In the dead of night, Gobskag scuttled through a hole in the crumbling wall, loot-sack bulging with stolen food and ill-gotten gains.  Mercenary work was right good, he thought to himself.  You could get rich without even doing any fighting!  Chengizz's ruby alone would make him a gob to be reckoned with.  He was well on his way to being downright respectable.

"Now where did dey say we was goin'?...." he muttered to himself, leering over a crude, upside-down map with an X scrawled onto the coastline.  He squinted at the horizon until he saw a tree that looked kind of like a picture of a tree on the map, and scuttled off in that direction, confident he'd reach Loosinny in no time at all.

[hr]

Legends tell us of how the conniving shaman did indeed arrive at his destination, after traveling the breadth of the continent for years in the wrong direction; felling terrible beasts, carrying out daunting quests, slowly becoming both a grizzled veteran and something of a folk antihero, cackling in the face of authority.  Tales are told of how he burgled the blue college against impossible odds, taking only a few bread rolls and a new hat, and using the headmaster's desk drawer as a privvy.  Songs are sung of how he rescued the fair Duchess Aveline from the clutches of the Raven cult, felling countless Daemons and swinging her to safety across a bottomless fissure, only to ask if she knew what Luccini was and how were you supposed to get there again?...  

Yes, whole decades passed before that huddled, dusty shape shuffled slowly into the border of Luccini.  The goblin was wizened, now, darker in color, missing one beady eye and wearing a fake grey beard hooked over his ears and dangling down to the ground from his chin, just to make sure everyone knew he was proper venerable now.  Onlookers whispered in awed, hushed tones of [i]the Prophecy,[/i] the foretelling of the day Gobskag the Glorious would arrive at the port and unseat the reigning Prince, claiming his throne.  But the grizzled green veteran only leered, sagaciously, and bought out the Prince's flagship in a jaw-dropping display of cunning negotiation and charisma.  He hired on a select crew of eager adventure-seekers, including a giant, anchor-wielding ogre first mate, raised the Scarey Face flag and set sail, coursing on to lands unknown.

Yet as the great ship was casting off, some brave, pluckish young boy called out to the goblin hero, begging the secret of his almost supernatural good fortune.  The greenskin mercenary looked back and could only leer, in as close to a kindly fashion as he was capable of.  His one good eye twinkled like a beady red marble.... and the ruined socket of the other glimmered with an even deeper, faintly magical crimson sheen.

"Lad," he chuckled, tapping the eye-stone, "I owes it all to me lucky ruby."  

[center][h3][i]~Fin~[/i][/h3][/center]