#and finally I'd like to thank armok

[reallyexists]

The dwarven fortress Bowloar has gotten over its outbreak of werelizardism. Now, an invading force ten goblins strong lurks at the map’s edge and calls for parley.

Unfortunately, this requires appointing a messenger beforehand, unbeknownst to me. The messenger I hastily appoint right after accepting the goblins’ petition spends the next 24 hours drunkenly headbanging to 20 simultaneous poetry recitations in the tavern instead of doing his fucking job.

The goblins lose their patience right as this metalcrafter/swordsdwarf is trying to construct the fuckhuge drawbridge over our Mega Pit.

They fall upon him and he’s killed right on the lip of the outer drawbridge. We scramble the militia to the tunnel between the outer and inner drawbridges, as an intermediate line of defense.

A goblin dodges a weapon trap and ends up in the pit. Every single rock trap in there is a miss.

The first militia dwarf on the scene is swordsdwarf Catten Lisedoddom, who immigrated to Bowloar last year. He leaps down the pit after the goblin and starts carving him up.

Catten kicks absolute ass. These goblins can’t touch him. He’s beheading them and impaling them with every strike, chopping them to pieces. He’s not even in a blood-frenzy from seeing his companion die or anything, he’s just grouchy from being rained on (and says as much out loud to nobody in particular).

After Catten killed the four goblins in the pit, I directed the rest of the squad to regroup outside, but they’re blocked by the drawbridges. Catten gets there first and immediately charges the remaining six goblins by himself.

He kills five of them and single-handedly routs the siege without sustaining a single injury. (Note the two dead goblins on the tile Catten’s standing on.)

Catten gets an epithet for killing five enemies, “Brass Tower of Aquamarine”, and we promote him to captain and give him command of his own squad. Hopefully his heroism will rub off on them!

We had to dig out more space in the invader stockpile for this one. There’s enough severed limbs here that half of those goblin corpses are just torsos.

In other news, our new mayor is a freak for statues. She wants us to make more of them, and periodically forbids selling them to caravans. Which reminds me, we really gotta get a statue of Captain Catten going.

We spend the rest of 106 and well into spring of 107 working on the pit thing. I had originally conceived of the flooding as a deathtrap of some sort, but I think it needs to be enclosed at the top for that. There are more practical possibilities if we think of it as an artificial lake three z-levels deep.

Drainage is a problem that gets solved with more windmills and screw pumps. I learned you can’t excavate or build anything too close to the edge of the map, but I don’t mind creating a flood plain as long as it’s not too close to the fort entrance.

Also just got around to looking at some of those memorial slabs we carved a while ago, and apparently we can’t bury our pile of slain visitors because they’re marked as “went missing”, I guess until their parent civ discovers their corpse. Certainly saves on tomb space.

Looks like we accidentally had a memorial carved for one of those goblins. What a dutiful fuckin’ stonecrafter, man.