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#the structures of this world are too ingrained too overpowering even for her
mummer · 2 years
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one very thorny part of f&b that i've always found really interesting and honestly a little befuddling is when rhaenyra passes over the female heirs to rosby and stokeworth in favour of their younger male relatives. because on the face of it, this is a very weird and obviously hypocritical move given that her entire reign is contingent on female inheritance rights. would it not be more politically helpful in the long run for her to champion their rights (perhaps instating dornish succession laws)? wouldn't this incongruence just provide more rhetorical ammo for the greens? so it's women's rights for her, but not anyone else? but i think there's a lot of potential in adaptation to make this tragic too. she makes this decision based on the recommendations of her male counsellors (corlys i believe) who convince her that she should consider herself a special case because, pragmatically, her lords would not accept their succession laws changing this drastically and would abandon her cause. and it's like... yeah. maybe rhaenyra wanted to make change, to fix things, but now she finds that her queenship is just another, more spacious cage. where every compromise is a violence and there are no good choices. i think there's such an opportunity to delve into the bitterness of that decision and the misery of getting everything you wanted and for it to still not be enough to matter. to have all the power in the world and to still find yourself chained!
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sokkagatekeeper · 2 years
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what is mai and sokka's mbti?
mai is an intj!
sokka — ENTP (NeTiFeSi)
sokka’s creativity, innovation, and love for science all come from his extroverted intuition. he never waits and observes, like a Ni dominant/auxiliary (entj; sokka is NOT an entj) would do. instead he puts himself out there for observation. sokka also never just accepts a solution alone for its tangible results without considering the logic behind the solution; he’s interested in the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the way things work, and from there he can get his own results. even unconsciously, his plans are more about seeing what would happen if x, even if getting results is also important to him bc his auxiliary thinking function. he prefers to focus on the situations and patterns in the moment and add on to that one in particular rather than reusing plans he already knows worked in the past in similar situations (like an estj; sokka is also NOT an estj).
he also expresses himself in a very extroverted, open, quick manner. he has a very charming wit and his ideas and movements are often pretty scattered. his body language + the way he speaks matches an entp almost to a T.
even though sokka is very versatile intellectually speaking, there is a very specific structure that is ingrained in his mind, and when he learns new information he doesn’t actually change his perspective, but he adds it on to what he already believes. this is why he’s able to be a skeptic while travelling with the avatar, meeting spirits left and right, calling waterbending “magic”. to sokka, these are all elements that exist, that cannot be explained right now by science, but that they can be, and they must be.
while sokka does have a sense of moral justice, he’s a lot more practical when it comes to it. katara is ruled by her Fi, aka her internal moral compass, and when she passes through a poor and hungry village that she can help (the painted lady), even though it’s an objectively minor thing to focus on and an irrational decision to make, she helps anyway. sokka does not follow an internal moral compass of his; he follows his head, and his logic. he understands they can only aid temporarily as of right now, and so helping the village wouldn’t be worth the time they would be sacrificing in order to do it since they have other bigger things to attend to (namely his SCHEDULE).
i was surprised to find sokka is not actually a very unhealthy Fe. an unhealthy extroverted feeler looks a bit more like azula, who is able to tell the needs and feelings of other people and use and manipulate them to her own benefit, but who also wants to be liked desperately. while sokka can read other people’s needs and feelings as well, he doesn’t just manipulate them to fit his agenda (though sometimes i wish he would, and sometimes he does?? but it’s more of a skill than an instinct. it’s complicated), and instead he tries to find a way to incorporate those needs into his plans. he does desperately want to be liked, too, but it’s more of a punishment on himself than others, unlike azula’s. i wouldn’t say he’s a perfectly healthy Fe because he’s still a little bit of a people-pleaser sometimes (in like. a weird way. in a way none of you actually understand.) but he’s getting there.
sokka’s Fe also gives him something to focus all of his thinking and intuition on. sokka has an urge to take care of people, whether that is his overpowered little sister, the 12-year-old avatar, his overpowered 12-year-old little sister, or anyone he likes as a person really, OR the entire world. when he refuses to waste time aiding the village in the painted lady, his Ti is able to tell him where that suffering is coming from—the fire nation’s messed up regime—and is able to make the connection that if they focus on overthrowing this regime that is hurting the village, the village will be saved eventually, and along with a bunch of other villages at that. but he does want to help. he is helping, actively, all the time.
we don’t actually see a lot of sokka’s introverted sensing but my guess is that his Si manifests as he often forgets about the smaller details in big, well-thought out plans (the boiling rock) but under external pressure (the day of black sun) he gets really picky and neurotic about everything going well. (tho the boiling rock wasn’t exactly his prime moment either and the inferior function is suppsed to come out intensely when in not-exactly-prime moments, with almost no operation in regular circumstances. so ???).
it also comes in waves, like how actually long it took him to go ‘hey, so maybe we should plan the scenario for aang to actually have an opportunity to get all this defeat-the-firelord business going’ and it had to be sokka’s inferior Si because katara’s tertiary Si was busy being nostalgic. other than that sokka’s Si doesn’t seem to be particularly underdeveloped or unhealthy, since he has no issue following plans through. who knows!!
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cahouser · 5 years
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Highlights: The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance By Josh Waitzkin
My growth became defined by barrierlessness.
LOCATION: 124
numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form. LOCATION: 149
Whenever there was a concept or learning technique that I related to in a manner too abstract to convey, I forced myself to break it down into the incremental steps with which I got there. Over time I began to see the principles that have been silently guiding me, and a systematic methodology of learning emerged. LOCATION: 165
lifetime of competition has not cooled my ardor to win, but I have grown to love the study and training above all else. LOCATION: 172
Presence under fire hardly feels different from the presence I feel sitting at my computer, typing these sentences. LOCATION: 174
I remember the strange sensation of discovering a lost memory. LOCATION: 199
Every day pieces of the puzzle fell together. LOCATION: 223
Perhaps the most decisive element of my game was the way my style on the board was completely in synch with my personality as a child. I was unhindered by internal conflict—a state of being that I have come to see as fundamental to the learning process. LOCATION: 300
I’ll never forget the feeling when I sensed my potential escape. Often in chess, you feel something is there before you find it. LOCATION: 453
Dr. Carol Dweck, a leading researcher in the field of developmental psychology, makes the distinction between entity and incremental theories of intelligence. Children who are “entity theorists”—that is, kids who have been influenced by their parents and teachers to think in this manner—are prone to use language like “I am smart at this” and to attribute their success or failure to an ingrained and unalterable level of ability. They see their overall intelligence or skill level at a certain discipline to be a fixed entity, a thing that cannot evolve. Incremental theorists, who have picked up a different modality of learning—let’s call them learning theorists—are more prone to describe their results with sentences like “I got it because I worked very hard at it” or “I should have tried harder.” A child with a learning theory of intelligence tends to sense that with hard work, difficult material can be grasped—step by step, incrementally, the novice can become the master. Dweck’s research has shown that when challenged by difficult material, learning theorists are far more likely to rise to the level of the game, while entity theorists are more brittle and prone to quit. LOCATION: 474
the art became a riveting window of self-exploration. LOCATION: 602
Since childhood, inclement conditions have inspired me, and as a young competitor I would guide critical chess games into positions of tremendous complexity with the confidence that I would be able to sort through the mayhem more effectively than my opponents. LOCATION: 604
This issue of process vs. goal is very delicate, and I want to carefully define how I feel the question should be navigated. LOCATION: 637
the beauty of those roses lies in their transience. LOCATION: 660
Another way of envisioning the importance of the Soft Zone is through an ancient Indian parable that has been quite instructive in my life for many years: A man wants to walk across the land, but the earth is covered with thorns. He has two options—one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals. Making sandals is the internal solution. Like the Soft Zone, it does not base success on a submissive world or overpowering force, but on intelligent preparation and cultivated resilience. LOCATION: 765
I was playing a tournament in Philadelphia with a Phil Collins song rattling away in my brain when I realized that I could think to the beat of the song. LOCATION: 781
Then one day, an old Bulgarian Master named Rudy Blumenfeld approached my father in the Marshall Chess Club and asked him if we were aware of what this boy was doing to me. We were not. He explained that in the climactic moments of the struggle, when I had to buckle down and patiently work my way through the complications to find a precise solution, this boy would start to tap a chess piece on the side of the table, barely audible, but at a pace that entered and slightly quickened my mental process. This subtle tactic was highly effective and I later found out that it was an offspring of the Soviet study of hypnosis and mind control. The next time we played, I was on the lookout for the tapping and sure enough, in the critical moment it was right there. Hilarious. Once I was aware of what was happening, I was able to turn the tables in our rivalry. LOCATION: 800
Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured continuously. Left to my own devices, I am always looking for ways to become more and more psychologically impregnable. When uncomfortable, my instinct is not to avoid the discomfort but to become at peace with it. When injured, which happens frequently in the life of a martial artist, I try to avoid painkillers and to change the sensation of pain into a feeling that is not necessarily negative. My instinct is always to seek out challenges as opposed to avoiding them. LOCATION: 826
He took a few deep breaths to clear his mind, came back to the moment, collected himself, and won a critical game in the National Championships. LOCATION: 918
I think a life of ambition is like existing on a balance beam. As a child, there is no fear, no sense for the danger of falling. The beam feels wide and stable, and natural playfulness allows for creative leaps and fast learning. You can run around doing somersaults and flips, always testing yourself with a love for discovery and new challenges. If you happen to fall off—no problem, you just get back on. But then, as you get older, you become more aware of the risk of injury. You might crack your head or twist your knee. The beam is narrow and you have to stay up there. Plunging off would be humiliating. While a child can make the beam a playground, high-stress performers often transform the beam into a tightrope. Any slip becomes a crisis. Suddenly you have everything to lose, the rope is swaying above a crater of fire, increasingly dramatic acrobatics are expected of you but the air feels thick with projectiles aimed to dislodge your balance. What was once light and inspiring can easily mutate into a nightmare. LOCATION: 1033
A key component of high-level learning is cultivating a resilient awareness that is the older, conscious embodiment of a child’s playful obliviousness. LOCATION: 1040
This journey, from child back to child again, is at the very core of my understanding of success. LOCATION: 1043
It might be interesting to examine, with a bit more detail, how this happened to me. LOCATION: 1048
On the page, the man is a genius. LOCATION: 1065
He is socially awkward and when not talking about or playing chess, he seems like a big fish flopping on sand. LOCATION: 1066
This was a delicate and rather mystical-feeling idea, and I wish I had possessed the sophistication as a sixteen-year-old boy to see its power. LOCATION: 1093
I have found that if we feed the unconscious, it will discover connections between what may appear to be disparate realities. The path to artistic insight in one direction often involves deep study of another—the intuition makes uncanny connections that lead to a crystallization of fragmented notions. The great Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors, for example, came to their revolutionary ideas through precise realist training. Jackson Pollock could draw like a camera, but instead he chose to splatter paint in a wild manner that pulsed with emotion. He studied form to leave form. And in his work, the absence of classical structure somehow contains the essence of formal training—but without its ritualized limitations. LOCATION: 1106
I don’t think I was even present to the question. LOCATION: 1115
You synchronize desires, speak the same language. LOCATION: 1130
practice becomes like the ebb and flow of water meeting a beach, the waves lapping against the sand (in-breath), then the water trickling back out to sea (gentle, full exhalation). LOCATION: 1261
My response is that it is essential to have a liberating incremental approach that allows for times when you are not in a peak performance state. LOCATION: 1406
The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick. LOCATION: 1424
With the practice of this type of simplified motion you can feel the subtlest ripples inside the body. You become aware of all the tension that resides in your feet, legs, back, and shoulders. Then you release the tension, step by step, hour by hour, month by month, and with the fading of tension comes a whole new world of sensation. You learn to direct your awareness inside the body, and soon enough your fingers come alive with tingling, you feel heat surging up your back and through your arms. LOCATION: 1441
Let’s combine Pirsig’s Brick with my concept of Making Smaller Circles and see how they work. LOCATION: 1475
A parallel would be a trained singer who, through years of practice, knows what the notes feel like vibrating inside. Then she is giving a concert in a big venue and the sound system is a nightmare. From onstage, she can’t hear herself at all—a surprisingly common occurrence. The great performer can deliver a virtuoso performance without hearing a thing, because she knows how the notes should feel coming out, even if her primary monitor—her ears—are temporarily unavailable. LOCATION: 1499
It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set. LOCATION: 1524
Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential. LOCATION: 1525
distraction was converted into fuel for high performance. LOCATION: 1550
be at peace with imperfection. LOCATION: 1553
we learn to use that imperfection to our advantage—for example thinking to the beat of the music or using a shaking world as a catalyst for insight. LOCATION: 1555
learn to create ripples in our consciousness, little jolts to spur us along, so we are constantly inspired whether or not external conditions are inspiring. LOCATION: 1556
deep mastery of performance psychology involves the internal creation of inspiring conditions. LOCATION: 1560
This injury was becoming a tremendous source of inspiration. LOCATION: 1611
bizarre though it may sound I resolved not to atrophy. At this point in my life I was very involved in the subtle internal dynamics of the body through Tai Chi meditation. I had an idea that I might be able to keep my right side strong by intense visualization practice. My method was as follows: I did a daily resistance workout routine on my left side, and after every set I visualized the workout passing to the muscles on the right. My arm was in a cast, so there was no actual motion possible—but I could feel the energy flowing into the unused muscles. I admit it was a shot in the dark, but it worked. My whole body felt strong, and when the doctor finally took off my cast he was stunned. LOCATION: 1612
if I were to stop training whenever something hurt, I would spend my whole year on the couch. LOCATION: 1626
You have to make obstacles spur you to creative new angles in the learning process. Let setbacks deepen your resolve. You should always come off an injury or a loss better than when you went down. LOCATION: 1630
we blithely consider the unconscious to be a piece of machinery that operates mystically in a realm that we have no connection to, then we lose the rich opportunity to have open communication with the wellspring of our creativity. LOCATION: 1673
We are at the moment when psychology begins to transcend technique. LOCATION: 1733
This is a nuanced and largely misunderstood state of mind that when refined involves a subtle reintegration of the conscious mind into a free-flowing unconscious process. The idea is to shift the primary role from the conscious to the unconscious without blissing out and losing the precision the conscious can provide. LOCATION: 1735
For a physical analogy, consider your vision. Let’s allow the conscious mind to be represented by your area of visual focus, and your unconscious to be your peripheral vision. LOCATION: 1738
chess players must let the unconscious flow while the conscious leads and follows, sorting out details, putting things in order, making precise mathematical calculations. LOCATION: 1743
Most people would be surprised to discover that if you compare the thought process of a Grandmaster to that of an expert (a much weaker, but quite competent chess player), you will often find that the Grandmaster consciously looks at less, not more. That said, the chunks of information that have been put together in his mind allow him to see much more with much less conscious thought. So he is looking at very little and seeing quite a lot. LOCATION: 1745
This is why profoundly refined martial artists can sometimes appear mystical to less skilled practitioners—they have trained themselves to perceive and operate within segments of time that are too small to be perceived by untrained minds. LOCATION: 1794
If the opponent does not move, then I do not move. At the opponent’s slightest move, I move first. The first stanza is rather straightforward. It is about listening, being sensitive to the adversary’s slightest tremble, and sticking to him. Adherence is at the center of Tai Chi’s martial applicability. Basically those four lines are about becoming a shadow. But the last idea stumped me. A shadow is an effect, not a cause. How do you move before someone you are following? LOCATION: 1825
What I did here is observe and provoke a pattern of action/reaction in my opponent. LOCATION: 1886
Players who are able to relax in brief moments of inactivity are almost always the ones who end up coming through when the game is on the line. LOCATION: 2160
Instead of feeling obligated to stay completely focused on the chess position while my opponent thought, I began to let my mind release some of the tension. LOCATION: 2170
At one point, after Kasparov had lost a big game and was feeling dark and fragile, my father asked Garry how he would handle his lack of confidence in the next game. Garry responded that he would try to play the chess moves that he would have played if he were feeling confident. He would pretend to feel confident, and hopefully trigger the state. Kasparov was an intimidator over the board. Everyone in the chess world was afraid of Garry and he fed on that reality. If Garry bristled at the chessboard, opponents would wither. So if Garry was feeling bad, but puffed up his chest, made aggressive moves, and appeared to be the manifestation of Confidence itself, then opponents would become unsettled. Step by step, Garry would feed off his own chess moves, off the created position, and off his opponents’ building fear, until soon enough the confidence would become real and Garry would be in flow. If you think back to the chapter Building Your Trigger and apply it to this description, you’ll see that Garry was not pretending. He was not being artificial. Garry was triggering his zone by playing Kasparov chess. LOCATION: 2569
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readbookywooks · 7 years
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A basilisk lay panting in the baking shade of a rock, dribbling corrosive yellow slime. For the last five minutes its ears had been detecting the faint thump of hundreds of little legs moving unsteadily over the dunes, which seemed to indicate that dinner was on the way.
It blinked its legendary eyes and uncoiled twenty feet of hungry body, winding out and on to the sand like fluid death.
The Luggage staggered to a halt and raised its lid threateningly. The basilisk hissed, but a little uncertainly, because it had never seen a walking box before, and certainly never one with lots of alligator teeth stuck in its lid. There were also scraps of leathery hide adhering to it, as though it had been involved in a fight in a handbag factory, and in a way that the basilisk wouldn’t have been able to describe even if it could talk, it appeared to be glaring.
Right, the reptile thought, if that’s the way you want to play it.
It turned on the Luggage a stare like a diamond drill, a stare that nipped in via the staree’s eyeballs and flayed the brain from the inside, a stare that tore the frail net curtains on the windows of the soul, a stare that
The basilisk realised something was very wrong. An entirely new and unwelcome sensation started to arise just behind its saucer-shaped eyes. It started small, like the little itch in those few square inches of back that no amount of writhing will allow you to scratch, and grew until it became a second, red-hot, internal sun.
The basilisk was feeling a terrible, overpowering and irresistible urge to blink …
It did something incredibly unwise.
It blinked.
‘He’s talking through his hat,’ said Rincewind.
‘Eh?’ said Nijel, who was beginning to realise that the world of the barbarian hero wasn’t the clean, simple place he had imagined in the days when the most exciting thing he had ever done was stack parsnips.
‘The hat’s talking through him, you mean,’ said Conina, and she backed away too, as one tends to do in the presence of horror.
‘Eh?’
‘I will not harm you. You have been of some service,’ said Abrim, stepping forwards with his hands out. ‘But you are right. He thought he could gain power through wearing me. Of course, it is the other way around. An astonishingly devious and clever mind.’
‘So you tried his head on for size?’ said Rincewind. He shuddered. He’d worn the hat. Obviously he didn’t have the right kind of mind. Abrim did have the right kind of mind, and now his eyes were grey and colourless, his skin was pale and he walked as though his body was hanging down from his head.
Nijel had pulled out his book and was riffling feverishly through the pages.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ said Conina, not taking her eyes off the ghastly figure.
‘I’m looking up the Index of Wandering Monsters,’ said Nijel. ‘Do you think it’s an Undead? They’re awfully difficult to kill, you need garlic and,-’
‘You won’t find this in there,’ said Rincewind slowly. ‘It’s - it’s a vampire hat.’
‘Of course, it might be a Zombie,’ said Nijel, running his finger down a page. ‘It says here you need black pepper and sea salt, but-’
‘You’re supposed to fight the bloody things, not eat them,’ said Conina.
‘This is a mind I can use,’ said the hat. ‘Now I can fight back. I shall rally wizardry. There is room for only one magic in this world, and I embody it. Sourcery beware!’
‘Oh, no,’ said Rincewind under his breath.
‘Wizardry has learned a lot in the last twenty centuries. This upstart can be beaten. You three will follow me.’
It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t even an order. It was a sort of forecast. The voice of the hat went straight to the hindbrain without bothering to deal with the consciousness, and Rincewind’s legs started to move of their own accord.
The other two also jerked forward, walking with the awkward doll-like jerking that suggested that they, too, were on invisible strings.
‘Why the oh, no?’ said Conina, ‘I mean, “Oh, no” on general principles I can understand, but was there any particular reason?’
‘If we get a chance we must run,’ said Rincewind.
‘Did you have anywhere in mind?’
‘It probably won’t matter. We’re doomed anyway.’
‘Why?’ said Nijel.
‘Well,’ said Rincewind, ‘have you ever heard of the Mage Wars?’
There were a lot of things on the Disc that owed their origin to the Mage Wars. Sapient pearwood was one of them.
The original tree was probably perfectly normal and spent its days drinking groundwater and eating sunshine in a state of blessed unawareness and then the magic wars broke around it and pitchforked its genes into a state of acute perspicacity.
It also left it ingrained, as it were, with a bad temper. But sapient pearwood got off lightly.
Once, when the level of background magic on the Disc was young and high and found every opportunity to burst on the world, wizards were all as powerful as sourcerers and built their towers on every hilltop. And if there was one thing a really powerful wizard can’t stand, it is another wizard. His instinctive approach to diplomacy is to hex ‘em till they glow, then curse them in the dark.
That could only mean one thing. All right, two things. Three things.
All-out. Thaumaturgical. War.
And there were of course no alliances, no sides, no deals, no mercy, no cease. The skies twisted, the seas boiled. The scream and whizz of fireballs turned the night into day, but that was all right because the ensuing clouds of black smoke turned the day into night. The landscape rose and fell like a honeymoon duvet, and the very fabric of space itself was tied in multidimensional knots and bashed on a flat stone down by the river of Time. For example, a popular spell at the time was Pelepel’s Temporal Compressor, which on one occasion resulted in a race of giant reptiles being created, evolving, spreading, flourishing and then being destroyed in the space of about five minutes, leaving only its bones in the earth to mislead forthcoming generations completely. Trees swam, fishes walked, mountains strolled down to the shops for a packet of cigarettes, and the mutability of existence was such that the first thing any cautious person would do when they woke up in the mornings was count their arms and legs.
That was, in fact, the problem. All the wizards were pretty evenly matched and in any case lived in high towers well protected with spells, which meant that most magical weapons rebounded and landed on the common people who were trying to scratch an honest living from what was, temporarily, the soil, and lead ordinary, decent (but rather short) lives.
But still the fighting raged, battering the very structure of the universe of order, weakening the walls of reality and threatening to topple the whole rickety edifice of time and space into the darkness of the Dungeon Dimensions …
One story said that the gods stepped in, but the gods don’t usually take a hand in human affairs unless it amuses them. Another one - and this was the one that the wizards themselves told, and wrote down in their books - was that the wizards themselves got together and settled their differences amicably for the good of mankind. And this was generally accepted as the true account, despite being as internally likely as a lead lifebelt.
The truth isn’t easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find …
‘What happened, then?’ said Conina.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Rincewind, mournfully. ‘It’s going to start all over again. I can feel it. I’ve got this instinct. There’s too much magic flowing into the world. There’s going to be a horrible war. It’s all going to happen. The Disc is too old to take it this time. Everything’s been worn too thin. Doom, darkness and destruction bear down on us. The Apocralypse is nigh.’
‘Death walks abroad,’ added Nijel helpfully.
‘What?’ snapped Rincewind, angry at being interrupted.
‘I said, Death walks abroad,’ said Nijel.
‘Abroad I don’t mind,’ said Rincewind. ‘They’re all foreigners. It’s Death walking around here I’m not looking forward to.’
‘It’s only a metaphor,’ said Conina.
‘That’s all you know. I’ve met him.’
‘What did he look like?’ said Nijel.
‘Put it like this-’
‘Yes?’
‘He didn’t need a hairdresser.’
Now the sun was a blowlamp nailed to the sky, and the only difference between the sand and red-hot ash was the colour.
The Luggage plodded erratically across the burning dunes. There were a few traces of yellow slime rapidly drying on its lid.
The lonely little oblong was watched, from atop of a stone pinnacle the shape and temperature of a firebrick, by a chimera.[18] The chimera was an extremely rare species, and this particular one wasn’t about to do anything to help matters.
It judged its moment carefully, kicked away with its talons, folded its leathery wings and plummeted down towards its victim.
The chimera’s technique was to swoop low over the prey, lightly boiling it with its fiery breath, and then turn and rend its dinner with its teeth. It managed the fire part but then, at the point where experience told the creature it should be facing a stricken and terrified victim, found itself on the ground in the path of a scorched and furious Luggage.
The only thing incandescent about the Luggage was its rage. It had spent several hours with a headache, during which it had seemed the whole world had tried to attack it. It had had enough.
When it had stamped the unfortunate chimera into a greasy puddle on the sand it paused for a moment, apparently considering its future. It was becoming clear that not belonging to anyone was a lot harder than it had thought. It had vague, comforting recollections of service and a wardrobe to call its own.
It turned around very slowly, pausing frequently to open its lid. It might have been sniffing the air, if it had a nose. At last it made up its mind, if it had a mind.
The hat and its wearer also strode purposefully across the rubble that had been the legendary Rhoxie to the foot of the tower of sourcery, their unwilling entourage straggling along behind them.
There were doors at the foot of the tower. Unlike those of Unseen University, which were usually propped wide open, they were tightly shut. They seemed to glow.
‘You three are privileged to be here,’ said the hat through Abrim’s slack mouth. ‘This is the moment when wizardry stops running,’ he glanced witheringly at Rincewind, ‘and starts fighting back. You will remember it for the rest of your lives.’
‘What, until lunchtime?’ said Rincewind weakly.
‘Watch closely,’ said Abrim. He extended his hands.
‘If we get a chance,’ whispered Rincewind to Nijel, ‘we run, right?’
‘Where to?’
‘From,’ said Rincewind, ‘the important word is from.’
‘I don’t trust this man,’ said Nijel. ‘I try not to judge from first impressions, but I definitely think he’s up to no good.’
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