With due hope that everything is okay with Babale, maybe it’s time to kick the turn to whoever’s next on the list? Babale can always take the next turn if real life stuff is brought to heel.
Unrelated DF stuff: Oh man, whoever plays next should get the new version. Therapist is out to support it now. I don’t even know anything about the other fixes that have been made, but today one of my hunters got stabbed in the foot by a goblin thief and a motor nerve was severed, and after being treated in the hospital for a bit, he grabbed a crutch and went back to hunting. I almost cried. 
Oh, plaster casts work now too.
Anyone had any good DF stories unrelated to the succession game, lately? I’ve had three good ones. My definition of a good DF story is one that would make a kickarse scene if it was in a movie. I provide them here to tide readers over while our succession game gets going again. 
Story 1: I have built a huge Bronzemurderedesque pump stack to bring water to my fort (45 frigging z-levels). Right at the bottom, there’s a trench cut to get water from the lake, and then the underwater lake has a bunch of walkways going across it to let my miners get at some valuable minerals that were down there. Suddenly I get a bunch of interruption messages because there is an elk bird on the loose down below. So I send my military… but there was a recent siege and only one of them isn’t in hospital. No worries - it’s my awesome militia captain. Fully suited up in steel, High Master fighter, Great swordsdwarf. Let’s go, let’s do this! They get into a fight, during which the dwarf gets his sword stuck in the elkbird’s lung and can’t pull it out, so he responds by scratching its eye out with his free hand. But eventually, the bird throws him off the walkway into the lake. Shit, I think, there goes my best guy. I go down a z-level to watch my brave dwarf’s sad end… poor guy’s walking around in a panic it seems. But wait - he seems to have some purpose. In amazement I watch him hold his breath and walk along the bottom of the lake to the trench that I had dug for the pumps, walk up the side of the trench and out of the water, and then walk over to the elk bird and stab it from behind in the brain.
Story 2: Different fort, right at the start. Two of my seven starting dwarves are miners. I’m dicking around trying to get a well dug, so I designate a vertical shaft be dug from the dining room straight down to a room below. For the non-DF pros: this is generally safe - a miner gets to the top of the hole to be dug and digs straight down. In this case, however, I failed to notice that half way down the designated shaft intersects an existing corridor - so really it’s more like two shafts, one above the other. So expert players will see where this is going - one miner starts on the lower shaft, the other on the higher shaft. The one digging the higher shaft finishes first, but instead of just falling down into the room below, she falls into the lower shaft, right to the bottom. This is an unacceptably big fall, and I go into the dwarf’s medical page. Two broken legs, two broken arms, a broken shoulder and a broken rib. Fuck. And I don’t have a hospital or any kind of medical staff. Double fuck. But this is Dwarf Fortress, so I get some farmer with no medical skill whatsoever and appoint him my Chief Medical Dwarf. He’s now in charge of diagnosis, suturing, surgery, dressing wounds, the lot. I get some random half-dug-out room full of rocks and shit, put a bed in it, a table next to the bed, and a chest, and declare it to be our hospital. Bam! Someone drags my poor wounded (and now in extreme pain, according to the wound readout) miner up the stairwell to my new state-of-the-art hospital and puts them in the bed. Meanwhile, my confused-looking ‘chief medical dwarf’ begins the diagnosis. According to him, this dwarf needs… surgery, wound dressing, bone setting, cleaning, and suturing. For each injury. Six of each.
…A long time passes. My single unskilled medical dwarf, over the course of about two months, has managed to fully treat the patient. We’ve all but run out of thread and cloth for the treatment, we had to order the carpenters to build more splints because we didn’t bring enough with us for this single incident, but it’s done. And to my amazement, the last splint applied, my miner gets up and walks! Holy shit! She’s a bit slower than she was but hell, this is still better than I was expecting. There’s a mining operation going on down below but for whatever reason (and who can blame her), she doesn’t seem interested in that. She’s not listed as ‘on break’ or anything, just ‘no job’. So with her four broken and splint-set limbs, she walks up the long spiral stairway from the hospital she’s spent the last two months in, gets to the surface, goes to an above-ground farming plot and stands still there for a moment, and then dies of an infection.
Story 3: This isn’t really a story, just an event, but it amused me. The first fort I mentioned with the pump stack, when it fell, fell to a huge goblin and troll siege. My military was entirely killed, except I had a trained giant war eagle who for some reason had hung back while the rest of the army was wiped out outside. She was about to get pulled down and killed by the goblin hordes, but for some reason there was a troll that came in as a kind of vanguard while the rest of the army was outside, so my eagle’s last act was to pick this troll up by the head and smash it against a wall until it died.
