Chapter 20 - Speed Freaks

It had taken another three days to get the tribe up to the point where the system had given me a second variant. If anything, this decision was harder than the first. Tunneling and excavation meant we’d be able to mine ore and quarry stone. It would make developing engines and power generation easier. Eventually it was critical to devise a source of copper and iron and this noblin thing could be it.

But before that, the tribe’s security was compromised. The night haunts had returned. It seemed the larger the tribe grew, the more of the nocturnal predators took notice. We’d lost out on another night of sleep and growth due to one attack, and in turn, a day of productivity. And we hadn’t even managed to kill the beast, this time. Despite my earlier promise, I’d had to ensure the night haunts had access to the tribe in order to continue growing it. But the act of setting up my goblins for sacrifice wore on my conscience, and wore on their confidence. The goblins would follow my orders to the letter, but they would do a much better job of things if they were confident and felt safe. Living in fear made them more timid and restless workers.

As much as we needed metallurgy, I had to put the security of the tribe first. I chose the hobgoblin wranglers. Even if they weren’t going to jump-start my tribe’s animal husbandry (which I hoped they would), having nocturnal sentries might deter the night haunts from breaking into the shelters at night.

<5 hobgoblin wranglers have been added to your tribe.>

<1 hobgoblin wrangler has been promoted to taskmaster.>

Show me the hobgoblin wrangler skills

I watched as the window populated with the list of capabilities my new hobgoblins were born with. During the malaise brought on by the second sleepless night in a week, I’d been too disoriented to complete the fine work required for my glider. I’d taken the opportunity to interrogate the system and see what it could and couldn’t show me. It seemed this world ran on a hyper-specific set of governing rules, much more high-conceptual in nature than the fundamental physics that ruled earth. The system could show me the stats and specialties of every goblin in my tribe, if I asked it, as well as a host of other, more niche, features. I used it to move several of the members around to better suit the talents of my individual taskmasters.

Hobgoblin - This advanced goblin can speak and reach level 3.

Nocturnal - These bad-boys like to stay up late and get into trouble. Their eyes are tuned for low-light. The downside is that they sleep until mid-day.

Thick Skinned - Whether teeth, claws, or harsh language, Wranglers will shrug off slashing damage from creatures.

Animal Kinship - Not much better than animals themselves, Wranglers share a sort of understanding with the beasts of the world.

Daredevils - Wranglers love anything that gets the blood pumping and the wind through their specially tuned hair. Wrangler senses and reflexes are increased at high speeds.>

The new wranglers had better vision at night, skin naturally resistant to biting and scratching, and a love for all things fast. Not only that, but the affinity for animals stood a solid chance of kick-starting our animal husbandry program. We were growing as a village, and there’s only so much hunting, fishing, and foraging could do to support a population. It was simply an issue of the resources in a given area being able to provide for X goblins who consumed Y chooms of food each day, and the difficulty of traveling further from a central hub growing less efficient without effective means of transportation. We were going to need a cultivated food source almost as much as we were going to need metal and electricity. That meant either livestock or agriculture, and preferably some combination of the two.

With 4 taskmasters, the tribe could be split almost completely evenly at just under 15 goblins per. The only problem was, my fourth taskmaster was sleeping in, so his goblins would spend a good deal of the morning idle or working on their own tasks.

That was fine. Let them. I didn’t need to be a slave driver, and the wranglers and their assigned goblins were going to be our first line of defense against the nocturnal night haunts. I wanted to make sure they had every advantage.

Neil took the hunters northwest. They had the dual objective of watching for Rufus’ return and making sure the javeline rutters didn’t find him first. I don’t know that they’d have attacked him on sight, seeing as both he and they were part dwarf. But I didn’t want my first friend in this world falling afoul of them. I worked on the control surfaces of the version 1 glider.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

The design wasn’t all that dissimilar to a glider concept I’d submitted to a NASA design contest in college, oddly enough. The controls allowed the user to subtly change the shape and angle of the wing in order to modify the glider on the fly (no pun intended) for high-speed and slow speed flight—which I could now realize thanks to the stretchy membrane of the night haunt wing. This was the design I’d had in mind when I fired up the first batch of ceramics, and the design used bearings and flanged joints that wouldn’t have been possible with wood or stone. Ironically, the deaths of so many goblins during the first attack were indirectly going to give us our first shot at unpowered flight.

As the sun reached its zenith, a quartet of shadows approached from my rear.

“Watcha’ got there, boss?”

I turned. All four of the new wranglers had woken up, finally. They all had the customary goblin trousers, but these had a patched vest, as well. They also each had a wedge of longer hair along the top of their skull, like natural mohawks. Unlike the other goblins who wore a skull half-mask over their eyes and crown, these ones opted to tie loose jawbones from the bone pit over their mouths like old-west outlaws. One of them had also apparently liberated the stone-sloth cub from its enclosure and was tickling its belly.

“Flying machine,” I said. Then thought a moment. “Well, gliding machine. Flying comes later.”

“Sounds swell. Can I try it?”

I had expected these guys to have the thick cockney accents like Buzz and Neil, but these sounded more like they were from the American Southwest. Though, I read a long time ago that the southern American accent is actually closer to what Shakespearean English should have sounded like.

“Slow down, Chuck Yeager,” I said. I cocked my head. Hmm. Good a name as any for a natural-born would-be flying speed freak. “It’s not quite ready yet. I’m trying to finish it today.”

“Just so long as I get one.”

I stood and dusted off my sloth-claw legs. “Make you a deal, Chuck. I’ll make sure you get to fly through the air, but you’ve got to figure out some way to cover terrain faster on the ground and fight a four-legged foe.”

Chuck grinned. “Give me some of the lads to work with and a few hours daylight to burn. We’ll do you proud.”

“Take the ten idle goblins with you,” I said.

My newest taskmaster whistled, getting the attention of several of the goblins milling about the village. “You lot, you, and you. With me. Grab your kit. We’re headed south.”

South. Out of the woods and onto the plains, then. I looked out over the bluff. “You want to jump down? Or would you prefer to try the new launcher?”

“You have to ask?”

I led Chuck and his new cronies to the southeast side of the bluff, where Sally had erected, of her own accord, a flex-a-pult to, as Buzz put it, not waste time falling straight down. We had two, so far, and she was working on a third, as well as a second freight crane. Even as I watched, two of her engineers were pulling a load of bricks onto the bluff with hooked poles while a handful of goblins balanced on the beam as a counter-weight.

“The big reason you’re here,” I explained to Chuck, “is the night haunts. They’re eating goblins at night, and worse, disrupting sleep for the whole tribe. Whatever you need to deal with them; spears, slingers, axes, nets. It’s yours. They’re the biggest threat we face.”

“Leave it to the Hobbies, boss-man.” He winked at me. “Hobgoblins own the night.”

I liked Chuck already. And I’m pretty sure when he saw the flex-a-pult, he fell in love. He stopped and stared at the contraption. We’d unlocked the technology the day we’d fought the first stone-sloth, but I hadn’t thought much of it at the time on account of we were in the middle of a pitched battle. But my chief engineer hadn’t let it go. She’d made an arrangement of poles that could be weighed down by her engineers until the poles bowed, and then released to fling an impressive load. Usually, that load was goblins.

Ordinarily, you’d need a lot of goblins to generate the mass in order to bend such a thick pole. But Sally had also combined the flex-a-pult with the ceramic pulleys I’d made in the first firing and the ceramic gears. We’d managed to get it to the point where two goblins could crank the whole thing down. Sally was turning into an ace at seeing applications for simpler parts to service compound machines. Honestly, I think she’d have fit right at home in the robotics lab at NuEarth—though most of those guys were closer to trolls than goblins. Chuck climbed into the basket along with five others, and I stood clear.

Everyone still in the village took a break to watch the flex-a-pult launch. It was basically Apollo Tribe’s national sport. The goblins lined up and hooted and hollered as Sally’s operators finished cranking and transitioned to the release lever. I’d tried to teach the tribe to do a joint count-down, but goblins were as numerically challenged as they were verbally. What I had been able to teach them, was the wave. From one end of the cliff to the other, my entire tribe screamed at the top of their lungs and threw their hands in the air.

“THREE!” I shouted.

The wave started at one end, hit the other end, and started coming back.

“TWO!”

The tribe had practically worked itself into a frenzy. Two of the goblins couldn’t take the anticipation and leapt over the edge themselves. There was always at least one, where the flex-a-pult was involved.

“ONE!”

The wave reached a crescendo and lost complete coherence as my tribe lost their collective minds. Sally’s operators put their weight into the lever, and the mechanism released. Chuck and a half dozen other goblins went airborne, EEEEeeeeing out over the southern forest toward the plains. The rest of the goblins assigned to Chuck scrambled to reset the flex-a-pult for their turn.

All in all, if I couldn’t prevent goblins from simply jumping off the side of the bluff, I could at least help them along their way. Thanks to the height of the bluff, the flex-a-pult sent goblins at least 500 meters horizontally, depending on the position of the moon. That was one of the other things about Rava that I’d noticed. Gravity was definitely not accelerating all objects at 9.8 meters per second per second, and it changed slightly throughout the day as Raphina made its slow circuit in the sky.

Plus, the little daredevils just loved being launched. They wanted to be airborn. I could relate. Who was I to deny them the simple pleasures in life?

Yikes. Well, maybe there was such thing as too much pleasure.