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Shoes are important. As an old supervisor once told me, you are never so poor as to not be able to afford good shoes. Captain Samuel Vimes' "Boots" Theory of Econonomic Injustice
If the Elder Scrolls have taught me anything, it's that both lycanthropy and vampirism, once contracted, will cure any other diseases you have... Dwarf Fortress agrees. They'll also prevent death by starvation or thirst!
Did someone say mine?
Dontgonearthe Castle? Oi I've been there. Nice vacation spot, and t'ain't too far from home.
Here but just coming out of heavy work overtime. Should be able to post tonight or tomorrow. Sorry for the wait.
What're you lookin' at?
"Aye, can't argue with ya there."
Fionna squints slightly at Rupert. Given that when the Patrician makes you an offer it's typically considered unwise to refuse, she's had nothing to say thus far other than the occasional nod. But the fellow has a good question, and it's actually addressed her way (if not exclusively so) so the dwarf at last deigns to speak up. "Well, considerin' we'll be by necessity workin' at cross-purposes with th' Watch, who I 'magine'll be lookin' for folks matchin' our general descriptions, it ain't a bad idea." There is a bit of a grumble before the dwarf goes on. "What of us can manage disguises anyway," she adds, glancing at the troll, then turns back to Rupert. "Longer we can go without gettin' int'rupted or chased or in-terror-gated, the better our chances o' figgerin' this out are."
Fionna is quiet. She's heard about the Patrician - who in Ankh-Morpork, or quite a few places out of it, hasn't? - and frankly she's not sure what's rumor and what's true and what's both. The dwarf was exceptionally reluctant to relinquish her hammer and musket on the way in, but is silently assuaged by the fact that, if she felt the need, she could use her rotund little body as a sufficient weapon in most cases. On top of that, she's confident they've done nothing wrong. They didn't make the hole in the floor - and Fionna herself would be the first to tell you, she's an expert at making holes in things, on purpose or otherwise - and they certainly didn't initiate hostilities with the gang of fake assassins. From what she knew of the city, Vetinari ran a tight ship; she imagined he wouldn't take kindly to fakes of any sort trying to do someone's job. For the moment she planted her feet in place, concentrated on not tripping over them, and waited for the fallout from her companions. And resisted the urge to apply palm to forehead when the troll... well, acted like a troll. It was a close thing, though, and her hand was already halfway up before she realized it and shoved it back down to her side.
Fionna scans about after Benris's inquiry, looking for a reasonable passage that might lead to the surface, starting with back behind the way the assassins came.
Fionna squints irritably at the clacks note, turning it over several times then tapping out the beat of the semaphore pattern on her armor thoughtfully. "Stage two? What was bloody Stage one?"
Fionna whirls around, bringing around the hammer mostly by momentum alone, swinging towards the nearest assassin in a mostly-blind stagger of inertia and force. It's pretty obvious the dwarf is moving simply because she's moving, like a sort of perpetual motion machine of destruction, and until she runs into something more solid than she is or something that hits back harder than she does, she's liable to simply crash around the terrain and barrel over anything that gets in her way. Fortunately for her companions, that's mostly just the guys who have been shooting at them for the past thirty seconds or so.
Fionna, grinning, goes around the rubble and debris behind the corpse of the man with the shattered legs, closing with the archers on the other side. "Evenin' fellas. Figured we could make this a bit more up close 'n personal like." With a howl, the dwarf barrels through the assassin and, if she gets a chance, through the ones next to him too.
Fionna follows Jon's high punch up with a low blow, swiping the hammer across the assassin's knees.
"Y'know what, bugger all this." Tired of playing back and forth with the weaponry, Fionna stashes away her gun back in its holster at her belt, retrieves her hammer, and marches toward the opposition, bringing herself to bear behind the leader with weapon in hand.
Fionna reloads, takes aim, steadies her thumb along the axe extension, and fires once again, at the same target. Touch
Sadly the shot goes wide. The dwarf grumbles deeply into her beard and shakes free of the layer of dust, soot, and gunpowder debris she's garnered.
It seems gunfire is the order of the day. Fionna lets her hammer lie, dropping it with a noisy crash over her shoulder and behind her, and draws her axe-headed musket from her belt, likewise taking aim and letting fly at the opposition. Since everyone else seems to be ganging up on the leadership, she decides to pick off one of the flunkies to the right. Touch
"Methinks there ain't gonna be much of a party left," Fionna grumbles. "Big holes in th' floor tend to put a damper on the partyin' spirit. Unless that's what the party's for, I guess."
"Aye, forward march 'n all that." Fionna takes up her place at the rear guard once more. She takes the time to examine the construction around them while waiting for the group to get moving. Typical sub-Ankh-Morpork construction, really. Humans don't know how to make things that last, she laments silently.
Fionna continues humming and tenderizing rats, feeling absolutely zero threat from the ankle-gnawing beasties.
Provided a clear path, Fionna makes her way through the rubble and debris beneath the doorway and within reach of the remaining rat. Humming a little mining tune under her breath, she lifts the weighty weapon - still trailing cinderblock dust in its path - and brings it down over her head and toward the wriggling vermin.
"Somethin' just ahead," Fionna calls out, casually pointing toward the source of the noise. "Lil' walkin's, I think." Considering she's still at the back of the group, there's not much further she can do to approach the noise... well unless she wanted to run straight through the group. Which she could do. But they probably wouldn't appreciate it much, and the troll and the bald fellow were sour enough already and Lord Fancyhooves would probably take it personal-like.
"Oi, I 'eard that," Fionna grumbles as she shoves her way out from beneath a pile of rubble while shaking a finger erratically in a vague aim that is what someone might generously call 'in Jonathon's direction'. However, the dwarf is a bit too distracted to really put a whole lot of oomph into the reaction; in the tumble and crumble of the past five minutes or so, almost all of her work of the evening has been lost amidst the falling rock and wood and people of disparate racial quality. Sure, she still has the pouch of spare parts and scrap metal where all of it came from, but the actual products she had been working on when the explosions went off are lost, parts and all. It's put her in a despondent mood with the potential to sour like a runaway cheese. She picks a few loose gears out of her beard and hastily stuffs them back away in her pouch, then scrubs the rest of the rubble out of her hair and pats herself down, checking to make sure everything's still in place. Beard, check. Boots, check. Armor, check, and all pieces thereof. Gun, check. Hammer, no ch.... no, there it is, sticking out of that pile of shattered cinder blocks. Check. "I kin walk perfectly fine on me own, thank ya very much," she continues as she hauls the maul out of its pile of debris - one it probably caused on its way down. "An' if there is to be a tumble down 'ere, I'mma want my feet on nice solid ground rather'n ground that be walkin' on its own, y'see. An' fur...." She stops short on hearing/seeing the faun, and blinks a little. She hadn't seen him at the party (though granted, she hadn't really been paying all that much attention to the guests, either...) and, well to be quite frank she wasn't really sure what he was. He was babbling on like... well, like a Very Important Guest, which he said he was. She sighed and brushed some more dust off the hammer and just shook her head at the whole ordeal. "Loverly," she thought bitterly. "Gonna have to escort a noble fopper what probably can't lift his own weight outta here without lettin' him stub his toes... no, that's hooves on some stray rock. And he's a Wizard ta boot. This is gonna be juuuuuuust dandy." "Fine, whatever. Somebody pick a direction already." The dwarf gave a defeated sigh, shouldered her hammer, and followed where the rest of the group led. "Since I'mma be Such A Burden On Our Haste, I'll go 'head 'n take rear guard. Just In Case."
Nekkid dwarves!!! That'll send the orcs screaming in fear! And the trolls!
Captain Carrot approaches Fionna in her corner. "Miss Handoverhammer, are you doing well? How goes the work at the mine?" Fionna looks up from her work, a few stray pieces scattering from her arms as she moves, bouncing haphazardly away and teetering on the edge of her table precariously, waiting for gravity to go on ahead and either get it over with or just give up. She didn't quite notice at the moment, since this was the first time she'd actually managed to meet Captain Ironfoundersson when there was nobody else around already talking. Of course, she'd heard about him the first day she was in the city, making the rounds and meeting the dwarves already at home in Ankh-Morpork, and in getting shown around the city she'd eventually run into him and some of the other members of the Watch and been introduced. It took her a little bit to grasp hold of the bit about him being a human and a dwarf, it's complicated, and so on and so forth, but once she had the basics down it wasn't too hard to follow along from there. Besides, he certainly knew how things worked, as far as dwarves went, and he was a genuinely friendly sort - something Fionna could appreciate, since most of her fellow dwarves were a bit on the dour side once you got them up into the light. "Oh hullo Cap'n. I'm doing quite fine, thank ya for askin'. Just tryin' to get this last little segment to hitch in here and all. Oh I imagine it's gone well, I haven't heard any complaints from the low or the high where's I pass 'em, though I haven't been spendin' as much time in the mine as I used to, on account of bein' busy with the work here, y'see. How're about yourself? How goes the long arms'n'legs o' the law?"
Fionna was far more social than your average dwarf, that was for certain. She loved a good chat, could babble on for hours about her latest hobby, chat your ear right off if you got her started on the right subjects really. And she was certainly in her element, what with all these craftsmen and guildsfolk and tinkers and such like around. She considered herself a bit on the lucky side for so quickly and easily falling into a group of like-minded folk who knew the value of someone's ability to work with their hands. Good, old fashioned hard work, skill, and ingenuity. Yeah most of them were humans, and there was the occasional troll who'd somehow gotten off his leash, but hey, life couldn't be perfect, and it wasn't exactly bad. She had no major complaints. All that said, however, she wasn't interacting much with the crowd at the moment. There were two major reasons for that. One was because wherever Fionna walked, unless she was surrounded by concrete blocks or iron walls, chaos followed. She'd stumble and knock over a table or trip and pull a door off its hinges. ("Humans, why'd y'ave to make everythin' so bloody fragile?!") And in a party like this, surrounded by meandering humans, tables full of food, and other fancy hob-nobs, it was a catastrophe waiting to happen if the first thing went wrong. So she'd been sent to sit off in a corner during the setup to wait out the festivities, in hopes that she wouldn't accidentally ruin the party with a poorly-placed round of dwarfish bowling. Secondly was because knowing she'd been exiled to out-of-the-way-landia, she'd made sure to bring along something to occupy her time. So while the people milled about, wizards and alchemists bantered and debated, the scent of food and drink wafting through the air, and all general noise and glitz of the celebration, Fionna was beard-deep in a pile of what to the untrained eye looked like scrap metal, tiny wheels, and mismatched shards of glass, with a pair of sharp tweezers or tongs in one pudgy hand and a complex utility tool in the other. She was clumsy-looking to say the least. Like most female dwarves there was nothing about her gender that particularly stood out at first glance. She was heavyset even for a dwarf, rotund and a bit on the shorter side of average, but more stocky and compact rather than simply fat. A little ball of muscle and ticking brains, she was, draped in a long sheet of ruddy blonde hair on top and in the back and an equally long beard of the same in the front. The notable difference from the average dwarf was the intricate and decidedly feminine braids adoring said beard, tipped with baby-blue bows and hair claps of quartz and iron fastened into artistic little cave beetles with glittering wings. Sequestered away in her corner, she poked and prodded at her latest project, her gaze only rising from her work to glance over at her coworkers not too far away, puttering away with Reggie on The Big Project.
Fionna just needs the extra skill point (or rather, one of her current skill points moved out of her clockworks and into something else to make room for the freebie one). I assume this extra skill point is per level, not just one overall?
Fionna is done and ready, minus needing to pick one more language known. Not exactly sure what languages are left to pick for a Dwarf from Uberwald.
Partial character sheet done (in profile). Will finish up skills, feats, traits, and gear tonight.
Sorry I didnt get on last night as promised, my group's game started earlier than anticipated. Mechanics:
Looks like I'll be taking that second set of dice rolls, arranged as so (racial mods included):
STR 17 DEX 8 CON 18(16+2) INT 16 WIS 14(12+2) CHA 11(13-2) She'll be using the Armored Hulk archetype, and basically be made to be a living wrecking ball. A surprisingly smart and charming one (for a dwarf anyway), and a bit on the clumsy side (see backstory) but with that STR and CON definitely a smasher. Backstory:
Fionna is a female (and not afraid to show it - she braids her beard) dwarf from Bonk in Uberwald. Her family are Schmaltzberg fat miners, and from her youth Fionna was supposedly destined (or perhaps doomed) to join them. Two things prevented the young dwarf - otherwise a strong, hale, and perfectly traditional picture of her species - from taking up the occupation of her ancestors: her obsession with tinkering, and her utter clumsiness.
Fionna has all the grace of a grease-slicked banana peel in a mud puddle. Her youth (and, well, some of her adulthood as well) was a constant string of accidents: falling into fat pits, slipping on fresh deposits, tripping over discarded tools, knocking over mining equipment, running into doors, smashing through walls and other obstructions, and such like. It got to be bad enough that some of the lower miners started putting up signs around sensitive or important equipment with the phrase "Go the other way you clumsy git [Fionna this means you]" written on them in dwarfish (so as not to embarrass the whole clan in front of the non-dwarfs, you see). Her years of self- and environment-inflicted abuse only served to make her tougher, in the same way that repeatedly abusing a muscle strengthens it, but when you go from a small, compact, clumsy ball of destruction to a larger, still pretty compact, and still very clumsy ball of destruction, you still end up in about the same location, you just get better at getting there with a navigable clear path left behind you. If there's anywhere that Fionna has tact, however, it's with tinkering. While her feet and body may be a catastrophe waiting to happen, her fingers are expertise itself, and she's always been extremely interested in how things fit together and work. She learned from family smiths in her youth, of course, and after mastering the basics of the forge she moved on to her own interests in clockwork and similar small mechanisms in her spare time... meaning when she wasn't cleaning up her own messes, working in the mines, or otherwise being hassled regarding the latest chaos. Upon reaching adulthood, Fionna decided to leave Bonk en route to Ankh-Morpork. No one outside her clan is really certain why, and she's not spoken up about it much. Nobody in Bonk or Schmaltzberg has much put up a fuss about her departure; they're probably glad they don't have to set up the drills three times every day now. As for Fionna herself, she's interested in work, whether it involves taking advantage of her strength and hardiness or her skill with machines as a repairdwarf, tinker, and/or designer. Fionna, despite her clumsiness and strength, is remarkably clever and intelligent. She loves music, reading, and Thud and other board games, as well as her tinkering hobby, which is probably how she got involved in this whole mess with guns and what not now. She's somewhat embarrassed by her klutzy nature, but tends to bury it in enthusiasm for her hobbies and a friendly, eager spirit that is fairly antithetical to the typical dwarven sternness. Be back around lunchtime to write up her character sheet.
I am noting a distinct lack of dwarves here. Be back later tonight when I'm off work to put up a dwarven barbarian.
Dice 1:
=8
=13 =7 =12 =14 =10 Dice 2:
=13
=8 =17 =16 =16 =12 Point Buy: |
