(None of this is intended as a political fight).
"Gobbo wonder how much longer he keep you hidden," Remy sighed, placing his hand against the glass. Since the Boss' take over, as long as Remy continued to supply the mad man with new toys and improving techno far beyond what it should have been. He'd be allowed to continue live... hygiene, modesty, and grammar might not have been high on the goblin priority list, but Remy wasn't stupid... He knew the genocidal maniac would murder him sooner or later. And that would be the final oblivion for his people. Well, not counting the ones mutated into kobolds thousands of years ago by the dragons into their sycophantic servant species.
But Remy would say 'no' to the night. He didn't have the resource for cloning, and that would have been a mockery of survival anyway. Instead, he taken the one resource humans didn't care about, the ones they considered 'biological waste'. The countless discarded ones' across the country, dismissed as not even alive... with access to every branch of government, Remy had provided new machines for the 'ten minute procedure.' And since they didn't leave any 'biological waste' behind, that made it 'neater' and 'cleaner' for 'everyone.'
Remy would give them the lives they were denied by indifferent twists of fate, the lives they were forbidden to have. Now, in the countless gestation chambers he'd built for them... There was infinite superior to the kitesune... no missing people, no angry relatives, no vengeful wizards, just lives that would have been snuffed out as if they never existed anyway.
The Nurse Soul-Drives built in goblins' image (with bat, rat, and snake features), cared for them. Something else Remy had kept off the books. As long as the Boss didn't find about his nursy by the time the Boss killed him... at least the goblin species wouldn't extinct. And the mad man obsessed with humans being the only sapient species in existence would be denied at least one victory. The portal would lead back to the goblins' old ancestral homeland, left as a inhabited trophy for the Boss to gloat over... and discuss that week's late night talk shows.
But that didn't mean there weren't complications.
"Ready to die yet goblin?" At first glace, he could have been mistaken for one of Circe's creations... being half man, half horse... except its proportions were all wrong... Arms and legs that were far longer they should have been, moving with strength and power, but his body was like skin over bones.
"Tikbalang need to learn to wait, Zedhryx."
Zedhryx looked around at the goblins in their glass wombs lining the walls, and the nurse gobbo-soul drives caring for the ones in their cribs. "These are all ours, goblin," Zedhryx said with a Philippine accent. "The souls of those denied their first breath have belonged to the Tikbalang for four-thousand years. We are the lords of limbo. The souls even Purgatory won't take."
"And you have stayed off the Normal radar because Normal obsessed with murdering dragons, Tanuki, goblins, elves, wolfen, lycanthropes, skin-changers, fairies, and all the rest, to bother noticing you. If you kill Remy, Normal find out all about you from dead-gob switch linked to Gobbo's vitals. If Normal kill Remy, Soul-drive gobbos not have Normal loyalty protocol, they take gobbos home to start anew... Tikbalang go back to claiming what's yours."
"You're not planning some sort of loophole to our truce by escaping their grasp are you?"
"... Remy end operation either way... new gobbos leave, Normal never learn of them... soul-drive gobbos teach them to be gobbos... and world never notice you go back to taking souls to limbo to become more Tikbalang."
"It's how we're born in the first place. We're not like the kitsune, it's how the first of us came into existence, and how the rest of us have."
Remy just hoped the Catalyst's friends provided him a way out in case the Normal MIGHT find his nursery eventually.
(None of this is intended as a political fight).
(The Tikbalang are a real Philippine creature of folklore, and this is one of the ways they're said to come into existence.)