rincewind

It's rude to stare," said the troll. Its mouth opened with a little crest of foam, and shut again in exactly the same way that water closes over a stone. "Is it? Why?" asked Rincewind. How does he hold himself together, his mind screamed at him. Why doesn't he spill?

A flicker of defiance flared very briefly in Rincewind's battered heart.

That's old Twoflower, Rincewind thought. It__ not that he doesn__ appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. He just looks at things, but nothing he looks at is ever the same again. Including me, I suspect.

Rincewind picked up a spare paper and read it.It was headed: Examination for the post of Assistant Night-Soil Operative for the District of W'ung.He read question one. It required candidates to write a sixteen-line poem on evening mist over the reed beds.Question two seemed to be about the use of metaphor in some book Rincewind had never heard of.Then there was a question about music . . .Rincewind turned the paper over a couple of times. There didn't seem to be any mention, anywhere, of words like 'compost' or 'bucket' or 'wheelbarrow'. But presumably all this produced a better class of person than the Ankh-Morpork system, which asked just one question: 'Got your own shovel, have you?

Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad.

You see," the tourist went on, "you know that thing you do with seaweed?"Bethan, brought up on the Vortex Plains, had only heard of the sea in stories, and had decided she didn't like it. She looked blank. "Eat it?" "No, what you do is, you hang it up outside your door, and it tells you if it's going to rain." Another thing Bethan had learned was that there was no real point in trying to understand anything Twoflower said, and that all anyone could do was run alongside the conversation and hope to jump on it as it turned a corner."I see," she said. "Rincewind is like that, you see." "Like seaweed." "Yes. If there was anything at all to be frightened about, he'd be frightened. But he's not. The star is just about the only thing I've ever seen him not frightened of. If he's not worried, then take it from me, there's nothing to be worried about." "It's not going to rain?" said Bethan. "Well, no, metaphorically speaking." "Oh." Bethan decided not to ask what "metaphorically" meant, in case it had something to do with seaweed.