Making Monster Girls 7: For Science!, page 11
“So, the Queen enslaved them,” I shook my head. “I don’t think I’ll ever grasp the reasons she did it.”
“We don’t even know the real reasons she did it,” Edony growled. “Though, I doubt I’ll ever want to find out. She simply saw men as lower than herself and decided to do something about it.”
“Sometimes, I wonder what happened to make her think that way,” I stated. “What happened to her? What made her think that way in the first place? Was she like this from the moment she was born, or did something happen later in her life that made her turn her back on the male population as a whole?”
“Maybe we’ll ask her,” the Duchess giggled. “When we reach the capital and finally punish her for her crimes. You can ask her. I want to hear her answer. I want to know why she’s done these horrible things for centuries.”
In my head, I visualized what I’d say to the Queen, but when I tried to put it into words, I couldn’t. Unlike many men, I was blessed with the choice of my life’s path, and I’d gone down it despite everything put in front of me. Many of the males in society didn’t have a choice, and the moment they stepped out of the boarding schools, they were sold into a life of slavery. Some of them even died at the hands of those who purchased them. Sure, I’d experienced verbal abuse, and a few times, Edony had whacked me with her wicked cane, but I’d never experienced what other men had. What would they say to the Queen if they could, or would they attack her without a single word?
For as long as I’ve been alive, I’d never heard a man speak badly about their mistresses or bosses, but I knew how badly they were being treated. It was ingrained into men not to talk badly about the aristocrats, or they’d be punished within an inch of their lives. So many times, I’d seen men around me say something entirely passive about their mistresses, and then days later, their deaths were announced by the town crier.
“If things continue on like this,” I grumbled. “If nothing we do makes the world change, there will be no men left in the world. The aristocrats and their horrible short tempers will be the end of an entire sex.”
“I agree,” Edony bowed her head and knitted her hands in her lap. “As the Duchess of Edenhart, it was my task to calculate how many ‘brutes’ died in the city per year and then send it off to the capital.”
“Why would you have to do that?” I asked.
“It was a duty,” Edony shrugged. “To calculate how many people were currently in the population, men included. I’d have to send how many numbers of male and female deaths there were along with the population. If the male deaths rose higher, the Queen would send out more male consorts to replace those lost.”
“Really?” I asked. “I thought she refused to aid Edenhart in any way since she didn’t have control over it.”
“Oh, of course,” the Duchess laughed. “But it’s been that way for years, but if I didn’t participate, I could be fined a hefty sum for not sending in my numbers. I always suspected that it was just another way for her to spy on me, though. She’d know how many people moved into my duchy and how many left or died under my care. If the numbers dropped below the normal, then she’d have an opportunity to step in and take over because I wasn’t ‘responsible’ enough. So, I worked hard and made sure that everyone, the men included, were kept alive.”
“It just seems so strange how overly involved she was in Edenhart’s business,” I shrugged. “You’d think she’d take it as a loss and let it go. I’m sure that it’s happened in the past, but why does she hang on to it for so long?”
“I have no idea,” Edony chuckled darkly. “It’s a strange and dark obsession that-- Oh, Charles, up there. Turn to the left, and I believe we will be close to being able to see the desert.”
I followed the Duchess’ instructions, shifted the reins in my hands, and moved my eyes over the horizon. It was so dark that I could barely make out anything around us, but just as Edony had said, the trees slowly and slowly grew farther apart. Even the dirt underneath the rolling wheels felt different as we drove across it. As we were coming down the incline, we’d bumped along, and we’d had to brace our legs against the driver’s seat floor to keep from falling off, but here, it was much smoother. As we passed the sickly-looking cedars, the ground glittered and flashed in between the blades of grass. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought it was a smattering of snowflakes, but I realized instantly that it was grains of sand.
When the trees dispersed, I lifted my eyes from the side of the road and looked out ahead of us. I stared into a bleak and desolate emptiness in front of me, and suddenly, I felt so small compared to the never-ending desert sand in front of us. I could barely make out the path we rode on, and I gulped loudly before gripping the reins a little tighter in my fist. Edony glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, chuckled, and then shook her head.
“What’s so funny?” I grinned.
“Just the face you were making,” the Duchess commented. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so fearful or amazed. When you looked out over Granhamn, your face paled, and you set your jaw as if you were determined to take everything on right there, right that second, but this is what scares you?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m scared, my love,” I chuckled darkly. “But we never know what waits for us out in the great unknown. Look at it, Edony. It’s just this huge, infinite emptiness, and we’re stepping right into it.”
Chapter Eight
The dark desert seemed to swallow us whole, and a freezing wind rushed out over the desolate landscape. The air hit me like a wall, and I held my coat a little tighter around me as I pushed forward. I wanted to get to Valestia as soon as possible so we could get the supplies and return to Granhamn, but eventually, I’d have to pull the caravan off to the side and bed down for the night. By morning, the weather would be very different, and all of us would shed off our heavy coats and bask in the hot sun, but for now, I needed to keep myself wrapped up tightly in my coat and scarf. Edony had crawled through the window behind me and gone to bed but not before giving me instructions on how to get to the mining city.
The Duchess said that the road we were on was a straight shot to Valestia, and if we kept on it, we should be there within a day or two. I wanted to minimize our travel time and get there maybe within a day and a half. We needed Valestia’s ore and iron desperately, and if we didn’t get it, we couldn’t conquer Granhamn.
For the first time in a while, I was left alone with my thoughts, and I gazed out over the vast desert with plans for the future rolling around in the expanse of my brain. Granhamn had to be the largest city we’d taken on yet, but I knew that there would be others in the future that would be more difficult than this. For a moment, I thought we weren’t ready to take on all of this. That I should’ve waited a bit longer and enlarged my army through other means, but I couldn’t let the men of this country suffer for any longer. They’d already been through so much, and I was the only one who had the ability to free them. It had to be now, or it would never happen.
What kind of lives would they live after they were freed? What would I have done if I’d been born with the freedom to do whatever I wanted? I chuckled lightly and shook my head with the reins held loosely in my hands. I probably would be doing what I’d done all of those years. As a child, I dreamed about becoming a practiced and accomplished doctor with experience in science. If the world were different, I would’ve probably been living in the capital, treating men and women for diseases and sicknesses. Though, if it’d been like that, I wouldn’t have become an alchemist or created my monster-women. Would I have even discovered that I was the first man to develop powers? I highly doubted it.
That thought brought up a few more questions that I didn’t have the answers to. Was I the only man in the world to have powers? They may have been minimal and only usable with certain actions, but was I really the only one? Not only that, but how did I come to develop them? Were they passed down to me by my mother, or was it some sort of freak mutation? I wanted to learn more about it and know where it came from, but there was no way for me to find out. Sure, Edony had offered to help me search Granhamn’s records for my birth certificate or any other paperwork about where I came from. Still, since the city was so close to Edenhart, I wasn’t sure if it’d even have any records about me in them.
Who could be my mother? Who had given birth to me and then ultimately gave me up into the arms of the horrid schoolmarms? I’m sure that whoever she was, she hadn’t spent a moment of her life worrying or caring about me, but for some odd reason, I wanted to know. Maybe even find her, see her face just once and take in all of the resemblances between us. I knew it was probably impossible to find my father, too since he was probably only some random consort, so the urgency to find him wasn’t as important, if it was even possible at all.
There were questions that I wanted to ask my birth giver, but I already knew all of the answers since I’d heard them so many other times from aristocats.
“Why did you give me up?”
“I didn’t want you.”
“Why didn’t you care about me? Was I your son?”
“You were a boy. and you’re useless to me. Why would I ever keep an abomination like you?”
Those words didn’t hurt me because I was desensitized to them, but if we found my mother, and we transformed her, would she take on that motherly role I’d always longed for, or would she be a completely different person? Of course, she wouldn’t love me in the way that my women did, but what would it be like to have a mother after all of these years?
I’d read ancient books from before women took on their aristocratic roles and how they lived with all of their children in one house. It seemed so alien to me. What would it have been like growing up in a household with not only a father, but a mother, too? Would I have had siblings? I probably had a handful of brothers out there in the world, and I wondered if, after all of this was finished, I could find them and bring them into my court. I already knew it was difficult for women to conceive because of current medicine, and if they did conceive, they didn’t know if it was going to be a boy or girl until they actually gave birth.
“What a strange world we live in,” I whispered, and my breath lifted into the air in a heavy cloud of condensation.
I rarely bothered myself with how the aristocrats thought or felt, but I wondered what it must’ve felt like to be pregnant for nine months, fully prepared to have a healthy heir, and then it came out as a boy. How disappointed were they? Edony had told me that she’d tried multiple times to conceive children, and only one lived but passed after it was born. I grieved for my wolf-woman, but I knew that that child had been a boy, and she would’ve sent it away as soon as it parted from her body.
Rian was pregnant now. Would she have a boy or a girl? It didn’t matter to me either way, though. The only thing I cared about was if the child was healthy. That was the difference between the aristocrats and me. I brought new life into this world with my machine, and now, those lives were giving me the beautiful opportunity of having children with them. All men deserved that same right, and I would give that to them as soon as I was King.
My women begged me for babies, and I listened to their pleas with understanding ears. I would give them what they wanted, and soon, I’d have a handful of children running around. Those thoughts brought me back to Rian. She’d only been pregnant a few weeks now, and she was just starting to show. I was sure that by the time we took over Granhamn and moved on to the next city, she’d be about ready to give birth since imps had such a high gestation rate. Before long, we’d be traveling all across the country with a child in tow, but I wasn’t afraid. From what the black-haired beauty told me, imps grew quickly, and before we reached the capital, I’m sure we’d have a child that looked around the age of nine or ten, maybe even older if they grew faster than I expected. Hell, by the time we reached the Queen, I guessed that most of my women would be pregnant and ready to give birth.
All of this seemed so fast. It felt like weeks ago, I’d created Valerie by accident and introduced her to the blossoming world around us, but I knew that wasn’t true. I’d created the feline-woman at the beginning of summer, and now, we were deep in the throes of autumn. Over the course of those months, I’d transformed Daisy, Rian, Kleeia, Josephine, Edony, and Cecelia. It felt so strange to think about. My life had been so different when I moved into the manor and started working for the Duchess. She’d been in love with me, but I’d had no idea, but she still treated me terribly.
The crook of my shoulder burned with the memory of her wicked, hooked cane coming down on it and forcing me down to the ground. The Duchess still sometimes carried the weapon, and though I’d let go of all of those horrible feelings and memories, it still brought up a feeling of uncertainty within me. I wondered how many more men had felt the bite of the pointed wood or worse. I’d heard horror stories of things she’d do with that cane, though I could never be sure if all of them were true.
I cleared my throat, shook my head, and adjusted my shoulders as I brushed off all of those thoughts and memories. Edony was a completely different person, and she’d never think of doing something like ever again except for maybe to an aristocrat. That was something I would’ve paid to see and would enjoy watching from afar. So many times, I’d watched her take out her anger and rage on the men around her, and I was ready to see her do it to the people who really deserved it.
Edony. I felt like during this trip, I was getting to know her better than I ever had. Of course, I’d been afraid of her when I first started working for her and the ongoing time when she’d asked me to build the machine, but I didn’t know her during those months. There was so much knowledge within her, and it was no surprise to me why she was the Duchess of Edenhart. She was born into the position, but it was clear that her mother had trained her well. The she-wolf knew far more about cities and how they worked than anyone else in our party. I was grateful that I’d decided to add her to our family, I really hadn’t known at the time what an asset she would be.
I stared out over the wasteland and squinted into the darkness ahead of me. I had quite a few things on my mind, and I was grateful for the time alone to think about them. A.B. had asked me to craft him a body, and I wondered, how could I do that for him? I had a few ideas on how to do it, but I wasn’t sure if any of them would work. It’d be a long time before we reached the capital, but I wanted to have it figured out by then. I could possibly find a body that I could place him into. The grotesque idea was to collect body parts from fresh graves, sew them together, and then place him within it, but I wasn’t sure if I could bring myself to do that. Or I could attempt to resurrect his corpse and bring it back to life, but that was borderline necromancy, not alchemy, and I didn’t know if I had it in me to pull all of that off. There were a few other options, but I’d have to test them out first before I subjected A.B. to any of them. I didn’t want to try one out and then accidentally kill the reanimated brain.
I breathed in a heavy sigh, leaned in the driver’s seat, and glanced behind me at the road we’d left behind. I couldn’t make out any of the trees or even the sloping mountains of Granhamn. This place was so strange to me, and chills bubbled up on the exposed parts of my skin. I’d grown up in the plateau between two mountains, so I’d never been to a location such as this. It was like a barren wasteland compared to Edenhart or even Birskonn and Granhamn. Though I wasn’t familiar with them, those places seemed more like home than this endless emptiness. Edony had said that the aristocrats who lived in Valestia had gone there out of necessity, but I could never imagine willingly living out in a place like this.
The mountains in between Edenhart always made me feel small, but this feeling was totally different. In the middle of this flat, barren place, I felt utterly insignificant. Not that that was a new feeling, but the darkened sky pressed down on my shoulders, and the stretching dunes snuck in on me from all directions.
“Alright,” I barked, shifted the reins in my hands, and guided the horses a little bit off the road. “I think that’s enough for one night. Let’s rest, boys.”
I hoped from the driver’s seat and then lifted it to reveal storage underneath. I grabbed feed bags for each of the horses and took the time to place them over their long faces. Each beast neighed and huffed contentedly as I caressed their soft faces and patted their sides. I was tired and more than ready to fall into bed with the rest of my women. We’d wake early and head out again to reach the mining town. I hoped that once we got there, the battle against the aristocrats would be relatively easy, and we’d be in and out of there within a day or so.
I trudged back toward the caravan’s door and tried not to fall over from the unfamiliar terrain. My boots sank into the sand and then shifted as soon as I attempted to take another step. It would take me a long time to get used to this sensation, and I highly doubted that I ever would. As quietly as I could, I opened the caravan’s door and slipped inside. The entire first compartment was dark except for a single candle burning on a side table, and I picked it up on my way toward the bedroom. As I moved closer, I listened to the soft sounds of my women sleeping, Rian snored pleasantly in the distance, and every few seconds, Valerie whispered something while deep in her dreams.
I rested the flickering candle down on one of the bedside tables and slowly began to undress. The light filtering in through the window from the moon was cast across the bed, and I glanced over each of their faces. Daisy slept on her back with her hands knit over her stomach. Her small, round face was serene, and her plump lips parted as if she were about to speak. Valerie laid on her side with her right arm and leg extended. The feline-woman looked as if she were about to take off running off the side of the bed, and as I chuckled softly under my breath, she whispered something under her breath. Rian laid on the edge of the bed with most of her red-tinted face obscured by her onyx-colored hair. Her taloned fingers curled once and then laid still on the mattress beside her. Edony rested beside the imp-woman with her arms and legs tucked into the fetal position, and beside her, Kleeia and Cecelia cuddled closely together for warmth.
