Chapter 56: Chapter 55: Bickering

Gottlieb wanders down the newly grown corridor, looking around himself as he walks, his heavy, thudding steps from his heavy body echoing out around him down the metal hallway. Occasionally, there are critters and the odd monster or two that take a peak at whatever is approaching, but as soon as they see him, they quickly retreat, hiding back in terror in their nests and dens.

 

- As they should.

 

Mighty is the power of the wrathful human-god, who is more beast than man.

 

“…What are you doing?” asks a voice from behind him, Grunheide the goblin.

 

Gottlieb, in the middle of flexing and looking at his reflection in a shiny pipe, turns his head around to look down at her. “Reasserting my self-confidence,” he replies.

 

“To who?”

 

Gottlieb turns his arms, flexing them the other way. “To everyone who matters,” replies the man, looking at his reflection again for a second.

 

“…Alright then…” replies Grunheide, clearing her throat. “Moving on. Are you sure letting these ghosts out of their chamber is a good idea?” she asks. “They’re locked up in there now, but knowing ghosts, the moment you open the door, they’ll burst out and haunt the rest of the station,” she explains. “It’s kind of like opening a cursed tomb.”

 

“Please, Grun,” remarks Gottlieb, rolling his eyes. “You’re such a downer. They’re just some ghosts. What’s the problem?” he asks. “What are they going to do, spook me?” The man taps his head. “Not afraid of some ghosts.” He gestures for them to keep walking. “Besides, in the ideal case, they’re gonna be human ghosts,” says Gottlieb. “I need them here.”

 

“Okay, wait. Let’s break this down for a second,” says the goblin in her scratchy, squeaky voice.

 

“I’m listening,” replies Gottlieb, instead watching his reflection along the pipe as they walk. Damn. He’s really jacked. Nice.

 

“First off, you don’t even know if those are human ghosts. They might be… I don’t know, kobold-ghosts or orc ghosts.”

 

“- Orcs are fine too,” throws in Gottlieb.

 

“Ignoring the fact that I can’t help but feel like I am an unaccepted being here -”

 

“- That’s because you’re a self-centered, self-important traitor, Grun,” says Gottlieb, looking at her. “Not because you’re a goblin.”

 

She stops looking at him. “You’re calling me self-centered? Really?” she asks.

 

Gottlieb, staring at his reflection, swipes a strand of his hair out of the way as he looks at his face, which he can’t help but feel has become more handsome than it used to be, if such a thing is possible. Maybe all of the prayer from the world below really is affecting him, like it does the station, as Kai had explained. “Yup. I call it like I see it.”

 

She sighs. “Anyways. Ignoring all of that, why can’t we just have the machine-god make new crew-members?” she asks. “There’s a literal harpy and a minotaur in the control room, why do we need humans now so badly?”

 

“Because it’s my job to look after humanity, Grun,” he replies as they approach the door at the end of the corridor. He scratches his cheek, looking at it. It’s a secured, metal door like any other on the station. However, there are rows of cloth bands tying it off. Paper seals with inscriptions he can’t read are glued onto it, depicting ominous warding mechanisms and spells. “Don’t take it the wrong way, but I don’t trust you and a swarm of goblins to do what’s best for humans,” he explains.

 

She stands there, with her hands on her hips. “You know. You’re a real asshole,” says the goblin. "Goblins move in clans by the way, not swarms."

 

He looks down at her, listening to the word ring around the hallway. Oddly enough, he smiles. “Thanks, Grun,” he says, feeling an odd nostalgia. Richter always used to call him an asshole too. Good times.

 

“I hope they’re goblin ghosts,” she mutters.

 

Gottlieb reaches up, grabbing hold of a seal and pulling it off of the door.

 

— A cold breeze shoots through the corridor, stemming impossibly from exactly where he’s standing. It whistles, scraping against the sharp metal of the corridor, its howling movements sounding like the mourning cry of a desperate banshee.

 

He rolls his eyes. “They’re not going to be goblins, Grun. Ghosts are souls,” says the man. “Goblins don’t have souls.”

 

“Wow. What? Excuse me?” she asks, taking a sharper tone.

 

Gottlieb nods. “You’re monsters,” he explains. “Only humans and orcs and stuff have souls.”

 

“Says who?!” she asks.

 

Gottlieb peels off another seal, throwing it over his shoulder.

 

— It catches fire in mid-air all by itself, the black smoke taking the form of a howling skull as it spontaneously combusts and then vanishes a second later into nothingness.

 

“Says that book I read in the library,” replies Gottlieb, peeling at the next layer over the door. “Wicker Marvin.”

 

“That creep?!” she yells. “I read his book too! He’s a human supremacist! He hates everything except humans,” she argues. “Of course he’d write that! It doesn’t mean it’s true!”

 

Gottlieb thinks for a moment, looking up towards the ceiling, before looking back down at her glaring face. She seems pretty angry. “Okay. I take it back; you probably have a soul,” he half-amends. “But they’re still not going to be goblin-ghosts.” He shrugs. “Hell. If anything, I’m expecting them to be the ghosts of the old crew.”

 

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“They turned into zombies,” she says.

 

Gottlieb peels off the last seal. “Their bodies turned into zombies,” he corrects. “Who says their souls did?” He rips off the hand-written seal, stamped with wax. As he peels it off, the wax stamp begins to crumble and flake apart, eating its way through the paper and leaving a hole in it that takes the shape of a blackened eye, before fading into nothingness together with the parchment.

 

“Maybe humans don’t have souls, huh?” asks Grunheide. “I’d believe it, looking at you.”

 

“Please, Grun. Don’t be ridiculous,” says Gottlieb. “You’re the smart one. Of course humans have souls,” he says, pointing at himself.

 

The door groans, starting to open but then stopping a second later, as if it were caught on something. The metal, freshly created from nothingness, creaks and screeches as metal scrapes against unoiled metal. The mechanisms behind it sound as if they were an artifact from a hundred years ago, rather than something that came into existence last week.

 

He bends down, grabbing the lower edge of the door, as he has decided this is taking too long, and then grunts as he forcefully shoves it up into the slot above.

 

A slow, oozing draft of frigidly cold air presses against them, and then… nothing.

 

Gottlieb steps into the room, with Grunheide walking in after him. The two of them look around at the area, a recreation room equipped with all manner of sports and fitness stations, game stations, and other such amenities.

 

“Anyone want a job?” calls Gottlieb out into the room, his voice echoing around the large, lifeless chamber. His breath floats through the air, the warm vapors visible in the icy cold.

 

No response.

 

“…Maybe they’re not interested,” remarks Grunheide. “Can’t say that I blame them.”

 

“You’re free to work anywhere else if you have a better offer,” replies Gottlieb, looking at her as she crosses her arms.

 

Auxiliary Gunner Grunheide glares at him. “You ever think that maybe I’d be more interested in helping humans if you weren’t such a tool?”

 

“I’ve thought about it,” replies Gottlieb, looking back at the room. “But I decided it didn’t add up, since -”

 

— The lights flicker.

 

The man raises his gaze, looking at the tubes lining the ceiling that are going in and out.

 

“Very spooky,” he says.

 

“Is that the ghosts, or is the sun going out again?” asks Grunheide.

 

Gottlieb grimaces. “We’re not ready for another blackout,” says Gottlieb. “Let’s hope that it’s just the gh-”

 

— The station’s power dies out.

 

The two of them are submerged in total darkness, as if they had been plunged beneath the surface of the ocean. The electronics of the station all around them hum, singing a quiet song as they drift to sleep, as the sun has once again died out in what promises to be a long phase of utter darkness.

 

“Well. Shit,” mutters the man, feeling the goblin grab his leg and hold on to it.

 

“Hey, uh…” says Grunheide. “So, I have a theory, what -” she starts. “- HEY! Really?” asks the goblin, interrupting herself. “Get off,” she snaps. “That’s so inappropriate. Go take a shower,” she barks.

 

“…What? I’m listening,” replies Gottlieb, fishing around for the helmet strapped to the side of his suit, as it has a flashlight built into its exterior.

 

He can hear her doing the same thing, muttering. “Perverted asshole. The fuck.”

 

“Excuse me?” he asks.

 

“- Ghosts being… ghosts and all, do you think that they…” She fumbles with her light. “You know.”

 

“— Don’t show themselves in bright, well lit rooms?” asks the man, flicking his flashlight on, the beam cutting through the heavy darkness that the emergency lighting in the corridor doesn’t reach at all, giving the distant hallway the appearance of a single beacon of light floating in a sea of nothingness.

 

And just in front of him, inches from his face, is a long, inhumanly stretched out face hovering towards him. Its mouth hangs down to the base of its neck, with only darkness visible within it. Whispering strands of long, blue, ethereal, floating hair drift behind the entity as if it were seaweed, waving slowly in the underwater currents of the ocean.

 

Gottlieb looks down out of the corner of his eyes, seeing the long hand wrapped around his leg, with fingers each as long as his forearms, belonging to a hand that is clearly not Grunheide’s.

 

There isn’t actually any darkness around them, at least not in the traditional sense of freely floating nothingness. Rather, all of the black around them, above, below, left, and right, is all the void inside hundreds of impossibly long, silently screaming mouths and hollow eyes.

 

— The door slams shut, and the flashlights die out and somebody screams.

 

 

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