“There’s a double-sized booth normally set up next door to that one, but it won’t appear until the fourth floor. Those guys sell trap supplies. In the meantime, I wanted to make sure you were aware this was here,” Mordecai said. “The proprietor is a little odd, but she’s harmless. Now give me 500 gold so I can check out that alchemist over there while you browse.” He paused. “You two need to make a good impression on this woman because you’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”
This store was called Hobgobs and Boom Sticks. I examined the proprietor.
Pustule. Hobgoblin – Level 30.
She was the first living hobgoblin I’d seen face to face. She stood about six feet tall, and she looked mostly like the hobgoblin sample I’d seen during race selection: a large, muscular goblin that got clobbered by the ugly stick. She had an open sore on her cheek that bubbled with black and green ooze. The pus ran off her face, down her shoulder, and stained her shirt, which was a threadbare, pink graphic tee featuring a unicorn wearing sunglasses. She smelled of rot and sickness. I swallowed. I still held the bottle of cheap bourbon in my hand. I took a drink to get the smell out of my sinuses.
“Carl,” Donut whispered. “She’s ugly. Like really ugly.”
“She also has excellent hearing,” the hobgoblin said, her voice surprisingly feminine. I winced. “Are you in the market for explosives tonight?”
Her tables held multiple boxes of both goblin dynamite and hobgoblin dynamite, along with smoke bombs, detonators, and several odds and ends I’d never before seen, like flat, pancake-like explosives that were basically claymore mines. The yield and stability of the mines was impressive, though they cost 5,000 gold each.
She also sold barrels of gunpowder and a few other chemicals, most of which I already had plenty of. A case of goblin dynamite held 25 sticks and cost 500 gold. The hobgoblin sticks were 20 for 2,000, which was highway robbery.
“Two questions,” I said. “Do you sell smaller explosives? Preferably ball-shaped? Also, do you have smoke bombs that don’t suck?”
She laughed. “Yes to both questions, though I don’t have it all in stock today. Goblin smoke bombs are crap. They don’t understand the chemistry, so what you get is a lot of smoke in a small cone for a short amount of time. They’re good in enclosed spaces, but if there’s any ventilation, you might as well just pull your dick out and point at it.” She laughed at her own nonsensical joke. There was an edge of crazy to that laugh, and I suddenly felt uneasy. “A hobgoblin smoke curtain works much better and is inexpensive, but I don’t have any right now. I normally carry round bombs. Hob-lobbers. Both impact-enchanted and fused. I only have a case of the fused ones in tonight. Yield is one-eighth a hobgoblin stick, or half of a goblin stick. It packs a punch, if you’re interested. I once watched my mother bite the head off of a vorpal muskrat. She said she did it to teach the warlord a lesson, but I’m pretty sure there was another reason.”
She’d added that last part without pausing, as if it was just a natural part of the conversation.
Donut: CARL, THIS LADY IS CRAZY.
I decided it was for the best to just ignore that last part. “Okay, so, does impact-enchanted mean what it sounds like?” I asked.
“That’s right. Dangerous to use, but Hob-Lobbing Lobbers use them almost exclusively. Don’t drop ‘em. Otherwise they’re pretty stable. The fused ones work like hobgoblin dynamite. Impact resistant, extra stable. You gotta light the fuse then toss them. Like I said, I have a case of those. 25 for 500 gold.”
I sent a quick message to Donut via chat.
“What’s your best price on a case of the Hob-lobbers and two cases of regular goblin dynamite?” Donut asked. She jumped down from my shoulder and landed on the table. “Also, we’ll be back in a day or so if you promise to bring in some of those smoke curtains.”
“Well, two cases of goblin dynamite and the last of the Hob-lobbers would be 1,500 gold,” Pustule said pleasantly. “I’m sorry if that price is too ugly for you.”
“Oh sweetie,” Donut said. “I think we got off on the wrong foot. Let’s start over.”
“Yeah, okay,” Pustule said. “We wouldn’t want anybody getting off on any feet.”
Donut gave me a sidelong glance. “Well, it might be a little late for that. But we do want to buy stuff from you. And I think we’ll be buying a lot of stuff from you, so I would really like it if we could be friends?”
“Friends?” Pustule asked. “I was friends with Tiff. The muskrat.”
“Yes, friends,” Donut said. “Hopefully your mom won’t bite my head off, though.”
“Oh, she died. It was a vorpal muskrat. You can’t bite the head off a vorpal muskrat without doing a little dying in the process.”
From there, they went back and forth for a few minutes. Donut did not have the extra discount that automatically came with the Artist Alley Mogul class, but she still had that insane charisma, and she managed to talk the hobgoblin down to 1,000 gold for the lot.
After that transaction was completed, I pulled one of my Boom Jugs from my inventory and placed it on the table. “Out of curiosity, how much would you give me for this?”
She picked it up, examining it carefully. “Nice design,” she said. She rubbed the side of the bottle and made a whimpering noise, one I could not decode. Then she pulled the bottle close to her face and licked it. I looked at Donut and mouthed What the fuck?
She snapped back to seriousness a moment later. “Your material cost is much too high. If you used a different accelerant, the effect wouldn’t be nearly so hot, but your build cost would be 90% cheaper. If you went out there and sold just the plain bottles of moonshine, it’d be worth much more.”
“So how much is it worth as it is?”
“I’d probably sell these for about 7,500 gold. I’ll give you half that. You looking to sell?”
“Not right now,” I said, taking the boom jug back. It was good to have a value reference in my inventory. I resisted the urge to wipe off the wet streak. “Thanks, though. It was good meeting you.”
“I’ll have more for you tomorrow,” she said as we walked toward the exit. “Beware of meteors!” she called.
“She wasn’t so bad,” Donut said as we left. “She just needs both a dermatologist and a psychiatrist. I can’t tell you how relieved I am you didn’t pick that race.”
“Excellent hearing,” Pustule called from her booth, about 50 paces away.
“Wow,” Donut said, looking over her shoulder. “You’d think someone who blew things up for a living would be deaf.”
I pulled a hob-lobber out of my inventory. It was a hair smaller than a baseball, but it was dense and heavy.
“Damn,” I said. “Too big for my slingshot.”
“Nobody likes your stupid slingshot, Carl,” Donut said.
“At your current strength, you can probably just throw this further than a slingshot anyway,” Mordecai said, coming to walk beside us. He handed me a pile of herbs and vials. “That’s what the Hob-Lobbing Lobbers do. They’re the Hobgoblin equivalent of a Bomb Bard.”
We exited the market and hurried through the dance arena, which was now showing the recap episode. All of the dancers sat on the floor, watching the screen. They’d all gone eerily silent, and the scene was disconcerting. The next room with the locals was also displaying the show. A handful of crawlers watched while the other NPCs went about their business, pretending like there was nothing on the screen.
“You two go ahead,” Mordecai said, eying the bar. “I’ll catch up in a bit.”
“You’ll catch up whether you want to or not as soon as we get back to the inn,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I just don’t like missing any of the show. Sometimes they hide important stuff in there. I’ll see you back at the inn. Go straight there.”