Dear mountainhomes,
How's everyone there? We're doing quite fine. Even though we, the starting seven, only founded this fort three years ago, it's already a bustling hill of content, well-fed dwarves. The entrance is trapped all to hell and back, and that may be why we've only seen about seven snatchers. There is no flux stone, so we can make no steel, but we doubt we'll need it. Everything here is pretty much fine, we've only lost one dwarf (a fish cleaner who went into an odd coma that he wouldn't wake up from) so far, everybody knows everybody else, and our farm plot continues to be fertile. We've started a little chicken breeding program to keep us supplied with bones to make crafts from (and in case any dwarf is struck by a mood and demands BONES! NOOOOW!). We were visited by an ettin. We then ate the ettin. He was a bit stringy.
We have just one request.
Now, there's room for everyone here. Although some fortresses practice "oublietting" - the locking away of "useless" migrants until they starve - we here have no such policy. Sure, we draft most of the peasants and wax workers, but you have to earn your stay here, dang it. So we don't mind if you send us migrants - there's about eighty-and-some of us here now and there's room for more.
Just, please. Next time you send them over...NOT in a massive group of thirty-six. We were up to your ASSES in work orders to get them all accomodated. The miners have blisters on their blisters, the masons don't want to see another cabinet in their lives, the carpenter is dumb as a turd so he'll happily keep out cranking beds in between chopping trees and doing fuck-but-nothing, and the brewers and butchers nearly went mad in the scramble to produce more booze and butcher the animals you bafflingly send along with the migrants each year (though most of them are very tasty, so please keep sending them!). As if this was not enough, one of our two miners nearly hung herself with her own socks when she found out she had to dig out quarters for the recently elected mayor (our grand master weaponsmith, who finds a lot of free time now that the trapping of the entryway is nearly done and therefore has about twenty friends) all by herself because her colleague had taken a well-deserved break.
And then you sent eight more migrants JUST after we finished making new bedrooms and all the free meat had been squared into the stockpiles. Some of the swears that the mason used to describe what he thought of that I'd not heard before, but they were very interesting (what's a catamite, by the way?).
So please keep that in mind. Oh, and please make sure the other letter gets to my parents.
With love from Gravelsnarling,
Urist McFarmer.
Dear Urist McMiner,
Put on your big girl boots. That snatcher was just trying to sneak through our Corridor of Death before you found him, he was missing a foot and a finger and had so many cuts that he'd be better off dead. In fact, he was trying to crawl AWAY from you. You, however, saw fit to run screaming into the forest. What are you, an elf?
With love,
Archon of Armok
P.S: How's the blisters?
Dear Urist McFishcleaner,
We know you're not in a coma. Apart from being startled by a capybara, you haven't been in ANY fights. It's not a Forgotten Beast syndrome, because NOBODY has been in the caves yet and although we've mapped out of most of them through peekholes, the fortress hasn't even attracted any of those monsters. There's fish cleanin' to do. Get out of bed or we'll dig the floor out from under your bed.
With ill-concealed hatred,
Archon of Armok
Dear Urist McFishcleaner,
So apparently that didn't wake you up. You're a very good actor, I'll give you that. Let's see how you like a week WITHOUT people bringing you breakfast in bed. You'll notice that Urist McMason is currently walling you in.
-Archon of Armok
Dear Urist McFishcleaner,
You're petulant. Give it up.
-blah blah blah
Dear Urist McFishcleaner,
...listen, I'll give you a nice cabinet if you stop playing possum now.
-Archon
Dear friends of Urist McFishcleaner,
Err...whoops? What can I say, I just thought he was a very good actor. Could've won a Urist if he'd've gone into theater rather than fish cleaning, tell you that.
Oh, what do you guys care. Go be ecstatic somewhere.
Going to drink myself into a coma,
Archon of Armok.