Mess Made on the Baroness' Bed, The

Author's note: certain content in this story is not something I usually write about or even typically have much personal interest in, however I wish to use the writing of this piece as a way to explore the content in question which I have uncertain preference for.

I implore everybody to please, please, please check the tags first before deciding whether you wish to continue reading this story or not.

I

I feel enough time has passed for the statute of limitations to have run out on the misdeed which I am about to commit the details of to parchment, although I am choosing to remain anonymous regardless to ensure any connections made between my identity and that infamous incident are kept to the absolute minimum. At odds with this wish to keep incognito, however, is my compulsion to confess my role in these events past, having carried the secret with me for many a year and having to firmly hold my tongue to the point of frustration whenever the topic came up lest I blurt something incriminating. While I would not describe this secret as an especially cumbersome burden compared to the sins some other poor remorseful souls might have to bear (indeed, entire months occasionally go by without it once entering my thoughts), it is still something which weighs upon my mind from time to time, and when it does, I worry to no end of the mockery I would doubtlessly never hear the last of until my dying day should the specifics of my involvement come to public light. It is my hope this written divulgence - unattributed though it may be - will assuage my bottled-up apprehensions by at least a little.

The following story which I am about to recount has been the inspiration behind many a crude urban legend within Forgdanshire and there's a decent chance you may have heard it already (having become something of a local claim to fame for our county) in the long period since it had actually happened, with the details becoming further muddied with each of its inestimable retellings. As somebody who was not only a witness to these events, but an active participant in them as well, I wish to set the record straight and definitively document all the facts surrounding the incident. Although I understand that you, reader, will only have my word and nothing else to go on regarding the veracity of this account, let it be clear that I would sincerely swear before the very gods themselves that everything I am about to relate is the absolute truth...to the best of my memory.

First off, I feel it is only proper that I should provide context for those unfamiliar with the dire state our part of the Kingdom of Anglalonde was at the time of the incident many years ago, back when I was a much younger man than I am now. Old Baron Hearmin had finally kicked the bucket following a gruelling illness, and his sole heir was hardly shy about inheriting his office. Ediva Hearmin had actually taken over the majority of administrative duties for Forgdanshire County ever since her father's health took a sharp decline, and while circumstances in the lands they governed were not exactly the best, they were tolerable enough, although it seemed as though the Baron's final say in matters was the only thing which staid his daughter's greedy hand, for once she officially took the title of Baroness, it seemed as though things immediately nosedived for the worst. Taxes were raised to outrageous rates that left the majority of commoner households destitute simply trying to keep up on their meagre incomes, which in turn lead to many businesses having to permanently close shop and lay off their staff by the droves now they had very few they could sell to or buy from, while the remaining sellers were forced to inflate their prices accordingly in order to stay afloat. Once affluent merchants were now begging in the gutter, and aspiring scholars had to turn their hands to backbreaking labour to pay their bills. If it was not the worst wave of poverty Forgdanshire, nay, anywhere in Anglalonde had ever seen run rampant since records began, then it must have come pretty damn close.

As if that were not grim enough, the decent and honest men and women who had served in the watch and tasked with keeping our streets and roads safe up until then were - at least in my neck of the woods - systematically replaced by mobs of undisciplined thugs employed to act as the Baroness' enforcers, which I have speculated was due to their being cheaper to hire and easier to directly control in exchange for being given carte blanche to carry out their duties however they saw fit, and they were all too eager to take full advantage of the arrangement: whether it would be supplementing their wages extorting bystanders for the few funds they carried in their pockets, or cudgelling anybody who so much as murmured their disfavour for their methods or employer before shutting them away in the slammer for an indefinite period of time. The ever-looming threat of these harsh punishments and the brutal efficiency by which they were autonomously carried out doused any spirit of defiance within the ordinary populace, with most having little choice but to endure the oppression now that they were too poor to leave their homes and start anew elsewhere.

For those unfamiliar with the Anglalonde's geography, Forgdanshire is situated in an obscure corner within the kingdom's borders, in fact being right at the cusp of the border itself with the neighbouring nation of Gwalia to its west, and a great deal distant from our own nation's capital in the south-east. Furthermore, no major highways or canals pass through Forgdanshire, and wilderness stretches for miles beyond its official boundaries before you would come across another village or town. While we are self-sufficient for the most part (at least in the time before and after these troubles), any outside news arrives infrequently and often late. Living here, you really do get the impression of being frequently forgotten about by the rest of the kingdom at large, and I cannot help but feel this isolation was part of why Baroness Hearmin reigned unchallenged for so long. That, and I'm convinced the pockets of any official inspectors from the capital were lined with the excess of her coffers to turn a blind eye as to how she ran things whenever the rare visit was paid.

Aside from the Baroness herself, her hired ruffians were just about the only ones who had any sort of steady income during that time, with the only methods left for ordinary civilians to make ends meet being those of the illegitimate variety; the paths of petty and not-so-petty crime, a path which I myself - a person who had little prospects to begin with even before these miserable times and certainly was not going to be finding employment at that point - was forced to turn to just to stop myself from starving. If you saw me as I am in the present without having known me then, I doubt you could ever guess I once lived a thief's life, and while I have no shame in admitting that as I only did what I had to in order to survive - as many of us who were driven to such measures did - I would have done anything to avoid resorting to robbery in the first place.

Believe me when I say if there was any alternative available to me, I would have taken it in a heartbeat, although at the very least, I can confidently attest I made a conscious effort never to target those less well off than I (which honestly seemed to be the majority at that time), nor to ever resort to violence when obtaining my boodle as much as resorting to those tactics would have made my dishonest work far easier. I cannot say the same for some others who were forced into the same career who ended up being no better than the crooked enforcers who harried them. Regardless of my willingness, I actually did turn out to be quite the dab hand in the filching trade if I do say so myself, and perhaps if circumstances continued as they did, I would have become a famous outlaw, but I'm getting off topic.

It felt as though an ever-pervading dark cloud of despair hung over the entire world during this period, one that seemed would never disappear during my lifetime, but a brief lining of bright optimism would show itself to me one night during this bleak period. While I was habitually spending the measly minor profits I had made that week on the miniscule drop of drink at the only pub in Forgdan (the city from which the county derives its name) whose rates I could still afford to try fill my rumbling stomach and dull my sorrows over what my existence had degenerated into, I heard a voice call out to me, not exactly one I would say was of an guardian spirit, but still one which brought me a great deal of comfort in the following few days in spite of (or maybe because of) its ungraceful tone.

"Gaw, ya don' look half-miserable there, lad! If yer face gets any longer, fawk'll start trippin' o'er it!" The voice - a woman's - said in a distinct dialect which was definitely not local, the associated accent of which I have attempted my best to phonetically replicate in writing.

Although there was no mirror on hand by which I could confirm if said face was truly as downcast as the voice so claimed, it should be noted that at this point in the evening I was sitting so stooped on a stool by the bar that my cheek was resting upon the coarse wood of the counter as though the weight of my worries was literally bearing down upon my shoulders, one arm hanging limp at my side while the other still firmly clutched on the handle of my half-empty pint mug lest it be snatched from me while I was lost in muzzy apprehension over what tomorrow, next week, or next year might bring should I not waste away from malnourishment first. I realigned my sight in the direction from where I was addressed, wondering both who would bother to point out my abject grief when such a state was the norm no matter where one might turn to in town in those days, and who could keep such a chipper timbre in their communication of such, though I unexpectedly had to lower my gaze some in order to make eye contact with them. Standing about a metre from where I was slumped and whose full height spanned only a couple inches taller than that distance was a young goblin woman, her hands upon her wide hips and looking to be in decent spirits if the raised corners of her lips were any indicator of such, although she might as well have been singing jubilations from how conspicuous even this minor hint of happiness was against the glum atmosphere.

I would not say goblins were an uncommon sight in that part of the country, although very few were permanent residents in Forgdan, and my personal interactions with their kind at that point were limited, most of which in fact - at the risk of promoting stereotypes - only being conducted during this malefactor phase of my life and almost exclusively involved unlawful haggles, which I will leave at that. If all goblins were as cute as the specimen that was then currently before me, however, I certainly would not have made myself such a stranger to their sort! As was typical for goblins, her skin was a vibrant green pigmentation and her stature was much shorter compared to the average fully-grown human's, being about three and a half feet in height by my estimate, with her head coming only up to my midsection when standing side-by-side. In terms of age, she appeared to be in her early twenties if I had to guess, or at least whatever her species' equivalent of that might be, as I know goblins possess slightly longer natural lifespans compared to the fleeting mortalities that humans alone seemed to be afflicted with amongst the various peoples of the world.

The fetching, freckled features on her round face were offset by a couple of conspicuous piercings - a ring in the lobe her left pointed ear and a ring through the right nostril on her defined nose - and a wild, asymmetrical haircut the likes of which I had never seen styled on somebody before, with the left side shaved down to the stubble, while what remained of her approximately chin-length crimson locks (coordinating wonderfully with the colour of her irises, as an aside) was brushed down the right side of her head. They were cosmetic choices that would have been considered unconventional in our part of the kingdom to be sure, especially at the time, although it was partly because they were so unusual that I found myself all the more drawn to the stranger, and I thought she suited them well regardless, both in consideration of her physicality and especially - as I would later become familiar with - her personality.

Speaking of physicality, I would be remiss to proceed without describing that while her countenance alone was enough to make me feel an instant attraction, it was her figure and the clothing it was clad in that completely captured attention and caused me to sit up straight like a shot. As I mentioned, adult goblins were very squat in height, although this stranger had breasts that would have been impressive even on a human woman, each being a volume more or less equal to that of her head (which was not too far off from my own) and currently held within a brown sleeveless top cropped short at the hem and cut low at the neckline to expose her flat midriff and a generous amount of cleavage respectively. The shorts of matching colour she wore were held up with a buckled belt that seemed to emphasise the width of her hips in equal ratio with that of her shoulders, and trimmed above her knees, about halfway up her stout, shapely thighs, revealing all of her stubby but smooth legs from there down to the midpoint of her shins, after which they terminated with a pair of scuffed leather boots on her feet.

"What's wi' everybody 'round these parts, eh?" She continued to speak. "Never been anywhere that's had a glummer lookin' lot in all me life! I think you take th' biscuit outta 'em all though, mate!"

"You seriously have no idea about what's been going on this past year?" I replied, baffled by her apparent ignorance to the universal despondency permeating the entire county that she alone seemed impervious to.

"Bit a' a drifter at th' moment." She simply shrugged at my response. "Jus' been passin' through here th' past week or so. Haven' had time t' stop an' get t' know what's what." She added before she then - quite literally - jumped up onto a vacant stool beside mine, reached into her pocket and - despite not appearing any more prosperous than I currently was - produced from it a handful of gold coins! While not an especially wealthy amount, all things considered, in my eyes it looked like a king's ransom, as coppers were what I and most others were primarily scrounging for those days with only the occasional silver coming into our possession. Gold had become an elusive sight, and I could not even recall when I had last seen its lustre before then, and yet here this stranger was flaunting it about as though it were petty change, jingling it in her palm as if deliberately taunting my penury. "Tell ya what, I've jus' earned a bit a' pay, and it's put me in a generous mood! If ya don' mind givin' me th' skinny on what's eatin' ya, I'll treat ya t' some bevvies and lend ya an ear free a' charge! Though a shoulder t' cry on will be extra!"

Whether it was because I already had a bit of drink within me, or whether it was because this was the first genuine considerate gesture anybody had shown to me in a long time, or possibly a combination of the two, I took up her offer and gushed my heart out then and there to the goblin whose name I had yet to learn, the floodgates on the feelings I had been holding back for so long finally being released as I summarised the general events that had led to my situation up until the then-present before rambling about my personal woes on what living in Forgdanshire had deteriorated into and my anxious predictions on where I believed conditions were heading, ranting about the brutes who enforced their mockery of the law and made the day-to-day lives for the regular people so wretched, as well as that despicable Baroness Hearmin who was the root cause of all this misery, and for who I had no shortage of graphically unflattering adjectives to furiously attribute to, which seemed to especially amuse the non-human woman as I listed them off. Once I had finally reached the conclusion of my heated harangue - uninterrupted except for the gulps of ale I took whenever I felt my throat going dry, and leaving me a little breathless - the goblin only had a single sentence to say to me in acknowledgement, leaning in and whispering as she did so: "How would ya like t' get back at th' bitch?"

Of course, one's natural reaction to such a blunt question being posed would be to assume the redhead was simply speaking in jest, especially for the smirk she wore as she said it, however she put it forward with such sincerity in her tone, that I hardly hesitated in blurting out a response in the affirmative with equal - albeit louder - earnestness, and with that single syllable of confirmation, the goblin's grin grew wider before she elaborated on what form this retaliation in mind was to take: "Then I'm reck'nin' we go tit for tat an' hit her where it hurts: a sting straight on her gaff. Nothin' too fancy, but th' simpler schemes are us'lly th' most sound I find. Jus' think a' it as takin' back a bit a' what she's been shakin' down outta ev'rybody an' their nan so far. 'Course, it's up to yerself if ya wanna go th' whole 'give t' th' poor' route wi' yer share."

It took me a moment to really process what this goblin was proposing, and the cool, prompt way which she delivered this brief outline tipped me off that she was more of an old hand in the larceny business than I ever was or would be, although I do not recall her ever stating outright that she was a cutpurse by occupation, and did not remember mentioning likewise about myself either, although it might have slipped out during my vehement tirade when words were leaving my mouth faster than I could think them. In fairness, I probably should have been able to make the connection from the gold coins she carried, and how it was doubtful she accrued such a collection in Forgdanshire of that time via legitimate means, and her mere possession of them further hinting she was adept at what she did as well!

It took me another moment for me to consider the venture proper. Of course, I had done my fair share of breaking and entering during this difficult patch of my life, but never anything on the scale which the goblin was suggesting. The risk would be great, no doubt, but the rewards would be even greater, although if a similar opportunity ever presented itself to me again, in all likelihood I would not take it thanks to the caution that comes with an older age. Back then, however, I was young, reckless, desperate and a little bit tipsy, and the prospect of spending a sentence in a dingy dungeon cell should the enterprise fail seemed only marginally worse than my current predicament. At least I would be guaranteed a meal every day as a prisoner, meagre or not!

"Count me in." I asserted my assent to the goblin's ploy probably not even a minute after she posited it, even though she could have been working undercover for the watch to snitch on potential dissidents for all I knew. Whether that was the case or not, the redhead only gave another toothy grin upon my collaboration being confirmed before she downed what remained of her current pint and wiped what dribbled down her chin with the back of her wrist.

"Meet me back here first thing t'morrow mornin' an' we'll start sketchin' out some schemes proper like!" After saying that, the non-human hopped off from her perch and back to the floor, leaving my company rather unceremoniously and leaving me to wonder if she truly intended to follow through on the designs she had detailed after only so brief a discussion, while also providing me with a chance to admire her plump pair of buttocks that had escaped my notice until now, and that her shorts appeared to barely contain, slightly wobbling with each step she took. She stopped about partway during her departure to look back at me over her shoulder as if she had sensed me staring at her backside, giving me a startle, although I received no reproval, instead only being told: "Oh, yeah, an' me name's Min, by th' by, jus' in case ya need t' ask after me." Min's name happens to be one of the more consistent details within the retellings of this tale I find, so I feel it would be pointless to withhold her identity in this record. With her late introduction made, she made her exit from the taproom, with myself doing the same not long afterwards.