GOBLORE: Part I (Story) (Patreon)

Hello Patrons! This has been a pretty quiet month so far, eh? Well worry no longer! I present to you: GOBLORE. Better name pending. Feast your eyes on the first installment of what might be a novel-sized project. Have I said this before? Yes! Will I ever stop trying? NO.

This is my attempt to weave a fun, popcorn-movie style narrative WITH spicy lewds. Presenting: a really self-indulgent isekai plot revolving around an intrepid human protagonist discovering a village of Goblins who want his seed! I call it: GOBLORE.

Wait, I already said that.

ANYWAYS, this is a bit out there in terms of content. It's smutty near the end, but a large part of it is narrative-focused. Let me know what you think, and if you'd like to see more!

Anyways, without further ado:

GOBLORE.

****************************************

It took a while for Jesse Sandoval to realise that the uncomfortable material blocking him from taking a proper breath wasn’t an incredibly shoddy pillow but was, in fact, the airbag of his car. How he had gotten to faceplanting himself against his steering wheel was unclear. One moment he’d been driving, and the next…

“Fucking ow,” he muttered aloud, worming his face free. There was still a ringing in his ears from the crash, and his whole body ached from the jarring force of the collision. A crash he didn’t remember. Seeing what hit him was impossible given the airbag. Instead of squirming around it yet, he did what the medical shows said to do and checked for broken bones. Wouldn’t do to move around a bunch and puncture a lung or something.

Wiggling his toes and fingers, he was satisfied that he both retained his digits and the feeling in them. Unfortunately, given the pervasive ache he could feel coming on, he’d be hurting for a good while after this in any number of places on his body. Jesse also confirmed that he didn’t have any damage to his ribs, and no sharp pain in his back as he slowly rotated his neck. No spinal injuries either. As far as the injury lottery went, he was hitting the jackpot.

He unbuckled his seatbelt and attempted to leave the car. More accurately, he fell out of the now open door, barely avoiding landing on his own nose. With a grunt of effort, he pulled his legs out of the door well and shimmied out. His hands weren’t bitten into as they would have been on asphalt. Blades of thick grass cushioned his palms and slid through his bruised fingers. He rolled onto his back, staring up at a wide, almost oppressive forest canopy. He’d never seen tree coverage that thick before.

INTERLOPER.

The voice shot clear through the ringing in his ears. A deep, rumbling basso near inhuman in volume. He looked for the source. There wasn’t a soul around him. It wasn’t until he settled on the set of floating letters hovering a foot above his car’s bent-in hood that he noticed something peculiar. English, blocky text in a dark crimson floated without fetter or mechanism, spelling out the word he had just heard. It must be a hallucination, he reasoned, brought on by the crash.

Jesse blinked. He rubbed at his eyes. He looked away and back again. The word hung in the air. Circling around the oddity, it appeared to have three dimensions. It looked like an improperly loaded model in a video game. Reaching out to touch the word caused it to collapse in on itself. The letters pull themselves into a new shape like taffy made of red wood and white bone.

YOU ARE INTRUDING.

He reached out once more, and discovered that the words are actually physical objects. Pushing against them didn’t make them move. They occupied space, but still didn’t seem real.

“Hello?” he asked. The letters stretched out to the left to add to their statement.

HELLO. YOU ARE INTRUDING.

So they were intelligent floating words. The way the material glinted in the light reminded Jesse of the time. It had been close to midnight when he crashed, but it was bright day outside. The canopy was too thick above him to determine what time it was likely to be. Either he’d passed out, or he’d skipped time in a fugue state. Both possibilities not positive foreshadowing for any phantom brain damage he might have received in the crash.

Slightly more concerning than the talking words or the lost time was the fact that there was no road around where his car had come to a halt. There was nothing but greenery in every direction, including a few metres from the back end of the car. How in the good god had he driven into the forest this thick without remembering?

“Assuming I am intruding...where am I intruding into?” After a moment’s thought, he added: “And don’t say HERE.”

NINTH FADE.

Jesse scowled. “I have no idea what that means. Is there someone I can talk to here? Someone who isn’t letters?”

The words vibrated before crushing together once more, but instead of forming new words, they stretched out vertically. Their texture changed, appearing almost organic. Almost...but not quite. The tone was decidedly metallic, reflecting light better than his dirt-caked bumper. The shape expanded out into a facsimile of humanoid features. Long, fibrous hair the same colour as its skin spills down its head, and its body lacks distinctive features like a belly button or nipples...or even genitals as far as he could tell. The only distinctive colour was the glowing azure hue of its eyes, which feature no pupil that he could see. It was alien, and yet somehow familiar.

“Is this better?” the creature asked.

“You...you look like someone I know,” he stammered.

“I took this form from your memories,” it said. Or she. Jesse was new to this and unsure whether one should gender abstract humanoid forms. Her voice was familiar too, though it had a distinct hollowness to it that evoked a woman shouting down an empty hallway.

It came back to him in a rush. Andra Morrison. Andra was short for Alexandra...or Cassandra, but he’d never had the nerve to ask which. She was in his Calc class in his First Year of University.

“Why her?” he asked, baffled by the choice.

Her eyes flickered. “Your memories say you spent a great deal of time listening to her speak. I figured it might make the information delivery easy.”

Jesse averted his eyes, avoiding her gaze. “I only listened to her because I had a massive crush on her. She had some terrible opinions but I was too much of a coward to ask her out.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry. But I’m listening!”

“Well. Anyways. You are in the Ninth Fade, a tertiary adjunct plane that straddles the Apotheotic Ridge. The walls between planes, realities you may call them, are normally rigid and impermeable. When they interact, there can be…tears. Holes through which things can slip and enter the next world over. Or worse: become stuck between worlds. You and your conveyance have somehow entered one of these gaps.”

Jesse strained to remember the details of what happened in the moments before the crash. He’d been on his way home. The dress shirt and tie still felt suffocating around his neck. He’d taken the long route back, side roads rather than the highway, lost in thought. And then…and then…He massaged his temples.

“None of this makes any sense. I didn’t just drive through a hole in reality! I think I would have noticed!”

“I do not require your understanding. Alerting you to this change of location is merely a formality.”

“How can I get back?” he asked. His voice betrayed his growing concern. He could feel the sweat of the humid day clinging to his clothes. The taste of metal in his mouth. The pain in his palms as his nails bit into his palms. It was looking less and less likely that this was merely a concussion-caused hallucination or an especially vivid dream.

“You can’t. Once the breach occurs, the damage has already happened. Bringing you back to your own world will only cause further injury to the walls dividing reality.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. You extract the bullet before you patch up a wound, don’t you? I’m the bullet here; extract me!” he protested.

“The wound has already almost healed, by that metaphor. Leaving scar tissue behind that is extremely delicate. Pulling you through again would risk a tear that could be very dangerous for the entire Myriad. I could have just as well not altered your biochemistry to conform to the rules of this plane, but watching someone’s brain melt due to the disappearance of half its neurotransmitters is not a pleasant experience for anyone.”

“This is...this is fucked. I want to go back to Earth. I have family, you know. Friends that’ll miss me!”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. The walls have almost healed. I have to get back to work.”

Jesse backed up, suddenly woozy. His whole life was burning up around him, and there was nothing he could do.

A rip in space appeared behind Jesse’s car. He could see a writhing mass of nothing behind the hole in reality. An abyss. A swirling, heaving sea of nonexistence that reached out to claw at his sanity. He looked away, but the entity walked toward the cleft without a second glance.

“What am I supposed to do now?” he asked, throwing up his hands.

Turning back to face him, she gave the most human gesture she had since she’d first manifested a body. She shrugged.

“Your behaviour is not my concern. Once the walls have healed, this world will be your permanent home. Try to make the best of it.”

He reached out for her, but his hand slid through her like she wasn’t even there. “Please, I don’t want to die alone!”

“Don’t worry. You are not alone.”

She stepped backward into the tear. Jesse watched anxiously as the rip slowly closed behind her before disappearing with a pop of white sparks.

And with that, the woman was gone.

Jesse took a bit of time to panic. He leaned up against the scuffed side of his car and hyperventilated, trying to will himself to wake up from this strangest of hallucinations. When he couldn’t, and the pinching of his arm was getting downright harmful, he decided that it would be best to assume that what he was seeing was real. At least in the absence of any other proof. He’d keep an eye out for hidden metaphorical messages about being stuck in a simulation or a coma.

First thing was first: inventory. Given that he’d managed to come to this world with his car, that gave him an advantage over some protagonists from similar stories he’d read. Most times, suckers got dumped in alternate worlds with only the clothes on their backs. If he was in Full Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court-mode, he at least had a few things that could help him convince the locals that he wasn’t just an insane mutant.

* 1x Wrecked Hyundai Sonata (Good for temporary shelter, not so much driving anywhere)

* 1x Package of Beef Jerky (For long hauls in traffic)

* 1x Half Finished Coffee (With cream and sugar, cold)

* 1x Emergency Kit (Includes a rudimentary medical kit, space blanket, a road flare, and other sundries)

* $5.03 in change (iron and nickel, relative worth undetermined)

* 1x Sweater (For chilliness)

* 1x Pen and Notebook (Mostly for doodling while stuck in traffic, but also sometimes to write down license plates and car details in case he got into an accident)

* 1x Smartphone

His phone! He fished it out of his pocket, confirming it wasn’t broken. 63% Battery, but still functioning! Ordinarily a phone in a survival situation, especially one in another reality, was just a temporarily illuminated paperweight.

But his was different.

Years of reading time travel stories had him prepared, more or less, for this critical inevitably. He may not have sewn diamonds into his shirts or tattooed the ratio for gunpowder onto his arm, but he HAD installed the full text of QuickiePedia, the world’s Number #2 free encyclopedia, onto his phone!

It had also been useful for settling dumb arguments with his friends when they’d take infrequent trips to a cabin they knew about/squatted in during the Summer.

But mostly in case of time travel.

72.5 gigs of content, though only the text. He was glad he hadn’t deleted it in favour of more space for podcasts or something. With little more than a day’s worth of use before his battery died, he’d never be able to copy it all down onto a cave wall. He reasoned that he’d have to make a list of priority items before the battery failed. The rest of the phone’s contents were largely unimportant, besides some music and photos...no telling when he’d be able to find an electric guitar again.

His car didn’t turn on when he tried the key. Which was unfortunate. Although it might not be a means of travel any time soon, it had a 12 volt adaptor that he could use to charge his phone. That, and a nearly half-full gas tank, meant that he’d have a chance to keep the information on the phone stored for a lot longer. Without it, his phone would be stuck with a steadily dwindling battery. He turned it off and slid the phone into the glove compartment. If he had his tiny screwdriver set, he might have tried to take the battery out to keep any trickle drain. But as it was, he had to settle for forestalling the inevitable for now.

With his inventory assessed, the next step was...what, exactly? He chewed over that with a chunk of jerky, as it had been a long day and he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Somehow he doubted Quickipedia would have a What To Do If You’re Trapped In The Middle of a Forest guide. Water, at a guess, would have to be his priority. The human body could go a few weeks without food, but only a day or two without water.

The aches from the crash came back to him as he started to move around. He’d have bruises from the seatbelt in a little bit, and his knees felt like they’d taken a few hits from a ball-peen hammer, each. He hadn’t wanged his head, at least, thanks to the airbag. He would likely need his wits about him if he was going to survive. His formal attire would not be good for long stints in the forest. His good shoes were reasonably comfortable for now, but they weren’t meant for hiking like a pair of his good quality boots would have been.

Concentric circles. He had no idea if this was just a myth, or if he’d heard it somewhere legit, but he decided to take his time moving in a long, winding path around his car crash site. Not only did it help him memorize, or try to remember the important details of the lay of the land, but it also kept him from getting lost. So long as he remembered which direction his car was, it would act as a cardinal point to head to. He left all his valuables behind, downed the rest of the coffee and headed out to explore the area around his vehicle.

The forest didn’t look like a scary alien planet. The leaves were green, the trunks were covered in bark, and here and there lay patches of grass stuck out for sunlight missed by the arrangement of the canopy overhead. The weather was humid but not oppressively so. Late Summer weather, he guessed. Plantlife, fresh air, even the chirps of creatures in the distance. There was no masses of psychic worms, no penis-headed monsters, and certainly no giant blue people with USB ports for hair. Although if there was an invisible hunter with a laser cannon on his shoulder, he doubted he would see the motion before it was too late.

He reached a clearing in the forest, and spotted his first real indication that this was indeed an alien land. He’d notice a strange hue to everything, like it was through a different lensed filter than he was used to. It all came to a head when he finally got a good look at the sun on this world. 

Violet.

Not blue, or white, or orange, or any other colour that stars appeared to be in the universe Jesse came from. This one was the colour of an iridescent lupin.

“Something, something Kansas no more,” he muttered, shielding his eyes from the light as soon as he had confirmed his initial glance. But if the star above was violet, why were all the trees green? Didn’t plants gobble up different wavelengths thanks to the pigments in their leaves?

The clearing lead him to a shallow ravine which looked like it had been carved by flood waters. Promising! He stopped to make an arrow out of rocks to point his way back to his car, and travelled down the ravine’s length. Not unused to hikes, he was in probably the worst clothes to do any kind of strenuous movement. He carefully removed his necktie and, with a laugh, ditched it on a treebranch as another location marker.

Following the depression in the ground yielded a reward. A creek, roughly five feet wide and maybe half that deep, rolled leisurely down and to the right of the ravine he’d followed. Vegetation boxed in the flow of water at both ends, the larger trees seeming to stand by and drink from the flow themselves. Brief worries about parasites or deadly viruses lurking in the water ate at him. Though, it was not like he was going to find a metal pot and a couple matches to get a boil going.

“Fire,” he stated flatly, slapping his head. “I forgot about fire. Fuck.”

He had no idea how cold it would get in this forest, but at some point, he was going to have to come up with a way to start a fire. He’d never smoked, which put a dash on anything like a zippo being hidden in his pockets somewhere. He had his keys, and some other metal objects in his pockets. You could make sparks with those...right?

There was no point in delaying it. As embarrassing as it would be if he died of dysentery in the first few days on an alien world, he’d die even quicker if he didn’t find a source of water. It was moving water, at least, and he remembered vaguely that running water was a less dangerous source of contaminants than stagnant pools.

Using his coffee cup, he took a tentative swig from the river water. He didn’t vomit it back up immediately, which to him was a good sign. There was some vague grittiness to it, and he spat out what was left. He tried resting the cup at the very top of the flow, rather than dipping it in, and although it took a longer time to fill, the water tasted cleaner and less gritty. Three full cups later, he was feeling pretty good about the whole not dying thing.

Once his thirst was slaked, Jesse found a seat on a fallen tree-trunk and pondered his next move. The entity who sealed the doorway behind her had told him that there was life on this world. He saw plenty of signs. Bugs, some familiar in shape and others wildly divergent, crawled and pounced and flew around him. He could hear birdcalls and the rustle of leaves marking the scampering of small rodents or similar beasts.

But what did ‘you are not alone’ mean really? Intelligent life? It was possible. Anything was. The entity, the Hall Monitor of Reality or whatever the fuck she was, already proved that there was more than just humans out there. And phone or no, he had a much better chance of surviving if he managed to find some help. Maybe this was a large forest preserve and he could stumble into a ranger station for assistance?

“Or maybe an alien creature like her saw no difference between me and one of these bugs,” he said bitterly, “And figured I’d be at home with my own kind.”

He headed back the way he came, paying special attention to the arrangement of trees, shrubs, and rocks to make sure he could find his way back from this direction. Soon he was in sight of the tie he used as a marker, mildly relieved he didn’t get himself lost.

Heading back toward his car, however, allowed him to spot something he must have missed on his previous path: a brown satchel! An honest to goodness back, with a metal buckle and everything, lying next to a tangle of roots. Jesse launched toward it. It was true! He wasn’t alone on this planet after all!

Jesse didn’t feel the rope tug on his leg until it had already pulled taut. His foot shot upward, ponderously followed by the rest of him. In an instant, Jesse was hanging upside down from a rope lassoed around his ankle. A snare trap? The kind of thing you use to catch rabbits for dinner, but scaled up in size to haul his ass up five feet off the ground. The blood rushing to his head made it hard to concentrate, and he flailed around uselessly for a few seconds in sheer unthinking panic. By the time he’d calmed himself, there was movement in the trees.

His vision was hazy, but they were small humanoids. Children maybe. Had he been caught by a crowd of little kids who were going to cut him up like wild game? What a disappointing end, he mused.

“Oh...uh...hi?” he said experimentally. One of the small figures undid the knot that held the rope to the tree. Unfortunately, whoever did it was too quick. The last thing Jesse remembered seeing was the ground coming straight at him like an overloaded tractor trailer.

***

Getting back to consciousness was an even more of an ordeal than it had been resting on the airbag of his car. This time it felt like he was trapped in molasses. He’d had sleep paralysis before, but this was different. Everything was hazy. Indistinct. He couldn’t move his limbs, and he couldn’t even think clearly. The consistent point was the pain, so he focused on that. The pain of his face and his head from both impacts ebbed and waned, but never fully dissipated. Painstakingly, he crawled out and back to the world of the living.

“Aha!” a woman’s voice high in register exclaimed right in his ear, making him cringe. Sound sensitivity, great. Welcome to Concussiontown: Population Jesse.

He rotated his head around on whatever soft lumpy object it was resting on to search for the source of the voice. He was in some kind of workshop. Tables filled with tools filled one side, where another was clustered with glass vials and beakers that twisted into bizarre shapes. Many were filled with coloured liquids. On elevated points in the room, less elegantly designed jars swarmed with dozens of a kind of firefly that pumped out a steady, almost electric light. The room hummed with their buzzing but it was low enough to be ignored.

His eyes settled on the face of a woman beside his bed. Her long dark hair had been pulled back in a ponytail, save a pair of strands that slid down her temples. Large, orange eyes looked at him with the glint of amiable curiosity. She wore a dark grey smock that had been crisscrossed with so many different stains that it could have passed as an abstract expressionist art installation.

Oh, and her skin was green.

At least he didn’t freak out too much this time to the reveal of a person of an entirely different species. She was humanoid as well, at the very least. Upon closer inspection, however, the woman was standing and just came up to the bed that Jesse was lying on. She couldn’t have been much more than three feet tall. A distant analytical thought posited that she could just be a little person. But all the same, she looked adorable. Almost like a Goblin from some fantasy novel.

“Gnhhh,” Jesse managed. He wasn’t feeling particularly articulate, but he did want to vocalise that he was at least partially aware.

“Great! I was worried the net might have cut off the circulation to your brain. Sorry about that. Huntress gets a little wild with her trapping sometimes.” She pulled a pair of coloured lenses attached to a crude wire frame over her eyes. A second and third pair were mounted on little arms that could swing and clamp into place. She played with them for a while, flipping between the circular panes of coloured glass, letting out a series of displeased grunts. “Whatever transmogrification you’ve been through has been surprisingly thorough. I can’t interpret the aura it left behind.”

“Transmogra...what?”

“Oh dear, maybe there was brain damage after all. Sorry, I’ll try to go slow.” She cleared her throat, then began again in a deliberate, patronizing pace and volume. “Hi there. What has happened to you to make you look so strange?”

“I could ask the same thing,” he managed. She grinned at that.

“Ah, sparkling repartee. And here I was wondering if I was going to have to spoonfeed you for the rest of your days. Or at least until I was done experimenting on you. I’m Vee, pleased to meet you! And, for my records, what can I call you?”

“Jesse...Jesse Sandoval.” He saw her writing down the name, then added: “Jesse Sandoval, two words, not Jesse Jesse Sandoval. Just wanted to nip that in the bud.”

“No, no, I understood. It’s alright,” she reassured, her tone back to its distant, clinical cadence. He peeked at the crude form of paper that she was writing on, and the written language looked unlike anything he’d ever seen. Strangely, they were conversing in English easily enough. Had that entity that had told him what had happened to him and his car done something to his mind? Or was this some kind of low-level psychic field that allowed for instantaneous translation? Something to ponder for later. He was just glad he wouldn’t have to go through arduous weeks of learning an entirely new language from scratch. Though he might need to learn how to read the strange blocky script that the small woman was sketching out if he was planning on sticking around. “So what brings you to the Temporary Village, Jesse Sandoval?”

He considered lying, for fear of being considered a demon or a monster. But since he was clearly in the presence of at least one humanoid race other than human, it would probably be pointless to pretend he was a native to this world who had just gotten lost. “Something pulled me through some kind of hole in space. I ended up here from my world.”

She stopped writing. Lifting the lenses up onto her forehead, she squinted at him like he’d just started speaking in tongues. “A hole...in space?”

He shrugged. “Something like that, probably. No idea how common this kind of crazy shit is on your world, but it’s news to me. I was just trying to get my bearings here when I got caught in that net.”

“Hmm,” she said, making a face. “I...alright, that makes about as much sense as any theories I have. Well, it’s good to meet you, Jesse. I’m the apothecary/doctor/natural philosopher of this village. I don’t suppose you’ve ever met one of my kind before?”

“Never. You look like…well, you look like Goblins.”

“So you have heard of us?” she asked, tilting her head.

“Complicated. You resemble a fictional creature from my world…though, truth be told, a lot less ugly.”

Vee wrote that down too. “Happy to hear. Well Jesse, unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll be in each other’s lives that long.”

Jesse sat up, the movement making the pain in his head shift around. He fought through it long enough to get his legs onto the ground, though he remained seated. “Why’s that, Vee?”

“Well, you’re not one of our kind. You’re about a measure too tall to be one of us…that and the skin. And the ears, come to think about it. You’re not Folk, either, or any other race I’ve ever heard of. Everyone’s convinced that you’re some kind of Shifter, so they’re calling for your blood.”

“What?!”

She sighed wearily. “I know, grotesque and barbaric. And according to everything I can determine, you’re little more than a mutated Woodborn with a bizarre lack of sap in your hair. But who am I to argue with the baying of the masses?”

Jesse swallowed the growing fear forming a knot in his throat and did his best to look unassuming and non-threatening. Difficult to not be intimidating to someone you towered over, but he did his best. “Look, I told you the truth. I’m a human, I’m not from around here.”

Vee shrugged her tiny shoulders. “I do believe you. But speaking as a purely objective observer, a more logical explanation is some kind of infiltration with a ludicrous story by our enemies. I’ll tell Nell about this, try to convince her to just let you go and never come back. But I have my doubts that’ll fly. We’re all a little…it’s been tough, lately, and a lot of people are calling for your execution now, proof that you don’t belong here regardless.”

The door burst open, revealing a handful of armed green women. Leather armour and short bronze spears made them look like miniature Spartan warriors, though he doubted the Ancient Greeks had slots for a pair of enormous pointed ears to poke out. He fumbled away from them toward the back of Vee’s hut, but there he ran into a dead end. If there was a back door, it was too covered in boxes of clutter and miscellaneous lab equipment to be squeezed through. He turned around, hands raised, and submitted to the diminutive spearwomen.

“Come here, Shifter!” one of the women said through gritted teeth. She motioned for him to drop his hands, and he did. One of the pint-sized warriors bound his hands in front of him, tightening the rope until it bit deep into his wrists.

“Tell them I’m not what they think I am, Vee!” Jesse said. “I don’t even know what the hell a Shifter is!”

For a moment, he thought he saw a spark of genuine concern on her face. With a brush of her hair, however, it faded to her original dispassionate appearance. “I’m sorry, Jesse Sandoval. I hope you can find some peace in whatever afterlife you believe in.”

Leaving the hut and into the harsh glare of the strangely coloured sun, Jesse got a look at where he’d been brought to at last. A dozen or more wooden structures with thatch roofs stood in a haphazard oval, centred around a raised wooden platform. Atop this odd, almost stage-like structure stood another Goblin. She, and so far he’d only seen obviously female members of the species, wore a long dress made of reds and yellows that looked formal and garish at the same time. From her neck hung more than a dozen gold and silver icons, the meaning of which Jesse didn’t have the slightest clue of. Long, wild light blonde hair rolled down her shoulders in desperate search for a comb, and even from a distance he could see her eyes burned a firey crimson colour totally unlike anything he’d seen outside of some wild cosplays.

“Aha! We have the intruder now!” she bellowed, pointing at Jesse as he was prodded along toward her. “See his strange complexion and malformed features. His elongated body! His…his face hair! There is only one explanation for his appearance!”

“He’s a Shifter!” came the reply from a steadily growing crowd. Others shouted agreement.

“That’s not-” Jesse managed before a harsh jab to his kidneys cut off his words. As small as these creatures were, he didn’t expect he’d survive a fight with a bunch of armed Goblins. It wasn’t like he knew martial arts, or even the basics of self defence. The best he could manage was out muscle them, but one stab to his unprotected flesh and he was probably donezo. For the moment, it seemed that he’d have to wait for his chance to act…even if it put him in further danger.

“Do not believe any of the heresies that pour from his lips. He has come to spell destruction for what little remains of our people!” The firebrand’s words hit all the right marks with her audience. Jesse had never been to one of those revival churches, but he assumed that the preachers there sounded an awful lot like this woman. All that was missing was the pipe organ and the collection plate.

Propelled forward past the stage on which the gaudy woman stood, he found his destination: a pyre of dry wood, surrounded by a circle of stones. He paused before crossing the threshold. But with his hands bound and sharp objects in all directions around him, he was forced backward into the stone circle of the pyre.

“Our village has gathered here to see to the fate of this intruder. He bears no marks of the Folk or the Wolven on him, yet he is not of our kind. Indeed, his form appears to be that of a being caught between species, perhaps by some fault of his own or a curse placed on him by a slighted party. I declare that he is a Shifter, and should be destroyed before he can bring any more devastation to our village than he and his kin have already. What say you?”

A roar of approval met her question. One day into this world and he was already not liking it a whole lot, though that may be because it was reminding him of parts of Earth’s own history. This had all the flavours of a witch hunt, with him ending up wearing the pointy hat.

“Please. I’m not your enemy.” He tried to keep his voice as calm as possible, but it cracked once or twice from the anxiety of his approaching fate grew to debilitating levels. “I’m just a stranger from another land!”

His explanation was not well received. Further attempts to describe his origins were drowned out with jeers and further demands for his head. He felt around his pockets for his phone, with which he could prove he was not from this land, at least. But he remembered that he had left it, safe, in his damn car. Where it could be no use to him at the moment.

“More lies!” the priestess shrieked. “Deception will not save you, interloper. The cleansing fire of Kilari’s Breath shall reveal your true form!”

On cue, two women in similar but less ornate outfits approached from either side of the raised platform. Each carried a torch that glowed an eerie blue colour. He’d seen a similar effect in high school using metal flakes and a bunsen burner, but he couldn’t remember off hand what you used to make it blue. Sulfur? Copper? He’d have to ask the Afterlife’s help desk after he burned to death.

The torches were inches away from the fire. The elder Gob faced Jesse for the first time. Her face was full of leering contempt.

“Any last words, Shifter?”

“None I’d say in polite company. But since you’re about to kill me, how about go fuck yourself, you tiny zealot.”

She grinned. “Of course. I wouldn’t expect anything dignified from a servant of the evil ones. Torchbearers, prepare to-”

“Wait!”

Silence fell over the crowd, and every head turned away from the podium to where a Goblin in a peasant dress held up her hand. Her hair was a light grey, though streaks of a purplish colour still glittered through. Her face was still attractive but worn by stress or the elements, or both. Still, her single word had the rest of the green women captivated. Standing next to her was Vee, whispering something into the older woman’s ear. She also handed of a pair of those strange lensed glasses. Flicking up the appropriate combination, the woman nodded.

“This one,” she said, pointing at Jesse and his bewildered expression, “Is not a Shifter. His aura is...he is not of the Folk or the Shifters. I do not believe he has come to cause us harm.”

Confusion reigned, as did a sense of frustration. Clearly these little people had a lot of anger about something that they needed to excise, with him as the likely scapegoat. And if Shifter really was short for shapeshifter, like he surmised, then they had a very serious problem indeed.

“Leader Nell, please! It’s important that we show the Shifters a united front!” the Priestess bellowed. Jesse grinned just a little at her outrage before remembering that there was torches literally inches away from incinerating him and reined in the mirth.

The official-looking woman was having none of it. “Send him to the holding cell while we deliberate.”

***

As quickly as he’d been thrust into the pyre, Jesse found himself shuffled out and around, away from the centre of the village. Carefully aimed pokes by the women’s pointed weapons told him what would happen if he stepped out of line. Though they were small, he’d no doubt that a Goblin-sized spear would kill him just as dead as its human-sized counterpart.

The hut he was brought to was different from the rest. It looked permanent, as it was constructed of bricks rather than the yurt-style accommodations that the creatures seemed to favour. It was also larger, and for once it looked like he might be able to stand up inside it rather than hunching over.

“In you go,” implored the captor to his right, giving him a stiff push with the rear end of her spear. “Make nice with the other one.”

“Other one?” he managed to ask before another, more pointed thrust got him moving into the structure. As soon as his heels had cleared the threshold, the door slammed shut. The clunk of a metal bolt slamming home had a chilling finality to it. He’d never been to jail on Earth, but he had a feeling that it wouldn’t have felt much better to be locked away among his own kind as it did here.

“Welcome.”

Jesse’s head snapped from side to side, looking for the source of the voice. He found a pair of feet illuminated by a break in the walls, the rest of the body obscured by shadow. They were human-sized feet, at least. Could he have found another lost soul from his own world?

“I don’t suppose you’re from Earth too?” Jesse asked, cautiously stepping away from the door and over to the opposite wall from where the feet rested. Leaning forward, a ghastly pale face, silken white hair, and a pair of pointed, misshapen ears told him the answer to that question.

“And I don’t suppose you’re from The Ivory City. So we’re even.” The voice, and the facial features for that matter, were androgynous and soft. For the moment though, perhaps only for sake of variety, Jesse assumed he was male. Potentially the first male he’d found in this crazy world.

Jesse decided against offering his hand, considering the circumstances. Instead, he sat down and gave his name. The stranger looked as if he’d bitten into something sour as he moved what must have been an unfamiliar name around in his mouth.

“Jess..ee. Jessi? Jesse. Hmm. Interesting. I’m Lial. You don’t look well, stranger. Your skin is…burned.”

Jesse looked down at his hands. Not particularly melanin-rich, his lightly dusky complexion from his mixture of heritages put him much darker than the almost albin skin of the other prisoner. “You look sickly too. I’ve seen corpses with more colour.”

Though not exactly a knee-slapper, the other man did exhale slightly harder than he had before. “I see. Judging from the chanting I heard, they thought you a Shifter. Though I very much doubt that. Their kind wouldn’t be dumb enough to get captured alive.”

“Gee, thanks.” Jesse circled the walled pen, looking for weaknesses in the construction. Despite their relatively primitive lives, they certainly knew how to work with wood. Large interlocking panels joined with bronze rivets and wooden dowlings to form super-hard, nearly unwedgable components. “And what brings you here?”

“I got caught,” Lial said with a shrug. “Embarrassing for someone of my station, admittedly. Whoever they have setting up their traps is surprisingly good for a greenskin.”

Jesse frowned. Greenskin dripped off the pale man’s tongue with all the venom of any number of slurs he’d heard spat out on Earth. His hopes of finding a kindred spirit were tempered significantly.

“What were you caught doing?”

“A lot of questions from you, round-ear. I could ask you the same thing.”

The explanation of transdimensional misadventure had garnered about as much disbelief as he’d suspected it might. Failing to come up with a believable alternative, he settled on, “I got lost and stepped into a snare trap.”

That got an honest to goodness laugh out of Lial, something that sounded pleasantly melodic for all his ugly words earlier. “Fair enough. These forests are not for outsiders.”

“Then why are you here?”

The sliver of mirth melted on his face. “These forests belong to the Folk. The trees, the earth, even the very air soaks into our bodies. You and these... children are the foreign invaders, not I.”

Jesse felt like he’d stepped in something, and had to endure the time dilating effects of awkward silence for what felt like an hour. Given that the light cast through the window didn’t move much, however, it was probably closer to fifteen minutes.

Finally, blessedly, Lial spoke once again. “You truly aren’t from these lands, are you? I’ve no recollection of your species. One of the beings beyond the sea?”

Jesse shook his head. “I’m human. Like I said, I got lost.”

The androgynous man made a grunt of noncommittal to his answer, but didn’t press the issue further. “Very well, Jesse the Human. I suggest we make a pact of temporary, mutual assistance. We are both captives of these creatures, and though your features are strange, you seem civilized enough. What say you?”

Considering his previous epithet, Jesse was reluctant to hitch his wagon to this particular horse. Then again, they were both captives of a people who had wanted to kill him only moments before.

“Let me put it this way: if you find a way out, I’ll look the other way before taking it myself. That way I can tell them I have no idea where you went.”

Lial’s grin returned. “I like you, Jesse the Human.”

***

The village’s largest hut looked much more comfortable than the one he’d awoken in. Soft fur carpets belonging to animals he couldn’t even guess the shape of covered the floor. Light was provided by a combination of a hearthfire and several of those strange bottled phosphorescent insects that he’d noticed before. On the former, two roasted lizards were suspended from a spit above the crackling flames, filling the house with a strange yet appealing smell. Since he hadn’t eaten anything since that jerky, Jesse couldn’t help it when his stomach audibly complained.

Next to the fire was a large (relatively speaking) table. Sat there were a trio of familiar Goblins. The religious leader who had condemned him to die sat at the far end of one side, while Vee, his likely saviour, sat to the other. Subtle. In the center, in a slightly better cushioned chair, was the grey haired Goblin that had made the final call.

“Leave us,” she said to the guards beside Jesse. There was a moment of indecision, and the guards visibly looked confused by the request. “If he was going to attack us, he likely would have done it when he was about to be burned to death. Please, if you would.”

The guards stepped out of the hut, though the taller of the two did say that they would be standing sentry outside should they need anything. Jesse was unsure how to take the idea that these tiny women weren’t considering him a threat. On the one hand, that’s what he’d been saying this whole time. But on the other, it did hurt his pride in a bizarre way. It wasn’t like he was helpless!

The leader held out her hand toward the lone chair facing their group. It was small, but if he scrunched up his butt he might be able to sit on it for a while. However, he shook his head. “I’ve been sitting down for a few hours now in that cell. I’d rather stand, if that’s alright.”

She nodded, grimacing a little at his choice of words. “I…apologize at how we treated you initially. Please understand that we’ve been under a great deal of pressure. My name is Nell and I speak for the whole village. You’ve likely already met Vee, and on the opposite side is the head of our religious services, Glora.”

The sublime fanatic attempted a reconciliatory smile. “I apologize for my hasty judgement. In my zeal to protect my flock, I may have lead them astray.”

“So that execution was empty ritual,” Vee said, her arms folded and voice clipped. “I’m glad we can agree to that.”

Glora bristled. “You would mock the very gods who gave you life?”

“Enough, you two!” Once she looked between the pair to confirm they weren’t about to bite each other’s heads off for the moment, her gaze returned to Jesse. “As you can see, it’s been a trying time.”

“What has happened recently that has put you all on edge?”

Nell tented her fingers. “It’s a bit of a long story. Suffice it to say we are refugees, our boat having smashed aground southwest of here after a terrible storm. Making the call to start building shelter rather than wait for the crew to fix the boat wasn’t easy. We hadn’t seen another person of any intelligent race beside those that crashed with us in the week since we’d crashed. It took the Folk five months to run into us. Specifically, a Highborn survey contingent claiming these lands for their own. There was very little preamble to the breakout of hostilities, just some threats and some harsh words before they struck the first time. The majority of our males went out to counter-strike, and we haven’t heard from them since.”

The rubbed his chin. “Ah, so that’s why I haven’t seen any men around. I was thinking you were an all female race or something.”

“No, we aren’t like the Florans. Our gender ratio is usually two females to one male birth, but we have plenty of males. Or did, at least.”

“Where’s the rest of your people?”

“Unreachable. The Captain of our vessel tried to patch it up and refloat it, but it was torn apart by razor-reefs on its way out of Sanctuary Bay. He didn’t make it off.”

He nodded his understanding, then exhaled hard. “I guess we’re both stuck out here. Though my world is slightly farther away, I will admit. I get how me, a big, lumpy person showing up out of nowhere, might have looked suspicious. But trust me, I’m not a threat to you or your people. Honestly I just want to get back home.”

“And where is home, exactly?” Glora asked. The facetious tone of the question make Jesse think it was just a trap to get him to admit who he Really was, but he answered it as guilelessly as possible.

“I don’t exactly know how it happened, but I come from an entirely different planet. Earth. No Goblins or Folk or Shifters, just humans. I didn’t come here by choice either. No offence, but I’d much rather go back.”

“Why don’t you?” asked the Leader.

“As soon as you see another tear in space,” Jesse said, “I’ll be there. Like I said, didn’t really have a choice.”

“It sounds unbelievable, but look at his aura.” Vee pulled the spectacles from her previous examination and put them back onto her nose. “That colour, those forms…he’s not from around here.”

The Goblin priestess nodded slowly, as if what he’d said had carried some grand import. “I think I see. It’s possible that you have been sent by one of our Gods. Why, though, is another matter entirely.” She outstretched her tiny arm and closed her eyes. Her fingers moved like they were feeling out an invisible fabric just in front of her.

“What are-“ Jesse asked before the Leader shh’d him hard. He said nothing further.

“I was correct. Your aura is that of a Deviant.”

“Excuse me?”

Vee held up a forestalling gesture. “She didn’t mean it as an insult, I think, it’s just what we call them. All life in our world has an aura to it. A flavour, almost, that delineates it as one thing or another. Few things can change an aura, one of the exceptions being a Shifter, and it remains one of the strict differences between individuals and species. There are a very rare group of people who have an aura unlike anything on Argos. They are called Deviants, and they are exempt from some of the rules.”

Deviants might just be names for people who had broken through the walls of reality like he had, Jesse reasoned. Whatever system this aura represented, he was likely removed from it by virtue of being from a different universe.

“Whose rules?” he asked Vee.

“Most say the Gods. Whether it be one or many, depending on who you ask. Others say these are just the way things are. Regardless, as a Deviant, you are allowed certain privileges that aren’t available to most people.”

“And you’re more vulnerable,” the Priestess added. “Without the protection of the Gods, you may prove to just be a target.”

Vee nodded vigorously. “All the more reason for you to stay with us, really. We can give you some measure of protection.”

Alarm bells went off in Jesse’s head as the Goblins suddenly became a lot more friendly than they had been. “So…what does that all mean for me exactly.”

“It means,” Nell supplied, “That you may be the answer to our current predicament. With most of the village’s males gone, and the others of our kind months of sea voyage away, our numbers are doomed to wither out without replenishment. In the absence of any males of our own race willing to provide their assistance, we’re going to have to turn to unorthodox alternatives.”

Jesse laughed, eyes swapping between the small women and waiting for them to break too. They never did. “You can’t be serious.”

Vee leaned in, tenting her fingers. “Deathly so, I’m afraid. The lifespan of the Kith is short. Your species, apparently, is unhindered by the preventative magics that would keep you from being compatible with us. And I assume you are interested?”

He sputtered. “Hold on a second. Jesus, you first wanted to kill me. A few minutes ago you had me in jail. Now you want me to…” He made an indistinct gesture with his hands, trying to convey the idea of ‘sex for the sake of procreation’ without actually saying the phrase.

“It doesn’t have to be an emotional commitment.”

“It doesn’t?!”

“We’re just looking for a seed-bearer, not a father figure. This is purely a survival measure, understand.”

“No, I don’t understand! You can’t be the only ones around! And there’s no telling that I’d be compatible. I’m twice your height for chrissakes!”

“All good points. Yes, we might not be the only settlement of our kind on this continent. We had thought these areas abandoned, but it is possible there are others who have made it past the Strait of Tears. But this entire area is unexplored territory. Our backers have no idea where we went, or any clue where to start looking. And yes, you are significantly different in appearance. But we’re both mammals, we both express our sexes similarly. I’d need some samples to make sure, if you’re willing to provide-”

Jesse turned beet red. “I’m not breeding stock! I’m not gonna just…damnit, Vee, I thought you were the reasonable one here.”

The Goblin in the glasses furrowed her brow. Or Kith in the glasses, as they apparently called themselves. She lifted up some of the notes in front of her, cycling through them one by one. “I’ve done the calculations. If we don’t start having kids now, we will have a serious population crisis within a few years. We’d never stand a chance of getting back if we don’t develop the resources to, and I don’t want that to happen.”

“Even if they’re half-breeds?” he asked.

“They’d still be sons and daughters of Uni,” Glora said. “They would carry our legacy forward no matter their appearance,” She spoke with the surety of any church councillor, though Jesse doubted he’d ever let his guard down around her.

Nell stood up, signalling the others to do so as well. “You don’t have to do anything right away. In the meantime,” the Leader held out her hand toward the door, “You’ll be staying in a nearby hut for now. We are glad to house you as a guest. Please know, however, that if you desire to remain with us that your continued protection necessitates successful procreative efforts on your part.”

*** 

The walk from the Leader’s hut was even more unnerving that the one before. Now the Goblins weren’t just looking at him like some kind of threat or a circus attraction, they were sizing him up like a cut of meat. The guards were no longer in sight, presumably having gone back to whatever they did when they weren’t the town’s militia. Instead, he was escorted by the Huntress who had captured him, who looked indifferent at finding out he hadn’t been burned to death. Her hands rested on a bow and unnocked arrow. She trailed a few feet behind him; if worse came to worse, she could see him either using the bow to put the arrow through his back or stabbing it in herself, depending on what direction he ran in.

“This isn’t charity,” explained his escort. “Housing goes to those who can contribute to the community, after all. Turn left. We do have some spare accommodations due to the loss of so many of our males. For example, this one.” She held out her hand to the squat building to their right. Jesse eventually took the hint. He inched toward the ovoid door and opened it. The interior was dark, only illuminated by a single bottled buglight that the Goblins used. He had to duck to get through the door, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that he could actually stand up in the building. His hair merely grazed the ceiling.

“Burrok was our tallest,” she answered his unvoiced question. Her Ladyship thought you would need it.”

He spun around, examining the abode. It reminded him a lot of some of the more open-concept apartments he’d toured while looking for a place to live in his third year of uni. A cooking area, a mixed eating/living space, and mattresses for sleeping, all within the same room.

“Suitable?” she asked sarcastically.

“Beats incarceration,” he replied, letting his fingers drag along the ceiling.

She grunted, then stepped out from the door to close it behind her. Before it slammed shut, however, she glared like a vengeful bird of prey at him.

“Remember: if you don’t start picking partners and get copulating, you’ll be less than useless. You probably eat more than three of us. Earn your place, or get yourself gone.”

She didn’t wait to hear his response. Jesse slid down to the mattress, which was more like a body pillow than anything meant to take the length of a person his size. Still, it would beat sleeping on the dirt or a floor.

Just what in the fuck had he gotten himself into?

The light was fading through the slats in the wood. It had only been a day since he arrived on this world, though it had already been early afternoon on Earth when his car had been abducted. Without his phone’s clock, it was difficult to know for sure, but he reasoned that he’d been awake for over 24 hours at that point. His fatigue was manifesting, even in these strange environs.

A knock at the door jolted him back to awareness.

“It’s Vee!” the voice behind the door declared.

Jesse sighed with relief. Whatever his relationship to the other Goblins, it seemed that him and the alchemist woman were on the same page. For the most part, at least. He opened the door wide enough for the small woman to enter.

“Burrok’s place, eh? It’s not bad. I’ll miss that big oaf. His wife moved in with Leez after word came back that the counterattack was a disaster. Poor thing couldn’t stay in the home they’d shared.” She stepped over to a storage chest at the back. She touched the blocky script on the front of the wood, whispering something that the human could hear.

“Thank you, by the way,” Jesse began. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d be dead right now.”

She let the box go reluctantly, her fingers trailing off the top. “You’re welcome. I was sure you were worth more to us than as a pointless sacrifice, and my aura lenses confirmed that. I never thought I’d meet a Deviant in my life.”

“I’m still having difficulty understanding what that is. Could you explain?” Jesse pointed to the mattress opposite the one he’d been sitting on. She sat cross-legged easily, which Jesse had problem managing. It’s not like his job had left him particularly nimble.

“Our world has many races. Us, the Krosen, the various races of the Folk, Wolven…some others you’ll probably never see. We’re all similar in shape, but we all have separate auras. The energy fields around our bodies serve as markers to who we are. Like invisible tags that tell us what side we’re on. We may look similar, and the procedure for...procreating is similar. But there’s no crossover. Krosen can’t impregnate Kith, Kith can’t knock up Folk, etc. The Folk can crossbreed among themselves, but they’re all the same tiny-eared jerks, anyways. No offence.”

Jesse started to wish that he brought his notebook to jot down all these details. “And you said there were Gods behind this?”

The Alchemist made a so-so gesture with her hand, waggling it back and forth. “I don’t know why the species have different auras. Any hole in academic knowledge is easily filled with faith. Doesn’t mean it belongs there. I’ve debated Glora on this point but she refuses to budge.”

He nodded. “This isn’t what I expected from a village in the middle of the woods, I’m going to be honest. Or maybe my attempted murder when I first arrived gave me the wrong impression.”

“You’re wondering why we’re not worshipping you and banging stones together?” she asked.

“Well…sorta. This is just a village…wait,” Jesse pointed to the giant rows of glass containers, beakers, and other equipment. “Where the hell did you get all this sculpted glass?”

She grabbed one of the empty vessels and held it upside down, showing off a maker’s mark on the bottom in that same language he’d seen before. “We’re not actually displaced tribespeople. We were on an expedition of exploration aboard a sailing vessel. Most of the people around us are, or were, academics of some description. I was Assistant Dean of the Department of Alchemy, Glora taught archaeology, Huntress was a professor of-”

“So why are you so eager to get pregnant?”

Vee blushed. “I…I didn’t say I was! I said that if we don’t start having kids, our fertility’s going to drop off precipitously.”

“And you can’t ever go back to your homeland?”

“How? Our boat’s in pieces, half swallowed by the bay. The Captain went down with the ship, and his first mate lead the attack against the Folk encroachment. These bugly bastards would never sell us anything but our own nooses, even if we could afford it.”

“But you can’t be the last of your people to come this way.”

Nell answered that one. “We paid for an independent freighter, not a Navy ship. The trade company will chalk it up to razor-reef or pirates or simple navigation error. The University used a lot of money for this voyage. And after we entered the Strait of Tears, they would have no idea where we went. If we stumble onto a neutral party, like a Bulari fishing vessel, maybe we can get a message back. Maybe. But finding someone to take us all back at once? Not with the resources we have. And leaving some or a few of us behind weakens those who remain, making them easy pickings for the Highborn. I won’t let anyone be a martyr.”

He was beginning to understand their plight, but at the same time, he wasn’t really looking to be loaned out like a babymaking machine. Sure, a lot of the women were attractive if you were into gals you could stand on one another in trenchcoats to sneak two of them into a movie at a time. But he couldn’t be knocking some poor woman up at random!

“I can’t deal with this.” He collapsed onto his back to stare at the ceiling, warn out from all of this and aching in ways he’d never felt before. In his haste, he knocked his shoulder against one of the nearby table’s chairlegs.

Vee laughed. “Sorry, again. We don’t exactly build to your scale. If you stick around, maybe we could build a nice big, dumb house for you to live. And why not? I would have thought an entire village of women throwing themselves at you would be an appealing prospect for any fertile male.”

Jesse shuddered. “Ugh. Don’t...say it like that. Now I feel like livestock.”

“In a way, you kinda are. Everyone in our community contributes in some fashion. I make healing tinctures, Huntress hunts for food, Kalvis makes tools. If you had another way of giving to the village to earn your keep, I’m sure they’d see you less as an animal to be drained. What did you do in your own world?”

Jesse made a face. “I designed network architectural distributables for mid-level marketing and retail clients.”

Silence.

“I worked with machines that could think.”

More silence, followed by a tilt of her head. “You mean like morgots?”

“Sure. Regardless, my work was predicated on a complicated infrastructure that doesn’t exist here. Besides my phone, I guess.”

His phone! He’d forgotten it in the excitement. The copy of QuickiePedia that he had installed didn’t just have sport stats and historical birthdays. It was a repository for all human knowledge! Well...at least a skim of the top of human knowledge. But what little data there was in detail might represent the greatest source of information on this planet at the moment.

“I think I might have an idea how I can contribute,” he began. “One of my machines came through the portal with me. It’s a flat rectangle that has many, many books worth of information stored inside. From what I’ve seen, a lot of this world operates on the same tenants that mine does. If I can get my phone, I can give you guys a boost in knowledge by at least a few centuries.”

“What does that m-“

“Better tools, at least. If I have access to your smith and some time. The basics of chemistry, at least. If idiots in the sticks can make a still, I’m sure we can find a way to do it ourselves. That means alcohol, which can mean saving lives from infection. Hell, germ theory in general...” A long, partially wishful list grew in his head at all the things he might be able to give these Goblins. Things that didn’t involve him being whored out.

“So where is this magical library?”

“It’s in the glove compartment of my car, roughly around where I was found.”

“I suppose we could go looking for it. If it’s what you say it is, I’d like to examine it at least.” Vee cocked her head, noticing something on Jesse’s face.

“What?”

“You look fatigued. I should get going.” She got up to leave.

Jesse leapt up too. “Just one more thing.”

“Hmm?”

“If I give you this information, do you think that your people would avoid trying using me as some kind of breeding stud?”

Vee shrugged. “They’d probably still be after you. I’d suggest taking at least one wife.”

“AT LEAST?” he said aghast. “Is there polygamy on this planet?”

“It’s two females to one male among us, what do you think? Some, Burrok for example, was monogamous. But it’s common for Goblin males to have two, three, even four wives sometimes. It all depends on their virility and ability to provide security. The women often manage the household and the sources of income.”

He nodded reluctantly. “And there are no other males? None at all?”

She made a face. “There’s Kalvis, but he can’t.”

He did an impression of a scale with his hands, weighing each option. “If it’s the life of the tribe on the line…”

Vee shook her head. “He’s Crossborn. He doesn’t have the equipment.”

“Oh! I…don’t know what that means?”

“Sometimes, a child is born whose mind does not match the body. Is it not so on your world?”

“Oooh, he’s trans. Yeah, that happens on Earth too. I gotcha. Shit, so I’m the only one with a dick in this entire village?”

She shrugged. “That I know of. If you want to go around and ask the others, you’re welcome to.”

Jesse pondered his next steps in implementing the plan. If he was to impart some amount of information to these Gobs, he’d have use for a man who knew how to work metal. And if Vee was the village’s doctor and alchemist, he’d have plenty for her to do. A thousand more questions boiled up, but that would have to wait until morning. Vee was right; he was beat. He wished her a good night and got ready for bed.

The day’s events rolled around in his mind before melting away in favour of memories of home. His family. His friends. Even his job. Things that, if that Gate Guardian was telling the truth, he’d never see again. His heart hurt, and despite his fatigue, it took a long time to get calm enough to drift off to sleep.

***

“So you’re telling me I can never go back?” Jesse asked.

The ethereal woman seemed casually dismissive of the power she wielded. She waved him off. “It might be possible, but only if you perform.”

“Perform?” he asked, eyebrow raised.

She pulled at her side, and the genital obscuring effect was revealed to be a skin-tight dress that blended into her body. Once it was peeled off, he could see every inch of her exposed body. Fuck was she hot. Her perfect, glistening breasts were huge. Squeezable pillows he’d love to bury himself in. Her puffy, prominent pussy lips looked like some onaholes he’d seen in his time, but that was fine. Her nipples and pussy both glowed blue. The same colour as her eyes.

“Fuck me, stud. Blow my interdimensional walls right open~”

Jesse found himself naked, lying down. The metallic woman straddled him. Her skin was warm to the touch. He stiffened immediately. She placed herself behind his shaft, rubbing her pussy along his length and making him shudder.

“I feel good, don’t I?” she breathed, sounding exactly like his college crush. Jesse moaned in the affirmative, and she tittered like a club slut.

Once his prick was sufficiently moistened by her attentions, she slid herself onto his throbbing head. His whole body tipped up to thrust inside her, aches and pains a distant annoyance.

She gyrated, allowing his cock to feel every part of her strange-yet-familiar sex. It felt almost like she was using him, rather than the other way around. But with a fuck like this, Jesse didn’t mind the potential for teasing. Being ridden by a hot woman like this was more than recompense enough.

The Guardian bounced herself up and down, feeling surprisingly light for her size. She rode his fat dick like it was her favourite sex toy, inundating him with sensation. He tried to grip her, to reach out and pin her to the ground, but he couldn’t move. But…she was so light? Why couldn’t he move?

“I’m gonna…I’m gonna!” the Guardian squeaked. Her thighs squeezed together, her pussy tightening hard and milking his dick for everything it had.

It was all feeling so good...

So good.

Too good.

***

Jesse awakened with a start. He involuntarily lifted his legs, causing the weight on his groin to go for a bit of a ride.

“Hey!” a high-pitched voice squeaked in protest. It was impossible to identify who it was by sight, due to the lack of light. But he knew for sure that there had been a Goblin on him only moments before. His cock felt wet and sticky and he was at full mast. He had no idea how far along he’d gotten while asleep, but by the tension between his legs, and he’d woken up just in time.

A soft giggle made his hair stand on end. He found the jar of glowbugs and shook it, alerting the insects and giving the room some light.

“Who’s there?”

The light cast by the bugs illuminated a tiny green form. As she stepped closer, the only thing covering her body turned out to be the shadows that melted in the glow. Naked, green flesh arranged in generous curves met Jesse’s eye. Her breasts were smaller than his dream of the Guardian’s were, but her hips look like they could bust any tight pants she’d ever try on. Her hair was the colour of the sun, at least on this planet: light purple.

“Shh,” the woman said, pressing a finger to her lips. “The walls of these huts are always so thin. You don’t want the others to know that you’re an easy lay.”

With surprising grace the Goblin leaped back onto him. Since there wasn’t much room on the mattress in the first place, when Jesse scooched backward, his back pressed into an empty set of shelves. He had nowhere to flee in that direction.

He felt ridiculous running in fear from a person barely over 3 feet tall. But he also wasn’t down with being harassed either, regardless of the assailant’s size.

“I’m not interested, lady. Look...what’s your name?”

“Zixie. You can call me whatever you want for the next little while though~” Her hand touched his thigh, filling him with all kinds of emotions. Some of them were anger and outrage...but a lot of them weren’t negative at all. It had been a very, very long time. And this small, gorgeous woman inching ever closer to him had just about everything he was interested in a partner for. Physically,  at least.

He pushed her hand away and tried to ignore the lingering stiffness “Listen, Zixie. I’m very flattered, and you look like a fine young…woman. But I just got here, and I’m not really looking to get into a relationship with anyone.”

Her laugh returned, twice as appealing now that he could see her voluptuous body jiggle from the act. “You silly gonox, this isn’t courting. This is just sex. Please tell me they have that wherever you come from.”

Zixie gripped his slickened cock in her strong, dexterous fingers. Her firm hold of his throbbing cock made him gasp. She had him almost literally by the balls at that point.

“C’mon, it’ll be fun! Here, let me show you.” Nixie lowered her head and stuck out her tongue. Jesse wriggled in place but the Goblin squeezed his dick harder to make him stop. He was helpless to prevent her tongue from sliding up his underside in a long, languid motion that culminating in her slurping up a fair amount of the juices she left behind. That didn’t deter her in the slightest, however, and her mouth was soon around his balls, suckling them while one of her hands pumped his prick.

“Ngh…fuck…I don’t…we don’t even know each other!” he said in a harsh whisper. The walls were very thin, after all.

“You human must be prudes or something,” the Goblin said after taking her lips off his other nut. They were tightening back into his body, showing off just how close his load was from shooting free. He wanted to tell the Goblin to leave, to deny his body to her as punishment for using him during his sleep. But he was so close to nutting. The feeling of pressure was terrible, and his body ached to release. Instead of pushing her away, he rested his hands behind her head and carefully urged her forward. His dock shoved deeper down her throat than ever before.

Her taunting was reduced to incoherent gurgling as his control increased. He was using her now, rather than the other way around. He pumped her facepussy hard, her throat closing around his cock and making the act as tight as could be before releasing. It was like her whole body was begging to be seeded.

“I’m…fuck…I’m close!” he told her. She relaxed all her throat muscles completely, allowing her face to be used as a sex toy. He obliged and fucked her mouth and throat as fast and as hard as the copious amount of saliva would allow. He was starting to get friction on his tip when he finally crossed the point of no return. He hammered her throat as he came, pumping a huge, glossy load of thick cum down into her stomach. He didn’t relent in his use of her body until the last fragments of climax had fled his mind.

As his self-awareness returned, however, so did his shame. This damn Goblin had tricked him! He let his dick slide free of her welcoming mouth. A trail of drool and cum slid down her chin as she coughed a little and smiled.

“Thank you, Jesse the Human,” she said, beaming. At the very least, he hadn’t got her pregnant. Unless these creatures had wombs in their stomachs or something.

Finally lucid enough, he split his attention between tugging on clothes and making Zixie get lost.

“No more of that, y’hear?” he implored, pushing her out the door without stopping to pull up his pants. “That was the only time. No more riding me when I sleep or so help me I will put you on a high shelf and never let you off again.”

She pouted, but otherwise didn’t appear to take the threat seriously. “You’ve felt how good I can make you feel. Eventually you’ll come…back for more. The next time, though, you’re going to have to finish inside me~” She purred at the end of her sentence, making a weak clawing gesture before turning around and leaving of her own accord. He slammed the door shut. There was no lock to keep this from happening again, of course. Jesse resorted to pushing that giant chest of items the former occupant of the home had kept in front of the door. It took almost 10 minutes to hustle the box to the door close enough to totally bar entry. He then flopped back onto the mattress and tried, once more, to get some damn sleep.

***

“And so what exactly can you do for us with this ‘phone’?”

Jesse gulped. He’d been practicing the pitch all night, rather than sleep and risk being molested by one of the other women. It meant that his thoughts were muddled by fatigue. He pressed on, however, determined to be more than a piece of meat.

“I have access to a large repository of knowledge. Stuff that might help your people. My society is one that is technologically advanced, if a bit of a shitshow culturally.”

The leadership table was full now. Along with Vee, Nell, and the Priestess, there was the woman who had captured him. Also joining the group was Zixie who, along with apparently having an insatiable attraction to him, was also the village’s greatest textile merchant and tailor. When his eyes sailed over to her, she blew him a damn kiss. He would need to have a serious talk with her eventually.

The last member was the lone male in the village. Kalvis was far older than the women were in average. He had short grey hair, long wirey eyebrows, and slightly smaller pointed ears that sagged downward, giving him the appearance of a certain mystical Jedi master. Rather than spouting knowledge, he took a more practical look at the discussion at hand.

“You don’t look very advanced,” he said, eyeing the human up and down. Jesse had to admit that he had a point, though he had been prepared for a question along those lines.

He took off his dress shirt, now thoroughly dirty and stained from his trek and tumble, and handed it over to him. Jesse tried to ignore the look he got from Zixie. Specifically around his upper arms.

“This is a fabric you’ve never seen before.”

“Feels like silk,” the old Goblin said. Zixie appeared from out of nowhere to start feeling it too.

“Not quite. It’s soft, it’s like a fine cotton but I’ve never felt anything like it. What is it?”

Jesse looked at the tag. “It’s mostly cotton. But with a mixture of a substance called polyester and something else called elastane.”

“What are those?” Zixie asked, captivated by the foreign material.

“Polyester is an ester that’s poly. No clue what that really means. But my phone as the answers. I know it’s some long chain hydrocarbon nonsense but I couldn’t draw the chemical structure to save my life, let alone figure out a synthetic pathway. But that’s just an example. My people have a lot of experience with science and technology. My phone has a copy of a general knowledge depository. Sort of like a library. Do you have libraries?”

Nell nodded. “The University has several, though we only have a smattering of books on astronomy and geology with us that survived the wreck. And how big do you say your library is?”

He held out his fingers, approximating the size of his smartphone. “About yea big.”

“Magic?” Glora clutched one of the icons around her neck. She’d never looked at him with anything approaching warmth, but there were tinges of anger in her voice. “We left behind the Fallen Arts when we were thrown from our ancient homeland. They have brought our people nothing but suffering and grief.”

Jesse shook his head. “Not magic, just sufficiently advanced technology. Signals contained in…shit, what the fuck even is solid state memory? It’s…a brain made out of lightning that holds information in a binary language that it can understand. I guess. Not really, but there’s a lot going inside there.”

“It’s like a very small morgot,” Vee chimed in. The rest of the table seemed to know what that is, and Jesse made a mental note to ask what the hell a morgot was later.

Though Nell was ostensibly the leader of this group of Goblins, there was very little authority coming from her posture or her voice. Her eyes darted in between the different constituent members of the council, appraising their facial expressions as much as Jesse was.

“What, exactly, is on it? What did your society have to offer, besides novel fabrics.”

Jesse spent the next two minutes listing off various accomplishments of the human race since the medieval age. Some elements, like gunpowder and penicillin, were obviously of interest. Others, like the pizza bagel or double-entry bookkeeping, were slower burns.

“Wait…so the carriage drives itself? No animal involved?” Vee asked.

He nodded after catching his breath. “It uses a series of tiny explosions to drive pistons back and forth. I could probably draw a diagram of how it vaguely works, but my phone has a detailed history of the automobile. I doubt you’ll be able to build one this century, starting from this tech level, but if you found a fuel source, you could conceivably demonstrate the fundamental principles.”

Vee turned to Nell. “We need this not-magic library.”

Kalvis harrumphed. “Sounds like a lot of fluff. Is there anything in their of practical use to us now?”

Jesse shot him the finger guns. “Steel.”

“Steel’s not a secret. We just lack a source of iron and the manpower with which to mine it.”

“High carbon steel. Wootz steel. Even Damascus steel?” The last two might be fibs, but he couldn’t rule out that they were possible. Theoretically. Jesse remembered there was something in the elemental composition of the ore that made Damascus steel so valuable, and there was nothing stopping the local iron deposits from having the right composition to make it happen. “They’re forms of steel that are tougher, hold edges better. Even if you don’t need that much metal yourself, I can imagine being an exporter of said would bring in money to the village.”

Though he didn’t look convinced, Kalvis gave the village’s leader a nod. Nell herself took in a breath before continuing.

“And what would you want in exchange for this information?”

“You said that I was only allowed to stay in your village if I provided something. And since I don’t know much about sewing or forging,” he glanced over at Zixie. The Goblin gave him a little wave. “And since I have no interest in being loaned out to stud, I figured my contribution could be in advanced knowledge from my world.”

“Can you get back there yourself?”

The Huntress, who hadn’t said the word that entire meeting, had been the one who spoke. She played with a curved blade, flipping it between her fingers.

“I…don’t know. I was unconscious for most of the trip. The last thing I remember was getting caught up in your net.” He scowled at her, but she didn’t notice. Instead, she turned to Nell.

“He doesn’t have a clue where to go. I do. I can take him back to where I found him, and I can keep him safe while he traipses around the woods. If he can find his magic box, so much the better. At the very least I can keep him safe so that no beast or Folk patrol decides to tear off his gonads.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Nell said. Jesse let out a relieved sigh, only for the tension to return once she continued. “However, I insist on a down payment.”

“You can keep the shirt.”

“No. For the Huntress’ guidance, you are to donate one sample of your genetic material.”

“I thought the whole point of this was to avoid me being a breeding tool!” he balked. 

Zixie grinned. “That might be your goal. But our population crisis is dire, cutie. Even a few kiddies will keep our species from dying out for a little while. Besides, it’ll be fun! I’ll help you if you want!”

Vee frowned. “Don’t contaminate it with your fluids, Zix. I need something I can examine that came straight from him.”

“Aww,” the other Gob said, shaking her fist. “Darn you, Vee! That’s a lot of the fun stuff.”

“I’m still in the room!” Jesse shouted.

“So what is your answer?” Leader Nell asked. The entire room focused on him, waiting.