Fascinating geography
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When he found a hundred dollar bill, he placed it on the table in front of his grandfather.
The satisfied old man smiled and, lifting up the hem of his long linen shirt, groaning, climbed onto the stepladder and took out a small soft-bound book from the top shelf.
– Does the Great and Mighty take up so little space? – Alina was surprised.
Then she began to read the inscriptions on the remaining dictionaries: English, Spanish, Italian. It was as if she had ended up in the foreign literature department. But all the other books were much thicker than the dictionary that her grandfather got, and this alarmed her. But, alas, it’s too late. Before she had time to share her suspicions with Dan, the old man began to perform witchcraft.
Methodius seated the necromancer at the round table opposite him. The magician, who turned out to be almost twice as tall as the old polyglot, felt very uncomfortable on the small, low three-legged stool. But he endured, because investing knowledge in five minutes is much faster than learning the language on your own.
In general, the magic of polyglots has always been considered very dangerous. Any magical effect on the brain is like this. One wrong word in a spell, and a person may forever lose his memory or knowledge of his native language. Therefore, as Dan managed to tell Alina on the way to Methodius, in childhood all wizards and sorcerers studied one or two foreign languages, and then, at the age of twenty, they were allowed to visit a polyglot magician so that they could correct their grammar and remove their accent. Such actions are not too dangerous; it is difficult to make mistakes in spells to improve knowledge. Why is that? The whole point is not the science of magic, but the fact that nothing can be given for nothing. And even if a licensed polyglot magician teaches someone to speak gibberish in five minutes, on the other side of the world a connoisseur of this language may completely lose his memory. Wizards called this effect the law of equal exchange in nature.
Methodius wrapped the dictionary in skin and placed it in front of the client. After that, he quickly ran to the kitchen and brought a kettle. Judging by the way the grandfather carried it, it was heavy, filled to the brim. From there he poured a viscous black liquid (was it tar?) into a bowl that stood on the window, and then splashed the substance onto the skin in which the book was wrapped. As soon as the first drop touched the fur, the fur began to glow bright blue. Having finished with the impregnation, the old man removed the skin from the book and wrapped it around the head of Dan, who was sitting at the table.
The black dragon sat comfortably in a corner and immersed himself in his favorite pastime. Alina looked at everything that was happening with her mouth open. She had seen similar actions more than once in television programs on the first layer, where various psychics and other suspicious individuals who considered themselves magicians performed.
When the skin stopped glowing, the old man removed the bandage from Dan’s head. The necromancer sat on a chair, closed his eyes, and was afraid to move.
«Well,» the grandfather lisped,
– Cool, bro! – the magician slapped the old man on the shoulder, so that he could not stand on his feet and sat down in surprise.
– Whaaaat?!?!?! – Alina was indignant.
– Oh, great, chick! – Dan smiled, hugging the girl’s hips.
Five minutes ago, this intelligent Czech guy addressed her so respectfully: «beautiful girl,» but what if… something is wrong… Is it possible that along with knowledge of the language, a person acquires disgusting character traits?
«Dan,» she said offended, pulling his hand away. – What do you say?
She grabbed the guy by the shoulders and started shaking him in the hope of knocking out this gross nonsense.
– What a cool bazaar, absolutely nothing! Are you, like, not getting it?
«I get it, I get it,» the sorceress mimicked him, «but why, having learned a foreign language, start being rude in it?»
– I’m freaking out! – the necromancer rolled his eyes, picking up a thin dictionary.
«Modern Russian slang and obscene expressions,» Alina read what was written on the cover.
«Dear Methodius,» she shouted at her grandfather, «do you even pay attention to what you teach a respectable foreigner?»
– Why the hell stare?
The old man chuckled, took the book from the girl and put it in its place, and then began to look for something.
– Isn’t this necessary? – she asked, taking out from under the leg of the stepladder Ozhegov’s thick black Explanatory Dictionary.
Almost every Russian schoolchild knew this book very well. But… the ladder, from under which the thick book was taken out, naturally fell to one side along with the old man.
It turned out that the grandfather carelessly touched his lamp and it, coming into contact with the bear’s skin, started a serious fire. With the number of books in the room, everyone present could have burned alive in a matter of minutes.
The dragon jumped up on its hind legs, clutching the precious manuscript to its chest. Dan, deprived of any vocabulary except Russian Newspeak, stomped on the tabletop and shouted heart-rendingly:
– The author is burning! Ftopku sovar of the Russian language!
Methodius, numb with horror, watched as the fire approached both him and his precious collection.
And only Alina, who by some miracle did not lose her composure, stretched out her hand, free from the dictionary, and shouted:
– Sandstorm!
The spell again spontaneously surfaced in her memory, from which book or film – she did not remember. The girl imagined how the earth began to move under her feet, how dust rose in a column and circulated around her feet, and then dispersed and was covered by fire, which had almost reached the dictionaries of the polyglot magician. The grandfather sat on his knees, looking with fear at the burnt wool on one of the skin-carpets, and tears welled up in his clear blue eyes. His collection was saved!!!
When Alina lowered her hand, the tornado stopped circulating, and the sand fell to the ground in an even circle around the girl. Definitely, after this spell, the magician’s apartment required cleaning.
The sorceress put Ozhegov’s dictionary on the table at Dan’s feet and stared at the old man with an imperious gaze:
– Teach him Russian back! Correct your mistakes.
Grateful for saving the collection, Methodius agreed, despite the fact that the fire happened due to Alina’s carelessness. Somehow the old man quickly forgot the bad things, but he seemed to remember the good things well for a long time. He did not demand a hundred dollars from the brave sorceress in exchange for the necromancer’s half-burnt bill sticking out of the sandy hill.