It was by no means the longest table ever constructed. There was a time when certain Warlords among the Dwarves, when the Dwarves had such things, build a vast, cunning, zigzag table, half a mile long, where Dwarves from every company and command could speak to each other and exchange Goblin jokes and drink until they were, if not drunk, at least pleasantly distant from the shoddy workmanship of the world.
It was a famed piece of furniture. Waitstaff of every variety fought for the honor of serving at it, and were it not for the essentially universal Hobbit love of barmaids, the battles might have been singularly intense. The Hobbits sent an army of Barmaids just as the Very Formal School of Butlery was about to engage in death-battle with Agatha’s Flawless Academy of Waitstaff. It was said the barmaids could carry a hot dish from one end of the Hall to the other before it could cool, which is impressive if you figure that nobody with a cocktail had managed to get that far without the ice melting.
This wasn’t that.
On the other hand, it wasn’t your ordinary excessively-long table, either. Nothing about it was all that ordinary; even the tablecloth was made exclusively from the fur of an extinct animal, and bringing THAT species back from the dead was frustrating even for a Necromancer; but that’s another story. Each table setting had eleven forks, four spoons, three knives, two prongs, a pair of miniature eating sticks, and a sharp and very elegant stick should one want to spear one’s meal, or (in, one hoped, less happy surroundings) one’s neighbor.
Conversation was possible, depending on your definitions of ‘conversation’. The elegant septet playing lovely, soft Elven music in the background was almost certainly there to enhance the pleasures of the meal and drown out eating noises. It surely wasn’t there to drown out speech, or because Alice had some mild hope that someone would hit a wrong note, one of her Ambassadors would take offense, and the world would be minutes between one and seven overpaid Elves. It certainly did the former; and the latter was on the mind of almost everyone in the room.
Except the Hobbits, who were simply eating calmly and gesticulating eloquently at the waiters.
Conversation was easy, so long as you wanted to talk to yourself. Granted, if you wanted to talk to your neighbor, or Alice, or anyone OTHER than one of the servants, waiters, flunkies, soulless death-dealing spellmakers, butlers, maids, Death Golems, and others who passed by the table frequently to see if anyone needed anything, which everyone did.
Everyone complained about the conditions, except the Hobbits, who tactfully gestured that those who found the meal unappetizing ought slide their plates waaaaay across the table over to them; and the Goblins, who were not present, as they had found the dessert.
It was thirty sentient minds, twenty-seven hungry bodies, and twenty-nine souls at that table, not counting Alice. It was their first meal together. They were to get to know each other. It was impossible.
Eventually, Alice, who had eaten very little (but who, like the Hobbits, knew the meaning of each and every individual fork)—rose up from her chair.
Then she rose ON her chair.
Then she walked, politely stepping over plates, nodding apologies, until she was at the center of the (fortunately) well-supported table. She said:
“Behold!
“The harvests of three continents lie before us.”
“The finest chefs of every race here have vied to create classic dishes.”
“…and I’m the only one who gets to really eat, because everyone else has to wait on a waiter, and unless you give them the ability to fly, waiters can only move so fast. (Do not give them the ability to fly; if you tip badly, they will drop a fifty-gallon container of gravy on you. I have learned this through experience.)”
She turned sideways, stepped back near the edge of the table, so she could, with some head-turning, look everyone in the eye.
“Is ANYONE enjoying their dinner?” she asked.
There was a pause.
“Speak freely” Alice suggested. “If you can’t tell me you don’t like what my chefs are doing, I’ll never get an honest word from you about policy in my life.”
…Alice was not good at telling jokes, but once in a while, she had incredible timing. And she did know her dramatic moments; after all, had she not been defeated by a Bard? (Or so said she and the Bard; and who would doubt such a pair? See: “I Hate Your Prophecy”. We wish that was a spoiler.)
“This is your celebratory first night,” she said, not shouting, but in a voice which carried. “I imagine you’re all enjoying it as much as I am, which is not at all.”
…Alice didn’t crack a smile. Noe-one could tell if she was joking, but the laughter which came wasn’t forced or even choked; it was a roiling, rolling avalanche of hangry spirits at least given one small thing to lighten their evening. Everyone had decided Alice was hilarious. She was hardly about to smite them all, or turn them into mindless zombies; while no-one would classify Alice morally on first glance, she was fairly obviously a harried academic desperately looking for someone else to be part of the administration before the metaphorical students barricaded the metaphorical gym and began demanding less education in class and more in a convenient twice-monthly pill form.
Alice sighed, flexed her legs a few times, dramatically leaped off the table and undramatically landed on her chair. she wasn’t un-agile, but accidentally breaking her legs would have really ruined the moment.) She stepped gingerly from the chair to the table, where she still wasn’t actually taller than the Ettin or the Ogres. She attracted a lot more attention, though.
The Dark Lord shrugged. She pointed at a small door which had succeeded beautifully in its quest to be inconspicuous.
“In there,” she said, “is a very reasonable, large meal which can be eaten with one fork, one spoon, one knife and, if you’re picky, perhaps one extra spoon. There’s a table set for thirty. Somebody has to sit next to me, and it’s usually Sam, plus, I imagine, the bravest or unluckiest person in the room. Either way, I’d like to meet you. There’s a limited number of dishes. There’s even a limited amount of food, although we can always ask the chefs nicely if they’d enjoy making us some snacks more than they’d enjoy fueling their own ovens; the answer is often yes. I, myself, probably won’t get my hands on some of the food I really like. This is normal, unfortunately.
“Really,” suggested a Gnome whose glasses had lenses which were probably, but not definitely, not quite as thick as wagon wheels. “Who would deny you a food you like?”
Alice sighed. “Law of Sacrifice. It’s difficult for one thing to be in two places at once. If we lose the waiters and it becomes your job to feed me the food you want, all we’ve done is overpaid the waiters and substituted an inexperienced staff who’ll be hungry and grumpy tomorrow. If the waiters treat me differently from you, it will be a really visible symbol of why one might want to seek more rank, with whatever it entails, rather than your current positions of some rank and some responsibility. In other words, it will make it even more difficult for me to share some of this workload with you. Which would be really frustrating. So to some extent, we’ll all share…somewhat.”
Everyone looked at the Hobbits. “We share!” protested one. And to prove it, he took off his hat under which he had secreted a slice of vegan red velvet cake, beautifully wrapped. “Anyone want to cut this in twenty-nine pieces?”
Alice sighed, walked over to the table, which was brimming with food and smelled the way food smells in your dreams just before you punch whatever idiot woke you up as the spoon arrived in the orbit of your mouth, and sat down. Everyone else sat at the big kidney-shaped table; Sam sat right next to Alice, and the other seat remained vacant for a long time. Alice sighed. Sam took out the tree bud, which was growing and was now kept in a special large pouch on his person when it wasn’t in sunlight, and placed her on the seat and began pouring a little water into her pot.
Everyone else slowly gathered around the table. Alice picked up her utensils and began eating very conspicuously and talking to Sam.
“Sam, do you think I should have all these Ambassadors tortured if they don’t start conversations with each other?”
“Absolutely I do,” replied Sam. He whacked the Druid next to him. “Hey! Eat your vegetables, they were gathered on the Solstice.”
“That would have absolutely no effect on the taste or flavor of the vegetables, and saying so is ignorance beyond—”
He paused.
Everyone looked at them.
“Do I die now?” he said.
Alice smiled.
“Yes. Archers, slay him.”
Everyone looked around as fifty black-clad Assassins, whose existence had not even been suggested a moment before, completely and totally failed to materialize.
- At this moment, waiters came in and asked if anyone wanted more wine. “’More’ wine?” asked Alice, who knew the importance of rum. There was a certain amount of chaos as many, many people ordered beverages at once. There was a moment when it looked as though people might actually start conversations. But people kept shooting glances at Alice and shutting their mouths.
Alice sighed, which was pretty normal for Alice. She pointed at Sam.
“Do you think he would have gone to all that trouble just to take you prisoner?”
“Sentient beings do a LOT of stupid things,” replied the Gnome.
All of our Ambassadors have freedom. Talk. Act. Do things. If I really, really hate it, talk to me first.”
The Ambassadors looked at each other.
Alice sighed
“Do you remember your visit to the torture chamber in your various tours of the castle?”
“It…is completely crammed with books,” noted a very small Ettin. “And a few scrolls,” suggested her other head.
“Look. I am a Dark Lord. I have made personal—very, very, very personal—pacts with Demons and Dragons and P’tah and also a certain set of promises made to a certain group of very, very annoying students. I could rule by force, but that is a LOT of work and money and I would NEVER do research. Or I could rule by creating rulers who make laws in my name and who will, invariantly, assume I will never, ever check to see what those laws are. And they’re right, because the system would massively change from ‘source of information and leadership’ to ‘I no longer have that part of my soul left to sell to any Devil which cures migraines.”
“At best, it would be like sitting at a very, very long table where anyone can talk, no-one can say anything, and everyone goes hungry.”
The Gnome ambassador, whose name was Felix, said,
“You could have simply told us this earlier. Some of us would have believed you, and the rest would have learned over time.”
Alice smiled. “I was impatient then, just like you’re hungry now. But if you’d like the lesson explained to you in ten thousand words while the others eat, I could work off that red velvet cake by walking around the Long Table with you and discussing my theories on power politics.”
Felix (probably) blinked; again, with those glasses, it was truly hard to tell.
“So you really do need Ambassadors. It wasn’t some sort of strange, dark deception.”
Sam and Alice sighed together.
“I only wish,” said Sam.
Alice realized no-one had opened a single pot, and she opened hers: cassoulet. She then walked around opening everyone’s pots, as she had acquired a certain flair for the theatrical and, besides, it let her avoid peoples’ eyes when she was worried she might mess up.
“I need Ambassadors,” she said. “Badly. Or the Long Table in front of all of us will starve all of our people at best, and get them fighting at worse.”
“AND they won’t use the right forks!” said the Hobbit, and set-to her cassoulet with a will.
__________
In addition to “A Goblincore Guide To Life”, we’re still working on the third book in our Dark Lord Alice trilogy. As is our custom, each book is standalone; you don’t need to know much about any of them except that the Dark Lord’s name is Alice, and, like most relatively-sane people, she finds that actually RULING is GRUELLING. (Sauron and Palpatine, for example, don’t really want to rule; they want to dominate everything. That’s their passion. Alice, on the other hand, really reallly wants to do more magical research, and has to spend almost all of her time making sure all the foolish people don’t do MORE foolish things without sending in giant armies to crush them…which would have terrible side-effects. You can’t burn down all the wheat fields, and the farms beside them, without losing a great deal of quality in your literal dauly bread, for example. It could be ethics, it could be self-interest; it could be both.
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