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If we don't hear from Mask by Wednesday, I guess we'll move on to the next in line.

Well, Asmoth was somewhere south of Demongate getting all philosophical about whether creating a race of nearly mindless killing machines was a good thing or not. Also, for someone who doesn't like talking much, a lot of Thane's story seems to be exposition.

Thane hesitated for a moment, then grasped Ob Kat's haft, reaching out with that sense somewhere between hearing and sight where the magic lurked.
"I know you're there," she said. After a moment with no answer, she shook the hammer. "Answer me!"
I don't live in that hammer, you know, came the slightly bemused reply.
"Then why can I only hear you if I'm holding it?" Thane asked.
I told you before, you've linked your own powers to the hammer. I had nothing to do with it. So, as a magical being, you can only sense me when you're holding it. And sometimes I do have other things to besides teaching you how to see.
"So, what are you then?"
Eh, I suppose I'm your mentor or something for now. I'm to show you how to use your powers so that you can... hrm... 'Be what you were meant to be?'... 'Fulfil your destiny?'... 'Take a level?'... well, something like that in any case.
Thane thought about that for a moment. "So, what are my powers?" she asked.
Every living being emits a certain amount of magical energy, which we measure in thaums. The average elf gives out one thaum, a dwarf half of that, with the obvious exception of those with latent magical abilities themselves. My point is that you weigh in at zero.
"And that's a bad thing?"
Not a good thing or a bad thing, just a different thing. A fish is immersed in water, and so doesn't see the water around it. You're outside of the river, so you can see its flows. With enough training, you'll be able to drink from it, if I may continue the metaphor.
"Drain magic, you mean?" said Thane.
And spit it back out, since I doubt you learned any table manners growing up. You can't actually influence it, any more than you can influence what shape water will be when you pour it out of a bucket, but it's a handy trick nonetheless.
"So... what does Fallen Angel want with you, anyway?"
Thane sensed a feeling of discomfort from the disembodied voice, as though it was shuffling its feet. He is my brother, I suppose. It's a difficult relationship to summarise. He's a little bit insane.
"I'd noticed."
Indeed. I can't really say what he actually wants, because pretty much everything he does has little to no bearing on what he actually intends it to achieve. It makes him difficult to plan around. Speaking of which, there's some confusion going on in the dining room.
"About what?" Thane couldn't help but think she was going to dread the answer.
Apparently, you're there in spite of several people seeing you coming here to the barracks to train. Most of the confusion seems to be centred around the adjectives 'happy' and 'polite', though.

Thane pinched the bridge of her nose in an attempt to suppress the need to crack some skulls. After a few minutes, she emerged from the barracks with the familiar weight of a hammer on her back. She was beginning to wish she really was insane. The real world couldn't possibly be this crazy.

"I doubt that the room beneath Castle Helgard is related to the bodysnatchers," Thane said, frowning.
Tarmid, ever the teacher, nodded approvingly. "Why?" he asked.
"The grave robberies seem to be done on impulse," she answered, thinking quickly. "Whoever turned Vladamir into a puppet clearly didn't have much of a plan for what they'd do afterwards. What's more, the stolen bodies have been showing up again more often than not. Burned and maimed, sure, but they're not that hard to find. There was no trace of the dungeon until you actually found the place itself, and even then there's no evidence of what it's being used for."
"Perhaps the corpses are the evidence of the room being constructed, and we simply didn't join the dots?" Tarmid countered.
"I suppose there's no way to prove that they're not, but it seems awfully careless for someone who leaves as little trace as the person who made that room. Plus, there's far too many bodies. Three or four dwarves could have made a room that small inside a month, even counting the breaks. A zombie would have had more than twice the working hours of a live person, but there's more than twenty empty coffins, and most of the missing bodies are accounted for. So, why would such a secretive person simply discard tools after such a short amount of time, particularly when they could potentially last forever? Plus, there was no corpse rot there."
"No..." Tarmid trailed off.
"No smell of death," Thane nodded. "There was no ventilation in that room, any smells would have lingered for months, and most of the bodies have gone missing and turned up again in the last year. It's circumstantial, I know, but it's true."
"So, we have two madmen running around doing Armok knows what?" Brenzen rumbled.
"At least two," Tarmid said apologetically. "There seems to be at least one other unknown force in Demongate, though that may just be our regular insanity being mistaken for something more sinister."
Brenzen closed his eyes for a moment. He seemed to be praying. "Fine," he eventually growled. "So, essentially, we have an unknown number of enemies, each with unknown objectives, and each with an unknown number of followers?"
"That's about it," smiled Tarmid. "Though I think we can safely attribute at least some of the cadaver theft to Dan. She's very eager to tell people about her, eh, 'science'. I think the best thing to do for now may be to operate alone and find out what we can about our opponents. Action before we're better prepared would only alert them that we know about them."

Thane and Brenzen nodded, and Thane turned to leave. As the door closed behind her, Brenzen quietly asked
"What do we do about the reading from her hammer?"
"I'm not sure yet," Tarmid answered. "We can't afford to give her enough time to utilize its power if she's an enemy, but on the other hand, she's had the thing for years now and barely murdered anyone important. At the very least, there's no point in turning her into an enemy when we need all the friends we can get."
"That is the beginning of a very dark path, scribe," Brenzen warned. "Be careful where you follow it."
"I'm sure I haven't completely compromised my morals yet," Tarmid smiled. "Besides, I'm sure if that day comes you'll be there, pick ready and waiting."
Brenzen nodded. "Until we meet again, then."

The turn after Garett is Mask's, so I'll see what he's up to.

That's not how sensing sources of magic works. Even if Fallen looks exactly like Thane and she can't see beneath the illusion, she'd still know that there'd a person completely shrouded in magic in front of her. Plus, a mirror image of herself standing in front of her would kind of tip her off.

Thane slammed into Fallen Angel as he left the barracks, pinning him to the wall. Her lower arm slowly pressed down on his windpipe. The bodysurfer was trying to overpower he, but only one of them had been swinging a piece of metal around for the better part of a decade. Thane pressed down one more time, then drew back and left Fallen Angel to collapse wheezing to the ground.
"I'm not going to kill you," she said quietly. "I'd hate to put you through the inconvenience of stealing someone else's body. But if you touch my hammer again, I will make you suffer."

The door of the barracks slammed shut behind her before Fallen could get his breath back. Thane snatched Ob Kat from where it was lying. She didn't know why she'd left it down, it had almost never been anywhere but in her possession since she'd made it. She was more worried about how she'd know someone had their dirty paws on it, but she had known with absolute certainty.
"Magic", she cursed.

The weapon traps weren't working, and they had a bowgoblin who could apparently 360 no scope anyone who tried to fire on him. Plus, the militia only had two members before the goblins came, so it made a net profit.

Asmoth's Log, 15th of Obsidian, 254.
I've sent some woodcutters out to deforest the caves. This will have no negative repercussions whatsoever.

25th of Granite, 255.
That was quite the New Year's party! Time to go on a break!

1st of Slate.
I can't think of anything else for the miners to do at the moment, so I've sent them looking for gold:

Should keep them busy for a while.

19th of Slate.

This should be good.

24th of Slate.

Some migrants arrived today. Most of them seem pretty useless. Our population is now up to sixty six working dwarves, plus one baby. In other population news, we now have three female crundles and two males.

10th of Felsite.

The crundling begins. Unfortunately, our crundles aren't particularly well trained at the moment, but I'm sure that will improve as time goes on. Hopefully we'll discover a use for their scales in the meantime.

1st of Hematite.
A vile force of darkness has arrived! This may not end well.

5th of Hematite.
The main gate has been closed after our weapon traps spectacularly failed to do anything whatsoever, landing a hit on only one goblin out of the ten invaders. On the bright side, that goblin is dead now. Mistem Rimtarlegon went out to try recover his weapons and armour, barely making it back inside before the gates and/or goblins smooshed him.

7th of Hematite.
Goblins are stupid, apparently. With the gates closed, they started wandering around and one of them found another weapon trap. We're down to eight.[/u]

18th of Hematite.
The forgotten beast Gol Ozmatgozru attacked us from the caves today. Our militia was able to take it down with no more than a fractured wrist, though three of them were overcome by terror when it first appeared. That does not bode well for our chances of breaking the goblin siege. Gol apparently had poisonous gas, but I have yet to see any symptoms.

27th of Hematite.
Apparently, we don't have a source of water anywhere in the fortress. The medics are refusing to discharge the guy with the broken writs until they clean him, and they won't let him drink anything but water, so it looks like he's going to die of thirst unless the miners can crack open another cave.

30th of Hematite.
Er... wow. I didn't even know this was a thing that could happen.


I'm also a little bit suspicious of our new captain of the guard, as she hasn't yet claimed a bedroom and has no relatives. On the other hand, her skillset isn't all that unusually varied, so I'm assigning her a room so keep her happy about having rooms and stuff.

23rd of Malachite.
The goblins have been driven away, and it barely even cost us half of our militia! This is a picture of our dwarves battling the final member of their dastardly army, showing no fear whatsoever, aside from one recruit who got 'possessed by a great idea for an artefact, honest':

2nd of Galena.
The guy who abandoned his comrades to die turned up again today with this:

I'm sure it's a very nice mechanism, but I think he'd probably have been more useful at his post.

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I kind of made a hames of everything to do with that siege. It's my first fort to deal with the new horror/discipline etc mechanics, and I underestimated how much it was going to affect the military. Here's a save from before I tried to get rid of the gobbos, and here's one from after. The after one is in the process of stabilising and shouldn't turn into a cascade barring further invasions and deaths, but there's a lot more death in it than there needed to be.