Chương 12: The Greater Meaning

Mop was an indecisive blur of activity. She scampered up to Gemma, remembered herself halfway, scampered back, and then—caught in the throes of every competing emotion known to goblin—started to run in circles.

"Gnal, look! It's Lil Gramma! She's here! She came back! She's…" Mop stopped running and gazed up at the woman as a second realization struck her low.

"She's old."

"I am." Gemma slowly sank to one knee, as one does when talking with small children and equally small goblins.

"It took a long time to find you. I had to comb through all of Thelma's and Ursula's old books for answers. And now, after all these years, you're finally here."

"Very impressive," Gnal congratulated as she spun around.

"Anyway, we should be going now."

"Wait!" Gemma cried.

"You just got here. I still have so many questions." Mop scratched the inside of her ear with a long, clawed finger.

"Like what?"

"Who am I?"

"You're Lil Gramma." Mop extracted something from her ear, studied it, and then flicked it across the room with a cavalier shrug.

"Anything else?"

"Where did I come from?"

"Earth. Well, at first, anyway. And then I smuggled you into the Void, realized that was a crap idea, and then smuggled you back. Single-handedly, by the way." Mop indicated Gnal's hovering shape with an exasperated roll of her eyes.

"This one just complained for most of it. Barely lifted a finger."

"I don't have fingers," Gnal pointed out. Gemma didn't appear to have heard that last bit. She placed both knees against the polished hardwood and sank lower, caught in a daze.

"And what was my purpose?"

"Purpose?" Mop said.

"Why would we know your purpose? Isn't that something you're supposed to figure out on your own with time, and experience, and whatnot?"

"I don't understand." Gemma's eyes were wide and rimmed in white.

"But you left me on Thelma and Ursula's porch specifically. There was a reason, right? A purpose?" The goblin's little head cocked to the side as she considered her answer. It was as bluntly terrible as Gnal feared.

"Survival?"

"We wanted you to be happy," Gnal added.

"Oh, yeah. That too." Gemma sat only paces away, but her voice sounded both distant and unusually hollow. She repeated Gnal's words in a manner that suggested she knew the individual words but, together, their greater meaning was lost on her.

"To be…happy."

"As I said," Gnal announced, attempting to pull Mop with her, "we should be going now." The elderly woman carried on speaking.

"I've spent the last forty years searching for answers. I learned ancient languages, symbols, pored through every book on eldritch summoning in existence in order to bring you here" — Gemma's gaze roved from Mop to Gnal and back again, eyes brimming with tears — "and the answer all along was happiness?" And then, as if reminded by the very word itself, Mop recalled all the reasons why she no longer felt happy towards Gemma.

"Bungled that up, didn't you?"

"I wasted my life." For most, watching another burst into tears would have triggered a comfort reflex. They would have offered a hug, kind words, and a basket of kittens to soothe the hurt. Not Mop. She took Gemma's pain and ground it deeper into the metaphorical carpet with her heel.

"I'll say. Running off with some boy, abandoning your family, that nasty letter you wrote, what an absolute waste." Gnal, meanwhile, considered forming hands just so she could slam them against her forehead.

"Mop!"

"What?"

"That was a long time ago."

"No, she's right. It was a nasty thing to do." Gemma dabbed the falling tears from her eyes with the edge of her sleeve.

"I was young and foolish. I hurt the people who loved me most. Aunt Thelma reached out and kicked some sense into me eventually. Ursula and I made amends before she passed. Thelma and I had a much stronger relationship in the years that followed. I even moved her in with me when the house got too much to manage on her own." Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

"Oh." Mop's sharp expression lost some of its knife-like edge.

"You came around?"

"I did, thankfully."

"What about the beau?"

"Divorced." Gemma lifted her shoulder in a shrug.

"Haven't spoken to him in years."

"Any children?"

"Never got around to it."

"So it's just you? All alone in this great big house?" Mop said. Gemma's lack of a response clipped away the last stubborn thread of malice. Mop threw her arms wide and barreled forward with a wail.

"My poor baby's all alone and unhappy! I failed her!" Gemma, fortunately, was much better at offering comfort. She engulfed the little goblin in her arms and rocked her side to side with a rhythmic sway.

"Now, now, that's not true. I have you now, don't I?" Gnal averted several hundred eyes. It didn't help ease the awkwardness, but at least she didn't have to witness Mop's ungoblin-like behavior. One impolite eye ignored its manners and swiveled back around to watch anyway. The two blubbered and wailed for some time, saying all the things they should have said years before. Gnal might have returned home right then and there had she not needed to take Mop with her.

Finally, having gotten the worst of it out of her system, Gemma eased back onto her feet and stepped cautiously in Gnal's direction.

"Don't think I forgot about you," she said.

"You look different than when I last saw you, but I'd recognize those eyes anywhere." Gnal had the sudden, irresistible urge to meow. Whatever dignity she had left clung tight, preventing her from saying anything at all.

"Still a good listener, I see." Gemma withdrew something from her pocket and held it in Gnal's direction.

"You might be interested in this." It was a pen. The blue and yellow paint was faded and the light-up planet on the end had lost half of its telltale rings, but the shape was unmistakable. Gnal swept forward with a gasp and plucked the pen from Gemma's outstretched hand.

"My pen," she said.

"You kept it all these years?"

"Yes. It's what I used to find you, actually." Had Gnal known that, she might have recovered it sooner! Without further ado, she unzipped her phantasmal pocket and stuffed the pen inside.

"Hey, I saw that!" Mop stomped over, hands at her hips.

"Give it back. We don't steal, remember?"

"You steal all the time!" Gnal replied.

"Not from babies, I don't." Gnal crossed several pairs of tendrils stubbornly.

"She's not a baby anymore."

"It's alright," Gemma assured them.

"I owe the two of you that and much more." Not one for heartfelt thank-yous, Mop's gaze wandered the room once more.

"Is it really just you here?"

"Just me," Gemma said it cheerfully enough, but the underlying sadness was impossible to miss.

"Thelma left me the house when she passed. That and Ursula's rocking chair, with strict instructions to exercise it twice a day and water as needed." Gnal cleared her throat to keep Mop from asking more questions.

"We should get going."

"What? Why? We only just got here!"

"Gemma tore a rift in the cosmos," Gnal reminded her.

"I have to seal it and return both of us to the Void before someone from the Earth Summoning Sector shows up and starts asking questions."

"But she's all alone!"

"No, no, it's alright," Gemma insisted.

"I wouldn't want you to get in trouble." Mop swiveled her head in Gnal's direction. Somewhere, in a distant, far, far away universe, an ancient array of stars aligned in just the right way, allowing the unthinkable to happen. A goblin, for the first and last time, was granted a single instance of magic. Mop, not realizing this, wasted it on giving herself the puppiest of puppy-dog eyes.

'Lil Gramma doesn't belong here,' Mop's expression said.

'There's still time. We can take her back with us. Her magic's under control now.' Gnal looked away.

"You promised you wouldn't ask me to break the rules ever again."

"Gnal—""I can't!" The force of Gnal's voice rattled the floorboards.

"We've wasted enough time already. We need to go."

"That wasn't what I was going to ask," Mop said.

"I was actually wondering if you could bring me some of my things on your next visit." Gnal's tendrils went rigid, like dry spaghetti noodles.

"You're staying?"

"I never found my place in the world, either. I think maybe it might be here."

"But the time dilation. You're a goblin, Mop. You don't live—""I know." Mop dismissed Gnal's concerns with a single, raised shoulder. Her smile conveyed ease, but her eyes were heavy.

"But I missed out on so much already. I'm not going to make that mistake twice." Gnal searched the vast reaches of her memory, skimming every list, footnote, and addendum to The Rules. The regulations specifically forbade leaving magical items behind. It mentioned nothing about goblins. Desperate, Gnal searched again, and again, again. Whatever arguments she managed to string together were half-formed at best. In the end, it wouldn't matter.

Convincing a goblin to change their mind once it was made was like trying to move a mountain with a hand trowel. It was possible, theoretically, but not worth the effort.

"Are you sure?" Gnal said at last.

"The most I've ever been." Gnal closed her eyes to keep from crying. Magic shed from her body and swept the room, repairing the hairline tears invisible to the naked eye. When the fabric of space and time was a whole again, she summoned the portal home.

"See you in two years?" Mop said.

"You'll need your things sooner than that. I'll drop in on my lunch break." Gnal paused, performing rapid mental math before settling on her answer.

"Seventeen days, three hours, and eighteen minutes from now."

"And not a minute later!" Mop said.

"Else you're gonna have two grandmas on your hands." The portal's gravitational pull coaxed Gnal's particles inside. Her particles protested, insisting they wanted to stay and spend the rest of their days as a cat instead. Gnal took one last look at the old home before the dimensional darkness swallowed her whole. The cosmos sped past at unfathomable speeds. She arrived back at her office, amidst a pile of spilled paperwork and overturned office furniture, to find it abuzz with activity.

Her small office was the most crowded it had ever been, unlike the heart-shaped hole at the center of her incorporeal form.