Shallow Reference Pools

A young woman enters the Dominion one afternoon. She has rented about twice before. “Do you have the last two Harry Potter movies?” she asks.

“Absolutely I do,” Fernando answers. He rises and tracks down the pair of movies, then begins filling out the rental slip.

“I love these movies so much. The books are also really good,” she says as Fernando writes.

“Oh, yeah. They're remarkably and surprisingly well-done. My only qualm is that they kicked off the stupid thing where studios split the last book of a series into multiple parts in order to eke out more money from them. Granted, Deathly Hallows had enough meat to the story to pull it off well, and probably needed it, but now that everybody's following the leader it grates on me.”

“I'm just glad that the author made such a success of herself.”

“Yeah, she definitely deserved that. She's the richest woman alive now.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, beat out Oprah a while back now.”

“Well, good. Someone with that much creativity and originality deserves that kind of thing. Like the...the horse with the bird's head that she created?”

“You mean thestrals?”

“No, no. From the I think it was third movie.”

“Hippogriffs?”

“Yeah! That's the one!”

“Actually, hippogriffs have been around since medieval times. They were claimed to be a rare variety of griffon which came about when a griffon mated with a horse, which didn't usually happen since horses are griffons' favorite meals. She didn't really invent them.”

The woman looks at Fernando askance. “I think you're making all that up.”

Them's fighting words, so Fernando tries a snappy comeback rather than unloading both barrels on her. “Well, yeah, since it's a mythological creature.”

“But none of what you just said was in the books.”

“I'm not talking about Harry Potter hippogriffs. I'm talking about Rowling's inspiration for hippogriffs, the basis. Ninety percent of people had no clue there even existed such a thing in mankind's mythological history until Prisoner of Azkaban rolled around. When will we ever see an ahuizotl in popular fiction?”

“A what?”

“Ahuizotl. It's a malicious, sociopathic monkey-dog-thing from Aztec myth that drowns people and eats their teeth, eyeballs, and nails.”

“Ew. Why do you know this stuff?”

“I've read fantasy and mythology beyond what is contained in the pages of Harry Potter. I chose to retain information like that rather than learning something more practically useful. I could tell you all kinds of useless shit about things that never existed. Did you know that there's a Greek variety of goblin that basically spontaneously combusts if it ever counts to three, and that people used to set colanders on their doorsteps to thwart them?”

“No.” The lady's eyes shift in her head in the direction of the door.

Fernando had provided enough of a tongue-lashing, so he relents in his verbal assault. “Just saying, Harry Potter's not the end-all, be-all repository of mythological knowledge. It's a more than adequate gateway drug, though.” Fernando looks down at the rental slip. “It comes to three-fifty.”

She pays and leaves. Fernando gets the feeling she won't be back soon. This is a price he is fine with paying.