oseo woke up with mouth and throat still full of the thick, gastric feeding tube of the sort he associated with silicone toys made to feel like tentacles, and his belly bloated full from every possible direction, all orifices plugged up tight. His thoughts were distressingly vague and fuzzy from the two neural rinses he’d been subject to for the past fortnight, and his sinuses were still painfully full, tubes still going up each nostril and branching out into the entrance to every sinus cavity, and also down his windpipe. His vision, blurred and painful, registered not the blinding violet-white light he’d been forced to look straight into after taking in dilation eyedrops, but a soothing red and black pattern that spun slowly in a very friendly sort of way.
Slowly, the pressure in his head eased, and he realised that the lightheadedness wasn’t from drugs, it was from his head literally getting lighter, sinuses being drained out. That hadn’t happened the last two nightmarish times he’d been strapped into the chair for “treatment” in the nightmarish weeks he’d been in the nightmarish sanitorium. They’d been obsessed with filling every space inside him, insisting in their weirdly Victorian way that it was what would cure him of This Hysterical Fancy That You’re Not A Lady.
He was a Lady, he just wasn’t a female one; but that had confused even modern attitudes, so he didn’t bother with it here, in this strange world that had an amalgam of Victorian attitudes with midcentury aesthetics and way higher tech than anything he’d ever known, though it was probably tech mixed with magic or something, from the unrealistic things it could do to a body.
He could see the edges of the pattern now, he realised; they were a spiral, a blurry spiral but that meant his vision was healing. Thank fuck, the horror he’d felt when they’d calmly forced his eyes open and calmly put dilation drops in and calmly put the visor over them and calmly turned on ultra-bright ultraviolet light had been the absolute worst emotion he’d felt in years, possibly ever. He’d felt horror before when people had been abusing him and he’d been aware they were abusing him, but that had always been emotional damage, which was infinitely more heal-able than burning out his retinas.
But why would looking at a red and black pattern somehow heal his eyes? That made zero sense; then again, nothing really made sense, here, so it may as well be that hypnosis could heal his eyes, why not? He certainly wasn’t going to question it, it certainly wasn’t the weirdest thing that had happened this week….
As he felt his belly beginning to drain, it occurred to him that this might in fact be some kind of rescue. The question was: why was he being rescued, and by whom?
As the pattern got clearer, he hoped it was who he thought it was. This wasn’t exactly the right pattern, but it was the right colours….
It took a long time for everything to drain out of his overstretched belly, and he started to black out as he felt the unknown rescuers touching his tits, for which he was grateful—the whole process of having whatever-it-was shoved into his tits had been agonising and done entirely without anaesthetics or analgesics of any kind.
⁂
Maximillien Vaux watched from the observation mezzanine, hands on his copper cane, as they undid all of Doctor [name]’s precious, careful ruining of one of his chosen pets. Ever since the damned madsci had come blowing into Vaux’s demesne, he’d been sniping out of the population Vaux used. And now this latest insult, the spicy little boy that—wonderful of all things—liked what Vaux had been doing to him—actively. Doing. To. Him, Vaux noted with more than irritation, the electricity arcing from his hands grounding itself with the cane rather than flying wildly around him, as it once had. It wouldn’t do to destroy his own sensitive equipment, after all.
He watched his pet Plague Doctor undo the damage, Vaux’s talons flexing where they were folded over his cane. He projected calm menace, but not toward his bird-masked doctor, nor the nurses. No, they were loyal, they were loyal and they were competent; Vaux watched as they worked on the paired SPDER devices—his own invention!—that had been installed, waiting for the verdict on just how they had been installed, and whether they had done any permanent damage that would prevent his new favourite not-a-cow-yet from giving milk.
Waited, and thought on revenge. The Plague Doctor finally gave soft orders to his assistants, leaving the boy’s nipples spread open as he went up the brass spiral staircase to the observation mezzanine, bowing briefly.
‘Master.’
‘How bad is it, Doc?’
‘Medium-bad,’ the Doctor said confidently—he said everything with quiet confidence, and Vaux appreciated that you could trust that confidence. If he wasn’t confident about something, he’d say he wasn’t, and not say more until he was, again. If he said it was medium-bad then it was medium-bad and you could bet money on it. ‘It will take time to heal the damage from how rashly they were put in, and the milk ducts have been permanently widened, which we don’t normally do until the cow has been giving milk, and growing, for some time.’
‘My SPDERs are up to the task,’ Vaux said, with the same confidence. ‘I just need to figure out what instructions to give them. What model are they?’
‘The Serenity.’
Vaux closed his eyes in a wince, sighing. ‘Of-fucking-course it’s the Serenity…’ A model that was barebones, cheap, and only suitable for use on subjects not intended for milking. The upside was that, like all models, it could be upgraded if you had the parts. The man who owned the factory always had the parts. ‘Order the necessary parts to upgrade it to the capabilities we need. We’ll just have to focus on growing his teats earlier than usual. The rat bastard already stretched out his belly for me, at least…’ Vaux watched as the Doctor bowed to him and went down to the main level again, sending his assistants to the parts cabinet and worktable to begin the arduous task of upgrading the SPDERs.
They would be a while, and Vaux watched for a while as the Doctor made the SPDERs emerge as much as they were able to, expanding them into maintenance configuration, the boy’s nipples held wide open by their araneiform ‘limbs’, before he turned to go into his panopticon and see what the boy’s scintillating little mind had been doing….