Thadius wrote :-

Thadius has been taken by a fey mood!
Thadius has claimed a writer's desk.
Thadius draws a picture of a forum thread.
Thadius draws a picture of a cloud.
Thadius has begun a mysterious construction!
Thadius works furiously!

There will come Hot Magma, by Urist McBradbury

In the Great Hall the voice-mechanism sang. Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o'clock! As if it were afraid nobody would. The morning fortress lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!

The automatic kitchens gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight quarry leaves, eight plump helmet stews, sixteen dog biscuits, two mugs of rum, and two cool mugs of wine.

"Today is Yeol 4, 526," said a second voice from the Great Hall ceiling, "in the city of GemClod, The Swamp of Malodors." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr. SirPenguin's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Pozzo's marriage. Rent is payable, as are the magma, meat, and booze bills." Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, mechanisms glided under magma-powered eyes.

Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o'clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But no doors slammed, no smoothed stone floors took the heavy tread of leather heels. It was raining outside. The weather mechanism on the front door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; capes, robes for today..." And the rain tapped on the empty fortress, echoing.

Outside, the Welcome Room chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting spikes. After a long wait the door swung down again.

At eight-thirty the biscuits were shriveled and the leaves were like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them down a metal throat which flushed them into the magma sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a chamber aboveground, a lever pulled, and then removed.

Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean. Out of warrens in the wall, tiny mechanical mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all stone and metal. They thudded against thrones, whirling their bearded runners, kneading the smooth stone floor, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their red magma eye faded. The fortress was clean.

Ten o'clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The fortress stood alone in a stinking swamp. This was the one fortress left standing. At night the swamp gave off a putrid stench which could be 'seen' for miles.

Ten-fifteen. The farming floodgates whirled up in protest, water leaking out the door in rivulets. The water ran down the charred west side of the Great Hall where the Hall had been burned evenly free of its engravings. The entire west face of the Hall was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in the engravings were of a man drinking a beer. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to vomit. Still farther over, their images burned on stone in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown severed cat's head, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a head which never came down. The five spots of engraving - the man, the woman, the children, the head - remained. The rest was a thin charcoal layer. The gentle trickle filled the farm with mud.

Until this day, how well the Fortress had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, 'Who goes there? What's the password?" and, getting no answer from the only foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its drawbridges and drawn doors in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.

It quivered at each sound, the fortress did. If a sparrow brushed a door, the door snapped shut. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the fortress!

The fortress was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

Twelve noon.

A dog whined, shivering, on the front drawbridge.

The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once large and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mechanical mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.

For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the magma sea, it was dropped like evil Baal in a dark corner.

The dog ran downstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was here. It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was making biscuits which filled the house with a rich odor and the scent of quarry bush leaf. The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, vomited, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.

Two 'clock, sang a voice.

Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mechanical mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.

Two-fifteen.

The dog was gone, the kitchen was restocked.

In the magma sea, the magma glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the disposal chute.

Two thirty-five.

Bridge tables sprouted from Hall walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Beers manifested on an oaken bench with cat tallow biscuits. Music played.

But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.

At four o'clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the paneled walls.

Four-thirty.

The nursery walls glowed.

Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal substance. The walls were masterwork Gem Windows. They looked out upon color and fantasy. Hidden crystals clocked though the well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was smoothed to resemble a crisp cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors! There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and water holes. It was the children's hour.

Five o'clock. The upstairs Nolio-prevention bathroom filled with water drawn from the river.

Six, seven, eight o'clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the Council Room, a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.

Nine o'clock. The walls warmed their hidden magmaducts, for nights were cool here.

Nine-five. A voice spoke from the Council Room ceiling: "Mrs. Pozzo, which song would you like this evening?"

The house was silent.

The voice said at last, "Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random." Quiet music rose to back the voice. "The Elven Jig, arranged by Sirroco, played by FiddlersThree. A favorite of yours, if I recall..."

The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on its tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.

At ten o'clock the fortress began to die.

The magma roared. A sudden spurt invaded through the kitchen diposal chute. Cat fat, improperly packaged, spilled into the flames. The room was ablaze in an instant! "Fire!" screamed a voice. The fortress emergency lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the fat spread on the stone floor, licking, eating, under the kitchen door, while the voices took it up in chorus: "Fire, fire, fire!"

The fortress tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the cabinets were broken by the heat and the dog and horse fat was thrown upon the fire.

The fortress gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the walls, pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.

But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which filled the baths and washed the dishes for many quiet days was gone.

The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon ChanceII and Kikka's in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

Now the fire lay in beds, stood in Gem Windows, changed the colors of engravings!

And then, reinforcements.

From the enclave trapdoors, blind mechanical faces peered down with faucet mouths vomiting green chemical.

The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.

But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the fortress, up through the enclave to the pumps there. An explosion! The enclave brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze shrapnel on the beams.

The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes that hung there.

The fortress shuddered, stone bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its mechanisms, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the first brittle winter ice. And the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.

In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished off toward a distant steaming river...

Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, preparing biscuits, or rapidly extending and retracting the Welcome Room spikes, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud all in the fiery study, until all the film mechanisms melted in the heat, until all the musical pages withered and the instruments themselves consumed.

The fire burst the fortress and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.

In the automatic kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen plump helmet stews, six heaping piles of quarry leaves, twenty dozen dog biscuits, which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!

The crash. The enclave smashing into the kitchen and Hall. The Council Room into forges, forges into caverns. Deep freeze, armchair, instruments, mechanisms, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.

Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaps of rubble and steam:

"Today is Yeol 5, 526, today is Yeol 5, 526, today is..."

Epee Em wrote :-

Inspired by all this talk about Toady's programming, I decided to make a flowchart for the typical fortress. Let's be fair, the game says up-front that it's an alpha.

However, it's somewhat poetic that the game's code resembles what goes on in the game itself.



It's...it's beautiful.