Tuesday, April 20th, 2027

I wasn’t ready to face the goblins yet, even if I had resolved to make peace with them. Right now, I needed to stock up on food, liquids, and any other supplies I could find. The vacant apartment had no food at all besides a few boxes of crackers in the cupboards and a fruit tray in the fridge. A week had passed, and while it wasn’t exactly fresh, it wasn’t spoiled yet either. I had a bit of my appetite back today, and I ate what I could of the fruit tray before bringing it back to my fridge. I didn’t care much for fruit, but the fruit was ready to turn, and it was better to use up perishable supplies first.

The old lady was a woman after my own heart. Her freezer was crammed full of easy meals, and those would last as long as the power did. There were chicken nuggets, frozen pizzas, burritos, and all the delightful comforts of tv dinners. She had her own stash of Mac and Cheese, and while she didn’t have pop tarts, she had plenty of other dry, boxed food. With all this combined with my reserves, I had enough food for at least a month. The paramount issue was that this woman used real milk in her Mac and Cheese, and it was expired. My dehydrated milk supply wouldn’t last forever. Even if I could scavenge more Mac and Cheese, what was I supposed to do without milk?!

I opened her fridge and experienced equal emotions of revulsion and delight. The smell was awful, and something was clearly long past its expiration. I liberated condiments, pickles, cheese, and the source of my delight, eight two-liter bottles of soda. The condiments didn’t expire for months, the pickles were in vinegar, and the outside of the cheese blocks could be trimmed to reveal good cheese beneath whenever I was ready to eat it. I put all of the refrigerated goods in my own, nearly empty fridge and left the rotten and questionable items in her fridge. I was really going to need a way to dispose of all this garbage. The freezer I left as is. There wasn’t enough room for all of the food in mine, and it wasn’t a long walk.

I gathered up the first aid kits from the two rooms and placed them with mine under the sink in my bathroom, and then I searched the old lady’s utensil drawers. I found four decent sized kitchen knives in her drawer to keep as backups, but nothing else of much use. Then I had a decision to make.

I knew the answer before I even stopped to think, but I had to go through the motions of reasoning it out. I needed to stockpile food. The goblins were searching the floor and most likely taking the food. I could keep breaking through walls to get food, but I would risk running into more goblins. On the other hand, having more food stashed away would prevent me from needing to fight over resources with the goblins, at least while I figured things out. I needed food, and if I wasn’t going to fight for it, I needed to gather it.

I broke through the next apartment after the vacant one, as it was further from the areas where I had seen goblin activity. This one was… different. The tenant had redecorated, and everything from the carpet to the walls and ceiling was either blue, pink, or yellow. It was so bright and was femininity incarnate. I swept the apartment, and there was no one inside.

The medkit in the garishly pink bathroom was gone. The bedroom was ransacked just like the old lady’s had been, with clothes strewn about. I started to look around and opened a few drawers, but it felt wrong in ways that rifling through the old woman’s apartment never had. I felt like I was intruding on something private and that I shouldn’t be here.

I moved on to the kitchen, but it was disappointing. Whoever this woman had been, she was a health nut. It was all fresh foods, fruit, vegetables, salads, and organic crap. Most of it had expired, and the rest of it couldn’t be considered food. The only edible things I managed to salvage from her apartment were a mostly full fifty-pound bag of brown rice, a small rice cooker, and a few dozen cans of strange vegetarian soups.

It wasn’t ideal, but with the bag of rice, I could stretch my food reserves for two months, at least. I was just about to move on to the next room when my mind was dragged away from my search for food by a very soft but very human scream.