7Disclaimer: I do not own The Hobbit.
Author's Note
What the heck am I doing with my life? This idea randomly came to me while watching someone play the Goblin Tunnels in the The Hobbit videogame. About the ending, don't ask. I seriously have no idea what happened with this.
Gorbash looked around the massive main cave of the goblin tunnels. His home was a wreck.
Goblins weren't actually stupid. Even if all they did all night was fight, steal, and destroy, goblins were actually geniuses. They were simply geniuses that couldn't work together.
Occasionally, goblins would get into teams to build. Even goblins, after all, needed a network to organise their home. That network could be the best on Earth, far better than the elves'. Their main problem was that if a team was formed, someone invariably wanted to show someone else up and somehow wrecked whatever structure was constructed until it was only barely serviceable.
Gorbash looked at the plans hanging on the wall in the meeting room. The spherical structure pictured could fly, burn everything in its path, explode pieces of scrap metal from tubes, and be an indestructible new home for goblinkind. Everyone was sure it was the perfect anti-elf weapon, and the perfect home for all goblins. The only problem? Goblins couldn't work together well enough to even begin to build it.
Gorbash wondered if he should get a team together to try building a new staircase to Cavern 2Y. Then he looked at a team building flooring on the other side of the cavern. Watching Takbok rip a board out of the floor and start chasing Itkiltik with it, Gorbash decided that nah, he'd rather not start an attempt to build another staircase.
Many millions of years after Gorbash had died and his bones became the dust that fed the grass of a valley hill worn down from his mountain, a soldier in white plastic walked through the ancient caves that had once been Gorbash's home. The soldier wandered into a cavern where he found a stone box.
Curious, the stormtrooper blasted apart the seal. Inside the box, he found truly ancient slabs of stone, painted with instructions to build a massive spacecraft. Looking at the slabs with their faded paint, the newly-minted stormtrooper called his superior.
Five months later, the Emperor approved the plans to build the Death Star.