Rolled 19, 14, 19 = 52 (3d20)
>>5838733It was an open question as to which was more moral: to test your ‘perfected’ chimeric mutagen upon a victim of the dragonpox, or to duplicate one of them—maybe even Izirina Henzler herself—to serve as the test subject instead. On the one hand, an artificial, magical doppelganger would (based on your animal experiments) have little will to live, meaning failure or unacceptable side-effect wouldn’t affect any ‘real’, thinking and feeling human being… But a <Clone> couldn’t consent to its creation, and it COULD still feel at least rudimentary forms of suffering. While a true, ensouled individual would feel such pains all the more intensely, and their loss would be greater, they could at least make the informed decision to participate in this experiment…
And you somehow doubted there would be any shortage of volunteers.
Once more, you wielded you authority as Archmage Henzler’s personal Mage Apprentice to requisition a shortlist of promising candidates. In this instance ‘promising’ meant those most advanced in the stages, with the worst prognosis. Better that your first attempt at a cure be tested on someone who, without your intervention, would die. Gut-wrenchingly, though, this meant a particular demographic skew, which became most prominent when you set eyes upon two columns: age, and sex.
Females, especially very old women and very young girls, were hugely overrepresented in this group.
“Perfectly logical,” the Archmage noted as you perused the list. “They were seeking to cripple our reproductive capacity and to demoralize us. Even one uninfected male could impregnate many fertile males; infect the female of the species, and the males might as well be humping a stone. The female reproductive tract is also the harder to operate upon to remove infected tissue, ro to cure with superficial healing spells; your <Monstrous Regeneration> could perhaps reattach a phallus, but never mend a raptured ovary.”
“It’s awful,” you muttered.
“It’s strategically sound,” she corrected you. “Steel yourself, Van Houtzmann. I’ll have no crying or vomiting in my laboratory, and you’ll be responsible for cleaning up whatever you produce.”
This woman… She had no more sympathy for her own sex than for the other, no more for her species than for any laboratory animal, except in the most abstract sense. It was still sometimes hard to believe that she, herself, was not the scale-bearing hybrid of the Henzler ‘family’.
But for the other Henzler, For Izzy, you did as she said: you steeled yourself. For all the other women, and men, and boys and girls who were thus afflicted… You would do what you had to.
You selected a panel of a dozen women and girls, of varying ages, and presented them the ‘solution’ at hand.
