Two friends compare scars and secrets
“Your flesh seems recently taught. The treatment must have worked, yes?” Corison sipped at his mug, licked the foam from his lips.
Ertik raised his chin and smiled the smile of an aristocrat, an air he feigned for Corison’s benefit. “Mm hmm. You could stand a bit of juve, yourself. Have you looked in a mirror lately?”
“Not since our trip to Tioc. You remember that red-haired Tiocian? The one with the dimples and the uh…”
“Tail?”
“The Tail, that’s right. Fen only knows what she could do with that tail.” Corison leaned across the dark-wood table of the tavern they currently occupied and squeezed the bicep of his compatriot. “Maybe I could do with a bit of juve.” He scanned the other patrons who talked in hushed tones within the low ceiling inn, this still being early in the day, local time. “These folk all look gene-tuned. You know how they’ve no wrinkles, not a flaw of any kind. That’s an ugly kind of visage to present, don’t you think, E?”
Ertik allowed the transgression of Corison’s touch. Corison was, after all, the nearest thing he had to a friend. Corison would no doubt state the same. “Scars that vanish as soon as the wounds heal? Broken bones that mend like new?” Ertik tipped the silvery liquid that lingered in his glass down his throat, gave a look to Corison — who nodded — and then waved his now fully fingered hand to the barkeep — another round. Juve didn’t eliminate every wrinkle and scar, nor did it vanish the telltale signs of bone fractures but, it could trigger the regrowth of certain limbs, one’s head notwithstanding.
The reinvigorated Ertik continued, “Not a countenance I’d prefer to offer, no.” He leaned back in his booth, stretched his legs and canted his head back and forth, faint popping sounds came from freshly swollen cartilage. “Where’s the mystique in that? The intrigue?”
“Quite right.” Corison swirled the amber fluid he preferred, a brewed beverage derived from the grains of wild grasses grown across the lower continent. “Take your spherical pate, an orb of a most admirable shape. What if that scar there, the one from Bloontah, I think, what if it wasn’t there? If your entire globe of a head were smooth as a dollop of obsidian?”
“How droll. How plain.”
“And that puckered indentation…”
“What of it?”
“Why, it’s remarkable not only for its oddity but for its provenance.”
Ertik unconsciously rubbed at the dent in his skull, a divot over his left ear. “No thanks to you.”
Corison chuffed loudly. The sound somehow sending danger signals to the room which fell briefly silent before ramping back up to its disharmonious buzz. He tipped forward and lowered his voice. “You recall I have an equally illustrious demarcation on my person placed there by none other than…”
The barkeep shuffled to their table and placed their drinks as well as a bowl of misshapen twists of fried dough between them.
“… Glinks! I love these gooey, crunching things,” Corison finished.
“You know,” Ertik said, leadingly, “they’re made with the egg sacks of centibles ground up and fermented for weeks.”
His friend inspected a mottled tan specimen the size of his thumb encrusted with black specs and salt crystals. “Centibles deserve far worse, the vermin,” he replied, cramming the entire treat into his mouth.
“I couldn’t agree more.” Ertik took a handful and began popping them from a distance, greedily chomping each one as they found his brilliantly white teeth.
Corison took an unusually long glink and pointed it at his friend’s noggin. “You know, you could have had that fully repaired.”
“And all this time I thought you’d been spouting evidence against such complete genetic rejuvenation.”
“I just…”
“You, yourself, could have done the same.”
Corison nodded sagely. “Yet… the remnants of our adventures, etched, cut and carved into our very bodies have come to represent, a certain, um…”
“History.”
“Yes, a history of our travels.”
“Our travels together.” Etrik hoisted his glass, still half-full of that elixir distilled from the reproductive glands of a giant mollusk and repeated his remark as a toast. “To our past and future travels, together.”
“Indeed,” Corison replied. “May they be as eventful as their historical brethren…”
“And leave a similar…”
“If less debilitating record upon our aging bodies.”
“Your aging body.” Etrik furrowed his brow at his friend across the table. “You really should glance in a mirror once in a while.”
