((well, here's nothing much.))
The Mayor of Oceanbridge Meets with the Manager“Aban, hello! So good to see you, especially following the unpleasantness during the siege. And let me just say that you handled yourself splendidly during that incident.”
“Ah! Yes? I mean, what? Yes?”
Lokum sat down in the chair opposite hers, turning his smile on her and saying “Now! About these orders I gave you some time ago. I did ask, quite politely, for those statues and carvings to be destroyed, and from what I can see, this has yet to happen. Now, I know that you are terribly busy, and of course I have no wish to impose on your time, but I had hoped that you could see your way clear to carrying those orders out?”
Aban shuffled some papers around in an attempt to look puzzled. “Well, I know I got some orders from you, but you know, with the siege...” She shrugged. “I mean, I couldn’t even get to my office for a while. They might have been lost or destroyed or something. You could send them again...”
Lokum’s smile remained, but it froze on his face “Oh, Aban. I wasn’t asking you to look for the memos. I am telling you to carry out my orders, right now. I should not like to have my two assoc iates, ah there they are. Wonderful fellows, just like you. I should not like to have to ask them to convince you of the necessity of these orders. So be a dear, and go do it, please.”
He and his two compatriots left the room, leaving Aban fuming. “Be a dear!” she muttered. Next time he said something like that, she was going to... well, she was going to be annoyed, that's all.
........................................
A Battle of Five Armies, Part One:
Derm had come to surface in order to protect the woodcutters. There was no way he was going to use his new axe on something so mundane as chopping down trees himself, of course, but if any goblins popped up...
So he was up there, almost completely alone, when the ape men arrived. Alone, and with no safe path back to the fortress.
But he was Derm, the Soulchopper. No mob of hooting three eyed apes was going to make him run, not now. Not even if they were, he saw, all riding alligators, while capering.
No, he thought. There's no way I'm going to run away from an enemy that's that fucking
ridiculous.
He took one last deep breath, and then ran at the enemy, The Disemboweled Ring held high in his hands.
Two of the ape men fell immediately, along with their mounts. Coated in blood and gore, Derm turned on the survivors.
And found that they had surrounded him. The capering wasn't just for show, the things moved damn
fast. Derm had no time to recover. One alligator clawed at his leg, while another swept its tail under his feet, and then, hooting, the ape men jumped on him, their dark clawed hands ripping and tearing.
Meanwhile, Heavy Weapons Guy stood, alone himself, firing bolt after bolt into the massed alligators. It didn’t seem to bother them much. They ignored him, to his fury, and chased after the poor civilians.
Ishar was cut off from both of them by the lower wall. She managed to get off one shot, wounding an alligator, before she and the farmer she was trying to protect were swarmed and ripped apart.
Fifteen dwarfs had been on the surface when the attack began. Five made it back into the fortress safely.
........................................................
Aban had been watching the battle from the ramparts, increasingly horrified as she saw what happened. That meant she was in an ideal position to see the ferric elfs as they came around the coast.
Unlike the ape men, they were marching in good order; some of them were riding war giraffes like their leader before, others rode elephants, leopards, and even giant eagles. And there were a hell of a lot of them.
"Dear gods..." She ran back down to the main hall. Forgetting for the moment that she wasn't the expedition leader, she yelled "Get the trap corridor open, and get everything else closed! Hurry, because we're probably all about to die!"
Next: Floods, Despair, and a Little Thing Called a Tantrum Spiral
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Topic: Oceanbridge - A Fortress Defense Community Fort: Reclaimed, Again! (And Again) (Read 183189 times)