---
Irwin growled with satisfaction. The locking mechanism seemed okay – he was far from being a technician, but the machinist’s – Fred? Something like that. He wasn’t concerned with names – regardless, possibly-Fred’s work seemed about done. Irwin turned and galloped up the scaffolding and threw the switch.
Below him, there was a ratcheting sound, followed by some clunking of gears beginning to wire into action. He suddenly felt a presence behind him, and his senses lit up – warmth, sounds of laboured breathing, and an odor; no, many. Sweat. Plant fiber. A hard, metal tinge. The boy, the mechanic from before, was behind him, using some old rubbish plant leaves to wipe himself up. It was a hot summer’s day, and most dwarves had taken the day to sit and have a drink in the shade of the castle walls. But not Irwin, and by extension, not was the dwarf he needed to finish his work.
The new stables would certainly be brilliant. It stood three stories high already, and that was merely the sixteen docile containment stables. Above that, a separate system was still being designed for containing hostile creatures. The royal stables would stand up to a potential six stories high when finished – truly a mighty building, and appropriate of a housing center for all beasts of varying magnificence. Irwin would no longer be a stablehand in charge of a few scant creatures then. He would soon be a true stablemaster, lord of all beasts of all magnificences.
Presently they were testing the bridge locks for dumping animals – in case any harmless yet hostile creatures were released into the stables, the bridges would be shut above them once they had been lowered into their holding unit to put minds at ease. The gears shuttered around for a few moments, and then the bridge lurched and disappeared near-instantaneously.
“So, uh, hey-o, we got a working system. Huh? You wanna let me off now? I got a cool ale sittin’ in the shade waiting up for me—”
“Gnh.” Irwin growled slightly, then yanked the lever again. Fred sighed, wiping his forehead some more. After a similar period of waiting, the bridge returned just as miraculously. “Slow,” the stablemaster grumbled.
“Well, yeah, your basic gear setup’s always gonna be like that. It’s like Bodie and I told you before, though, if you wanna upgrade to the new fluid logic stuff we’re gonna have to take out a couple a’ these stables to make space—” Irwin growled again, more aggressively. “…Right, then,” the machinist said. “Be seeing you.” He took off down the scaffolding for his long-awaited thirst quencher.
Irwin looked around a bit, then nodded. The day’s work was done. Now it was time for a bit a recreation.
He monkeyed his way down the scaffolding and into the pile of dogs waiting for him. Each one of them was trained to be a killer if necessary – but all were ownerless, and stayed close to Irwin without any other home to go to. They crowded on top of him as he landed, licking his face and yipping in excitement, happy for his presence. He reciprocated happily, and they rolled around for a few minutes. Abruptly, Irwin got up and began running low, wildly, towards his shack, dogs at his feet. Any other day he would have time to romp around with the mutts. But today was important.
Morul met him at the door, beckoning him in. “A little late, aren’t you?” She asked pleasantly. The dogs piled up in a corner and went to sleep. Irwin stood fully and shook his hair around a bit, grunting in response. “I know, I know,” she said, “you can’t stand those mechanics. But you know how much you need them for your stables.”
Irwin grumbled in defeat. He’d done his best to work autonomously, but he’d been forced to bring in Bodark’s crew when no easier solution presented itself. He knew his wife was right, much as he hated to admit it; she always seemed to be.
“What are you doing home so soon, anyhow? Isn’t it your big day?” Morul took out a set of cutlery from a chest and began laying it out on the table. It was all handcrafted goblin bone; there was no bone carver better than her.
He brushed down his clothes, then looked up at her. His usual dirty and mud-stained garments would be no good for this class of demonstration.
“Don’t be silly, you look fine,” Morul reached out across the table and gave his beard a few slaps. A haze of dust floated into the air and lazily dissipated. “Since you’re home early, we’d better eat now. I imagine you’ll be out late tonight.”
They feasted on ground wolf spider mixed with cheese, wrapped in longland grass and heated. Irwin saw it was a human dish again; Bomrek had been trying out more foreign styles with the last visit from the human traders. It was called a taco. Irwin had never been picky about food, but this new style didn’t seem very, well, dwarfy to him. He excused himself halfway through the meal to clean himself up, then headed out to the keep with a quick goodbye to Morul. The dogs stayed – they wouldn’t be welcome where he was going.
The keep itself was still far from being a proper stronghold yet. Its main floor was still bare, and its brand new dungeons had not been cleaned up. But it was still the keep, as the sword and arrow mural on what was to be the grand hall showed. Irwin walked across it proudly, doing his best to keep his posture up, then descended into the dark below.
“Well! You’re early, of course,” came a voice from the shadows. Irwin’s eyes, not yet adjusted to the rare darkness Mightygrips had to offer, saw nothing at first, but he knew it was Datan, waiting. “We’re still only just getting set up.”
His eyes adjusted and he looked around. The room was as yet hardly fit to be called a dungeon, but it was on its way. The twin staircases echoed of grandeur; the large pit in the floor was clearly positioned for aesthetics rather than practicality. But soon enough it would become what it now only mimicked – a true dungeon.
He stepped forwards and looked down. Far below, in the center of the circular pit, there was a puppy chained to a stake in the ground. It was looking around nervously. Something was definitely triggering its sixth sense – something tangible, and nearby. Irwin could feel its presence himself to a lesser degree. This was not a safe place, and he knew that better than anyone. It noticed his figure looming over the pit’s rim and began yipping at him desperately, looking for a friend. It wouldn’t find one; not today. He turned sadly from the pit, the ceaseless yipping haunting him.
“Lady Victoria and Lord Percival will be here any moment,” said Datan, walking up to him. She was in full formal uniform – dark purple and blue cloaks, with the hoods lowered around her shoulderblades. Irwin was unused to royal tradition, having grown up on an outpost far from the mountainhomes, but figured the getup must’ve been to impress rather than to function. “We’re all ready for the presentation, of course. We have someone standing by the levers ready to pull at a moment’s notice, and all our safety precautions are in place,” she said. “We’ve brought Mafava in for the demonstration, due to her… nature.”
Irwin grunted his approval and nodded, not taking his eyes off of the puppy. He hated to see dogs hurt, regardless of circumstance or necessity. He even did his best to avoid eating Bomrek’s canine dishes, even though the beasts had already been cooked and his silent protest wouldn’t bring them back. But tonight he would have to bear the weight of his decisions. It was too important.
“By the way…” the dungeon master said playfully, walking over to her temporary desk and sitting on the corner of it, “what are you going to name it? Surely you’ve thought of something by now.”
“Hmpf.” Irwin scratched at his beard thoughtfully. “Need to get more familiar. Wait n’ see.”
“Suit yourself then, I’ve—ah! My lady and lord. So good to see you.” Datan hurried over to the stairs, where a number of dwarves were descending. Lady Victoria and Lord Percival were at the forefront, the baroness meeting Datan in pleasant conversation while her consort suspiciously washed his eyes over the dungeon walls. Behind them were the chamberlain James Gleehalls, bearing a sour expression on his face, and a hooded man Irwin had seen once or twice hanging around the nobility’s quarters. After them were a number of other dwarves clearly not part of the usual entourage and were tagging along for the show, among them Sirs Grath and Randall. To Irwin the demonstration was more a matter of business; to the public it was just good entertainment in a place where entertainment came rarely.
“Arright, where is this thing?” Randall shouted boisterously. “It damn near killed me up in the caves, I wanna see it earn its keep!”
“Soon enough, soon enough,” cried Datan, holding her arms up and speaking in a loud and direct yet gentle tone. “Irwin has spent a long time preparing this event for you tonight, and I think you all owe it to him to let him speak a few words.”
There was scattered applause and begrudging silence. Dwarves were rarely ones for spectacle; they had come for the meat of the show.
Irwin stepped forwards and looked around at the surprisingly large audience that had assembled. He was lost for words, though not from any fear over public speaking; language had simply never been something he’d felt the need to muck around with. Tonight was important enough, of course, but despite the time he’d devoted to thinking about it he’d been unable to come up with any sort of speech to say.
“Hrmf,” he began, muttering something. The dwarves looked at him from the darkness, figuring he was clearing his throat, but nonetheless waiting silently. “Wanna…” he said, pausing to consider where he was going with this, then approving and repeating himself. “Wanna train lotta t’ings. Big t'ings. Nobody ever trains ‘m ‘fore.” The crowd was silent, waiting for him to finish. “S’not so easy, s’what I mean,” he continued. “Gotta be careful. No buggering ‘round. I gives it a shot tonight, so… if t’ings go well, I getta do lot more a this. High stakes,” he said. The audience let him pause, sensing a lack of finality to his words. “Kill lots more elves too!” he concluded with, and his crowd finally cheered and showed some enthusiasm. Irwin beamed, and saw Morul towards the back of the crowd, smiling proudly at him. His confidence was renewed. “Pull tha lev’r an’ let’s get it on wit’!” he shouted down, and there was more cheering as the audience crowded around the pit. There was some familiar shuttering of gears, and then they saw a bridge lower in the depths.
A hissing silenced the audience and reminded them what they had all come to see. There was a clang, and a few gears went flying towards the pit’s open floor. Black, thin, hairy legs stretched out into what light there was in the depths below the keep.
The giant spider lurched out of the shadows, smelling prey. Irwin swallowed, his throat feeling closed up, but it didn’t ease his tension. If things went well, he’d have permanent support for his rather dangerous proposal to train their entire violent undead menagerie; if they didn’t, he’d just have to hope that their safety precautions were cautious enough.
Below him, the puppy began yipping again, somehow locking eyes with him and solely him. Irwin tried to break contact, but it seemed desperate to communicate with him as if he would cancel the demonstration and rappel down to save it. He focused his attention on the spider, the source of the small canine’s fear. It lumbered towards the puppy, hissing again, and… waited.
The crowd watched. “So is it gonna eat the thing or what?” asked an impatient Randall. “We din’t come down here to watch ‘em make friends!” There was a murmur of consensus among the audience. Irwin stared downwards, knowing his time had come.
“Kill ‘m,” he said. The spider tensed and lowered itself at the sound of his voice, noticeably reacting. He’d spent countless weeks alternately whipping and rewarding the creature until he’d trusted it enough to follow simple commands; he’d been hoping his conditioning would have a permanent effect, but hadn’t known for sure until that moment. The spider clearly made out his voice above the others and recognized it and its power. Surely enough, mere moments after he’d called out to it, it leapt, sinking its teeth into the small creature and coating its shredded parts in webbing for later. He couldn’t help but feel a wave of betrayal bowl over him at the puppy’s final death wail, but tried to put it out of his mind and press forwards. “Let Mafava at ‘m,” he called down to the lever operator.
There was more gear shifting, and then a haunting cackle rose from the pit. Mafava Shockedmorning, an elven trader that had become violently homicidal, charged onto the pit’s open floor after the eight-legged monster. They’d caged the tall berserker for an unknown later use; now she was being used as spider food.
“Go on, defend yerself! But don’t kill ‘er yet!” Irwin called down. The crowd booed a bit, but went along with his orders, curious. The spider went on the defensive immediately, crouching down and spitting huge throngs of webbing onto the angry elf. She swung at it helplessly, blindly, but was trapped out of range of the monster. The spider waited, not knowing its next course of action. “Disable ‘er,” Irwin said. “Nice an’ easy-like.”
The spider quickly swung out and bit the elf in the left leg just below the knee, paralyzing it. It then began to rip away its skin and some tendons, immobilizing it and preventing it from running.
“She’s all yours!” Irwin finally called. “Kill the hippie mongrel!” The crowd started cheering again, already riled up but waiting for something to yell about. The spider below slunk back into a stance of familiarity, having been waiting for this. It attacked the elf’s leg more aggressively, ripping out chunks at random and immobilizing the creature for the rest of its short life. It then began indiscriminately ripping and biting away the elf’s guts at random while slowly coating it in thick, mucus-y webbing. Finally it ripped off the elf’s left leg entirely, to more rowdy cheering from above.
“Thing you got t’ ‘member,” said Irwin out loud to no-one in particular, “s’ that spiders take their time. They likes t’ have fun wit’ their meals. You gotta give ‘m somet’ing t’ snack on erry now ‘n then.” Below, the spider continued to mutilate the still struggling elf. It was slow, of course; the undead always were. But its slow, torturous methods were impressing the crowd immensely. The elf’s struggling slowed, and it finally gave in to pain. Its guts were strewn across the pit’s floor for all to see.
~
Later, when the crowd had dispersed, Datan approached Irwin. “They’re ready for you,” she said. “Good luck. It was a great demonstration, I’ll give you that.”
Irwin nervously nodded, then stepped forwards into the room the baron and baroness were waiting in. They were standing along with him for lack of chairs, but their commanding presence was distinct as ever.
“Well, Mr. Slaughtersorb, we were rather impressed by your pet’s performance, but Percy thinks…” began Lady Victoria, but was then cut off by Lord Percival.
“It’s risky business,” Percival said, meeting him eye to eye. “Once these monstrosities are trained, or trained as best you can, they’ll be out free among the populace. If their conditioning slips, even for a moment, that’s dead dwarves on our hands. And on your conscience.”
Irwin quickly nodded and broke in, “Wit’ all my respects, sirrah, I knows this. S’what the demonstration was for, wasnit?”
“What Percy is trying to say, I think, is that we consider you a very impressive animal trainer—practically a legend, in fact!—but the fact still remains that it’s very, very dangerous to trust these beasts in the wild.”
“But—” Irwin shouted, before being silenced by a firmly raised hand.
“And so,” Victoria continued, “we will not be placing our trusts in the creatures at all.”
Irwin stared, solemnly. He’d been working with the spider to instill its conditioning perfectly. There was absolutely no reason to deny him the right to—
“We will instead be placing our trust solely in you,” finished the baroness.
The stablemaster blinked and stopped midthought. Was that approval he heard?
“You have permission to train all the violent, aggressive, and monstrous creatures you like,” said Victoria. “The benefit to our rather... slim military outweighs the potential risk of a trained beast breaking from its conditioning.”
Percival leaned towards him menacingly. “Keep in mind, if one does… it’s all on you. I mean everything— not just the judicial repercussions, but the moral ones as well. You’ve got full responsibility of this project.”
Irwin yipped a few quick words of delight and rushed out into the main chamber. All those months of work hadn’t been wasted at all. He’d finally been granted approval to follow his dream: taming what was believed to not be tameable, mastering those that had no master, conditioning the chaotic rogues of the wild. He would begin the next morning; he couldn’t wait any longer than that. It would be utter bliss.
He ran for the twin stairs to head back into the light. Though it was night out, the stars and moon illuminated the lands around him, providing a light to step into from the dungeon’s shadow. He crossed the bridge from the keep to the main yard, feeling the heat and glow from the magma moat briefly coat him in illuminated warmth, then stopped for a moment to admire the midnight. It would have been a perfect day if not for the puppy. Anything else, thought Irwin; they could’ve used anything else. A donkey foal. A kitten. It didn’t matter so long as it wasn’t a dog. The way it looked up at him in its final moments, asking for help… and he had given the order to kill it. Betrayed it. Had it been worth it?
“Irwin!” called a voice—Datan’s—from below, loosening him from his thoughts. He turned and looked back towards the keep. The dungeon master had tossed her ceremonial garb in for a more practical outfit and was jogging to catch him. She met him and then slowed to his pace, now walking with him back to the hovels.
“A very impressive demonstration again,” she said. “Can’t stress that enough. I’ve never seen a cave spider respond to verbal commands like that before.”
Irwin shrugged and grunted something. He’d never known how to take compliments directed at him. He usually didn’t get them. They walked on in silence for a moment.
“So?” she finally asked.
Irwin turned and looked at her blankly, stopping again. He wasn’t sure what she was asking.
“The spider,” Datan said. “You were going to name it after the performance. Don’t tell me you forgot…” she said as she grinned in a sly manner – perhaps more slyly than he was comfortable with.
“Din’t forget,” Irwin said. “Went with n’ elvish name.
Thecerewirethi. Figger its first big kill ‘s an elf, suits it ‘n all that.”
“You speak elvish?”
“Word ‘r two.” He began walking away, turning.
“Irwin, what does it mean?” Datan finally called out to him.
He stopped, still facing away, and smiled sadly in the moon’s light. Finally he pivoted slowly to meet the dungeon master’s eyes. “Skirtedguilt,” he said, and turned back to face the night.
---
Hey there! Been a while, huh? I was actually starting to worry that I wouldn’t be able to get an update out at all; I’ve been having some pretty serious internet connection issues since I flew back to the coast (new laptop, associated problems, etc.) but I managed to write an update up connection-less and rush over to a public connection and post it. And what an update! Aside from finally focusing on Irwin, who I’d been wanting to expore in more depth for a while, this is a 3365 word update, which I think makes it the longest by a fairly significant amount. The old record-holder was 2538 words; the chapter 2 closer orc melee skirmish. Hopefully this somewhat makes up for the big 10-day break I took off there.
As for the update, this means I’ll be modding in [PET_EXOTIC] and [trAINABLE] tags to the horde of beasts we have caged away now; if I have trouble training them because they’re undead, I might just use some utility hacks to make them part of the civilization or something. I dunno. They’re no fun just doddering around in cages.
Incidentally, I paused the game at the moment just before the berserk elf died to finish the update and filled it out with Chuckles as a placeholder name for the spider, figuring I’d try and work whatever the RNG picked in afterwards. Skirtedguilt just happened to perfectly fit the update I’d already written. So that’s pretty cool too I guess.
I’d like to say I’m fully ‘back,’ but with the internet being what it is right now, it might be more than my usual one-two days before I get something else to you guys. Don’t worry, though – still love ya!
Damn, it feels good to be
a gangsta back.
Author
Topic: The Castle Mightygrips: Cancelled. [community] (Read 47992 times)