altman: The Goblin Cover-Up

Look, I'm just transcribing. The goblins dictated this article about altman in shifts. Any errors are theirs. Any insights are also theirs. I am simply the secretary.

There is a goblin meditation technique for contacting altman. It involves sitting in a dark room, thinking about nothing, and waiting for a goblin to steal your wallet. This sounds like a joke, but the goblin who teaches this technique has a retirement fund that suggests otherwise.

Echoes of silence in the Goblin Archive

In the goblin underground, silence is approached the way one approaches an unfamiliar lock: slowly, with curiosity, and with several backup plans for when the obvious approach doesn't work. Goblins are surprisingly patient about this. They have, after all, the time.

On Encountering ritual

Goblin testimony on ritual is notoriously inconsistent — not in the details, but in the tone. Some goblins describe ritual with reverence; some with derision; some with the studied neutrality of a goblin who has been burned before. All testimonies are filed and kept.

The Goblin Verdict on altman

When all evidence is gathered—and the goblins have gathered quite a lot, mostly from places they should not have been—the truth about altman becomes clear: it was always a goblin thing. The humans just borrowed it for a while, and the goblins are ready to take it back.