A green goblin was lying on his rotten mattress in a house. Not the kind that royalty have access to; it could barely be called a home. The frame was practically breaking apart, and the doors were on the verge of falling off their hinges. This was what SbUg called home.
Crammed between a decrepit, yet lively, convenience store and an abandoned house, with barely enough space to live, he had to make do with what he had. This was what life in the slums was like, after all.
'Sigh... I feel terrible... I can't believe I have to go to the mines on weekends now...'
Sluggishly opening his half-lidded eyes, it was time for SbUg to get ready for work. He slid the cloth covering him, which was breaking at the seams, to the side and sat up on his mattress. He let out a clearly worse-for-wear yawn — if it could even be called that — from his dehydrated mouth. Using his stronger-than-average legs to leverage himself onto his feet, he stood up.
He walked over to a pile of clothes on the ground.
'What a nice... wardrobe... haha...'
It was nice to laugh. It was nice to make jokes. He liked focusing his attention on anything other than his painful life in the slums.
He picked up a tattered pair of pants and a shirt. The former was an uncomfortable mess of sewing. It had a rather boring brown color and barely fit him. The latter was a more comfortable blue, looking like an exemplary piece of work compared to the pants.
It was quite a ripoff, to be fair. It had cost him 1 silver and 18 copper, around the price of four weeks of terrible-tasting rations. Even though it was a total scam, he really wanted something to show that he was a hard worker, something to show that he was willing to put in the effort to achieve his goals. Really, it was just the first step toward riches for him — the first of many.
After putting on his clothes, it was time to go to work. He didn't have the privilege of making himself look nice or brushing his teeth before work. Hell, he didn't even have working electricity or water. Luxuries like that were hard to come by for a slum rat like him. In the slums, you had to make do with what you had to survive, making whatever sacrifices survival demanded along the way.
He walked to the rotting wooden door of his room. The door handle had fallen off long ago, back in the days when this shack of a house looked a little less decrepit, so there was no need to twist a knob or pull on a handle. He simply pushed into the door... and... it was stuck. Maybe it was the wind, or something else from last night, but the door had somehow closed fully.
With no handle, there was no way to get the latch to retract.
'Do I really have to kick it down? This day is definitely starting out well!'
Unfortunate events tended to cascade for SbUg. It could never just be one bad thing happening to him at a time. For example, a few months ago, a cart had run over his foot in the mines, causing an injury. This made him flinch in pain, which caused the cart to tilt over and fall off the barely barricaded edge of the track into a fissure. He got a real bad scolding — both physical and verbal — from his boss, and some paycheck deductions for losing the cart.
In short, he knew this could potentially be a terrible day already, which was why this minor inconvenience put him in such a bad mood. Well, maybe having to kick down his bedroom door was a little more than a minor inconvenience. Maybe a sort of... medium one?
Tired of thinking of ways to distract himself from what he had to do, he finally got ready to kick down his door. It was already falling off the hinges, so it had to — hopefully — be an easy task.
Really only hearing about people kicking down doors in the rare fictional stories of the slums, he wasn't sure how to go about it. So, he just had to go for it.
He awkwardly readied his leg, reeling it back. He launched it forward with all the force he could muster while standing on one foot and...
"Ah! Curses..."
Without knowing how to kick properly, all he managed to break were maybe a few toes. Well, maybe not break, but they hurt like hell at the moment due to his poor pain tolerance.
'Maybe I just need a running start...'
After holding his foot to try to ease the pain, he backed away from the door. After getting as far as he could — against the wall of his bedroom, next to the pile of tattered clothes — he got into position to start running.
He launched himself forward. With every step he took, the door came closer and closer. He readied himself to jump into the air just before the door was within arm's reach and sprung into the air. He put his feet in front of him, the soles facing the door.
The force from the running start and the jump was much greater than simply trying to kick the door from right in front of it. But would it be enough? His feet touched the door, and with all the force he had built up, it didn't just break down. It shattered.
'I did it! It... it even shattered!'
His celebration was cut short because he was now nearing the ground. The same ground that was now littered with chunks of a wooden door. His luck was really showing now, wasn't it?
He hit the ground back-first and immediately felt the consequences of his terrible luck. His back was littered with sharp pain — pain that he didn't have a particularly high tolerance for.
'Damn it... damn it all...'
He was probably running out of time to get to work by now, so he didn't have time to process the terrible pain coursing through him or take out the chunks piercing his back. The only thing he could do right now was keep going. And hope that was the end of his terrible streak of luck.