Almost done. Just wanted to make you all live through one more cliffhanger. Also, my ability to take screenshots mysteriously malfunctioned just as things were getting good, but hopefully I was descriptive enough to make up for it.
Excerpts from A Million Little Pichus: A Memoir, by Maximum Spin Spatteredgorges
The goblins were upon us almost as soon as we noticed them. They brought Shelgon, Gabite, and strange pokémon they called "beak dogs", as well as the now-familiar "trolls". As they poured out across the southern hill I wasted no time in ordering the entire military to confront them. That is, the entire military except for the one squad I had formed as a bureaucratic procedure, the Fleeing Flaaffy, consisting only of myself. The Fleeing Flaaffy were ordered to stay in reserve well away from the battle, naturally.
As I hoped, human mercenaries were the first to engage the enemy. After all, what purpose do they have if not to give their lives to protect dwarvenkind? I wondered, though, if they would be enough to hold the line (now teeming also with Golbat and Garchomp, suggesting that perhaps the goblins have chosen to maintain a 'G' theme), and whether Pocketball had one of those popular entrance-sealing bridges I've heard so much about from other fortresses. There was certainly a bridge in the right place, but I had no idea what lever, if any, might be used to close it. I decided to wait for stragglers, then pull whatever lever would seem most logical at the time.
I thought it best to restrain myself to the levers in the small room adjacent to the bridge, where it would be most sensible for a bridge-sealing lever to be found. But there were three levers there, all unlabeled. Perhaps I would pull the granite lever in the far right corner of the room, which was attached to a single rock salt mechanism? Or perhaps the closest rock salt lever on the left wall, also connected to a single rock salt mechanism? Or even the further rock salt lever, connected to a whole pile of mechanisms that would probably mostly not do what I wanted, but one of them might? I had no way to decide. Perhaps I should pull them all? I wondered if there would be time to put it to a vote. Of course, that thought was totally absurd; there simply wasn't time for that, and, for good or ill, I was in charge. I decided to pull all the levers if the situation became dire enough.
[No, I don't have my left and right backward; I'm describing it as seen by a dwarf entering from the top...]For the goblins, that is. It turned out that they needed to invest in more gym badges, because their pokémon regularly disobeyed them, carrying them far afield in terrified flight, often leaving trails of goblin blood behind them. One particular goblin was particularly unlucky, having been dragged along a twisting path uphill while spraying blood from her ragged leg stump the whole way.
Meanwhile, in the bloody core of the fight, MCreeper was vying with a goblin hammerer over the title of hammer supremacy. It was a pretty one-sided contest.
Taupe was less lucky, having lost first her weapon, then the use of her good hand, then a foot.
Still, she survived, though by a thread. I asked her, afterward, what thought could have given her the drive to fight through such ghastly injuries, and her response seemed eminently reasonable.
Deep underground, DrewLegend was stymied from reaching the battlefield by a vicious Roggenrola. It didn't matter much, though, as the goblins were routed with only a few miscellaneous casualties on our side. Two dwarves, three humans, and another Feraligatr gave their lives for Pocketball that day, but so did many more goblins and their various vile allies. The last invader left on the field, a war Shelgon, offered the goblin perspective on the battle's outcome.
Naturally, I did not feel the need to pull any levers. This proved to be a good thing, since MCreeper later told me that they would have flooded various parts of the fortress, not sealed the gate. On reflection, I had no choice but to agree that it was perfectly obvious and logical for the set of levers next to the gate to flood random rooms.
During the retreat, our scattered cage traps had captured two war Gabite and, most interestingly, one of those strange Beak Dogs, which I ordered to be installed in the Master-Ball for proper study. As the army began to head home, vomiting steadily along the way, a hunter stumbled upon the Roggenrola in the depths, and began to crush the steel beast with her bare hands. One of RedMageCole's captive Mimikyu went feral in the Mimikyu cubby. Clearly, Pocketball had, almost instantly, returned to the usual everyday routine.
Yet there was still the matter of the demons. After a ludicrous amount of time and effort, Paddywagon Man's trap was finally fixed and prepared for use. With the doors having been wasted in the last, failed attempt, there was no safe way to trigger it; we simply had to hope that we would be able to pull the lever and collapse the block before any demons escaped the target zone. With that in mind, I locked myself in the lever room to ensure that I would be able to pull the lever the instant I heard the signal, and sent someone expendable down to open the passageway.
Pocketball used Attract!
It doesn't affect DEMONS...
Well, it wasn't entirely ineffective. Two demons appeared from somewhere and began murdering wild pokémon in the caverns. It's possible that these were some of the original foray from my year that escaped into the caverns and may only have been triggered to attempt to return when the path back to their fellows was reopened, since no demons were ever seen leaving their stairway. I decided to arrange to drop the rock I'd had set up directly over their heads instead, and sent the military down to the caverns to clean up the two stragglers.
Just at that moment, with demons loose in the fort again and the tunnel to more wide open, with the military scurrying around in the depths trying to protect from that threat... a wereloris appeared. Luckily, the two demons in the deep were pushovers, dying almost instantly after killing only one of our human meatshields. The wereloris, in turn, killed a child and a hammerdwarf who were wandering on the surface, only to be killed by the crack duo of a random miner with a pickaxe and his Greninja, which he had inexplicably named after himself. Just to ensure that Pocketball would never be without excitement, both were bitten in the process. I decided that, if Catten and Catten survived their initial injuries, I'd draft them to fight the demons.
With that taken care of, I turned back to the demon problem. It was becoming clear that building another lever and connecting the relevant support would take the rest of my term and probably most of the next one, so I finally opted to switch to plan B: order some unlucky passerby to dismantle the support by hand. The citizens of Pocketball generally agreed that this was a massive improvement over Paddywagon Man's typical plans, since, instead of requiring the sacrifice of a miner, it only required the sacrifice of a mason. The winner of this rare opportunity was Rith Cloisterrhymes, a huntress. To everyone's surprise and disappointment, she survived, as did the demons. I quickly ordered that someone,
anyone, remove the disconnected staircase that I realised was blocking the collapse. Then I realised I should've been more specific, because Beirus, Champion of Pocketball, stepped in to perform the task himself, unaware that there was no other means of support. At the same time, a gem cutter had wandered into the target zone, just to keep things even more interesting. Beirus was thrown clear with a fair chance of surviving; the gem cutter was presumably obliterated. But so, too, were the target demons, and the others nearby were thrown into a state of disarray that I thought might lead them to finally take the other trap corridor.
While studying the aftermath of the collapse, I also discovered how demons had been leaking into the caverns. It seemed nobody before me had ever noticed that the stairway they were occupying opened directly onto a cavern from above, leaving the area totally accessible to flying demons and presumably allowing the others to occasionally fall through. Now six angry demons, most of them web-spinning Brutes of Waste, were loose beneath the fortress, capable of attacking at any time through the side stairwells. Luckily, I figured it would probably take at least a month for them to get anywhere important, making it someone else's problem.
The three other surviving demons, however — a Kite Fiend, a Boiling Devil, and a Shade Monster — were making their way through Paddywagon Man's trap corridor as intended. A few of the flyers even returned to follow their friends this way. I hastily ran back to the Master-Ball to await the signal which was now to arrive from the Attics of Mimikyu, who had been stationed in the area to watch for activity. One of the Attics, human crossbowman Ahdo Telldrive, matched my sprint with one of his own, but he was sprinting directly toward the demons. The results were predictable but there was no time to dwell on that. Another crossbowman from the Attics and a very stupid wood burner blundered into the tunnel just as I pulled the lever. Suddenly, dramatically, Paddywagon Man's plan finally met fruition.
Pocketball used Earthquake!
It's super-effective!
There were now only two demons left alive and free in Pocketball, both Brutes of Waste. I ordered the entire military to hunt them down. There was no point leaving them to be someone else's problem now; I wanted to be the overseer who freed Pocketball from demonic thralldom forever. They were certainly strong and dangerous, but I was unconcerned. We now had the advantage of numbers, for the first time. Just as the first Brute went down, my Mareep evolved into a Flaaffy. Clearly, it was as excited as I was. The second Brute was more, well, brutal. It killed the four soldiers who initially arrived as quick as anything, then waited for their reinforcements. TheImmortalRyukan ran into the tunnel and quickly proved mortal. MCreeper and another soldier were next to be laid low. DrewLegend and the Captain of the Guard charged in from another angle, but fared no better. The Brute now saw its way clear into the fortress at large and made a break for it.
Running straight into Champion Beirus, who quickly earned his title. The Brute was suddenly vulnerable, mobbed on all sides by terrified civilians – all of whom, shockingly, survived – and unhelped by its webs now that it was in the open. Though still bruised after being caught in the collapse a couple of days earlier, Beirus suffered no wounds while demolishing the Brute. The only demon left in Pocketball was our imprisoned Snail Fiend, caged in an area I'd been calling the Smoking Section. We were finally free.
And that kind of thinking is exactly why I was caught so by surprise when the time came and Catten the Wereloris (dwarf Catten, not Greninja Catten) turned.
Incidentally, Zefermcdwarfpants avoided death by mere moments, as he was straggling just behind the Brute as it ran up the stairs into the fort. If he had caught up with it sooner, it probably would have treated him the same as it did the others who reached it in time.
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Topic: The World of Dwarvemon - Succession Fortress of Pocketball (ENDED) (Read 60129 times)