Jet had decided nothing could be worse than the inside of a human’s rucksack. He was almost eager to meet this dreaded “Merchant” character at this point, if only for the agony end. Hours of being rocked back and forth as the humans walked, rather erratically in Jet’s opinion, had left Jet sickly and weak. He had already vomited twice, …

Pug woke from his sound sleep to the distant thudding of a fist on his front door. He shot up in his bed, startled but not yet fully aware of what was happening, blinking dumbly in the dim light of his room while residual numbness worked its way out of his limbs. With one hand he tried to knead life …

Pug’s day had gone from bad to worse in a horrid type of escalation, almost as though he had dared the universe to do its worst. Something he would never do, of course. Pug knew full well just how awful and capricious the world could be, and wisely chose to mitigate life’s reasons to visit misfortune upon him by keeping …

Tourmaline was not, by most standards, an important part of the gnome burrow. She knew many people would tell her differently, especially her father who was technically mentoring her through her apprenticeship, but in her mind the gnome responsible for “moving debris and dirt out of the tunnel” was not critical to the burrow’s continued function. Even when she finally …

It was the dead of night when Jet’s alarm woke him up, its vibrations shaking him into wakefulness as his pillow writhed beneath his head. Blearily fumbling under the fluffy mass, he mumbled curses and snares as it bounced out of his grasp. The cursed thing, created to awaken him with movement rather than noise, consisted of various moving parts …