“I don’t see anything,” Teekas said, peering down into the pool of dark water.
“I could only see it out of my left eye,” Malik said. Teekas turned her head to the side, either in confusion or to try it herself, before doing a double-take and whipping her head back up to look at Malik, who was grinning widely. He winked at her with his right eye: his left, as it had been since birth, was shrunken and blind.
“Har har,” she said dryly. “You’re hilarious.”
“I’m so glad you noticed. But in all seriousness, I can’t see anything either,” Malik said.
The goblins were currently clustered around one of the small, deep ponds in my cavern layer, peering into its depths. It was pitch-dark in the cave; all a human would have been able to see was the [Night Vision]-shine of goblin eyes in the dark. Even with [Night Vision], though, my newest minion was proving elusive. I knew it was there, I could feel it as it slithered in the lightless water, but I had no way to actually get it to show itself. No amount of coaxing in Apophic, nor undignified kissy-noises, had been successful.
These sorts of performance issues would have been embarrassing if I’d been paying more than a fraction of my attention to the cave pool crowd. However, I wasn’t: the majority of my attention was on Teenage Edgelord and his +1 Crossbow of Premature Discharge. My goal was to separate him, and his abominable disregard for weapon safety, from the crossbow before he hurt someone. At the moment, Edgelord was still sitting around the fire, crossbow in his arms, brooding. He shot an occasional glare at the others, deeper in the cavern, but he was alone — just as planned.
See, the problem wasn’t just getting the crossbow away from the kid. I could take it from him easily. Hell, I could just kill him. I didn’t want to kill him, though, and if I just yanked it away from him, that would definitively and permanently set the tone of our interactions going forward. He had no family among the other goblins as far as I could tell — there was a good chance he’d watched his parents get murdered within the past 48 hours. He was a scared kid, clutching frantically (if unsafely and antisocially) to any security he could grasp. If I tore that away from him, I immediately became just another threat: he would never trust me. If he stayed here, unable to trust me and therefore unable to let his guard down and participate in the life of the community, he would become increasingly socially isolated. Either he would leave, exiling himself to an uncertain fate, or tensions would mount until he lashed out with more than words. Needless to say, neither of those were acceptable outcomes to me.
If using my vastly superior power to crush all resistance wasn’t on the table, that left only one real option: talking to him.
Ughhhhhhhhhh.
“Hey man,” I said, doing my best to speak quietly. From the way a few heads turned towards me among the goblins watching the pool, I only partly succeeded. I probably needed to hurry it up before any of them got bored and wandered back over, putting themselves back in the danger zone. “What’s your name?”
The kid didn’t look up from his bolt-whittling. “What’s it to ya,” he said defiantly.
“Well, I’ve been mentally referring to you as ‘that asshole,’ so I figured I should offer you the option to be called something else if you wanted,” I said. No! Bad Persephone! Bad! That was not a helpful contribution to the conversation!
That Asshole snorted — either dismissively or in amusement, I couldn’t tell which — at that. “Whatever.”
“Anyway, I noticed that you were shooting that crossbow sort of casually just now. I’m worried that you might accidentally hurt someone with it,” I said, forging on determinedly and hoping my friendly tone of voice wasn’t too strained.
“I’m not gonna accidentally hurt anyone with it,” he said, placing particular emphasis on the word ‘accidentally.’ He slotted another bolt into his crossbow and began winding it. “Maybe get off my case about it, huh?”
I chose to ignore the veiled threat for the time being. “You know, even if you don’t hit someone directly, the bolts could ricochet or shatter and hurt someone. What safety measures are you taking to make sure you don’t accidentally hurt anyone?”
“I’m not taking any safety measures because I don’t need to take any safety measures because I’m not an idiot,” he snapped. “Mind your own fucking business and don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”
I probably should have anticipated it would turn out like this. He wasn’t even arguing about safety, really: this was pure pushback against a perceived threat to his social standing and autonomy. The conversation was effectively over at this point; there’d be no getting through to him. As if to emphasize my complete failure at Engaging With The Youth, he angrily stood from the log, crossbow in arms, and started stomping off towards the stairs to the surface.
An idea occurred to me. It was a little bit mean, and not entirely safe, but it might just do the trick. As he took a step, the rock where he was about to set his foot down grew mirror-smooth and slick with suddenly-condensed moisture. I managed to finish tilting it at an angle just as he put his weight on it. His foot went out from under him, and with a yelp, limbs flailing, he fell. The loaded crossbow went off as his hand tightened around the trigger in a reflexive search for something to hold onto, and a bolt zinged against the shaft wall, ricocheting twice before embedding itself in the floor inches from his head. It literally could not have been more perfectly timed, comedically speaking.
Yikes, he did almost die there, though. Not ideal.
As Teenage Edgelord/That Asshole/whatever-his-name-was laid on his back, staring goggle-eyed at the crossbow bolt that had narrowly missed him, I said in what I hoped was a dry but non-judgemental tone “I’m gonna take the crossbow now. You can have it back later.”
“Yeah,” he said meekly. “Sure. Sounds good.”
Any further conversation was cut off by a shriek of alarm from the goblins gathered around the cave pool.
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“This is boooooring,” Enlil-itu whined. The young goblin dramatically sagged and rolled their eyes. “There’s nothing in there!”
“If Persephone said there’s something in there, then there’s something in there,” their older sibling Harig said, tugging on Enlil-itu’s pointed ear for emphasis. “...It is getting boring, though,” they acknowledged phlegmatically after a moment.
“What if we threw some food in there?” another goblin proposed. At the suggestion, all eyes turned to the fauxtato that Teekas was still munching on.
Teekas clutched the food closer to herself defensively. “Fine, but just a little bit,” she said. “I’m still eating.”
“You tore off a piece of it to throw at me, like, just a second ago,” Malik said.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“That was that and this is this,” Teekas said, turning her nose up primly. She pinched off a tiny fragment of vegetable matter and held it over the pool. It left her fingers and began to fall towards the water.
Just before it hit the water, there was an explosion of motion. A column of inky darkness erupted from the depths of the pool. The scrap of fauxtato vanished into a vortex of gleaming white teeth: the vortex continued upwards, unheeding and unsated, in search of bigger prey. Teekas felt a sting at her fingertip as she reflexively yanked her hand back, the razor-edge of a tooth opening her skin as she grazed it.
A shape hung in the air for a moment, looming above the goblins, a wet coil of black muscle terminating in a mouth ringed with concentric circles of triangular teeth. Multiple people yelped in surprise, scrambling away from the pool. Then, the dungeon’s new minion fell back into the water with a great splash. As Teekas picked herself up from where she’d stumbled backwards, she saw a status bar for a Giant Cave Lamprey - Lv. 5 appear over the pool, circling to and fro with the coiling motions of the monster beneath. A glowing eye-symbol, rapidly dimming, next to the status bar indicated a creature that had broken, but was re-entering, concealment.
“Oh, shit, is everyone alright? What happened?” Persephone asked.
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What a clusterfuck. I’m convinced that most of the goblins think I was playing a cruel prank, luring them around the pool to potentially get eaten. My giant cave lamprey almost killed Teekas! I didn't blame them, I wouldn't have bought my suspiciously vague excuse of “I was distracted doing something else" either. The ones that don’t think I was toying with them probably think I’m an idiot. I think I’m an idiot. Stupid- go and lecture some dipshit kid about gun safety, and I almost kill him trying to prove my point, and then fucking immediately someone almost gets their arm chewed off because I didn’t think-
I wanted to scream. Oh, I wanted to scream.
When I was in my old body, I had a hard time crying. Even after I started hormones, it never really got easier for me the way some other girls said it did for them. I had so much tension, so much fear of showing any weakness, that I physically could not make myself relax enough to express grief, or sadness, or even confusion. It was a stifling feeling, like I was a prisoner in myself.
This felt like that, but worse. I couldn't cry. I couldn't scream, not the way I wanted to: creating sound with my domain through [The Heart Speaks] was nothing like actually talking. I couldn't punch my pillow or hurl empty beer bottles into a dumpster or take deep breaths or any of the half-dozen other ways I'd tried to physically exorcise the emotions that at times threatened to totally overwhelm me. I couldn't even wield my domain to knock some trees over or blow craters in the earth or collapse this whole stupid cave right on top of myself, because it might hurt the fucking goblins!
It was just… all catching up with me at once. I couldn't even muster the attention to check out my lamprey's stats or start levelling Teekas or study the light-crystal on the fallen adventurer's crossbow. I was full to bursting, full to choking. I was trapped in this body, a million miles from home and so, so alone — except for these fragile, so terrifyingly fragile and mortal creatures that were probably in more danger from me than from anything I was trying to protect them from. I'd been scrabbling for control, for any illusion of security, just as much as Teenage Edgelord had been, and now just like him it had slipped through my fingers. These feelings rose up and rose up within me, with no way to let them out.
I felt like I was going insane. Maybe I was. There was only one thing I could think of that might let me get a grip on myself. I had to take drastic action.
“Nar-shesh?" I said, doing my best to keep my voice level and calm. “Could I see you in the heart chamber, please?"
Nar-shesh looked up from the woven-rush sleeping mat he'd been helping another goblin repair, and wordlessly padded over through my lightless caverns, steering well clear of the lamprey's pool as he went. In a moment, he stood before me, looking up at my heart-body. “What's up, boss?" he asked.
“Nar-shesh," I began, before trailing off awkwardly. Come on, girl. Now or never. I really didn't want to do this, but I didn't see any viable alternative. Deep breath. Let's go. “Could I… have a hug?"
He blinked. If I had lungs, I would have been holding my breath. “Uh, yeah, sure," he said. “Is this like a test? Because I'm not sure I can scale that pillar."
Ah, right. I would need to lower my physical defenses as well as my emotional ones. My pillar sank into the pool, and a bridge of stone rose likewise. Nar-shesh approached my core and sat next to it. “Like this okay?" he asked, wrapping his arms as far around my circumference as their length would allow. I was larger and bulkier than his entire body, in this form.
“Watch the spike cluster near your hip," I said. “I don't want to-"
“Ouch!" he hissed, as aforesaid sea-urchin-like black growth jabbed him in the side.
“Yeah, that."
He shifted to a spike-free position without further complaint. “How's this?" he asked, giving me a squeeze.
It was…indescribably comforting.
“You could squeeze harder," I said. He did, and that was even more comforting than the potentially record-setting comfort I'd already derived from the hug. I let myself enjoy it for a few seconds more. “Thank you," I said at last. “Sorry.”
He released the hug, still leaning against me, and gave a one-armed shrug. “You said earlier that the system took your whole life from you.”
“Yeah,” I said, hesitantly. Internally, I debated how much I wanted to tell him, if he probed for more details. I didn’t know what there was to be gained, exactly, by hiding my origin as an otherworlder, but I didn’t know what there was to lose by revealing it, either — what expectations or dangers I might expose myself to. Even though I was confident my paranoia was tactically sound, I felt a squirming sense of guilt and unease at the thought of lying to him and the other goblins, even by omission.
“I think if you tried to tell me about it now, it would just go in one ear and out the other,” Nar-shesh said. He pantomimed the process with his free arm, the other still slung around me. “Got my own shit to deal with at the moment, y’know? But… in the future, if you ever wanna talk about it, I’ll listen.”
Oh. That was… “Thank you,” I said. Even though my domain-voice involved no throat, no lungs, no subconscious twitches of meat and gristle, my voice still sounded a little choked-up. “If you ever- y’know, same to you.”
He gave me another squeeze at that. “As little sense as it makes,” he said, looking back at what was left of his family, gathered around the campfire. “I guess we’re not in this alone.”
We sat like that for a while, one goblin and one dungeon core, watching the fire burn low. “Hm,” I said eventually.
“What’s up?” Nar-shesh asked.
“Just thinking,” I said. “My azoth’s almost refilled. I was gonna start digging out the caverns some more, but I feel like I shouldn’t make noise while you all are trying to sleep. And I was gonna level Teekas up to match you, but she just went to bed too, so same problem. Not sure what to do next, is all.”
“Hm,” he said. “Don’t you need to sleep?”
“Nope. I don’t eat or sleep. All I do is dungeon.”
“Huh. Wild.” He thought for a moment. “Well, what are some other things you could do?”
“I wanted to take a look at that light-gem on the crossbow, see if I could figure out how it worked,” I said. “And check out the giant lamprey’s stats. I guess I could mutate some more fruit trees, or empower some more animals. Oh, I’ve still got a bunch of skill points to spend, too, wow. I totally forgot about that.”
“Yeah, I was meaning to ask about the crossbow,” Nar-shesh said. “What happened with you and Kizurra?”
“Who, Teenage Edgelord? I don’t want to talk about it,” I said grumpily. “Just two dipshits flailing at each other, and the bigger dipshit won.”
“He is kind of a dipshit,” my right-hand minion agreed. “Not that I can really blame him. His parents died around the same time my dad did. Lekubi took him in after that, but the humans killed her… fucking hell, yesterday?” He scrubbed at his face. “It feels like longer. Anyway, just. Y’know.” He gestured vaguely.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I know. I’ll do my best.”
Nar-shesh’s nod of acknowledgement turned into a lengthy yawn. “Well,” he said. “Sounds like you’ve got plenty of stuff to keep you busy for the rest of the night. I’m gonna go pass out now.”
Fair enough, I figured. We mumbled our goodbyes and he staggered off sleepwards while I dismissed the stone bridge and re-raised my pedestal. I turned my attention first to my cave lamprey, lurking in its pool. As I watched, a fish vanished into its garbage-disposal mouth, spiralling rows of fangs shredding it in an instant.
Alright, Chompy. Let’s see what you can do for me.