The Graces were one something like Gods in their own right.
They may represent perfection, of which Goblins are capable, and whose harsh yoke has harnessed the talents and powers of so many, only to drive them in the wrong direction when they get ninety-seven per cent of the way and knew they should have gotten one-hundred-ten. But worshipping all Gods is dangerous; even Goblins know that. Even LIKING Gods is dangerous.
Nevertheless, we worship the Graces. We do! They’re very pretty and very smart and if you mess with them, they will GET you.
We can respect that.
We talk to people the same way we look at rocks: with interest and without pretending we’re something we’re not. But we invoke the Graces to go out of our little Goblin world and make sure they enter theirs. Do you know most Elves consider it in insult if you take the delicious chewing gum in your mouth, which has at least another five minutes of great flavor on it, and offer it to them? Elves are weird. We first learned this the hard way (as did the surprised Elves; it’s a good thing Elves have a thing about removing their own corpses, or we would have had to choose between buying more nets to catch us when we swing from the rafters, or a waste disposal company. So many dead Elves. Icky!
But it’s weird the way humans get trapped in conversations. Have you heard of ‘record players’? Fergus stole one the other day (we haven’t dared ask him how he’s powering it) and he showed us what a skipping record sounds like. Other than “awful”, it…sounds like a skipping record. It keeps trying really hard to go forward, but the moment it encounters something out of the ordinary, especially a fault or a break, it simply repeats itself forever, until you turn it off or switch the record. We learned the hard way that you can’t reason with records, or record players.
There are quite a lot of people like that. One of the simplest reasons Goblins are happy is that once we figure out someone’s stuck in an infinite loop of their own beliefs, we do the same thing you’d do: we change the record, turn the player off, or, if it’s not ours, we go elsewhere so the skipping doesn’t drive us crazy.
I mean, drive us to the WRONG KIND of crazy. It can happen to you. The glorious freedom of Chaos is matched by the fact that there are plenty of people around us who’d like to create a kind of chaos because their brains insist it’s right.
We don’t blame their brains. Brains are not very efficient, and screens are very effective, and Humans in particular do love their screens. (Not that I’m not using a word processor now; what do you think I am, a Bridge Troll?)
So this is the great power:
If somebody’s a broken record, be polite to them, and gently edge your way away until you’re free and can get back to Real Life. Or Realistic Life, whichever it actually is.
If someone has something interesting to say or show, we listen. If they don’t, we wander off. We don’t understand why humans spend so much time saying things they don’t mean just to be polite if they’re just using it to distract you from the daggers in your hand. We’re Goblins. We’re weird and peaceful, but not nonviolent. We have so many better things to do than hang around being threatened. Even if the threats are ‘real’, we’ve still probably got better things to do; so many species use pieces of reality to justify stabbing you a whole lot.
Now Glorthax the Masochistic holds the record for Most Knives Taken By One Goblin In One Day. He tried so very hard to be accepted by humans. We can’t even call him a pincushion; when you’re done with it, pincushions are still there, full of useful pins. Glorthax is hanging around glumly. He spends all day counting the holes in his body.
So avoid unthinking people. They inevitably lead to extreme boredom. Nobody wants Glorthax around. All he talks about it, “Ow, this hurts”.
We presume he got what was coming to him, though we’re not sure why it came to him or why he deserved it. But Humans know best, we’re told. So it was probably a goo reason.
Ish.
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