Pairs of Pumpkins #10: The Embrace of Disgrace 01

Pairs Of Pumpkins Episode 10

The Embrace of Disgrace

By Jess Faulks

Part One: The Dam of Degeneracy

Month of Adonnamoon, Day 17: Vindak

Boots and dress shoes rapped along the snaking, cobblestone streets of Stusport's Low Town, shattering the stillness of the night. The town was desolate while horns of alarm rang out in the distance above and around them, from the High Town whence they fled down a towering cliff's worth of zig-zagging stairs.

"Hurry! The safehouse is ahead!"

Portia wasn't fast with Jasper in tow. He was in his late teens and with a full stride and youthful vigor, he should have been able to keep up with the heavy-chested, older adventuress. Instead, he was panting almost as long as he'd been limping and he'd been limping from his first step. One leg was shorter than the other, he'd mentioned, unsolicited and repeatedly.

Plague had been simmering in the city while she was lost in her quest of self-discovery and Stusport was barren now. Sickly, green pennants warning of infection hung from every oil lamp lining the streets of High Town above and less consistently, here in Low Town.

Thinking back, she'd noticed the coughs and sniffles when out in public. Sebastian, the Counselor and Zhang, the exotic bartender were in less-than-perfect health when she'd met them. Things had been deteriorating in the city but it was only after her leap from the Grand Bridge just five days prior, when she started to notice.

It was one more thing to feel guilty about missing in her self-absorption but that phase was in the past. Whatever her mental sickness or disgusting addiction was, she had an obligation to her children, to ensure their safety and offer them freedom.

Her exact plan to check on, and if needed, rescue the three of her children who lived in the city formed quickly after meeting Varda but as the threat of plague grew more real by the day, they changed nearly as fast and she re-prioritized by threat level.

Young Bowen was with a family, Young Sienna at a brothel, and teenage Jasper was adopted into the local royalty. Bowen might be happy and safe with his family and likely didn't need to be rescued at all. Sienna absolutely did, whether she knew it or not but her rescue was a much lower risk than Jasper's would be, incurring the wrath of the whole City Watch. He was supposed to be last.

Portia wasn't sure if Jasper would want to leave his life. There was no inherent exploitation in his adoption but as the lockdown took effect, it was clear the Lord's Castle might become impossible to infiltrate if she waited any longer.

After some recon and preparation, she broke in that night. With a grappling hook, she scaled the castle walls, navigated the outer yards then climbing the tower to the balcony of a bedchamber. After peeking to be sure, she climbed in to meet a familiar-looking and very surprised teenage fox in his nightclothes.

Portia explained everything quickly enough: she was his biological mother. He'd been adopted. She didn't know any of this until recently.

The vixen offered him to continue his life as it was or run off with her, this stranger claiming to be his mother. Jasper knew of her by reputation as an adventurer, and she had some concern over how exciting he found that. He wasn't adventuring material.

The boy was handsome, like all of her children she'd met thus far, but was out-of-shape and overfed, soft from a life of privilege. In height, he was up to her collarbone with a mop of hair like the head of a mushroom. It was the worst haircut she'd seen in some time and the clearest evidence his family might in fact, be cruel.

The fur of his body was the same, stark white as the hair on his head. It came together to make his entire appearance strikingly monochrome except for his sky blue eyes. There was a slouch when he stood and he limped when he moved, in such a dramatic fashion that no one would miss his impairment.

Like every man she'd ever met, he talked to her chest as much as her face, even after explaining their blood relation. She didn't expect him to be so eager to leave with her but it didn't take long for him to rationalize. He spoke of how obvious it was to everyone he was adopted and how they treated him as a lesser for it. Nobody liked him. Nobody loved him. He had no friends. What convinced her was his dread of the impending responsibilities that came with royalty, something she related to as a former Princess.

Still, his awareness of her adventuring career had likely biased his choice in a way he wasn't thinking through Her appearance and figure might have too. Telling the boy a woman is his biological mother was not the deterrent of attention she expected, when he was eye height to breasts bigger than his head. They hadn't had enough time to talk before the guards arrived. What else could she do?

"Are we close? I don't know how much more I can run."

"You're going back home and I'm dead if you stop."

After zig-zagging down the cliffside stairs, his exhaustion was more justified and even the vixen adventuress had broken a sweat. The young Lord had likely never had to run for his life.

"C'mon, it's not much further!"

Jasper was only one of many hundreds of children Portia recently learned she had. Zarron, a raccoon wizard in her home of The Pale Lands had taken all of her eggs twenty years ago without her knowledge but possibly, with her consent. He'd been breeding and selling them ever since.

The seven she met before tonight were healthy and beautiful. Beyond his impaired leg, Jasper mostly seemed to be as well.

Unlike the others, Jasper was the result of one of Zarron's more disgusting initiatives: the raccoon sorcerer had bred some of her eggs with seed from her younger brother, Bjorn.

"Purebloods" Zarron called them, for some sick reason. Jasper could have been any manner of monster for his being inbred and there were hints in the ledger she'd stolen from the wizard, some became exactly that.

The first set of "Pureblood" entires had been updated in the years since its writing. The first two, Tati and Titian had their genders updated from M to I, which she presumed meant Intersex, something she'd met very few of in her travels and magic had often been involved. Was that also an experiment, the passage of time or some side effect of the inbreeding?

Additional, brief notes marked the first "Purebloods" as failures by angrily scrawled, single words in red ink: Hellions. Idiot. Runt. Feral. Murderer. Jasper was commented as "malformed," presumably because of his legs.

Skipping ahead through the pages, later inbred children were few and far between, most without the same updates added later. For whatever reason, Zarron hadn't made many of them. Perhaps because of the trouble they caused or perhaps for a lack of enough sperm.

Jasper's entry didn't indicate the Lord and Lady of Stusport asked for or had been aware they had an inbred child. Of the Purebloods, he was the second to have been sold as an infant. Only a daughter named Alena, a wife-to-be ordered to have "the biggest breasts possible" and later updated as "Murderer" had come first.

Jasper wasn't as slow as an overdeveloped Alena must be, but the limp was ever present and his commentary on it, consistent. The rest of his slowness she credited to a cushy, well-fed, courtly life.

"We need to get off this street!" he barked after a few more blocks, panting and winded.

"I told you, we're close!"

"Now!"

His demeanor had been shy and submissive the entire time until now, when he dug in his heels and tugged her to turn down a narrow alley. The boy was leading now and she was immediately irritated, the brick walls scraping the front of her breastplate and the weapons on her back at once. She wasn't built for tight spaces.

"You remember I'm rescuing you, right?"

Jasper was panting hard, fur drenched in sweat as he stopped and turned around, much easier than she could in the confines of the close-together walls. His eyes darted over his mother, practically wedged in behind him and blocking the entire alley. With obvious reluctance, he surged in and ducked through the tunnel made by the one-foot difference between how far her breasts stuck out in front of her, and the rest of her. He squeezed under and against her, poking his head out the other side to watch. His body was hot against her armored stomach and thighs, swelling and contracting with his labored breath. Her stomach sucked in, trying to ignore the growing heat.

"They're coming," he said and her hand reached back to the grip of a tomahawk, the other resting on his bent-over, lower back sticking out from the other side of her. Almost on cue, clopping, shoed footfalls and rattling scabbards rushed down the street they'd just been on. Six gazelles in light armor and shortswords, passed the alley at speeds no fox could outrun. They were a Pursuit Team of the City Watch, moving with the urgency and awareness that a noble child had been kidnapped.

"Quiet," she whispered and took a deep breath to hold, bringing even more of her against her son. He did the same. The darkness of the alley would hopefully be enough to hide them.

This was closer than they'd ever been, their first time touching other than her dragging him by the hand as they fled. It was a convenient excuse for him to be against her breasts. He'd been staring and talking to them shamelessly from the moment she appeared in his room and only after the revelation she was his birth mother did he make any effort to stop. He failed often.

The vixen wasn't innocent herself. Jasper was in his nightshirt when she broke into his bed chambers and his teenage arousal began to pour from his sheath in her presence. The second, mature son she'd met, he was also enormously endowed, perhaps even bigger than Joseph. Joseph, the son who had her bent over, mounted and anally knotted when she learned she had children at all.

Size ran in the family, from her mother to her daughters. Joseph and Jasper suggested it was true for the men as well. She'd had more endowed partners in equines, bovines and some canines but there was something almost magical about how perfectly Joseph fit inside her, like some long, lost key to her lock. The familiar warmth in her loins swelled with the magnetism of her son as if her sick addiction hadn't already been confirmed. An impulsive flash as she stood in his bedroom imagined seducing him in his childhood bed, his hands planted on those giant breasts he clearly loved so much.

Portia kept her head straight and was proud of her self-control. Were they not interrupted, she'd have put more effort into talking him out of coming with her or at least, making sure he was absolutely certain. Rescuing the others was clear enough but Jasper had an actual future and a family behind his teenage dissatisfaction, even if it was a royal one. This was the first rescue she'd been hesitant about, after meeting him.

The hooves passed into silence. The gazelles were chasers, not hunters. The hunters would come eventually but she'd been dropping spiced, alchemical bombs behind her, to throw their trail from whomever might try to track them by scent.

"How did you know they were coming? You heard that before me?"

"I know their patterns and stuff," he whispered, his back against the bottoms of her armored breasts. "You could've taken them, though. Gazelles aren't as tough as the Royal Guards at the Castle."

Jasper had also known guards were coming to check on him before he should have been able to hear them, like a sixth sense some adventurers developed after enough years of paranoia. It gave her a moment to lock the door as they arrived, which bought them time but aroused suspicion.

He tried to bluff through closed doors but wasn't convincing and she didn't have the stature to find anywhere in his room to hide. Everything had escalated quickly and the pair escaped down the rope she'd climbed up on, right before they kicked in the doors.

As they'd fled through the castle grounds, he'd done it again at least twice, anticipating when guards were around a corner and more, behind a door. She'd had to knock out a few guards who spotted them anyway but escaping a castle on high alert should have gone a lot worse than it did.

"Everything went wrong back there. We weren't supposed to fight anyone. I was trying to sneak you out! Do they always check on you that often?"

"Since I was a kid. It's annoying."

"Well, we would have had to fight a lot more of them if you weren't so good at knowing where they're going to pop out next."

"They have patterns," he repeated. "We're clear now."

Portia sidestepped back to the mouth of the alley, burying his head as she peeked out. They were gone. "You're going to let me lead this time?" She slipped out past him, back into the street. He looked sad as he stood up, scolded. "I mean, unless more of them are coming. That was well spotted."

Jasper smiled, his mouth still hanging open, panting but less intensely now. "We're fine but I'll tell you. You said we were close."

The vixen nodded. "You're okay? Ready to run?"

He nodded quickly and she led, dragging her son by the wrist with a little less urgency now, giving him time enough to warn her of the next threat.

They wove through a few more city blocks until they reached a waterfront road, part of the docks themselves. Massive, moored ships, cranes and crates lined one side of the street and on the other, weather-worn row and warehouses. Among those, was the basement safehouse. Zhang arranged it when she last saw him, pale and coughing. Portia insisted on paying him, at least for the supplies he had packed it with. He hesitated to accept but did, wishing her well and looking like death.

With the inn closed, she hoped for the safehouse to be her Base of Operations for all three possible rescues but a total lockdown of the city was declared for the next morning. The lethality of the plague was said to be dangerously high and earlier in the day, she'd seen carts of bodies being hauled to mass cremations in several of the town squares, their smoke plums rising into the sky confirming their quantity and graveness. She would meet with Jasper before the Fortress was on its highest defenses and decide after what to do about Bowen, Sienna and leaving Stusport.

At the safehouse, she ushered him in and then closed the door behind them. She locked the door and then flattened her back against it.

"None of that went the way it was supposed to go," she slumped and sighed.

"I hate to say it but this plague might work in our favor. They can't go house to house looking for me, once the lockdown is in effect!"

"We can't leave town either. Maybe we can't even leave this place."

The safehouse was minimal and it made sense why Zhang hesitated to take her money. It was a small, basement room of a commercial warehouse converted to an improvised living space, intended for someone to hide out for a very long time but not very comfortably.

The main area of the room was simply furnished with a round, dining table and four chairs. There was a minimal kitchen and deep pantry, with water, bread and dried meat to tide them over for months if needed. The water closet was detached and a true closet, with barely room for her to turn around in it. The only bathing facilities were a long-handled brush, a sponge and a wooden tub that neither of them would fit in. The accommodations were far from luxurious but it would be enough to weather most trouble or unwanted attention.

Jasper used the handrail to step down a short staircase and to the sole bed, panting as he sat down hard on it.

"I wonder how far this plague spread. I'm worried about the others."

"My other brothers and sisters?"

"Well, yes. All of them. But particularly, the other two here. And the five I left back in Zentia."

"Big family."

"You have no idea," Portia shook her head and pushed off the door. She tugged her tomahawks off her back and set them down before coming to sit on the top of the small staircase.

"When the wizard stole my eggs, he didn't seem to waste many. You've got hundreds of brothers and sisters. Possibly a thousand? Thousands?" With a twist of her posture, she slipped the ledger off her back and set it aside, by her weapons. "I can't bring myself to count but it's a thick book. I think he's going to keep making more until I stop him."

"But how do you juggle stopping him with all the older children who need help more urgently?"

"That's a great question. I'm working on it." The plague made all of that much more complicated.

Jasper nodded, starting to catch his breath. "They're pretty sure it's contained to the city. They shut the gates a few days ago when they figured out how bad this might get."

"You sure know a lot of things."

Jasper looked to the ground with a shy smile. "Well, I overhear everything that happens in the Lord's Fortress. I guess it gives me some advantage." He paused a long moment before speaking again. "You said didn't know about all of these children. Until recently?"

Portia canted her head. "I didn't give birth to any of them, including you. It's been less than three months since I found out about any of you," she rubbed her hand over her face.

His face straightened before she was done speaking. "They're coming."

The vixen perked her ears and tilted her head. Silence. "Are you sure?" He sat still, watching her and after a moment, she heard it too. "Shit." She jumped to her feet and slung her weapons on her back.

"They're only searching. Not expecting a fight. Don't open the door."

The clopping of boots soon arrived. Portia froze, watching Joseph and pulling a weapon near. A knock rapped on the door.

"This is the Stusport City Watch. We are looking for a couple of white foxes who may be in this area. We can see the light on."

Portia threw a glare at the candle she'd left lit.

Jasper began to cough. Lightly at first, then hard. It sounded fake until it didn't and Jasper was coughing loud enough to worry his mother that it was genuine. Portia waited at the door, studying her son with narrowing eyes.

"Forget it, they're goners," one of them spoke, muffled by the door.

She rushed to Jasper, standing before him as he caught his breath. The smile at the corner of his mouth confirmed he'd forced it.

"Raised by royals. Learned deception. Who'd have thought?"

His smile grew to a proud grin.

"How did you know?"

"Know what?" His smile disintegrated as fast as it appeared.

"They were coming."

"I heard them."

Portia narrowed her eyes and balled her fists at her hips. "You hear better than me? How'd you know they were searching and not on to us?"

He was nervous. "I studied..."

"Door-to-door patterns for manhunts during outbreaks of disease? How stupid do you think I am?"

"It's not magic."

Portia froze and her fur stood on end. "I didn't say it was magic. Magic doesn't work on me," she said, lifting the charm around her neck, which drew his eyes back to the cleavage it emerged from. A wave of guilt surged through her. She loved it. Thoughts raced to imagined sensations, wanting those inexperienced hands all over her breasts.

Her mouth opened to say more but it trailed off as she read his face. His eyes had doubled in size and dropped straight to her chest while his jaw fell entirely slack. It was like she'd said it out loud. He knew!

"How are you doing that?!" she barked, stepping up and taking him by the shoulders, which only brought her chest closer to his muzzle.

She froze with a realization. "My Gods. Are you reading my fucking thoughts?!"