Register or Become a Beast

When the party searched the bomb workshop again, the evidence was uglier than the fight. The room still stank of blood, oil, burned goblin flesh, and something sharply citrus beneath the smoke. Blown-apart bodies lay among torn wires, vest bolts, and broken scrap. One goblin corpse was still twitching from whatever magic or mechanism had failed to realize the battle was over. Beside the remains, the party found a Lawful document. It had been used as goblin toilet paper. That was crude, but the message under it was worse. The wall scrawl, once translated, said that the law considered a goblin a beast unless the goblin paid a fine. Elsewhere, a registration notice had been marked in red: this applies to goblins too; register or become a beast. The policy behind the words was not subtle. Unregistered goblins could be hunted, mutilated, or treated like animals under Lawful authority. The temple still belonged to dangerous people. Grease Tooth's bombers had killed civilians, attacked Pringle Manor, built explosive vests, and used void-tech junk in ways that could not be excused as ordinary resistance. But the papers and scrawls made the conflict harder to flatten into monsters and heroes. Grease Tooth's people were violent. Lawful policy was violent too. The party also found a goblin-crafted Vytherianist rapier, a crude drawing of Grease Tooth, and enough evidence to confirm that this site was part of a larger factional struggle, not an isolated nest of bombers. Point Pringle's problem was no longer simply that goblins were attacking. It was that two systems of cruelty had found each other, and everyone nearby was being pulled into the blast radius.