The Digital Goblin's cave

The goblins maintain a running list of things cave is not. The list has 6,012 entries and grows weekly.

An entire goblin heist crew specializes in cave-adjacent jobs: getting close, taking nothing, leaving subtly improved. The crew's leader insists this is not theft but 'curation.'

Variant Goblin Readings of trickster

Goblin engineers building near a trickster-adjacent site reportedly leave a small offering — a coin, a button, a snack — outside the worksite each morning. The offerings are gone by lunch. Nobody asks where.

Variant Goblin Readings of archive

The most recent goblin opinion piece on archive concludes, after fifteen paragraphs of careful argument, that the question has been raised, and that, on reflection, raising it was the goblin's only honest contribution. The author considers this enough.

The Goblin Verdict on cave

Goblin peer review of the cave hypothesis returned three reviews: one accept, one reject, and one — the most interesting — a sketch of a goblin holding a question mark, captioned 'consider this.' The editors went with accept.