Little Myth Marker By Robert Asprin

That made me a little bit nervous. I was having enough problems without having Gus get his nose out of joint.

“It isn’t that, Gus. Really. The whole crew-yourself included-is closer to me than my family ever was. It’s just… I don’t know …”

“… you want to be liked. Right?”

“Yeah. I guess that’s it.”

“And that’s your problem!”

That one threw me. “I don’t get it,” I admitted.

The gargoyle sighed, then ducked behind the counter. “Have another milkshake,” he said, shoving one toward me. “This might take a while, but I’ll try to explain.”

I like to think it’s a sign of my growing savoir-faire that I now enjoy strawberry milkshakes. When I first visited the Bazaar, I rejected them out of hand because they looked like pink swamp muck. I was now moderately addicted to them, though I still wouldn’t eat the food here. Then again, maybe it was a sign of something else completely if I thought a taste for strawberry milkshakes was a sign of savoir-faire!

“Look, Skeeve,” Gus began, sipping at a milkshake of his own, “you’re a nice guy .. . one of the nicest I’ve ever known. You go out of your way to ‘do the right thing’. . . to be nice to people. The key phrase there is ‘go out of your way.’ You’re in a ‘trouble-heavy’ profession anyway. Nobody hires a magician because things are going well. Then you add to that your chosen lifestyle. Because you want to be liked, you place yourself in situations you wouldn’t go near if it was for your own personal satisfaction. Case in point: the card game. If you had been out for personal gain, i.e., wealth, you wouldn’t have gone near it, since you don’t know the game. But you wanted to be friendly, so you went expecting to lose. That’s not normal, and it resulted in a not-normal outcome, to wit, Markie. That’s why you get into trouble.”