Walking through Chinatown, Rory caught a glimpse of himself in a faux antique gold-framed mirror that stood inside a window display. He didn't like what he saw. His body showed the effects of the 4 years he spent in college hunched over a keyboard as he worked toward a computer science degree. The sleepless nights, buckets of ramen, and lack of physical activity could be seen in his toneless limbs and large gut. And now he was working a high-stress contract job at a tech company, with even worse hours. He'd been drinking heavily to cope. Under his short black hair, his pale face had a bleary expression and perpetual bags under his eyes. He wondered if all that hard work in school was even worth it, if this was what his life had come to.
Suddenly the winds changed, and he caught a whiff of something in the air. It smelled like coconuts, cigarettes, leather, and eucalyptus. Rory tracked it to the next store down. He entered the tiny storefront that had all of its walls covered in shelves, stacked with small metal tins. Some were labeled with dragons or tigers, others had illustrations of body parts, and still others were simply unmarked. A small Chinese man had open a small tin of ointment, where the smell was coming from. It was a clear, whitish wax.
"This is calming balm." the owner said. "Erase all troubles. Happy happy forever. Here, try it."
Rory pulled back, but the Chinese man's grasp was too fast. He got Rory by the front of his company polo. With a gloved hand, the owner smeared some ointment across Rory's forehead.
"You think too much. This will make you dumb and happy.:
The ointment burned, and Rory collapsed to the ground. The burning sensation spread across his scalp and his face, down his neck and his back, into his chest, his balls, his legs, and even down to his toes. The heat consumed Rory in a fog of pure pleasure, and for a moment he couldn't even see anything but white. It penetrated into everything he was. Rory knew that it threatened to take it all away. He was afraid. He resisted the change. But he couldn't hold out as the ointment swept all his smarts away. Everything he'd learned in school. All his raw intellectual ability. Gone. In fact, it never was a part of him. He never attended college. In fact, he dropped out of high school at the age of 16. Since then, he's been working as a landscaper.
Rory's body continued to burn. He looked down. His skin was a deep bronze now, which came from doing yard work shirtless every day. His polo was gone, and replaced with a white tank. Underneath, his gut was shrinking, and his pecs were filling out with pure muscle. Looking at his now sleekly bulging arms and calves, he remembered all the daily lifting he did and his surfing on the weekends. He was wearing board shorts and flip flops now. Rory caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror on a shelf. His hair was now a messy blonde faux hawk. He flashed himself a flawless easy-going smile and laughed. Life's so easy when you're hot, he thought. He noticed a smear of some sort of wax on his forehead. Some of it was red, and the rest was white, but it was turning red as well. When the whole glob was red, the Chinese man took hold of Rory's chin, and scraped all the wax off with a spoon. He then shook the contents into a small vial labelled "IQ 120 COMPUTER SCIENCE".
"Ick One-Two-Zero"? Rory read out loud. Brah, what's that stuff, it looks grody! He laughed heartily, making his beefy pecs bounce.
"20,000 of profit," said the shop keeper.