"Eric Flint - The Thief and the Roller Derby Queen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flint Eric)

The Thief and the Roller Derby Queen:
An essay on the importance
of formal education
Eric Flint




The problem, in a nutshell, was that he had a lousy formal education. It didn't help, of course, that he
suffered from delusions of grandeur. But if he'd stayed in school, he would have taken enough tests to
realize that he was a dunce.



Being a dunce is okay, but you have to know your limitations. If you choose thieving as a profession,
shoot for hubcaps instead of the Crown Jewels. For sure, don't try to steal from Satan. But that's exactly
what he did.



Why did he do it? Well, partly because he was an egomaniacal dunce. But, mostly, he did it because of
his girlfriend.



So it's time to introduce her: Loretta Minisci. Twenty-two years old; five feet, ten inches tall; raven-black
hair; brown eyes; beautiful; shapely; and possessed of an all-consuming passion to become the greatest
witch who ever lived. Her problem, in a nutshell, is that while she was incredibly bright she didn't have
any higher education either. And despite what you may have heard, it really takes a lot of book learning
to be a great witchтАФmuch less the greatest witch who ever lived.



So, she was frustrated. Her spells never seemed to work quite the way they should (when they worked
at all). And she couldn't use a lot of spells, because the really good spells are written in arcane languages,
bizarre runes, and the like. You really need a Ph.D. to work through that kind of stuff, and she was a
high-school dropout.



The worst of it, from Loretta's point of view, was that she wasn't able to summon demons. She tried,
once, but the affair went badly. She followed all the instructions in the grimmoire, including the part about
being naked while you do the incantation. That last was a piece of cake, for her, because she made her
living as an exotic dancer in between roller derby matches. But because her education wasn't up to snuff,
she didn't quite understand what a pentacle is. Stumbling through the words in the grimmoire, Loretta
made the word out to be tentacle.
So there she was, when the demon materialized, surrounded by a pile of fried calimari.