One of the level sevens glanced in our direction and approached.
She was a female goblin, standing about five and a quarter feet tall, making her tower over the others. She had well-defined muscles and wore a jet-black robe. She carried a wooden staff that, oddly, also held a pineapple at the top, but this one was actually made of wood, a part of the carving.
The goblin’s face was filled with piercings. There had to be fifty of them. She looked like one of those body modification people who would appear on Ripley’s Believe It or Not! It was hard to look at until you got used to it. The woman sneered, revealing sharpened teeth and a forked, pierced tongue.
Goblin Shamanka. Level 7.
In case you’re wondering, Shamanka is just a fancy way of saying female shaman. Goblin Shamans are the leader class of all goblin clans, second only to the War Chieftain or, more rarely, the Goblin Warlord. They are without humor and are said, as part of their training, to have to pick two of the following three actions in order to graduate Shamanka University: they have to fuck, cook, and/or eat their own parents. Most don’t pick cook. And if that wasn’t messed up enough, they specialize in Anguish Magic, a dark magic school designed to focus and enhance damage from other attacks.
“You may have a pass, but you are not welcome here, human,” the goblin said. “Not in this place.”
I took a deep breath. “I want to buy a vehicle from you guys. Or have you make me one really quick. Preferably something that I can negotiate down stairs, but I’ll take what I can get. We have a lot of ground to cover, and I figured you guys could help.”
The goblin looked at me as if I’d just asked her to eat a Twinkie out of my ass.
“You stupid, ugly, excuse for a monkey. Do you really think you can just…”
“Oh, honey, can we discuss what’s going on here?” Donut asked, interrupting the goblin. She waved a paw, indicating the jewelry in the goblin’s face. “Is it like some sort of performance art? Do you wear all that metal because they made you eat your parents?”
The shaman looked at Donut, a mask of utter outrage on her face that started to melt the moment she met the cat’s eyes. It was the weirdest thing. I realized the cat was casting a spell of sorts on the goblin, some sort of automatic charm effect.
“What?” the goblin asked, her voice totally changed. She, to everyone’s complete surprise, sat cross-legged on the ground and leaned forward. She discarded her pineapple staff. “What did you say?”
“I mean, I guess I can see what you were going for. You have exquisite cheekbones,” Donut said. “But your face looks like an overenthusiastic brillo pad. That other lady shaman down there, she doesn’t have nearly as many things in her face. Though, my word, she does have that unfortunate necklace made of bones, doesn’t she? But we’ll get to her later. So, tell me. Is it a daddy thing?”
The goblin didn’t say anything for several moments, but then she put her face into her hands, and she burst into tears. “Yes,” the goblin cried. “It’s true.” Donut walked forward and sat in her lap.
The other shamanka, alarmed at this new development, came running forward. But a moment later, the two magic users were on the ground, sobbing, clutching onto each other. The one with the bone necklace had a line of snot running down her face as she ugly cried about having to eat her father raw.
Donut named the one with the facial piercings Rory and the other Lorelai.
“So, Rory,” Donut asked after a few minutes of the goblins sniveling, “how about that vehicle my friend asked for? Is there something you can do for us?”
Rory wiped her face. “We cannot part with a murder dozer. They are much too valuable, and the chieftain would literally kill us. But I will have them make a human-sized chopper. One with a sidecar.” She indicated a line of two-wheeled contraptions leaning up against the wall near the bulldozers. They appeared to be steam-powered bicycles. “But we can’t do it for free. You gotta trade something.”
“I have all sorts of stuff,” I said. I pulled up my inventory. I selected the satchel of gunpowder, and it appeared in my hands. It was a heavy leather sack. I wanted to keep the stuff, but I wanted the transport more.
Rory thumbed over her shoulder, indicating a line of barrels right next to the giant machine. “We got funpowder.” I hadn’t noticed the barrels before. They all had XXX marked on them. Sparks were constantly showering off the giant steam engine. If one of those sparks landed on a barrel… “To offer goblins funpowder is like offering water to a piranha,” she added.
This went on for a bit. I offered torches. Healing potions. Antidote potions. Both the pet biscuits and the crawler biscuits. All of it rejected.
My eyes caught something else on my list.
“How about this?” I asked, offering up the two baggies of meth.
Rory snatched them away. “Is this all you have? Two hits?”
Lorelai scrabbled at Rory’s hand, coming away with one of the bags. The goblin opened the baggie, stuck a pinky in, and had a quick taste. Her eyes grew wide. “This is dungeon made,” Lorelai said. “He didn’t bring it with him from the outside.” She looked at me. “Where did you get it? Did they have more?”
“I’ll tell you where to get more in exchange for that machine—one that won’t blow up on us—plus coal or whatever you need to run it, and some of those grenade things your Bomb Bards carry.”
“I don’t know,” Lorelai began, looking uncertainly at the other shaman.
“Do it,” Donut said.
“Deal,” Rory said.
Lorelai got up and started screaming orders at the engineers, who looked at her as if she had gone insane. The shamanka sent a blue bolt into the backside of one of the engineers, and they scrambled to work.
“Do you… do you want to come with us?” Donut asked Rory, her voice surprisingly gentle.
Donut still sat in the Rory’s lap, and she purred as the green monster stroked her hair.
The pierced goblin sighed. “I cannot. I can’t leave the chieftain. He’s terrible, soft even, but he’s still leader of my clan. My family. And even if I could go with you, I wouldn’t be able to leave this floor. If we climb down the stairs, we die. You get halfway down, and your body just dissolves. I’ve seen it myself.”
“So you know how this works? You know what’s happening here?” I asked.
The goblin nodded. Her face jingled when she moved. “I know enough. I know we are on the first floor. There are smart mobs, like us, and there are not-so-smart mobs. The deeper you get into the dungeon, the more are smart. In this borough, we are king. Us and the gnolls and the rat-kin and a few others. Most of the monsters aren’t so smart.”
“But do you know what happens in a couple days?” I asked.
“The floor collapses,” she said. “Yes. But it is only you who dies when this happens. For us we go to sleep until the next dungeon opens. We will open our eyes, and it will be the same as it has been. Just another day. But one of these days, one of these days we will wake up, and we will be deeper. That’s what they tell us. Kill the crawlers, get better at killing, and you get to go deeper. And one day, eventually, we will be so deep that crawlers will never come, and we will finally have peace. We will have peace and a place to live and breed and have our little ones run free and not worry about killing for survival.”
16
Goblin Copper Chopper with attached sidecar. Human-sized. Contraption.
Take a junkyard bicycle, add an unreliable steam engine, remove all the bolts holding it together, replace them with chewing gum, and you get the idea. The preferred assault transport of Goblin Bomb Bards, what this contraption lacks in reliability and safety it makes up for in absolutely nothing.