Chương 11: Phony Bologna

The weeks trickled past. Gnal had hoped time would give Mop the space she needed to reconsider, but the days turned to weeks, and the weeks turned to months, and still, the goblin remained steadfast in her anger. She would never, ever return to Earth, and that was that.

'No ifs, ands, or kiss my butts', was how Mop so maturely put it. Gnal, meanwhile, made several trips on her own, but it wasn't ever the same. The house felt empty without Mop and Gemma tearing it down from the inside. Thelma and Ursula picked themselves up and soldiered on the best they could. They remained in the house for many more years, until that one fateful day in summer when Gnal discovered Ursula's rocker empty. Thelma was all alone after that. Riddled with guilt, Gnal bumped her visits to bi-weekly.

She spent many an evening on Earth as an old gray cat, napping on the lap of an old gray woman, as they rocked together on the porch. Three more work weeks passed before the inevitable happened, and Gnal arrived to an empty house. The bedrooms were bare and what furniture remained was shrouded in white cloth. She stopped visiting after that. There wasn't any point. Ursula was gone. Thelma was gone. And Gemma was but a distant memory.

Gnal threw herself into her work, but the thrill of novelty pens, stickers, and clipboards had lost their former luster. Life was suddenly gray. Perhaps it had always been gray, Gnal theorized, and she'd simply never noticed before. It was the Void equivalent of Thursday evening, the start of Gnal's shift. She sat sprawled across her desk, ignoring the looming stack of paperwork waiting to be sorted, stamped, and filed.

Her incorporeal tendrils rippled in the stale office air, moving back and forth with the motion of the oscillating fan in the corner, when the door opened and the most unexpected guest shuffled inside. Mop's empty gaze wandered the walls, the ceiling, the floor, checking over every piece of the office except for the space inhabited by Gnal.

"Hi." It was the most unenthusiastic greeting in existence. A monotonous drone had more life to it.

"Hi." Gnal returned the greeting.

"We haven't talked much lately," Mop said, still staring at the ceiling.

"Just wanted to, you know, check on you. See how you're doing." Gnal considered lying, telling Mop that all was fine and there was nothing to worry about. A small, spiteful side of her considered speaking the truth. Nothing was okay. The people Mop supposedly cared about, the family she'd carefully cultivated on Earth, were gone, and Mop hadn't been there when it mattered most. Gnal might have said it too, if it were not for the way the tiled floor suddenly glowed bright yellow.

"Great cosmic dust!" Mop jumped in fright.

"Is that you?" The yellow glow rippled outwards. It flowed to each corner of the room and moved up the walls like a tide of gravitationally confused paint. The thrum of magic buzzed like static in the air.

"It's not me." Gnal's voice was small.

"I-I think I'm being summoned." Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. The goblin clambered up onto the desk beside her.

"Are you sure?"

"I don't know. It's never happened before!" In order for an eldritch abomination to be summoned to Earth, their name had to be known. Written in books, spoken on tongues, etched in pig's blood on a basement floor, at the very least. But no one knew Gnal's name, not even those she worked alongside with each day. She was just another faceless, shapeless cosmic entity amongst a sea of far more interesting horrors. Her clipboard was the only thing that'd ever set her apart, and it'd just blipped out of existence.

As did the door and the filing cabinets lining the back wall. Gnal and Mop held each other as the edges of the magical ooze merged as one across the ceiling. Light flared, shifting from yellow to white. The rest of Gnal's office disappeared, joining whatever dimension the clipboard and filing cabinets had gone to. Gnal gripped Mop tighter as the light rocketed past, hurtling them through the fabric of space and time. Screaming didn't help, but it certainly helped pass the time. All six seconds of it.

Gnal and Mop jerked to a halt. When the luminescent white glow faded, they found themselves in a familiar sitting room, with familiar portraits on green and gold paper-lined walls, across from a familiar rocking chair. The elderly woman slowly rocking back and forth by the unlit hearth was the only element out of place. Mop shook like a leaf caught in a tornado.

"What the heck just happened?"

"You're the first goblin in existence to have ever been summoned." Gnal didn't tack on the fact that it'd been by accident. That probably wouldn't have helped Mop feel better.

"Congratulations."

"I didn't like it."

"Not many do." It was the reason most summonings required a cleanup crew afterwards. Getting summoned out of your bed in the middle of the night without warning left most eldritch horrors a bit cranky. At least the summoner wasn't chanting and waving mystic artifacts at them, demanding world power this, and smite my enemies that. Come to think of it, the summoning lacked all of the classic signs of an amateur. For starters, the symbol on the floor had been etched in white chalk, not blood.

It wasn't a pentagram either, but a fascinating weave of overlapping concentric circles. An array of welcome gifts lined the outside of the circle. There was a vase of lilac flowers, hot tea, and a basket of fresh muffins—the kind with little hidden pockets of chocolate inside. Quite frankly, it was the most impressive summoning Gnal had ever seen. Her gaze settled on the person responsible for its creation.

The elderly summoner simply sat and waited with her hands neatly folded within her lap, as though she'd been expecting them for some time now. Mop wasn't standing alongside Gnal so much as she was standing inside of her. The goblin batted Gnal's transparent particles aside, as if she were a bothersome swarm of gnats.

"Will you move already? I can't see a darn thing." That explained why her companion wasn't a nervous wreck. Mop had no idea where they were. Gnal floated clear of the summoning circle.

"Great cosmic dust!" Mop glanced around them.

"How'd we get here?" Mop was too busy taking in the room to notice the elderly woman in the chair. The woman noticed her, though. She staggered to her feet and braved a daring step forward.

"I know that voice. You're real."

"Of course I'm real." Most goblins hid when discovered. Mop wasn't most goblins. Her great-great-great-grandmother must have been part chihuahua, because she stood her ground as bold and brash as ever, utterly unintimidated by the larger, approaching stranger.

"What'd you expect, huh? Phony bologna? I'm as real as real gets, lady!"

"All these years I thought it was a dream," the woman said, voice trembling.

"But that voice, I know that voice."

"You do?" Realization struck Mop like a sack of bricks. Not a particularly heavy one, fortunately, as she remained standing. The goblin peered closer at the elderly woman.

"Lil Gramma?"

"I don't think anyone's ever called me that," the woman said.

"Of course they have. It's your name, silly."

"It is?"

"Blame her." Mop pointed accusingly at Gnal.

"She named you. I was gonna go with something more refined. Queen President or what-have-you."