With diplomacy failing and the famine threat in tatters, the Goblin Council of Elders has turned to the supernatural to end the Chinese military exercises on Mudwick Isle. It has summoned the dead.
Under cover of darkness, the Council's shamans and necromancers gathered in a secluded clearing, chanting incantations and sacrificing questionable substances (fermented durian and expired pixie dust, by most accounts). A legion of ghosts answered: deceased goblin warriors, a great many disgruntled ancestors and a few disgruntled seagulls.
The plan was terror. The ancestors had other ideas.
They descended on the encampment and did what goblin ancestors do. They rattled pots and pans at four in the morning. They criticized the soldiers' tent placement, their posture and their marriage prospects, in Mandarin poorly translated by a goblin Ouija board. They asked every soldier why he hadn't called. Then they staged a full reenactment of the Dunk Crater incident, complete with glowing basketballs and spectral crabs, and explained it, at length, twice.
Within a week the soldiers had packed up and left the island, not in fear but in the manner of anyone who has spent seven days with someone else's relatives. Those who stayed longest barricaded themselves in their tents with earplugs.
The Council declared the operation a resounding success. "Who needs missiles and tanks when you have a ghostly army at your disposal?" chuckled Elder Gnarltooth over a fermented mushroom cocktail.
The ancestors, however, have not gone back. Having found the living again, they have moved into the Council chambers and have opinions about the décor. The shamans say the summoning ritual has no reverse. Elder Gnarltooth's late grandmother has asked why he never married.
