Chapter VI: What We Take On

“Hun, you have to see this. Can you sit up?”

“Yeah, give me a second here,” she stiffs her arms and rests against the headboard of the bed while fixing her gown.

He gently slides the towel towards the center of the bedsheets.

Her jaw dropped and her face contained mixed emotions. All three sacks were split open and little faces stuck out of them. Three pairs of beady black eyes ogled back at her, and both parents were awestruck.

“How do you feel?”

“…I am,… not sure…, they look kinda cute.”

The sacks shake more vigorously, and struggle is written on the young ones’ faces. Arms the size of pencils thrash around the heads. In mere seconds, the slits ripped open from one end to the other. The three spilled out onto the bed covered in a thick goo. The one in the middle attempted to stand up first yet fell forward on their face. The other two tried standing as well, yet they too fell over. Their legs were scrawny, and they soon crawled up to mom.

“Wow, I didn’t think they’d start walking already.”

She tears up, “I don’t know what to think, this is not what I expected…”

They climb up her legs and torso like a jungle gym. The three were mainly green, but each of them had a different pattern and color attached to their skin. Each of the patterns were different, yet they all appeared to be a mossy growth that spread across the body. One had a blueish spider-web pattern. The next had bold lines of red, and the last baby had a yellowish honeycomb pattern. They sniff her gown intently and occasionally nibble on the fabric.

She hoisted the smallest of the three up to her chest and coddled it. It laid in her arms contently without fuss. The young one looked at her with a nervous focus in its eyes, as if it wasn’t supposed to be held. She was mesmerized.

Alakar then picks up the largest of the three that couldn’t stop sniffing her feet.

It was still so small that he could wrap both of his hands around the torso. That didn’t last long though because it squirmed around a lot and bit him.

“Ouch!”

She snickers, “serves you right, ha.”

“I didn’t do anything though, I just wanted to see if we had a boy or girl.”

She rocks the little one and says, “Babe, we need to clean them up, and have a little talk...”

He turns his back to her while soaking a towel in water and says, “…I figured. A lot happened to me while I was on my hunt. I’m not sure you’ll believe me once I tell you…”

She shouts, “Happened to you?! Don’t even start with me!”

*Murrahh!* *Murrahh!* *Murrahh!*

All three gawked in fear at her and made distressing noises. The yellowish one snuck under the bed, the reddish one crawled into a drawer, and the tiniest of them all quivered in her arms.

He chuckles, wrings out a towel, and says, “Well that was to be expected.”

She sets the blueish one down on a pillow and says, “What is that supposed to mean?”

He looks at her and says, “They’re goblins, they’re cowardly by nature… But they’re my children so I’ll make them brave!”

She whispers under her breath, “You’ll just get them caught up in craziness.”

“No, I will not, have a little faith in me now. Will you at least trust me to clean them up?”

“I guess… I need to wash up and retailor a dress or two since none of my clothes fit anymore, thanks to you…”

“Eh, but it’s… never mind, let’s talk about this later.”

She walked out of the room with a couple pieces of clothing and shut the door behind her. He turned around with several soaked towels, ready to wash them yet none of them were in sight. He heard occasional noises being thrown back and forth between them in the room. With a bit of searching, he popped open a drawer and the reddish one leaped out, screaming onto his tattered shirt. He was clearly enraged from being found.

“Hey now! None of that!”

He seized his son and scrubbed him down with the towel. It was difficult for him to scrub all the afterbirth off. His son resisted him the whole way through, biting and kicking, yet Alakar was much stronger and didn’t want Margrett to think he was too incompetent to do this task. Once it came to cleaning in between the toes, he screamed more and was let go. He soon rolled into the sheets in an attempt to collect lost filth. The son looked back at him with resentment, yet he ignored his anger.

He gazes around the room with a smile and asks the room, “Who’s next?”

The smallest son climbed off the pillow and walked towards him across the bed. This one was a little different than the other two, as he looked down and avoided eye contact with his father. He clasped his hands together in front of his body and continued to look down. This son watched his brother go through the first cleaning and knew that resisting would have been futile.

“Alright come here little one,” and he washes him more thoroughly than the last.

They both smile at each other with toothy grins, and he asks, “Now where is your brother?”

The wee one looked at him and had no clue what he was asked. There was no point in asking further as none of them knew the native language yet. He tossed the dirty towel on the dresser and proceeded to search for his third child. It was a struggle to find the little guy. There weren’t too many places to hide inside the small bedroom, but they were good at finding hiding spots regardless. He checked inside the piles of clothes, the dressers, under the nightstand, and in the bedsheets. Finally, he crouched down and peered under the bed.

“Ah, found yeah! What are you eating?!”

It wasn’t clear what he was consuming, but it couldn’t have been anything good. He pointed at his feet repeatedly and gestured for him to come here, but his son refused and moved further away under the bed. The next ten minutes was an exhausting game of cat and mouse as he moved from one side of the bed to the next to shoo him out.

He points at him and yells, “Oh, you’re not gonna out run me!”

His son ran out from under the bed and shot towards the door. There in front of the door, near the corner of the room, he jumped again and again for the door handle. Alakar leisurely walked over to the door with him. This guy had no idea, even if he managed to reach the door handle, he’d find it locked. He quickly snatched him up, and his son started resisting him like the first one. It wasn’t until about midway through the scrubbing that he calmed down and accepted his fate.

“Okay, that wasn’t too bad…, I guess. Now everyone come here.”

Two of his sons were in front of him. One looked uncomfortably full, sprawled out on the bed. The other wee one sat there attentively, and the first one was absent since his cleaning.

He sighs and grumbles out, “Come out here, don’t make me look for you…”

The moment he spoke, he heard a rustling inside the only drawer left within the dresser. It was obvious where his last kid had decided to hide. He pulled the dresser ajar, just a little bit.

“Grrrrrrrr!”

A pair of defiant eyes glared through the slit, and he responded with a deep growl.

The dresser slams shut, and a cry goes out, “Murrahh! Murrahh!”

He sags his shoulders and says, “Oh c’mon, I’m not gonna eat you. I know for sure goblins taste horrible anyways…”

With some patience, the reddish one eventually emerged from the dresser drawer and followed his gestures. It wasn’t easy but he managed to clean his children up and gather them in the middle of the bed. And this is when he noticed that the slimy cocoons were gone, and he put two and two together.

He speaks directly to the middle one who is still sprawled out and on the verge of a nap, “So you ate your own afterbirth, eww… Is that even normal?”

All three of them look at the now sleeping goblin, each with a different expression. There was still some work left to do, and while the three wrestled on the bed, Alakar swept up glass and threw clothes back into drawers.

*Click*

Margrett stepped back into the room with a blue dress on and many pairs of brown pants in hand. The clothes were all hemmed, and she tossed the shorts to her husband.

“These should work for now, or at least until we change back to normal. How are my babies doing?”

He jumps up onto the bed next to a pile of goblins, and says, “They did okay, at least they’re clean now, but I’m not sure how long that’s gonna last…”

She frowns at him and says, “Why are they piled up like that? You sure you were watching them?!”

He turns over and laughs, “Yeah, that’s the most normal thing I’ve seen thus far. It’s eating afterbirth that has me really confused.”

She almost went green in the face, yet she was already pretty green.

“What did I hear? You know what, for once, I don’t want to know. Let’s talk now.”

They dress the little ones in the makeshift pants that were provided by Margrett, and they get into a long conversation about what happened over the past week.

“So, you’re telling me that you didn’t mean to turn me into an ugly monster?”

“Hun, I wouldn’t dream of turning anyone into a beast, not even my worst of enemies, and definitely not into something as lowly as a goblin…”

“And what about that stone? How does a fucking stone turn people into monsters? I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”

“Well, just when I thought I was about to die there were voices in my head, and before I knew it, there was a gemstone in my chest…”

“Okay… So how do we turn back to humans? I have no boobs anymore, this is a problem, like what am I going to do with all my bras?!”

“Hmm, we could make slingshots out of them.”

She shoves him and he falls over with a grin, and she says, “What the fuck, no… You caused this, and you’re gonna fix it!”

He leans back up and suggests, “There’s really only one person I can think of who would help us right now, my cousin…”

“Mel… He’s that biggest goofball I’ve ever met, right after you. How’s he gonna help us?”

“He’s the only mage that I know of that’s close, and I’m sure he’d try to change us back.”

“And what if he doesn’t and hands us over to the empire? We’ll be killed, experimented on, or even worse…”

“There’s no way he would turn over his own family members. I’m confident he wouldn’t sell off his own family like that.”

She sighs, “I hope so… I’m not sure I can live like this…”

He rubs her back and says, “I promise, this will work itself out. Let’s just enjoy what we have until he gets here, there’s no point in feeling glum about it right now.”

“Um, yeah, I guess you’re right for once. I’ll send a bird and tell him it’s an emergency and that he needs to move here.”

“Sounds good to me, you know I can’t write it so it’s up to you. And by the way, can you watch the kids, I need to go set some snares so that we have food for tomorrow.”

“Of course, just make sure you come back this time…”

He walks out the door, blows her a kiss, and says, “Anything for you, my love.”