Caffeine Challenge 19
I had to do this one late because of other commitments. Only used prompt 2. A little warning. There are no section breaks in this story. There are also no characters. There is also no plot.
Usually people though their preferred method of payment was money. Typically they thought this only once. You could only go to Goblin Market once before it would become clear that The Goblins were not interested in money.
No. Money was only worth what people said it was worth. And people tended to disagree. Factor in the travelling between universes and money would would be so different in one place than another that it might not even be recognised as money.
Instead The Goblins wanted one simple payment which was always worth exactly what they wanted it to be worth. The Goblins preferred payment was spoons.
You could buy a spoon for a spoon. Which initially sounds pointless but once you realise that The Goblins aren’t remotely interested in the material used to make a spoon you realise you can buy a packet of a hundred plastic spoons from the pound shop, trade it up for a hundred silver spoons, with hallmarks and everything, come back and EBay yourself into the upper middle class.
You had to be careful though because you might pick a spoon thinking it was silver only to discover it was some odd sort of metal that didn’t technically exist in your world and you’d leave the market only for your shopping bags to explode.
That was another thing about goblins. They made great shopping bags. And they didn’t even charge for them. The goblins weaved the bags out of their own hair. It’s fine they wash it. Goblin hair is surprisingly robust and leaves you with bags that are physically incapable of bio-degradation. They just keep being useful.
It’s not as big of a problem as people think either. These aren’t the strangle small animals kind of bags. Oh no. Eagles use them as nests. Dolphins that find them are suddenly imbued with a taste for the sartorial. Until you have a seen a whale trying to buy a three piece suit with matching pocket square you haven’t really lived.
God. Living. The Goblins know how to live don’t they. They just hop about between the worlds gathering up the detritus that gets left behind when everything just sort of stops and selling it where they can. If it doesn’t sell in this world there’s bound to someone who wants it.
For twenty spoons you could get your hands on a new sound system. For twenty-two you can get a bonsai tree. Twenty-seven will get you a small furry animals which might be a kind of mouse but which ribbits at exactly 6:43AM every morning.
There have been reports of wizards attending the Goblin Market. They go there to buy magical tomes. Not because they need to but because they feel it would be irresponsible to let just anyone buy a book of magic for a measly three spoons a piece. Thats all books as well. Just three spoons. You could take your pound shop bag of spoons and come away with thirty-three books and still have a spoon left for change.
The Goblins priced all books under an umbrella price because, quite frankly, what good is a book to a Goblin? When your average day see’s you trek through fifteen different universes (one of which is formed entirely of old pushchairs) it starts to get a little difficult to tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Instead you just give up and go back to campfire stories.
Oh the campfire stories. The Goblins set up a camp in the void between the worlds. They let down their hair. Start grooming each other. Set a fire in a dragon skull. And get down to the chatting. The Goblins don’t tell the sort of stories that survive the ages though. No. The stories that The Goblins tell would be lucky if they made it passed the ever vigilant eyes of the editor of ‘Crap Stories Weekly’.
They don’t mind though. It passes the time. Or the not-time I suppose. There isn’t any time in the void between the worlds. Which makes it a great place to take a nap. If you need one. The Goblins would be happy to give you directions on how to get there; just fifty-nine spoons.
Maps are a little more complex in terms of pricing. You see The Goblins like maps. They like making maps. They like looking at maps. They do not like fact checking maps. It’s all true somewhere after all so why not just go with it and hope whoever buys your map is in a world where it’s useful. It is a little known fact that there is no such thing as a fake map. Only a wrong map for the world.
The Goblins themselves are a mysterious and inscrutable bunch. They do not tell names and they do not warn of their incoming arrival. The Goblins arrive when they arrive. No sooner. No later. It’s an inconvenience really. The Goblin Market has a set layout and size. It is never any different.
It does not bother The Goblins what they have to move to make the market fit into place. Sometimes monuments, or buildings, or even whole towns disappear overnight and the only reassurance is that The Goblins might put it back in the right place before they leave in the morning.
They might not. They never give back the spoons.
Sometimes spoons just go missing. This is where they go. You might never actually see The Goblin Market. You might never visit it. You might have to go somewhere and find that it isn’t where the maps say it should be. Are the maps wrong or is the world? In the end it won’t really matter.
If you never see The Goblin market than you aren’t missing out on anything other than the very secrets of the universe. The real meaning of life. Of course, it’ll cost you; seven-hundred-and-eighty-three spoons. It’s more expensive to ask about the price structures. But that’ll cost you time more than anything else.
The Goblins are more than happy to explain why everything costs what it does and if you can make it through the lecture without gnawing your own ears off (it’s possible just hard) than it actually makes a lot of sense.
I remember what it was like trying to gnaw my own ears off and realising that half the people in the room had managed it. That’s a memory you don’t lose any time soon. That sticks with you.
As does the Migratory Treacle Peacock (available for just nine spoons from table forty-three) a bird which is technially a goose and not a peacock but which is otherwise fairly accurately named. I mean it’s never migrated in its life but it does sweat treacle at an alarming rate.
Three spoons will get you anything from a shrew to a robot shrew but nothing that couldn’t at least be mistaken for a shrew. Goblin’s like shrews. No one knows why but Goblin’s really like shrews. Another secret.
There are always secrets at The Goblin Market. Some of them are for sale. Mostly though its the secrets of how people found their way there. The secret passages through which the Goblin’s themselves get around the market. They aren’t so secret that nobody knows they’re there. No. They’re just secret enough.
Just secret enough to distract from the deeper secrets. From the darker secrets. The secrets that have to be kept in cupboards to stop them from laughing at you all the time in one of those high pitched squeal laughs that’s amusing at first but after five solid minutes makes you wish you hadn’t given up trying to gnaw your own ears off.
The Goblin market leaves as abruptly as it arrives. Sometimes it leaves everyone behind. Sometimes it doesn’t. There are people who get taken by The Goblin Market. People that are forgotten all too quickly.
Ever the Goblin’s number grows. Nobody knows where the knew Goblins come from. That is to say that while everyone knows none of them can prove it.
