>>5205404While your allies attend to such matters, you beckon your newest thrall to you: the False Degenerate. You lift him from the forest floor and take him into your arms, kissing him and allowing a portion of Irinnile’s essence to slide up from your gut and out your lips, squirming and burrowing deep into him and making him—as with the late Felman and Lithobathius—your creature, for good or ill.
<WANT: 14>
When you break the kiss and turn away, you meet Henzler’s approving eyes. She nods slightly, with the faintest hint of a smile. Not for the first time, you wonder how much of the inhuman activity to which you are applying her is actually entirely in keeping with her own free will…
“Can you not do sssomething about hisss sscaless?” you ask.
Henzler looks down at the ground as if thinking, and then back at you, countering: “Can you?”
“With oil,” you say truthfully, “or more permanently, with my sssuccubuss.”
Henzler blinks a couple times, considering this. She obviously hadn’t expected that answer. You’d think it would be apparent from your body… But then, you suppose she might have assumed you scaly patches were hidden under your clothes, as with Alahzred’s more overt and thickly-coated areas.
“That… Implies a greater degree of compatibility than I’d realized was the case,” the Head Chimericist says. “maybe, with more time, better equipment, better conditions…”
“Doess my ssexxx create difficulty?” you ask, curious. “Would a female human be a better match?”
Henzler scoffs at this. “An overrated difference. A slight modification to the alchemical formula of the blood, some hormonal adjustments… Sex, or at least the expression thereof, is actually very fluid and malleable. If I were to need him to bear or carry to term a CHILD, that might prove difficult to achieve, but controlling for how sexual traits manifest is simple.”
You want to argue—it is not what your upbringing and education among Reptilians taught you of the deep-rooted nature of sexual differences between males and female—but then you pause. You remember how easily Irinnile manipulated your form to make you more ‘compatible’ with Zi the Goblin. You say nothing, simply nodding.
When you return your attention to the others, you find the owlbear digging a deep hole to bury the bodies, which have been quite violently dispatched. The Dragonborn looms over proceedings, sending Roth comically skittering to the side, both Henzler speaks up in admonishment of The Great One:
“No! Bad! No eating these!”
The Dragonborn recoils, and Roth glowers at your pet fleshweaver, but Henzler appeals to you, saying: “I had to. Eating these modified organisms could have unpredictable effects on the dragon-chimera. You still want to bring it back intact, correct?”
You nod.