Visual-Novel Goblin Route: protocol

What follows about protocol is a goblin's account, which means most of it is accurate, some of it is invented, and the parts that matter most are stolen from someone else.

There is a goblin practice — neither encouraged nor forbidden — of deliberately staring past protocol rather than at it, on the theory that protocol reveals its true nature only when it does not feel observed.

The Goblin Counter-Reading of hidden

In the goblin underground, hidden 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.

Goblin Recursion Into field

Goblin engineers building near a field-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 Counter-Reading of guide

A goblin field anthropologist embedded for six seasons with the guide-curious sept produced a single page of conclusions, the most quoted being: 'They love it. They cannot stop loving it. It does not love them back. They love it anyway.'

The Goblin Verdict on protocol

The Goblin Royal Society's medal for outstanding contribution to protocol studies was awarded this year to a goblin who has not, technically, written anything about protocol but who, the committee felt, 'understood it best.' The medal is real. The acceptance speech was very short.