“This is not a goblin.”<\/p>\n
“No, it’s borscht with beef and sour cream.\u00a0 It’s good.” I took another spoonful and savored it.\u00a0 “Really good.\u00a0 It won’t kill you.”<\/p>\n
Doloise looked at me through her sunglasses.\u00a0 They looked more red than gold in this light.\u00a0 She had changed her outfit somehow during the night, and was now wearing something in blue that looked (if you squinted and turned your head a little) a little\u00a0like an interview shirt I have ironed and hanging in the closet.\u00a0 That’s one of the neater magics they’re capable of, that I mentally subtitle, “Riffing off the note.”\u00a0 It’s a similarity magic (if you’re paying attention) where they draw (well, conjure) from subtle illusion into being the fantabulous, but only if they have something real from which to start.\u00a0 Seven-course royal banquets out of a kernel of corn, that sort of thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
(That’s another reason Thomas warned us out of trips to faerieland.\u00a0 Thin and wan, remember?\u00a0 They don’t eat much.\u00a0 The golden arches there don’t serve hamburgers, although it would be the franchise opportunity of an immortal lifetime.)<\/p>\n
“Goblins would kill you,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Not if they were this tasty.\u00a0 If goblins were this tasty,” I slurped a little, and used my napkin to pat my lips, “they’d be endangered.”<\/p>\n
She looked confused.<\/p>\n
“Rarity.\u00a0 Everything would be out to eat them, and so there would be few of them left.”<\/p>\n
She shuddered.\u00a0 “I know what goblins are, and you would ascribe value to them?”<\/p>\n
I tilted my head and looked at her, resting my chin in my hand after a moment.\u00a0 I’m sensitive, don’t get me wrong, but I do kind of paint everything with my white man’s brush if I don’t catch my assumptions.\u00a0 Still, handling Doloise had really expanded some of my horizons.\u00a0 Thomas had warned me that the fey had a certain tunnel vision when it came to…anything else.<\/p>\n
“What are goblins?”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Admittedly, I had run into a few goblin nests, and Ed and I had decided that extermination really had to be done with fire.\u00a0 I had not actually run into any goblins.\u00a0 I can’t say they struck me as the most genteel of creatures given the stench and remnants of small things they had gathered, but maybe, not being from Around Here, so to speak, they adapted poorly.\u00a0 Maybe it smelled like a sweet ambrosia that reminded of their home next to the Bog of Everlasting Stench, or whatever it was called.\u00a0 Doloise just made me want to question\u00a0its judgments.<\/p>\n
I thought about it, really.\u00a0 Did I do that with Maggie?\u00a0 Did I second-guess her because she was a woman?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I don’t think so – most of the time I was happy letting her drive.\u00a0 (Well, minus the actual driving part – she scared me on the road.)\u00a0 I thought generally that even though we disagreed fundamentally about the practice of the esoteric arts and its moral components that we meshed really well with our worldview.<\/p>\n
But Doloise got under my skin.\u00a0 Maybe because I was never sure how much it was her as an independent being having ideas or it as a collective sharing the ideas of its controllers.\u00a0\u00a0 I felt like Jiminy Cricket.\u00a0 “What you need is a conscience.”<\/p>\n
They don’t, though.\u00a0 They’re not native to this world-sphere.\u00a0 They’re rarely here for long unless it is to make mischief, and then they don’t have to care what happens in their wake.\u00a0 That’s one of the things that makes them so much trouble for the Big Guys; the responsible heavy-hitters have to hit more precisely so that the overall impact is expressed in ways that don’t ricochet off innocent bystanders.\u00a0 They’re not superheroes.\u00a0 Superheroes get to wear the 4-color tights and crush buildings.\u00a0 They have to be surgeons, cutting at the seams of reality and excising its cancers.<\/p>\n
Me, I’ll stick with kind of being a plumber.\u00a0 I’m more a situational comedy than a medical drama.<\/p>\n
Doloise harrumphed.\u00a0 Well, at least, that’s what I think that noise was.\u00a0 It was a kind of expression of disgust, but her nose actually crinkled up kind of cute until the following snort repulsed me.\u00a0\u00a0 She took a bite of the borscht, ignoring me.<\/p>\n
“This is really good,” she admitted.<\/p>\n
I silently cheered.\u00a0 It wasn’t a big victory, but I won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Goblin does not taste like chicken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-three"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}