We returned to the great hollow where Eileen prepared a light blue vial that could supposedly remove my penis. The color was the complete opposite of Miuna's secretions from dissolving a tennoraphallus. Was I really going to do this? Remove the thing that the high priestesses crowned me for sharing the image of the Goddess Vessyra?

"What did you use to create this?" I asked Eileen.

"You… don't want to know…" she answered, red in the face and turning away.

"How is that supposed to inspire confidence?!" I complained.

Eileen squirmed uncomfortably where she stood, especially her legs.

"D-Don't tell me, you…"

"In order to accurately test its potency, I had no other choice but to use myself as a sample subject," she said.

This was Eileen we were talking about. Probably the most gifted alchemist of our time. If I could trust anyone to successfully brew a potion to give and remove a penis, it would be her.

Mira sat at the dinner table with her legs crossed, gnawing on a sephalothane leaf as a substitute for her pipe.

"Do you have anything to add, Mira?" I asked.

"It's your body, darling. If I had to say, I would prefer to be the only one who carries your child. Perhaps we could switch one day?" She grinned. Her answer couldn't have made me anymore nervous from what I was about to do.

When it came down to it, Eileen had an abundance of potions to reverse the effects. If I wanted to have a dick again, I could. I pinched my nose and tipped the liquid into my mouth.

A weight had lifted not from my shoulders, but from between my thighs. I lifted my robes to see not a bulge, but the flat surface with an ever-so slight bump from my vagina.

"It's gone." I sighed with relief.

"Of course, it worked. Worked on me," Eileen declared with joy.

Mira hugged me from behind and plucked a pink vial from the potion rack.

"Maybe it's my turn to impregnate you," she said.

"Gods, no. At least not yet… I don't think I'm ready for that…" I mumbled, face turning red.

Although the idea of having Mira's baby stirred me with indescribable joy, right now wasn't a good time. Who knew what could happen in the coming months. Mira was taking a big risk carrying already. It scared the magic out of me that she continued to put herself in danger in spite of that.

"Well, then…" Mira glanced around the room, spotted Eudora's unfinished hot chocolate, and poured the contents of the vial into it. She successfully mixed the contents just in time as Eudora finally emerged from her hour-long soak in the bath, steam billowed out from underneath.

"You can expect me to come here more often. That was quite a treat," Eudora said.

Eileen and I gawked as Eudora chugged the rest of her hot chocolate. Mira burst into laughter, but the victim was none the wiser.

"Did I miss a joke?" she asked.

Eudora keeled over like she had been punched in the gut, then lifted her robes to see a penis. She glared at the one person in the room still laughing.

"This is funny to you, is it. Then I hope you will live with this consequence." The Cackling Witch had the last laugh. She drew a nail across her palm and bled onto the floor. Bloody tendrils sprouted and took a hold of Mira, binding her in place.

"Mmmm! Mmmmrrpphh!" Mira's muffled screams pleaded for help as she was forced to the ground with her ass in the air.

"You ladies won't wish to be here for this," Eudora said, to which Eileen and I quickly booked it out of the house.

"Sorry, Mira. You brought this on yourself!" I shouted as I left.

We took a stroll into Lotherain for a drink, walking past the many orgies that were happening in the streets. These humans who had vehemently rejected demi-humans were now engaged in intercourse with those from another race. Even though the priestesses were all women, the female humans couldn't resist. It was as though Vessyra herself descended and cast a spell on everyone.

"So, uh… I might have had a hand in why so many women have an extra reproductive organ…" Eileen said, scratching her nose.

"Oh, I know. I just hope all that money you made was worth it," I said.

Many of the priestesses were impassioned by the sight of some women possessing a penis. I was no longer unique, though I had lost mine. Now plenty of people shared the image of the Goddess Vessyra.

Barco's tavern was empty. The bell on the door chimed our arrival, but no one greeted us from the counter. Chairs and tables looked like they were hastily abandoned. When Eileen thought to help herself to the beer behind the counter, Barco emerged covered in sweat and buttoning up his pants.

"Oh, it's you two! H-How can I help?" the tavernkeep asked.

He couldn't make it anymore obvious what was going on behind that counter if he wanted to.

"We're just here for some food and drinks," Eileen said.

"Two cold beers and some lamb chops, please!" I made myself comfortable on a table that still had unfinished bowls of stew.

It felt like ages since I was able to enjoy a warm meal in peace. The gruel Madame Gestain had served us was without flavor, cutting corners wherever she could to fill her own fat pockets.

Eileen ate silently, each breath was a sigh that took effort to swallow along with the food in her mouth.

"All that alchemy sucking the soul out of you?" I asked, washing down a mouthful of lamb with beer.

"What? No! I love alchemy. Belle came to me earlier in the day asking for help. For the first time I didn't know what to do. Got me thinking about my own friends and family," she said.

I recalled that she moved here from High Saquin, the very place Eudora had annihilated. Her parents and guardian had since passed away. Hardships along the way could only have made those memories more fond.

"My parents passed away when I was young, too. Happened around a year after I enrolled at the Academy," I revealed.

I had no pictures to remember them by, and their faces had become a blur by now. What hurt me most, the thing that really opened my eyes that they were gone, was how little I thought of them by the time I graduated. 

Eileen cleaned her lamb chops down to the bones. She choked trying to swallow it and had to chug half the beer to get it all down.

"I've decided, Mistress. I want to become an alchemist that will be written about for ages to come." Tears began to stream down her freckled cheeks. She clenched the beer with both hands and drank the rest like a drunken sailor. "That way, I can tell people about my parents! That way… I won't forget them…"

I put my arms around the girl's shoulders and stroked her hair, letting her weep silently into my robes.

By the time we returned home, Mira and Eudora were nowhere to be found. A note was left by the table. Written in Mira's handwriting, detailed in very colorful language, it explained that she had taken the portal to Vessyra to act as Eudora's ambassador in negotiating terms of an alliance. She would be gone for a few days. The bottom half of the letter was just her cursing out Eudora.

Despite Eudora saying otherwise, she did still have plans for us. Belle and I should expect something tomorrow, too.

"Ah, Mistress! I need your help with an experiment," Eileen said.

"Does it involve taste-testing your new brews?" I asked suspiciously.

"I thought about how Eudora's form is just an alchemical-forged vessel for a soul— not unlike a soul stone itself. So I figured we could maybe forge a body for Miuna?" The eyes of someone who was on a scholarly high stared through me.

"You… want to give Miuna, a slime, a body? Did you already ask Miuna for permission?" I raised a brow.

"Yes! In fact, Miuna was more than eager about it," she said, bouncing as though she were a child being taken to a candy store.

Slimes were amorphous, gelatinous creatures that were supposed to be without a soul. That wasn't the case for Miuna. Eudora's experiments had left it with sentience, and the capacity to communicate with us through a series of vibrations on its body.

What would a slimeform even look like?

"Alright. If Miuna's okay with it, then it's fine. What do you need me for?" I asked.

"Most of the ingredients we can get from your farm. Eudora provided me with an empty soul stone. I just need a basilisk's gallbladder, and…" Eileen went red up to her ears again as she hesitated to continue. The embarrassed expression was all I needed to know what she was going to say next— at least, what I suspected she wanted me for. "I need your help in collecting the ejaculate of a dragon, mycelid spores, and a cluster of fertilized remsectnid eggs."

"D-Did I just hear that last part right? You want me to gather from those oversized insects?" I gulped.

Eileen simply nodded, both to confirm and as an apology.