At first, nobody really wanted to pay more than the fifty thousand dollars that the initial enthusiasts offered to pay. However, after I revealed the fact that goblins would be coming with a starter kit of E grade leather armor and E grade printed ivory weapons they stopped complaining and started fighting. It was honestly kind of sad to watch.
After the price stopped rising in hundreds and went up by a thousand per bid, the bidding lasted less than a minutes. The eventual winner made a bragging post about how the aloof goblin would be better to personalize and how cheap he felt seventy-two thousand dollars was. His last bid was pretty much twice the price of what it would take to outfit the yard.
When people started becoming upset about having to bid for the last goblin, I told them they should have taken the original queue when they had the chance to be grandfathered the fifty-thousand value. Next, the queues were set to sixty-three thousand with a remark about how profitable- cheap- it was to catch and train goblins in small scale.
THEN I finally got the advances I needed to finish the property as well as the total value of the auction.
Because the warehouse building and property would be under construction for a day or two, Lucinda would not have much to argue about when it came to bringing the hobs home. I needed her help with the hobs, anyway, because they needed to be taught to clean and maintain the building and property. I COULD do that, but I wanted to train the gobs.
Despite how I thought things would go, Lucinda had a lot to complain about when it came to revealing the hobs even existed. She had several good points, though. No matter how loyal Poniard was, one hob was equal to her in physical capacity and greater than Poniard. Leaving her alone with them was a risk.
Having forgotten how comparatively weak she was to me despite how freaking scary she could be, I decided to minimize the issue by hobbling the hobs. With their hands together and their feet only able to move so far apart, they posed little risk even to Poniard who would be keeping Lucinda company. She settled for also being armed with an ivory sword the whole time.
Even though she still had plenty to complain about because she continued to complain about having to do this at all, she once again settled down when I showed her the value and number of electronically contracted goblin sales I had. Even if I went to an upper E dungeon I probably would not be able to catch and preserve or even find enough goblins to fill my current contracts.
Nor did I want to! Even though this was good money, not everyone wanted goblins and not everyone wanted them from me to begin with. For now, I would fill a third of the queues and blame circumstance. When the first set of sixty-grand-goblins were sold I would then try to start capturing some other critters like some above-ground giant rats as well as some F grade spiders and slimes.
Spiders were seldom sold in the markets because not many people wanted something that big and creepy or could take care of something that big and creepy. I, however, would get them while they're small and farm them for web while raising them to E grade. They would, of course, get huge but not as big as the spiders who were born E grade.
It was like the difference between a lower E spider the size of a small but fat horse and an upper E spider more comparable to a low sitting SUV. The smaller E spiders were speculatively F grades who capped and birthed E grades while the upper E would achieve D and so on. No Earth companies were allowed to house any spiders outside the lower D spectrum because those spiders had bodies like a small tank and stood taller.
Low E spider silk was the most commonly farmed silk on our side of the portals and for good reason! I simply wanted to farm some low grade silk for until the spiders impregnate each other in hermaphroditic fashion. Then I could just sell the spiders and use the stockpile of silk to make lighter armor for actual beasts.
Something big enough to ride like an alpha wolf but was normally not meant for mounting would need ultralight armor and equipment. Even Earth spider thread had hellacious strength for its size scale. Increase the size and the strength will only go up, making F grade spider silk a viable replacement for Kevlar vests.
As for collecting slimes and cave rats, it was experimental for the most part. Slimes, spiders, and large rats were often found in tandem with goblins and were known to actually ride the rats to some extent. It would take time to develop the training for teaching rats and goblins decent mounted combat variations, but selling them together with equipment would be pretty much a hundred grand per creature.
Slimes, though, would inevitably be a necessity and further on down the line they would be a payout. Keeping lots of different beasts that can or cant pick up after themselves will require proper waste management. I can put a handful of slimes in a septic tank and be done with it, only needing the servile pair of hobs to dump waste daily.
The slimes would, of course, grow and multiply almost immortally but I could sell them off for their cores and mucus once they went above E grade but while in a contained environment they would not outgrow the environment and simply breed more to compensate before finally turning on each other.
If I ever wanted to get more or bigger creatures than those, though, I would have to expand the property and get a corral or barn. Even now I did not have the facilities to train wolves for mounts or even just service dogs. Nor did I really want to, but they were a high-demand creature on the familiar markets, mages especially preferred intelligent canine and feline guardians.
For my side business to work and retain relevancy, though, I needed to have at least a little stock of what WAS relevant. If I did not have what big budget customers wanted then I could never make the business self-sustaining. It would probably only take a year or two if I had a few more mascots like 'goblin poo'.
After hashing out the business details of the goblins I finally got into the training details that these people wanted. Even though the bidder actually wanted a goblin with the same everything as Poniard, the other two wanted different things from the start. They did not have the same appreciation for speed builds and fencing that I did.
The man who got the white marked goblin wanted a different type of speed-damage build entirely. His goblin was to learn Eskrima- a native martial art of the Philippines- for unarmed and ax fighting. Even though they approved of the paper version of the armor Johnathan was making in his spare time, they were also designing additions to the basic leather equipment to make it heavier duty so their strength training had increased priority.
The guy who got the black marked goblin decided that if the goblin was going to be taking hits then it would be trained to take hits and raised as a tanker. He wanted it to be trained solely in sword and shield tactics so that it could begin more advanced training sooner. With just the basics of unarmed combat, fencing and knife fighting, as well as staff and spear lessons, Poniard was pretty much capped on everything they could learn in general besides more words.
Even then, once Poniard became proficient in his staff and spear set he would need to practice each set of sets daily in order to maintain the overall mastery.
While I did my own research on Eskrima, I set the white marked goblin's tablet on a treadmill and cuffed them into place while it played a recommended video for hand-to-hand combat techniques and exercises. Then I started the treadmill and did the same relevant tasks for the other two goblins in training before taking Poniard and the hobs inside.
Inside the building the hobs were chastised by me and then by Poniard for messing up the floors and walls as well as for having forgotten to clean their individual litter boxes. Then they were made to watch videos made by editing clips of different jobs and tasks from sweeping a warehouse with a push broom or washing dishes and equipment as well as cleaning barn stalls with a pitchfork. These were the kinds of jobs they would be performing.
At first, they were very confused and made gestures with clicks back and forth. Poniard eventually hissed and clicked after about a minute of getting annoyed and they both quieted down. Slowly.
Then we showed them how to clean the building and made them clean the building. Quickly. Luckily, a set of couplings came with the TV for jacking an HDMI into multiple different ports so their portable TV could play the videos while they worked.
Because the goblins had lived their lives climbing up and down trees to get in and out of bed on top of living in a naturally resistant environment, I was not too worried about their endurance. As such, I was not surprised when the goblins wearing weighted vests and running in the yard were still keeping pace despite audible huffing and puffing. It had only been twenty minutes, though.
After increasing the incline of the treadmills to shorten the time it took them to wear out their little bodies, I sat back in the yard with Poniard to wait while the hobgoblins experienced raking for the first time. Twenty minutes later, the goblins were starting to let themselves get dragged further and further back. Five minutes after that, they were once again moving at the same pace with the same weight but they had stopped to drink water and the incline was removed.
I also placed the D grade healing artifact that made my training so valuable on a simply log in the middle of the triangle that the treadmills made. Because goblins were naturally inclined toward having high vitality for their evolutions, even this low a grade artifact at their low grade allowed them to recover faster than they spent. It only took an hour longer to reach full recovery in this endurance straining fashion.
The unmarked goblin, though, was simply sitting on its treadmill and watching secondhand videos because their owner wanted the Poniard Special from the training menu.
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