Slaves to Armok
A Hayate the Combat Butler Oneshot
By
EvilFuzzy9
"He he he. Yeah, it almost looks done... alas... those who are in your teens, hold on until your twenties... those in your twenties, your thirties... others, cling to life as you are able...
It should be pretty fun though."
- Tarn "Toady One" Adams, posted on the Bay12 forums, September 1, 2004
A/N: Dwarf Fortress is a game of unfathomable complexity and nearly infinite nuance. It is also horrendously difficult, with an almost impenetrably unintuitive UI, a sheer-cliff difficulty curve, and no in-game way to win. It is a masterwork in progress, the grand vision of one man, supported by the boundless insanity of an entire online community and a frighteningly devoted fanbase.
It is, in short, fucking awesome. And I have recently gotten back into it. Which probably isn't that good for the continued progress of my fanfics, as it is also incredibly addictive and time-consuming. So this is partly a warning of that, and also partly a tribute to the epic monstronsity that is Slaves to Armok: God of Blood - Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress.
Check it out, if you're curious; it's free to download. And as you're playing, remember:
Losing is fun~
...he he he...
Hayate looked at his mistress, who was staring at blinking pseudo-ASCII characters on a black backdrop.
He sweatdropped.
"Milady..." said he, "... did you sleep at all last night...?"
"Ngh," Nagi grunted. Her eyes were bloodshot and baggy, eyelids drooping.
Hayate sighed.
Nagi was optimistic as she ordered her miners to carve out a small tunnel that, fortune willing, would one day expand into a massive, sprawling fortress. She had high hopes for this embark site – she'd done a preliminary survey of the local resources with d*hack and found an abundance of hematite, lignite, and flux stones, not to mention the abundance of natural resources above ground.
So yeah, she was feeling pretty lucky. Once she set up the minimum basics for the survival of her dwarves – a farm, places to eat and sleep, and some essential workshops – she had plans to start working on setting up a steel industry. And then she would expand from there into other .
Naturally, mere seconds after Nagi unpaused the game, her embark party was torn into pieces by harpies.
"Ah, Nagi..." Maria said, looking her mistress who was currently engrossed in the action on her laptop's screen. "You have a visitor... They want to see you about renting an apartment..."
"Tell them I'm busy," Nagi said without even a second's hesitation. Her eyes were fixed on a number of g's that were clustered around a handful of c's and d's.
"Again?" the maid asked in something approaching exasperation.
"Hn," Nagi grunted with a nod of her head as the aforementioned letters vanished beneath a wave of red 6's and 7's.
Maria sighed longsufferingly. She tried not to enable the young Miss Sanzen'in's neet tendencies, but she would nonetheless do as her youthful charge said... for now.
Nagi laughed triumphantly as her defense system tore the goblin siege into tiny little pieces. A two by ten entryway lined with weapon traps bristling with exceptional to masterwork serrated steel discs operated by only the highest quality mechanisms... pure genius, if she did say so herself! Why, with this sort of defense, she didn't even need a military!
So she didn't.
Naturally, when she finally wound up pissing off the humans after stealing from their caravan one too many times they sieged her. And because their diplomats had seen her traps, they were able to waltz right through her only real defense and rip through her ramshackle, thrown-together militia like it was made out of rice paper. They took no prisoners.
"Hey," said Chiharu, peering over Nagi's shoulder as the blonde gave orders to her bearded little virtual drones. "Have you done any work on your manga recently?"
"Mehhh," Nagi droned, her fingers flicking over the keyboard.
Chiharu shook her head.
"I don't know how you expect to beat Ruka if you're constantly putting this off..." she said with a sigh.
"Eh." Nagi shrugged, not looking away from her laptop's screen. "I'll figure something out."
Nagi cackled maniacally as she watched her magma pumpstack come online. It was a massive construction – easily her most ambitious project to date – rising nearly a hundred z-levels from the magma sea deep beneath the earth, right through the center of her fortress, and all the way to the top of her embark. It was a true feat of dwarven engineering, powered by over a dozen windmills hooked up to a single microcline lever in the center of her legendary dining hall.
And her mechanics had just finished connecting everything, and now magma, the molten blood of the earth, would pour forth and scorch the land, burning away all those pesky surface dwellers.
She gleefully rubbed her hands together in anticipation of the FUN to come, watching the spout of the stack and waiting for the red numbers to come pouring right out...
... and waiting...
... and waiting...
... and waiting...
... And just as Nagi started to wonder if something was wrong with her design, she was suddenly spammed with countless red job-cancellation alerts, shortly followed by a frightening string of purple-lettered death alerts. It was something along the lines of
'Urist McDwarf cancels Eat, cannot find path.' x 100
and
'Urist McDwarf has bled to death.'
And that, incidentally, was right about when Nagi belatedly realized just what 'magma-safe' meant.
Ayumu peered over Nagi's shoulder, staring curiously at the pseudo-ASCII characters covering the screen.
Nagi scowled, finding it annoyingly hard to focus with someone watching her play over her shoulder.
"Do you mind?" she snapped at the older girl. "I'm trying to run a fort, here!"
Ayumu blinked.
"Oh," she said. "So that's what you're doing..."
She was silent for a moment, staring at the screen as Nagi tried to ignore her and play.
"Say, Nagi, since you're busy..." Ayumu ventured after a moment of thought, "... would you mind if Hina and I borrowed Hayate-kun for a bit? We were thinking of going to the beach, and we've got new swimsuits that we want his opinion on..." she trailed off meaningfully, the implication of her underlying motive quite obvious.
"Whatever," Nagi grumbled impatiently, just wanting to get Ayumu out of her hair and not really caring what the girl did as long as she did it somewhere else.
Ayumu giggled victoriously. "Okay, thanks!"
Nagi glared at the FPS counter on the top of her screen, eyes flicking down to the legendary miner who had been excavating the same tile for several seconds now.
The number did not change. It simply sat there, mocking her and her state of the art laptop.
3 FPS. THREE.
What — But — How — How the hell did that even work? Even after using every FPS saving trick in the book, from atom-smashing or trading away every last bit of loose crap to walling off unused sections of her fortress, butchering every last non-pet animal, lowering the GFPS... Hell, she'd even used d*hack to vanish every last bit of the mud, blood, vomit, that had built up on every last tile, item, and creature in her fortress over the in-game years!
And she was still only getting three FPS!-?
With a heavy sigh, Nagi hit the 'escape' button and scrolled down the menu to the option labeled "Abandon Fortress".
This fort had had a good run. She'd basically done everything right, playing it safe and building up gradually, eventually becoming the new mountainhome and even uncovering the "hidden fun stuff".
But it looked like this fortress had reached the end of its lifespan.
Really quit? All active saves will be deleted. (y = yes, other = no)
This region will be saved for later use.
She pressed 'y'.
Your settlement has been abandoned.
A/N:...
...
...
... Soooo... If you haven't played Dwarf Fortress, or don't know what it is, you probably didn't really "get" this fic. Maybe. If you have, then you probably chuckled once or twice or said, "Oh yeah I know what that's like."
Hopefully.
Anyways, let me know what you thought~
TTFN and R&R!