June 8th, 1972. In what would no doubt go down as one of the strangest days in a man’s life, Associated Press photographer Nick Ut aimed his camera at a nine-year-old child running down a road, naked, after being burned by napalm. The moment was captured in the blink of an eye, a response born of instinct, to bring the horrific realities of the Vietnam War home to people who just didn’t understand exactly what kind of Hell on Earth had been given birth in the jungles of the region.
It was a moment that would end up winning Ut a Pulitzer Prize, and nobody doubted how much he would deserve the praise he received for having the presence of mind to capture that moment. What many would doubt, however, was his explanation for how he could fail to capture some of the first moments of the Outworld Incident, which seemed to have begun, overall, in several locations throughout southeast Asia.
Shimmering blue cones of unknown energy sprang up out of the ground at seemingly random locations, whirling dust devils from the looks and sounds of them, disgorging the flying, flailing bodies of creatures that could only, to the minds of most people, have come from fairy tales, comic books, and cartoons. No official record would ever be conclusively agreed upon about what race of Outworlders arrived exactly first among this world of mankind, but what everyone would later recognize was that the most public and notable of these arrivals in the first 24 hours of the Incident was a group of magnificently garbed elves, men, women and children, all being deposited in a cluster in the middle of Times Square in New York.
The second most notable grouping, due largely and unfortunately to their rather belligerent reaction to arriving in an unknown place, surrounded by things and people they did not understand, was a clutch of five minotaur warriors who had been dropped into the holding cell of a Seattle Police Department building, still holding their war hammers and axes, adorned in heavy steel plate armor. The quintet had rampaged through the precinct house, slaughtering twenty-seven officers before finally being brought down in a hail of gunfire from supporting officers from around the city. When the same Outworld ‘portal’ disgorged another set of minotaurs a couple of hours later, they were surrounded and gunned down without question by those same still-stunned officers.
The portals cropped up all over the world for a span of nine days, depositing these strange creatures. Most were reported to be bewildered, dazed, and reactionary, seeming to suspect the first humans they encountered of being responsible for their sudden dislocation. Many seemed to speak a language that was close to English, though plenty of them seemed to have a facility only for their own native tongues. Militaries the world over ended up rounding up thousands of these alien entities and securing them in various military installations, trying to ascertain what level of threat they were.
The thing that most troubled many world leaders and think-tank sorts was that none of them, even the seemingly highly civilized lifeforms referring to themselves as ‘elves’, seemed to know what exactly had happened to them. One such creature, a male referring to himself as ‘Grimack Sonder, High Sage of the Council of Terrana’, informed his American wardens at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, that his cadre had been en route to a vital peace summit with Kentaka Umat, Lord of the Goblin Wilds, the territory due north of the Nation of Terrana, when the portal had appeared before their group and passed over them like a tornado.
It was the clearest account anyone would get and release to the public for a long time. As days dragged on into weeks, and it became clear that these creatures weren’t going to just disappear as abruptly as they had arrived, nations began the laborious and peculiar process of trying to safely accommodate these newcomers and get them situated into the lives of the countrymen to whom they would now be neighbors and fellow citizens.
To say it was a bumpy process would be an understatement of the cruelest sort.
President Richard Nixon promised the freshly arrived American minotaurs, lizardmen and goblins that they could achieve full citizenship if their more aggressive and war-ready kin would be willing to immediately deploy with his own armed forces to a little place called Vietnam. Many agreed to this condition, while an almost equivalent number told Nixon and his DOD to pound sand; these unfortunates were turned out onto the streets of America with no money, no documentation, and a hearty ‘best of luck’ by their new hosts. Some few managed to successfully argue their case to at least be given back their personal affects, brought with them from their own homeworld. Not many, mind, but some.
Nixon’s announcement later in the year that no new conscripts would be called up to deploy to Vietnam seemed, to some, rather curiously timed. Stories about defection and post abandonment among the Outworlder conscripts started seeping through certain news journals and magazines, and one goblin in particular told a disc jockey in the greater Atlanta radio market that he had used an old magic ritual from his homeland to just transport himself back to the United States the moment he’d slipped away from his unit commander’s notice.
The remainder of the year had been as chaotic as one might expect, but in short enough order, the Outworlders began adapting to life in this new world. They obtained citizenship; got jobs; paired up with their own people and formed small communities of their own kind in major metros the world over; had kids. The business of everyday life went almost back to ‘normal’ for most people in about two or three years’ time. Sure, there were some new factors to account for in many walks of life, like figuring out how best to build a sedan that could withstand the weight of being ridden in by three or four minotaurs, or how to adjust revolving doors for the tails of lizardmen who went to work in the shiny glass complexes that served as multi-business hosts in places like New York, Chicago and L.A. But eventually, these things got worked out.
And in April of 1982, in a small apartment in Brooklyn, New York, a tiny, hook-nosed newborn, his skin still the deep, forest green of all newborn goblins, was laid for the first time in his basinet beside the queen-sized bed his parents shared since moving in together. They had named him Crick, after his father’s own grandfather. “It’s all he has of our world,” his mother remarked as tiny Crick yawned and splayed his arms out to either side of his little head.
“He’ll have our ways, as well, my dear,” his father replied quietly but firmly. “Of this, I shall make certain.”
**
From “How We Fit”, by Cedric Welker (excerpt from its first chapter)
The first and obviously most noticeable loss for most of us Outworlders, some of whom still call ourselves Caldeans, after the lands we were all torn from (Caldea), was the loss of our homelands and the lives we knew. One more loss that many of us felt, especially the elves and the shamen of my race and the race of minotaurs, was the almost total disappearance of our access to magic.
Magic is extremely difficult to perform here on Earth, we have discovered. Mana, magical energy, is quite thin in the environment, and hard to coalesce for use in spells or rituals. Entire bloodlines of elves have fallen into despair since arriving here, and some have pushed to form an organization of all the Caldean magic-users in an effort to reverse the portals that so unceremoniously dumped us here in a world mostly inhabited by humans and insects. But I would argue that, for the rest of us, who aren’t the high-minded, arrogant, and self-righteous de facto rulers of most of Caldea, this new world presents us with opportunities to be what we couldn’t be back home: seen as the equals of elves.
(Simon and Schuster, published 2015)
**
“You’ve got your group meeting tonight, right,” Chef Taylor asked quietly, as Crick started breaking down the prep line, using the clingy plastic wrap to cover the various containers that he slipped out of the cooler unit. The elven chef made sure to only approach and pose this inquiry while the other two cooks on shift were busy shooting the breeze between themselves over by the dish pit.
“Yeah, second and last Fridays of the month,” the goblin replied in an equal volume.
“Okay. Go ahead and skip out, I’ll finish this up,” said Taylor, taking the box of plastic wrap and shifting it down the line to continue the work.
“I appreciate that, chef,” Crick said with a nod, untying his apron and heading for the door out of the kitchen. Selena called a quick good-night to him as he made his way out of the restaurant, and he waved absently over his shoulder to her, zipping up his jacket as he stepped out into the chill autumn evening. Winter was not making any bones about how nasty it was going to be when it finally arrived, and for a moment, Crick wondered why he had chosen this state, of all places, to take up permanent residence when he had left New York for the last time.
He didn’t have a long commute to get to the location of the meetup; truth be told, it was only about a two-minute drive from his building. The Community Center that hosted the meetings was a squat gray structure that would not have appeared out of place at a military installation, and in the dying evening glimmer of nightfall’s approach, it gave the impression of the fallen toe of some concrete goliath that had opted to leave behind the digit in the midst of some gigantic battle. Crick pulled into the parking lot fronting the center, taking note of the three other vehicles already parked along the front. He walked along the evenly spaced slabs of the front walkway, pausing to look up at the glass-encased bulletin board to the left of the doors leading inside of the building. The letters hadn’t been changed in almost three months, and for the moment, there didn’t seem to be any reason to change them.
Once inside the main entryway of the structure, he headed forward and slightly to the right, toward an open pair of double doors that led into a large commons chamber. The layout was simple, familiar, and bordered on the morbid, given all the other groups and organizations who used this same space for their meetings. Most of these groups had the word ‘Anonymous’ in their titles. But as Crick stepped further into the Community Center’s Assembly Room, he immediately recognized all three of the folks who had arrived ahead of him, standing over by the long folding tables to the left of the entrance, the tables themselves hosting the usual assembly of Caribou Coffee in huge ‘To-Go’ canteen servers, donuts in boxes from the nearby Kwik Trip, and small single-serve bags of chips.
Crick approached the trio, greeting them all by name briefly. The first was Eddie Rygar, a strangely mellow minotaur who tried to look natural in an oversized suit and tie, but whose natural physique put one in mind of a pro wrestler just waiting for their cue to howl like a barbarian and rip off their clothes to the cheers of whooping fans. Crick often detected a hint of the scent of baby powder from Eddie, and after coming to these meetings for almost a full year, he’d dared to ask the huge, bull-headed humanoid about the smell. “My armpits, man,” Eddie replied with a warm chuckle. “Antiperspirants don’t work for my people, Crick. It’s either Gold Bond, or baby powder, end of story.”
Standing to Eddie’s left, looking more like wax statue than a living, breathing person, was Kimberly Lachance. Kimberly was the group’s quietest member, and the only elf to attend since Crick had joined. She was shoulder-height to Eddie, narrow and ephemeral in a way that evoked thoughts of ghosts or other phantasms. Her knee-length brown cardigan, worn over dark blue jeans and plain black sneakers of indeterminate brand, aided in this wispy impression, as did her long, dark hair. She had, since he first met her, struck Crick as the quietest person he had ever met. But those eyes project loneliness with the roar of a lion, he thought as he nodded to her.
Lastly, to the right of Eddie by just more than arm’s reach, the goblin took in Samancha Coffet, a lizardman auto mechanic. Dressed in a plain denim jacket over a faded Ramones shirt and jeans that looked like they had been wrapped around a board and dragged behind a truck in a gravel quarry, Sam smelled like cigarette smoke and motor oil, his scaled hands spotted and marked with the grease that gave rise to the attempted pejorative of ‘grease monkey’. Sam gave Crick a slow nod and ‘salut’ with his coffee, handing an empty cup to the goblin cook. “Thanks, Sam,” said Crick. “We the first ones here tonight?”
“As usual,” Eddie replied. “Stephen called about five minutes ago, he’s on his way.” Crick nodded, and Eddie and Kim moved toward the slightly raised stage to do a quick mic check.
“Work’s steady for you then, Sam,” Crick asked absently.
“Steady as can be, for now,” the lizardman mechanic replied, sipping his coffee. “Lots of people trying to extend the life of their beater cars, what with all the pushes toward all-electric vehicles.” Crick grinned at this, cocking a craggy eyebrow at Sam.
“You have one hell of an advantage there, you know,” the goblin observed. Sam nodded, snapping the fingers of his free hand, generating a small magical spark of electrical power.
“It’s harder some days than others, though,” the mechanic said, shaking his head. “My father used to tell me that back in the homeland, I would’ve been able to take out a chimera by myself as a mage or sorcerer. Fat lot of good that does me here.”
“I’ve heard of those,” Crick said. “Not the ones in comics and cartoons and such; my mom and dad fought one once when they were both barely into their courtship. Anyhow, what’s the difference here?”
“There’s not as much free flowing mana here on Earth as there is back on Caldea,” Sam answered, his eyes narrowing slightly. “It’s also harder to shape magical force here, according to, well, everybody from our parents’ generation. So yeah, I can charge my Tesla all on my own, but by myself, I can only charge it about halfway using magic on a given day. I mean, sure, that works out great for me,” he said, placing his free hand on his own chest. “But it doesn’t help anybody else.”
“Gotta secure your own oxygen mask before helping someone else, Sam,” Crick said, finally stepping forward to pour himself some coffee. The small handful of other members of the group trickled in over the course of the next ten minutes or so, and everybody filled in the front two rows of seats in the center of the Assembly Room, the full complement of fifteen minus Eddie, who stood up on the stage at the lectern with its microphone. He cleared his throat, winced at the momentary feedback, then turned open the notebook he’d brought with him to its first page.
“Greetings, my fellow Children of Outworlders,” the minotaur began, looking up from his notebook to grin at his compatriots. He was about to proceed with his usual introductions, when the Assembly Room doors creaked open, and all eyes swiveled back to see who the newcomers were. To Crick’s intrigue, there entered three new goblins, none of whom he had ever met before, two gotrins (rat-men), and a lone figure who did not fall easily into any of the known Outworld categories of peoples he knew of off the top of his head; this last fellow appeared to be mostly human, from his simple loafers to his suit and tie and overcoat, but where a normal human head might normally be expected, there was instead what appeared to be a glass pyramid of some sort, filled with a scarlet mist. “And, ah, apparently, greetings to some new potential members. Please, come on in, fill up that third row here,” Eddie continued.
Seated in the second row, Crick found himself nodding almost enthusiastically as the three goblins filed into the row, two females and one male, all three looking to be about his age. One of the women and the man were quite obviously pair-bonded, as evidenced by the way they clutched each other’s hands, while the second female, wearing what Crick assumed was an almost-perpetual scowl, just glared at the back of the other goblin woman’s head. A similarity in jawline and ear shape made him wonder if perhaps the two were sisters. When the third row newcomers were all seated, Crick and his fellow veterans turned back toward Eddie, who was turning in his notebook to a new page.
“I won’t take too much time up here getting started before we move to introductions of our new members,” the minotaur proceeded. “The first order of business- Crick Solomon, you’re next on the rotation to provide the food at our next meeting, which is always something we all enjoy,” he said, gathering some muttered agreement among the membership. “For our newcomers, Crick is the only member who is a professional in the food service industry, and he’s one hell of a good cook and baker; we benefit from him coming up in the rotation this way, and you’re fortunate to come in at this time. That’s in just two weeks, friends, heh heh. Second order of business- Stephen assures me that he’s been keeping a pretty close eye on the online chatter, and we don’t seem to be under any immediate threat from certain human supremacist groups at this location. Still, it never hurts to keep an eye and ear out, folks. If you see something, say something.”
Crick desperately wanted to chime in here, but he knew he would be better served letting it wait until his turn up on the stage. Everybody got a chance to speak, at every meetup, even if it was only for a couple of minutes. Some, like Kim, barely spoke above a whisper, and spaced out what they had to say to keep their chatter to a minimum, but the chance was given, regardless of how long they would end up staying at the Community Center.
“Okay, well, that about does it for me to start. I’ll go ahead on now and do my introduction and updates. I’m Eddie Rygar, paralegal for Ernst, Flemming and Grotten, a law firm based out of Saint Paul. I live in Shakopee for the time being, though I’m looking into possibly getting a place closer to my job. My, uh, other recent update is, um, my brother, Jackson. He’s been promoted, and is not an E-5, in the United States Army, a Staff Sergeant. Pretty cool for him, you know?” Here, Eddie lowered his head a little, his shoulders slumped somewhat. “And our father, he’s very proud of Jackson. ‘He’s living the way a warrior should, your brother’. That’s what he tells me, anyway, and I’m sure it’s what he tells himself, too. But, a warrior for what? Against who? This isn’t our father’s world, there aren’t dragons to go slay, or enemy tribes trying to conquer our lands, you know? I don’t know, just felt weird to hear him say that.
“But we’ve all had those moments, haven’t we? Where our parents, either meaning to or not, just sort of remind us that, well, this world? The one we were all born into, and will likely live our entire lives in? It isn’t what they knew before. Their expectations, they just don’t mean the same thing they used to. But I’m not sure what else to make of it, for now. Anyhow, thanks, folks,” he finished with a nod. He headed to the side of the lectern, stepping down easily from the stage, leaving it vacant. Crick sipped his coffee, bided his time; someone would step up, inevitably, but he didn’t want to be the first to go up after that down note. After all, his own update was likely to bring people down too, and he didn’t like the idea of following one sour pill with another. Thankfully, he wouldn’t have to, as one of the gotrins got up from his seat and sauntered up toward the stage, a lanky fellow almost as tall as Eddie, but with barely a sliver of the same body mass and presence.
Dressed in a zip-up Vikings purple windbreaker and beige khakis, the rat-man got behind the lectern, zipped his zipper down an inch to rotate his neck, and peered out at the audience with his beady, blackened eyes, his long, silvery snout whiskers twitching rapidly back and forth. “Um, h-hey,” he began awkwardly, hands thrust into the windbreaker pockets. “I’m, uh, Peter. Peter Westing. And, um, I’m a gotrin, obviously. I, uh, I got a brother, he’s right back there with me, tonight. Um, we’re here mostly, well, mostly because, ah, our folks just passed, about a week ago.” There came some murmured condolences from the crowd, and Peter nodded, trying to grin sheepishly. “We, we’re pretty private people, our people, in general. We only let the rest of the world know about us, um, when I was, like, ten years old, back in 2009. And we’ve been having a hell of a time adjusting, becoming part of the wider society in this world.
“But this world is the only one my brother and I, like you all, have ever known. We’re just, we’re having some trouble, I think, because our folks kept us hidden from everybody when we were growing up. And now, now we’re trying to fit in, and humes, man, they don’t much care for us. They call us dirty, and a lot of them seem to assume we’re, like, disease carriers. But it isn’t like that, man. But, anyway, we heard from some folks about this group, and others like it, and we figured, why not come check it out? So anyway, that’s me. Thanks.” There was some light, polite applause for Peter as he dismounted the stage, and almost no gap between himself and the next speaker, the pyramid-headed newcomer. This I have to see, Crick thought, puzzling at this stranger.
“Um, I should begin by saying, I am not exactly a ‘child’, per se, of an Outworlder,” said a voice seeming to issue from the glass pyramid atop the man’s neck, the glass front shimmering with the movement of its voice, like a visual indicator of its speech. The voice that issued from it was calm, cultured, almost English in affect. “I am an alchemical creation, a golem, constructed by the great and mighty sorcerer, Averneth Kento, an elven mystic brought here from Caldea through the same portals that brought all of your forebears here to this world. But I had not been activated when the portals brought them, including my master.
“My master, upon arriving here, quickly imbued myself and four others of my sort with the spark of life, and brought us into operation with a single imperative- to continue to serve him as we would have back in Caldea, until such time of his passing. At that juncture, we were to try and have our own existences, here in this world, and make them as functional as we could. And that time has come; master Kento was killed last week in an explosion in his alchemy lab. You may have heard about the small explosion in Prior Lake, near the Mystic Lake Casino and Hotel; that was my master’s lab being blown sky high.”
“Holy shit, I was just down the street from that,” Samancha yelped, half-rising out of his seat. “I live not too far down the way from there.”
“Wait a minute, you’re a what now,” one of the goblin women behind Crick asked.
“A golem,” said the creature at the lectern. “I am an automaton, now without a master. My designation is Libras. That is what you may call me.” The creature seemed to look around at the audience, then ‘nodded’ its ‘head’ slightly. “That is all for me, for tonight. Thank you.” It stepped away from the lectern, returning to its seat; the goblins, who had been seated next to him before, now seemed eager to scooch their chairs slightly away from him.
Introductions of the new members continued for a little while, though for Crick’s own part, the only one who interested him much was Velis, the older sister of Gelta, whose husband was Tenak. His reasons for interest were, he knew, base and primal, but he had important business to discuss at that night’s meeting, and he wasn’t about to let himself be distracted.When Tenak hopped down off of the stage, executing a fairly nimble tuck-roll to make up for the height of the drop (he was a good six inches shorter than Crick, who was coming to slowly realize that he was a rather tall example of his species), the cook headed for the shallow steps up onto the stage, clearing his throat before getting to where the other goblin fellow had left the microphone on the floor.
Crick looked out at the gathered Children of Outworlders, and took a moment to gather his thoughts. He had seldom taken very long being up front with his comrades as a captive audience; he was much more comfortable with one-on-one conversations, of the sort that would pick up all over the Assembly Room once they had all had their turn at the mic. But he had been worrying at this matter for a couple of days now, and he suspected that once he brought the matter up, others would feel more comfortable relaying their own experiences at future meetings.
“Hello, everybody. I’m Crick Solomon, goblin, obviously,” he said, using his non-mic hand to do a head-to-feet ‘take a look’ motion. There were a couple of chuckles, which felt good to hear, and which helped him feel a little more comfortable. “I’m a cook, over at The Loon Café, a little hole-in-the-wall diner in Prior Lake. I’ve been working there for a little over three years now, and I gotta say, I like it better than most of the places I’ve worked since moving here from Brooklyn about a decade ago, including a brief stint at that hellhole over in Shakopee, the Amazon warehouse.”
This was met with a few groans and nods of understanding, especially one raised fist from one of the two gotrin brothers. Should talk to them later on, Crick thought before pressing on. “Now, something happened at my work the other night, something that has happened a few times throughout the last five, six years, but it’s never been egregious enough for me to really pay much mind to it. But then,” he said, reaching down for the book that he’d brought with him, Cedric Welker’s “Where We Fit”. “That very same night, I started reading this book. I imagine most of you have at least heard of it, right?” Almost everyone made some motion to indicate that yes, they had at least heard of it. “Now, I don’t know about you folks, but I got through two chapters, and I started to see a bit of a problem. At least, I think it’s a problem, and one that we’re all going to have to come to grips with. I saw evidence of it at my job the other night.
“There was this trio of minotaurs come in, and I recognized the markings on their necks, pegged them for fishermen,” Crick said, starting to pace up on the stage with the mic, unsure of why he felt the need to move while addressing the group. But, it felt natural, so he just went with it. “When they were done with their food, they asked to see the cook who’d prepped their meals, and so I stepped out front. And they took one look at me, and they started laughing, having a good knee-slapper with each other, because hey, check out shorty over there, that kind of thing, you know?
“And that’s what I’m seeing in this book, and what I’ve seen in a few other spots the last few years. We’re all here, in this world, because of something that happened to our parents back in Outworld that threw them here. We’re all in the same boat now, though; we’re stranded in a world where we don’t have a history, where we’re making that history, day by day. We’re members here, all of us, of the first generation of a people who never had anything to go by before. If you ask me, it’s no good trying to drag all of those old hurts and grudges along behind us like bad luggage. What’s in our parents’ past? It’s not just behind us, now; it’s in a whole other world.
“And I also think that this group can help with that,” he added, starting to wind down to his final point. “I think there’s more of us in this area than are showing up, and that’s obvious with our new folks here tonight. I think we need to try harder to find other Children of Outworlders in the area, and convince them to come together to a meeting some night. Maybe not everybody needs to get on the mic when they show up, but we should at least try to get a better idea of how many of us there are, because until we can see that we’re not in such small numbers, we might end up being as defensive and, frankly, jingoistic, as Mr. Welker here seems to be,” he said, waggling the book. “At the very least, it couldn’t hurt. That’s my update for tonight. Thanks.”
Though it was a small crowd compared to many other such gatherings and events, the applause of his colleagues sounded to Crick like the roar of a packed theater.