robert asprin - myth-taken identity

"Uh, Rat—Rattila, we don't like caviar," Strewth ventured.

"You have to like it!" Rattila boomed, his red eyes gleaming. "It is expensive. Think of all the poor mall-rats who don't have caviar!"

"Oh, okay, dude," Strewth replied, resignedly.

With a shrug to the others, he took a bite, trying not to gag. The others followed suit. Rattila could feel their distaste. He rather enjoyed it.

Perhaps the grand celebration was premature. He should have saved it for when the gauge in the Master Card had reached the top of its potential limit, but it was close. He really felt his power now. It was wonderful. The Massha cards were feeding him nicely.

'The day is coming soon when I shall be all-powerful, omnipotent, all-encompassing!" he informed the rats as he served them pressed pheasant, another costly delicacy. "I lust for that moment."

"Whatever," the mall-rats murmured, shoving unfinished caviar under the tablecloth and hoping he didn't notice.

"It is! It's whatever I say!" He let loose with another blast of power that shook the foundations of The Mall. "You see! I control everything!"-

From a nearby heap he caused a Massha's Secret box to fly to him. The contents spilled out, feathered garters flitting around in the air like round butterflies. Yes, and in his future, butterflies would be round!

"Pretty, pretty!" Oive and Lawsy crooned.

"Yes, they are," Rattila acknowledged.

He squinted at the garters. They were full of magik. It must be his! He reached for them and touched them with the Master Card. The feathers drooped as the power was drained from the garters.

"Awwww!" the mall-rats chorused. "Why'd you do that?"

"What do you care if they work?" Rattila snarled, throwing the silk wisps away from him.

"Well, they're cool that way," Oive argued. "I like the one with the lunch box on it. You can keep a sandwich fresh all day in that little pouch."

"Don't worry," Rattila declared, crushing the last garter in his clenched paw. It burst into flames, but he didn't seem to notice. "Soon all the power in this Mall will be mine, and you will have all the working toys that you could ever want. Everyone's lunch will be yours!" Strewth and a few of the others started to edge backward. They were terrified of him. They thought he was going insane. He caught a whisper of the ringleader's thoughts: Power corrupts.

"No!" he thundered, letting loose a blast of magik that shook piles of merchandise down all over the vast chamber. "Power is good! It can be dangerous, yes. Knowledge is power," he slavered. He started to flip the box aside, then laughed at the name. "Massha's Secret. We've learned a lot of Massha's secrets, haven't we?" he asked, holding the image of the Jahk in his mind.

Lawsy had done a good job of gleaning truths out of her. Honestly, she could have obtained a real credit card with less information than she had unwittingly given Lawsy. Rattila luxuriated in it.

"She doesn't use all the power she has at her disposal, preferring to rely on all that jewelry. If she did, I would be already over the mark. But this will do," he insisted, fondling the Master Card. "This will do nicely. I'll add the Pervert and the Troll to my collection after I have become the most powerful magician in the world. In the meanwhile"—he turned to glare at his trembling workforce—"eat up! There are rats starving in Brooklyn!"

"We can wait until the next Skeeve sighting," Chumley suggested, as I stomped out of the Will Call office.

I didn't know where I was going, but if I had stayed there, I would have started breaking heads, and none of the heads I wanted to break were there.

"What do we do now?" Cire asked, glumly. "Our trap is gone, and so is our subject."

"I don't know. I have to think," I replied, moodily.

I was torqued by the invasion of the tax agents and the disappearance of the mall-rat, but what really irked me was the expressions of deep and sincere sympathy on the faces of the merchants. Our humiliation had become com- mon knowledge. I figured the shoppers who'd been in Massha's Secret when the explosion came had spread the word about the riot. The merchants almost certainly thought we were complete screwups. So much for M.Y.T.H., Inc's reputation.

A plump female Djinnie came sailing out of a shoe boutique and whisked around us in circles.

"Oh, you lovely people," she gushed. "Marco told us all about what happened! He told all of us, and we have told everyone else in The Mall!"

"Yeah, yeah," I grunted, with an embarrassed wave, hoping to stave off the recitation. I didn't want to live through it again.

But the Djinnie and I weren't on the same page.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" she beamed, zooming in to kiss me soundly on the lips. She seized Chumley and Cire and planted one on them, too. "We are all now checking for discrepancies in our expenditures! You may have saved many of us from that horrid Rattila!" She hugged Massha and picked Eskina right off the floor. "You are wonderful!"

"Yeah," I agreed, realizing now what she was talking about. I should have guessed. The Djinnie would be a lot more interested in not getting ripped off than in our tax shutdown. I straightened up a little. "We are."

"Come, choose anything from my shop," she invited, guiding us toward the shoe displays. "Each of you. Please."

"We were just trying to do a job," I argued. "But I noticed how my companions perked up at the Djinnie's gratitude. "Well—okay."

Not that I needed shoes, of course, but the proprietor, name of Tarkeni, had snappy accessories, including belts and personal-grooming kits, one of which was made of scaly leather not unlike my own fetching skin, except in bronze. I found myself turning it over in my hands a dozen times until Tarkeni stuffed it in a bag and pronounced it mine.

"It is the least we can do!" she exclaimed. By the time we left the shop all five of us had more of a spring in our steps.

"You see, big guy?" Massha declared with a wink. "Retail therapy definitely helps."

"This is the life, huh?" Cire asked, admiring his new shoes.

Flippers like his were hard to fit, and the boots the Djinnie had pressed on him must have been worth dozens of gold pieces.

"Rather!" Chumley agreed, enjoying his new ParchmentMan automatic book scroll.

Other grateful merchants were eager to help us recover from our run of bad luck. I hardly had time to think about the Skeeve impostors or our own humiliation as we were dragged out of the corridors every hundred paces by another shopkeeper or booth owner.

"You are good people," a Gourami remarked, kissing us all as she urged us to try on the glass finger and toe rings she sold.

"My mother would want you to have this," a teenage Whelf insisted, pressing a bag of candles on us.

I even found myself wandering around a furniture store with the Djinni owner hovering at my heels promising a deep discount on anything in the store.

"Or anything you choose to order," he added, hospitably, smiles wreathing his broad blue face.

I browsed a selection of recliners to take the place of my burned-out armchair, thinking what pleasure I'd get out of handing Woofle the receipt and insisting he pay the balance.

Thanks to one of Massha's gadgets, what parcels and boxes Chumley couldn't haul floated along behind us on our way back to the hotel.

"If we don't get the alarm to chase a Skeeve-clone, I'm going to take a nap," I informed the others.

Massha cupped a huge yawn behind her broad hand. "Good idea, Short and Scaly," she responded.

"There you are!"Rimbaldi Djinnelli came flying toward us through the crowd. He seized Massha's hands. "I love you even more today than before, you beautiful lady! Come to my shop!" He herded us all along with him. "You must all see the outfit that my wife has designed for this so generously made lady, whose body matches her heart. It will fill you all with delight!"