Pairs Of Pumpkins Episode 11 The Teleporting Tours Of A Top Heavy Teenager Ch 05 13

Pairs of Pumpkins, Episode 11:

The Teleporting Tours of a Top-Heavy Teenager

by Jess Faulks

Chapter 5 of 13

Anastasia Pridemoon hurried to the wide, master staircase from the library, two floors above the breeding laboratory. Reaching it, she took the railing in both hands and pressed her back to the wall before easing herself down.

She was used to not seeing her own feet since age fourteen and within another year, her chest had grown so much that she had to navigate stairs by feel alone: one careful step to plant her heel into the crook of each step. Then another, minding her balance and always hanging on for support.

In those earlier years of learning to navigate with her bulky and unbalanced adult figure, she'd fallen down these very stairs five times and several times asked if she could move her bedroom to the basement. Zarron dismissed the request.

"You're going to need to learn how to carry those things. Might as well start now," he'd said.

The past year on the road had improved her fitness from the sedentary life she'd lived before. Her calves and thighs had grown noticeably as had the firmness of her butt and stomach. Only touch, mirrors and her mother's observations made her aware of the change.

From her own vantage, there wasn't much to her body beyond her shoulders, arms and the tremendous, dominant mass of her bosom.

No amount of exercise would ever compensate for how top heavy she was and even while invisible, she was every bit as careful as when she couldn't see four or five steps ahead. The sloshing of her chest was often at the mercy of unpredictable inertia and stairs would never fail to present a challenge.

Her mother didn't care for the Invisibility spell but for Anastasia, it meant being aware of much more of the world around her, a massive blindspot created by the grotesque extremes of her proportions. It also meant not being noticed, called out or approached in public for a freakish figure she had no other means to hide.

Arriving at the ground floor, she squeezed her elbows to half-restrain her bosom and briskly walked towards the basement lab. When closed, its entrance was concealed from casual inspection but Eva and the Duos left it wide open.

She could hear them echoing from the top of the basement stairs. These ones were more dangerous still: twice as long thanks to the depth of the basement and entirely straight, so any fall would continue for quite some time. She'd only fallen down them once.

She descended them with the same caution and care, with back to the wall and both hands clutching the railing. Upon her save arrival at the bottom, she approached the doorway of the lab.

The familiar space wasn't grand nor sophisticated in appearance, at least not for the scale of its output but it was quite full of tanks, pools and the supporting infrastructure of the operation of creating new babies from eggs and sperm without a mother or father present.

The room was an oval and a bit over one hundred twenty feet, end to end with a fifty foot ceiling. In the center were two above-ground pools of equal, forty foot diameters. They rose three feet from the ground as an extension of its stone, embossed with all manner of runes: Life magic on the left, Elemental on the right.

Only the life magic pool was filled with liquid: a pink, warm and gooey, nutrient-rich bath of Zarron's crafting for the eggs to grow in. Two of the duodecaplets stood beside it, guessing what it did and how it worked.

Surrounding the two pools were a number of structures carts and cabinets, support systems for the incubation process. There were also workstations, carts and cabinets laid out in order of operations, for the actual creation of a new child.

The most impressive structure was centered between and behind the tanks, a wooden lattice that framed two twenty five feet tall and eight foot wide, parallel glass tanks, each with a capacity of nearly twenty five hundred gallons. They were the fluid reserve which renewed the wet pool as its exposed surface was consumed or evaporated.

Zarron used to never let it get below the halfway mark but now it was closer to a quarter-full, a testament to his recent neglect.

Those two tanks were fed by a separate bank of nine more bronze vats that lined the back wall of the room near the ceiling, each of them twenty feet tall and ten feet in diameter. Around them were two levels of cat walks.

The upper was near the ceiling and gave access their lids to check and refill them. The lower catwalk was for maintainance, output valve adjustment and inspection. It also connected to the two tanks by the incubator, providing a walking bridge and hanging beneath it, the nine lines that gravity fed them.

Between them and the floor were ladders with guide railings she'd climbed many times to refill ingredients. Zarron had added additional safety precautions a few years before, once a younger Anastasia's bust grew too prominent to safely climb.

The contents were hidden except for a porthole every quarter to see when one was getting low.

The contents of each tank were a different color and viscosity of oil, extract or other fluid from virile, hearty and regenerative flora and fauna. None of it was particularly obscure or scarce by Zarron's design but some were challenging to get in large quantities. Sometimes they'd have to venture out to collect more ingredients but it was less often over the years. He'd established supplier relations for almost all of it over the last two decades, even a delivery of the essence of Axolotl every few years. That was the rarest and priciest ingredient.

Dwarfed by the tanks and their multi-colored contents, a workstation was at the bottom of it making the whole thing resemble a giant, rainbow pipe organ. The ingredients fed into valves with dials that had been balanced many years ago to create the perfect cocktail of a nutrient bath.

One of the Duos was on the lower catwalk, examining one of the portholes. "Is this blood?" he tapped on the glass.

Dolphin blood, to be precise.

Next to the mixing station was a wheeled cart with an attached seat. It had yet another liquid container the size of a small wine cask, a slightly different mix of the fluid for the eggs to be fertilized in.

Sandwiching the cask were shelves, containing rows of broad-based, porcelain bowls. They were sized and shaped to be a steady foundation for an embryo to grow from a speck in a dish to an egg big enough to carry a five to fifteen pound infant and the accompanying amniotic fluid and yolk sac. Each bowl would be filled about half full of liquid before being moved the next and final workstation.

A fourth Duo was inspecting the cask with a particular curiosity for the liquid inside. He'd be fine if he drank it, if he could keep it down with its slimy texture and wretched taste. The curse of her iron trap memory was remembering all the stupid things she'd tried as a curious, little girl, including tasting every liquid in this room when Zarron's back was turned.

A broad and deep, rune-scribed cabinet stood near the mixing station, slightly out of the way. The runes were of ice magic and they kept the contents perfectly preserved for decades. Inside was over five hundred vessels of sperm from different donors, mostly small jars from a single ejaculation but a few of the early donors had larger containers like the early, grey wolf donor who'd been father to the Duodecaplets, the gladiator triplets and many others since. Much of it was collected in the first few years, before she was born or as an infant but Zarron would travel for months at a time to scout for prime specimens and pay them handsomely in gold and sometimes a whore to help. That first timber wolf he'd described as a particularly massive and deadly warrior, so much larger and stronger than average that it would more than offset that he was cross-breeding them with a fox.

The last step of the process was the Conception Station, positioned between the cart and the nutrient pool. It's most prominent element was a large optical device, a sophisticated series of tubes, lenses and focus dials, like one might stargaze with, but aimed down. It made things impossibly small to see with the naked eye, plainly visible. Anastasia had looked through it many times before.

There was room for hand movements on either side of the workspace itself and around them, an array of five magic wands, mounted on gears with two axes of adjustment, all aimed down. One was of Healing, one of Fortitude, one of Polymorph, one of Repulsion and an odd, one-off that Zarron had created for this process. He called it "The Wand of Egg."

The first four wands had additional tips attached to them and dials on them, allowing their intensity to be adjusted.

To conceive a new child, he would place a single, unfertilized egg in the bowl then inject semen from the desired donor. Submerged in a thin layer of the nutrient fluid, the sperm had far better success ratios than in utero. Very small samples could be used and a single donor ejaculation could potentially be used hundreds of times.

Once fertilized, the egg was also more resilient in the nutrient bath. If there were any challenges to it's growth in the first hour, the dampened  Wand of Healing would be used to keep it alive. In an hour, The Wand of Fortitude would be fired at it, all but guaranteeing its survival going forward.

The Wand of Repulsion was for splitting fertilized embryos to make twins, triplets or quadruplets like he often did or one remarkable time, the Duodecaplets. Split eggs would get hit again with the Fortitude and Healing wands, and again if split more than once. They had a slightly higher fail rate after splitting more than two times, so sextuplets were the safe limit he settled into after initial experimentation. When they would divide an egg in three then each of those in two, survival rate of all six was nearly 100%.

They'd discussed at length over the years if splitting twice degraded their quality or intelligence. Zarron was sure it did and wouldn't risk splitting any high value child more than once. Ana was less confident it made a difference.

Seven years ago, Zarron had begun making more triplets in an effort to conserve eggs, worrying about the day he would run out of Portia's. Around five years ago his concern passed rather suddenly.

"I did the math and realized I've got eggs to last me for decades. I was worried about nothing," he explained at the time and never discussed it again.

Ana was also good at math. Better than Zarron. The nutrient pool could hold fifty eggs at a time and they needed six months to grow before being moved to the incubator, where they needed two more months before hatching. A six-month cycle out of the nine month long year meant Zarron could make at most, one hundred and fifty new children every two years or seven hundred and fifty per decade.

What none of them knew were exactly how many eggs there were. Hundreds of thousands was a guess based on size of an egg divided by the volume of their jar. Even if it were only one hundred thousand eggs, they would last over one hundred and thirty three years at full production. It was strange that he would have worried at all, though Zarron was sure to live quite a bit longer than that. She'd learned by then when to stop asking questions.

She had however asked in an unrelated and earlier conversation why were Portia's eggs so valuable. Why couldn't he use another, related donor, like her or Evangeline?

"Portia's blood is stronger than any of yours," he'd explained. "The only thing better than hers might be her mother's but the Queen of the Pale Lands is a bit less accessable to me than a headstrong runaway."

"And what about the Purebloods?"

He'd considered it for a moment. "It doesn't seem to be the same kind of strength and my Purebloods all seem to have problems. But it would be interesting..."

The Wand of Repulsion phase would be followed by additional rounds of Fortitude and Healing and that was the end of it for pure fox embyros. The process only took about twenty minutes.

Crossbred children were significantly more complicated and began with the Polymorph wand, dampened to give only enough magic to force compatibility without losing the essence of the fox egg. After the precisely time Polymorph right when the sperm broke through an incompatible egg, Zarron would spend two or three days on and off, bombarding it with the Healing wand and manual Regeneration spells, ensuring they would survive to viability.

A fifth Duo peeked into the eye piece. "I don't see anything." There was nothing in there to see and he wasn't getting the angle of his head right to focus.

Somewhere during the process, Zarron would cast a simple cantrip of Fate. It was the simplest form of a "wish" spell that could tip a matter of chance one way or another. He would use it to predetermine the sex between male and female.

A nonbinary outcome was more involved with so many possible outcomes. It was requested seldomly enough, Anastasia had never learned exactly how he did it. Most of the intersex children had been born male or female then developed unexpectedly at puberty into something unexpected. All of them that she was aware of were inbred.

There was another technique he'd used on a few orders over the years as an experiment, that fertilizing a egg with two sperm would produce 'semi-identical twins' with some if not full hermaphroditic qualities but the outcomes weren't predictable.

The standard procedure when an order was requested to be intersex, was to alter the embyro towards that direction so he could guarantee exactly the bits the future owner did and did not want.

When the process was finished and with the eggs sure to survive, Zarron would cast two Timer spells on the bowl itself, after it would be carried by him or Anastasia to a one foot divet in the nutrient pool. A small rack held towels for drying off their legs after wading in it.

There were fifty such divots in both the wet and dry pool spaced five feet apart from each other for safety of not knocking into them on the way in or out.

For the majority of her youth, most of the divets were occupied by growing eggs and around the time Zarron started worrying about his supply, there was enough demand that he had to make a waiting list.

Now there were only eight visible, fertilized eggs in the nutrient pool as well as thirteen, empty looking bowls. New zygotes wouldn't be visible to the naked eye for some days and these would be the product of today's work.

In all her time in the lab, they'd never made so many in so little time. Now that Zarron was so seldomly there, it made sense that the orders would back up but to do so many since they'd arrived meant they'd been working especially fast and not performing any major alterations. Perhaps Zentalia and Branka were helping in parallel, otherwise they'd barely have time to fertilize that many.

The eight visible eggs were all the same coconut sized with an eggshell that was still soft, suggesting Zarron had done them all on the same, previous visit and from their size, it was about two months ago.

The eggs would sit in the warm, nutrient bath among their brothers and sisters, developing in a chemical simulation of their mother's womb while the egg's shell grew and hardened until it contained a full-sized infant. At that point they were a foot and half tall, grow into its bowl as a stand.

That took six months after which the first timer spell made the base glow, announcing that the egg was ready to be moved into the heated incubator.

The moving of eggs from one pool to the other used to be Anastasia's job until she was fourteen and dropped one of them. By then her chest had grown too much to be able to carry anything that large.

Zarron rushed to ensure it survived and forgave her faster than she did herself. After all, he'd made her this way. After that he commissioned an engineer to help him automate the process and now a purpose-built automaton would wake when the timer went off. It would wade into the nutrient pool and scoop up the egg, move it to a divet in the incubator before returning to its station.

The odd machine was named "EMA," as a practical abbreviation for Egg Moving Automaton, both moved eggs and looked like an oversized one except made of metal and with legs. When activated, it opened up to expose a padded cradle, where it could pick up and protect an egg inside itself.

Zarron had let a younger and less cynical Evangeline paint large, round, friendly eyes on it.

"What is this... thing?" One of the Duos tapped EMA on its top, as tall as his waist in it's idle, resting squat.

Eva looked back from where she stood at a wall of bookshelves, where Zarron kept the documentation from his research and experiments.

"He made a machine to move eggs when Anastasia's tits got too big to do it for him."

"Where does it take them? Just from there to there?"

Eva rolled her eyes and nodded. "It's the dumbest thing I've seen Zarron do. It's this completely overbuilt, magical machine and all it does is carry eggs about thirty feet? All because he doesn't want to do it himself and I'm apparently so useless I can't be trusted to haul fucking eggs around."

"You're not built for carrying something that size either," one of the Duos said and she scowled. "He should've asked us."

Another spoke, not minding his brother. "Is it sentient?"

"Gods, I hope not, for its sake. Its existence is even more pathetic than the rest of ours."

Two more Duos stood at the open air incubator, where embryos would finish developing inside their now full-sized, hard-shelled egg. The incubator was build almost the same as the Wet Pool but with a cutout to step into it, no liquid contents and quite hot inside. It had the same spacing and divets, which she'd often seen at capacity. Now there were eleven eggs, which meant his second most recent return was between six and eight months ago.

Usually they'd be bare and dull brown but these eggs were freshly painted with runes and a seal, something sure to be part of the Zarron's new teleportation delivery system.

"When do you think they hatch?" one of them mused to his brother.

The second enchantment of the bowl itself would alert Zarron the moment the egg was ready, wherever he was in the world.  That alarm was a fallback as such things were scheduled far in advance with the arrival of the buyers, especially in the case of adopting families. He was confident the initial imprinting on parents was important to developing a healthy connection and made sure those meetings were timed appropriately.

Anastasia was less confident about that. The raccoon's face was the first both her sister and her had seen and the one thing they seemed to agree on was the desire to stab him in the back.

The bookshelves where Eva, Duayne and the last of the Duos stood were an extensive library of notes and documentation of their experiments over the years. Sifting through books they grabbed at random, they looked every bit as confused as Ana expected they would be.

Not only was Zarron's system of organization as chaotic as the Life Magic he practiced, but the simplest concepts of it and science would be over all of their heads. Duayne carried the Ledger with him. It was the only book here that would make sense to any of them.

The obvious curiosities of a laboratory kept their attention away from the whole reason any of it existed: The remainder of their mother's unfertilized eggs. Not quite hidden, just tucked in an unremarkable heated alcove and in a glass jar not much larger than a tankard of ale.

Zarron had never explained in detail how he extracted them from their mother, despite her asking on several occasions. If she knew that, she could run the entire operation on her own.