The Goblin Husbandry Project Pt. 01

(Discretion advised: Contains questionable/retroactive consent, deliberately disgusting and disturbing imagery)

There was a bitter taste in Leigh's mouth as she realized she was awake, sitting on her bedspread and holding an emptied bottle of amnesia potion. Oh well, there was something that yesterday's self didn't want her to know, not that uncommon.

There was a subtle hum in the air as Leigh warmed up the mana reactor for the morning as she always did. The thing, which sieved the more energetic particles of mana out of the air throughout the night and stored them to be directed throughout her tower's systems, had cost a pretty penny which she did not in fact have to pay back just yet, sinking a whole year's proceeds from adventuring into the principal on the loan for the parcel of land her tower was on and the reactor, which at the moment had been used only for lighting and appliances. The savings in time for not having to employ servants or worse, use her own magic to make daily chores acceptably easy, had been spent in the preparations toward executing on the work which she would set about doing this day.

She had purchased this parcel from a local lord who apparently did not see the same value in it that she did and she felt no need to inform him of his mistake. Not that he would be able to eke the same value out of this thick, hilly forest without destroying the very thing she'd sought it out for. It was just her good fortune that mages in good standing often chose to set up out in the wilderness in order to pursue their studies of magic away from the distractions of society. Leigh herself at the tender age of twenty-two was perhaps a little too young for this approach to make sense, but anyone who had been in an adventuring party and split up the horde of a dragon could be expected to use up their share of gold right away on frivolity.

Stepping into the dressing room, she spied that her curly, chestnut hair was again falling over her ears and she considered summoning up an imp to take it down a few inches. She'd gotten used to a boyish cut during her adventures after an incident while clearing out a tomb had burnt off a large portion while it hung to her hips and the party's rogue had taken the initiative to chop the rest roughly off. It wouldn't be that bad as it was, even as something to potentially be grabbed by a monster, so she just ran a brush through it until her tangled bedhead was relieved.

Breakfast was already cooking when she stepped into the dining room, made by an imp whose summoning circle was built into the kitchen counter and activated upon the opening of her bedroom door, one use of thaumaturgy Leigh was particularly proud of.

Her other little point of pride brought the platter holding breakfast into the room, his green head bobbing as he walked. The goblin slipped his delivery of sausages and an omelette into her space at the table and calmly walked to his own where his own serving already sat. Timmie was rather well behaved for one of that hateful little breed, even spreading a handkerchief over his bony lap, though Leigh had spent months of conditioning to get his manners to this height.

"Washed your hands, did you?" she said.

Timmie flipped up his hands, showing that indeed he had even taken care to get the dirt from beneath his claws. Trimming those would be important in the future, but for her plan to bear fruit, the little man would need to resemble his near-animal brethren to a large enough degree to pass without notice in their home.

Something she found humorous, washing a goblin left its chronically filth-covered green skin two or three shades lighter, not quite minty.

"Once we have finished our meal, the two of us will be going out for a walk to the hole you found for me last week." Leigh extended an ethereal hand into the space above Timmie's head and gave it a brief pat as a reward. The sparse, stringy hair she felt under the magic hand's fingers would be another bit of grotesquerie to be ameliorated in the days to come. "Prepare rations for a half day and a coat. We wouldn't want you to come down with something, would we?"

He flopped his head back and forward in a mock nod, his long ears nearly slapping against the side of his cheeks. The creature was still an imbecile after all, but the ears were oddly endearing, almost elfin if it weren't for the nibbles his mates had taken out of them before Leigh caught him.

They ate in silence, as though goblins technically had the capacity and anatomy for speech, one from an area like this with a dismal human population and outside the domain of any demonic lords looking for cheap cannon fodder would not have the need for it. In fact, it had been a major difficulty in studying the damnable creature's history as they did not have a tradition of oral storytelling, Leigh had never heard of a goblin writing a single thing down, and they rarely made artifacts beyond a thing tied to another thing. Piecing together a history had taken a great deal of crystal gazing and then had only revealed that they were goblins now as they were goblins millennia before, wallowing in the wading pool of evolution. From the garbage heap of creation, the ravening creatures could perhaps call Timmie over there, stuffing his face with sausage, the peak of their culture.

Yes, Timmie, the one who, upon Leigh leaving her tower, it was discovered failed to properly pack the rations and was in fact simply holding them in the crook of his elbow, one bar of oats and dried berries clenched between his gnarly teeth. And, seeing her disappointment, spat the remaining half in with the rest of them, contrived to look apologetic.

No matter, she thought as they walked; she'd made sure to have enough for herself in her own bag along with her potions and varied pouches of supplies. It was hard enough to bear eating off a plate one of these monsters had touched, when her years of adventuring had shown it necessary after finishing an extermination to have oneself cleansed at a nearby church or shrine to ensure one didn't come down with a pox. These days, knowing that she would have to interact with the disgusting creatures on a regular basis, Leigh carried always an ampoule which would do the same and not incur an offering to whatever backwater god happened to be worshiped locally.

While she kept an eye out on the way, following Timmie, Leigh knew very well that there wouldn't be much in the way of herbs to collect. If there had been anything worth taking away from this land, she wouldn't have gotten it at such a premium, now would she? Pallswort, every once in a while she could spot peeking out of the underbrush, but those small, brownish flowers were only really good for chewing to get rid of bad breath. And one would think that she would grab this up to have Timmie gnawing at all times, but while it did effectively clear up the sour, rotting-meat smell, its taste was so repulsive that she didn't even feel right making the goblin chew it.

And anyway, teaching him to brush his damn horrible teeth was working well enough at the moment.

Timmie stopped suddenly and sniffed the air, they were close. He received his head-pats for being a good boy and Leigh pulled out a collapsible spyglass to scout ahead.

Sure enough, there was the hole into the goblin tribe's warren, set into the side of a small hill, and a couple of the males were dragging inside the carcass of a boar that they had taken down that night. It was apparent that they hadn't been able to do so without taking their share and more already, gouges in the poor animal's flesh correlating to the hunters' bulging bellies. Hard to blame them for indulging when they brought home the prize, and would get a similarly small portion as they left behind when it was one of their fellows bringing it in, as was more than evident as goblins were endemically starving at almost all times.

Welp, time to get to the point. Leigh pressed a bottle of purplish liquid into Timmie's hand and he went along with the plan, dashing into the warren to find his way down into the deepest depth and once there, pull the cork.

A minute later, there was a poof of purple gas from the entrance and Leigh strolled to it with the certainty of one who had herself created the sleeping potion, earning herself a day and a half nap on her lab's floor when her glassware had turned out not to be completely air-tight. A slumbering goblin by the hole's entrance, the furthest point from the epicenter of the effect, further assured her sense of safety as she bent double to half-crawl inside.

Only a few steps inside, the light from the outside was entirely cut off. At this point, her former adventuring party would have broken out the torches, but Leigh had been at work even then to make something which would make the smoking, choking things obsolete: a salve she slipped out of her pocket and swiped across her eyelids, granting her perfect vision in this underground space as though the ceiling was open to the sky without drawing attention to herself with the glow of firelight.

Not that it made the structure of these tunnels that much easier to navigate. The tunnel to the surface was itself straight but there were branching tunnels coming off it and obscuring where each path might have led. In soft clay like this, Leigh assumed each member of the pack would feel comfortable digging out their own space and thus complicate it beyond reason. But goblins were, as a rule, moronic, so the main chamber would be predictably beneath the root system of the tree on the hill where the structural integrity was best.

Brushing her shoulders against the walls, Leigh tried her best to make her way forward without falling to her knees. Cave systems were better or worse than this and she didn't feel like complaining, but hoped she would have to go inside herself minimally in the years to come.

Down here there was a stench like rancid meat and body odor, not to mention the... waste... Her nose would eventually grow numb to the smell, experience said, so Leigh continued, swallowing the beginnings of vomit and waiting for her brain to get it done.

As predicted, the primary nest was right where the roots stabilized the ceiling, a bit of taproot poking through the dirt. It was finally large enough for Leigh to stand and stretch, grateful and pushing the incipience of back pain out of her mind.

A couple dozen little, green bodies lay scattered in the communal sleeping/everything else space. This clan in particular was actually starting from a better place than most of the dullard species and had made themselves a softer nest out of dried grass piled up rather than curling up wherever sleep took them like a dog.

No, Leigh corrected herself, dogs did in fact clear out their own sleeping spaces before settling down.

With the derogatory thoughts out of the way, she went about the arduous task of measuring each individual. The very largest among this bunch was three feet tall when she stretched him out and didn't show many markers of past disease, but size itself wasn't the only thing to be bred for; that would likely take care of itself with an increased availability of food. He did have relatively spotless genitals...

The popular conception of goblins was one borne of encounters with the more civilized sort. There wasn't a scrap of cloth to be found on this lot. Not much to see anyway, as the warty penises were shrunk back into sheaths and the only apparent difference between a goblin man and woman when not in a state of arousal or pregnancy was the hairy sack hanging below (even then, the goblin females could give their brothers a run for their money with untamed hair, reducing the difference further). Sure, there was that one clan that a human had spent two decades selectively breeding for tits and ass, but it was an ultimately damaging endeavor when the spinal issues on the poor creatures cut an already low life expectancy down to half.

Well, they sold well enough, and that was likely all the breeder cared about.

Leigh did make sure to separate the females and the males; selecting for the biggest brain case would be a horrible miscalculation if one didn't also consider the width of the birthing canal. And yes, she thought as she trimmed away matted hair to insert the spectrum for measurements, this would eventually give the descendants disproportionately large hips. But childbirth was already a major difficulty with the species to the point that some researchers assumed they bred in litters as the only way to maintain a population when birth was so dangerous for the females.

Right, cutting down on litter size would probably be a good idea as well. The more resources that went to a single child the better.

Once she was finished categorizing the lot of them by desirable traits, Leigh took from her bag a device modeled after the sting of a wasp and administered a small amount of potion into the blood of those in which she could find no value. She'd have taken ninety percent of them from the gene pool with this potion, which would harmlessly disable sperm production and reduce the health of the uterine walls so these individuals would make less of a difference in the clan's future generations, but that would have destroyed the population within only a few years. She would have to bring in more clans from outside at some point to avoid issues with genetic bottlenecking anyway.

For this round, she was only able to focus on those apparent disabilities and genetic diseases which damaged potential effectiveness as a species. The goblin was such a disfigured one in the first place that there was no shortage of these traits, but most people, adventurers and common man alike, only recognized this as ugliness instead of a disadvantage.

Leigh wiped her hands on her coat as she finished to get off the grime. She continued down the hole, going by feel toward the point Timmie would have rushed. At the epicenter of the sleep potion's effect, and with his weight, the little guy would likely have to get home on Leigh's back, and she justified the disgusting experience as a reward for him.

Deeper, the dirt tunnel turned more steeply down and she had to brace herself against the opposite wall to keep from sliding down on her ass into the unknown.

It wasn't until she was completely vertical and her foot no longer touched the opposite wall that she understood why the damnable things would make a hole like this one. Actually rather clever, considering how backward the clan would have to be with its limited contact with the more developed races. After all, she might think of making a passageway which only someone like herself could navigate, and those ugly claws would in fact make it trivial to climb a soft, dirt hole or dig a new one with less of an incline to get out.

Leigh dropped down the trap and rolled head over heel to a stop in a tight chamber. And she heard, somehow, the chittering pseudo-speech of wakeful goblins.

They petered in from side passages, half a dozen or so of them with more making themselves heard from deeper within the tunnels, and menaced Leigh with rocks clutched in grubby paws and bared teeth.

She raised her hand to blast them with magic and in that moment discovered that her wand had gone missing in the fall. The lead goblin grabbed her wrist in wiry fingers with monkey strength and dirty claws scratching at her skin; his cheeks were drawn back in a rictus grin, giggling behind it as it yanked her off her knees and onto her belly. There wasn't any time to search for a tool to take down her attacker before she was set upon by his fellows, jumping on her back, capturing her other arm and wrenching it behind her back.

She wriggled beneath it, instinctively trying to get herself free even as the revolting creatures grabbed at her clothes, heaved back on her hair so she couldn't even hide her face in the dirt to avoid having to look at them.

So this was how it ended, she thought, already starting to tear up. It wasn't supposed to be this way, alone in the dark like a newbie because she hadn't taken them seriously... but why hadn't the sleep potion worked!? It went through her head over and over even as the group dragged her away through tunnels too tight for her to travel except prone, even as she tried to stop sobbing since one of the creatures had liked the taste of salt on her face and kept trying to get its tongue up her nose. She'd used that very technique to destroy hundreds of goblin nests with potent poisons, but this once it had the gall to fail!?

Leigh let herself be dragged, stewing inside but careful not to spew abuses at her captors lest the bumpy, lapping tongue find its way inside her mouth. Through more tunnels, across stones, branches, and other refuse, she was eventually thrown against a wall of exposed rock deep within the earth and had to watch as the group filtered out with most of her clothes and her bag ripped and clenched in their grubby paws, then covered the only way out with a hatch of sticks jammed into the dirt.

There in the dark, cramped space, Leigh had to tear away the last few scraps of clothing they left her with, underwear included, to cover the largest cuts on her skin.

Sure, the so-called bars on her cell could have been easily kicked out of place, but she couldn't know the way out, not well enough to escape when the nest was entirely awake...

Leigh curled up against the wall and thought up plans until the potion allowing her to see faded from her blood and her world was plunged into cthonic darkness. She didn't think she could sleep, not with the sting of her many scratches and the pains from being dragged along the ground like a sack of potatoes, but in this darkness, there was hardly a difference between wakefulness and slumber...

-=-

No way to tell how long she'd been unconscious, but Leigh knew she had been when the prison was cracked open and a couple of her captors came inside. One grabbed her ankle and tried to open up her legs, huffing and puffing until her foot caught him in the ribs. Even the kick of a small woman like herself was enough to smack him against the wall to the other goblin's laughter, but he was back right away and the way he snarled said to her that her next outburst would be met with something more, a point it drove home with a sharp-toothed nibble on her hip.

Trembling, Leigh girded her mind against what she knew would happen. Her thighs were forced open, claws digging into her tender skin as the small body moved between her legs, bumpy skin rubbing against hers. She could feel the damn thing's cock raising out of its hairy crotch, throbbing against her thigh, but it didn't wait a moment to thrust, missing her pussy entirely and unfortunately dragging the rough length of it across her clit. She drew a sharp breath in surprise and thrust her hand between her legs to stop it, but the other one just as quickly grabbed her wrists and pulled them up against her head, standing astride her head, its stinking, oily balls flopped against her forehead.

She turned to avoid the thing's penis as it too came to life against her face, whapped against her even as his friend's cock finally found its target and pushed between her pussy lips.

A clawed grip around her hips forced the goblin's cock deeper with the thing's frantic humping, balls swinging against her ass as it squealed with pleasure. Despite herself, Leigh could feel something too, heat radiating from deep within as she started to hear the squishing between her legs. She felt a gob of warm saliva drop into her lap, pressed inside her pussy by the head of the creature's dick, sticking and foaming against her skin.

The one by her head wasn't satisfied with its stinking cock leaking precum against her cheek. It brought up its foot and stomped on Leigh's breast, angrily waggling its balls across her face, smearing her with its juices in an attempt to nudge her lips apart with the head of its cock.