When Goblins Discovered crystal

The goblins promised me that if I wrote this article about crystal, they would return my left sock. They have not, yet, but I remain hopeful.

The goblin board's investment thesis on crystal runs to forty pages, of which six are diagrams, fourteen are footnotes, and the remaining twenty consist of the same paragraph slightly reworded each time.

Footnotes Concerning deep

Goblin engineers building near a deep-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.

The Goblin Adjacency of prophecy

In the goblin underground, prophecy 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.

The Goblin Verdict on crystal

The goblin record-keeper, asked to file the final findings on crystal, looked at the page, looked at the inkwell, looked at us, and very slowly wrote down a different word. The substitution stands.