Returning to command

1 Granite 140

As I am dealing with paperwork in my small but efficient hospital ("As I told your client, I would have removed that copper bolt before discharging him from the hospital, however he insisted it was an 'ampallang' and refused its removal, as he thought it made him look 'hip'"), a nervous looking Dwarven Child came in to inform me that he had been told to tell me that I must reclaim the scepter of leadership.  I sigh, but know that when duty calls, one must answer.  As I have been preoccupied with medical matters for the last two years, I ask the child to give me an update on the state of the fortress since I last was in charge.



We take a brief tour of the fortress, and I walk in silence, trying to absorb the enormity of exactly how big a mess has been made of the fortress I founded.  A mess that I have been tasked with cleaning up.

The largest horde of Goblins and Trolls I have ever seen, including three of the most devastating foes that the green menace can send: Goblin Elite Crossbowmen.

And to face this menace, we have... 7 low-skill soldiers, out of a fort of 85?  When I had left, we had 3 soldiers out of 18, and that was already too low a proportion.  With this large a fort, we should have at least two full squads of soldiers training. And why are they so poorly skilled?  I inspect the training regimen of the troops we do have, and see that they have spent the entire past year sparring... verbally?  Is that how they came up with these preposterous, pompous nicknames, instead of learning how to, oh I don't know, stick sharp things into bad guys to make them stop moving?  What is going on here...

TRAIN, 1 MINIMUM??????????

Not only is this squad on duty for only two out of every three months, ONLY ONE DWARF AT A TIME IS ALLOWED TO TRAIN?  What sort of lackluster peacenik was in charge of this military?

Well at least we have traps in the front hallway, right?  Yes, traps will rip them to shreds...

Wait, someone crafted twelve steel trap weapons, and then only put 1 into twelve traps that can hold up to 10 weapons each?  When that steel could have gone to armoring more soldiers, and the coal could have been used to make a dozen cage traps out of any worthless metal, each of which is guaranteed to stop a goblin? And then the weapon traps were put in a 3x4 grid, instead of one long single-access line, so every goblin would hit every trap? And then left OPEN STAIRS to the outdoors, on the INSIDE of the bridge that is the only thing keeping the fortress sealed?  Well, I guess at least they'd have to have flying mounts to get to... oh.

Almost no trace of the small, private, efficient workshops surrounded by appropriate stockpiles remained... instead, uselessly wide, stone-cluttered hallways separated vast sprawling, storehouses...

...some half-filled with raw meat sitting on the floor, covered in flies...

...others filled with endless piles of stone blocks, and still others filled with... coffins and memorial slabs?  And yet no mining for more urgently needed coal seemed to have been done, even though deposits are visible on the surface on the eastern side of the map. Clearly someone has been spending too much time planning for the next world, and not enough time working to stay in this one. I had heard rumors of thriving fortresses brought to ruins by death cultists, but I had always dismissed them as nonsense. Yet here I was, faced with evidence that my own fortress may be infested with suicidal maddwarfs.

Although I must admit we have need of those memorial slabs...

...since the bodies of two dead dwarves are rotting on a hillside swarming with trolls, and 'Alath Zon' Uzoloddom has already risen as a ghost to protest the 'leadership' of this fortress.

The liquor supplies are the one positive note, with over 500 drinks available. However, the small, easily-managed farm plots had been ripped up and replaced with a single massive field, partitioned into crop areas.

I had to admit the design was clean -- it was certainly uncontaminated by growing crops. Of course, with no barrels or rock pots, there was no way to store all these crops, so the farmers would waste countless hours on growing plants that would rot in the fields or be eaten by vermin.

Ridiculous, extravagant, cavernous rooms, housing a mere 12 dwarves in the space where 32 could cozily live -- with some dwarves having to walk four times as far to get out of the housing block.  And where were the doors?  How was a dwarf supposed to sleep -- or concentrate on the delicate labors of Crafting Dwarven Babies -- without any doors?  Between the apartments and the storehouses, I had to admit my predecessor did think big -- so big, in fact, that I am starting to suspect they might be a human in disguise.

We walked down the exploratory stairwell and passed a breach into the vast underground cavern system. I shuddered at the thought of my home exposed to Forgotten Beasts and unthinkable horrific syndromes, and sneezed at the fungal spores already wafting everywhere in the fort. On the bright side, those spores would provide underground pasturage for our livestock and, eventually, wood.  But in the short term, this breach meant that rather than having a single front to our battle, we now have two. Oh, and it's not just one breach, but several, across multiple levels of the stairs, with mining instructions left to make more of them.

The stairs... it had taken a while for me to figure out why my legs were aching so much, since we didn't seem to be climbing up and down THAT many levels, and I realized that these staircases were of a strange design that I had never seen. Rather than using stairs that could be walked in both directions, the stairs had turnstiles that only allowed you to walk in one direction. You had to walk a step sideways for every level up or down you wanted to go.  Unable to contain myself any longer, I asked my child guide about the reason for the inefficiency.

"Oh, they're safety stairs.  If you are knocked down those two-way stairs you can fall a long way and die."

"I... see.  And how often have you seen someone fall down stairs?"

"Well, uh, never, I guess?  But they said if a dwarf gets in a strange mood and goes crazy, he could knock someone down them."

"Ah, yes the homicidal madness artifactus interruptus. They taught us the cure for that at medical school. Do you remember the workshop design we had a couple years ago?"

"The five-by-five little rooms?"

"Exactly.  If a dwarf has... urges... that it is clear can not be met, the administrator has ample time to craft and install doors in the workshop that the afflicted dwarf has claimed."

"Oh, and how does that cure the madness?"

"You lock the doors, and when it gets all quiet in the workshop, they're cured. So really, we're buying a little bit of hypothetical safety at the cost of thousands of wasted extra steps every day."

"But shouldn't our fortresses be safe?"

"You ask: why are so many of our fortresses dangerous? I say: why not marry a safe fortress if you love 'em so much.  In fact, why not invent a special safety drawbridge that won't hit you in the butt on the way out, because you are fired."

"Fired?" the child gasped, tears dripping down into their wispy beard. "B-b-but, that's what they said I was to tell you about the stairs..."

"Oh, and what was the REAL reason for the stairs?"

The child stopped, realizing they had said too much.

"Out with it."

"It was because... they looked like... little fishies." the child croaked out.

Little fishies?  My face burning red under my beard, it all finally made sense.

At that point I knew that f I was going to save this fortress, I was going to need every one of those 500 drinks.