[b]Old Sewer System, Bronx[/b]

Beneath the city, a messenger of a wholly different type carried his mental parcel. A timid goblin, she crept on slimy webbed toes over the slick stone of an ancient pipe of a type and age relegated to archaeology elsewhere in the city. The large clay tunnel afforded the shadows room to play with the fears of the little fairy and she leapt at every drip of condensation and each ripple of stale water. When she first heard the dead call, she rightly assumed it an artifact of her overactive imagination. When it sounded a second time, however, she stopped in her tracks. "Meeeeeeeooooooow." The sound which instilled fear in the bravest fey heart reverberated through the hollow clay and froze the goblin in her tracks. When two yellow moons opened a midst the darkness and a black mountain of fur pounced from the shadows, the little fey knew it was to late. Petrified, she stood still in the rapidly yellowing water at her feet to await her fate. At the last instant, a metallic chink sounded the strain of a steel chain. When the goblin opened her limpid eyes she found the massive mangy feline struggling madly at it's collar, little more than a paw swipe's distance from its would-be meal. 

"Goblin!" The girl followed the voice to a hidden door now cracking through the clay wall of the pipe. The long, hooked nose of a gremlin extruded through it and the wizened fey's yellow eyes, similar to the cat's only smaller, narrowed into devious crescents. "If ye want to be cat food for the neko by all means wait there in yer piss, but if ye want to deliver yer message and get paid, best start yer slimy ass movin'" The gremlin shook his pointed features as the goblin squirmed in from the dark. "Bakka," he muttered. A gaggle of fellow gremlins craned their noses in to see and smell the meeting. In the back, a crafter stopped his work on what appeared to be some fusion of a leg trap and a firecracker to twist his head around. The leader's long ears tilted back in mistrust as he surveyed the messenger. "You have word from the STD?"

"TLC," the goblin corrected meekly.

"Whatever," the gremlin snapped like one of the mousetraps the messenger had to avoid on her trip.

"...Yes... they will... umm take the job." 

A yellow toothy grin spread through the room like a dental disease. The leader unfolded his long, dexterous fingers in order to give the goblin's moist bald head an appreciative, if slightly creepy, pat. "Well done. Your King will be pleased and the Underking always rewards his servants."

"There is one problem..." The gremlin waited, arms akimbo and hands a flinch away from the spearguns which hung at either bony hip. "Their leader... he's... smart... for a troll... he seemed suspicious being asked to attack both a Seelie and an Unseelie target."

The gremlin relaxed before bursting into a fit of snickers. It soon spread throughout the room culminating in a young gremlin who was so overtaken with laughter that he fell back into a primed bear trap. After the ensuing fountain of green blood had painted the ceiling like a canvas of modern art, the other gremlins quieted down. Their leader, unphased by the common occurrence of accidental gremlin demise, explained in a level voice. "There is no such thing as a 'smart troll', unless by smart you mean capable of counting past two. Now, I want you to go back to your pathetic little warren and await further instructions. If all goes as planned you'll be ruling it as a vassal of the Underking by the next month."

"And the payment... for the trolls?"

The gremlins seemed about to burst into another fit of laughter, but after the last fit's tragic consequences they seemed to think better of it. "Payment? What makes you think they'll escape that ball to collect it?" The gnarled fey smiled as he pulled out a speargun and tweaked its barbed tip. The projectile's steel point, once the tip of an ordinary finishing nail, flashed with unnatural glamer. "If by some miracle both the Seelie and Unseelie guard fail to put them down, we will. Can't have them thinking there's a puppeteer pulling their strings now, can we."