“Arachnophobia is a serious thing!”

“How!? They’re adorable! That’s like being scared of puppies!” Shouts Lizz at me while holding back her laughter.

“You- you do know the average person swallows eigh- eight spiders in their sleep a year r-right?” Asks Shiona while having a hard time speaking.

“Well for one that’s been proven wrong! And secondly I don’t have a mouth, so ha!”

It seems that I won the argument, seeing as they have gone quiet and started staring at me.

“Plush… Can you take out your mask again? I’d like to take a look at it.”

“Sure.”

The book then reaches out an arm and gives her the mask, after looking at it for a bit she flies up to me and holds the flat backside of it in front of my face.

There I see myself in the reflection, a round black head with two glowing yellow circles for eyes and-

“!”

And below those two circles there was now a sharp wavy yellow line, like a bunch of yellow “w”s attached by their ends.

“What the…”

I keep looking at myself, I then try, and succeed, at moving it, both at bending it like a “u” or a “~”, as well as actually opening it, and when I do it opens properly rather than just changing the shape of the light like with my eyes.

The book takes back the mask and Lizz then asks me:

“... Can you eat?” And after she asks that Shiona puts her wing to her chin and seems to start thinking about something.

“... I… I don’t know…”

Lizz then flies into the book, and after a few seconds she comes back out while holding a meat skewer.

I take the meat skewer and try it, I take off one of the pieces of meat from the skewer and toss it in my mouth, and after I close my jagged cloth-lips I instinctively start chewing it with teeth I didn’t even see that I had.

I then somehow swallow, though I’ve no idea how.

“Well?” Asks Lizz and the both of them stare at me in anticipation.

“... I don’t feel like I did something wrong, actually it felt like when I used the blue jellies…”

“Could you taste it?” Asks Shiona as a follow up.

“Surprisingly, yes.” I say as I take another bit of meat, after which Lizz flies by and snaggs the skewer from me, I stare at her a bit in contempt.

“It’s pretty good actually.” I say as I take out a new meat skewer from the pouch, at this it becomes Lizz’s turn to give me the evil eye, however it soon changes and gains a mischievous glint which I am all too familiar with once I finish the skewer.

“Say, now that you have a mouth it means the spider thing could still happen, ri- Ah… It disappeared…”

Hearing what she said i take the mask back out and see that my mouth has indeed disappeared completely, leaving only the seamless surface of black cloth which my head is made of.

“Well that’s… convenient? I think?”

Lizz sighs and flies goes back inside the me, Shiona and I then take off again while she’s still giggling.

After a while the trees below us disappear and are replaced by a mostly empty patch of yellowish-green grass with a few gray stones sprinkled about, there we see a dirt road, and on that dirt road was a carriage, however it didn’t look very normal.

“Are those…”

“Those are goblins.”

“I’m pretty sure you meant ‘were goblins’...”

The carriage was made of a rusted metal and was covered in half-meter long rusted metal spikes sticking out on all sides, on those spikes were a large number of goblins and a few hobgoblin who had most likely killed themselves on the spikes, and from the back of the carriage came a cloud of black smoke.

It was the same for the horses, they seemed to be wearing full body rusted armor which was covered in impaled goblins as well as having small pipes on their helmets which black smoke came out of.

Behind the carriage there was a long trail of still flowing blood.

I notice that we start descending, eventually my feet touch the ground and Shiona lets go of me. She then lands a meter or so away and throws up.

“Are you okay!?”

After she finishes she responds to me.

“Are you kidding me!? How could I be okay after seeing that!? And how are YOU okay!?”

“You know I helped my father at the butchery, I’ve seen enough gore to be fine with this.”

“But those weren’t animals! These are sentient creatures!” She screams at me.

“Ha!” Laughs Lizz who had come out of the book.

“First of all I think you mean sapient.”

This casual response catches Shiona off guard and she looks at her blankly.

“Secondly, these things aren’t sapient at all, they’re stupider than wild animals. Tell me, how do you think those goblins got impaled on that carriage?”

“It drove into them obviously!” Shouts Shiona, angry at how we’re all looking at the same thing yet only she is reacting.

“Oh really?” She says and points to the back of the carriage. “So that must mean those horses pushed the cart backwards in order to get those goblins then? Without impaling themselves first? And what about the ones on the roof? Trust me when I say this, those goblins are stupider than stone and I would bet all the food in my room in the book that they simply walked into the carriage and impaled themselves all on their own. Though I admit not even I’m certain how they got on the roof like that…”

Shiona seems becomes so shocked that her anger dissipates and just looks at the goblin corpses.

“Honestly, people have been researching goblins for centuries yet no one know how the hell they haven’t gone extinct yet. There are some species that kidnap humans and use them for breeding, with the ones abducting males being much more successful due to a lot of them coming along willingly, however no one has ever seen that be pulled off by goblins, Every so often highbreed goblins are seen though, these are smarter than others and usually help the rest of their tribe gather food, when they come out it usually gets pretty ugly, even uglier than the goblins themselves, however even then it’s incredibly rare to hear stories about goblins successfully taking out even the smallest of villages before doing something stupid and getting themselves killed, though that’s not to say it hasn’t happened, about once every century there’s been an uprising of some highbreed goblin who found out how to make goblins stronger.”

She finally takes a deep breath and then continues, both me and Shiona being to shocked by how she suddenly started acting to stop her.

“It’s actually one of the thirteen wonders of this world just how the hell goblins are even born, no one has ever seen a pregnant goblin. Really, feeling bad for goblins is like feeling bad for mosquitos.”

And with that it seems like Shiona was finally convinced as she stood up, her face still having a confused look on it due to the stream of information that suddenly flowed out of Lizz.

“HEY! You guys okay!?”

Looking away from Lizz I see that the carriage had stopped and three people had come out of it and started approaching us.

They were all very tall and thin, they wore simple clothing, brown pants and white shirts, both of which were covered in oil and grime, they all wore leather goggles, one wore them on his forehead, one wore them normally, and the last one, a woman, had them hanging around her neck. They all also had sharp pointy ears, white skin and blonde-white hair, the woman had short and spiky hair while the men had it long hair tied into a bun behind their heads.

As they approached us we see that they didn’t just look thin, but even malnourished, their arms were so skinny that they looked like they hadn’t been used almost at all, neither having much muscle nor fat on them.

Once they get to us all three of them crouch down and are completely out of breath.

“Are you guys okay!?” Asks Shiona.

The female raises one hand, and on that hand she raises her index finger, telling us to wait.

After a bit they all raise their heads and we see they all have large dark circles under their eyes, the eyes of one of the men turn inwards and he fall to the ground, fainted.

*thud*

The man who fell had had the bad luck of hitting his forehead on a rock and had started bleeding profusely.

“Ah! Shro! Are you okay!?” Asks the other man who I now saw had a short white beard, and in response the one who fell lifts a bloodied hand and gives a thumbs up.

Shiona fumbles a bit in her bag and pulls out a glass vial filled with liquid the same color as the healing jellies and pours it on the back of the fallen man’s head.

In response the man lifts his other arm and gives another thumbs up and says thank you, though we don’t hear it too well due to his mouth being in the dirt.

The other two help the man back up, his now blood covered face looking like something straight out of a high class horror movie.

“Thanks.” Says the woman and starts scratching the back of her head while smiling wryly. “We came out to see whether you guys needed help when we saw you standing next to the forest, turns out the roles got reversed.” At this the two men also smile just as wryly back at her, the man whose name was apparently Shro looking even scarier than before now that his blood covered face was combined with a smile which we can instantly tell hasn't been practiced.

“Well the least we can do is introduce ourselves, I’m Fallis, the man you helped is Shro, and that’s his brother, Rosh. Also which one of you guys owns this blessed doll? I don’t want to corrupt him by getting in his way....”

“Corrupt him?” Shiona asks and looks at me.

“You don’t know about Blessed Dolls?”

“Erm, Fallis was it? I’m not a Blessed Doll.” I say while holding up my hand to get her attention?

“Wait really? Then are you a Fleecy? Wait no, those guys all wear those weird masks, hum…” She puts one of her hands at on her chin and supports it with her other.

Something she says catches my non-existent ears.

“This?” I ask and pull out the mask from the book behind my back, however to them it looks like the mask must’ve been hanging off of it all the time.

‘I probably shouldn’t just tell them what I am, but this might be my only opportunity to find out.’

“Yes! Wait, how did you take that off? I’ve never seen one without it…”

“Wait!” Shouts Lizz. “He told you what he is, and you can easily see what we all are, but what are you? I’ve never seen humans with ears like that.

“Oh! Sorry about that, I got a bit excited. Erm, I don’t remember what the humans call us, but we call ourselves elves-

-=Shiona POV=-

“... ourselves elves-

“NOOOOOOO!!!!” I scream, disregarding everyone’s surprise.

‘These can’t be elves! They’re dirty! They look like homeless people! They pollute the air! One of them even has a beard for crying out loud!’