Marlean stood at the reception room entrance with a covered pot in her hands and three small green faces peering out from behind her. She had disappeared a while ago saying something about getting us all breakfast. But I wasn't expecting her to bring some company back with her.

“Are you alright Marlean?” I pushed myself up from the couch for a brief second before sitting back down as the room began to spin.

“Marlean you… Oh, their feet are filthy, and that one.” Linda pointed. A very unladylike thing she would normally never do toward one of the goblins.” Is it pregnant, and… and what's in the bag Marlean?”

Linda sounded like she was about to lose her mind. The state of our new guests, and the possibility of something other than garbage being inside the black garbage bag that one of them clutched. It all might have been just enough to send my normally calm friend into a tailspin.

I had seen the one holding the bag before. They had been the one the unicorn had been about to attack before I had intervened. It smiled at me now, a mouth full of pointy teeth that could use a good brushing.

“Oh, they're fine,” said Marlean as she moved further into the room. “And they're helpful.” The pregnant one followed Marlean to the wooden coffee table in front of the couch. She smiled a shy smile and held up a stack of seven bowls.

Marlean plopped down the covered pot on a pile of old magazines. The scent that wafted out of it was surprisingly delicious smelling and I found my stomach beginning to grumble. She grabbed the bowls from the pregnant goblin thanking her with a nod.

“I made breakfast. We will eat and then they will show you what they have brought for you, Frances. Apparently, you saved that one and now they have brought you a gift.”

The room was absurdly silent for a second as Marlean lifted the lid to the pot and began to ladle out what looked to be cheesy bacon oatmeal. I was instantly skeptical about the choice of breakfast as she ladled a small portion into each bowl. As if in response to my skepticism Tami May cleared her throat. She had slapped a shaky smile across her face, but she looked like she could bolt from the room at a moment’s notice.

“Hold on Marlean! I mean that sounds—smells great, do you know what… um who they are.” Tami May said for the first time since Marlean had come back with food.

“Can't you see their tags over their heads?” Marlean grumbled. “I swear if you don’t even try to understand what is going on here than all the suggestions I made to the System might as well be falling on deaf ears.” She slapped the lid back on the pot and stood back up. “Foods ready, eat it before it congeals.”

The goblin with the bag stepped forward, his eyes glued to me as he gripped the bag so tight that the plastic nearly broke open. He carefully placed the package on the ground at my feet and grabbed one of the bowls and spoons. He skeptically looked down at the bowl and then back up to me.

“I still don’t see it,” said Linda.

I looked away from the goblin and back at my friend's. Marlean had already shoved bowls of food into the two other goblins' hands and was hurriedly eating her own. Tami May and Linda, however, were looking at the goblins, their food forgotten.

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“Oh, I see it!” Tami May clapped her hands in front of her face. “You just have to focus. It’s like small table placements, easy to miss if you're not paying attention.”

“Tabel placements are not hard to miss Tami May. That is exactly why they are there— Oh, I give up.” Linda waved a hand in front of her face as if to dispel the whole thing and grabbed one of the two bowls of food left.

The room went once again quiet as Tami May grabbed her bowl and began eating. It was surprisingly good, the oatmeal. I had never had it prepared in a savory fashion but, at least this recipe was… actually, pretty good.

Once the room quieted from the din of clinking dinnerware and overly loud chewing we sat quietly once again just staring at each other. The goblins stayed in a huddle, their eyes glancing around the room as they waited for something to happen.

“So why were you fighting that crazy unicorn?” I figured I would ask the most obvious question first.

The goblin that I had saved wrung its hands as its eyes flicked to the garbage bag and then down to the floor. The older goblin silently stepped behind him and bumped him. His eyes widened and he looked up at me.

“He… was our master,” he blurted.

Marlean let out a little snort, but I just waved her away and nodded my head toward the little green man.

“He had become obsessed with you, and distracted once this world opened back up—”

“Opened back up! You’ve all been here before?” Lindas eyebrows rose as skepticism set into her face.

He shook his head no.

“Master had been here before. The unicorns can live for… forever with the right magical blood sacrifice. But we do not though,” he looked behind him at the older goblin who sighed but said nothing. “Anyway, the master had been here before and your family has special blood so he was distracted… so we escaped, or we did. The others, the ones master hadn't already consumed for nourishment did not hide as good as we had.”

“Nourishment!” Linda said making a disgusted face.

“Yes, blood magic is very important to the unicorn's power and us goblins have a lot of magical blood.”

“They eat you?”

The goblin nodded and my friends pailed. A few hands have found their way to their mouths to either stifle gasps or keep the food we had just eaten firmly in their stomachs. I wasn't shocked though. The unicorn had made it quite clear that it enjoyed eating flesh.

“Not all the time but mostly during new world openings and berths.”

Everyone looked over to the obviously very pregnant goblin standing at the back of their little group. She looked around the room before her green skin flushed a darker shade and she tried to hide behind the much older one. These unicorns were just sounding better and better by the moment.

“So, you escaped and then got caught while stealing food,” said Marlean obviously getting bored with the whole thing. “And temp saw you and got killed for it. I say your lucky Frances, looks like that unicorn was a real son of a bitch.”

“Yes, I didn’t see her, and Hat-Tilda-Nap doesn’t have long, and your food is so good.” He stopped talking and hurried to the garbage bag scooping it up and shoving it in my hands. “It is a gift, a thank you for what you did… and maybe, maybe you can be our new master.”

With a quick yank, he pulled off the garbage bag and I nearly drop it to the floor in surprise and disgust. It was the severed head of the unicorn I had defeated. The one that had impaled me. The one that was not there when I had woken up. It had been altered a bit since I had last seen it protruding from my chest. Its horn was missing, someone had sawed it off at the base, and the head in general was now mounted to a square piece of wooden plyboard.

He then with one quick movement produced the other candy that had dropped when I had wone the battel and shoved it into the open mouth of the unicorn. Thrusting it up to his knobby elbow and retracting it just as quickly, the candy no longer clasped in his hand.

“Was that the other—”

But my words were cut off as the dead eyes of the unicorn opened and it began to scream.