“Don’t touch that!” the old wizard Phyron yelled at one of his few remaining goblin slaves. The stupid creature looked up at him but still reached out and grabbed the brightly glowing crystal. For just a second it seemed as if nothing would happen the spell form that the crystal was supporting snapped and the backlash caused the crystal to detonate spectacularly.

Phyron was quick enough to raise a barrier between himself and the explosion but his apprentice didn’t even realize the danger before the blast struck him, but that wasn’t what killed the poor fool. Instead he was lifted up and thrown out the only window in the tower. The sound of his very high pitched scream stretched out for several seconds before it suddenly cut off.

Facepalming Phyron shook his head as he lamented on the quality of modern apprentices. In his day apprentices were often thrown out windows or tossed into rooms with monsters but no, now they had to be coddled and look what that gets you. He knew from personal experience that there were a half a dozen spells the idiot could have cast that would have saved his life, instead all he heard was screaming, as if that would help.

Unfortunately he had to retain at least one apprentice to get his research grant approved. Ever since it was discovered that licking a green slime made you high, recreational slime abuse has become the plague of the modern era. Unfortunately, green slimes occupy an important ecological niche as the only creatures that can eat the giant red mosquitos that infest the surrounding swamplands. This is why his research is so vital, he was trying to create a green slime that didn’t get people high, yet so far all he has been able to create are slimes with different side effects. The sparkly green slime that made people think they were vampires was a particularly bad example that had somehow made its way into the wild, or at least the underground slime trade. He actually suspected his last apprentice before the man had died tragically during the teal slime fiasco.

Teal slimes, while they look similar to green slimes, have been used by alchemists for centuries to make the best laxatives in the empire. A single drop of the slimes secretions must be diluted a thousand times to make it safe to use, and even then it is potent. Apparently a shipment of teal slimes meant for the alchemists’ district in the capital was intercepted by a group of bandits. Believing them to be some species of green slime, the bandits sold the teal slimes on the black market. Somehow his apprentice at the time got his hands on one and proceeded to lick it.

It was the single most gruesome death he had ever witnessed. Phyron had to tear the carpets out of his apprentice’s room but he still couldn’t get the smell out of the walls and ceiling. He finally had the room bricked shut and placed warning runes all around it. He suspected that the stench had gained sentience as he would sometimes hear noises from the bricked up room and he could swear a strange smell would leak out of the walls.

Looking at the remains of his latest experiments Phyron was surprised to find that the goblin had somehow survived the explosion, though it wouldn’t last much longer. The explosion did serious damage to not only the goblin but to the surrounding lab apparatus as well. How the goblin had even gotten into the room was a bit of a mystery as the door had been sealed to prevent just such a catastrophe but it was surprise that the mindless beast would grab the spell crystal, after all it was bright and shiny, and everyone knows that goblins cannot resist “shinnies”, as they call them.

Generally speaking, goblins are weak and stupid. That said, they do have a very high tolerance to raw magic, which is why Phyron had several as slaves, despite the occasional mishap. While they are just as vulnerable as most things to spell effects, the raw magic itself, which would warp, or outright kill, nearly any other creature, doesn’t seem to affect them, or at least not to any noticeable degree. This made them perfect for cleaning up areas used for magical research as the stray magical energies in the area wouldn’t turn them into something unnatural. After all everyone remembers the horrors of Magister McDougal’s bunny farm experiment. Phyron had another reason he kept them around but that was a secret he kept from everyone.

Phyron repressed a shudder as he unsealed the door with a wave of his hand and used wind magic to blow the cloud of raw magic left over from the explosion out the window. The stone surrounding the window was incased in lead for just this purpose. He pulled out his notebook and wrote down everything he remembered and chronicled the aftermath.

With the air cleared and his notes taken he called for more slaves to clean up the mess while he observed from a safe distance and took additional note of anything they discovered. As they picked up the wreckage, putting it into lead lined crates to be sorted later, an odd squeak could be heard under the remains of the table.

Stopping the work, Phyron had the slaves gently lift pieces of rubble out of the way as he watched from the other side of the room. There was no way he was getting close to the result of an unstable experimental spell explosion; after all he didn’t have the intelligence of a goblin. As they lifted a large wooden slab out of the way an iridescent blob came into view. Phyron marveled at the multicolored glowing puddle, slowing stepping forward only to leap backward as the blob shifted on its own.

“A slime!” he exclaimed in excitement as he rushed over to grab a Magi-ware® box to store it. Casting a quick magic hand spell he sent the box gliding across the room but just before he could catch it the puddle broke into several smaller balls and started bouncing around the room. “Gotta catch them all!” He said to himself as he put a magical bubble around himself and started catching the bouncing balls in his box. There were over a dozen so it was no surprise that he missed the one that slammed into one of the goblin’s face and shot straight up his rather bulbous nose.

The goblin screamed while running around the room waiving his arms, which to be honest all of the goblins were doing at this point. After several agonizing seconds the goblin sneezed and blasted what remained of the unfortunate slime across the wall.

After that Phyron quickly caught all the remaining slimes and sealed them in the Magi-ware® box. While Magi-ware® boxes were more expensive that the original Trapper-ware® boxes, but they were made of more slime resistant materials so he had little choice but to spend the extra money.

The rest of the cleanup was rather anticlimactic as there were no other slimes, eldritch horrors, or other random summons within the wreckage. Phyron was ecstatic as he had a new slime to play with, or as he liked to put it, experiment on. When the poor goblin, who had his nasal cavity violently violated by a slime, tried to explain what had happened to the wizard he was misinterpreted as wanting to have his nose picked and was summarily kicked and told to get back to work.

Had Phyron bothered to look closely at the goblin, or performed even the simplest of magical scans, he would have found that something odd was happening.

The goblin, who’s name at this time was nothing more than a series of grunts and coincidentally enough a sneeze (though in goblin it was grand name which unfortunately translated to Fart Sniffer in common), only knew that it itched so far up his nose that he couldn’t reach it. It never occurred to either of them that this would be the beginning of an impossible adventure.