>>5794476You hadn’t gone to and old adventurer just to sneak around a Tower in the middle of the world’s most populous city—certainly not THIS adventurer, gaudy and garish as he was given to be. No, you’d recruited your father because you had heard tell of goblinoids involved in this mysterious conspiracy which you were SURE would lead back to the Henzlers… And you needed your father’s help to find them.
Twenty years ago, the goblins in question would have been easy to find without any such expert assistance. Back then, they lived just outside Hawksong’s easterly-most gate and near to the waste-water culvert. These days, largely as a result of the moral panic surrounding the terrorist attack on the Iniaties’ District and a surge in cultic activity, Goblintown was mostly memory. Oh, a FEW goblins and hobgoblins lived around that area still, but most of these were too young to have been involved. In truth, few of their race were LIKELY to still be alive—goblins lived 60 years if they were LUCKY, short-lived even compared to humans and beastmen.
But the records you’d read indicated that they were a communal culture, and most of the community which had existed on Hawksong’s fringes had, when push came to shove, retreated to the Goblin Wastes.
“The wastes, ey?” your father asked, rubbing his beard and looking thoughtful. “Well there’s no shortage of ADVENTURE out that way, that’s for sure. But looking for a specific goblin in all that space is less like looking for a needle in a haystack than a needle across a very wide area where the needles sometimes unexpectedly leap up and stab you in the back, wot? And even then, it might not be YOUR needle!”
You... Were PRETTY sure you followed. There were a lot of goblins in the eponymous wastes, which were a wide expanse of mostly-barren, rocky step and soil which could barely sustain scrub-brush or weedy grasses. Despite this, they were widely-dispersed, often hidden away, and finding one with knowledge of that fateful Hawksong summer two decades prior would be difficult even with MUCH longer than a week. Much more likely was to encounter one of the many goblin bands which sustained themselves on banditry and plunder.
“Are you saying you can’t do it?” you’d asked.
Rudolfo crosses his arms and drew back his head to fix you with a withering look… Then grinned widely, façade crumbling.
“I’m saying I’m proud of you, my boy!” he said. “Your instincts tell you this is the surest course, yeah? And you’re following them, damn common sense and consequences? THAT is how a man of ACTION behaves!”
It was also rather unlike you, you thought… But then, maybe it wasn’t. You’d always been driven, after all. Always a risk-taker, when it counted… And your father was right. Your instincts DID say that this WAS the way! Just as with confronting the archmage as a child, as with jackalope incident, as with the Shirin… You could not do otherwise.
