Chapter 10 - Get a Job

Once Kuul was done testing me, he left in a hurry, hobbling out of the room and shouting at someone outside.

The other two goblins, Hunty and Tiba, set about nursing me back to health, which mostly involved giving me water and dried meat. My body took care of itself thanks to my new Exotic status.

Back home there were stories about Exotics that could survive in the vacuum of space for hours and come back for more after a good nap, and apparently I had something of a healing factor myself. It wasn’t so impressive that I was immortal, but given enough time, my wounds would close and my body would come back to health given enough fuel and rest.

That didn’t stop Tiba, the village’s healer and herbalist, from taking care of me in her ‘clinic’ where I’d woken up, and she turned out to be a lovely little goblin, if you didn’t cross her. Much like the medics and doctors I’d already met during my life, Tiba was just interested in fixing what was broken. Much younger than Kuul, she had distinctly feminine features with a pointed chin, button nose, and long hair she kept tightly bound in a side-bun.

Singing tunelessly as she worked, Tiba cleaned my wounds with wet cloths as my body mended itself. She *tsked* over my stab wounds and fussed at me if I choked on my water, taking care of me much like you would a small child or an animal. Mostly, she made declarative statements, speculations, or observations in soothing tones, not expecting me to understand or answer.

“Oh no. This hurts, I think. You don’t go near spiders alone, yeah?” when cleaning my back, or “I like this arm. This is my favorite arm of yours,” when she set about cleaning the debris off of my metal side. Maybe she enjoyed not having to use any of her herbs on that part.

My bonds were never loosened or untied. Hunty made sure of that.

Hunty was built powerfully for a goblin, thick in the arms and chest with a short mohawk type style to his black hair. Multiple scars marred his neck and shoulders from what was, no doubt, a harrowing battle with a monster or something equally cool. He watched me closely as Tiba went about patching me up, always poised to act, pointing the tip of his spear at my throat from a distance but not so far that he couldn’t lunge forward and end me. Hunty almost did just that when my reflexes got the better of me, and I jerked away as Tiba packed one of my more tender wounds with chewed herbs. In a flash, he was between me and the healer, stone spearpoint digging into the side of my throat.

Tiba talked him out of killing me multiple times, calling him an oaf and a flitskizard, whatever that was.

Soon enough, I was on the mend, full HP and mana, debuffs gone.

I’d taken to watching the minutes on my debuffs tick down, measuring the time with it. The Exposure debuff got less severe as the timer approached zero, which I very much appreciated. Being able to observe my captors even as they sat at the crude table in the corner of the hut was a welcome relief from the unknowing blindness of before.

With nothing better to do than bide my time, I took a while to explore my status screen and poke at some of the terms I hadn’t had time to mess with before.

Ryan Kotes - Level 1 Animator (Uncommon)

Type: Artificer (Common)

Core: Engine (Unique)

HP: 32/32

MP: 35/35

Attributes:

Body: 12

Mind: 12

Spirit: 13

Free attribute points: 1

Abilities:

Shape 3

Consume 2

Iron Grip 2

Devouring Grasp 1

Volatility 3

Skills:

Climbing 5

Unarmed Combat 1

Running 1

Stealth 2

Conduit 1

Affinities:

Goblinoid F

Iron F

Magnesium F

My status screen turned out to be pretty flexible in how it was structured. I changed the order of things, what to display and what to not. The same thing was true of my logs and quest boxes. I’d had them be a distraction in the middle of a fight before, and I needed that fixed, especially if I was going to try to escape from this place.

Taking some cues from games I’d played in the past, I chose to keep the text logs minimized unless I called them up, and I made my HP and MP visible to me at all times along with my status effects.

I poked around at some terminology as well, starting with my new Ability.

Volatility: Temporarily overcharge an object with mana. At your will or upon energetic contact with other matter, the charged object will explode violently. Damage: Dependant on amount and type of mana used, Range: Touch

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I could already think of a few useful applications for Volatility, juicing up rocks and throwing them at Kuul being one of them. Even though Hunty was the one that stabbed me, I couldn’t bring myself to stay mad at him. Kuul ordered Hunty to do the stabbing, and the warrior goblin seemed legitimately afraid of me or maybe afraid I’d hurt someone like Tiba. I could understand where he was coming from at least.

In all the media I had ever consumed from books to games to sims, people never really came together and decided whether goblins were tribal nomads of the wilds or deep dwelling monsters with an aversion to sunlight. One story would have them as mischievous little thieves who couldn’t help but covet shiny things, and another would depict them as world devouring hordes of barbarians.

Sometime during the dark years of Exodus II, after Earth went silent but before my ancestors woke from cryo, that mystery was put to bed by the discovery of the multiverse: It was both. Goblins, a lot like us, were adaptable creatures, willing to put up with a lot in order to live. Our universe didn’t have them, as devoid of magic as it was, but almost everywhere else, goblins lived wherever they could fit, usually in a place where they could steal from others.

These goblins, the ones that held me captive, lived underground in a cave system, somewhere in the lowlands of Ralqir, where water had exposed bare rock and carved immense branching tunnels that went down and down and down forever.

Most of the village lived in an expansive cavern warmly lit by torchlight and a soft ambient glow from a stream of daylight that flowed in through a hole in the far corner, well away from the rest of the buildings. Tiny huts constructed from wood and straw dotted the floor like little brown mushrooms, and crude, funnel shaped barrels were set in seemingly random places as water catches for the constant drips from stalactites overhead.

Tiba’s hut, or the “Healer’s House” as she put it, was on a natural shelf above the rest of the village with a ramp that climbed up to it from either side, and when I was frog marched out of the door, hands bound behind me and at Hunty’s spearpoint, hundreds of pairs of reflective goblin eyes stared at me from almost every nook.

I stared back, mostly reeling at how many there were but doing my best to hide my feelings. The creatures were in doorways, on roofs, peeking around from behind barrels, and hanging from the walls. Any thoughts of Consuming my ropes and making a break for it, fled before the sheer number of green-skinned little monsters in here.

I stood there, taking everything in, turning my head to get a fuller picture of the place, mostly looking for a way out. Not all the stalactites were made of stone. Twisted roots invaded the cavern, winding around the rock formations and drooping down in a jagged maw of wood that gradually creeped down toward the cave floor. Dirty streaks of soot shot through all of the rock, and burned nubs of thick old roots told me the goblins had a controlled burn in this place from time to time to keep their home from becoming overrun by nature.

Hunching my shoulders and bending at the waist I attempted to seem smaller than I was, more cowed. It wasn’t hard. I was practiced at that. The bonus points in my Body attribute made my job hard, though. I had always been lean, even as a kid before the accident. Looking imposing was the last thing I wanted to do, but now, with the System, I was noticeably thicker and heavier, more so because of the metal parts of my anatomy, which also seemed to have filled out after I reached level one.

Hunty got me going again with a jab at my back, marching me down the ramp and through the village. Most goblins ducked into their homes or scurried to get out of our way, but I spotted a few goblin children peering at me from roofs or from behind the raincatcher barrels. Curious little eyes followed my every move, little mouths opened in shock. I was a giant in their midst, a fairy tale come to life. Despite myself, I smiled at the little ones brave enough to make eye contact, but their parents were quick to usher them away, scowling at me reproachfully.

I was led past the village and into a tunnel that sloped down and to the left, worn smooth by water over time and stained orange by innumerable goblin feet. It was slippery as hell, and I stumbled multiple times, forcing Tiba to light a torch so I wouldn’t die on my way to my cell. Hunty would not allow her to walk in front of me, however, so I ended up walking awkwardly behind my own shadow, unsure if it was better than the pitch black.

Eventually, hundreds of feet later, our spiraling tunnel leveled out, the shaft expanding into another cavern lit by torches. This one looked more artificial, dug out and made flat by tools. Piles of… stuff were everywhere. Rocks, sticks, chopped wood, straw, coils of rope, bundles of leaves, tools, weapons, and even, in one pile, what looked like corpses, not goblins but other types of monsters. Several goblins sat around that one, practiced hands wielding stone knives to harvest what bits of the monsters they deemed useful.

Industrious workers lugged things out from an adjacent tunnel into this one, throwing whatever they carried into the proper pile. Grunts and shouts from the workers echoed harshly around the cavern as they went about their business, while the smell of smoke, sweat, and viscera compounded on one another, forming a busy bouquet reminiscent of an open air market next to a slaughterhouse.

Kuul was there, pointing and shouting, waving goblins past to get them out of the way of our little procession. When we approached, he smiled wickedly at me.

“Come. Its special cage is ready,” he said, leading us through the commotion to the back of the cavern, past an absolute mountain of a stone furnace, so massive my old hab on Proxis would have fit inside of it. The structure lay dormant, but little tendrils of smoke slithered lazily up the stack from the spent wood at the bottom.

My “special cage,” as Kuul put it, turned out to be a whole room, or maybe it would be better to call it an antechamber to the main, lower cavern. It was about the size of a four-passenger vehicle cab, tall enough to stand if you lowered your head, wide enough to lie down without having to tuck your legs. Like the rest of the cavern, it was partially natural and partially dug meaning the walls were generally smooth with some tool marks here and there. Slightly off-center on the floor was a hole that I could almost squeeze into if I angled my shoulders.

Upon ushering me inside, Kuul had my ropes cut, and everyone else backed out of the cave, Hunty and his spear last. Then it was just me, hunched over in a tiny room, staring out at a bunch of goblins, every eye trained on me and what I would do.

Again, I had the urge to rush them, use my superior size to bowl them over, maybe Devouring Grasp Kuul’s green scrotum on my way to freedom, but I knew better. They were waiting for something like that, no doubt. Plus, I wasn’t conscious when they brought me into the caves, so I had no idea how to get out. If I did escape, then what? I’d have a horde of locals tracking me with spears on their home turf.

No, I needed to stay and play ball for now.

Upon seeing I wasn’t going to make a move, Kuul nodded with visible satisfaction, then he brought his hands up, fingers splayed. He opened his mouth and… sang? Groaned? Whatever it was, it sounded painful, a low, growling song that filled the cavern and tickled my ears. In the torchlight, it was hard to tell, but I thought I saw a tiny white glow at the goblin’s fingertips. My teeth itched and the hair on the back of my neck and on my arms stood on end as stones cracked, and pebbles fell to the floor with echoing pops.

Then the roots came. Through solid rock, grasping tendrils of earthy brown slithered into the room’s opening, one, then two, then a dozen, then so many more, intertwining and braiding themselves into living ropes. They wrapped around one another, so tight they could be mistaken for a single plant. They dug into the floor, past this part of the cavern, downward further into the rock and continued for long seconds where all I could do was watch the bars of my prison grow thicker and heartier.

When Kuul finally stopped singing, the roots had formed my prison bars, taut and strong, leaving so little space between, I would have a hard time fitting more than my hands through.

Kuul staggered on his feet, reeling until Tiba steadied him by slipping the old wizard’s arm over her shoulders.

Kuul swallowed then cleared his throat, wincing in pain. “The hole goes to underriver, way down, deep. It can’t escape that way,” he said. “If it does not work, we poke it. If we poke it, and it does not work, we starve it. Understand?”

I stepped forward until I was almost pressed against the wooden bars of my prison, hunched yet still looking down at my jailers. “What work?” I asked.

Kuul narrowed his eyes and bared his teeth but didn’t give the order to stab me again. Apparently, I didn’t have permission to speak still, but now I was in his cage and theoretically ready to cooperate. He seemed to be weighing whether or not it would be worth it to have me punished before I even started.

Eventually, after a minute of grinding his teeth, Kuul replied, loudly enough to be heard by all those assembled. “It makes weapons with magic. Now, it makes weapons for us.”

Several goblins in the assembled crowd grunted or cheered, toothy smiles spreading across their lips as they turned to one another and slapped each other on the shoulders or went so far as to embrace. Even the more stoic goblins looked cautiously happy, hopeful even.

What the hell is going on here? What am I missing?

I looked down at the bars and back to Kuul. I thought about bargaining for my freedom, telling them that I could probably be out of my cell and among them with a little effort and some help from my core, but then I would be back to being lost. Kuul also had some kind of magic, and that was an unknown I didn’t want to mess with until I was ready.

I needed a better plan, more tools, and more options. Luckily, the goblins were willing to give me the time to generate all of those things, assuming I worked.

“I can do that,” I said, popping the knuckles on my hand before crouching down to get to eye level with the old monster. “Bring me metal.”