Tholumom Lathonudlerned has been very unhappy recently. He has mourned for the loss of loved ones recently. He has had a mediocre drink recently. He has looked at a masterful engraving of his family and been saddened. He has slept in a decent Alder bed recently. He has complained about the inclement weather recently. He has been angered at his conscription recently.
He is slow to anger, but often feels depressed. He is not particularly sociable. He cannot find happiness in his work. He is not self-conscious. He is reserved.
He has a wonderful kinesthetic sense. He is very strong. He possesses an incredible endurance. He recovers quickly from sickness and injury.
He has begun to wonder whether all this death is worth it.
Tholumom stars into his mug of ale. The ale is utterly tasteless. Another mediocre drink from the workshop of Addortalin Nuggadogon.
He looks around the bar, dwarves are legitimately happy here. He keeps to himself, the pain of his life would only make the others unhappy.
“Tholumom, Get over here! You are on active duty!”
Tholumom grumbled into the ale, not even the omniscient narrator could make out what he said. “Now what?”
“You don’t need to know to get into uniform.”
“I am in uniform you idiot.”
“I am your commanding officer.”
“You? Ha! I’ve had more experience than you, and all I’ve done is fight a few hundred cubic-meters of rock and dirt.” Tholumom smiled when he said this. There was enough of a grudge between him and this other dwarf Urist... whatever it was it translated into ass licker.
“This time it is actually serious.”
“So we won’t be doing something pointless for a noble who doesn’t need protection from moths?”
“Well... No, we aren’t doing that.”
“Good.”
Tholumom looked at the other dwarf, Urist, his beard was braided tightly enough to be a hazard if cut. he began to talk, interrupting the possibility of doing such a thing. “You don’t want the incidents of three years ago to be repeated.”
Tholumom’s face became bright red, not the happy-drunk red-- the angry-drunk red. “Don’t talk about that! I’m done with that.”
“Unless you want that to happen again, get your ass down to the Admantine tube. We need to be on guard, if we aren’t demons will break through and kill the fortress, every single dwarf that lives through that will have the same terrible experience as you.”
His eyes narrowed on Urist. “You don’t know what that experience was.”
“I can gather that it isn’t pleasant.”
“You have no idea. I’ll go.”
Tholumom finished off the mug, the barrel, and then another barrel for good luck, after all, combat could cause dehydration.
Urist led him through the staircases that merged and diverged through the entire fortress. The sterilized, once dangerous cavern system, they passed a few legendary dining halls, and the minecart system used to deliver the heavy stones throughout the fortress from their original resting places in the newly mined out sections.
The fortress seemed to go on forever, it went down to the mantle of the earth itself, not that that made it particularly impressive. The pits of hell were just a few meagre Z-levels beneath them, and there was the true prize, Slade.
Slade was even harder to obtain than admantium, if the fortress received a commission for admantium, then Slade would certainly mean true, lasting greatness.
There was a catch for either of the metals or stones. The entire legion of hell would have access to the fortress.
The others in the massive squad were brandishing their war-axes, Tholumom grasped his hammer. The events of three years ago brought back bad memories whenever he used a war-axe.
When he stepped into the line, the commander decided that his nobleness would give a speech on the goal of today’s engagements.
“You idiots are going to keep the demons back while we build flooring over the pits, preventing them from getting in.”
It was the shortest speech that anyone there had ever heard, for anything, at this fortress, or another. Either way, the troops were rendered speechless by this lazy oratory. The sub-commander walked up the the commander and whispered to him.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT I SHOULD GET OUT OF PUBLIC SPEAKING?”
more whispering.
“Whatever, you, miners, get on with this BS.”
“Shouldn’t we have some cage-traps set up? Just in case we fail?” Tholumom said.
“Nah, we can’t possibly fail.”
Tholumom waited for the ceiling to collapse, but, unfortunately, that was too easy.
The hammering of pickaxes on stone continued for hours. Finally, something crumbled. A horrible stench rose up from outside the crack. The commander woke up from his nap. “Masons, get on that job!”
The masons arrived quickly, and began to build a staircase down to the floor of hell.
“Attack, Charge, Charge!”
The group gave a roar. Dwarven roars are known to resemble the mating call of many of the variety of demons in hell, including number 53 and 41.
Unfortunately, the other demons follow those two types around, meaning that 1 through 53 would come.
Tholumom was the last dwarf left in hell. The others had either fled, or died. Even now, he swung his silver hammer at the 53s and 41s, they flew into the slade walls, exploding into gore. Inside his head, he could hear nothing but the thoughts relevant to battle. This cognitive process was known widely as the Martial Trance; and was often heralded as the final advantage that dwarves had over the other races.
The demons continued to flow towards him. A 32, made entirely out of tentacles grabbed him, throwing him into the pit. The martial trance broke once he realized that he was falling.
The strange glow of the eerie pit illuminated him as he fell. Darkness never came... No, there was light.
The light grew brighter and brighter. Soon it was daylight again. There were no demons to be found. Needless to say, after seventeen long weeks underground, this was not an easy transition for Tholumom to make. As the atmosphere began to blue with the natural absorption spectra of oxygen and nitrogen, he began to vomit from the fear, the exposure to natural light. Soon there was moderately sized vomit sphere moving with him. This fact bothered him slightly less than the fact that he had just fallen into the infinite depths of the earth to emerge in the upper atmosphere. Unfortunately, to his knowledge, none of the dwarves that have managed to fall from such a height survived; they had a tendency to explode on impact.
The world beneath him began to resolve itself out of fog. An ocean, or a lake. Either way, Tholumom was pleased to see it. “I remember swimming as a child... My father had to throw me into the pond. I was lucky that I didn’t drown.” he thought to himself. His skills were rusty; the plight of so many dwarves, so few used a large number of skills; they were built to work in a single system, a place where they only needed to work at one job at a time, nothing else had to be known in order to survive. They weren’t an ant colony; they could learn more professions than one, but that meant more work than they needed to do.
Of course, Tholumom thought to himself, if he survived, then he would have to learn a lot of skills to last more than a day or two. He grimaced, that did not sound like much fun. he was rusty in everything, including mining. The last few years had not been kind, but admittedly, they were still nicer than the sensation of slamming into the water.
The water was fresh, cool, and unlike at home, it made no attempt to smash him into a wall. Seagulls flew overhead, it was peaceful.
This was mostly due to the fact that the dwarf in leather armor was unconscious, floating facing towards the sky, completely unaware of the beasts that swam beneath him.
Not that the beasts really mattered; they were a rather distant bunch of aquatic beasts, scary-sure, dangerous-not particularly, willing to get involved with this strange creature—most certainly not. So the dwarf just floated there; his center of buoyancy just happened to be encouraging his metabolic processes to continue unabated, and not to assume that he was going to drown. Metabolic processes are a psychosomatic bunch, so the encouragement pretty much guaranteed that he was alright. But this isn’t about those metabolic processes, is it? Well… Okay, so if they are okay, then we have a story, regardless of how stupid it might be.
Needless to say, the dwarf was rescued. No, there were not a bunch of benign merpeople trying to help him back to land(which was probably a good thing due to the genocidal habits that dwarves developed in response to the high price that goods made out of their bones engendered). That was probably fortunate, because Tholumom had not heard about how the price crashed after every single fortress expanded towards their sea in order to harvest the merpeople’s bones, thus he would find a perfectly good reason to start that practice over again here.
No, he was rescued by something that he would find even more detestable: a purple unicorn.