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Once upon a time - a time so long ago it has now receded into fog of legend for the humans - Goblins too lived on the surface. I guess we have always been a little secretive, jealous of our own privacy and, even in those days, we tended to live in enclaves away from the lands of men. Even as surface dwellers, we shied away from the bright light of day and preferred the dark of night for our excursions. These differences in preferences made the primitive men of that time highly suspicious as to our true motivation, and gave rise to all kinds of myths about our nature. As is the nature of people everywhere, many of these myths were untrue, exaggerated or just plain nasty, and we became the bogeymen of many cultures. Well, perhaps a few of these rumours had their basis in fact, although at this distance in time nobody can be entirely sure. But in any case, relations between the Goblin peoples and the men-folk became increasingly strained. This was at a time when human developments, and the increase in their population, made it increasingly more difficult for use to hide ourselves from view. Tensions increased and violent clashes became more commonplace. The leaders of that time therefore hatched a plan, a grand ambitious plan, to move the entire Goblin race completely away from the influence of man. This was a plan which required the construction of vast underground caverns, tens of miles across, linked by a complex network of tunnels and transit tubes. All this was only tractable because we had long maintained our abilities with magic. This is a practice that almost all humans have long forgotten and nowadays, bizarrely, declare even the existence of such a thing to be impossible. Goblins are, I have come to realise, something of a magpie race. It is certainly the case that, in recent centuries, we have borrowed - or perhaps just stolen - various technologies from the teeming humans on the surface world. They have developed many useful devices and, where they are robust enough - and cheap enough - we have incorporated them in our everyday lives. I've even heard it suggested that the magic that is such a part of our existence may not have originated with our species, or at least that some more advanced techniques were acquired from others. Although exactly from whom we gleaned these abilities is not entirely clear and, unsurprisingly, this insight is not one included in the standard histories that every Goblin learns at school.
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Part 2