The Great Game 🎲 Vicinto Prossimo
iv. Auberge Espagnole
It was three months since Farenn had slept in the spare room in the back of Talfar’s house. His parents thought that Farenn was a student from an outer region of the Purple Pulse.
He was the most entertaining visitor they had ever had, and their house had been a home to a number of visiting students and scholars. Farenn was interested in absolutely everything. Talfar’s mother would bake a simple stardust pie, and Farenn would look at it like it were a marvel from some far away dimension. The fluffiness, the lightness of its crust, the crumbling star bits exploding like icing sugar on the tongue, were like a drug.
When they went to the pub, the table at which Farenn sat was by the end of the night circled by girls with lazy eyes, long silky hair, breathless excitement, and sparkling lips. He could out-drink even the toughest ragball players, and could arm wrestle any of the workers that happened to stop by to get a glimpse of the glittering girls that were like butterflies swooping among the cherry trees of men. And of these men Farenn was exceptional. And yet he made sure to lose many of the arm wrestling matches. The last thing he wanted, although he did want it still, was that one of these pretty Vicinese girls would find out how rock hard his abdomen was.
Talfar took it all in stride, because he knew that the one girl who he was infatuated with also knew that Farenn was not for her. They had great affection for their friendly Fallarian, but they also knew that their friendship was an experiment of the highest and most dangerous order. They never forgot that Farenn could be killed on the spot if the authorities knew who he was. And if the authorities discovered that Talfar and Thalphemera had helped him, they would “disappear” for the rest of their lives.
This was the subject of one of their late-night bar-room discussions, during which Farenn said to his two friends, “This is why we need to keep doing this. We have a right to know one another, but the way things are we could be tortured for exercising this right. For now this experiment has to be a secret one. We shouldn’t feel bad about that, since our aim is to uncover the secrets that keep our worlds apart.”
[IN PROGRESS]
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