Dissonance 12 – Goblin Cleaning and History Lessons

The less said about the hospital visit, the better.

When Eldred heard the words ‘deworming procedure’, he had decided that there were things that he did not need to harden himself against. Alas, Avari and Nyx had made that same decision and leaving Ellie in the hospital alone would have been cruel…

The less said about the hospital visit, the better.

Eldred had never been happier to have been born in a land where the worst plague going around was the creeping death of the soul through a lack of challenges. Bad as that was, it beat… yeah, he preferred not thinking about it.

After an hour and the administration of almost two dozen different, fairly cheap alchemical tinctures and regular medicine, Ellie left the hospital. The entire procedure had been standardised. Eldred was not even the first one to try and build a harem in Iridescia and he was far, far, far from the first one to have invited a newcomer to the City of the Interstice. After all, none of the soil nor any of the species in this spot between worlds had originated there. At the start of it all, this space had been empty.

Eldred had no idea how that had changed.

The check-up cost basically nothing, less than 5% of the earnings Eldred had made from that most recent mission. Medieval worlds scarcely had the kind of parasites or diseases that could fight off the advanced magic and/or science of Iridescia.

With the insides of the goblin checked out, it was time to carry her to a bathhouse. Carrying was indeed necessary, even more so than before. The attention from the nurses and doctor had overloaded Ellie’s social capacity. Past the halfway point of the interaction, she had just been shuffled about by everyone involved.

They found a bathhouse that offered the renting of private chambers for groups in addition to the generalised male, female and mixed spaces. Eldred had no problem with using a mixed space, but he also appreciated the privacy. The extra fee was scarcely relevant to them.

Nyx took charge of handling Ellie. She peeled the goblin out of the sorry excuse of clothes that her tribal garb was. Naked, there was… very little different about Ellie. The stitched together scraps of linen had left very little to the imagination. The hospital also had removed all of her body hair as part of scanning for things. Eldred had paid the little extra to keep her head of hair untouched.

The pear-shaped greenskin was nudged along into the private bath. It was set-up for up to 8 people with a pool big enough that friends could hang out in it without awkward body contact. A half-wall in the centre and the actual walls at the side held a couple of ‘washing stations’. Each came with a shower head, a stool to sit on, a waterproof mat to lie on, a few tools such as sponges and combs, a selection of available soaps, and a bucket for quick rinsing. The room was of a sterile, white design with a couple of blue tiles set into basic patterns to break up the monotony. The edge of the pool was made from actual stones, the gaps between them filled with a nicely blended plaster.

“Sit.” Nyx pushed down on Ellie’s shoulders. She plopped down on the stool, twitched when water suddenly hit her, then relaxed as Nyx washed her hair. Ellie had a whole lot of it. Enough that, freed from the braid, it was the length of her entire body.

“Well, at least you found something useless,” Avari drawled sarcastically. “That’s not the worst option.”

“What is the worst one? Picking up an opportunist?”

“Good to hear you still have some brain cells.”

Despite what she had said earlier, Eldred picked up on her lingering annoyance. He honestly had not stopped to think how the gremlin would feel about him dragging a new woman back on his very first mission. ‘Proves I need to get better at the harem management,’ he told himself. ‘Let’s start with a bit of atonement.’

Avari started to wash herself. Eldred gave himself a quick rinse, enough to make sure his hands were clean of the dirt of the other world, then moved behind his gremlin. “Mhhhhmmm… that’s… pretty goooooood,” she gasped as he worked her upper back.

“Your shoulders must be sore from carrying our finances all the time,” he whispered. “Among other things.” It was impossible not to look at her tits. She was too small for her back to hide them and they were too big to ignore their pull, drawing in all male attention with line of sight. Though his hands yearned to be reminded of the sensation of abundant squish, the boob-lover only grabbed a bottle of massage oil. He poured it onto her small back, then resumed his work. “How about you lay down for a bit and let me take care of you?”

“You’re the one who just came back from work…” Avari muttered, her willpower melting under his hands.

“So let me relax by taking care of you,” he insisted.

Gently, he pulled her over to the waterproof mat. Once he had her on her chest, all she produced were de-stressing gasps. For his part, Eldred was mesmerised by the way her chest spilled past the sides of her slender torso and how much that pancaking increased when he put pressure on her. Primarily, he focused on actually working out the knots in her back.

“You’ve been working very hard as well,” he whispered to his adorable gremlin. “You deserve all the recognition I can give you. I know I can be demanding and reckless. Thank you for putting up with me. I love you.”

“…shaddup…” Avari muttered under her breath, pleasant warmth radiating from her skin.

“Awa…awawawa…awawawawawawa-whaaaaaat is happening, where am I?!” Ellie finally rebooted, her head flying left to right, then she glanced down at herself. “Grublerelgasd?!

“is that your local goblin language or are you shutting down again?” Eldred asked.

“S-s-s-s-s-shutting down?!” Ellie looked to Eldred, then to Nyx. The ghost lady was combing the goblin’s long hair unperturbed. Every long stroke of the dense comb pushed brown-tinged water out of the soaked strands. “What, uhm, uh-“

“Total girlfailure energy,” Avari stated. “Eldred, go dom her into submission.”

“As you say.” Eldred got and marched across the tiny divide between the station Avari had claimed and Ellie’s current position. Upon his arrival, Ellie gulped. Yellow eyes failed to stay on his face, snapping right to the half-mast Eldred was currently sporting. When Eldred squatted down, the drooling greenskin kept staring at his manhood.

“The cock handler position is still available,” Nyx cooed into Ellie’s ear.

The goblin’s face turned a considerably deeper shade of green. A number of additional noises left her. “Gods, gold and greed, she sounds like the world’s most adorable blue screen,” Avari remarked. “I am getting why you wanted to keep her. Even I am getting the ‘must protect’ urge.”

“Right? She is adorable.”

“Ad-d—d-d-d-dora-“ Ellie did not get through the whole word. All rigidness left her for a brief moment. The slam of Eldred’s palm against the tile jumpstarted her again. She jumped in her seat, now stuck between the driven man and his banshee.

“I need you to concentrate for a little bit,” he told her. “I won’t demand you make it today or tomorrow, but in the next couple of days you will have to make the decision whether you want to be mine or if I have to arrange for you to find your own place in Iridescia. Okay?”

“O-okay?” Ellie gulped audibly again. “I-I’m going to focus.”

“Good. Step one, help Nyx get you clean. We’ll talk in the tub.”

Getting Ellie clean took a full twenty minutes. After giving her hair a thorough combing, Nyx showered the goblin from head to toe. Ellie finally realized that she had lost her bush, which she seemed far from upset about. In fact, she was busy inspecting all the usual places with a half-smile for a while. Avari started chatting with (or at) the goblin about the various alchemical products used to promote or inhibit hair growth. Eldred used that time to clean himself.

They all moved into the bath. The duo of shortstacks were submerged to the neck just by sitting there. Eldred and Nyx had to half lie in the bath to the same effect. They all let out a collective sigh of relief.

“Hey, Avari?” Eldred said.

“Yeah?” the relaxed gremlin asked.

“Now’s the time to tell us all about our situation.”

“Why’s that my job?”

“Because you are the best informed. I’m the will, you are the competence.”

Avari snorted at the metaphor. “Ain’t that the truth… alright, girlfailure!”

“Y-yeah?” Ellie stammered.

“You might think that mister tall, built and well-endowed is some big shot, but the three of us are actually at the entry level of the corpo totem pole. We are not members of a megacorp and we are way, way away from the Great Ones. It’s just us three, living in a ruin… for now.”

“Uhm… okay?” Ellie muttered. “Was that… building where you were… hanging out nude?”

“Company policy, members of my harem are not allowed to wear clothes inside the office building,” Eldred explained casually.

“Except to strip out of them,” Nyx added.

“And his company is his harem,” Avari added. “All of it is currently starting off. You are lucky in the sense that, all of this being new, there would be room for you if you decided to become part of this absurdity. You are unlucky in the sense that we live in a ruin… but from what I hear about your previous life, our ruin is better than your cave anyhow.”

“It… was a p-pretty big cave… with running water…”

“Look around you, girlfailure.” Avari’s tail surfaced for a moment to splash a bit of the hot water at the goblin. “Does it look like Iridescia is short on water?”

“R-right…”

“On the topic of the ruin, though, we can finally get to fixing that. The money Eldred brought in will be sufficient to hire a construction company.” Avari rolled her neck. “So, if you stick with us, you’ll definitely not starve. Before I even start contemplating whether I want you to join, though, I need to check out what you can do. Eldred might have been fine with picking you up as a carriable cocksleeve, but I’m not going to let that fly. You’ll be useful to the corporation or I’ll drop you like a hot potato, understood?”

“…What’s a potato…?”

“…That’s the saddest question I have ever heard. We’re having potatoes after we get out of here.” There was a temporary lull in the conversation now that the general situation had been laid out. It was at this point that Eldred cleared his throat. “And what stupid-idiot-moron question is coming my way now? If you are going to suggest we spend all our money on Echo again, I will–“

“No, that money is all for you,” Eldred assured her and he meant it. “I’m nowhere near Elemental Mastery. Everything takes me seconds of focus right now. I’ll continue taking jobs.”

“Then what’s the question?”

Nyx put her chin on Eldred’s shoulder. “We wondered if you could give us a brief on Iridescian history.”

Turning to Ellie, Avari remarked. “That’s another point, Eldred knows nothing and Nyx is smart but she is a vengeful spirit so she got most of her brain wiped. You’ll be in the company of absolute cretins if you stay with us… then again, you are used to that too, aren’t you?”

“…I’ve not h-had anything t-thrown at me for over a day now s-so… this is pretty good…” Ellie muttered.

“…If you stick with us, I’ll give you your own closet to hide in, girlfailure.”

“W-w-why do you… keep calling me that?”

“Because you look like one, bags under the eyes, long messy hair, absolute lack of confidence despite having an ass like mine… bigger maybe…” Avari eyed the surface of the water.

“Eeep!” A shy shout and the slither of the gremlin’s tail later, Avari had her answer.

“Slightly bigger. Wow… anyway… let me give you the brief rundown of Iridescian history – and I mean the brief one, because even the medium one would have us sit in this tub until we are beyond wrinkly.” While rubbing some hot water on the base of her left horn, Avari sorted her thoughts. Once she had her facts in order, she began. “7984 years ago, Iridescia was founded.”

“7984 years?!” Ellie squeaked.

“Yup, this place has been around a while. Recorded history of Iridescia begins with a bunch of unlucky morons getting stuck in this interstice. They were sucked into a massive portal alongside just enough arable land and the right kind of crops to subsist. This is the Agrarian Age of Iridescia, lasting until the year 536. Are you familiar with how portals open in Iridescia?”

Ellie shook her head.

“Basically, it’s just random. Now, the interstice is huge. Scratch that, from all that we know, and we know a lot, the interstice is endless. Portals just open up inside of it due to spatial fluctuations in the endless worlds of creation. Not even gods can open portals to the interstice deliberately. It’s sort of this… layer that portals usually go through, not into.”

“So… if the portals open randomly… and, uhm… they appear randomly in the infinity of the interstice… as the city grows, it gets access to more portals?”

“Precisely,” Avari responded. “Which, initially, was just a side benefit. During the Agrarian Age, Iridescians would steal soil, rather than trade for it. It was a poor farming community, so what the hells did they have to offer?” The gremlin shrugged, her magnificent boobs bobbing over the water line. “So, for 500-ish years, Iridescia was just this oddity connected to just a couple of worlds. That expanded and expanded and expanded until subsistence turned to a decent living. Then the mining started and things really went wild. Stealing soil? Well, you sometimes have people not that enthused about that. Mining dead worlds? Now you’re in the money!”

“And… I t-take it someone… saw all that wealth and decided they wanted it?”

“How come she knows more about our history than you two do?” Avari asked, to which Eldred and Nyx shrugged in power couple synchronicity. “Where did you pick that up?”

“J-just seems like… the logical next step?”

“Mhm… and who do you think attacked?”

“P-probably an outside force…? Like… a big, big kingdom?”

“An empire, yes – called Imperius, funnily enough.” Chortling at the name, the gremlin continued after a pause. “Imperius craved the Iridescian crops, metals and technologies that we gathered from other worlds. They also wanted to use Iridescia to spread to other worlds. Alas, Imperius had a problem: mounting an offensive through a portal is very hard.”

“S-so the united Iridescian army pushed them back?”

“The united– Bwahahahaah!” Avari laughed aloud. Eldred joined in that with a chuckle, to the joint confusion of Ellie and Nyx. “Listen up, girlfailure: there has never been and there will never be a united Iridescia. They tried during this time, but even the agrarian version of Iridescia consisted of so many different species and cultures that working together was just doomed. Imperius tried to hook into that, peppering the interstice with assaults in an attempt to break our will to fight.”

Remembering a history lesson, Eldred posed a question. “That’s when the first Cultivators emerged?”

“Exactly. Desperate to find a proper way to deal with Imperius’ war mages, the various factions of Iridescia researched a multitude of ways to gain supernatural power of their own. This was when the qualities of Echo were discovered. Stockpiles of what was previously considered a useless rock were swiftly consumed and then the Cultivators counter-invaded Imperius. 17 years after declaring war on Iridescia, that entire empire was turned to dust. It was the closest the City of the Interstice ever came to losing a war.”

Ellie stared, wide-eyed, at that declaration.

“This is when the Age of Blood began,” Avari stated. “Iridescia wasn’t always a realm of mercantile culture. After installing a puppet government in Imperius’ place and after gathering the first couple waves of tribute from that now subjugated realm, the various people of Iridescia asked themselves ‘why can’t we do this elsewhere?’. In a way, Imperius thusly achieved what it wanted, though it wasn’t the one in charge.

“The Age of Blood, we call it, for the blood we spilled during that time across thousands of worlds. It lasted for almost 2600 years, though you can say it managed to clear that goal depending on where you say it ended. What our ancestors did during that time was militaristic and brutal, but we were also a pretty advancing force. During this stretch, the various ethnicities and cultures of Iridescia began to melt together, joined by the common prosperity of the worlds that were being taxed. Common values emerged, some of which we enforced on who we found. The outlawing of slavery, the value of a strong charity system, freedom of religion, freedom of speech – we gave that to everyone we found and in return we put a heel on them and squeezed. Some were thankful, some were not, none could stop us. There was no united front against Iridescia. The only way our vassals could communicate was through the portals that ran through what was now officially the City of the Interstice.”

“So…” Ellie spoke very slowly. “If nothing could stop you… but you changed so much since… something must have happened from within?”

“You guessed it.” Avari bumped shoulders with the goblin. “You’re a smart cookie with no social skills. I’ll extract so much value from you!”

“Uhm, uh, uhhhh…”

“If you do join the corporation, we can be a shortstack sandwich.”

“Awa…”

“We can even play while Eldred’s away.”

“…awawawawawawa…!”

“Avari, please,” Nyx raised her forlorn voice. “4000 years remain before we reach our present day.”

“Right, right.” Shimmying a bit away from the slow-boiling greenskin, the gremlin continued. “Around the year 3153, a prominent trend emerged. Historians say it started with the Sect of the Golden One, but whoever started it hardly matters. Fact is that Echo was pulled from the open market and restricted to the Cultivators of large organisations. In order to gain access to Echo, more people joined these organisations, which made them more powerful, which further restricted the Echo market. Worse, the leaders of these organisations became incredibly powerful and basically everything morphed into a quasi-religious sect focused around the High Cultivators. They even discovered how to refine Echo during this time, just to let them achieve more Cores.

“All of that came crashing down in the Revolt of the 4th Milennia. In the year 4000, exactly, a series of uprisings cascaded into a total war within Iridescia that ended with all of the High Cultivators getting torn apart by massive crowds. Even the strongest people succumb if you throw enough bodies at them.”

“And then… the Exodus?” Eldred suggested.

“Yup. Without the High Cultivators, all of the sects broke apart. Well, the sects were also running all the portal extraction stuff. Without the tributes, the Iridescian supply chain collapsed. This was the time with the most attempts at making a central government, but they all failed. Several resentful vassals tried to punch back at Iridescia, but they failed too. Really, Iridescia was suffering from its own success. The Exodus era gets its name from the vast swathes of people who decided to leave behind the famines of the City of the Interstice and settle on the other side of a portal. We call that process a Colonising Crusade to this day.”

“H-how long did that last…?”

“Only a generation, 37 years,” Avari answered. “Between people leaving and Iridescia being absurdly rich, the supply chains worked themselves out again. Really, the Exodus was a blessing. It was at this point that the City of the Interstice realized that it had crossed the threshold into being entirely self-sufficient at a luxurious standard of living… alas, the gods realized the same thing.”

“The gods?” Nyx asked.

“Yeah. In 4039, a goddess of fate known as Aurora became the first deity to permanently settle into Iridescia, using one of its depopulated districts. That started the Godshome Age. Over the next 600 years, hundreds of gods followed her example, most of them bringing their churches with them. Initially that was just accepted, but the gods turned out to consider Iridescian tolerance an open invitation, not a culture to assimilate into. What do you think comes next, Ellie?”

“Uhm… s-so… depopulation… gods that are not on the same page as the locals… or each other, a-assumedly?” A nod answered that question. “S-s-so… uhm… I would guess… a long period of stagnancy ending in a big war?”

“Nailed it again. You really are smart.” The genuine compliment made Ellie giggle. “The Age of the Grey Rainbow or the Iridescian Dark Age, whichever you prefer. You had all of these gods and their followers effectively doing gang warfare in the streets, competing for more followers, which they hardly got. The local Iridescians were largely tolerant but they also had no interest in being pulled into zealotry. Effectively, Iridescia itself continued existing, but it was riddled with enclaves of foreigners that just kept fighting each other. The gods were too strong to take on at first… but Iridescia was still expanding, the Cultivators were replenishing, while the gods were keeping each other down like crabs in a bucket.

“This era ended in the 50 Year War, also known as the Godswar or the Curtailing. It was a gigantic series of skirmishes, conflicts, battles, and terroristic activities. It began with the death of a god of war, Kyres, and ended in the Peace of Aurora. Initiated and negotiated by that first goddess to settle in Iridescia, the gods effectively were beaten into submission on all fronts by the Iridescians. They were forbidden from warring in the name of faith and street preaching would be confined to specific districts to allow people to ‘shop’ for their preferred religion. Churches were no longer allowed to be fully insular. Iridescia would be Iridescian and nothing else.”

“And then?” Nyx wondered.

“The Currency War,” Avari stated. “The proudest chapter of Iridescian history!”

“You think that us fighting over currency is our proudest chapter?” Eldred asked with a raised eyebrow.

“My name is Avarice, I am a greed demon, have we met?”

“Fair enough,” Eldred relented.

The gremlin continued with the details. “So, Iridescia had operated under multiple currencies since… forever. That worked well enough when combined with some bartering, but there was an issue now. With Iridescia no longer interested in conquest and the Peace of Aurora effectively banning religious organisations, the primary way for people to come together became corporations. These corporations wanted to pay a salary and for that salary to be accepted everywhere a singular currency was needed. Thus, the Currency Wars. So, for about 550 years, all of the corpos were violently engaged in a struggle for whose currency was going to win.”

“W-who won?” Ellie asked.

“No one… except Clingu.” Avari clasped her hands in prayer. “Honoured be his holy name,” she muttered, then continued. “Basically no one could win and eventually everyone just resigned themselves to the fact that the currency would be backed not by any one mega corp but by the collective distrust they all had for each other. The Coin God, Clingu…” Avari stopped again to honour his name. “…got the minting rights. He lives in perpetual bliss, making the money for the largest economy in the known universe.”

“And what transpired after that?” Nyx asked.

“You’re not gonna believe this… barely anything.” Avari rose from the hot water, clearly done with soaking. “We enter the Iridescian Golden Age in the year 6158. It lasts until the year 6874, when the Pulsar is invented. Thus, we transition into the Iridescian Platinum Age, where the City of the Interstice has everything and anything and the only thing you need to fear is your own lack of drive.”

“F-for… almost 2000 years… nothing happened?” Ellie asked.

“It’s not that nothing happens, it’s that Iridescia has essentially become too large and rich for anything to cascade into something that affects the entire city,” Avari explained. “If I had to hazard a guess, one day one of the Great Ones will probably outdo the competition and the resulting monopoly will transform Iridescia in one way or another. Maybe that’s how we get cursed with a central government.” She took a brush and carelessly scrubbed the base of her horns. “Hasn’t happened yet though.”

And that was the short history of Iridescia.