Deep in the pits a cry was heard. Fausta, the hermit-pontiff,  watched from the perch above. Her latest subject was due for a daily observation; the pontiff had low hopes, but an observation was still to be made. 

In the pit - one of mine - was a gaelic woman, well built, with muscled thighs and a delightful pertness to her smallish breasts. She was of the northern clans - of those who intermixed with the elfines gaelic and the tribes of the germans. She thus had a certain exotic feel to her features, a uniqueness in the pigmentation of her nipple and her vulva, an interesting curve in her waist and a fiery-red mane of hair. A delight. When she first arrived, she was proud, and moved with barely concealed power in her legs. She did not answer when spoken to, though Roman she understood. She looked like someone who would endure the leash a thousand times over. 

But Fausta did not own a leash. She despised the article. A magos had no need for physical cruelty. 

The creature in the pit had very little left in the ways of gaelic pride. She was writhing on the cobbled ground, hands locked on her member, masturbating not with abandon, but in agony. She was overproducing. She had to breed. It was too much for her mind. 

Overproduction did not quite describe it. The cobbles of the pit could not be seen under the thick layer of semen mixed with dust. The walls were splattered liberally. Even the edge of the pit with rife with ropes of the stuff, each thick as thumb. To clean the pits was a herculean task - and one that had to be done regularly. The musk was so powerful it would dim the mind and take complete control - if not for the wards. Fausta knew with certainty that if the wards were not maintained, she would found herself leaping into the pit long ago - in a heat much, much more powerful than reason. She saw it happen with the occasional slave girl in the stocks. It was an entertaining watch. 

While she reminecented, the gaelic woman noticed Fausta, standing on the perch, and mustered strength to rise to her feet. She screamed something in her muffled bar-bar, swinging her hips - and with it, her member. Begging. For more release. For a girl to breed. For a doll to bloat with semen. Anything. 

Fausta was discontent. This one still retained speech, begging for more release, for a woman, for a doll, for any hole warm enough and moist enough. But beyond that her mental faculties were degraded. She was barely lucid. More animal than human.

But her form… she grew stronger, quicker, capable of wrestling and raping even the most aggressive doll. And the member… it was gigantic, easily a cubit and a finger, darkened, with a small head of an angry, crimson colour. It's width was too large to encircle with one hand. It had skin in excess and veins visibly pulsing. She couldn't maintain an erection, at first: she'd lose consciousness too quickly, but as the transformations went along, the erection stopped being a problem. It never went away. That became the new problem. 

And the production. She would leak all the time, throbbing, even when she regained slight lucidity to eat and sleep. When she would erupt in climax, she floods. Fausta wondered at the mechanism of this copious production many a time. She experimented. She would leave salts of Eros in the pit and provide the woman with a doll or a fresh slave girl. The rut would take hours: until the gaelic woman would lose all feeling, until she would exhaust herself to near death. For hours, she will breed, and breed, and breed. Her victims - by this point "partner" was a word poorly chosen - would be inhumanly distended, womb filled to such an extent that all mobility would be lost. And yet they lived. Something made them survive that priapean ordeal, gave them the sturdiness and the elasticity to partake in the rut. 

And quite often, they did so successfully. 

The dolls couldn't get pregnant, of course. But the slave girls could. While the gaelic woman was out, recuperating from her suicidal lust, the dolls would remove the distended female figure from the pen. Never were they conscious in the process, having lost any semblance of lucidity long ago. 

They would be taken to the study, then, where Fausta would observe them - for months, if need be. Once they regained the capability to walk - usually after a nundina has passed - they would get to enjoy a very simple and pleasurable existence for quite a while while the elfine pontiff would observe the changes of their bodies. 

Draining the excess semen took a long time. It was too thick, similar to cream. The amount was inhumane. Any natural being - a human, an elfine, a ludex - would not produce in a lifetime the amount this gaelic woman produced in the span of an active hour. And then was the fertility. 

The slave girls - Fausta prefered italian market stock, brought from Egypt, Asia Minor and Greece - would have little time to recover for their distorting ordeal, because it would soon begin anew, bur from another source. Their pregnancies - which never failed to take root, ignoring all cycles - would progress naturally; yet the amount of offspring was the surprising aspect. Such was the potency of the seed that in the three cases studied Fausta first misattributed the rapid distention of midriff to an accelerated pregnancy; it would take her merely a month to correct that mistake. They bore children in the multiples. One, a widely-built slave from upper Italy, bore a full ten. 

She assisted with the births - which were much less complicated than the physical state of the body entailed - and observed. Most were boys and girls. Some were, as they fathers, of both sexes. The boys and girls Fausta sold to a slave orphanage in the City.  Those of both sexes she sent away to friends in Gaul to be risen there. The Pontiffs shouldn't know what she was practicing. They would not agree with it. 

The gaelic woman was thus a success from the standpoint of her body. The latest serum was perfect. It made a woman into a hermaphrodite of no peer; of a breeding monster, capable of breaking any woman and own her like a child owns a toy. Not one of her many preceding serums gave a result so magnificent. 

The body was perfect. But there was the question of a mind…

Fausta did not want to create animals. That wasn't in the interest of her clients. Her proteges needed to be sane at all times to fulfill their many potential functions.

But she could  not risk changing the serum anymore. The physical results were outstanding - beyond perfect, too good to lose. But she had to solve the problems of mind. Fausta considered her options. They were not many. 

She could try to dosage the serum, to slow the transformation in the hope that the mind would persist through the process. She tried that on a farm girl from Spain, who was built like a silver miner, with an ugly, brutish body, lacking in a pleasing  curve, but with girlish, pouty face completely out of place on her mannish body. She transformed slowly, maintaining her sanity for the longest time - until her final growth spurt, whereas she would lose all reason and attempt an animal-like escape. It almost succeeded, too: she raped four dolls to an immovable bloat, broke through a metal gate and made it into the forest before the Slithering Catcher got her. 

Fausta chuckled to imagine what would've happened if she got away. How many women could she impregnate in a night, her being in that animalistic rut? A hundred? It would be the biggest single case of cuckolding in the history of the Republic. All performed by a pontiffs escaped changeling. 

Fausta would be the talk of the City - and dead within a week. 

No, dosage did not matter. Maybe there was a way to fine-tune it, but she didn't have enough stock. Therapy? Control? 

She tried many ways. The gaelic woman was the latest experiment in a long, long line. The serum was perfect, but the stock couldn't handle it. There was no way around it. She could not find a trick

Fausta shook her head. 

"Mistress?" 

A doll came close, draped in a dark tunic. Fausta ignored her for a moment. She immensely appreciated the service of her dolls, her blood-woven servants, but their lifeless, mechanical loyalty tired. She tried to give each a body and visage slightly different from one another to make them appear as sisters; it did little to alleviate the problem. 

"It's nothing, Myrmida. Fetch a pair of strong bodied dolls and offer them to the thing in the ninth pit. Her barbaric screams tire me." 

"Immediately, mistress." 

"Are there any news from Arcadia?" 

"Nothing so far, mistress. But it's a long way back. A few days of travel at least." 

"She could've sent a pigeon." 

The doll opened her mouth - and closed it. They were decently intelligent, but had their limitations. She didn't know what to answer - so she said nothing. 

In this way they were much smarter than most people Fausta knew.

She waved the doll off and moved away from the pit, strolling alongside the little gardens towards the elevated portico. Observing the gaelic woman - or the animalistic breeder she became - tired her. Thus she found herself in the elevated High Garden - a brutish, wild thing, ugly by any City standards. But it had a view of the Alpine, and no healer nor magos could better heal a tired soul.

Fausta sighed, then bared a smile. It was chilly; the people of the City might be enjoying the first warm days of the year, but here, in the Cisalpine, the chill of winter would persist for quite a bit longer. 

Yet the elfine did not mind that. She couldn't stand the City. It tired her in many ways and infuriated her in countless others. The bickering and the politics of the pontiffs limited her, the cesspit of Rostra angered her. Fausta was born in the City, earned her stay and much more in the City, reached greatness in the City - but could not muster a modicum of love for it. She had a house on the Palatine, which she sold and never looked back. Her new holdings - a modest villa on the Cisalpine, on the Italian side, blessed not with fertile soils nor anything else fit for financial exploit looked like the typical madness of pontiff born into money yet completely inept in it's management. 

Fausta did not mind such opinions. Those who were interested in her services knew better. Those who were not were of no concern. 

After all, the things she did here couldn't be done at the City - lest the plebs would burn her house. 

…

She expected Arcadia to come back sooner. The management of the villa was taxing. Slaves could not be trusted to handle the operation of her house - nor would they be strong enough, physically and mentally, to manage the stock. This far from the City and this close to Gaul she may also risk revolt. 

She populated the house, thus, with dolls. Loyal, hardy. Capable of easily surviving the outbursts of Fausta's "subjects". But they didn't have imagination. Orders had to be precise. Arcadia somehow mastered it. Fausta, to her irritation, did not. She didn't like how much orders had to be given in order to have a supper. She didn't like how much talking and explaining she had to do. She was patient, but she felt like her time could be better spent. Documenting. Running experiments. Reading and thinking. Perhaps painting, or playing the flute. Anything but trying her best to explain her needs to an automaton of flesh and blood. 

Weird, she then thought, how easy it is to be annoyed by your own creations. Must be the same with children. 

She missed Arcadia very much. She needed her in this house. 

But alas. Arcadia had a task more important than Fausta's daily comfort. If it'll go well, everything will be worth it. And far beyond that. 

The final serum - a tincture of wolfgrass, minotaur blood and seed, olympian golden dust and many, many other thing - was too damaging for the mind, yet perfect for the transformation of body. Her stock wasn't up to it's par. It couldn't handle it. 

Humans lost their minds quickly. The only ludex she tried it on - a good year ago - did not go through the transformation smoothly, and thus was discarded into one of the closed chambers, where she still wails. Elfine stock did not exist - no elfine will be a slave in the Republic, after all. Such is the law. Orcs were a good contender, but no Roman household would dare maintain an orcish slave. Orcs are to be viewed from the safe distance of the amphitheater, after all. 

But what if there was a race, elfine in bloodline, yet denied any protection from the Roman law? A race of high stature, standing at a pace and a cubit on average? Strikingly beautiful, physically strong, statuesque to the very last woman and man? 

There was such a nation, merely forty years ago. Two tribes. Tribes so monstrous they scared the city like nothing else ever did. More than the monstrosities of Barca and the vengeful cohorts of King Numa. The Teutones and the Cimbri. The elfinii of the east. The monsters that almost took Rome. The evil whom no Roman law would protect - not even the unbreakable ban on any elfine slavery. 

Perhaps, if Fausta could find such a specimen, if she could locate a woman of that kind, that monster, that enemy… 

Perhaps then she'd have her perfect specimen for her perfect serum. 

…

From the road, the sounds of a heavily-laden cart were heard.