So. It was in the early hungry days of my fortress, when the military is half a dozen guys with wood crossbows who can’t shoot, when everything is big mining and grand plans and challenges of lacking basic infrastructure, and no unpleasant memories walled off forever in some secret corner of the fort. That, and realizing there’s some shit you’re out of now, that you forgot to worry about. Great days.

So in those heady times, the arrival of migrants is something to be celebrated, back when it’s vital work force and before it turns into “Jesus Christ where am I gonna put you guys.” So when a little band turned up I was happy to have them. They were a little family, I think 3-4 adult dwarves and one little girl, and they were all weird.

I have never before, or since, encountered a dwarf that on their personality sheet “dreams of bathing the world in chaos.” No creating a great work of art, no raising a happy family, just chaos. Another one dreamed of ruling the world. They also, some of them, had incredibly impressive stats in some unusual areas. Well… dwarfs are odd. Whatever. Here’s your tools, you’re a carpenter now, make some bookcases, I hope you won’t be a problem.

I cannot remember if they did anything alarming before the incident, or if the general unease I felt about them was just because of the chaos thing, but I definitely had a feeling of unease about them. And then, out of nowhere, there was combat.

What the fuck. Why is there combat? I paused, began flipping around, and was met with a confusion at the entrance to the fort, and eventually pieced it together: A hunter had killed a monkey, and was bringing it back to the fort to turn into monkey roast, when one of these fuckin guys brought the monkey back to life. The reanimated monkey corpse then bit the hunter, which had made him alarmed and unhappy, and the mere fact that it was back alive again was horrifying several bystanders.

Once I figured it out, re-killing the monkey was easy enough, but after that point the new guys were solidly on the shit list. I tried to evict them from the fort, which for some reason didn’t work, and lacking the mental bandwidth to put proper attention to it I just put one of those little mental I-don’t-like-this asterisks on their names and hoped they wouldn’t do anything else weird.

Then, their little leader got himself elected mayor.

Fuck this. This guy has to die. I don’t know what their plans are but they are not aligned with success for my fortress.

I had learned by this point that the obvious solution, just taking any weapons away from him and putting him in a room with a bunch of axe guys and hitting “K”, was likely to lead to strife in the future, especially if he was mayor. But. I had a brand new water trap. It was a massive cylindrical tank, about 120 feet in diameter and several stories high, with a long corridor winding around its circumference, and a big gate that could click open and connect full tank A to enemy laden hallway B, and other gates that could slam shut at both ends. This thing stayed as the main defensive feature of my fortress for decades, and rarely let me down, but at this point it was absolutely brand new, and untested.

Well, guess what your new role is, monkey guy.

I put a desk and chair at the midpoint of the hallway, and told the new mayor that that was his office now. In pretty short order, he went and sat down, eager to get to some work I guess.

Soon after he sat down, the gates, far far away at each end of the long hallway, slammed shut. He would have heard an eerie, total silence for a while, in the empty closed off hallway, and then in the distance a rumble like a distant train, but getting louder…

The remainder of the band I was able to evict or kill. I hesitated when I got to the little girl. She, too, dreamed of bathing the world in chaos. But she also was 9 years old, and she clearly hadn’t done anything. I decided to simply let her be to make her way in the fortress. I have to admit I was a little bit curious what if anything the chaos thing would turn into.

This was the close of the first chapter of my fort. It was the beginnings of decent infrastructure and effective defensive works, and the end of innocence and hopeful plans unmarred by DF’s chaotic reality. I do not know if anything bad would have happened if I had let the little necromancer run my city, but I had a pretty good guess and no interest in finding out if it was accurate.