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[varnish]

((Yeah, that did happen in Greatbridge, towards the end! Fond memories. Got it fixed now, thanks))

A Visitor

The upper levels of the fortress were filled with the sounds of building, and occasionally, with the more organic sounds of goblins being crushed into paste, along with one guinea hen who was somehow mistaken for one. Aban had retreated to her office. It was quieter there, and much less messy. There was almost no chance of slipping and falling in a puddle of goblin guts.



Her office... she had only recently realized that, after all this time, and after everything that had happened at Oceanbridge, she still used the same dirt packed room as her office. It had the same high backed, badly carved granite chair, and the same willow table (though its legs had gone, and been replaced with piles of limestone brick), the same piles of paper on every surface they could fit. It was possible some of them were from before the first fall.

Aban wasn't "in charge" anymore, and didn't really want to be, but in here she could see the internal rhythm and life of the fortress, and that was worthwhile. Dull lists of numbers, requests for supplies, brief notes from the surgeons; nothing. Until you put them all together in the right way, and they became everything. Croaker's ambiguous notes (she could never make much sense of them), the demands from Gar for more and better murder machines, Mr. Anderson's taciturn reports on the state of the army (awful)... put it all together and it somehow made Oceanbridge make sense.

"You're getting pretentious, little dwarf"

Aban didn't jump up from her chair, nor did she fall over backwards. She did swear, in a quiet, stunned way. There was another dwarf in the room, standing in front of her.

It was her.

Well, obviously it wasn't. It looked exactly like her, and sounded like her, but it wasn't her. That would be absurd. It looked like her, but it wasn't. Aban kept telling herself that as she stared at the thing that had appeared in her office.



"Yes, I thought this might get your attention. Little else has so far. And no, I am not you. I am more.  I am your god. I am Tholtig" The thing that was not her stopped and waited, looking very pleased. Aban could only wonder if she really looked that smug at times. Probably not.

The 'god' continued. "I sent you here on a mission, and The Bridge is going well, and you are to be commended for that. But then you build fortifications, and walls on the outside of the fortress, and that huge underground room..."

"The safehouse?"

"I do not care what you call it Stop. There is no need for that. I can protect you from-"

At that point, Aban had to laugh. She had been in shock, watching something that looked and sounded exactly like her give orders like the old queen, but hearing the words"I can protect you" brought her back.

"Excuse me? Um, if your job is to protect us, you're doing a piss-poor job of it. I mean, have you seen what happens here? All the time? And you aren't Tholtig... I don't know what you are, but I'm sure you aren't a god. Get out of my office, and leave me and this whole place alone. We've got enough problems as it is."

Tholtig didn't respond, at first. She didn't seem to know how. Finally, in a slow, powerful voice, she said "You will do as I command. Who do you think protects you from Rakust, the mad god, now? Who do you think brings the fires that cleanse his minions from the field? Who turns his slaves against one another, so that you may continue to build? You owe me everything, dwarf."

Aban thought of an answer, later that night. But the voice that Tholtig used on her then stripped away every thought she had, and left her feeling frightened, and small, and very, very vulnerable. Fortunately, someone chose that moment to knock on her door.

At the sound, Tholtig... dissolved into the wall, (there was no other word for it) and another person, a real person came through the doorway.

"Greetings, bookkeeper! I am Jacen, and, you may well note from my formal livery, that I am a soap maker! Yes, I was born into the most noble of all professions, but that is not what I wish to discuss. I would like you to direct me to your ashery, that I may ply my trade!"



Aban sighed in relief. This, at least, was normal.

..........................

Next: Messy Business

((I've got to dig out the post where Tholtig first shows up, I'm sure this is confusing))

[varnish]

honestly, everything about this fortress has become an unwieldy mess, and I don't know what to do with it.

I'll figure something out, probably.

This was not intended to take up over a year of my life.

Giant snakes, maybe.

[Spy227X]

Can I have a male hammerdwarf?

[varnish]

hey, I have a place to stay again!

barring further disasters in my life, i will finish this. (i know, I've said this before)

update coming soon.

[varnish]

((as i said))

The March Across the Bridge

And when the dwarfs came to bridge with stone blocks in hand, they found it had been stolen from them by the giants, who mocked them by being much, much larger than they were. And the dwarfs were filled with fury, and they put down their blocks and their green glass windows, and they found their weapons.
Fifty strong, the dwarfs marched in loose order up the approach to the bridge.



 And the historian marched with them, for all may become caught up in events that are larger than any dwarf, and because the historian was drafted by a one "Mr. Anderson", whose name shall be made infamous.

The first giant to meet them was a hammer lord, and one of the most immense of the giants who had come to terrorize the good people of Oceanbridge. The bronze hammer of the beast alone was the length of three dwarfs, and though the dwarfs surrounded the giant, it felled many with broken knees, and shattered ribs, and many other injuries that the historian grew tired of seeing. But no creature may live survive forever, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and at last a bolt found its way through the giant's armor.



 And it roared and fell, and the dwarfs slew it where it lay, by chopping it into many small pieces, so that if it rose again, it would only be as a vengeful fingernail or two.

Now the dwarfs marched on, over the bridge. They marched over broken rusted swords, though the more intelligent marched around those, and over moss coated blocks that had been set down by long dead hands, a decade or more before. Old bones and new bodies lay in their path, and still they marched on.



The dwarf Neo, as always, led the way, which was just fine in the historians opinion. A war jaguar stood in the way of the march, and was crushed underfoot. And the dwarfs still marched on, for there were more giants ahead. A Greater Ogre stood in Neo's way, and soon found itself unable to stand at all. Because Neo had chopped away its feet.



Giant after giant stood in the path of the army as it marched the length of the bridge, and not one could slow them, for they stood alone, and the dwarfs marched together. And at the end of the bridge, the last of the giant's champions lay slain, and the historian saw the shores of the dwarfs homeland in the distance. All the dwarfs saw the same, through the haze that always lay over the ocean, and they stayed in that spot for a long, long while. For it was good to simply see it.

On the way back, a dwarf chopped off the head of a goblin, out of good cheer.



............................

Next: More Violence

[peregarrett]

Blood for the Blood God!!! It's time to purify The Bridge from gobbo (and others) scum!

Is Gar still alive?

[varnish]

((of course. there's no stopping gar))

From the Journals of Aban Brothertreaties

Well, just when I thought it couldn't get any bloodier and more horrific upstairs, Mr. Anderson finds a way to surprise me.

So dear old Gar has been enthusiastically crushing any goblin that he can get between a bridge and the floor, but as that requires some unwitting cooperation on the part of the goblins, there are plenty he's missed. 

So Mr. Anderson made the decisions to just start killing them. He has the army marching through the halls, butchering every goblin they find.



And that's a lot of goblins. It's probably a good thing, a good idea, because we don't want them turning on us, and we know they will. It's not the goblins that have got me worried, nor the fact that another ape man army has arrived today. (Seriously ape-men? Haven't you been slaughtered/burned to death enough?)



No, it's the fact that there's some creature masquerading as me wandering around the fort. It's the fact that we're still all destined to die and the fort to collapse, if we can't change the future somehow, because we accidentally trapped some mad "god" thing. It's the fact that there are no mountainhomes now and all the survivors are fleeing here for some reason



the fact that the dead are rising from their graves, the fact that we're still going to build this bridge no matter what happens, just because we have to now... dead goblins don't worry me.

........................

Next: Who is This Tholtig Person, Anyway?

((look at what a splendid warrior Jacen, Soap Crusader is:



it goes on for a couple pages.))

[varnish]

((ok, now this is going to be fun. short update))

From the Journals of Aban Brothertreaties

Oh, I see. Things had started going well, and that can't be allowed. Never, and I mean that.

The goblins turned on us today.

Very quickly. When it happened, I and the Soldier were standing outside, listening to Mr. Anderson go on and on about the siege, saying something like:

"Ape men? I don't care if there's one hundred of them. We kill giants here in Oceanbridge. These ape-men can't even walk two feet without setting themselves on fire." I think he's almost convinced himself that he's in command of the army now.

He was about to call the army out, I think, to deal with the ape-men, when Neo came up, shouting about how a goblin had murdered one of the wounded recruits in her bed by slashing her to bits with a lash, and that the goblins were running through the fortress killing, and would we like to come down and deal with it, please?



So I'm putting down my book, and joining the fight.



There's a lot of it to be done.

................................

Next: AGH.

((three pages of hostile goblins on the list, by the way. We've killed a lot, but there were a lot of them))

[peregarrett]

Screw the apes, chop goblins!

But...
I should have smashed more of them with bridges. Or drown them. Or shock with cave-in dust. Plenty of ways!
Is it too late for locking them somewhere and cover the exit with traps?

[varnish]

((in a word, yes.))

From the Journals of Aban Brothertreaties

It's hard for me to piece together what's happening, because it's happening all over, and it's happening right now. I'm just scribbling down what people tell me, those of us who made it to the safehouse in one piece.

It started in the hospital, like I wrote before. One goblin. It killed every single person there, before Balnash got to the scene.



Slashed them to pieces, and so on. He says "It came screechin' at me with some sorta steel whip. Bashed its head in with m'spear, but then the rest of 'em came after us." After that, he had to go go save a group of recruits from goblins, and themselves. They'd forget to get weapons, apparently.



Neo was there, ran up to warn us, etc. After that, he headed to bridge, in order to warn people there, I think. Too late, of course. There's dozens of the creatures out there. He says he saw Naithal get chased by about eight of them, before he was pulled down by an ogre. Never got to train us any of those war yaks everyone seems to want.



Neo was set to charge onto the bridge, kill them all, and so on, when Mr. Anderson caught up with him, coming the other way. There were goblins on the roof of the trade depot, of course, and their leader, some sort of "special, bigger goblin" (I don't know what this things are called, a spearmaster or something) knocked Anderson down the stairs, broke his leg, and went after some poor recruit. Neo made it out, obviously. Just Neo.



Gar had built a collapsing wall and ceiling trap where that fight happened, and it heard it come down a few minutes ago. I'm just hoping it came down on that goblin.

Balnash (and unfortunately myself) ended up dowstairs, with about fifteen others, facing up to some number of goblins. They'd already killed Jacen, who had shouted something about "cleaning this mess up"



Well, there sure was a mess after he died.



I don't remember much of the fighting, of course, because I'm not exactly a warrior. I'm good at being attacked, had plenty of opportunity to learn that over the years, but not fighting. But with Balnash, the Soldier, and Neo (once he got back down, having given up on our bridge as lost, yet again) leading, we actually stood a chance.



Which doesn't mean we didn't take losses there, too.



In the end, we won there. But with an army of goblins storming towards the gate (Neo saw them coming up the shore, about forty more) and army inside the gates, and an army of apemen frolicking off in the trees... we got together everyone who was still able, and moved down to the safehouse. Where we are now, listening to the sounds of slaughter upstairs. They can't get to us here. But no one's seen Gar around, or the mayor. The mayor, we can live without. But Gar? Well, for one thing, he's the only one who knows how the safehouse gates work.

And there are some other reasons to find him, I'm sure.
..........................

Next: Plans

[peregarrett]

I am really-really intrigued with what happened with Gar next. That engineering genuis can't just die to a goblin grunt... or can he?

[Remalle]

How is my dwarf doing?  Has he died and caused a temporal paradox yet?

[Firehawk45]

same question, did the crossbow save me?

[varnish]

((no, space and time haven't collapsed yet. yet.))

Where Was Gar?

When the goblins attacked, Gar did what any sensible dwarf in his position would have done. He went for a drink.



A long, long drink. If he was about to get killed, he was going to make damn sure that he had a good barrel of booze to bring with him to whatever sort of afterlife was working these days. The others knew what to do, anyway. It wasn't his fault if they didn't remember where the traps were.

He had just finished off about a third of the barrel, when Tirist, a recruit of some kind, stumbled into the room. Gar waved at him with his free hand. "Sit down, man. Grab a drink, then help me fire off the levers when you're done. They drive the goblins off yet?"

"The... Gar... there's no time! The goblins are here! They're right behind me, I just escaped with my life! There's no way out of here, is there? We're going to die right here!"

Gar sighed, and put the barrel down, and looked the room over, before he saw what he needed. "You can die if you want. I'm going to do something. You see those tree logs over there?

"The birch ones?"

"I don't fucking know, the wooden ones. Help me block up the entrance, damn it. If the goblins are right behind you, we ain't got much time."

It took some pushing, but Tirist did as he was told, (the goblins hadn't quite been right behind him) and before long, they had build a rough wall in the rooms one entryway, blocking it off.

Tirist stared at it, trying to make sense things. "So... now we're trapped. Was that the plan, Gar?"

Gar nodded. "Yeah, son. We're trapped. Trapped in a room that also's got enough food and liquor to last one hundred dwarfs five years. Or as I like to see it, we're safe, warm and fed in here, and the goblins are all trapped, hungry and cold, out there."



"Oh. Oh!"

"Yeah. Sit down, get a drink. We might be here a while."

....................................

And a Few Others

Ishar had been working on clearing out the old magma pump stacks for weeks, and had only come back up for a drink. She found a very different fortress waiting for her when she reached the main stairwell. She also found Remalle.

Ishar poked at the other dwarf, who was lying face down on the cavern floor, with her pick. "What are you lying at the bottom of the stairs for, Remalle?"

"Who the... Ishar?" Remalle pushed himself up, with some effort. "The goblins are attacking right now, Ishar. One of them knocked me down the stairs. That's why I'm lying here."

"At least you weren't hurt! I guess you're mostly scars anyway, that probably protected you. I can't imagine what might happen if you died! Are the goblins coming this way right now?"

"Um, no, I don't think they are. Unless we let them in. All the stairs are blocked off now."

"And why would we do that, right?"

"Well, if I remember correctly, we hadn't managed to move any alcohol down here yet. We might have to drink water for a while."

"Oh dear." She shouldered her pick. "I think I might have to go let the goblins in right now, actually."

...............................

"And Firehawk?"

Croaker pointed to another bed, with another blood covered dwarf. "That's from a goblin axe, if you want to know. His entire lower body is... fractured.



 It's going to take a lot of work and a lot of time to heal, and he's not the worst, so let me get back to work, please."

The Soldier nodded. "Right. Yes." She had a list of the wounded, and the dead, which seemed to consist of half the army. And since they had drafted the whole fort into the army... Things weren't looking good. Who even knew what kinds of horrors were going on on the surface.



"And now that Rakust loving mayor has called for a 'meeting'," she muttered. Whatever that meant.

...........................

Next: The Bridge

((this is a disaster, but i think it's survivable! no reclaims, dang it. no more))

[Firehawk45]

wounded, forced to drink water.... Is that survival?