This short story was commissioned by Hack_Blowfist and written by Vanessa Foxe (breedorbebred)
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I drained the last of my tankard with a contented sigh, and set it down a bit harder than I needed to. The beer here at the Hangman's Dance wasn't good, and it wasn't even strong. What it was, was cheap.
"Another?" the man behind the bar asked as he stopped to grab the empty bowl and plate from in front of me. I gave him a nod, and he added the empty tankard to the stack of dishes.
"Drinking to remember," a high, feminine voice asked from behind me, "or to forget?"
I turned in time to see what I assumed at first glance was a young girl using the little built-in steps on the back of the stool to reach the top. At second glance, I realised she was indeed a woman, a grown woman who just happened to be maybe three feet tall at most.
She was halfling-sized, the race those step-ladder stools were probably meant for, but she was certainly no halfling.
Sure, it's rude to stare, but I couldn't pull my eyes from the woman as she situated herself on the stool. For all that I'd heard stories of her folk, and even known that some lived in the cities up here in the North, I had never seen a goblin in the flesh.
She raised a delicate, green-skinned hand to flag the barkeep as she called, "I'll have what he's having."
The man gave her a nod, and scooped a second grimy-looking tankard to fill at the tap.
Satisfied at the imminence of her drink, the little creature turned to me and grinned. I tried my best not to stare, but the picture she cut was simply too bizarre.
The goblin's skin was the light green of an almost-ripe pear, except for her cheeks which were reddened with what was almost definitely powdered rouge. Her eyes were a deep, muddy red, and so big that they made her look almost childlike. And unless I was mistaken, that was a delicately-applied layer of eyeliner around them.
It looked like she was wearing lipstick too, or at least some shiny lip tint. The rich mossy-green colour made her too-wide smile stand out even more. It also drew attention to her pointed teeth, which looked more like fangs.
It was those sharp, pearly-white teeth that I was staring at when she spoke in her shrill voice again. "So, which is it?"
"What?" I managed, incredibly eloquently.
It was my first time seeing a goblin, a real honest-to-gods goblin, so maybe I could be forgiven for my lack of manners. And it's not like I was particularly well-spoken on the best of days. If I'd been an eloquent man, I probably would have made a life as a merchant and spent my nights drinking in nicer establishments, instead of working as a guard for a merchant's caravan and blowing my meagre wages in shitholes like this.
"Drinking to remember or forget?"
I blinked again, and finally forced out an answer. "Not much to remember," I told her, "and you can't drink enough to forget if all you've got to drink is this watered-down swill."
"Hey," the barman complained, with no real heat in his voice. He knew as well as I did that the ale was crap. The man slid my tankard in front of me with enough force for the frothy top to slosh over the side and wet the bartop, then turned a stern look on the woman. "Let's see your coin first."
"You didn't make me pay before drinking," I pointed out belligerently. I didn't really care too much about this random woman's problems, but I also didn't care for bullies. "You can't be a dick just because she's a... well, you know..."
"Goblin?" the portly man cut in, turning his furrowed brows on me now. "Thieves and swindlers, the lot of them."
The goblin gave him a pointy-toothed smile, one that looked distinctly less friendly than the one she'd given me. "If I wanted to steal from you, you'd never know I was here. Besides, this fella's paying for my drink anyway."
The two turned to look at me, and I shrugged. I fished a couple of coins out of my belt pouch and dropped them on the counter. The bartender frowned at me for a moment longer, then took the coins with a grunt. He obviously didn't care much for goblins, but money's money.
"Grab a table?" the woman asked, pointing at one over in the corner. I wasn't in the mood to keep staring at the grimy man behind his grimy bar, so I snatched up our drinks and stood. I held a hand out to her without even thinking about it as she slid off the stool, and she burst out laughing.
"A real gentleman, hey?" Her voice was slightly mocking, but she took my hand all the same. It was a bit of a drop from the stool to the ground, after all.
The table was lower than I was used to, and the stool was a bit short. Obviously someone had made this with both humans and halflings in mind, so it was a bit too squat for me to be comfortable and a bit too high for the goblin. The table was a perfect compromise: no one came away from sitting there feeling happy.
"I'm Neeka," she said once she was uncomfortably seated once more. I'd had a chance to give her a look-over as we'd crossed the bar, and to admire the grey-black dress she was wearing. It was sleeveless and cut a bit short at the front, so I'd gotten a nice eyeful of her slight breasts as she'd walked-- and a second as she had clambered up into the chair beside me at our table.
"Hadrian."
I slid her drink over, and she grabbed the tankard in two hands. It was obviously sized for a human to enjoy, and the handle looked almost comically large against her delicate hands.
Neeka took a sip with obvious relish, then licked off a bit of foam that had clung to her upper lip. I watched the motion of her pink tongue a bit closer than would have been polite. My first feeling on seeing her had been surprise and maybe just a tinge of discomfort, but now that I was looking at her up close... She was actually kind of pretty. In a very nonhuman kind of way.
Her noise was a bit too small and upturned, and her eyes and mouth were both a bit too large for her head, which in turn seemed too big for her body. Her ears were wide, long, and pointed at the end, almost like an elf's.
Of course, I'd met a few elf women in passing before, and I doubted any of them would be less than devastatingly offended at the comparison to a goblin.
"What do you do, Hadrian?" She turned in her seat to face me, and gave me a slow lookover from my brown hair to my boots, and back again. The brazenness of it made me feel a bit less guilty for having looked her over only moments before. "You look pretty strong, broad. I'm thinking... dock worker?"
"Do I smell like fish?" I joked, and she gave an amused snort. It wasn't a very dignified noise, but I was beginning to suspect that this Neeka didn't care much about things like 'undignified' or 'improper'. "No, I work security with some of the travelling merchant groups. What about you, Neeka? What do you do?"
"Oh, a bit of this and a bit of that." She took another swallow of her ale. If the weak, watered down flavour was as unsatisfying for her as it was for me, she didn't show it.
"Hey, that's no fair," I groused playfully. "I answered your question, didn't I?"
"Well, life's not fair." She grinned at me, and I couldn't help but match her expression. Her face was so expressive, her wide mouth showing each emotion so readily.
"Well, shit." I raised my tankard up, tilted slightly towards her. "I'll drink to that."
She tapped her metal cup against mine, and we both tilted our drinks back and downed them. The tankards clanked against the table almost in perfect sync, and I flagged the barkeep for another round.
"How long are you in town for, Hadrian?"
The rounded fellow came from behind the bar with a pair of tankards filled to the brim with his signature piss-water. He thumped them down on the table and grabbed our empties in the same motion, then stood there and stared expectantly at me until I dropped another copper coin into his outstretched hand.
"Day or two," I answered her as the man stomped off. "Just travelled with a group from down near the southern border all the way up here. I've got a couple days' rest before I travel with another cart back down."
My hometown was right on the southern border of Patridike, so close to the border with Sawarra that the differences between the two countries wore a bit thin. The official government of the town was whoever came by to collect the taxes that year. Life was slower in that small town, which is exactly why I'd left.
Patridike as a whole had a reputation across most of the continent-- maybe even across all of Vierset-- for being hedonistic, lazy, and indulgent. That was actually true for the most part, except for the merchant princes who basically ran the country over top of the actual government. Their armies of merchant caravans, legions of warehouse workers, and flotillas of cargo ships were in constant motion. And they always seemed to need extra hands.
By the time I'd left home a few years ago, at the ripe age of eighteen, I could have counted the number of nonhumans I'd seen on one hand. I would've still had a finger or two leftover, too.
Things were a bit different up north, especially so close to the large port city of Limani. It was a multicultural "melting pot", which basically meant that only a bit more than a third of the people walking around were humans, with most of the rest being halflings or elves, then a handful of weirder folk like dwarves, orcs, and apparently goblins.
I'd even heard rumours of centaurs visiting Limani, but I was pretty sure that was just an urban legend.
"Well, at least I've got you for the night," Neeka whispered.
I almost choked on my drink as she spoke. I flicked my eyes back to her and found the pretty goblin staring at me with undisguised interest. I'd already found my attention drifting to her exposed green skin and wondering what the rest of her looked like once or twice, but I hadn't expected her unadulterated bluntness. It took me a bit by surprise, but the biggest hang up was...
