Husband of the Goblin Tribe

[v2] Chapter Thirty-five – In which Ark spends some peaceful days being Daddy, Kiwi comes into the world, and Mint presses the logout button.

Recently, there have been some peaceful days to be found here in Goblinhome.

The Goblin’s Guild has welcomed three new members; Primrose, Selene Hecate, and Chanterelle.

Obviously, the non-existent goblin sorting-hat of fate has thrust Primrose into the ranks of our impressive goblin hunters. Selene Hecate is firmly entrenched in the caster faction, and Chanterelle… I would say she’s in the maker faction, but I’m not entirely sure that’s the case.

Chanterelle is definitely a goblin who goes at her own pace.

For the record, I’m well aware of what Kino is, as there was a compendium of monsters available to read in my mother’s… in Salondra Wyze’s private library at the manor house I grew up at in this world. Myconid Emperors were first seen and recorded in the northern lands of Nevara well over three-hundred years ago, in a particularly dangerous dungeon. The illustrations and ecology that was recorded by a seventh circle magus who had a penchant for studying rare monsters matched up with the general appearance of Kino.

I’m also fairly certain that Kino can adjust his size with relative ease, and as far as I can tell, is absolutely dedicated to Chanterelle much in the same way that Bitey is to Ebony. Kino also seems to be on extremely good terms with both Button and Truffle, perhaps because of their longstanding affection for mushrooms. As for me… I don’t get the feeling Kino sees me as hostile. But perhaps that’s because I try to be amicable to this strangely dangerous mushroom that is clearly presenting itself as a guardian for my daughter.

I did some small renovations to Truffle’s cave-hole at her request. Similar to the indented booth I made in a wall on Ivory’s side of their joint cave, I found a manageable bit of space to make something like a cubby-hole for Kino to rest in. Truffle had gathered some of the spore-laden soil from the crop field for Kino to use as some kind of fertilizer. I added a small depression just past that small plot of soil with sugary water (made from syrups boiled down from non-acidic fruits) after remembering something from a biology class I took back in high school in my previous life—that Mushrooms liked sugar water.

Due to Kino almost always being at Chanterelle’s side, and the fact that I had essentially sealed the dangers of the shit-pit when the toilets were installed, the restrictions on Chanterelle being able to walk Goblinhome were lifted for the most part. Furthermore, Kino often acts as a kind of mushroom-vehicle for my littlest mushroom goblin. She can lazily sit or lay down on his wide cap and Kino will carefully wobble his way to wherever she wants to go.

Though it’s been a while since Ebony was still living with me in the breeding room, Beastie had often done the same for Ebony… carrying her around to different places she wanted to go. As far as I can tell, Kino accepts both Beastie and Bitey as comrades-in-arms. I’ve even seen Bitey riding along on top of Kino just because Chanterelle thought it was funny.

Kino, who has something of a face on his stem… stalk? Likes to eat foliage. Usually, grass and leaves, but also likes to munch on small pieces of wood. The freshly cut kind, preferably. Also, when not immediately needing to chaperone Chanterelle, Kino likes to spend time with Mint, who was initially quite disturbed from their first few meetings.

Mint… has embraced, for lack of a better understanding, her position as a Druid. Bloody Druid or whatever. She spends a lot of time doing something at the crop field and there have already been great results from it.

One such result… Wheat.

I don’t know what she did, exactly, since I thought there was a lot of manual work that went into turning wheat into flour, but she had come to me holding a small pouch made of snakeskin full of the white stuff out of nowhere one afternoon.

Thanking her profusely for it, I got to work in Melon’s Kitchen creating that.

No, not pizza. That would come later. Before anything else, I had to make this world’s on-hand ingredients equivalent of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Baking the bread was an extremely tricky process, especially because of the need for yeast, which I could only really get from Berry. Fermentation is fermentation, and that’s what yeast is.

Melon is the kind of genius that can understand anything food-related after seeing the process once. The method of making jelly was already available to me, but bread was the key factor that had been missing. Thanks to Berry, Mint, and Melon, it was now possible to make bread here in Goblinhome.

For the last stretch of the process, I had to see Old One and teach Wise-eyes how to make it. It was so that Wise-eyes who had made an agreement with the GUU’Z—Big Bessie—some time back when I had experimented a little with summoning magic together with her, could fulfill her end of the contract and be allowed to summon GUU’Z should there be a critical need for her to do so in the future.

Old One, aware of the benefits that Ebony and Chanterelle have thanks to their companions and being the true conniving Bloodmaw goblin that she is, quickly pushed Wise-eyes over to me so that, in her (slightly flawed) understanding of the situation, Wise-eyes would have access to the GUU’Z in a similar fashion.

Trust and believe that Old One understands at a core level the concept of borrowing a knife to kill someone.

So, with Wise-eyes in tow, we returned to Melon’s Kitchen and successfully made a few sandwiches to feed the local area-boss. There was absolutely no chance I was going to risk summoning that goose inside of Goblinhome, so we went outside to do it, with Wise-eyes performing the actual formulaic magic spell to create the portal.

Big Bessie walked through it after a short while and brought with her a most intimidating aura.

That is… until she saw what Wise-eyes was offering out to her with both hands.

“HONK!?”

“GUU’Z! As promised, I bring you tribute! The... sand-witch!” Wise-eyes said with nervousness.

It… was a scene of carnage.

Big Bessie’s neck moved with almost superhuman speed as her beak chomped at that sandwich. Diana crossed her arms and watched, nodding all the while commenting appropriately.

“GUU’Z is strong. Even after having a Blood Fury, I still don’t know if I can dodge all of her bites if she were serious.”

This was high praise coming from Diana.

I was well aware that one sandwich wouldn’t be enough. So, a few more were made as a safety measure and Wise-eyes continued to feed them to her, much to Big Bessie’s enthusiasm.

“HONK! HONK HONK!!”

After four sandwiches, Big Bessie stopped and just sat down.

“Honk.”

Wise-eyes seemed to understand what was happening better than any of us.

“She’s going to take a nap now. Doesn’t want anyone to disturb her.”

Being lazy after eating four sandwiches is something that resonates with most goblins, or at least will in the future once they become popular… so they let her be and went about doing other things. But, even on a peaceful day here in Goblinhome, there is always something unnecessary bound to happen.

In this case, Kino happened to wobble by with Chanterelle and stopped right next to Big Bessie.

At first, I thought it was Kino being kind as the large mushroom cap unfurled…

Only… a shit ton of spores were dumped right on top of Big Bessie, coating her in black dust.

Oh… it was bad.

I might have intervened, if I had my quartz focus orb to rely on to protect me. But since I didn’t… I wasn’t crazy. I’ve had my ass bitten by Big Bessie before on a hunt with Prima. No thanks. I was fine with taking a hard pass on this encounter.

Now, Big Bessie doesn’t take shit, I know this much. She spread her wings wide, bent her long neck, and let out a disastrously loud honk that just about floored everyone in hearing range of it.

Feathers flew and Big Bessie got into a rather intense fight with Kino. Moving with incredible speed, she pecked, kicked, and slapped Kino around with her wings quite a bit, all the while Kino showing no signs of being damaged at all and hadn’t bothered counterattacking even once, not that I had any idea how that worked with a… mushroom.

After a while, Big Bessie slowed down her assault and then kind of… fell asleep.

Kino wobbled around her immobile body in what I assume was some kind of victory dance, then proceeded to widen the cap again, shielding Big Bessie from the sun. Chanterelle cheered Kino on as she went right ahead to lay down next to Kino on the other side of the GUU’Z, also being shielded from the sun.

I asked Chanterelle if she knew what happened just now, but she said she had no idea. All she knew was that it was the perfect time to be lazy and take a nap right in this cozy spot, so all three of them… kinda did… I guess?

Wise-eyes and I made a discreet retreat. She had kept her end of the bargain with Big Bessie, and as far as I knew, a few hours later the GUU’Z had woken up and took off with no further violence or anger. While Big Bessie was a bit of a wild card as to where she stood with the Bloodmaw, it was good to know that Kino was fully on Chanterelle’s side.

In the days that followed, it then came time for another of my daughters to enter the world.

With a mixture of brown and green toned skin, I couldn’t help but give Pear’s newest strong-one the name Kiwi. Unlike Pear and Melon, Kiwi was a very slim goblin. She had a great appetite, but didn’t seem to increase in mass at all.

Kiwi wasn’t a lazy goblin, much to the disappointment of both Pear and Melon.

No, it was far, far worse than that.

Kiwi was curious.

Excessively so.

Every single thing she came across, she tried to understand it. She was perhaps the quickest of my daughters in learning how to speak, solely because she wanted to know how things worked. Didn’t matter what it was, she just wanted to know how it worked.

The toilet in the shit-pit, the Heating runes in the breeding room bath, the fire-pit outside, Bitey—who she had disassembled no less than three times before Ebony had to get involved in stopping her.

When I think about it now, I probably should have named her Jackfruit, if only because she was quickly becoming a jack-of-all-trades type of goblin. By the time she could walk Goblinhome on her own, she knew where every single goblin in Goblinhome lived, and could converse with each of them to great depth on the matters of their interests.

Pepper? Kiwi was interested in fishing. Having talked to me about fishing, I was coerced into making her a fishing rod with proper metal hooks made by Dara so she could join Pepper at the stream from time to time and fish alongside her.

Figurine? Kiwi liked dancing but was more interested in acrobatics. After mastering the parkour course outside, I was coerced into making a cave suitable for gymnastics. Kiwi also learned how to play the harmonica to some degree, making Figurine quite happy to have a fellow musician little sister.

Game and Fun? Kiwi got involved in their creative process by helping to playtest their games. I can say for sure that Game and Fun almost always invited her to play with them at every opportunity.

Vera? Kiwi was a quick study when it came to learning Runic Formulas. Those two would spend hours coming up with some crazy things, and they also played the Runic-scrabble game I used to play often with Vera in the early days of her living with me.

With the sole exception of Chanterelle, who Kiwi just couldn’t get along with because she was truly a lazy mushroom goblin at her core and entirely incompatible with Kiwi’s industrious nature, Kiwi was probably the busiest goblin to be found in all of Goblinhome.

Kiwi even learned how to hunt, and actively asked Prima for sparring lessons—willing to use a spear if it meant she’d agree to train her. Now in the mornings, along with Rushk, a small skinny goblin was seen quickly becoming a protégé! But she didn’t limit herself to a spear only. She also engaged in swordplay spars with Nova and Orchid, Archery with Jewel, Stella, and Jade… she convinced Doll to teach her how to use an axe both for combat and chopping wood. I could keep going on, because that’s how it was with her.

But what really got her going… was me.

Dipping her toes into all sorts of things with all the other goblins made it clear to her at some point that I had been responsible in some way or another for most of the things she took interest in. I have never thought of any of my daughters as being pestering… but Kiwi let me know that there is always a first time for anything.

And it’s not like I disliked Kiwi’s constant questions and brain-picking. If anything, wouldn’t a parent welcome a child who had the makings and drive of a college-bound student? Professor Kiwi—it had a nice ring to it… unfortunately, I’m not as smart as she probably wished I was.

Did I know about chemistry and the periodic table of the elements? Yes. Did I know all one hundred and more of them organized by name and atomic weight? No. No, I did not. Did I know math? Yes. But not anything as deep as calculus… I was at best a C student in algebra. Cooking? Surprisingly, Kiwi wasn’t all that eager to learn how to cook from Melon or me, even though this was something I did have confidence in.

While I knew many things, I wasn’t in any way an authority on most of it. My previous life’s education wasn’t from a particularly good college. My current life’s education was mostly based around magic at the academy I went to. It was… in a way… unfortunate for her.

Me as well.

I was left feeling like… out of all my daughters, I had let her down the most.

And it irked me a bit.

I felt lacking as not only a father, but also as a man.

Diana always put me on a pedestal as being some kind of strongman. I wasn’t strong, but Diana wouldn’t accept that. Button also, in her own way thought of me as some kind of ultimate wiseman when it came to the swirly-whirly. Kiwi, on the other hand, quickly saw me as a very fallible person. She didn’t dismiss me outright, but as it would be whenever we conversed at length on a topic, I simply didn’t have all the answers she sought out. Every conversation would almost always end with… “I’m sorry Kiwi, but that’s all I know about it.” The disappointment that she was unable hide on her face when that time inevitably came always felt like an arrow to the gut.

Then, of course, it became time once again to lay my hands on yet another of my precious daughters and let her climb the steps to adulthood.

Well, two daughters… actually.

While it was long overdue, the two in question weren’t Button and Glace. It was Ebony and Mint—with Mint being the instigating party.

According to Mint, who had cornered me early one morning and brought the matter up discreetly, it was because of a promise between them that was made after I had become the Monster. Ebony wanted to become an adult goblin, but knew Mint was in a bad place because of what happened. So, Ebony made Mint a promise that when Mint was finally ready, as a big-sister goblin, she would be there to help Mint become an adult goblin.

I questioned her a bit further, mainly to determine if Mint really did want to go through with it, or if she was just feeling pressured. Her reply… was something I couldn’t quite process.

“I’m… not really Mint. I’m… just someone who wound up inhabiting her body.”

Rather than coming from Mint, I expected a line like that to have come from Ebony.

“Uh…huh.”

“I don’t expect you to believe me. What I’m going to say will probably sound crazy, but… something has happened recently that makes me feel I need to tell this to you, even though I shouldn’t.”

“Alright… you know I will always lend you an ear. What's the story?”

Mint collected her thoughts before speaking once more.

“Before I became Mint… I was someone else. Someone… from what would probably be considered the future of this world.”

“The… future?”

“Yes. Since I’ve never been outside of Goblinhome, or the Night Forest, I don’t know what the current time period is. I do know a few things, however. About you, and about your mother… the Tower Magus Salondra Wyze. The only magus to have reached the ninth circle in the last thousand years.”

“Ninth circle? Unless you know something that I don’t, my mother is still an eighth-circle magician.”

“I know that in her family mansion there is also a private library. Among the books which can be read there, one such book contains the lineage and doings of the Wyze family dating back to its beginnings. In that book, at the end, there is a mention of her only son, Ark Wyze, which mentions that he met his untimely end as an adventurer… with no traces of him or his party ever found.”

“…”

“But I found you. In the future. Far to the Northwest of the Night Forest, in the Gorynn mountains. You weren’t a human when I encountered you at that time. You were…”

“I was the Monster.”

“You were a goblin. But old. Subdued. Alone. You had the ability to change into your human form at will. You also… didn’t need your focus orb to use magic.”

“I see. Alone…?”

“You were the last remnant of the Bloodmaw Goblin Tribe. In that time period the Bloodmaw were barely a historical footnote. It’s only by chance I came to know about them, because in the future, I had also met… well… The Great Protector, though they went by a different name.”

“Are you telling me that something catastrophic happened to the Bloodmaw?”

Mint nodded and recounted a tale which apparently the future version of myself had told her. A story which involved being attacked on three fronts: an Orc incursion from the East, the Black-claws from the South, and some adventurers from the West.  How I survived or escaped wasn’t mentioned. Only that I was filled with regret and had given up trying to restore the Bloodmaw Tribe, since only I could do that… as I somehow came to possess what the Bloodmaw called the Origin Blood.

In truth, I understood that already. I knew from way back at the beginning when I had the stamina that no man should possibly have. The circumstances behind Diana’s immediate full-term conception. What I’ve done to Stella and Rushk…

“So, I was at death’s door and you… the you before you became Mint… agreed to inherit the Origin Blood and become a Bloodmaw?”

“Yes… but… how that happened… involved something similar to what happened with Stella.”

“…are you saying that I…?”

Mint nodded.

“I wasn’t supposed to become Mint. I was supposed to give birth to Mint. The original Mint of this time died shortly after she was born. Instead of creating Beastie… Ebony made the bones of Mint become her skeletal companion and little sister… In fact, the same day Mint was supposed to die was when that all happened and when… Lumi was born.”

It was a tragic story Mint was painting. But with Mint being alive and us having already fought and killed the Orcs who came across the Stream…

Isn’t the future already changed somewhat?

“I think… the whole reason I was sent back here to live as Mint, was… to help you find acceptance with the goblin side of yourself. I know you are a human and don’t wish to lose your humanity. But the survival of the Bloodmaw was dependent on you being able to procreate with everyone… especially your daughters.”

Obviously, that wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

“And this is why you pushed me so hard that night with Lily and the twins?”

Mint nodded.

“I had no idea it would bring… that side of you out. I mean... I knew it would hurt you… I definitely knew that much… but… after getting to know everyone… how… could I let them die so easily?”

I know Mint is a good girl, but this story of hers was still nothing all that pleasant to hear.

“So, you’re telling me that you've accomplished what you came to do, then… right?”

“Right. I’ve… got a way back now. I can go back to the future where I’m from. The only thing is, I… need to keep my promise with Ebony before I go.”

“Let’s say I believe you. When you say that you can go back… what exactly happens to you… here? Will you disappear?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine I would just disappear, but… I also can’t say if the original Mint will… return.”

So, there’s a chance that Mint will just be… a vegetable?

“Does Ebony know?”

Mint shook her head.

“I plan on telling her… but I want to do so afterwards.”

“Alright. But… can I ask you something on a personal level first since you appear to trust me enough to tell me your plans?”

“If I can answer it.”

“Did… you ever think of me as a father?”

“…no. To me, you have always been Ark Wyze. Calling you… anything else…”

I nodded.

“Then let me say this. To me, the future hasn’t happened yet. To me, you are one of my many precious daughters who I love deeply as my family. You are my Mint. Not whatever may exist after you leave. I’m sure Ebony feels the same. So… if you somehow do manage to go back to your future... don’t forget us, because we’ll never forget you.”

“I promise. If… it’s possible… if you somehow aren’t dead in the future… I’ll come find you and Ebony.”

I reached up and cupped her face in my hand for a short while wondering if this is why she always appeared to be disconnected.

Mint left to go find Ebony. It seems tonight, both Ebony and I will need to give her a proper send-off. I shouldn’t believe what she says, but… I’ve been reborn in this world… a world that has magic in it. A world where… perhaps… the impossible can happen, as she says it already has.

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