I was sitting in Yaojing Diner, reading the Daily Bugle article by Karen Carpenter, a reporter known for writing pro Daredevil pieces, for daring to name Wilson Fisk as the Kingpin back when he was still hiding who he was. Now he was proving he was more dangerous in prison than most people criminal gang leaders on the street, which raises the question of superhero problem solving, and leads me to the other man in her life, Frank Castle, the Punisher. Daredevil was a clear superhuman, a hero who defended the downtrodden and waded through crowds of thugs and even super powered enemies like Satan released from Hell and about to have a word with you about your sins. Frank Castle was not technically a superhero, but my jury is out on whether he is properly considered vanilla human. He became the Punisher because he failed to defend his family when they were killed in a gang crossfire. Like me, he is a combat veteran who has realized you cannot protect good people when bad people are free to walk without fear, and do both their business and their battles in amongst the defenseless civilians. Daredevil rehabilitates, educates, and gives second chances. Punisher is the consequence of living by the sword.

They say that if you kill a killer, the world will never run out of killers. The Punisher shows why the reaper is depicted with a scythe not a scalpel, as he doesn’t kill individual killers, but whole gangs of them at a time. Left to his own devices, organized crime street thugs and gang bangers could go the way of the dodo. Or he will leave behind enough traumatized people to assure that the new generation will rise up intent on being deadlier than the last. I have no idea if Frank is right and Daredevil is wrong. I want to say Frank is right, but I am a goblin, and when I let my instincts make decisions for me I do shit like eating hearts in front of damsels in distress I am trying to rescue.

This brings us to Karen Carpenter’s article today. She did a spread on the “Two Goblins of Flushing.”

She has the writeup on the Green Goblin that was here off and on for the last few years. A psychopath on a bat winged glider who threw literal flaming pumpkin grenades and dropped Police Helicopters on Swat Team armoured cars when he wasn’t raiding high tech laboratories and research institutes for whatever tweaked his little goblin mind. I get that, goblins are driven by territorial need and greed. We are hunters. predators and the go to assholes of the Unseelie Fey when you need dirty jobs done. This guy was maybe a little too deep in Spirit Halloween’s gift section, but he was living the goblin reputation straight down the line.

Then she handled my introduction. She outed Goblin King to the world. I wondered why she had me pose with Punisher and a pile of dead mobsters for her photo. I mean, a pretty girl with a pink Hello Kitty Glock asks you to pose for a picture, you pose for a picture. She called me a “deeply wounded forest creature loose in the city, armed with too much power, too few limits, and a deep seeded need to help people.” She described me as a cross between every hero in a bodice ripper romance novel, and every horror movie monster that ever terrified teenagers playing grab ass in a darkened theater on date night. I mean, she phrased it better, but her picture of my mental health and the gap between my stated mission and my chosen tactics was sobering.

I finished my second helping of the daily four item special. Nothing eats like a goblin whose body had just finished sweating out sixteen bullets. They didn’t stop me, but they didn’t miss me either. They tore me up, and fighting at full power with them inside me burned up energies that didn’t just come back overnight. I was healing, and my spirits were in a downward spiral alongside my fading physical power. I was in a lot of pain, not all of it physical. I was not a soldier anymore, I was not a child anymore. I was not a helpless changeling either. I was the Goblin King, the long stolen magic of my goblin heritage came crashing back into me when my “other half”, the stolen human child who had used my stolen magic to become a Fairy Knight had died in Fairy. The magic that had been his in life, the elven magic that made the Good Neighbors so freaking scary that you didn’t just come out and call them elves because they might hear your words and not be amused, well it came crashing back into me too when my Changeling ass stayed in this realm and didn’t return all the stolen power of our Changeling pair back to Fairy.

I had no idea how to use it, but I would learn. It had saved Karen when I couldn’t. I had turned that into another murder fest because I just didn’t look for any other answer. Maybe there wasn’t, but the fact kept slapping me in the face, I never cared to look.

I looked at the two goblins in the Daily Bugle, the psychopath on the bat wing glider, and the laughing goblin striking what the Punisher called my “gay pirate pose” beside his black, skull covered, looming. Was Karen trying to warn me to figure my shit out before even I couldn’t tell the two pictures apart?

Connie, the owner’s wife and sole waitress of Yaojing Diner came by to take my plate. She looked down on me, smiling. Big eaters make her smile, and I was a growing goblin. “You want some pie? Hong makes the best. It is the only reason I marry him.”

I remembered having “a moment” during Karen’s rescue when I ripped the heart out of one of her attackers and offered it, still beating, to her in my open hand. When she refused it, and me, I ate it in front of her.

I sighed deeply. Then told Connie “Just another coffee Connie. I disappointed a lovely lady the other day, and thus I get no pie.”

She smacked my shoulder hard enough to hurt a mortal, which I was not. “You treat ladies better. If you gay, you treat boys better. You don’t shape up, you will find yourself riding a bat chucking pumpkins at people and wondering why you got no friends.” Connie said, tapping the photo of me as Goblin King.

I winced. I moved her finger to the picture of the Green Goblin and corrected her. “That is this one. The Goblin King tries to help people.”

Connie shook her head. “No difference. They both swoop around hurting normal people, leave bodies in huge piles, and both got no friends.”

I winced again. Connie was way too on point today. I would take the offered coffee, but after that speech, it was going to sit like lead weights in my stomach. I had gotten way too comfortable with stacking bodies as a solution. Not that it was always the wrong solution, but heroes are supposed to only kill when necessary. I had killed because it was easier, I had killed because it was funnier. I had killed because that is as far as I bothered to travel in searching for solutions. Yes I had embraced my Goblin powers, and even made peace of a sort with the ghost of my dead Elven half, I saved my damsel in distress, I saved all the working girls and boys who had been trapped by Tony the Pimp and his gang. I had done some good things, but not once did I even think of anything other than blood as the solution.

I was winning the battle to become the monster I wanted to be, to play superhero here in New York City, but I was losing the war to be the man my mom and dad raised. Bad goblin; no pie.

I sat sipping my coffee, and chewing on my thoughts in Yaojing Diner. I looked at the fox eared long nosed forest goblin on the sign, the trickster spirit who taught the first Ninja how to sneak, and who taught generations of folk heroes how to fight back against the lords and trained warriors who oppressed them. I am the truth behind that legend. I am the goddamned Goblin King. I could do better. I could be better. The Green Goblin was not my future, he was a cautionary tale about those who seek power for its own sake. Shit for all I know, he could be a cousin. I was not just a mama’s boy. I was my mama’s boy. I was the man that grew from the boy my father taught to deal with his anger and his pride. I was a monster, but I was also a man.

Or some shit like that. Sugar would laugh her black ass off at my “naval gazing”. She was a street walker, a survivor of the school of the streets. There was no room for regrets in the deepest part of the shadows of this city. You did what you needed to, looked after those you called your own, and didn’t count the cost. I think the world would be better if she got the power. It was time to get back on the streets, back to completing my education about this jungle called New York. Not just its predators, but its ecosystem. I wanted to be an agent of aid, not a disruption that just brought more violence and suffering to an area that gets shit on by superpowered people of all kinds, and corporate and criminal interests whose weapons are laws and money, and who crush as many in their path as the ones who chuck lightning and cars at each other. I had to bring change without destroying the balance, I had to reduce harm without destroying the ecosystem. I was a line soldier, not an officer, this entire problem was over my pay grade. Of course with mom doing my laundry, on several million in stolen cash, I may be misunderstanding my current pay grade.

Four gentlemen in leather jackets came in. Their blue collared dress shirts and the full sleeve tattoos peaking out of their shirt cuffs matched with the pure Asiatic skin tones and sharp features of the classic sons of Ameretsu. These were Japanese Yakuza. Blue shirted Kobun, or street level enforcers of the local Japanese mob out to spread the good word about their solution to the power vacuum I had created on the streets. Daredevil had been working his way through Madame Gao’s Triad, Punisher had taken out most of the Russian mob and the Central Americans. I had done for poor Tony and his Mafia masters. I guess the Yakuza was ready to welcome all the business that had finally gotten out from under the thumb of organized crime and help them deal with that annoying profit and freedom they hadn’t quite gotten used to.

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Connie sounded terrified but polite as she tried to defuse the situation. Hong had stormed out of the kitchen, thinking it was simply an unruly customer. Now he was clearly terrified in the face of the new masters of the streets of the district. The old fear had a new face, the brief days of sunshine soon to be only a dream as the shadows reached out to drag them back. They were not fighters. They were not rich or powerful. They were just good people in a shitty world. There was no one coming to defend them, and they knew it.

I sighed. Goblin’s are territorial. Soldiers are trained to stand between their people and danger. There was zero chance I would be able to be a good goblin and not start something. At this rate, I would never get pie.

I reached up, and let a little of my goblin magic flow from my finger. I let my darkness and the poisons that can, when I choose, drip from my fang and claw. It smoked and sizzled as it burned in the patterns my will and magic wove into it. I saw the circle form, perhaps twice the size of a big serving platter. A black circle of thorns burned into the plaster and wood of the wall.

Setting my coffee down, I touched my claw to my own flesh and let the acid and poison of it flow into me. I let my guilt and my shame, my pride and my power flow through my skin. They say you can read a Yakuza’s life story in his tattoo if you know enough of their poetry to translate the mythical images into the crimes and battles so referenced. I don’t know their code, but I knew my own story. I let it write itself in my goblin flesh, and let that shadow cover the human seeming of Nick Condon that I wore.

I stripped off my jacket, and undid the buttons at my wrists and chest, letting my shirt hang half open as I approached them.

The Gift of Tongues is something I owe to my inner elf. He may not have left instructions how his Fairy Magic worked, but some things were close enough to instinctive that they still worked for me, and the Gift of Tongues was one of them. In better Japanese than these street Kobun spoke I addressed them.

“Pathetic errand boys, your blindness will cause your grandfather to lose face. He won’t let you cut off your fingers for this offense, he will feed your balls to his koi as a lesson to the rest of his kobun not to drag his name in the sewers, and not to bring war to the steps of his house.” The language rolled off my tongue, and the threat rose up in my voice. My words were polite, but power filled me, sang to me. My fatigue was balanced, my goblin soul sang with the need for killing, for laughter and the bright arterial spray of blood.

They saw what looked like a young Jimmy Cagney in a half buttoned dress shirt staring back at them. The language and threat rolling off me did not compute in their brain, so they tried warning me off. “Stay out of this, gaijin.“ The leader warned. “This is a community matter, outsiders are not welcome.”

I turned to the circle of thorns newly burned into the wall, and ripped my own shirt open, to let the tattoos show. Barbed wire of thorns wrapped my wrists like chains. The battles on my left sleeve were shown in my uniform, the battles in Afghanistan rendered stylistically. The ones on my right showed flashes of those that I had saved, Sugar, Karen, and others who I rescued by chance and by fate since I had come here. It was my chest and belly that drew their eyes. On them, a goblin slaughtered armed men by the score, if you looked close you would see Tony the Pimp, and you might recognize some of the local mob bosses that recently made the paper for getting very dead, some with their hearts ripped out and eaten.

They read the story of my tattoos, and felt the eagerness in my body as I coiled ready to add their faces to the deaths recorded in my flesh, ready to add their fates to my legend. They froze.

“Do you not see the circle of thorns on the wall? Learn this sign. Learn to look for it. Learn to accept that any place and any person that bears it is beyond you, and beyond those you represent. I would hate to see your Grandfather alone, with no sons to keep him safe, no daughter to keep him happy. I would hate to see him die alone and forgotten in a land so far from his birth.” I spoke of their boss as their grandfather, letting them know, that if any of theirs crossed those under the protection of the sign of the Goblin King, that I would slaughter them as I slaughtered everyone who held the power on these streets when I got here.

You could see both Connie and the Yakuza thinking that I was like them, a street soldier of a criminal gang. That I worked for a super powered monster that had cut through the criminal underworld like a bullet through a ballerina suddenly gave them a context for me in their world, gave my words a weight deeper than any threat. I was not a person, I was part of the shadow cast by one of the great predators that ruled the city, and they were simply scavengers that hunted and gathered in the fringes of the shadow of another such figure. It was not theirs to cross such a power, nor to draw their boss into such a confrontation. They understood territory, and the reality of the urban food chain.

I handed a business card to the terrified thug. I let the power of my spirit wash over them, my magic crawling all over their skin like every night terror of their childhood. Their minds filled with visions of fang and claw, echoes of screaming. I was faking nothing. I let them see how they would die, and let them hear the mad wild laughter of the Goblin King in the silence of their minds where there was no deeper shadow for them to hide in.

“If your Grandfather has any questions about where my interests lie, or any need to resolve any issues that may, purely by accident, occur between such noble and civilized figures, he merely has to have one of his policy makers call this number, and one of ours will contact them. There will be the tea and conversation of harmony, rather than entrails and blood spatter of discord between us.”

I wanted to kill them, and it showed. I wanted the violence to explode, because they were no threat to me, and they were daring to threaten people in MY TERRITORY. My inner goblin was little different than their street thug culture. A predator in a sea of prey. By the moon and tree, I was supposed to be more than that, but I may not lie, even to myself. If I was more than that, then I was also that.

Taking the business card, the Yakuza thug whose hands didn’t know what to do with themselves, because they itched to grab a weapon, but knew to even twitch that way was to die, latched onto my business card like a drowning man to a thrown life preserver.

“Gomennasai! Gomennasai!” They Yakuza thugs bowed their asses out the door of the Chinese diner.

I went back to my booth, shirt still open. Connie approached me with the caution she would show a cobra sitting in the same booth. Oddly, she held the coffee carafe in her hand. I took my cup, and held up between both my hands in a bow of respect.

“Ah Connie darling, you are water in the desert, you are the first flower of springtime, you are sin to a young boy’s innocence. I could do with some caffeine right about now.” I said, doing my best to let humour and my smile defuse the situation. I should have used illusion to do the work, but I had burned the tattoos into my flesh with goblin magic. It was pain. It was a testament to prices paid, a memorial to the lost and a warning to the living. It was my journey and my foundation. It was pretty bloody stupid, and pretty much compromised this identity. On the other hand, my mother knew me to be an idiot and still loved me, my father knew I was a goblin and still claimed me as his own. It was more important to remember who I was, than to have an identity to hide in.

Let my enemies find me. What Karen warned me about was losing myself. These tattoos were my map home.

Connie poured my coffee and searched for words.

“We have a little set aside, the tax we paid the community association.” Connie began, talking about what she used to pay Madame Gao’s triad thugs for protection when they ruled here.

“Then treat yourself to a spa day, or get Hong the big range he wants for the kitchen. This place isn’t under the protection of another gang. It is under my protection. I am not a criminal.” I said as I sipped her fine coffee. I said it, and I relaxed, smiling. I am a goblin. I cannot tell a lie. I am not a criminal.

Connie looked at me, then looked again, hard. She searched for something in my face and didn’t find it. “Who are you, really?”

I let the glamour fall away, and grinned back at her, green skin and long fang. Too fine features shared by goblin and elf, but where elves draw upon every love dream of the joyous May morning, mine is drawn from the cold hungry fears of the darkest December night where you fear dawn will never come.

“I am the Goblin King. There are ten thousand things in this city that prey upon good people; hard working people who will never have enough money or enough power to make anyone want to defend them. Those ten thousand things are my prey, but those people; those people are my reason.”

I waited for the screaming. I felt her hand reach out, touching my face, the pointed ears, the green skin harder than sheet steel, the fangs hard and oh so bright in the café light. She pulled her hand back slowly, eyes focusing inward on gods only knows what memories. She turned and walked away. I sipped my coffee and wondered if I would have to find a new restaurant. If I did, it was my mistake, and this place would continue to have my protection. Tonight was about deciding who I was, and what I stood for. It wasn’t about being smart, it was about my soul.

I didn’t notice her return. All I noticed was a slice of pie slide across with my bill. I looked at the bill, the pie was not on it. Just a note in Cantonese. “Faan Lai”, or come back again.

Fuck me gently. I guess I did something right. I was a good goblin. No one got killed.

I got pie.

Only good goblins get pie.

Now I knew what I was, maybe it was time to go find out just what the frog was up with that other goblin. The so called Green Goblin. I mean, I had a decent handle on at least the basics of goblin magic, but I didn’t have even a racial memory shard that implied I got to fly around on a bat or chuck flaming pumpkins at people. I didn’t know enough to say if we were the same thing or not, but now that I was getting a handle on who I was, it was time to meet the other goblins about town and come to some sort of understanding.