Chapter 2: End Game Part 2
Choch had just finished the early afternoon cleaning of her burrow near the entrance to the warren. A hole in the ground shouldn’t need much cleaning, to begin with, but the matriarch had exacting standards. Checking her walls, she made the routine check for invading roots.
She straightened and dusted her few pieces of comfortable furniture. She polished her tabletop to a fine shine with a bit of magic and some elbow grease. She also cleaned off the surface of her small wood stove, swept the bare stone floor, and checked the lock on one of the only doors in the warren to ensure no one had tampered with it.
She always felt a bit better after this daily regime, even if it was just something to keep her busy until lunchtime, which is why, when she heard the scared chittering of the dibbun fast approaching the warren and her burrow, she had a different emotion well up.
Fear. Scared dibbun sometimes overreacted to something, but sometimes not.
Scurrying to the entrance of her burrow Grand-dam Choch was not happy to spy real panic in their eyes. There were faint traces of blood on Jerry’s claws. All three were covered in smears of dirt, crying as they rushed toward her.
They tumbled back into the warren in a panic, chittering madly about humans. Something about Jerry almost being crushed. She listened for a few seconds before realizing what must have happened.
“And then Jerry tore the foot up something fierce and-”
Grand-dam Choch cut Sek off roughly,
“YOU IDIOTS! Where was this?! How long ago?!”
her eyes blazed as they grew larger and lit up with her fury at one of hers being close to injury and the human hurt.
Excited, fearful, babbling met her, and she took a deep breath to try and calm herself a bit before she listened to their hurried explanations and then snapped out orders to the trio,
“Sek, run and fetch your parents, Jerry, the same. Gomm, you tell Uncle Lester and Aunt Mina to get the others together for a council right quick! No time to waste, MOVE!”
The three young Goom rushed to obey with no back talk, only a few backward fearful glances. Finally, Choch turned and moved to one of the few doors the Goom had bothered to install inside their warren.
She took the small magical combination lock in her deft claws. Then, she quickly and efficiently spun the tumblers and muttered the soft incantation to prevent the lock from shocking her severely.
Removing the lock from the door, she opened her deep pocket and emptied everything near the back wall, even the pie she had baked just this morning. Then, stepping inside the smaller room, she filled her deep pocket with sets of armor, weapons, gold, and decoy chests.
She and Lester had crafted them in preparation for something like this happening. She hoped it wouldn’t come to it, but the equipment might be needed to defend the settlement. In addition, the gold could help the older Goom fuel their magic if it came to battle or escape.
She scolded herself briefly for not emphasizing how dangerous it was to interact with the humans to the youngest generation sooner but stopped quickly with a thought.
‘Can’t put the yolk back into the egg after it’s broken. Would have, or could have doesn’t solve the crisis.’
She stepped back into her burrow. Then, carefully, she turned around, picked up the pie, and put it on the cooling rack on the stove. One shouldn’t waste good pie.
Looking at the burrow, she left and headed towards the largest room in the warren, the dome. It was a large room that could fit the entirety of the settlement’s Goomer in an emergency. Or just for a fun gathering or large meal. The dome was named for the large, curved ceiling with carvings depicting her settlement’s story.
The carving started near the entrance and spiraled to the center depicting the travel from their old home, which was destroyed by a fire mountain. The scene wound through a desert and vast plains.
She smiled briefly at the section showing the settlement stowing away on a river barge and some of the antics they got up to on that voyage downriver. She could still hear the barge captain yelling at his crew as the Goom fled into the woods at the end of their brief voyage.
It wasn’t the crew’s fault. The Goom could be very sneaky when they wanted. They had good reason to avoid contact with the sailors at the time.
She stopped reminiscing as Lester’s bald form entered the room with Gomm. The other Goom started filing in shortly after. Lester’s hairless condition was unfortunate, a result of being severely burned by a mage as they fled the last disaster they had faced near the fire mountain, or that was the story they told.
He was the only Goom that bothered with clothing, more to hide the scars than his hairless form. He straightened his short tunic under his outer robes and adjusted his belt as they waited for the other Goom to sort themselves out in the various chairs and couches around the room.
Wasting no time, she got right to the point,
“One of the farmers has been injured.”
The other elder Goom frowned worriedly while Lester asked bluntly,
“One of us, or an accident on the farm?”
“…Jerry clawed up one of their feet in the southern field,”
she replied,
“I called you all here so we can plan how to deal with this.”
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Jerry’s dam and sire, Wat and Chihuaquequenotzin, spoke up in turn.
“What?”
Said, Wat.
“What was he doing in the south field?”,
Said Chichi, glaring at her son. Everyone called her Chichi as her real name was ridiculous to even her.
Jerry looked ashamed. He hadn’t explained why everyone was needed in the dome. He was quietly reserved as he replied,
“We were playing Albuquerque near the corn, and I forgot to bring lunch. So we figured we could sneak a few ears for a snack…Somebody saw us and tried to squish me as we came out of the tunnel under the fence. I got scared.”
Jerry’s eyes shrank a bit and began to gleam with tears,
”I didn’t mean to, but it all happened so fast! I just wanted to get away!”
He wailed piteously.
Gomm spoke up quickly as the other Goom began to chitter to one another,
”It’s my fault, Grand-dam warned me not to go near the humans. I didn’t make us come back for food.”
“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,”
said his uncle Lester,
”It happened, and we need to deal with the aftermath.”
He looked to Wat and asked,
”How are we on stores?”
Wat scratched his chin and replied,
”We have about three months of stores leftover from this winter. Chichi and I can start putting together some trip packs for everyone when we are done here, and we won’t be able to take it all.”
Choch replied,
“Pack what you can and pile the rest near the entrance. Lester, Mina, and I can use it for other things.”
Chichi, who was busy smacking her son around the head and shoulders, stopped briefly and snarled,
“Jerry can help us with that! We should have a pack for everyone ready by morning,”
She went back to disciplining her son. Jerry wailed at the sharp blows. Everyone ignored it except for Jerry.
Lester and Mina were whispering in a corner, and she spoke up next,
”Lester and I can start scouting the farm and try to pick up some information on how the humans will respond. We’ll need some gold to feed the spells and charms, so we aren’t caught out.”
Choch nodded in response to this and handed over a few coins to each of them. She then turned to Sek’s parents, Kosmo and Mearah.
“I hope we don’t need to, but how are we looking on new sites for us? We may need to move quickly depending on what Lester and Mina find.”
Mearah muttered rapidly with a dark look at Jerry’s family,
”Not great. Kosmo just finished scouting in both directions to the south and west of us.
We would have large human population centers to contend with. As you already know, north is out. I can look through the maps we brought, but those won’t be very helpful.”
We’ve only been here a year. We haven’t had time to expand. Or research much beyond what we had at the old settlement.”
Kosmo clarified Mearah’s statement,
“The maps we were able to bring with us don’t run that far south of where we were. We lost a lot to that damn fire mountain.”
Choch was frustrated again by something else she should have planned for. She had thought they would have more time to rebuild what they had lost. But, instead, she had been more concerned with them being fed through the winter.
“Do what you can,”
She stated.
“If we need to go east blindly, we will, but anything you can give us would be helpful. Also, bring me a few copies of our local maps as soon as that’s done.”
The two Goom in charge of the settlement’s history and other records nodded and moved out of the dome to start on their tasks.
“Now, wait just a minute!”
Protested another of the Goom.
“We shouldn’t have to move again!”
This was from a shorter, squatter Goom named Vulso.
”We just got here last year, and there’s no way we should need to move over a few scratches to a farmhand.”
“Yeah. I can’t pack everything up and move again so soon,”
Another Goom, Raldo, agreed.
Choch smiled thinly at the pair.
“We may not have a choice. These are necessary precautions. We must stay ahead of the adventurers if they are called in.
We all know the tales of what they do to us if the humans get their small clothes in a bunch about us.”
Vulso, Raldo, and most other elder Goomer’s fur dimmed shade at that statement. It wasn’t shared amongst the dibbun, but the fate of a Goom caught by the adventurers was dire. Even contemplating it made the older Goom shudder.
Lester and Mina moved to the door, Lester’s dark robes over his other clothes swishing softly. Mina spoke over her shoulder as she and Lester left,
”We’ll be back as soon as we know something solid.”
Tearisa stood beside the last two Goom dibbun. Daris and Roeisa anxiously shuffled and chittered in place.
“What about us, Grand-dam?”
She asked.
“You three, Vulso and Raldo, start gathering everyone’s things from their rooms. Pack essentials only. Bring them to Wat and Chichi for the trip packs. We may have to leave everything else behind.
Gomm, help them. I’ll be at the lookout tree. I’m going to go keep watch until Lester, and Mina get back.”
Gomm was worried as he followed the three elders and other dibbun out of the dome. He didn’t understand what Grand-dam Choch had said about the adventurers.
He doubted any of the other dibbun did either. He was starting to freak out over how quickly the other elders simply accepted that they all might have to abandon everything and flee.
‘Are the adventurers that bad?’
What would they do if they did show up? Gomm hurried his pace and hoped Jerry hadn’t monumentally screwed up everything.
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