MBGSP Chpt 15-17

Just getting ahead of things since this week is going to have daily updates on Royal Road and I don't want to make a new post every day here. Bear in mind, chapters on Patreon are subject to change before they go live on Royal Road.

Chapter 15 - Fruits Away

<Your tribe has decreased to 34 members.>

<1 goblin taskmaster has been added to your tribe>

<Your tribe has increased to 40 members.>

More night-time predation, and I’d lost two goblins this time instead of one. Either the creature had been hungrier, or it had brought a friend. Either way, I couldn’t have night-time attrition eating a third of my population growth. We needed better sleeping quarters.

The problem was, we also needed hunters out looking for food in great enough numbers to sustain the tribe, we needed bodies on the wall project, and we needed Sally’s team making crossbows for the tribe. Not only that, but I still had to impress Rufus on his return in a few days.

At the morning Taskmaster pow-wow, Buzz and Sally were accompanied by a third goblin. One of the new arrivals was an additional taskmaster, which would let me further delegate work in the tribe. I decided to call him Neil.

“Are you the non-talkative type?” I asked.

“Nah,” said Neil, and didn’t elaborate further.

I looked at him for a minute, waiting to see if he’d say anything else, but he just stuck his finger in his nose and rooted around.

“So… what do you like to do?”

My newest taskmaster tilted head. “Like?”

“Yeah. Sally’s got her testing and production, Buzz enjoys construction projects. If there’s something you think you’ll be good at, I can put you in charge of it. So what do you like?”

Neil thought for a minute. “Hunting,” he said. Then considered for a moment. “Explosions.”

I grinned. “Ordinarily, that would be worrying. But, boy, is it your lucky day,” I said. “Wait for me on the north side while I get the others sorted.”

Rather than making more crossbow parts, I demonstrated to Sally’s team to start mixing mud with dry grass and forming it into bricks to dry. Making actual hardened structures required a great deal of resources we simply didn’t have, and the majority of our lumber was going to the fence and reinforcing shelters.

Today, I gave each member of the 12-strong hunting party members a crossbow. I had Neil get all the goblins down the north slope, in hopes to keep as many crossbows as we could intact. Then I grabbed my own supplies that I’d prepared, as well as the stone-sloth skin.

Two of the goblins still managed to break their bows, so I passed each of them a wicker basket. Each one was lined with moss and grass to make the inside as soft as possible.

“Congratulations,” I said. “You’re on bomb fruit detail. Each of you go get 10 fruits from the pits Sally dug and keep those baskets far enough away that you won’t blow up the rest of us—or each other—if they go off. Understand?”

If the goblins were upset about being assigned explosive ordnance detail with the unstable fermented fruits, they gave no indication. They took the baskets and dashed off at top speed, squawking and making explosion noises as they went. One of them tripped and nearly lost the basket as he rolled but raised it over his head triumphantly when he came to a stop. The rest of the hunting party cheered him on.

We were all going to die.

When they returned (thankfully moving much more cautiously), I had them maintain a safe distance while I took the hunting party back to the clearing near the clay deposit. Ideally, we weren’t going to have to fight the sloths. I took the hide, and then motioned over to the nearest goblin.

“You want the front or the back?”

The goblin looked at the stone-sloth hide, and I swear his fur turned a paler shade of blue. He shook his head vehemently, but I proffered the skin, and with a reluctant look, he draped it over himself.

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Skinny-sneakers>

I had each of the goblins take a bomb-fruit and carefully place it on the ground about 10 meters apart. Then, I had them stand far enough apart that they should be out of the blast zone. Finally, I gave Neil instructions on what I wanted, took my own wicker basket, and crawled under the sloth skin with my unfortunate partner.

It was hot and muggy under the hide. My visibility was limited to the two holes where they eyes had been. The thing itself was heavy, too, with the clay the former owner had used to armor itself. Maybe if it came down to it, that armor might protect us. Yeah, right.

Slowly, we crept forward toward the clearing until the two stone-sloths came into view. Papa-sloth must have been out hunting or foraging, because I didn’t see any sign of him. We shifted the heavy hide forward, inching toward the clay deposit near the river. I kept my eyes on mama sloth, making sure she didn’t get any ideas. She spotted us, and eyed us warily, but didn’t charge. I guess she must have mistook us for a very ugly member of her own species. We passed the closest point to them, then started to move away toward the clay deposit.

I could see the older sloth physically relax, lowering her posture, and returning to rooting around in the dirt with her claws. We got the hide over-top of the clay, and I picked up a handful and squeezed it between my fingers. It was rich and red, with a little bit of grit and a smooth consistency. If I was lucky, the color was an indication of high oxidation and iron content, and the grit would be sillica. I started to pack the wet material into the wicker basket. My partner helped, making the work go quick. It was working!

We filled up the basket and left the clearing. The hunting party came in view, and a few of them raised their crossbows before Neil stopped them from firing. Maybe our costume was a little too good.

“Nice work,” I said to my partner under the hide, who was a little wobbly at the knees. I traded the full wicker basket for the empty one. “A few more trips and we’ll have all the clay we’ll need for the time being.”

Neil raised his goblin eyebrow, as though shocked I would willingly go back in. But when we made it back into the clearing, the bigger stone-sloth ignored us completely. We headed for the clay deposit and started loading up the second basket.  Things were going well until I heard a cold, wet sniffling, and looked down to see the stone-sloth cub had gotten curious, and come over to take a sniff of the new arrival. It had poked its head entirely underneath the skin. I stared down at it, it stared up at me.

Before I could figure out what to do, my partner looked up from the wicker basket and squawked.

“No, wait!” I hissed. But it was too late. He balled up his tiny fist and planted it straight in the nose of the cub.

The cub, from curious infant to victim of goblin brutality, scrambled back, whining in a high-pitched cry that was obviously some sort of distress call.

“Go, go!” I said. “Get the basket!”

As soon as I heard the older stone-sloth’s ferocious roar, and the answering call from deeper in the woods, I knew we were hosed. We hauled the basket between the two of us as fast as my new legs could carry me. The older of the two rock-sloths had pushed the baby behind it, and its hackles were up. It growled and grunted at us and stamped the ground. Then, it lowered its head and charged.

Surprisingly the hide of the stone-sloth actually did absorb a lot of the impact. The matriarch hit center mass, which meant she actually hit the dead space between us two goblins and all three of us went down in a tangle. The hide ended up draped over the charging stone-sloth, which let my partner in crime and I make a break for it with the goods while the cub screeched at us and the older one flailed.

We put on a little extra speed. From the north, something began to crash through the brush, and I looked back to see the patriarch shredding through foliage to get to the clearing. It took one look at the situation and charged us.

“Drop it and run!” I shouted.

The other goblin didn’t need further encouragement. He let his side of the wicker basket drop, spilling clay onto the ground. A distressingly few number of seconds later, the adult stone-sloth trampled the wicker underfoot, dashing the clay in all directions. We sprinted through the trees, and this time Neil was ready. I had to watch my footing carefully, not only because of the primitive prosthetics, but also lest I step on a bomb fruit. But that let the stone-sloth close the distance. And like I’ve mentioned, despite their superficial resemblance to the slow, peaceful earth creatures, these things could really move. If I hadn’t had the sloth-claw prosthetics, it would have been on me.

Neil waited until I was clear of the field before he gave the order to shoot. Rocks began to fly past me. One or two were aimed at the charging stone-sloth, because it’s hard not to shoot at the enormous charging predator, I suppose. But most of them were aimed at the bomb fruits on the ground that we were not-quite out of range from.

One of the stones struck home, blowing up maybe five meters behind and to my right. the blast picked me up off my feet and sent me flying. Luckily, I landed on my head and bounced. My ears rang, and my vision swam. Something heavy landed beside me, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my partner.

Another explosion went off, sounding muffled and far away, then another. I heard a shriek and tried to regain my bearings. At least the system hadn’t popped up with any notifications. Scratch that, one came up.

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Popper trap>

I heard the tromp of goblin feet on the ground and saw several diminutive figures rushing past me. Sound was starting to come back, and I could hear the collective war cry of the hunters and the snap of crossbows going off. The goblins were cheering. At least, until one of them put a foot wrong.

BOOOOM

Chapter 16 - Revenge of the Sloth

<Your tribe has reduced to 38 members>

The cheers turned to shouts of alarm as the goblins realized they’d chased their quarry back through their own minefield. Rather than slowing down and carefully picking their way out of it, they panicked and scattered in all directions at break-neck speed—miraculously not triggering a second accidental explosion. Neil came over to help me to my feet as things calmed down.

“Did we win?” I asked groggily.

Neil grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me around. The first thing I noticed was the fine mist of blue fur drifting in the light. Well, those would be goblins 39 and 40. Or what was left of them. The second thing I noticed was the two halves of the matriarch, separated by about ten meters.

“Oh.”

The third thing I noticed was the claw and wrist of the patriarch, which was the heavy thing that had landed near me. The thing must have been reaching to slice me with those long claws

“We did win!” I shouted.

The goblins all started cheering again, fallen comrades mourned and moved on from just as quickly.

Neil came to stand beside me. “Wot’s next, boss?”

To business, then. I brought the hunting party carefully around the minefield and into the clearing. Our wicker basket had been crushed, but there was no sign of either of the larger stone-sloths, which meant we had free access to the clay. I had each of the goblins start weaving something to carry it with, while I looked over the clearing.

On the east side, there was a crag in a large boulder where I was pretty sure the sloth-bears had been nesting. When I peeked inside, that was confirmed. There were also bones. Goblin bones. I spotted at least one shattered skull, and several small, humanoid limbs. As soon as I saw that, I felt a lot less bad for killing the two adults just to get at some clay.

The cub was there, huddled against the back wall for safety. It was, to me, about the size of a medium dog would have been to me as a human. Of course, I knew it would grow to several times the size and weight of my goblin body. Still, it didn’t seem right, leaving it here. Chances are, it would die without its parents.

Neil came up beside me and peered in the crag. “Good eating,” he said.

“Barely any meat on it,” I said. “We got that whole sloth in the minefield to munch on. Let’s take this one back with us.

Neil gave me a skeptical look but was quick to turn around and delegate the task of retrieving the infant. Two goblins managed to hoist it between them, and the thing was too stunned by its circumstances to really do anything about them.

Clay, cub, and carcass in tow, we headed back to the village. I hated to take materials away from the wall project, but I borrowed enough poles to create a simple pen for the cub. If nothing else, maybe whatever predator had been infiltrating the village would go for the isolated animal, instead.

Neil was leading the way, but he stopped suddenly in the trail and held up his fist. He looked back. “Make scarce, boys!” he whispered.

The hunting party was a frenzy of activity as we took cover off the path, in the thickets, behind trees, and behind roots. I watched as Neil worked the crank on his bow to set a stone in place and peered at the path.

A four-legged figure pushed through the unbroken thicket onto our trail. It had a pig-like lower body, but a stocky, wide upper body and a battered iron helmet covering its face. It had a spear in its right hand with an iron spearhead.

Metallurgy, I thought to myself. The Javeline had a source of iron in the forest somewhere. I wondered how they were collecting it and refining it into a usable form. System, what level is it?

<8>

Well that wasn’t so bad. Lower level than the stone-sloth, actually.

The rutter stamped at the ground, and then reached down to brush its hairy fingers over our tracks before straightening. It tightened its hands on the haft of the spear, looking around at the surrounding forest. It let out a low, reverberating whistle that seemed to bounce through the trees and almost made the leaves vibrate. Two more of its kind joined it from the forest. One of them was massive, broadly built with a barrel chest and thick arms. A mane of black hair and a bristly, braided beard draped across his shoulders.

<16 and 12>

I didn’t have to ask which of the new pair were higher leveled. System, can you super-impose levels above individuals?

Floating numbers appeared above the heads of all three rutters. A cumulative of 36 levels against a group of 14 level 1 goblins. I didn’t have to be a tactical genius to understand these odds. The javeline exchanged words, though it sounded more like the low rumbling of a landslide to my goblin ears. Then, they moved off along our trail, back in the direction we’d come from. They heard the bomb fuits, I realized. They were investigating. And thanks to the robust method of goblin pathfinding, they knew a tribe was also in the area. Well, they’d find the battlefield and see what was left of the stone-sloths, too.

I hoped we’d be able to find a diplomatic solution with the creatures. But it didn’t look like that was in the cards.

Something snapped further along the trail, and the rutters dug in their hooves and set off at a gallop toward the noise, spears raised. They were surprisingly fast on those little legs. Much faster than any goblin not being propelled by the blast of a bomb fruit. If it came down to it, they would run us down in the woods before we could make it back to the safety of the tribe.

We waited in our hiding spots until long after the Javeline left—longer than I would have. But, when I made to rise, I felt a small fist against the back of my skull, pushing me back to the ground. I looked over at Neil, who was still watching the direction the javeline had moved off in. Neil kept my head down until he decided it was safe to move. As he was now the taskmaster of my hunters. I decided to trust his judgment.

The return to the village was a much more somber affair after our encounter with the rutters. We’d avoided them, this time. But what would happen if we weren’t so lucky the next time? Would they be interested in treating with a goblin king? Or would they slaughter the entire tribe out of principle? Or sport? I didn’t know anything about them, and we were better off not learning firsthand, for now. We needed time and more goblins. We needed better fortifications. We needed a leg up. We needed something better than stone at the end of our spears. And I had an inkling on how to get it.

Sally had set a few dozen raw adobe bricks to dry in the sun, and I’d need them tomorrow, along with a lot of wood.

<Goblin component technology unlocked: Raw icky brickies>

 I thought for a moment.

System, can you track available resources like bricks and wood?

<Define measurement parameters.>

Numbers for bricks works fine. Hmm. Can we do kilograms for wood and bone and other resources?

<Kilogram is not a recognized unit of measurement on Rava. I recommend utilizing the ‘choom’ as both a standard weight and volume metric>

What’s a choom?

<Approximately the weight, surface area, and volume of an individual goblin’s severed head.>

Lovely, let’s go with that.

<Parameters defined. Tribe Apollo has the following resources:

Raw bricks: 54

Bone: 12 chooms

Timber: 24 chooms

Finished poles: 22

Scat: 15 chooms

Water: 4,201 chooms>

Convenient. On Earth I’d needed a manually updated inventory spreadsheet to keep track of inventory. Here, the system could handle tracking all that for me.

<You’re welcome.>

Oops, thanks System.

Chapter17 - Skipping Ages

<Your tribe has decreased to 37 members.>

<Your tribe has increased to 45 members.>

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Dirt-dobe brickies>

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Clay thing-holders>

Only one goblin during the night, and a good amount added. We woke to find a decent-size hole worried in a weak corner of one of the enclosed shelters where one of the goblins had apparently been dragged away in its sleep. The others were starting to get restless in the mornings. While they didn’t seem to lament the loss of any single goblin in particular, they also didn’t like the idea of getting picked off in the night.

Somewhat selfishly, my primary concern was that it might happen to one of my taskmasters, whose specialty of keeping other goblins on task and making them better at their work. Still, we’d added 8 additional members. I’d been doing some tracking, and it seemed like the increases were loosely based on the amount of sleeping mounds. Goblins would only form a mound with a minimum of 12 members, no more than about 20. Each independent mound would produce 1-3 more goblins per night, which meant we’d gotten pretty lucky by getting 8 goblins out of 3 sleeping mounds. I decided to re-work the shelters for max efficiency so that the mounds would only be able to hold about 15 goblins to ensure distribution to the maximum number of mounds. That should optimize reproduction without resulting in undersize piles.

With 45 members total, I could split the tribe evenly between my three task-masters. There was safety in numbers, after all, and fifteen goblins with crossbows, spears, and cleavers would be much safer than just 10 or 11.

I checked on the juvenile stone-sloth as well, and found it still asleep in its new pen, untouched by whatever was preying on the goblins. I got the feeling that a lot of predators wouldn’t think the juice of dealing with the clay-reinforced hide of the sloths was worth the squeeze. Goblins were level 1 and practically defenseless.

Buzz brought Sally and Neil over for the morning round-up. I sent Neil off right away with the hunters, who took their assorted crossbows and fishing poles. I had them go west, away from where we’d seen the Javeline. I wasn’t going to mess with the boar-men quite yet. I also wanted them to bring back hides for tanning. Buzz had his wall project, though his eyes got a bit greedy when he saw the stack of bricks Sally had cured.

“Sorry, Buzz,” I said. “I need those for another project. But we’re going to be making more. A lot more. In fact, I want you to send two of your crew over to the pond and just have them make as many bricks as they can.”

With just Sally left, I pulled out another set of charcoal sketches I’d whipped up the night before while the stone sloth roasted. My chief engineer’s eyes got as big as dinner plates when she saw that I had drawings, and just about snatched them out of my hand. She looked through, eyes keen as she absorbed details of the structure. She whistled for her crew, and started chittering and squawking as they arranged lumpy, mis-shaped bricks and slathered them with muddy mortar.

In the meantime, I tinkered with a design of my own using a few of the gears and a crank, along with a stretched hide and a stone drill. When the last brick was put on top, the engineering crew busied themselves loading the bottom with fuel and tinder and carefully tossing in coals from last night’s fire.

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Fumey-furnace>

Not exactly an accurate description. Really, it was a forced-air kiln. You see, fire requires two things—fuel and oxygen. You add more fuel, you get a bigger fire. But you add more oxygen, you get a hotter fire.

Sun-dried clay is useful for cups, bowls, jars, and containers. And I had a couple of those drying in the sun the previous night, which had finished by the morning. Primitive cultures on Earth had used clay for a huge number of applications, even things like recording history. In fact, the earliest recorded message was a business transaction, for Barley, if I remembered my Econ 101 class. Which reminded me, I needed to consider some fermentation science if I wanted my goblins to really celebrate my rule.

But, I digress. One of the interesting properties of silica clay is that if you fire it in hot—like, ridiculously hot—temperatures, it turns into something between a glass and a crystal, called ceramic. You need a lot of air for this, and a lot of fuel because forcing oxygen through that fire causes it to devour fuel like your fat uncle at Thanksgiving going through the sweet-potato casserole.

While you were at Thanksgiving, you might have seen some of your grandmother’s old dishes kept in a big case, and heard that they were ceramic, and associated it with tissue-thin delicate cups and plates that never actually got used because they were too special. And that probably gave you, as well as most other people, the wrong idea about the material science behind ceramic.

Ceramic is brittle, sure. It can shear somewhat easily along its crystalline structure. But you can plan around that. And once you do, you suddenly have a material that can be harder and sharper than steel, easily shapeable until its fired, doesn’t need to be mined or smelted, is incredibly heat resistant, and has just a few simple ingredients that you can readily find in a mountainous forest area. Popular applications of ceramics include things like bullet-proof body armor, precision instruments, turbine engine parts, bearings in my old prosthetics, oh, and the reentry tiles underneath the space shuttle. You know, the ones that keep it from burning up in the upper atmosphere?

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Sticky-skinny impeller. I think you skipped a few steps, King Apollo.>

You’re damn right, I did. We were skipping bronze, iron, and going right to pre-industrial. We’d need metal eventually, but ceramics were like a cheat code for a lot of the applications primitive cultures used metal for. I whistled for Sally and had her assembly team start making raw clay parts based on my designs while the fire warmed up. They went to work shaping clay, making blanks for a few different designs. Knives, spearheads, arrowheads, ball-bearings, connectors, pulley parts, hooks, fasteners, scribes, scalpels, fine hooks, and gears. Everything a budding goblin village needs to speed-run industrial parts manufacturing. The prototypes, if they worked, could be used to make molds from sun-dried clay, and then it was a simple matter to stream-line the process of shaping even more tools and components.

While the goblins worked the first clay prototypes, I showed two goblins how to work the impeller. Essentially, the two cranks spun spindles on either side of the kiln’s air intake, and small wooden blades on each one forced air through a channel and directly below the fire. It’s a bit like a bellows, but with a constant supply of air to the fuel source. Not only that, but I’d designed the kiln with a narrow throat at the firing chamber, to increase air flow even further—like a carburetor. It’s counter-intuitive that air speeds up through a constriction, but it does, and it would make the fire even hotter. Also the same physics principle that creates lift on an airplane wing, if you’re curious.

It was hard work keeping the fan blades spinning. But Sally’s goblins had energy to spare. The fire underneath roared, venting out the top of the furnace in a shimmering column of super-heated air. We had a decent supply of fuel from the days of idle goblins collecting sticks and sawing down small trees that turned out to be inadequate for the wall project. But the kiln would take every branch we could feed it. The heat coming off the bricks was immense.

When I judged it hot enough, I pulled open the front face with a hooked pole. The wave of hot air that came blasting out felt like I had stepped into the furnace myself. I shielded my face while Sally’s team inserted the thin adobe plate with the first of the ceramic pieces. Then the second and third plates went in, and I pushed the door back shut. My fur was matted with sweat already. The insertion team’s fur was singed in places. We needed gloves and protective aprons for this, really.

The goblins on the impellers cranked and cranked, trading off in shifts as the fuel team swept out spent ash and put fresh fuel in. Being king comes with certain privileges, so I sat back and watched the glowing oven

The kiln was really my first major accomplishment. We’d had to fight for the clay, lost goblins in the process, and needed parts and tools to work and shape the clay into better parts and tools that would give this tribe a much-needed leg up in this forest full of things that wanted to kill and/or eat its members.

We kept the fire going into the evening, even after Neil and the hunters returned with fish and fowl and hides and started to cook them. A few even tried holding roasting sticks over the kiln output, but when the first and second bird burst into flames, the effort was abandoned. Even after Buzz finished the wall and sent his goblins out to replace the dwindling fuel stock, we kept the fire going. Sally’s goblins worked in shifts on the cranks and at the fuel, making sure the kiln stayed red-hot into the evening. Finally, as the catch of the day was done cooking (now with containers ready to catch and store the oil and grease for later use), I called for a stop. Sally came over, fur so streaked with soot and grime she looked a bit like Rufus with his black-striped badger fur.

It had taken a whole day to make our first batch of ceramic parts. It would take the entire night for them to cool off enough to remove from the kiln. It was incredibly time, resource, and labor intensive to produce ceramic parts. The morning would tell if it was worth it.