The goblins leapt from the boat, taking care not to fall into the bitterly cold water of the river, and dragged it onto the shore. With a series of taps to shoulders, Nar-shesh gathered his crew in a huddle. Harig, stone-footed and stone-faced; fussy Sarsu; Kizurra, bouncing on the balls of his feet with eagerness; and Neraru, stiff and awkward as she always was. Nar-shesh resolved that he’d get them all home safe. “Alright, listen up,” he whispered. “We’re looking for a big building, full of baskets or wooden barrels. It’ll probably stink like pipeweed, you all know what that smells like. We stick together for now — no wandering off.”
Kizurra rolled his eyes at that. “Like we need to be told that. We’re not children.”
“You are a child, though,” Neraru said, confused, and more importantly at normal speaking volume. As one, everyone else turned to shush her. “Sorry,” she whispered, crumpling under their collective glare. “I’ll try to be quiet.”
“Better succeed at being quiet or we’re all fucked,” Kizurra muttered, disdain for the older woman clear in his voice.
“Shut the fuck up, both of you,” Nar-shesh said with a slashing gesture. “Anyway, like I said, we stick together for now. Remember what Persephone said. The first and most important rule is don’t be seen. If we do this right, they won’t even know we were here until morning. Understand?” The other thieves nodded. “Alright, let’s go.”
The waning moon provided more than enough light for the goblins to see, as they crept between the buildings of the plantation. The eeriness of the situation came not from darkness, but the threat of discovery. Karlus Presdjees was no humble homesteader, and his plantation was no simple farm: if the human girl was to be trusted, anywhere from forty to sixty people lived and worked on the plantation. It was practically a village unto itself.
The planter’s house was situated on the crest of a hill overlooking the river. On the far slope, the actual fields of the plantation stretched away for acres. On the river-facing side of the hill were located many of the auxiliary facilities of the plantation — a kiln, a farrier’s workshop, beehives, etc. — and, most importantly, a long and looming dockside warehouse. Nar-shesh figured that had to be where they were keeping the leaf, which was convenient — it was right by the dock. This whole job could be done in half an hour, easy. He motioned for the others to follow him.
The warehouse had a double door wide enough to drive a wagon through, which Nar-shesh supposed they probably did. This door presented their first problem, as it came into view — or rather, the thick iron chain and padlock wrapped around its handles did.
“Motherfucker,” Kizurra hissed, giving voice to the group’s unanimous reaction. “How the hell are we gonna get that open?”
“Check if there’s any other way in,” Nar-shesh said. “Another door, a chimney, anything. Sarsu, you’re on lookout.” A circuit around the building revealed no windows, chimneys, cellar doors, loose boards, or any other obvious methods of ingress.
Nar-shesh paced back and forth in front of the warehouse, wracking his brain for a solution. He refused to be defeated by the very first obstacle. They needed this stuff to help Persephone continue fortifying the dungeon’s meagre defenses. Atop that, he didn’t want to let her down, not after she’d done so much for them already.
The padlock presumably had a key, somewhere, but who knew where they’d keep it on an estate this big, or how they could tell it apart from any of the other keys? Plus, his crew was sneaky, but they weren’t “creep into a sleeping person’s room and steal from right under their nose” sneaky. So, stealing the key was out.
He made another circuit around the building. There had to be something… Hm. “Harig, give me a boost,” he said. The big goblin obligingly leaned against the wall, cupping their hands in front of them. Nar-shesh took a running start and leaped off the provided springboard, scrambling against the planks and shoving his hands upwards. There! His eyes hadn’t deceived him. The eaves didn’t rest flush with the walls: there was a gap of almost a foot, big enough for him to squeeze through. He did so, dropping into the warehouse’s pitch-dark interior.
After a moment, his [Night Vision]-augmented eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness, and he began looking around for the pipeleaf. The warehouse was half-full at most, its contents stacked against the walls. Stacked lumber, buckets of pine tar, coils of rope, crates nailed shut or sitting open and full of various materials — none of which were what he needed. The human girl had said that the leaf would most likely be packed in large wicker baskets. The only such basket Nar-shesh could find in the warehouse was, when he excitedly snatched its lid off, empty. After several minutes of searching, he was forced to admit that there wasn’t any pipeleaf anywhere in the warehouse.
“Shit!” he hissed, kicking a crate hard enough to shift it a few inches. This, of course, hurt his foot, which provoked another round of quiet swearing.
“Nar-shesh! What’s going on in there? Did you find the stuff?” came a hissed whisper from Sarsu through the chained door.
Nar-shesh hobbled over to the door. “No,” he said, simmering with frustration. “It’s not here. Gimme a bit, I’ll come back out.” Climbing up a stack of crates, he wriggled back through the space between the building’s wall and its sloped roof, dropping to the ground outside.
“It wasn’t in there?” Neraru said, eyes wide with shock.
“Nope.”
“Fuck! What the hell do we do now?” Kizurra said. “Do we just leave?”
“No,” Nar-shesh said. “It’s gotta be here somewhere. I’m not going back empty-handed. Split up, check the other buildings.”
And so, check the other buildings they did. None of the outbuildings or workshops in back of the plantation house held what they sought, although the goblins did pocket useful things here and there — a steel razor, a half-full jar of honey, a handful of nails, and the like. A few of the other buildings were locked, but the majority were not. The humans didn’t seem to have posted any sentry or set a night watch, either, so the goblins were able to go about mostly unimpeded.
It actually started to annoy Nar-shesh, the blithe self-assurance that the lack of security spoke of. Planter’s Bend was only a few days' travel from the frontier of human settlement, but even that tiny buffer seemed to be enough for the humans to relax and luxuriate in their ill-gotten gains. The humans had bullied, crowded, and murdered the goblins out of lands they’d called home for generations. Already, after a few short years, the thought that they might face any real consequences for this — that the goblins were still here, that they might push back against the humans’ greed, that their anger meant anything at all — wasn’t even concerning enough to keep the human settlers up at night.
He did have one close call, opening a workshop door to be greeted by a loud snarling sound. When no beast emerged to attack him, though, he cautiously peered into the room. The sound repeated, but this time he could see that it had come from a human, snoring ferociously as he slept among his tools. Nar-shesh carefully closed the door again. Best to let sleeping humans lie.
Checking all of the outbuildings took an hour or more. The goblins reconvened at the edge of the empty vegetable gardens, immediately behind the main house. Energy and morale were both fading, Nar-shesh could tell. “Okay,” he said. “There’s still the other half of the grounds to check. If we really can’t find anything, we’ll go home. Just hang in there until then.” That got him an unenthusiastic round of nods, but he’d take what he could get.
“What about the big house?” Neraru asked, pointing up at it where it sat atop the hill.
Nar-shesh looked at it. The planter’s house was, by goblin standards, a massive construction. A wide, shallow two-story rectangle with a wood-shingled roof, it loomed large against the night sky, lightless glass-paned windows staring like empty eyesockets. “Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “You know how humans are. Everything in its own place on the Chain. They wouldn’t keep it where they sleep, even if it is valuable to them. We steer clear of the buildings they actually live in.”
Carefully, warily, they crept over the crest of the hill, giving the house a wide berth — if there was anywhere on the plantation that had guard dogs, or an alarm formation, or someone with an intruder-detecting skill, it would be where the master of the place slept. The crescent moon overhead, they looked out over an expanse of fields big enough to swallow the mountain village they’d abandoned a dozen times over. Empty now, their crop of pipeleaf already harvested, they were eerie in their vast desolation.
“There,” Nar-shesh said, pointing to a cluster of buildings off to the side of the farmland, near the treeline. From Pacifica’s descriptions, those were the actual farm buildings - barns, stables, and the workers’ cabins. Among them, too, were the curing sheds where pipeleaf was aged and dried after it was harvested. “We’ll check the curing sheds. If the stuff’s not there, we’ll go home.”
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“That’s right next to where the workers sleep,” Harig said. “Better be extra quiet.” As one, the others turned to look at the large goblin’s mutated stone feet, which had been making audible thumping noises this whole time despite their best efforts to be stealthy. Harig did not dignify this skeptical scrutiny with a response, and began plodding across the fields. The others followed.
With no shelter to break its momentum, the cold night breeze tore at them as they crossed the fields. Nar-shesh merely shivered, but his lower-level compatriots cursed and drew their fur-lined mantles closer about themselves.
The doors of the curing shed groaned loudly as the goblins pulled them open. Everyone froze at the sound, panicked grimaces on their faces. Nar-shesh hurriedly motioned everyone through the narrow opening, eyes and ears wide for any sign they’d broken the humans’ slumber.
Inside, blessedly, they found what they were looking for. Half a dozen great wicker bins, the size of a full-grown goblin or bigger, sat in the shed. Neraru pulled the lid off of one and reached inside, drawing out a brown rope of cured pipeleaf. “This is it!” she said excitedly - and, again, at normal volume. The chorus of shushes this time was even more emphatic and irate. “Sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered, face crumpling in dismay. She hit herself several times in the head, hard. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she hissed, tears in her eyes. She only stopped when Harig caught her arm in a gentle grip.
“We don’t have time for that,” they said, not unkindly. “Come on, let’s-” They tried to heft one of the baskets and grunted in surprise as it barely moved. “Hrgh! Let’s- wow, these are heavy. We’re gonna need all of us just to carry one of ‘em.”
A brief period of experimental tugging and dragging showed that Harig was correct. However, even with four goblins hefting the basket at once, moving it was challenging and awkward. They managed to make it out of the shed, the door groaning loudly once again as Nar-shesh dragged it open wide enough to accommodate the basket, and about ten yards into the field before Sarsu tripped and sent the whole group tumbling to the ground.
“This is not working,” he panted, on his back in the mud.
“Yeah, no shit,” Kizurra said, breathing heavily, hands on his knees. “We gotta figure out a better way to move this stuff.”
“We could maybe… do it like hunters with a deer?” Neraru said, knotting and unknotting her fingers anxiously. “Like, if we get some long sticks, and-”
“-Put ‘em through the handles, so we can all carry it on our shoulders,” Nar-shesh said, snapping his fingers and pointing at her. She nodded, a relieved smile on her face at being understood. “Good idea. Look around, see if we can find anything.” Cautiously, they all crept back towards the farm buildings. It didn’t take long to find, in one of the barns, a collection of hoes, rakes, and other such implements. Nar-shesh grabbed two, passing one of them to Harig. As he turned to leave, he saw Kizurra attempting to awkwardly cram a fifth pole under his arm alongside the four others already there. “What are you doing?” he hissed.
“They’ve got metal heads! Metal’s valuable!” Kizurra hissed back, gesturing at what was admittedly a near fortune for the metal-poor goblins.
“We have a realmheart!” Nar-shesh said. “She can literally just make us as whatever we need!”
“Then how come we had to go steal the pipeleaf?” As Kizurra swept his arm to emphasize his point, the poles clutched under his other arm collided with those still stacked against the wall. The goblins watched in horrified slow-motion as they tipped, slid, and finally clattered loudly to the ground.
From somewhere nearby, a dog began barking.
Nar-shesh bolted for the door, and the abandoned bin of pipeleaf beyond it. The other goblins were hot on his heels. “I am going to fucking castrate you if we make it out of this alive,” he growled at Kizurra as they ran. “Come on, hurry!” In a frantic scramble, the poles were slid through the bin’s handles and subsequently hefted atop the group’s shoulders. Moving with as much haste as they could under the weight of their burden, the goblins fled back across the empty fields up the hill. Bringing up the rear, Nar-shesh cast frequent looks over his shoulder, expecting to see angry humans boiling out of their houses at any moment. However, after a minute or so of barking, the dog quieted down. If it had woken anyone up, it didn’t seem like it had managed to also get them out of bed. “Alright, wait, slow down,” he said. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s chasing us.”
The other goblins came to an immediate halt, setting their burden down with a heavy thump. They took a moment to catch their breath, puffing clouds of steam into the chilly night air.
They then took several more moments.
“We feeling good?” Nar-shesh asked dryly once his patience had been exhausted. “Ready to get moving, or do we want to spend some more time sitting around in the middle of a wide-open field with a bunch of stolen shit, deep in enemy territory?”
“Easy for you to say, you’re not carrying a million pounds of pipeleaf!” Kizurra said. “How’s that fair?”
“Well, think about it this way. Do you want the strongest and deadliest person in the group to literally have his hands full if things start going badly, or do you want him free to pull your asses out of the fire?” Nar-shesh said, an eyebrow raised in challenge.
Kizurra just grumbled at that, and shouldered his pole again.
They made it back down the hill to the canoe without further incident. The boat rocked in the riverside mud as they dropped the leaf-bin into it with a collective groan of relief. As the others caught their breath, rubbing at their aching shoulders and backs, Nar-shesh was deep in thought.
“We’re going back in,” he announced after a bit.
“What? Why?” Sarsu looked alarmed and confused. “We got what we came for.”
“No, we didn’t. Persephone didn’t say she needed a lot of pipeleaf, she said she needed as much pipeleaf as possible. There’s still room in the canoe,” Nar-shesh said. “We’re going back. One more basket, and then we’re done.”
None of the others seemed enthusiastic about this plan, shifting uneasily where they stood or sat but making no motion to start back up the hill. The message was clear: they didn’t think it was a good idea, and he didn’t have the social standing to compel them to obey despite that.
Nar-shesh sighed. “Look, yeah, we could leave now. Going back for another load is a risk. But when the
There was a beat of silence as the others considered what he’d said. Then, almost moving as one, they rose from their rest and started trudging up the hill. Nar-shesh didn’t smile, because this wasn’t a smiling sort of night, but he did let out a brief snort of satisfaction as he turned to lead his band of reluctant thieves.
As they jogged across the empty fields toward the curing shed, the dog began to bark again. Nar-shesh could feel the others hesitate. “If it didn’t wake them up last time, it’s not gonna wake them up this time,” he told them. “Come on, let’s make this quick.”
It seemed at first as though Nar-shesh was right. Despite the dog’s intermittent barks, stopping and starting as though some blearily half-awake human was repeatedly shushing it, no one emerged from the workers’ cabins to catch the goblins in the act. They hefted another basket of pipeleaf on the poles, grunting with the effort, and began to make their way back to the boat.
As they emerged from the curing shed back into the night, the goblins heard the sound of a door opening. They turned to see a groggy human man stumble from his cabin, scratching at his stubble. “
“Go! Go go go!” Nar-shesh whispered to the others, gesturing wildly. The growing racket obscuring the sounds of their footsteps, they hurried away from the farmstead towards the fields.
Their streak of luck, already stretched beyond all plausibility, had to break eventually, though. The inevitable break occurred when Anna, the restless dog’s owner, threw her own door open, intending to tear her fellow farmhand a new hole for not minding his own business. She was carrying a portable magelight, a wooden wand carved with a formation and tipped with a crystal lens. Pouring more of her azoth than she meant to into the wand, she cast a blindingly bright beam of light right into her angry neighbour’s face - and past it, out into the night. Whatever she’d been about to say went unsaid as, eyes widening, she raised a hand, pointed over the man’s shoulder at where Nar-shesh and the others were hurrying across the field, and yelled “Goblins!!”
She yelled this, as one might expect, very loudly.
Immediately, a system notification chimed for each of the goblins — and, more importantly, for every human on Presdjees’ plantation, loud enough to wake them from their slumber.
Event Quest: Goblin Raid
Goblins are attacking! Repel these monstrous thieves and defend your homes.
Conditions (Humans):
* Kill goblins. Goblins slain: 0
* Repel goblin incursion.
Conditions (Goblins):
* Kill or capture humans. Humans slain/captured: 0/0
* Loot valuables. Current loot value: 44.5s
* Damage structures. Current damage value: 0.06s
“Motherfuck!” Kizurra said, puffing and panting as they ran. “Didn’t wake them up before, you said. Won’t wake them up now, you said. How’s that fucking workin’ out for ya, Nar-shesh?!”
“Save… your breath…” Sarsu said in between strained gasps. “For running!”