The Ultimate Cure for Athlete’s Foot

Smackdown Round 2. Brief: mash up a couple of stories and give ‘em a SF twist.

For some unknown reason I chose The Portrait of Dorian Grey and Twilight.

Oh dear…

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It was a day where cerulean and azure could be used to describe the sky, particularly if the author had been reading Oscar Wilde prior to trying to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard or even ThoughtInk to screen.

Bella was waiting; waiting with baited breath and her lower lip clenched delicately under pearly white teeth for her beau to arrive. They had met for the first time a few weeks before when she had performed the bard’s Hamlet in front of the mixed races of the Galaxy Playhouse in the Red Quadrant. As the place was a notorious dive, she had been startled to see a member of the gentry in the box normally reserved for the stage manager. That particular reservation was normally required to allow him a clear shot at any of the more unruly patrons, but Bella had been acquiring a growing reputation as a singer, one who could calm even the most rowdy onlooker, so to see someone different hovering gently next to the stage was a delight rather than the normal harbinger of someone getting zapped.

She had sung well that night, entranced by the idea of performing for someone other than the peanut throwing masses, and at the end of the performance the inappropriately named Mr Grey, he of English spelling and deliciously strawberry lips, had swept into her dressing room expounding with delight as to the superfluity of her performance, and thankfully narrowly missing the moment when she had been scraping the dead skin off her Athlete’s Foot.

Instantly smitten by his boyish charm and good looks, the high noble cheekbones and swept back hair of his forehead, that and the slightly metallic sheen to his skin, Bella had swooned into his arms, delighting Dorian and leading to a meeting the following morning in one of the more fashionable parlours, where they had whiled away the afternoon walking through fields of holographic daffodils and cavorting with virtual comets. Daydreams of his embrace had haunted her waking hours since, and had only enhanced her longing for a replacement to the vampiric liaisons that she had left behind her.

It had been only four weeks since she had been caught up in the temporal vortex that had whisked her Dorothy-like away from high school and the tribulations of vapidly written teen life, weeks where she’d found herself in the tortuous and twisted world in which she now co-inhabited with all manner of strange races and alien beings. Thankfully though they all valued music and she’d put her predilection for the works of Showaddywaddy into good use earning a living as a singer, before the owner of the Red Quadrant had spotted her and asked her if she fancied moving into acting. It was there that she’d first seen Dorian, and had since seen him as often as possible. The practiced airs and experienced charm of a man graced a boyish face, a face that seemed to almost sparkle with life and energy, his curiously English affectations leaving her breathless with anticipation at another meeting. There was a slight darkness to him that she found intriguing too, something that spoke straight to her fantasies. The more time she spent with him, the greater the longing to become his had become, until she had made up her mind that morning that she would hand him her soul to do with as he wished.

“My lady, I appear to have caught you deep in thought, I can only hope that one day you will look into mine eyes with such concentration and ardour of intellect.”

Bella flushed and leapt to her feet as Dorian joined her at her small table, knocking over the small swan faced alien who had come to take her order, reeling back from the flapping wings with warnings of swans breaking arms flapping across her mind with the voice of her mother.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Um… Hi.”

Dorian turned his limpid gaze on the swan creature, handed over a platinum credit and quietly muttered something which caused the swan to bow deeply and move quickly to service. He then lifted Bella’s pale hand to brush his lips across it, before tucking her safely back into her seat.

“My lady, your beauty makes the day complete.”

“You flatter me prettily Dorian, but am I your lady or just the latest in a long list of conquests to be flaunted on your arm for a brief time before you move onto the next?”

Grey fluttered a hand to his forehead in mock agony before pressing it to his heart with a smile. “You wound me Bella. Perhaps a cup of subliminal tea will go some way to assuage your doubts. It is quite divine and manages to convey the taste and relaxing properties of tea without even needing to be poured. Why sully the beauty of your lips with liquid, let us leave those cherry flowers of feminine purity to dreams of what might be.”

She watched as he rested a long pianist’s finger on the teapot, watched as he closed eyes with their almost feminine lashes and breathed deeply. “It is an experience that should be shared Bella, as with many things, the partaking of two in even a minor sin makes it more pleasurable.”

“And if a minor sin is pleasurable, would a major sin be divine?”

Grey looked at her through heavily lidded eyes. “It would depend what you consider a major sin Bella.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the passage of two elegantly dressed humanoids who barged past their table, disdain clear on their faces.

“Are they acquaintances of yours Dorian?”

“They are of little importance.”

“But you know them?” pressed Bella.

“I do,” he said sadly. “Bella, I am different to other humanoids of well to do families. There are those who consider me foppish and callous, but this is mainly due to my condition.” He waved an airy hand at his skin. “This renders me near invulnerable, unchanging, but it is a curse, a curse similar to that of vampirism. I remain unchanged, despite the years that crowd my memory, while those around me age, decay and witter on about dark science and ill formed medicine. They merely show a lack of understanding and prefer listening to hearsay and rumour rather than keeping their petty jealousies to themselves. Much of it is just envy that my family made their quadrillions through mining asteroids while they sat at home and played with their housebots.

“But enough of me and my troubles, let us enjoy the beauty of the day, as I know I shall enjoy seeing you perform A Midsummer Nights Dream this evening. Your Titania is simply divine.”

“Fnah, fnah.”

They looked up as the small herd of Innuendo Weevils walked past and waited patiently for them to move away from their natural food source of poorly concealed conversational euphemism. As they moved off Dorian plucked a flower from a nearby bush – that swore briefly at him in ultraviolet before it died – and tucked it in her hair, looking deeply into her eyes.

After a few moments, Bella looked away from the intense gaze that captivated her soul, and rubbed absently at her foot. She itched furiously for a moment and then blushed as she realised what she was doing.

“Something ails you my lady?”

“I, er… I just had an itch. Um… so you’re saying you’re immortal?”

“No my lady, I think not, but I am very quick to heal and my visage has remained unchanged despite the subtle pressures of life that seem to etch their lines of history on other’s faces. Perhaps a small demonstration.” Grey lifted a knife from the table and without warning sliced delicately across his palm, a thin ribbon of red springing from behind the blade.

“Oh my God!” gasped Bella, momentarily horrified that she’d forgotten to use a suitably teen acronym. “Dorian, are you mad? I…”

Whatever she had been about to say was lost with her exhaling breath of wonder as the wound began to knit itself back together before her eyes, a silvery sparkle seeming to dance along the wound.

“Nanobots,” said Grey.

“Nan O’Bot? Irish?”

“No, nanobots. Microscopically small robots, they repair any damage almost instantly. They’re outlawed on most of the worlds in the system, but my father invested half his fortune to have me ‘modified’.”

“But why?” Bella whispered, watching in fascination as the wound sealed and re-established itself as flawless skin, a small sparkly flourish finishing the robotic suture.

“I was dying. It was the only way; I was the only heir to the Grey estate.”

“And now you’re immortal.”

“Aye, and impotent. The ever youthful last of the Grey line; cursed, perfect, unchanging and alone.”

“But you don’t have to be alone.” The words left her mouth before she thought, whispering across the short distance between them with devastating effect as Dorian reeled back from her.

“Are you saying that you would want this? You would want to become like me?”

“Yes.”

“But I am considered a freak.”

“Just because you’re the only one of your kind does not make you a freak, it makes you unique. Is there some way you could make people become like you, can you make more nanobots?”

“Well yes, I can, but it takes a little time as they are built from whatever I ingest, but…”

“And two of us could make a lot more…” Bella smiled seductively. “I believe that ‘the partaking of sin with two people is far more pleasurable’, someone quite close to where I’m now sitting said that recently.”

“Indeed, but I am no longer a thing of attraction, no longer a man.”

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder Dorian. You are different perhaps, but I’m afraid you hold my heart in your hands, you can now do with it what you will.”

Dorian paused, seeming stunned and fanned himself absently with a small flying creature that happened to be sunning itself on a rock nearby.

Wanting to distract himself from the current train of thought, Dorian pointed to the spaceport nearby. “Look yonder my lady, it is of the Grey estate.”

Bella looked to the north and watched as a transport ship slowly lifted itself from the ground, the utter silence of its antigravity engines slowly changing to a slow building grumble as the ship accelerated and the awesome sound of air rushing into a vacuum reached their ears as it reached into the upper atmosphere.

“Perhaps one day I would be permitted to take you to the stars Bella, I would love to bring you to the edge of heaven.”

Dorian flapped the small flying creature irritably at the Innuendo Weevils who had returned for more sustenance, and Bella reached down and took off her shoes, sighing as she rubbed absently at her feet.

He released the small creature with a faint indignant squawk, and looked at her feet. “Is this a malady that ails you my lady?”

Bella broke from her daydream of being held in Dorian’s arms in zero gravity, horrified at being caught yet again. “Um… Athlete’s Foot,” she said blushing and lowered her eyes to the ground.

“Oh. I have not suffered from even the merest sniffle since my father had me altered. One of the few benefits it seems. Does it plague you Bella?”

“It does rather. There are so few humans on this world that very few medicines seem to work. Athlete’s foot is sent to trouble me, but is the only thing I seem to have managed to bring with me from distant Earth.”

Dorian leaned forward, his eyes suddenly intent. “We could change the world Bella, you and I. Everyone could be perfect, just like us. Flawless, immune to injury and disease, we could be the leaders of a new race. What say you? It would take but a kiss…”

She lay in the half light of the morning, the pale sunlight of the red dwarf sun that bathed her skin creating ochre lines through the slats of the blinds that imperfectly covered window. It had been relatively painless, fascinating even as she had watched Dorian’s teeth elongate, built up by the nanobots under his control. They had extended to superfine points that had enabled him to inject a stream of sparking nanobots into the vein of her neck, the kiss of the future, the small bots instantly beginning to change her, rebuild parts of her and leave her alabaster skin flawless and statue like. She was perfect, so Dorian had said. They would spend eternity together. They would build a master race, but more important that all of this, more important than all the power, she had the cure…

…the ultimate cure for Athlete’s Foot.

~~~The End~~~