Part 232: Pozzo: Update 6

UPDATE 6: RABBITMONGER KOKEBERITH, MASON

The moments after the siege were quite emotional. The guards, for the first time in the years I've been living here, showed an emotion other than contempt. They had not lost so many of their number at once since the schism of the New Guard under Globofglob. Chance II was coming in slowly from outside with his head hung low, pointedly ignoring the corpses of his three fallen comrades, knowing it unlikely that anyone would be able to tak the time to bury them, and that they would most like staay rotting in the various parts of the bonehoard that they fell until their bones were indistinguishable from those of the many spawn they had just downed.
Noone else did anything that day, we were all so shaken by the loss of the Guards and Febrezeninja, the mild mannered and friendly count consort. The only one who kept working was Bobzzothethurd who kept mining away happily in his little siege battery area.

A few days later he was done and ordered Vander and Rotinaj to begin reassambling the ballistas in there.



Thewhitecrane for his part was ordered to begin smoothing the walls in there in prepartion for them to be chiselled into fortifications for the ballista to be fired through. However, he also continued in various other duties, including dumping garbage. This lead to a heated exchange when Bobzzo actually found out what it was he was dumping. I happened across them as they discussed it in the main hall. TheWhiteCrane had just returned from one of the northern exploratory shafts, around the strange warren of tunnels that Tosanu had ordered dug out.



Bobzzo was passing him in the hall, and stopped him to ask a few questions. I didn't hear the start of their conversation, however, I did hear the outburst which Bobzzo let loose once he heard what TheWhiteCrane was dumping.
"What in hells name are you doing running around in those blasted tunnels dumping water for, you great clod?"



"...Well stop that at once, what! This blasted Tosanu fellow, what was he trying to do?! Look, you just belay all of the orders this fellow gave, alright, he sounds like a madman!"
The hallways themselves were filled with constant miasma from the rotting bodies of the 40 spawn lying around. But we were largely accustomed to the smell by now, and everyone just got on with their work and tried to avoid the barracks and main hall, if they could.


Avoiding the miasma was unfortunateley not possible for me, as the cheif mason. Bobzzo had taken me aside one day, on the first of slate, and taken me down to the bonehoard. There he showed me a plan he had for a pair of mysterious machines, and told me to get to it constructing them.



Conequently I spent most of the spring working in the cloud of death that hung ever over the bone hoard.
This put me in a good position however, to see out on the glacier. And on the 17th of Slate, I saw an strange and unlikely sight, out there in the snow and the haze.



The mountainhomes, somehow knowing instinctively that the countess had died had sent us through her replacement, along with a small group of migrants, including the hammerer.

The dwarfs that arrived were:
Cyster The Countess,
brute_force Her consort,
Strange Matter Our new she-dwarf Hammerer,
Teim A Soapmaker,
notwhoyouknowiam a gemcutter,
kilohurtz an Engraver
Pozzo a peasant.

Imediately on hearing of their arrival, Bobzzo ran out to meet them. Cyster, the countess, began to speak to him "I gather you are the mayor, Ah, Mr. Bobthethurd is it? I must say, I have been greatly disappointed by the-" but Bobzzo ran past the three nobles and began excitedly speaking to the few skilled migrants.
"By jingo! You little fellows made it! Marvellous, just bloody marvellous, what! Right, first off, and no mucking around, what are your skills?" The group looked slightly stunned at Bobzzos summary ignorance of the countess and was too dumbstruck to reply. "Come on, as my old commander in the siege corps used to say: We're not here to fuck spiders! A bit vulgar, I always thought, but true! You there, whats your name? What do you do?" he pointed at a tall young dwarf at the front of the group.
"Er...well, I'm kilohurtz, an engraver."
"GREAT!" cried Bobzzo. "I want you to go into the fort, turn right at the top of the stairs, by the rotting corpse of the last count-consort..." brute_force and his wife gasped "...and cross the bridge over the chasm. You'll find a fellow there named TheWhiteCrane. He's our chief engraver - actually our only one. I suppose he is the chief now haha, because he can boss you around! He'll tell you what to do! Right, who else? How about you two?"
"Well I'm a gemcutter" said notwhoyouknowiam, a suspicious looking character who appeared to be wearing a fake beard.
"...and I'm a soap maker." said Teim, who, judging by his darker skin looked like he had come from far north, closer to the heat of the equator.
"Righto! Well, you know whats like soap? And you, do you know whats like a gem?" both of them looked confused, and shook their heads.
"Ballistas are!" cried Bobzzo. "You're both siegedorfs now! A noble profession. Go and find a nervous little man with glasses by the name of Vander. He'll tell you what to do."
That left the one lone peasant standing behind, with the nobles. "You look familiar, lad. Whats your name?" asked Bobzzo.
"Pozzo, sir" said the peasant. Bobzzo took a sharp intake of breath and looked shocked. "Huh, ahem. What? By jingo!" he cried. "Tell me" he said, regaining his composure, "Who is your mother?"
"Iridescence Slickracks, sir". Bobzzo had begun to look positively stricken. "Are you alright?" asked Pozzo
"Oh yes, yes. Its just that I...I knew your mother. I...I'm going to have to have a think."
"What should I do though sir, anything?" Bobzzo was walking already walking away.
"What? Oh, right. Just, um...Just haul, lad. Just haul."
I watched as Bobzzo walked slowly away across the bones. The Countess was still standing confused in the middle of the bonehoard. "This is unacceptable!" she screamed, but nobody was listening. I turned back to the slab of Microline I was working and started hammering it back up against the wall.