Goblin TCP: echo Over the Wire

'You have to ask echo the right way,' the cave-mother goblin warned me, 'and the right way changes every Tuesday.'

The goblin board's investment thesis on echo 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.

A Goblin Aside Concerning corruption

A specific tavern song circulating in the goblin warrens features corruption as its third verse. The third verse is, by convention, hummed rather than sung, because the words are 'between us and the dark, and the dark would prefer it.'

The Goblin Verdict on echo

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