A Fable


        Once there was a village; a midsized village by modern
standards, of five or seven or ten or three thousand people.  We'll
call this village Goetia.  A dragon lived on the outskirts of this
village, really more like a few miles away or so.  The people took
issue with the dragon, as the dragon often came by and ate one or two
or three villagers, and the people disliked this.  Yet the villagers
themselves had many faults; it should hardly be implied that they had
some sort of moral superiority over the dragon, or indeed it over
they.
        Some people of the type that call themselves 'concerned
citizens' went to see a wizard that lived in the village, to ask him
to go and kill the dragon, dropping hints of social recompense and
such.  The wizard received them without insult and showed them the
door fairly quickly, but he was less than overly disposed to view their
request in a very positive light.  For the wizard often dabbled in
arcane sciences involving the reanimation of corpses, and naturally his
most readily available supply therof was the communal graveyard of the
villagers.  So, every so often, the villagers would try to assassinate
him or storm his tower with burning torches in an archetypal kind of
scene.  Now, this hardly affected the wizard beyond the realm of
inconvenience, but he was tiring of what he saw as the mass
schizophrenia of villagers who tried, however ineffectually, to kill
him, and then asked for his help in some matter he hardly cared about.
	So the wizard came to think that it was time soon to be rid of the
villagers, and fairly quickly concocted a scheme wherin he and the
dragon would help one another kill off the great majority of the
villagers, and thereby he would obtain a great number of fresh corpses,
and the dragon's hunger would be sated for quite some while.  They
could keep alive a few villagers for breeding stock, the wizard mused,
and so a similar situation would be prevented from arising in a
neighboring village.
	The dragon's thoughts were running along the same lines at this
time, for the dragon had informers in the village who let the dragon
know of such things as the dragon might find interesting, in exchange
for not themselves being eaten, or a few pieces of gold, or some such
thing.  The other villagers were not aware of this, naturally.  Thus
the dragon had been told that some of the villagers were going to
attempt to ask the wizard to kill the dragon, and the dragon thought
that the time had come for a different approach to the villagers.
	Just about as the dragon reached this conclusion, the wizard
teleported into the dragon's lair to present his proposal.
Unfortunately for the wizard, the dragon was still considering how the
wizard might be coming to kill the dragon, and thus the dragon
immediately breathed fire on the wizard and so killed him.
	After this, the dragon flew to the village and perched upon one of
the two or three or four highest buildings in the village; at any rate,
it was the one which best overlooked some sort of central open space in
the village, a market-place or meeting square or some such.  Some of
the villagers, noting the dragon's presence, took to firing arrows at
the dragon, but the dragon projected a sphere of psychic energy, and
the arrows bounced off.  The dragon breathed fire on the people who had
shot arrows at the dragon and they died; consequently the other
villagers stopped firing or decided not to when they might have without
that deterrent.
	After everyone had calmed down a little bit, the dragon spoke to
the villagers.  The dragon noted that they were really out of place in
blaming the dragon for all the village's death, as the common criminals
of the town killed far more people than the dragon.  And this was true
as far as it went, although it ought to be noted that the dragon still
killed many more people than any individual criminal in the village.
The villagers really ought to just crack down on crime, the dragon
explained, and stop harassing the dragon.  The dragon went on to state
that the dragon was tired of having to chase down villagers for
sustenance, and that they should just proceed to bring the dragon a
virgin female for devouring purposes every two weeks: the dragon was
perhaps overfond of ritual.  Then the dragon left.
	Soon the villagers held some sort of meeting to decide what kind of
action they ought to take.  There was almost universal opinion that
they should find an alternative to the dragon's proposal, despite the
obvious fact that this proposal would have both led to less villagers
being eaten by the dragon over a span of time, as the villagers would
have realized if they had bothered to do the associated maths, and that
this would have provided a clear incentive for young females to shed
themselves of their respective virginities as soon as possible, which
could only have been good for the sex lives of the town leaders, seeing
as how they were all male and almost all heterosexual, this village
being modeled on a sort of medieval archetype.  However, it seemed that
all anyone could do was think of their daughter being selected to feed
the dragon, and not think that whoever was selected would generally be
the most irritating female virgin in the village.
	At length, an old scribe stood up to propose that if they could get
the dragon to accept any person in the village, rather than just female
virgins, they could rid themselves of a general selection of irritating
citizens, not just those from a rather small portion of the overall
population.  Perhaps, he added, they could even get the dragon to
accept sheep or something, though most rather doubted the plausibility
of that, but saw the rationality of introducing this burden to the
general population as a sort of permanent ostracism, in the Athenian
sense.
	Now this scribe was something of a pre-Freudian psychologist, and
the theory which had occurred to him, which he then outlined to those
at the meeting, was that the dragon was suffering from penis envy, and
needed to undergo therapy to let go of this, and he would go talk to
the dragon about this.  Well, actually, the scribe didn't quite outline
the last part so much as everyone else there outlined it for him, but
he had suspected that everyone else would try to send him off, so he
accepted it relatively gracefully.
	When the scribe reached the dragon's lair, the dragon asked him as
to his purpose, and he responded with an elaborate summary of the
dragon's sexual frustration, adding that he thought there was nothing
the matter with the dragon that a few years of therapy couldn't work
out, and that his rates were very reasonable...  but at this point the
dragon ate him.
	As the scribe failed to return in a day or so, most of the people
surmised his fate relatively accurately, though some opined that he had
simply fallen and broken his leg on the way there, being in his sixties
or so, and was just lying there pathetically expiring of thirst and
hunger, but nobody particularly felt like going to check the veracity
of this theory.  For the next couple of days, nobody had any great
ideas at the village meetings on the subject of the dragon, but after a
few days, an accountant presented his theory.
	This accountant worked for the ruler of the village, and as
something of a consequence to dealing with much more money than he was
paid for such a service on a regular basis, he had become something of
a proto-Marxist, but contrary to some rumors, he had never embezzled
any of the ruler's funds.  He had proposed his theories of economic
redistribution to the village leaders many times, but as they were far
richer than the average citizens of the village, they saw themselves
getting the short end of the stick on this exchange, and so they had
taken something of a dislike to this accountant.
	Nonetheless, they let the accountant outline his theory that the
dragon was overly attached to goods, as he proposed that in the sort of
medieval economy they were living in, virgins were really a kind of
disposable commodity, and the dragon was really just extending his
interest in unusable materials, that the virgins were another kind of
gold or treasure for the dragon, albeit one the dragon ate.  The
leaders of the village were less than impressed by this theory, but
they sent the accountant to go talk to the dragon, figuring that at the
least, they would be rid of the accountant.
	So the accountant came to the dragon in the dragon's lair and
outlined the theory we have already seen, attempting to convince the
dragon of the futility of seeking happiness through goods.  And then he
added the part of his theory which he hadn't outlined before the
village leaders; that the dragon was serving as a role model for the
village leaders in their pursuit of possession, and that by giving up
such things the dragon could deprive the leaders of the implicit excuse
that the dragon did similar things, and that the dragon was far more
powerful than they, which many would take as adequate justification,
for none of the town leaders had ever bragged, even while quite drunk,
to any of the others concerning how he might beat up the dragon.
	But at this point the dragon interrupted the accountant and pointed
out that the leaders' acquisition of material wealth was nearly as
pointless as his, for they also did little with their wealth but look
at it, and that if the accountant really believed his theories, his
time would have been far better spent pilfering the houses of the rich
than trying to convince the dragon of the truth of these theories.  The
accountant was deprived of an opportunity to practice this, however, or
even respond, because, having said this, the dragon ate him.
	With no new theories on how to alternately subdue the dragon, and
with both of their ambassadors presumed dead, the villagers sent the
dragon a virgin of the female variety in two weeks' time, and proceeded
to do the same every two weeks for quite some time afterwards.

last revision January 01, 2001

all content © 1999 - 2001 Like A Vagina Networks