Jesus, is this forum ever busy. I count three threads that’ve started up today, and there’s like five more from earlier this week. Man.
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20th Timber, 16~I waded through the waist-deep water, seething.
“
Julius!” I shouted. “
Get down here!”
The young master mason peeked out from behind a wall, then disappeared just as quickly.
“I saw you! Get out here, you idiot!”
After a moment in which I imagine he was wondering whether to come out and meet his fate or commit immediate suicide, Julius waded through the water towards me, looking downwards.
“What the hell happened?” I shouted. “This was your project! I put you in charge! Now half the fort’s sunk!”
“It was… uh… I’m not sure. Something—”
“You’re not
sure?!” I was being pretty hard on him, I knew. But he’d spent the better part of the season trying to convince me to let him run this project, and I woke up to see our quarry flooded. I was rather unimpressed.
He winced at my roar. “It—I don’t know, sir, a frogman came out of the source flow, and we couldn’t close the gates, and—”
“Is it still there?” I interjected. Silence. The boy was about to break into tears, but I had a fort to worry about. Let him learn his lesson the hard way. “Is it still
there?!” I roared again.
“Go easy on the kid, Quinn. It wasn’t his fault.” Bodark’s voice. Great. I got to play the bad guy again.
Julius ran (or rather, waded) over to Bodark and curled up behind him a bit. Bodark was still the fort’s top architect, and the best mechanic we had, and had a team made up of migrant engineers working under him. They called themselves Machinists now. Hell if I knew why. But Julius looked up to him like no other, and I’d seen Bodark teaching the kid about architecture in their spare time. There wasn’t really a way for me to look good in this situation, so I figured I’d just hold my ground.
“It’s gotta be somebody’s fault, Bodark. It’s always someone’s fault.”
“Not this time,” he said. “How were we supposed to know a frogman had gotten loose from the dammed-off river? We couldn’t have. You see? Nobody’s fault.”
I sighed. “So, should I go yell at the frogman, then? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Nah, Ubik’s already done that. Just go easy on the kid, all right? Sam’s making all the buckets we can get, everybody’s helping out. All right? Just relax a bit.”
I gritted my teeth and grumbled, wading up the ramps to drier ground. Standing atop the quarry pit, I could survey the accident. I tried to recap what happened. Julius’ new power plant needed water, which we got from the moat. But then the moat was too low, so to fill it… we opened up the gates to the river again. And somehow an exposed tunnel or something had poured a whole ton of water in here. We were lucky nobody had drowned.
Drowned. Sarvesh.
I still hadn’t determined what had happened to him yet. Jyrvus figured he took a turn for the worse out here with the zombie eagles and offed himself, but I knew otherwise. I still hadn’t told anyone yet, but there wasn’t a point – all I knew was that somebody had made off with Styledstrike. And killed Sarvesh, too.
I felt personally responsible for Sarvesh’s murder somehow. Every time I thought of him, my thoughts turned to Urdim, ripped apart by orcs. As if I needed another death on my conscience now.
I vowed to stop whoever this murderer was from killing again. But not right now. I headed for the yard to grab a bucket.
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So yeah, there aren’t a lot of in-game events happening to write about, and… really, it’s just a pain to do a whole update on “Traders came. Nice profit. More migrants.” So I figure I’ll just leave the stuff that’s not story-material down here in the sidebar and make the story an actual
story, not just a set of boring journal entries. Hopefully I’ll be able to start incorporating more characters this way.
The magma cistern system is all hooked up now, but I don’t have a power source – and I need 700ish power. Once the setup’s working (buncha waterewheels in a section of the bridge) that’ll be easy, but getting it going is the tricky part. I hate waterwheel depth issues. Aside from that, just a lot of wall work (a LOT of wall work – 75 of our 90 dwarves are full-time builders now, so the going’s fast). No orc siege lately. I think I’m gonna turn off [WEBBER] finally from the damn wolf spiders and see how the knights fare this time. I’ve prepped a fully-cage-covered safety ground, so anyone who passes out from pain will be whisked to freedom in a magical safety chamber. This means orcs and spiders too! We’ll have quite a menagerie, I think.
ooo Stable relocation. I request along with this stonesense screenies
Thus far it's less relocation, more deconstruction. I need the workhouse to come down so I can put the new, rather spacious stables there, and since I'm not just collapsing everything, it's taking some time. But I'll post screenies when I got some.
As a final note, the fort is one month old today! This is also update 30, so I'm keeping a pretty good update schedule, I think. This seems an appropriate spot to mention that I'm going to be continuing some work on my megaproject fort, Undergrotto, which I haven't been able to work on while Mightygrips has been happening. I was hoping to finish Undergrotto before the new version was released, but it won't take toooooo too long, I think. I play a lot of DF in a day. But this will mean I won't be doing too much work on Mightygrips at the same time, though I'll try to keep them balanced. So that's just a heads-up there. I'll still be watching the thread, though, so feel free to ask stuff / banter enthusiastically all you like.