shocked him back into life. Dwarven medecine at it's finest!
Like some macabre toilet bowl, various body parts and other miscellanous bits were flushed into the farm chamber, leaving bloody streaks where they collided with the walls. Nice.
With that problem solved, the two dwarves we sent to the pumps decided it was a great time to deconstruct those pumps. The resulting backflow of water cascaded down the hallway and forced them into the freezing cavern lake.
They managed (to my great surprise) to swim across the lake and make it on shore, where they were greeted by the still-warm ashen remnants of the cavern's undergrowth. That croocdile was somewhere out there, hunting for them . . .
No one bothered to rescue them, if only for the simple reason no one remembered who they were. New guy problems, am I right??
Right on queue, the dead began to rot in the farm chamber, choking poor Tholtig half to death, which is actually about a quarter-to-death, as Tholtig was already half-dead.
Also, that same day, I heard the best news all week - Dodok was back from the dead! Well, sort of. . he was pretty pale, and liked to hang out halfway through the wall like some weirdo, but it was definitely him. A little bloated, for sure, but he had the same jokes and same weird way of staring right through you. Love that guy, glad to see him back in action!
That brings my Ghost Score up to 1, by the way.
2nd Limestone, 667Dodok (a different one than the ghost) and Godel, the two cavern swim superstars, have managed to survive 3 days without seeing the crocodile. Godel actually had an axe with him, so they built a little still and have managed to get by eating raw tubers dug from the cavern muck. That is, until they ran into this fellow:
Dodok lasted about ten seconds before the ooze severed his lower spine. Goden used that moment to strike the ooze and kill it with the axe. Goden, in complete denial about what just happened, started to monologue about random bullshit while sitting in a pool of warm blood. He's such a great actor!
17th Limestone, 667:The bedrooms are coming along nicely:
Also, the dwarven traders came. I gave them a great deal on some old clothing we had lying around. When asked, "Why is it all stained red?," I just pointed at the sky - not a bad excuse to have!
In return, I bought some more spider silk, to make those cheesy decorations the public seems to enjoy so much. We fluff it up a bit and string it around, and people just hand us their wallets.
19th Limestone, 667:Somehow, Godel recovered from his broken ankle and is up and about. He's still at the 'scavenge mud for tasty roots' stage of survival, but next on his list is a carpenters workshop. Maybe he can even make a little hut for himself. Without a pick, though, he's never making it back inside the fortress. Unless someone remembers he's out here, perhaps?
While he was out harvesting, he even saw a rare phenomenom only know to a select few dwarves: the mass migration of the Cave Pygmy. While passing through our lands, they chose to strip Dodok's rotting corpse naked and make off with his socks, shirt, pants, tie, you name it.
5th Sandstone, 667:Today we were attacked by a melon head.
It died to the cavern guards before we could study it much. Strange creature indeed.
13th Sandstone, 667:Apparently, Tholtig died like a week ago but no one noticed. It was literally EVERYONE'S shared responsibility to check up on our wounded once a day, but NO ONE bothered. And look, he's totally fucking dead!
. . .
Who,
me?! Look, I was busy and the manager was breathing down my neck all day, I didn't have a chance to check on him! Plus, he was a goner anyways. That's what the 'necromancer' said, not that I trust that guy's opinion or whatever, but you know, he's like a literal necromancer. He probably knows what a dead-guy-walking looks like, right?
15th Sandstone, 667:On Today's episode of 'Godel Survives Alone in the Cavern', Godel dies. Horribly. To some demon called a trite:
Damn! I was really hoping for a Season 2. He had just finished his carpenters workshop, too:
Poor guy, but alas, everyone learned an important lesson that day: one should never demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system capable of modelling basic arithmetic.
21st Sandstone, 667: We built a series of 'death rooms' to, well, store all the dead things.
Honestly its a little fucked up but management says coffins are too expensive. Just hold your breath and you'll be fine.
11th Timber, 667: It started snowing again, and then the pond froze over:
Meanwhile, the workshops have expanded somewhat, and the new living quarters are just about finished.
Many of the dwarves still like to visit the surface, just to go and pray in that tiny hut by the lakeshore. I've constructed a grand temple, larger than has ever been seen before, to entice them down below, where the proper dwarf lives. I dedicated the temple to my god, Kal Avanasdug. Kal is a proper dwarven god, who likes to sing, dance, get drunk, and be happy. The statues are being constructed as we speak!
24th Timber, 667: Disaster! For real this time! Two beastly zombified bulls charged out of the forest today, killing four before we really knew what was happening.
One of those four was me. My last thought before death was nothing profound, really. . I was thinking about what a 50-50 mixture of Dwarven Wine and Peach Rum would taste like. Kind of creamy, with a sugary aftertaste, I bet? Anyways, I wasn't gone for long - some strange netherforce pulled my soul back into my body before I could really comprehend I was dead!
My muscles worked the same, in fact I felt stronger than ever. I think my skin was a little pale, and I had gained a mysterious new title, "Sallow Hunter," but I was practically as good as new!
And then the bull just sort of struck me down again. I checked "get gored to death by a bull twice in a row" off my bucket list, and slowly passed into the void. This gave me time to finish my previous thought, the one about about the cocktail, and I decided I should try this strange mixture once I got to wherever I was going, oh, I think I see a bright light in the distance, is that what I think it is? IT IS! I KNEW
IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS!
IT'S AMAZI-==================================================================================
Anyways yeah crazy times at camp Crystallake. Honestly, I should probably go to a publisher with this story, it's about time we got the honest-to-goodness truth out there about these predatory companies. I was young, you know, I could get by on that little pay, but some of the other employees had families, or were older and had a lot of health problems, and they should have gotten more, considering, you know, all that happened. .
...
Yeah? You think so? Yeah I suppose I'll try self-publishing. I could start a company to handle it, though I'd have to hired some shmucks to do all the printing for me. I wonder if I could get it done cheaper in a different realm. . .
Thus ends the journal of Sodel. Crystallakes appears to be at the brink of destruction - can the next in line save this god-forsaken fortress?
OOC:
Please for the love of god, close the front gate before those bulls kill everyone! Those things are freakin OP!
That should seal the fortress, though I never bothered to actually test if I left any holes.
Final ghost score was only 1, and truthfully I was hoping for more. . if you want you can bury the bodies now.
Save is here, have fun with all the new creatures. Assume everything is broken.