A Dragon's Bond

Building Retribution

    We awoke, poured out of the caves, and into the sun like ants starting their day, ready to begin the construction of our base. We sent Holbrook and one of the Earth Dragons into town. They would spread the word of our cause and see if he could get at least a handful of people to join and help in the early phase. The more people we could get the better. Not only for help with base building, but we would need the numbers for when we met the Queen in battle. We spoke with everyone who had seen the Queens army and no one could give an exact number for her army's size, we didn't know what we were going to be up against.

    We started by leveling and clearing a large portion of the forest, reshaping the Earth to our will.

    We chose a spot within eyesight of Jack's Blacksmithing hut. We needed to be close enough to the armory that we could quickly retreat if necessary, yet far enough away that its location wasn't obvious.

    The Earth Dragons began leveling out the terrain in the spot we had decided, and were making quick work. They worked the Earth as if they had created it themselves, pushing away mountains and leveling the ground to a precision I wouldn't have thought possible. When finished with leveling we had an enormous flat area to create our base. They had even gone so far as to remove stones and boulders that had been in the way and backfilling the holes they left.

     When they had finished with the leveling they began building the outline of the city. Draioct and I joined in as our team began carving a moat around the perimeter. The hole we created was enormous. It needed to be large enough that dragons or wooden machines couldn't be used to cross it. The walls were the final piece of the puzzle on defense.

     We decided on a double wall defense approach. There would be an outer wall just in front of the large moat. It will be the higher of the two walls, concealing the moat behind it. That way they wouldn't know that there was a moat, then when they broke through the wall, they would be met with a hole and another wall.

     I think it should double as damaging to their motivation. Imagine finally breaking through a massive tall wall, only to be met with more seemingly impossible obstacles. The building took time but it was worth it, and as time progressed our skill in Earth moving grew, allowing us to assist more and more.

     The rest of the people began cutting and gathering logs for building. We wanted most of the buildings to be made of stone but the insides, and various other parts of the base would need lots of wood.

     The base would also need a canal system for water to come in and go out, which meant that we would need wood for bridges.

     Surprisingly one of the first people to show up was the town's architect Denarius. He helped us with the planning for the infrastructure. We needed wells, towers, and various other amenities a serious town would need. His arrival was perfectly timed and his knowledge was invaluable.

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     As the days progressed more and more people began to show up, to the point I began to worry. There were so many newcomers that we pulled people from working and had them filling people in on the situation. There needed to be a whole group dedicated to ensuring people were "the good guys" and that they settled in. Although we needed large numbers of troops to fight the Queen, we still had a code of ethics. We didn't want to remove one evil leadership only to replace it with another corrupt one.

     As newcomers came something became apparent very early on. At this rate our new base would not be large enough. We adjusted the sizes in our plan twice before finally giving up and making it roughly ten times the size of our original plan. If we got enough people that we out grew that, I really couldn't complain.