Cadenza's Musing on Gypsies (snippet, possibly for later use in something?)

When someone needs to be cursed in a movie or some TV show, that’s where you’ll see us. When someone needs to run afoul of some old mystic, my people will be there, as a widely accepted plot device, a little rabbit out of a hat, a tired but trusty trick up a sleeve to stand in as the spell-slinging substitute for the fairytale witches of old. Often we’re made out to be spiteful, stuck in the past, or just plain weird, dressed in exotic rags and waving around skulls and wooden staffs and things that reek of voodoo stereotypes we have nothing to do with. Except, of course, in the Hollywood-glazed eyes of the public. We get mystified, romanticized, knocked back several centuries in progress in their stories. When someone gets “gypped”, that’s a knock at us—and yes, even our current name, “gypsy”, was once a slur. No one’s going to take the time to call us the People of Arganthonios, or Children of Spirit, or any of the other names we once were known by. We’re the strange, the unknown, the cast-offs.

Except in Rubato. There, where so many, nearly all of us are gypsies or the descendants of gypsies, we are finally home.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arganthonios