Alright, I'm in.
21st-22nd Slate, 305
Lokum 'ACP' Avuzkubuk was laboring on yet another of his famous mechanisms when Danarca entered his workshop. "My time is up, you're next." he said quickly, overwhelmed with relief.
At the sound of the final word, Lokum grew pale. He let the pincers tumble out of his hand, dropping an impossibly thin stone gear into a congregation of its siblings. "I thought Barbarossa was next?" Lokum pushed the mechanism aside and pulled out a scrap of giant cave spider silk. The faded remains of a Goblin word adorned the edge of the scrap, where it ended in an elastic strip. More recent writing indicated that Lokum was to follow Barbarossa, as he had suspected. "He is next! Leave me alone!"
"Barbarossa excused himself, I'm sorry." Danarca failed to show sympathy, he was simply happy to be done with ruling Sparkgear. He wasn't cut out for that job, not that it made him unique. "It turns out that..."
"He bribed you, didn't he?" Lokum's terror briefly moved aside to make room for anger. "This is a solemn duty, not a petty chore! When the King hears about this, he'll have both of you hammered!"
"Barbarossa won't be running Sparkgears in the near future. The reasons are justified but confidential, and consider that spoken under oath. The only one facing a hammering is you, if you fail to follow the succession protocol." Danarca fired the words in quick succession, turned and started to leave.
"I'm not ready. There's still..." Lokum was grasping for straws, but he knew that he was done for. He's going to run this hornets' nest, if the burden doesn't turn him into a babbling maniac first.
"Take the rest of the day off and meet me first thing in the morning for the official transfer."
Lokum went back to his work, and then pushed it away, got up and went to prepare. He did this mainly by crying himself to sleep, waking up in the middle of the night and watching the sieging orcs camping outside the fortress. Eventually, the sun rose and a fresh, beaming Danarcas greeted him and lead him to the office. Danarca cheerfully went through the motions while Lokum followed numbly, as if he were outside his body, directing the actions of an unrelated dwarf.
That's it for now. I'll post an update with substance as soon as I figure out what to do next. Most of the trap designs I've used in the past relied on the enemy being slow enough to allow for a reasonable reaction time. This obviously isn't the case with the zero speed orcs.
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Topic: Sparkgear 6: I made the game too hard (Read 55901 times)