Just Run With It

Mellisan didn’t like the goblins by any means. For those little pyromaniacs, even respect was a lot to ask. But it was there, of a sort. An unspoken agreement, from one fire hazard to another. They didn’t stick their necks out for her, she didn’t stick her neck out for them, but they helped each other out, when it was convenient. It never hurt to have friends, or at least makeshift allies. Even if they were a meter tall, illiterate, and firework-obsessed.

So when Mellisan’s back-alley lurking was interrupted by the sound of screeching, smoking, sprinting goblins, she didn’t run, hide, or start flinging fireballs. She sighed, marked her place in her formula book, and hopped off the rotting crate she’d been using as a stool.

She was just winding a coil of red hair around her left horn when the first goblin came streaking around the corner. Tiny, green, and hairless, with a melon for a head and a mouth full of razors, the creature couldn’t win a beauty contest if it was the only entrant.

Mellisan stepped aside to avoid getting a goblin to the kneecaps, calling “How many guards?”

“Moby’s earth ‘a peelers!” it yowled nigh-incomprehensibly. Mellisan drew a blank for a moment as she tried to arrange the jumble of syllables she’d heard into something sensical. A Moby’s worth of … she’d take that back: absolutely incomprehensibly. She darted down the alley after the goblins.

“A what worth of what now?” she asked.

“Moby!” one shouted back. It gestured wildly, making a series of sounds even Mellisan couldn’t interpret. At least it seemed to notice this. “What do we do on a goblin wailer, what do we do on a goblin wailer, what do we do on a goblin wailer, early in the morn-ing?”

Many had said that goblins had no musical talents. This was true. Many goblins had tried to prove them wrong. They had failed. Goblin singing could be best compared to that of a screaming, burning cat. For the most part, it was even about fire.

“Moby...wailer...oh, a whale,” Mellisan puzzled. “A whale’s worth of…”

Oh no. No no no no no.

Mellisan stopped in her tracks and started frantically bundling her hair around her horns while her tail dug through her pockets for the potion. She pulled out the bottle, tugged the cork out with her teeth, and downed the contents in one gulp. She gagged. The liquid stuck in the back of her throat, then boiled, filling her mouth with a vile gas.

And that is why she was doubled over coughing when the first peelers sprinted around the corner.

They ignored her--she was clearly not a goblin, and helping random choking kids wasn’t their job. That was peelers for you: the laws first, their lives second, and the people last of all. You couldn’t bribe them, you couldn’t befriend them, and heavens help you if you tried to trick them. Mellisan had ample reason to doubt that the heavens were on her side, so she tried to stay well clear of the peelers. She was perfectly fine with being ignored--

A gloved hand landed on her shoulder. “You. Kid. Are you all right?”

Fata Morgana, she’d just had to jinx it, hadn’t she? She took a deep breath. She could run with this.

She straightened up, brushing the peeler’s hand away, cleared her throat, and said, with no trace of her usual Infernal accent, “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Bloatheaded nutcase startled me, is all.”

The peeler looked at her in a way she didn’t like at all. Peelers weren’t supposed to care; it wasn’t allowed. But his clockwork hound’s stare was worse. Those things could almost always tell that she was...a little more than human. Even with her scent buried, her voice alchemically disguised, her body temperature modified, her horns hidden, and her tail--it could still see her tail.

Mellisan lurched backward and slammed into the wall. She quickly straightened up, trying to pass her movement off as the result of a loose shoelace, but the damage had already been done. The jagged, overlapping plates that formed the hound’s hackles rose as it let out a low growl. Yep, damage done.

Calm down, she told herself. Breathe. I can run with this. Because if I can’t...

She leaned against the wall, acting as casual as she could with her mind’s eye full of torches and pitchforks. She asked, “What’s with your mutt? I doubt that’s normal for them.” She knew full well that it wasn’t. She’d seen that particular response--she wasn’t sure of its name--hundreds of times by now. Which is why her hand flitted to her pocket the moment the peeler glanced down. The vial of alchemist’s fire was still there. Her panic button. Worst case…

The peeler knocked on one of the hound’s armour plates. “Hey! Anybody home? What’re you pointing at?”

It straightened its tail, lifted a paw, and pointed directly at Mellisan. The peeler’s gaze followed it. Locked onto hers.

Mellisan couldn't move, the corner of the vial was digging into her hand, every muscle was tensing up, already planning her escape route. Fight or flight; what’ll it be?

Shut up, she shot back. Everything’s under control, just shut up.

The peeler shook his head, shaking Mellisan out of her trance as well. He said, “Dumb bag of bolts must think you’re a goblin. Any ideas on why?”

At last, a life preserver. Mellisan unclenched her fist with difficulty, then pulled out another bottle, this one cloudy, with a bronze snowflake set into the glass. She said, “Well, I’ve never seen a goblin who didn’t reek of fireworks (at its best), so this might explain it.”

The peeler immediately snatched the potion from her hand and held it up to the feeble light. “Where did you steal this?” he asked gruffly, all traces of sympathy gone.

Mellisan gave a long-suffering, completely fabricated sigh. “I didn’t steal it from anyone. I found it near that snake break on Zephyr. It’s just a potion. Fire the cleanup crew anyway, it could well’ve been an ooze.”

Most of this was a lie. She had made the potion herself, but she wasn’t about to give this peeler any reason to prolong the conversation. But the serpentfolk made the goblins look like bumbling puppies; she wouldn’t put anything past them. Not even unleashing a living, hunting alchemist’s nightmare on a populated area.

The peeler nodded slowly. “All right.” He dropped the bottle into his bag. “In that case, I’m taking it.”

Mellisan bit back her objection. A single potion was a small price to pay for getting out of there alive and relatively unsuspected.

But the peeler wasn’t leaving. He chose his words carefully. “Have you seen anything… unusual around here in the last few days? Strange people, strange animals, maybe even strange machines?”

Mellisan attracted strange in spades. Or maybe she just had a habit of noticing. But she said, “Apart from the snake break, no. And that was out of the blue,” because you always lied to peelers if you could get away with it, on principle.

The peeler didn’t look at all satisfied with this response, but he signaled to his hound and jogged away towards the rest of his group.

Mellisan impassively watched him go. “Wow,” she remarked to no one in particular. She stretched, coughed, and added, her voice back to its darkly melodic lilt, “The peelers’re getting dumber.”



Featured in the "Fantasy Newsletter (January 6, 2016)"