>>5269294>>5269289>>5269282>>5269259>>5269212>>5269183>>5269172>>5269166>>5269162You cave to the <APPETITE>, your need for a distraction from recent and (if you’re being honest) still somewhat troubling overruling your drives towards practicality and propriety. Before anything else, you decide to pay a visit to the breeding pits.
The pits are deeper into the earth than most of the forward base, close to the well-guarded rookery which houses the resultant eggs. Reptilians are not like mammals, and certainly not like humans and goblinoids who breed profligately and year-round. Rather, the breeding cycles of Reptilians are more sporadic even than the beastmen of the eastern surface-lands; where they experience arousing and develop the ability to breed seasonally during each year, a Reptilian goes years—sometimes decades, in older ages—between feeling the urge for sexual congress and reproduction. This is for the best, as with your diminished numbers and the requirement to maintain a diversity of uniquely-specialized subraces for the sake of the Grand Design, breeding must be coordinated carefully among those Reptilians not already bound as chattel to a higher-ranked male. The breeding pits are where such un-committed pairings occur, between Reptilians closely-related enough to reliably produce a useful offspring of like type—Silkscale clan with Silkscale, for instance—but distantly-related enough to avoid deleterious effects to the bloodline.
Of course, this has always been the rationale for forbidding your entry: a Dragonborn must be bred selectively, if at all, following the Fleshweavers’ dictates. This proved especially frustrating in your early adolescence, when a powerful and perpetual such urge swelled within you every few months and carried you here to spy upon the couples in Priest-approved coitus. Now, you see the rationale in a new light… For, of course, Degenerates are forbidden to ever breed.
Hm. A lot of things really ARE beginning to lend themselves to fresh interpretation in light of last night’s empathic communion.
You watch the action for a time, taking in sights, sounds, and smells which set your blood ablaze, before your obvious and untoward interest draws the attention of Steeltalon placed to bar the spawn of shamed and genetically-inferior bloodlines, or to pry apart forbidden couplings