No action here today, just some setting and character building
Several days later, Father woke up hanging perilously off the edge of the bed that he shared with his wife and two children. He supposed he would miss the family closeness someday, but now he was eagerly anticipating the day their children would move into their own rooms. Gingerly arising so as not to wake the others, he grimaced at the sound of his feet squishing in the mud that had so recently become such a major feature of their home. His office was clean, and thankfully so were the workshops, farms, and the hall of records where he had began carving the history of their family into the stone walls, but the cooking and living areas had all been coated with a fine layer of mud.
Father chuckled briefly at an idea of how to use molten magma to clean up the mess. Perhaps not so soon after the waterfall fiasco...
Grabbing a biscuit from one of the barrels that had protected their food supply, as well as the precious beer, Father stepped carefully around the sleeping cats that seemed to be everywhere these days. Mother loved the stupid pests, and they were breeding like nothing but cats could. He had stuffed as many as possible into cages, thinking gleefully of the prices he would be able to get from those human traders who had wanted new leather backpacks so badly, but Mother refused to lock up any of her favorites, so they continued to run everywhere. She had been devastated by the death of one who had drowned in the recent accident, the only casualty fortunately.
Stepping out of the fortress doors guarding home Father tripped and began to swear at the inevitable cat, but he stopped when he saw the obstruction at his feet. He absentmindedly scratched the ears of one of the two dogs chained at the fortress enterance as he considered the mangled creature before him. Another kobold thief had tried to sneak in and been stopped by the ferocious war dogs. Father loved the dogs. They bred almost as fast as the cats did, but the cats never brought him dead kobolds. He dragged the corpse over to the makeshift dump where the body could rot until the bones were bleached and ready to be made into crossbow bolts. Grabbing the copper knife the stupid creature had hoped to use against the dogs, Father tucked it into his belt to add it to his melt pile later. These mountains were filled with coal and iron, but so far he was relying on the generosity of the kobold thieves dying at his door to be able to make steel.
A short jaunt around the hill and Father surveyed the results of his most recent labors. A long trench ran from the top of the hill down to the stream. The small pools of water still slowly drying on the mountainside bore testament to how important this simple ditch was. The new waterwheel was disconnected from the pump system by a complex gear-and-lever system in case of emergency, but this new runoff chanel was what should release enough water back into the stream to give them a nice mist indoors instead of another disaster. Father had not been pleased to add another opening, another weak point, to their secure little home, But if experience was any indicator it would take a colossus to navigate that channel once the pumps were activated.
Author
Topic: A Family tale (Read 1339 times)