~~~~
From birth goblins receive a
rigorous education, but not in the way you'd expect. They're don't study from
books for the big test, it's more akin to an informal military boot camp. They are
screamed at by a series of drill instructors. Whose only job is to beat all the
information into the young goblin's heads. Sometimes literally.
The most important and valued of
these lesson are the 2,071 tips for survival. Which cover everything from
wilderness, to combat, to natural disasters. For example, Tip #1: "always
let the next guy go first." The goblin who can remember each of these tips
is guaranteed to survive (slightly longer), in this harsh dog eat dog world.
Unfortunately, most goblins don't take the tips to heart. These poor souls are
expected to die before they turn twenty. However, Frekle was different.
Frekle wasn't an ordinary goblin,
unlike most he took the tips for survival very seriously. When the other goblin
kids were sucking on lit sticks of dynamite to look cool. Frekle would take
cover behind the nearest big rock. When the other kids went out to go play war
with real swords. Frekle would be back home trying to recite the survival tips
from memory. You'd think he'd suffer from serious bullying for being so
different, but he wasn't. The other goblins saw it as his loss for not coming
out to play and ignored him. Frekle didn't care, he knew it would pay off in
the long term.
Like many young goblins when Frekle
turned 15, which was about 20 in human years, he was sent off to war. When
goblins go to war they are assigned a job at random from pieces of paper picked
from a hat. Most of Frekle's peers were selected for the "fun" jobs.
Like catapult operator, meat shield or catapult ammunition. Frekle was chosen
to be a scout. Meaning his job was to run ahead of everyone else and if he met
the enemy to scream. If he was lucky he'd scream loud enough to alert everyone
to his position before dying. If he was really lucky he'd be selected as the
day's trap detector. Which meant he'd run headlong into enemy territory. Trying
to activate as many traps as possible before dying. So then his allies could
make it through unscathed. Obviously, Goblin scouts had some of the highest
mortality rates among the army. However, Frekle wasn't an ordinary goblin.
All his time spent reciting the tips
for survival finally paid off. On his first scouting mission into the Forest of
Infinite Pain, Frekle remembered the first two tips for survival. Tip #1:
"Always let the next guy go first." Tip #2: "When running for
your life never be last in line, how else are you going to trip the guy behind
you?" When Frekle's commanding officer had them charge into the forest,
Frekle held back. After they found giant goblin eating spiders instead of their
enemies, Frekle ran in the middle. Then he tripped the guys behind him whenever
a spider got too close. At the end of the day only Frekle and his CO survived,
but he didn't care, he never liked those guys anyway.
These doomed scouting missions
became the norm for Frekle. He and a dozen random goblins would find themselves
scouting some horrible place. Then only Frekle and maybe two other guys would
come back in one piece. Frekle always remembered the tips for survival in this
situations. Such as Tip #867: "Never do anything dangerous that you can
convince some other idiot to do it for you. (unless it's jumping to
safety)." So, whenever there was a time Frekle needed to say, jump across
a bottomless chasm to secure the other side. He'd trick one of his peers into
doing it instead.
This continued for many years.
Frekle saw many good goblins, and many more bad goblins, die in the line of
duty while he lived on. By the time he was twenty-five his superiors could no
longer call this luck. They had a genuine survivor on their hands and promoted
Frekle to chief of the scouts, much to his delight. His first mission was to
scout out a series of vast caves in the Mountains of Eternal Doom. Frekle went
with little hesitation and great pride.
He followed all his usual tips, send
guys ahead of him into danger, trip guys behind him when running from danger.
Whenever there was a risk involved, Frekle always made someone else do it, and
so on. However, the Mt. of Eternal Doom turned out to be his greatest
challenge. Frekle had to pull almost every trick out of the book within the
first week. By week two he was down to just three more meat shields between him
and death. Frekle was concerned, but hadn't given up yet. There was always Tip
#2,069: "When a job is facing certain failure quit while you're ahead and
lie about it later." Plus Tip #2,070: "When all else fails, run like
hell." The answer was simple, he abandon the mission and blame his dead
subordinates. Then the earthquake hit.
He was but an hour from safety when the
whole cave system began to shake violently. It wasn't long before big chunks of
rock began to fall from up high. Frekle panicked, a goblin meat shield doesn't
do much against 50 tons of rock. Abandoning all pretense and strategy. Freckle
followed his natural instinct and ran screaming for safety. While dozens upon
dozens of hunks of jagged rock fell all around him.
Frekle desperately searched his mind
for a survival tip dealing with falling rubble. Yet, nothing came to mind. Not
after the first of his meat shields was crushed under rubble, not after the
second tripped and fell in a hole. Then when his last goblin screamed in horror
as a huge cluster of rocks came falling down right on top of them. It finally
came to mind. Tip #2071: "When trapped in a cave-in with rocks falling at
all sides make sure to never...make sure to never..." Frekle couldn't
remember the rest. He'd spent his whole life memorizing these tips, yet that
last one chose to allude him now. Without his tips Frekle didn't know what to
do, especially as the shadow of impending doom closed in on him.
Frekle wasn't an ordinary goblin. He
spent his whole life memorizing tips for survival, while others ran blindly
into danger. He was a genuine survivor, he "was" at least.
~~~~
Well this was a fun experiment. I guess this is the exact opposite of show don't tell, but I wanted to try telling a story in this format. I guess you could say it's more akin to parables and certain fairy tales that describe what happens in a story. Rather than a story being told through dialogue, or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm not sure what my next post is going to be, I have some stories I could drop in the pipeline, or I could write something new. I'm really not sure.Until then Read, Comment and Enjoy.
