The humans cautiously ventured up the ramp to my still-under-construction hill fort. Their leader was a tall, thin woman with pale skin and reddish-blonde hair. The system informed me that she was Temperance Blackwater - Lv. 5 Human Mage. I inferred from the size of the fireball she was holding at the ready that she was probably the one who’d tried to barbecue Striga. That didn’t fill me with warm and fuzzy feelings towards her, but I reminded myself that it had been self-defense. Not even technically self-defense, just straight up self-defense.
That was what complicated this situation. This angry mob of humans obviously hadn’t come in peace. They carried a variety of improvised weapons, pitchforks and billhooks and such. If it hadn’t been broad daylight, I’m sure they’d have been carrying torches as well. While I wouldn’t tolerate attempts to harm my goblins, or me, from their perspective a dangerous animal had wandered out of the woods and attacked someone. If Striga weren’t my minion, I wouldn’t think anything more of it than I would of fish-and-game agents putting down a bear or cougar that had been attacking people — tragic, but not unreasonable. I therefore couldn’t say that, at this point, they’d done anything wrong. If anything, I was the guilty party here, which was one of the reasons I was hiding from them.
Killing people who hadn’t done anything wrong and hadn’t attacked me yet didn’t sit right with me. However, secrecy was my greatest defense at this stage. If I let them go, and they ran off to tell everyone about the weird hill that had appeared out of nowhere in the woods, I’d probably have parties of adventurers knocking down my door in no time. Not that I had a door, yet. I made a mental note to correct that later.
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A prickling sensation crept down the back of Temperance’s neck as the mob neared the mound. It was like the air before a thunderstorm, like being watched. Her [Fireball] threw off sparks, its color going washed-out and pale for a moment before returning to normal.
“There’s something nearby,” she and Old Thomas said at the same time. They shot each other a glance of surprise. Temperance continued. “You all saw what happened to the fire just now,” she said, gesturing with the hand holding the blaze. “Means there’s something strange with the world's azoth here.”
“Witchcraft,” Jens the miller’s son gasped.
“Not necessarily, lad,” Old Thomas said. “Could be we’re near a place touched by the spirits, or there’s a rare treasure hidden nearby.” He scratched his beard. “O’course, could also be there’s a high-level monster about, or it’s witchcraft,” he conceded.
There was a general shuffling of unease at that. Temperance shot the old hunter a filthy look. “Anyway, be on your guard,” she said, and began striding towards the hill. She pointedly did not look back to see if the others were following her.
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“They’re climbing the hill now,” I said. [Walk and Talk] allowed me to give the goblins a blow-by-blow of what was happening above, while still planning my defense.
“So, wait, you took a skill that makes peoples’ teeth fall out and then forgot about it?” Malik said, raising a skeptical eyebrow.
“I didn’t forget about it,” I protested. “I was just so caught up in the excitement of cool mutations that I neglected to consider the ethical implications!”
“You get how that’s not better, right?” he said flatly, hand on his hip.
“Is this really the right time to be having this conversation?” Nar-shesh hissed. “Can it not wait until the humans are gone?”
“I can have this conversation and keep an eye on the humans at the same time,” I said to Nar-shesh in what I hoped was a reassuring tone. “I took a skill for it.”
“Does this skill also make people’s teeth fall out?” Enlil-itu asked excitedly, struggling against Harig’s firm grip around their midsection.
“No, it just-” If I still had a nose, I would be pinching the bridge of it. “No. Okay, so [Mutagenic Domain] creates a small chance of mutation for living things the longer they spend in my domain. It also gives all of my minions a slightly bigger chance of mutating every time they level up. Based on my experiments so far, that’s about a 10% mutation chance on level-up.”
“Should you be telling us all this?” Ergiza asked nervously.
“I should have told you about this before I even got the skill!” I said. “Fuck, I’m such… I am so sorry, you guys, really. I didn’t mean to start changing your bodies without your consent, and I totally understand if you don’t want to stay here now, or if you do we can figure something out where you’ve got a safe place to stay that’s not actually in my domain…” I trailed off awkwardly. “Why are you all looking at me like that?”
The goblins wore facial expressions ranging from awkward confusion to nervous embarrassment to exasperation that I was missing the point. “I was mostly just giving you shit about the teeth thing,” Malik said, by way of explanation. “We’re all — I mean, maybe it’s different for realmhearts, I don’t know — but mutation is like… It’s weird, sure, and not all that common, but people will mutate. Like, I had a cousin on my mom’s side who ate a weird herb and then he grew these gill-fronds, like a salamander.” He held his wrist against the corner of his jaw, hand bent backwards, and wiggled his fingers to pantomime external gills.
“Mutation is one of the Mother’s gifts to her children,” Sarsu said, hand pressed over his heart. “Or a sign of a spirit’s favor. It is a holy thing — allowing us to become what we must! And a mark of superiority over the humans, besides, bound by the Chain as they are.”
“Talking about your skills like that is bad, though, sainted elder sister,” said Immir-shesh the basket-weaver, holding up a lecturing finger. “Skills are a mystery. It’s improper: you must make the necessary observances first.”
“That’s a bunch of
“Yeah, shut the fuck up, man,” Nar-shesh said. “That’s just superstition that the lodges spread to maintain their power.”
“That’s rich coming from you. Maybe if your father had kept the skill taboos, a plague wouldn’t have killed most of the village,” Immir-shesh said with a smirk. Wow, I was starting to see why Ergiza didn’t get along with her cousin. From the number of angry exclamations coming from the other goblins, and the way people physically moved so they weren’t sitting next to him, I guessed that I wasn’t the only one who thought that was too far.
Or maybe they were just trying to get out of the way, because Nar-shesh had leapt from his seat and crossed the room in a blink of an eye, winding up for a haymaker that sent Immir-shesh sprawling. I saw another tooth leave the basket-weaver’s mouth, arcing through the air trailing droplets of blood. Man, what was it with today and teeth? “You wanna fucking say that again?!” Nar-shesh yelled, continuing to hammer on the other goblin.
Malik had joined in as soon as he’d seen what was happening, steadying himself against the cavern wall with his good arm as he aimed a kick at Immir-shesh’s ribs. “Fucking asshole! I didn’t see you doing shit!”
As amusing as that was to watch, I couldn’t help but feel we had other problems at the moment. “Hey, hey, guys! Break it up! Break it up!” I yelled. “Kick him to death later. I still have questions.” Chest heaving, with a snarl of fury still on his face, Nar-shesh backed off. Malik followed, with a smirk even smugger than the one Immir-shesh had just gotten wiped off his face. “Immir-shesh, you go sit in the corner.” I carved a circle on the floor with [Dungeon Domain] to illustrate where I wanted him. Moving gingerly and holding his ribs, he complied. I imagined he was just glad to be out of arm’s reach of the others. “Alright, thank you. Fucking hell. Ergiza!” Ergiza’s head snapped up from where she’d been tending to her baby, predictably upset by all the noise. “Nevermind, sorry, carry on with the baby,” I said. “Someone who’s not Ergiza! Explain to me what the skill taboo is.”
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“I mean, it’s just…you’re not supposed to talk too much about your skills,” Teekas said, enunciating slowly and carefully around her new razor-sharp teeth. “Um. What they do in general terms is okay, and what they’re called. But the specifics, or how you got them, you usually shouldn’t share — at least, not directly.”
“Why not?” I asked.
Teekas shrugged. “It’s just private, I guess? And people say it’s bad luck. The Heavens will punish you if you speak too freely about the mysteries.”
“Oh, is that what the whole heresy thing is about?” I asked. All of the goblins immediately got very quiet, wide-eyed and with mouths either stretched in a grimace or pursed in a wince. A system notification dinged across my feed.
Warning! You have gained heresy. This will have consequences.
…Bruh.
“Ooookay then! Forget I just said that. Let’s move on.” Nar-shesh had been perfectly willing to discuss and explain his skills with me earlier: I’d assumed that was normal, but I was now getting the impression that he was something of an iconoclast among his people. I’d ask him about it later. I didn’t want to put him on blast in front of everyone like this, without knowing what the social consequences for him might be. “What’s a mystery?”
They all goggled at me again. “I told you she had abnormal standards,” Malik muttered to Nar-shesh. Sarsu looked like he was about to have an aneurysm, which I supposed was understandable. If I was correctly inferring the situation I’d put myself in here, it was a bit like a Catholic saint showing up, doing a miracle, and then asking “so who’s this Jesus guy y'all keep talking about?”
Ergiza took pity on me at this point and chimed in. “They’re like… sacred things. Secrets of the Chain, that can’t be talked about freely without inviting disaster. The cult lodges were all formed to keep their particular mysteries. They have rituals and safeguards that can protect their initiates.”
“Huh. Okay. Tell me more about the lodges. Are any of you initiates? Am I allowed I ask that?”
Several goblins raised their hands - Ergiza, Immir-shesh, Sarsu, and an elderly goblin I hadn’t spoken to yet. “About half of a tribe would be initiated into at least one lodge, ordinarily,” Ergiza said. “But the plague threw all that into chaos. Whole lodges were wiped out. The Obsidian Grail Lodge… well, I shouldn’t talk about it, but it wasn’t possible anymore for me to be initiated any deeper into the mysteries than I already was.” From the way her lips trembled as she spoke, I inferred it was a sore spot for her.
If the lodges were keepers of knowledge about the system and its workings, then I needed to learn as much from them as possible. I’d have to make reaching out to other goblin settlements an agenda item for the future, once I’d sufficiently consolidated my position here. I doubted that the hierophants of these mystery cults be willing to help me for free — but given what Nar-shesh had already told me about goblin experience growth rates, maybe I could entice them with the prospect of free power-levelling in return for their assistance.
Something was still bugging me, though. “Are you all really okay with the mutations?” I asked. “Like, what if you get a mutation you don’t like?”
“What if you get born with a face you don’t like?” Immir-shesh said with a sneer from his time-out corner. “That’s life. Why whine about it?”
“The gifts of the Mother are not for us to question,” Sarsu said. “Instead, one should contemplate the truth of their circumstances in order to understand the purpose of their gifts in their life, and trust in Her benevolence.”
“Power’s power,” Kizurra said. “You can’t afford to refuse anything that’ll help you survive, in this bitch of a world.”
I looked at Teekas. She was gingerly probing her new teeth with a finger. I couldn’t read her facial expression. Admittedly, this was partially because she was making a weird face as she poked around in her mouth, but still — I worried. I should have felt relieved, I guess, that the goblins didn’t perceive my negligence with regards to their bodily autonomy to be a problem or a transgression. I didn’t, though. I realized that it made me uncomfortable, even if it didn’t bother them. It wasn’t my place to stomp all over their cultural understanding of mutation, but I had to make some kind of effort, for my own sake. “Okay, well, if you do stay, and if anyone gets a mutation they don’t like, I’ll do my best to fix it for you. In fact, if any of you have anything you don’t like about your bodies, I’ll try to fix it for you.”
Enlil-itu raised a hand excitedly. “I wanna be taller!”
“Denied,” I said immediately, while their older sibling gently but firmly dragged their hand back down. “You’re still growing, I don't wanna accidentally fuck up your bones or something. Ask me again in a few years.”
“Can we please stop talking about this and focus on the human problem?” Nar-shesh said, dragging his hands down his face. “Or at least let me start hitting Immir-shesh again.”
“Hit him later, I need you ready in case we have to fight the humans,” I said. “And speaking of which, they appear to be… Hm.”
Well, that wasn’t ideal.
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The mob had initially stuck close together as they advanced onto the hill, at Temperance’s snappish command. Splitting up was a good way to get picked off by goblin ambushes, or stumble into their traps. When they’d reached the camp without being attacked, though, and without seeing hide nor hair of any goblins, discipline had started to slip. When James had broken off, like the damn fool he was, to go look at something or other, that had spelled the end of Temperance’s grip on the party. The group had dissolved, wandering away in twos and threes to investigate various parts of the abandoned campsite as took their fancy. Only Old Thomas stuck by Temperance, standing over the embers of the campfire.
“Ashes’re still warm,” Thomas said, rubbing them between his fingers. “Whoever was here, they haven’t been gone long.”
“How many of them were there?” Temperance asked. “And more importantly, where’d they go?”
“Not sure yet,” the old hunter said. His eyes glinted yellow as he activated [Tracking]. “I’ll need to have a look around.”
“Do that then,” Temperance said brusquely. “I have to go see what my damn fool husband thinks he’s doing.” She strode off, leaving Old Thomas to peer at the ground as he stepped carefully through the campsite.
James looked up at her as she approached. “Jens found something,” he said, gesturing at the ground before the two men. “Turned earth.”
Temperance looked down at two patches of disturbed earth, side-by-side, each about five feet by three. “And?” she asked.
“Well, we got to thinking, James and I,” said Jens. “About what Old Thomas was saying, how it could be a rare treasure nearby what’s making your spell go all weird. So we thought, why not dig it up and see what’s what?” He grinned triumphantly.
Temperance looked at him, then at her husband, then at the two patches of earth. “You think there’s buried treasure here,” she said skeptically. “Just like that. I remind you, both of you-” She shot a look at James. “That we’re out here hunting for that owl-monster and whatever made it, not looking for buried treasure. Who’d even leave treasure out here? Bloody goblins? And weren’t you sniveling not ten minutes ago about witchcraft?”
“Well, yeah, but that was before the prospect of buried treasure entered the mix,” Jens said, looking very proud of himself for his adaptability. “Come on, aren’t you curious? Besides, maybe it’s buried treasure what mutated that owl!”
Temperance pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed heavily, resisting the urge to cuff Jens about the ear. “So you plan to dig up a possibly-cursed goblin artifact that mutated an owl into a dog-murdering child-thieving monster?”
Jens nodded with puppyish enthusiasm. “Yup!”
“Gods above, woman, are you never happy with anything?” James grunted. “It’s not as though there’s anything else going on out here.”
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Apparently, one of the humans had brought a shovel as his improvised angry-mob weapon. I noticed this because the humans were currently in the process of digging up the graves that Nar-shesh had spent several hours on yesterday, for the two goblins that had been cut down by human adventurers before reaching my cave. I had no idea what they were hoping to accomplish by digging up goblin graves, but it wasn’t the sort of behavior I wanted to encourage.
One thing that interested me about this human incursion was that they hadn’t been attacked by any of the empowered minions scattered around my domain. The owls were asleep, the mushquirrel was gathering nuts to use as fertilizer for its fungal garden, the snake was in its burrow digesting its last meal, the tree was a tree, and so on. Minionization didn’t seem to have changed their instinctive behaviors at all: they were skittish around humans, even though they had the majority of the party beat cold on levels. The only exceptions were Temperance the fire-mage, at level 5, and Old Thomas the Hunter, at level 7. It was possible I could command my animal minions to attack with [The Heart Speaks], but that would give the game away. An invisible booming voice in the woods, shouting orders at the mutated animals attacking you? Noteworthy, to say the least.
So, with commanding my minions apparently not an option (mumble grumble fucking ripoff [Bind Minion] etc. etc.), I needed some other way to deter the grave-desecration in progress. What to do…