A letter rests upon the desk of the attorney general. Several, in fact. Many are either caked in blood, or caked in dirt from travel. How they came to be here is anyone's guess, having evaded the best efforts of the home office of the Delphonso Frights and Magic company. The AG opens the first, having dug it out from under the rest, and opens it.
"To whom it may concern,
My name is Splint Orderdyes. I am the acting militia commander of Crystallake, as well as the current camp activities director for the year of [the date appears badly smudged] having assumed command from commander Litast Organpost on grounds of organizational incompetence.
I pen this and several other letters and send them with private couriers to inform you of the gross misconduct on the part of the company - A minimum of two dozen citizens have died due to their negligence and cost-cutting measures, and now thanks to their choice of location, 38 innocent citizens who had come expecting between one and five year furlough from the main settlements full of entertaining frights and year-round spook-filled holiday atmosphere are currently besieged by a horde of bloodthirsty psychopaths and their vile minions who i suspect may have murdered some of our staff and stolen their uniforms, as last I check the company couldn't afford to hire actual greater wights.
As of this writing, I am attempting to rectify the issues concerning military equipment and management. I doubt I will be successful, but currently the militia fails to meet the minimum equipment needs set forth by the merchant's guild to be classified as anything resembling a proper security force. At best, they would be listed under "armed rabble," which in professional terms is completely unacceptable. As such, I am currently taking steps to mitigate this with the production of 20 suits of iron mail armor. While we have capacity to produce steel locally, iron provides a more expedient measure that is to the standard expected of guild-compliant security forces.
According to the stocks I have to hand, the camp has sufficient stores of iron to produce at least that much, so accounting is at least something the company can be said to not be completely useless at. I've ordered larger, better situated training facilities (including one with a firing range,) that befit a security force to be errected, and locked the doors in our open air skull building, in case the yokels try to scale it and get in through the eye sockets.
Let me be clear. This equipment issue is just one of many incidents of gross negligence on the part of Delphonso Frights and Magic Company (hereafter referred to as DFM.) The amount of stress that the acting expedition leader, Ms. Ber Irontongue, is proof enough of that, and she has agreed to assist me in figuring out and reporting to you all of the follies of this wretched place.
There is rampant neglect of the dead, loss of life far above what could be expected from the overzealous method actors working in the caverns (which I can assure you was not caused by fear,) willful neglect of the dead by the Camp's upper management resulting in multiple ghostly spectres haunting the place, the incident with the zombulls, I'm fairly certain Mr. Eric Giltsunken is guilty of actual witchcraft (definitely against guild policy,) and the camp doesn't even resemble a camp.
Further messages will detail events over my tenure as camp overseer.
Signed,
Splint Orderdyes"
Elsewhere, another letter is opened in a dimly-lit corporate office, festooned with tacky skeleton decorations and cobwebs made of badly dyed yarn.
"This place is a mess and whoever you hired to manage it is an idiot. They've delegated so much responsibility that the company is going to get butchered in the courts no matter what our legal team tries. Hell, at minimum we're looking at getting slapped with a false advertising charge since the camp doesn't look like a camp.
However, to that end, I've begun sending formal letters to the Royal AG detailing attempts to rectify some of the problems, which should at least grant plausible dependability that the camp staff flat out didn't care about the wellbeing or safety of our guests. I've also had someone draft new contracts for the current residents that waives any and all responsibility on the part of the company should they be called upon to defend the property, and I've made enough copies that from now on everyone who shows up will have to fill it out. That'll at least wash our hands of any "service-connected" deaths or injuries.
Also for the love of all that is holy, nix the method actors at the next enterprise. Those idiots killed like six people in ways that we literally can't prove were due to fright because the dipshit CMD has the causes of death written down on stone tablets. There's no way I can get rid of those short of things that would reek of foul play.
Oh, and those greater wights you told to sit and spin because of the price they were trying to gouge us with? Yeah, they're banging on the gods-damned door trying to kill everyone (I'm also pretty sure they killed the guys we got to replace them and made off with their equipment just to spite us.) I threw that Eric guy under the wagon in the official letter, so we might be able to blame these idiots showing up on him.
And don't worry, nobody has made any mention of you-know-what that I know of. The king shouldn't be making a visit to tour the grounds any time soon unless one of the traders last year heard something about it.
- Splint
PS - The Ghosts are working as intended. Even got a couple to sign on for post-mortem employment so long as we cut their next-of-kin a check once a year for a thousand sovereigns.
"
Hoo boy, where to begin.
I hate this place. Literally everything about it. It's dispersed, entirely subterranean, the militia literally had no armor, there's shadow beasts everywhere, I don't know where anything is besides what I assume to be the current main entrance which is bricked up, everything looks wrong and it's driving me crazy. That being said, it could be a fuck of a lot worse.
I've exhausted our iron supplies at present making basic armor for the militia, which I've assumed command of, locked some doors, and turned off the alert burrow because people were spamming job cancellations about inaccessible lumps of rock. Also going to see about getting a marksdwarf squad set up, or at least have a squad prepared to be filled, if nothing else, since I doubt we can supply the amount of ammo they'd need to be worth anything in a fight.
Not the worst amount of progress for a month of game time though.
As you can see, I'm definitely of a more serious temperament, but I'm erring on the side of "Yeah, here's everything that's wrong, I can prove it! Now here's what we're doing to fix it too!" To essentially wash the company's hands of at least
some of the crap its likely to be hammered for (we literally can't get away with some of the deaths being from fright - I've had ghosts scare people to death and those death reports say they're dead from fright. The coronor don't lie.
,) whether the camp survives to the end of October or not.
And my dwarf may or may not be trying to save his own ass in the process in throwing everyone else under the bus.
Author
Topic: Spookyfort: Inheritance (Read 25979 times)