I guess it's up to me now, Cog 'Barconis' Amugfikod, to run this little fortress for a year. Now that Aramco has his fancy office and grand mausoleum, he doesn't want to be bothered with the little day-to-day decisions. I can work with that. I'm also itching to practice my trade making armor, which he hasn't given me much chance to do since I got here. I'm in charge now, I'mma make some armor.
First though, some of the industry needs a little tending before we run out of booze. Also, the rest of us have been a little ticked that Aramco grabbed such nice rooms for himself and the rest of us have no place to eat or relax. So we're goin to fix that.
Foldedwall is in a spot with lots of potential. We dug in at the end of a natural squared-off valley near the volcanic vent. Wouldn't take much at all to straighten up the walls so that any attackers have to come at us over a nice flat killing ground. That ought to make a nice project to get a start on later this year.
5th Slate: Another group of migrants have arrived. We've doubled our population, to 38 dwarves! One of the arrivals, Olin 'Genoraven' Esderzuglar, is a fellow armorer, but he tells me he always wanted to be a surgeon. He complained that he almost never gets a chance to really study that craft, so I've assigned him to do any butchering that needs to be done in addition to his surgery duties. We don't really have anybody who worked in a slaughterhouse, strangely enough, so skill at surgery is about as close as we get.
11th Felsite: Moerul Lorbamkubuk suddenly began to act as if possessed, claiming a craftdwarf's workshop and feverishly pawing through the stockpiles for different bits of junk. He's locked himself in the workshop, rocking back and forth, muttering about "cloth... thread...". We had a little pigtail thread we wove into cloth, but he turned up his nose at it. It must be silk or nothing. An elven caravan arrived not long after this started, but they did not have any silk. Our only hope of getting silk is to dig down to the caverns and harvest some webs. We went out a good distance in front of the fort and drilled a quick staircase down about 25 urists to the caverns. Now it's a race to see how quickly we can weave some silk. Could take a while; the weaver seems really puzzled about how to get to that silk no more than 10 urists north of the bottom of the stairs. (It takes some fiddly forbidding to focus thier attention on the right stuff.)
The elves got bitchy and demanded that we cut no more than 100 trees in the next year. I said we'd agree; we've got a little under 80 left marked for cutting, and a lot more than that waiting on the ground, so it isn't a big problem to keep them happy this year. What does Aramco do? Throws a party.
We never should've opened the caverns. There are ant people down there. They struck down charred_gp and Doren Bekarlogem after long battles, and the rest of the squad went chasing the ant people deeper into the caverns in search of revenge. Six ant people and a troglodyte paid the price for thier dwarf-murdering ways! Some of the fighters look a little worse for wear; I think we need some kind of infirmary or hospital. I went ahead and converted the previous meeting area into a hospital, but we don't have any new beds made yet so dwarves will have to lie on the floor until we get them built. Meanwhile the chief medical dwarf was headed off to chop more wood; seems like he's been assigned to do just about every job in the fort! I fixed that for now, to get the wounds tended to.
Finally, though, enough silk was harvested for Moerul to start his crafting. We've stopped silk weaving for now, no need increasing the danger. What did he make? A native copper piccolo he calls Guzbal Mangrodurist, "Simpletone the Ashamed Daggers".
And now more migrants. It's mid-summer, 9th Malachite, we've got 44 dwarves and I'm about to put a hatch over the stairs to the cavern.