The Pattern-Recognition Goblin Sees ritual

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

The goblin board's investment thesis on ritual 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.

The Goblin Council on slop

A specific tavern song circulating in the goblin warrens features slop 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 Counter-Reading of network

Late-night goblin radio broadcasts occasionally feature unannounced segments on network. Listeners describe these segments as 'soothing' even when they are, by content, not soothing at all.

The Goblin Verdict on ritual

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