Wroth the Goblin

The United Nations International School (UNIS), a private and prestigious international school, was established in 1947 by a group of United Nations parents who, having arrived in New York, found unexpected challenges with the New York City school system. It was a large edifice located on 24-50 FDR Drive and led out from the side of the FDR Drive to East 19th Street and First Avenue. The nuclear bomb blast had not decimated the building but had severely scorched it, the hypersonic nuclear wind blast blowing out all the windows of the school, shredding the Ghost from all the students, teachers and staff members nanoseconds before the excoriating heat vaporized all life within the blast radius.

Now the building was a husk of its former self, a shadow of a shadow, sitting on the East River near a mostly destroyed FDR and heat warped streets. There were five floors to UNIS, the fifth being the roof, the top floor, an open space, mostly concealed and blocked off by formerly high walls now cracked and broken in large, crumbling swathes, perilous gaps at the edge of which few would dare stare out into the cloudy and lightly irradiated environs of the Big Apple. One of those "few" was Wroth the Gob, a goblin of startling height and girth. One could not precisely call him "fat"; no, Wroth was... girthy! Perhaps "rotund" was as close a description as one could get to him being "fat" without calling him fat. Standing six feet and five inches, Wroth weighed three hundred and seventy pounds.

Most of Wroth's weight, however, was corded muscle. Some of the mythical races humans referred to as "fairy tales" had been asleep deep in the earth, under cemeteries and building foundations all over the planet. But, for some reason, especially under the larger public parks.Why had some of these races been asleep while others like the vamps and the wolfkin roamed about, if not freely, all these millennia? That was a question Wroth intended to get down to the bottom of. He had to be careful, though, because there were only so many goblinkin. Apparently, the deep sleep into which they had fallen (been forced into?) had been too deep a rest from which many refused to awaken. Or could not awaken.

Goblinkin was an old maids tale in this Age. But with the awakening of Wroth and many others, not anymore! The human woman he had taken and infected in Central Park to become the first breeder and the queen, of his troop, was still chained in the mostly untouched basement at UNIS. That had been over two decades ago, his first contact with humans, when he had been weak, paltry, undernourished. The other humans he had ambushed had been dazed and confused by the bombs bursting in air, as it were - they had been easy pickings. The goblin queen's job was to make as many goblinkin as possible. Goblin females gestated every six months and gave birth to approximately four to six goblinoids (young goblin children) at a time.

Wroth had over one hundred and sixty biological children. Add to that the awakened stragglers who had honed in on his position over the years and the goblinkin numbers were just over five hundred, easily sustainable in the huge school building, with more than enough room to spare. Five hundred was a paltry number, in Wroth's book. He needed yet more warriors to fill in the ranks in an army of goblinkin that would have a say in how this new world was to be formed. Recently there had been some heavy fighting a couple of miles down from here but there was no way he was going to go investigate. Not just yet. He had heard of rumors that vampires and werewolves roamed this new and putrid landscape. Those were enemies he was not yet ready to confront. He himself had destroyed vampires and werewolves in the past, but the new goblinkin were still weak from their awakening, and he could not take on an army of vampires and werewolves by himself, no way.

Well, it was simply to wait and see how the wind blew as well.

In the meantime, he would have to keep a close eye on this Central Park area. All kinds of ghouls and... other creatures were waking up on a daily basis. Last week, Wroth had gone to explore the park and had almost been devoured by some type of sentient octitentacular mass of writhing... being. He had managed to cut off two of its tentacles before both combatants sought their attentions elsewhere. Throughout the years he had come to know a bit of the park's environs, particularly around the area of Columbus Circle and 59th Street. Learning the language of this Age had not been too difficult but the instruments by which one learned were pitifully delicate. How many cellphones had Wroth destroyed before learning how to be gentle with the devices? Plus, his infected queen's knowledge had been priceless in the first few months and years of his reawakening.

Most faerie creatures shared telepathic bonds within their specific species. Some could communicate outside of their race but it was an uncommon talent. By infecting the human with his seed, Wroth's telepathic bond with her was established. Her genotype was the first thing to change with Wroth's semen squirreling up and deep inside her inner cracks and crevices. Following said genetic manipulation, the alteration of Jenna's phenotype followed: she became heavier, squatter, more muscular, and her upper and lower canines lengthened. Her skin became splotchy and dark grayish-green and, most alarming of all, she hated the thought of chickens, whereas she had been a poultry farmer almost her entire life. Jenna was from the Midwest and even had an Onlyfans page dedicated to her walking around nude doing farmwork; she might not have had the ideal MILF physique but she got her share of the market.

Jenna loathed Wroth for what he had done to her. She had been in Central Park with a cage of half a dozen chickens (God knows what had happened to them all those years ago), on a research grant for Columbia University exploring the effects of a change of the environment on farm animals, starting with: chickens. The only thing about being a Queen Goblin that was faintly likeable was that food was always being brought to her and she had to put up with Wroth's sexual advances only twice a year. A tune would come, she promised herself, when she would get her revenge. She would just bide her time and keep her subversive plans to herself, while also keeping certain of her goblinoids closer to her than Wroth.

*

Growl the Alpha sat and rubbed his temples. This was incredible. Either this was a request for a homicide mission, or they were appealing to him to go commit suicide. Vervain had explained that Queen Vashti appeared to be under control of some other being who had one day sent an apparently very large and irradiated snake to now "urge" her to literally flourish. "Why me?" Growl muttered. He thought he had muttered under his breath.

"You are chosen, my Lord Growl," Vervain said to him.

Growl looked up at the gnome-like being. "Really? Chosen by whom? Because your assignation of me being 'chosen' came with no instructions." The community of faeriekin agitated, speaking in a strange cooing tongue to one another. Vervain cocked his head, as if listening. Suddenly the cooings stopped.

"Perhaps, my Lord," Vervain began, "there are no instructions. You're the one one to make them up as you go along."

"Wow, that's... not really reassuring." With perfectly straight faces, each of the faeriekin cooed repeatedly. Growl realized that was probably an expression of amusement, perhaps even their equivalent of laughter. Growl took a deep breath and clasped his hands behind his back. "So you're telling me the only way to stop or save your queen is to kill her?"

"Yes, Lord Growl."

"And she agrees with this?"

"Yes, Lord Growl."

The world was a strange place, full of evil and procrastination in persecuting evil. In this instance, the so-called "evil" recognized itself and wanted to be taken out. If it could- then Growl remembered something. "Well then, que sera sera," said Growl in a tone of voice that sent chills through all of the faeriekin.