Book 1: Business Model
Chapter 1: Something Scrumptious Part 1
Gomm was contemplating eating the babies. It wasn’t that he was ravenous. Instead, he was aware that he would be hungry soon and wanted to head off the hassle of getting something when he was hungry.
Luckily he wasn’t huge and didn't need more than a few young lings to hold off the specter of hunger for a long enough time. The baby carrots crunched softly as he decided the snack was warranted to give him energy for today’s play.
Gomm didn't have a lot of cousins to play with. They were a small settlement at the end of the day, even on Tuesdays. Fifteen or so Goomer populated the warren just outside farmer Jenkin’s eastern fields.
With rare settlement visitations, Gomm’s chances to meet new Goomer weren't as frequent as he or the other dibbun would like. He contemplated the severe lack of new playmates,
‘Never is not frequent, right? Is that how to use that word? Boring is what it is around here.’
Grand-dam Choch had kept promising the visits from other Gomm would eventually happen. But, after a year with no new playmates, Gomm was doubtful.
He had tried to go and play with the human dibbun from the village near the farm. He had been spying on them for weeks to find the perfect opportunity to join in their games.
His wily Grand-dam had caught him before he could get close enough and quickly disabused him of that folly while ushering him back into the warren.
“Humans,”
she explained with some anxiousness in her voice,
“Tend to fear what they don’t understand and will kill us all.”
“Kill us? What’s so hard to understand? I want to play, and they want to play,”
he responded as his antennae twitched in agitation.
The Goom themselves were humanoid in shape, standing a little under two feet tall with white fur that could change a lighter or darker shade with mood or need. Red, gemlike eyes with the ability to change the size to gather more or less light, strong digging claws for harvesting plants whole or to be used as a last line of defense. The delicate antennae atop their head helped them sense the flow of magic in the world.
They had short snouts with the shape of their faces being similar to a bear cub. With robust but short limbs supporting them, the Goom could replenish their source of magic by eating food to refuel their Mana rapidly. Mana was needed for the charms and abilities they used in everyday life—especially their deep pocket.
All Goom had a pouch in their bodies with a sealed opening crossing their chest that was bigger on the inside when they had enough mana to operate it. When closed, a faint line reached across their chest in a swooping line through their fur.
Rare inorganic materials refilled this mana resource faster. Sometimes instantly, if they were rare enough.
What determined the rarity, though, varied by region, and none of the Goom were sure what affected this, though Gomm’s grand-dam seemed like she knew more.
She paced to and fro as she thought about explaining the danger Gomm had almost brought down on the settlement. Tapping her digging claws against her legs, she responded to his question,
“The human dibbun are more accepting of differences, but as they grow, the sense of wonder and enjoyment of the strange and new grows less. We are different from them, Gomm. We are dangerous to what they know.
The dibbun may have enjoyed playing with you, even asked you to come back tomorrow, but the grown humans would have feared you ‘corrupting’ the dibbun.”
It would not have taken them long to message the closest Guild outpost and request a contract to kill or capture us all before our ‘influence’ could be spread among all of the human dibbun.”
Gomm was shocked and angry at this,
“But we aren’t dangerous to humans! We do so much to not hurt them! That’s all you and the other elders talk about!”
Choch stopped pacing. She shook her head sadly at his dismay and caressed his face with her antennae while continuing,
”We know that. The humans don’t. Often, what one thinks they know is more dangerous than what they do know. For everyone.”
Gomm brushed away her antennae before replying,
“Then why do we do so much to not bother them? We even help them with their crops! I thought they were just…so fragile, we were making sure not to wreck where we get our food from,”
Gomm replied indignantly.
“How can they ‘kill us all’?”
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“The local humans are fragile, though farmer Jenkins seems to be a little smarter,”
she added thoughtfully.
“But the adventurers aren’t fragile in the least. They constantly seek out danger and dangerous creatures to fight them and become stronger. Those are the ones we have to worry about.
Those humans can be deadly dangerous, depending on how long they have been on the circuit. Even the newbies can cause more trouble than it’s worth as they summon the PCs if we are callous towards the Npc’s.”
“PCs, NPCs?” Gomm asked, confused.
“Powerful-Caste, Non-powerful-caste,”
Choch replied nonchalantly.
“NPCs are the humans that don’t actively fight dungeon spawn or us to become stronger and for loot. Some can be powerful, but most humans in our area haven’t been taught.
Or learned how to become stronger after defeating smaller spawn in our area. The point is, those NPCs can alert the real threats to our presence.”
Gomm was silent as he took this in. All he had wanted to do was play with some of the human dibbun near his size and apparent temperament. They even seemed to play some of the same games as he and the other Goomer dibbun.
The names the human dibbun used were different in words, but the meanings were prominent, tag, freeze tag, hide-n-seek, sandbox, though imperials vs. rebels left a weird flavor as he translated from their tongue to his own.
Flee and pursue, freeze from fear, conceal and seek, dig and build, and even dungeon spawn and heroes in the Goomer speech. He hadn’t considered how the grown humans would react to Gomm playing with their dibbun.
“Okay, Grand-dam,”
Gomm conceded after some thought,
“I’ll only play with other Goomer…but I think it would be fun to teach them our games. Smash and grab would be a good one!”
Choch chuckled softly,
”Some of the grown humans already play that one, though most, not very well.”
Gomm looked at her blankly, not wanting to ask more questions and delay his playtime even further,
”…Okay.”
She laughed loudly at his obvious impatience to get back to having fun; swatting him playfully, she shooed him back out the warren entrance.
“Go, see if you can find Jerry and Sek. They should be almost done with lunch and just as eager to get into mischief. Stay away from the human dibbun, though!”
Gomm nodded eagerly and scurried out of the part of the warren that belonged to his grand-dam, Jerry and Sek would play with him. He would stay away from the humans and be sure to tell the same to both of them.
‘If fun prevents more fun being had, wouldn’t that be not fun?’
Jerry seemed to disagree.
“That’s the best kind of fun!”
Jerry paused, then added reluctantly,
“If you don’t get caught anyway… If it doesn’t hurt anyone while you do it and you don't get caught, then doing what you’re not supposed to gives the best chance of wasting time in an entertaining way.”
Sek nervously asked,
”But what if you are caught?”
Jerry blew a raspberry with his pink tongue,
”Pthhhhhhhbbbbbbbbbbb! Then you’re doing it wrong!”
He looked to Gomm as if searching for confirmation of a profound truth.
“Right, Gomm?”
“No.”
“But-”
“No, Jerry,”
Gomm reasserted firmly.
”Grand-dam Choch has been around a long time, and she’s only still around because she learned how to deal with the humans the hard way. We don’t need the human dibbun to have a good time.”
Jerry’s antennae drooped as he realized Gomm was against having fun with the humans.
‘All those weeks of spying wasted. At least we had some fun doing that part.’
His red eyes dimmed and grew slightly smaller, and his white fur grew a bit duller in disappointment.
“So what are we gonna do instead?”
he asked in a chastened voice.
Gomm thought a moment. The slight twitching of Sek’s antennae in excitement reminded him they had continued a game the previous day that couldn't be finished before it was time for them to return to the warren for dinner.
They had been playing it intermittently for weeks, intermingling it with the spying. It had kept them out from underfoot of the elder Goomer.
The elders were resting for tonight’s work and away from the human dibbun. The elder’s seemed to be tired an awful lot lately.
Best of all, it fooled Jerry into learning to be more functional while still being entertained. Gomm enjoyed playing with Jerry, but his ability to become easily bored when not constantly stimulated with something was tiring.
A slow smile plastered his face,
”Albuquerque,”
He continued as Sek twitched some more in happiness.
”Jerry, get some more small posts from the warren stash, and we’ll see if we can’t beat what we got done yesterday. Sek, you fetch our plan sheet from the toy box, and we’ll start laying out where we want it to keep going.”
The game was decided. Jerry and Sek scurried to retrieve the requested toys while Gomm sat down and slowly started to draw in the dirt what he remembered from the plan yesterday. Their game site was a short distance from the real warren, closer to the southern field, but still out of sight from the main farmhouse.
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