The bunnies were wising up. Carrots, lettuce, and assorted vegetables had worked as bait up until recently. Now they didn’t even come to the edge of their warrens as I wafted the delicious veggies by the entrance.

  “Milord, if it pleases you, milord, I’m quite sure I do not like this plan of yours! Milord.”

  Pedro stood in his scruffy robes, shifting nervously from foot to foot as I gestured for him to come closer. I lay in wait on the far side of the den's opening, but my bait was a bit too reluctant.

  “I only missed that one because Kat distracted me! Simeon patched you up. Stop being a baby,” I whispered, waving a claw again to order him closer. He moved perhaps half an inch towards me. I narrowed my eyes and waved again. He held his wand in front of him and took half a step backwards this time. Another glare, and he took a full step forward. I could feel the tension in the air. Another predator, this one cute and fluffy, was preparing to strike at my minion, and my fan of spiky, sucker-covered tentacle-tails shifted slowly into position.

  A pale white blur shot out of the den, long white teeth flashing towards Pedro’s throat. A sucker landed on the thing's head mere inches from the terrified farmer, and I hauled the uni-bunny back, wrapping it in one of the tails I had dedicated to prisoner management. Six other bunnies thrashed and bit at me, but the pair of tails I had wrapped around them was too powerful for the little devils to be a bother.

  “One more or do you need to change your trousers again?” I asked happily. This would make it one hundred and forty-six captured bunnies, and the first of the fully modified robo-bunnies should be ready soon. It had been a long night for us all, but especially for poor, terrified Pedro.

  “Milord, I do believe I will not be fit to serve in this capacity again until Gledna has done another laundry day. I am out of clean trousers!” Pedro complained.

  “Ah, fair enough. I’ll ask Kat to buy another pair from the shop.” I checked myself. Bloody hell, I was in a good mood. My inner greed had barely twitched when I used the B-word. Was I growing and maturing as a dragon? Probably not.

  “How’s things in the dungeon for you, Pedro?” I asked as we made our way up the stairs to the industrial level. Half the minions had been reassigned to support the Orlic as he frantically constructed robotic parts and implanted them into the cute, fluffy bunnies.

  “It’s been good, milord. Lady Kat-” he made a noise that sounded like a cement mixer starting, and I saw him twitch in my peripheral vision, “-has been very, uh, kind and loving.” While my pixie was many things, kind and sentimental were not on that list.

  “Really?” I couldn’t keep the doubt from my voice.

  “Well, she has been more gentle with the, uh, the punching of the, er, well you-”

  “It’s fine! I know where she likes to punch people.”

  “It’s become far more playful. Almost teasing. Sometimes I make deliberate mistakes, so that she has a reason to pay me that kind of-”

  “For the love of god, man! Stop! I do not want to hear this shit.”

  I made a mental note to avoid having conversations with Pedro as much as possible. We lapsed into silence for the rest of the trip to the Orlic's laboratory. The crude industrial floor I remembered from when Kat first bought it had changed a lot. Extremely sturdy cages lined the long corridor down to Simeon's workspace. Each contained a solitary rabbit that glared at us with pink eyes as we passed. Pedro stayed perfectly in the center of the corridor, glancing nervously from side to side and flinching whenever one of the vicious monsters yawned or moved.

  I nudged open the doors, which had all been conveniently resized to accommodate my draconic majesty. I entered what could have been Doctor Frankenstein's laboratory, if he had had a thing about Bugs Bunny.

  Various vessels filled with murky liquids lined the walls, and strange machines with coils and metal orbs that sparked and zapped were spaced between them. Tubes and wires ran from the devices to a row of tables on which was a vivisectionist's wet dream.

  A dozen bunnies were splayed open, skin peeled back, and organs on display. Gledna was passing up and down the line, waving a glowing green hand over the creatures in turn. On the tables closest to the door, they were largely intact, with just a few incisions to open up their chest cavity, although that was horrific enough.

  The ones in the middle had it the worst, limbs removed and replaced with clunky-looking sockets lined by metallic gears that spun occasionally as some errant nervous impulse was sent to a limb that was now in a very large bin labelled “Clerical Paste”. Even his labels were in rhyming slang. I shook my head.

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  Pedro spun away and vomited noisily. I closed my lips tightly, not to contain my own rising bile, but because a Janglebonk hopped by to clean it up. The hopping animal noticed me and froze. The pupil in his solitary, oversized eye shrank as the creature began to shake. It hopped away quickly, and I fought down the urge to chase it and pounce. My sudden appetite completely vanished as I turned back to the nightmarish medical experiment I had authorised.

  “I’m going to have to save so many kittens stuck in trees to wash this stain off my soul,” I muttered. “Gledna! Got some fresh, er, meat for you!” I waved the tails and their captive bunnies at the gland-witch, who looked up and nodded.

  “Bonkers! Go box them up. Won’t be done with this lot for a day or so, chuck them some lettuce in the cage!” Gledna sputtered, spraying saliva across the exposed internals of a bunny.

  It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if I hadn’t been able to see the animal's eyes rolling and looking about while they were medically “exposed”. Salnia and Harold Hardprick took the little bastards by the scruffs of their necks and held them at arms' length as they carried my prizes away to wait for their involuntary introduction to cybernetics.

  A door at the far end slammed open, and Simeon emerged with both his real hands, as well as the nightmarish array of metal limbs that sprouted from his back, held over his head.

  “It sieves!” he bellowed and then proceeded to laugh manically until his eyes met mine. His extra limbs snapped into his back, and he dropped his lime green biological ones to his sides.

  “Muss and fuss, it’s a barrel of fun,” he said, suddenly serious. I felt a headache coming on.

  “I am going to ask you a series of simple questions. I don’t want you to try to speak. Please just nod or shake your head. Is this OK?” I said very slowly.

  Simeon's mouth opened slowly, then closed very quickly as my eyes narrowed. He nodded carefully.

  “Is the first finished model ready?”

  He shook his head.

  “Is it almost ready?”

  Frantic nodding.

  “How long– scratch that. Do I need to come back later?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “How– Can I come through and watch the final process?”

  He nodded and fled back into his sanctum sanctorum. I followed and found myself in a mad scientist's dream. There were more of the weird machines. These had an Art Deco vibe as opposed to the steampunk contraptions in the other room; smooth, finished lines and chrome trimming. Very nice. I nodded in approval.

  “Where is it?” I asked, and Simeon pointed toward a globular device, not far from the same size as my reptilian glory, at the far end of the room. The counters and tables were scattered with mechanical parts, some of which were recognisably limbs, and some more esoteric in appearance.

  The egg at the far end of the room was giving me flashbacks to my own birth in this world. I heard a series of mechanical clangs and crunches as I moved over and peered inside through the porthole Simeon had built into the door.

  A humanoid form, about six feet tall, and clad in black metal armour, was facing away from me. Scarred and partially hairless rabbit ears poked up over the thick collar of the robo-suit. A helmet descended with a hiss that I could hear through the six-inch-thick door.

  Once the mask and helm had settled into place, the nightmarish contraption stepped forward and slowly turned to face me. The eyes glowed red, a series of blades flicked in and out from its wrists and fingers as it rotated them, and the fiery eyes focused on the movements as though it had only just realised it had hands. A shoulder-mounted turret of some sort flicked up to the left of its head and tracked towards me. A targeting light flicked on, and the beam settled over my left eye.

  “This door is strong enough to contain it, right?” I turned to ask Simeon.

  He opened his mouth, thought better of it, and then nodded quickly.

  By the time I looked back through the window, the robo-bunny had appeared with its face held an inch from the other side. The armoured ears stuck up a foot above the helmet, and it slowly cocked its head to one side as the pin-pricks of its ocular sensors flickered at me.

  “I’m not sure this was a good idea, Simeon. That thing looks evil. You’re sure, and I really do mean absolutely sure the damn thing won’t go postal on us?”

  He nodded again, but it was slower than before, and I sensed a certain amount of hesitation. Before I could raise any more perfectly justified worries, the door clicked and swung slowly inwards. My new soldier stepped back to give it room, then strode forward as my neck curled to pull my nose out of its range. Acid would work on something like this, right? Acid was my anti-armour attack. I really hoped it would work if it came down to it.

  The cyborg slowly panned its bunny head across to Simeon, who looked part terrified, part happy new dad, then brought it back to look me up and down. I contracted the muscles in my shoulders that launched my breath attacks and waited a moment.

  “I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.”

  “Very bloody funny, Kat! I damn near doused the thing in acid.” The pixie emerged from the egg chamber as my head snaked around to examine the cyborg from all sides. It was solid, well-armed and armoured, and driven by a murder-bunny. “You sure this is OK?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine, scale brain.” She waggled a faintly glowing gemstone at me, then tossed it in my direction. One of my tails snapped out and snatched it from the air, instinctively landing a sucker on what turned out to be a remote control. As soon as I touched it, I felt some kind of connection in my mind. After a few seconds of stunned confusion, I could sense the cyborg in my thoughts.

  The bunny part of it was quiescent, but the burning lust for violence was there, buried under mechanical discipline. I sent out a thought, and it pivoted to Kat, the shoulder cannon, that I now knew was some kind of mana condenser linked to a focusing array that would output something akin to a very powerful laser, lit up with a lambent green light.

  “Bunny Five is alive!” My thoughts were transmuted and emerged from the robo-bunny in my normal voice.

  “Oh, this is kind of fun!” I muttered as I struggled for another line.

  “Serve the public trust, protect the carrots, uphold the dragon,” emerged from the machine in my best Peter Weller impression.

  Then I made it moonwalk and do the robot dance, only stopping when Kat threatened to batter my cloaca.