Rats

A giant rat has sprung from ambush!

He crept out of the chasm in the mountain. Some of our newly built apartments were accidentaly sited on an unknown spur of the chasm and gave access to our living quarters to foul creatures.

First it killed and innocent cow. Then it crept into trapper Cerol Zasitlogem's room and slew him in his sleep.

From there the ravenous rodent made his way to one of the main corridors. The military was activated and recruit Cerol Ritholmelbil was the first the intercept the rat.

He was devoured.

All the cavernhome was in panic at this point and dwarves were running toward safer quarters. Most of the newly activated recruits had no way of knowing where the creature was and wandered around ineffectually.

The next victim was a dog. Luckily he was someone's pet and not a stray. A stray would have been potential war dog material. Yes, during the spring puppies were born! We shall soon have trained canines to deal with these foul critters, thus saving us much misery.

Tosid Arithalath, the manager came stomping up and demanded the rat stop interrupting work. He did this with an air of authority, the same authority which has allowed him to order us around and make us effective workers these last few months he's been here.

He was struck down.

More soldiers were activated. In a rush they came upon the rat and managed to slay him. The cavernhome is safe once more.

This episode has been a bit of a wakeup call. A rat killed three dwarves, a cow, and a dog. Imagine what a zombie elephant would do if he got in here.

Luckily our door to the outside world is secure and with threescore sets of stonefall traps lining the entry corridor and two retractable bridges and a chasm to cross we feel safe from pachydermal threats.

But against threats from within we seem woefully unprepared. Luckily we have orders to ignore rubish and let it fester, lest we collect and chasm is, which might anger the chasm creatures below.

I've had experience with this sort of thing before. At the last dig I was involved in, some maniac of a designer decided he wanted channels full of water running along the main corridors, thus neccessitating a needless number of bridges and creating as well a potential flood problem. But the worst part was, at the chasm the channels just flowed right off the cliff edge and poured all those millions of gallons of caveriver water right on in.

This naturally angered the dwellers of the mountain cleft and soon enough we were under a contant barrage of bat man attacks. We had an effective canine fighting force that took care of most of it. The real undoing of that place was the fast flowing water in the channels. If you fell in you got swept right over the falls and into the bottomless chasm. And with floors slick with bat man blood, it was easy to fall in.

We lost a third of our population to chasm accidents in the season following the channel's completion. From a peak of over a hundred dwarves we had fewer than fifty left by the time the decision was made to abandon the fortress.

But that place was paradise to this. No elephants or dangerous animals of any sort. Fine dogs for cavern defense. I knew the dogmaster well, his is a sad tale that I shall tell another time. I shall only say it was for the best that hes slept and fell into the chasm. That was a truly broken dwarf, it was as if some malevolent controller had decided to do everything possible to destroy his life.

That was all a lifetime ago, before I came to Shistosid.

One good thing of late is the building of beds. Now that we've got a gross of barrels for food and beers the order came down to build beds. More than a dozen have been built, but now our wood supply has run out, and we're ordered to stay indoors for fear that the haulers will try to loot the corpses of those trappers the elephants killed a while back and bring their stuff back to the finished goods warehouse and possibly bringing the wrath of the elephants upon us.

But without trees we can't build any more beds, and I haven't gotten one yet. I'm still sleeping on a sandstone floor.

And to all you dwarves complaining about sleeping in the mud? Quit sleeping in the mud! There's plenty of dry cavernfloor around. Don't fall asleep by the river during flood season and then complain of the mud!