"What you reckon this is, Mump?"

A hairy, stout goblin with tanned skin and a big, fat nose held up the strange item to his friend.

It was night time, their preferred time of activity. The goblin holding the floppy white thing waved it in his friend's face until the latter snatched it.

"Give it 'ere, Glump," the creature snapped. This other goblin was much too skinny, black-haired, with twine tying its mane back. Both had bright orange-yellow eyes that peered down at the strange thing.

"It's a paper." The one named Mump smacked his friend's head and began walking back to the caves with it.

Mump tore angrily at the strange red substance on the paper and ripped the contents out.

"It's a map." Mump sneered again. He tossed the casing aside and opened the folded paper.

"Are you sure?" Glump asked. "It looks like a letter–" The goblin received another sharp jab from his friend's elbow.

"Auh' course I'm sure–" The goblin opened the paper fully to reveal a strange set of characters. "I can't read it, so it ain't no letter and it's got weird drawin's so it must be a map."

"Then where's it tellin' you to go, Mump?" The goblin asked as they entered the royal hall of the mountain.

They were two of the least likely goblins to ever come back with food, let alone something interesting. The commander of the food patrols sized them up undesirably.

"Nothin' again, eh, Mump an' Glump?"

"Well if it isn't anything I can eats then I don't 'ave to hand it over," Mump sniffed back, beady eyes flicking from the commander to the rest of the goblins who watched in anticipation as he hid the letter behind his back.

"I'm your patrol leader! You have to give whatever you found over to me!" The other goblin demanded childishly.

"No, I ain't!" Mump snarled, showing off his mismatched teeth.

"Maybe we should hand the map over," Glump whispered to his friend, catching the attention of the commander.

"You better not be hiding some map to some kind of food stash, you greedy, meagre milk-worm, or I'll have all the hairs plucked from your head." The commander threatened, his eyes going bright with rage.

"Well maybe I do and maybe I don't want to share it with the likes of you, fathead."

The mouths of the other goblins dropped open, including the commander who was reeling from the insult. An insult from a subordinate, no less.

"And maybe if good ol' Mump brings all the food back from this here map, I'll get your job, and Prince Froglip will 'ave to do somethin' nasty to yeh, Commanda'."

The commander's eyes lit up with anger and he stepped down from his dias in the middle of the room, preparing to have it out with the other goblin.

It was rare for one of these food gathering nights not to end in a brawl. However, a rough but reedy voice shouted from the top of the cave entrance and stopped the confrontation.

"What ith going on down here?"

The prince of the goblins, who had wandered all the way up from the royal chambers, sneered at the two gryping food gatherers. His golden eyes pierced them through the darkness and all the goblins repeated his name with dread.

Prince Froglip was tall and skinny for a goblin, much like his father had been, and bore a broken nose that pointed permanently up as if a boulder had smashed him right in the face. Behind him, a long magenta cape that matched his flamboyant pink hair trailed along the steps, scraping the stone floor.

Now there would surely be a fight. Prince Froglip always came looking to fight when he did show up. Goblin Princes often had to fight to keep their lessers in line and prove their standing.

The prince seemed to abandon the notion of a fight for at least a moment when he spied the thin object Mump had firmly hidden behind his back.

"What'th that?" The goblin prince snorted and took a step towards Mump, who had become surprisingly meek in the presence of the prince.

"Auh– it's nothin' your 'ighness, not a thing." Mump barely got those words out before Glump snatched the letter back from his friend and practically threw it at the prince.

If Prince Froglip gave Mump a beating, then Glump wouldn't have anyone to talk to during the food patrols.

"It's a map, sire, just a plain ol' map we found in the woods."

Froglip, once more pacified, studied the paper before flicking it open with his claws. Unlike almost all other goblins, Froglip was not illiterate to the sun people's written words. He had been tutored before the plan to take over the sun kingdom had failed most spectacularly. He wasn't good at it persay, but he was familiar enough with writing to know that what Mump and Glump had brought with them was most assuredly not a map.

"Idiot'th–" The prince spat and the two goblins shirked back in fear. "It's a letter."

Glump pointed in excitement as Mump continued to cower unhappily. "I told you, Mump!"

"To whom it may con'thern, the ambath'adors to the goblin kingdom are hereby invited..." Froglip's pupils nearly rolled up into his eyelids from boredom. He should have known the goblin patrols never came back with anything interesting.

His gaze snapped back to the paper.

"–by Printh'eth Irenie." The goblin prince gasped, his eyes growing wide as he brought the words closer to his mishappened face.

The prince's golden eyes rapidly scanned the next lines of text with voraciousness, hardly aware of what they meant except that this letter had been written by the princess and it was addressed to him! ... Well, the goblin ambassador... whoever that was now.

Having only heard Froglip whisper the sun-princess' name, the goblins began to chatter excitedly amongst themselves.

'Princess Irenie, she's the sun princess!'

'What you think she wants?'

"Didn't she dump Prince Froglip?" Glump asked his friend, 'dump' being the goblin vernacular for when a female goblin rejected a suitor's advances by throwing them off the nearest cliff.

"Auh course not–" Mump tittered uncharacteristically, his voice going tight as the Prince's dark pupil slowly cut across the surface of his golden sclera.

"She must by tryin' to win him back!"

"Maybe she's lookin' to propose to court 'im," another said.

Prince Froglip's sharp nails crinkled the paper and his eyes slowly wandered back to the surface in new found interest.

He began to read again.

"What does it say, sire?" Another food gatherer asked and the question was echoed by grunts from the other goblins.

Froglip looked up from the paper, pupils rolling up under his eyelids in annoyance. It was very difficult to immerse himself in the princess' writing when he had a hoard of mindless underlings peeping over his shoulder.

"The ambath'ador to the goblin kingdom is hereby invited to a preth'tigious gathering of local nobility by Printh'eth Irenie."

Another gasp went out. Froglip continued after barking at them to 'shut it'.

"I, Irenie Tor, on the behalf of all people above the mountain, wish to offer the goblins an opportunity to engage in commer'the. The goblins would have equal th'tanding amongst the people above ground and we would create an everlath'ting bond between our kingdoms."

Prince Froglip's eyes glazed over last words, hardly believing what he was reading.

"You have doubtleth'ly reth'eived many of my letters, and I would be glad to offer you the chance to communicate back th'o that we can begin our friendth'ip... signed Printh'eth Irenie"

Froglip sighed deeply and closed the letter, holding it tightly before his gaze snapped at the goblins who inched so close to their prince that they had all crowded in a small group behind him.

"Does anyone elthe have a letter from the Printhe'th Irenie?" The goblin prince gnashed as he glared down at his subjects, his voice thick with irritation.

Hesitantly, 23 shaking hands raised themselves into the air. The commander of the food patrols went the goblin equivalent of red when he saw that all of his subordinates had brought the letter back without his noticing.

Froglip's upper lip curled up past his gum line and he snapped his open palm down, waiting. As far as he was concerned, these letters were for him and no one else. They were Princess Irenie's letters to him.

"If yer 'igness wouldn't mind, Oi'd like the idea of trading with the sun people." One goblin tentatively drummed it's fingers together, looking up hesitantly at the prince.

"Well, I didn't ath'k what the th'nivelling food patrol wanted, did I?" the prince snapped from behind his stack of letters, still unhappy that his underlings had tried to hide them from him.

"An' Oi always liked the smell of the sun people sugar bread, we might trade them for that, Prince Froglip." Another asked and then added in quickly. "Since you ought to be on good terms with the Princess of the sun people for her to be sendin' all these."

Froglip's hands clenched around the letters, but the words had struck him and he retreated from the others. Suddenly, he turned on his foot and exited the chamber, now on his way to an entirely different part of the goblin kingdom.

It was no small thing when the ambassador for the goblin people found someone knocking on her rock entrance close to the end of the goblin day. Tomorrow would be full of issues and she wanted to get a bit of sleep.

The ambassador received a nasty shock when the one and only prince of the goblins barged into her hole, throwing the rock blocking the entrance aside.

"Prince Froglip!" She jumped back as the goblin prince invaded her home. 

"You're the ambath'ador, are you not?" The prince spat and the other goblin backed away from him.

"Yes, yer highness, but I–"

"Not anymore, your job is now mine," Froglip said flatly, his word becoming instantaneous law.

The ex-ambassador blinked several times, trying to understand what had just happened. She couldn't not be the ambassador, she liked her job and didn't know what else she'd do if not that. After all, the prince taking her job surely didn't make her prince, did it? The goblin hierarchy was quite confusing, but it didn't seem like that would be possible.

"But– but I-" the goblin was nearly taken off her feet. "Forgive my interrupting yer highness, but I have to see to the Dogglemire dispute with Wartsbreath's clan an- and there's that note I been meaning to send to the miners 'bout them making their structurally unsound holes in our mountain-"

Froglip waved his hand quickly in her face to dismiss the issue, the thumb and forefinger of the other hand pressed into his brow. "I don't care about that, I am ambath'ador with the th'un people."

Relieved at having rescued her position, but befuddled by the prince's statement, the reinstated ambassador stared at the prince in confusion.

"Sun people? They've never done agreements with us. They just dig where they want, build where they want-" The goblin woman sniffed at the notion. "Bunch of cowardly, soft-headed-"

"Yeth' yeth', but the printh'eth has offered peace between thun people and goblins, and I want to be that ambath'ador. The one to the printh'eth," the prince said as he began to pace quickly from one end of the hole to the other.

"Ah... but my prince, we ought to correspond with a letter first..." to make sure it wasn't a trap, but that wasn't where Froglip's mind was headed.

The goblin prince stopped in his tracks and nodded his head. Of course, he couldn't be too eager. A few flirtatious letters back and forth would be the perfect display of his princely-ness to Princess Irenie.

His long slender form shivered with a new found energy that the other goblin could not bring herself to feel at this time of day.

"Might we begin corresponding tomorrow?" she asked. "And after I've reported this letter to the Queen..."

Prince Froglip jumped out of his thoughts and snapped his head in her direction, nearly causing the ambassador to yelp.

"No. The King and Queen are not to be informed... and if I catch any hint of word being th'poken to them-"

The ambassador cowered and nodded her head quickly before gulping down hard on her parched throat. "Not a word yer highness."

Froglip could not stop the creeping smile that revealed his broken front teeth.

"And we th'tart now."