Arguing Against Tautology

A shabby man Fernando has never seen before enters the Dominion one day. He's frumpled and chunky and wears clothes that make Fernando's fashion sense seem positively enlightened.

“Hello!” Fernando greets him as the door jingles shut.

“Hey, where's your movies?” the man asks.

“Right over here,” Fernando says, striding out of the office and into the obvious. “New releases are right here on these racks, with the newest of the new on this shelf and the top ten rentals up top here. Everything else goes back chronologically. The rest is broken up into genres, so you've got kids' and family over there, sci-fi on the back side of this rack, action on the three spaced out in the middle here, comedy beyond that and wrapping around into horror, which wraps around to the outside wall over there. Drama's next to that and then war and westerns have their own little sections there and there.” Fernando gesticulates fervently during his speech, pointing to each section of the store as he comes to it.

The guy doesn't really seem to have taken any of that in. “Where's the new ones?”

“Ri-right here.”

Shabby Mack trundles into the aisle and stops very near to Fernando. Fernando shuffles away, in part because personal space is not a hypothetical and in part because a miasma of booze envelops the man in a ghastly cocoon. Roll a d20, save against poison. Mmm, nope.

Fernando moves a little bit farther away. “If there's anything in particular you're looking for, just let me know and I'll track it down for you.”

Shabby Mack grunts and looks around the store. “How come these cost more?” he asks.

“Well, they're newer.”

“Yeah and?”

“Um...that's it, actually. They're newer, so they cost more.”

“That don't seem fair.”

Fernando shrugs. “New things cost more than old things. That's just the way things go.”

Shabby Mack rotates and faces Fernando. He opens his mouth. “BBBRRRRRRREEEEEEEEP!”

A noxious cloud of stomach-gas assails Fernando, who staggers back and desperately fans the air.

“That's what I think,” Shabby Mack says. He exits the store.

Fernando, now deader on the inside, returns to the office and considers getting out of the business for the first time.