CHAPTER ONEPRETTY BOYSEvery first Friday of the month, the great Central Market of the District of Columbia opens its doors to hold auctions. It's usually a grand affair, with hundreds of people attending, and a rger amount up for sale. New sves are flown into the neocssical colossus next to Union Station from every corner of the country throughout the month. They are divided into the various halls, great and small, each meant to appeal to its own customer base. And then, finally, they are sold.
There is the Great Hall, filled with all the highest-value offerings: those with stories, with unique attributes, fallen celebrities, young women, and the like. It’s the pce where the wealthy gather, looking for sves to be kept and used in the domestic sphere.
Celine usually pops in for just a moment, more so she can be seen by other (prospective) sve owners than to actually buy herself.
It’s where one can see the junior Senator for Missouri look longingly at a 23-year-old man, pretending that his interest is purely academic. Meanwhile, his colleague from Rhode Isnd tries to avoid recognition as she strolls past a litany of naked girls for purchase. Each pretends not to have seen the other, stuck in mutually assured destruction with the bckmail they have. She chats with the former as a donor and party colleague — in that order — and makes small talk with the tter, referring her to a good sve trainer after she meekly asks for one. She reminds the Senator to mention that Celine Foret had referred her to them.
What she doesn’t mention is that she will get paid handsomely for that referral. A girl like the one she seemed to be eyeing would sell for at least five million. It’s standard practice for a referrer to get 1% of the final sale price upon the start of training, meaning Celine just netted herself at least fifty thousand dolrs at the expense of having to stroll amongst the country’s rich and powerful for an hour or so.
That’s all she’ll do up here. Celine doesn't care about the antics and the bidding wars of the Great Hall, or even the smaller sites that surround it. She hasn’t bought from here in fifteen years. Her st purchase from the Great Hall had almost sunk her, and whilst she can easily afford to waste a few million now, there’s no reason for her to do so. She already has her Elo?se. She doesn’t need anyone else with such an amazing, hard-working sve as her in her life.
Instead, she makes her way into the deep bowels of the Central Market, many small underground cells lining its many hallways. Most people aren’t allowed down here, as it's a space reserved for the institutional buyers: corporations and sve traders. The products on sale here aren't of interest to a more general audience. This is where one finds the lowest of the low, the cheap sves, the useless sves, written off almost the day they were brought in.
For twenty-five thousand dolrs, one can be the proud owner of a man who scored badly in all the tests they could throw at him. The government is all too happy to be rid of them. They’d be too expensive to even put up for auction, or even to keep around, so they’re sold at a massive discount.
Their fates are the bleakest. Most will go into hard, physical bour, working in a factory or an Amazon warehouse halfway across the country. Some of them — the even unluckier ones — will be picked up by enterprising sve traders and dragged out into the countryside to be sold to farmers, creeps and perverts, people who wouldn’t even be allowed to get near the cheap sves in normal circumstances. These are the men who took the bet between life in prison and life as a sve and found their fate was going to be horrible either way.
Celine doesn’t feel bad for them, not for most of them.
Legally, they're all murderers, in the first, second or third-degrees. That doesn't mean they personally brandished the bde or fired the gun. In fact, most of them were accomplices, co-conspirators, or otherwise loosely linked to the crime in question. Just being a member of a violent gang is enough to be sentenced to life in prison these days, and thus also enough to request to be sold under the SLAVE Act.
Gang members used to sell for a pretty penny back in the day, before the government opened the floodgates for new sves. Back when she could prove that she'd managed to subdue and train a violent person and had turned them into one of the best-behaved servants in the world. They especially liked the tattooed ones. Her buyers loved the visual reminder that someone was a cold-blooded killer. But the edge they once had is gone now. They're more likely to have been involved simply selling drugs than actually doing something violent, convicted on the flimsy basis of helping fund death than actually causing it themselves.
Which means no more premiums for Celine, and that sucks, because it's the premiums that fund her business empire. If a sve trader takes on the risk of transport and finding a willing buyer, the sve trainer takes on many more.
For one, they need to be reasonably sure that their subjects will be open to being trained — a tough sell, especially with the types of people who end up in the system — and that paying for upkeep, security, training and the entire process of reselling will repaid in full, in addition to a healthy profit margin.
It costs hundreds of thousands of dolrs, with the general effect on the price being somewhere between forty and seventy-five percent. It's why most sve trainers are upstairs, in the side-events, trying to find interesting young men and women who could be turned into perfectly good sves. It's just not possible to make a profit on merely training the dregs you find in the market's basement. Jack shit plus fifty percent is still jack shit, after all.
Which is why she doesn't sell the same product she buys: she takes cheap, plentiful young men and turns them into rare, expensive young women. Well-trained young women, at that. A man she buys for fifty thousand dolrs can be sold for a hundred-fold that one or two years down the line. Even accounting for the cost of transition — and for staff and the buildings — the profit margin on her typical finished product is some 66%. That is, for every dolr spent on a successful product, she makes two dolrs in profit. When the average sve in the hallways sells for twenty-five thousand dolrs, that’s a little less than 2 million dolrs of profit on a sale.
Of course, not every product succeeds, the failures having to be resold on the discount market at an equally impressive loss, but that's where the magic of the industry lies— knowing which risks are worth it, and which are best left to the factories or the perverts.
Celine has gotten a very good eye for such risks over the years.
The first factor she selects for is appearance: would the boys look the part well-enough after the effects of estradiol and surgeries? By that she doesn't mean whether they would look like a woman to a general by-stander, but whether they would actually be pretty. Good looks can make a difference of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dolrs on the sale price once that day comes, and she's not going to throw that potential money away when young men are so plentiful. She can afford to only select the prettiest.
The second factor is whether they would respond well to training. If they can't be trained, they're entirely worthless to her— she sells trained female sves. Her reputation depends on her sves being well-trained. Attaching her name to these products adds hundreds of thousands to the price of each one she sells, and just one or two bad products can tarnish her reputation. She needs to select for this because there are only so many failed products she can throw into the horrors of being a partially-female sve bought by a random farmer to be used for pleasure before it turns into an issue for her business. It's easy to filter for this factor, though: if they say they regret their actions in court and don't look too defiant behind the gss walls of their cells, they're probably going to be just fine to train. They are generally not cold-blooded murderers, after all. The less-calcuting ones are much more pliable
The third factor — the most important factor, the factor that her competition has consistently failed to effectively select for — is knowing how well the boys would respond to transition. This is much more of an art than a science and by far the riskiest part of the business. It’s the reason why one in four of her investments have to be written off at tremendous loss.
There are a few obvious things to check for: discomfort at being naked being one, or signs of being not quite or much too masculine in their presentation. Hints in the short biographies provided to buyers online. With experimentation, she’s also figured that a lower score on the psychological tests the men are put through corretes with an easier time adjusting to femininity. They seem to be more malleable in general and thus are easier to train too, though that comes at the cost of them being higher maintenance. A high maintenance sve isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, though, especially not for her consumers. They’re not going to be discouraged by being told that their sve needs to be shown a decent amount of love, not when they’d already come to her with the intention of buying a sve they can make love to regurly.
Besides, they’re amusing. Her Elo?se very much is, at least. There’s something endearing about a sve who needs their owner’s care and attention and is willing to do anything to get it.
If she scores the young men on offer on all of those factors, includes other information such as general physical characteristics of the products on offer, inserts everything into a big spreadsheet, applies a rather complicated formu based on hundreds of data points, and then sorts the offering by the predicted net profit margin of each young man... She finds, as always, around fifteen men who fit her rather strict standards. Fifteen calcuted risks that almost guarantee her millions of dolrs of profit a year or two down the line. Another fifteen men to be thrown into her facility, undergoing the same treatment as hundreds of others at the same time. Another fifteen girls happily serving the wealthiest households of America in the future.
With her work done for the day, she can move on to more personal affairs. Her not wanting to buy a boy from the Great Hall doesn’t mean she’s not interested in buying a boy for her personal purposes, after all. Celine enjoys all the work that she has to do as a billionaire CEO, but she likes training.
Usually she has some personal commission running around, but none of her social circle has made such an offer in two years. Eli has gone to her master, so there hasn’t been a boy of her own to train at home for a few months now. Having such a picturesque domestic life with Elo?se is nice, but it’s just not enough for her. Celine needs a project to work on, and she’s pretty sure she found the perfect candidate just now.
The boy piqued her interest earlier, when she was walking past the many cells slowly filled out in her spreadsheet over way too many hours, as she usually does.
He’s a blond boy, twenty-one years old, short and thin and neglected. It’s not just the kind of neglect that would result from underfunded private prisons out in the countryside, but the kind of neglect that must have existed for much longer, leaving a body ready to fill out into a more feminine form when he does start eating enough again.
He’s a high-school dropout and described in the biography as a bit of an airhead. He could barely hold down a job prior to his crimes, a bit too open about being part of his local LGBT community. A self-described anarchist, he was particurly rebellious in prison, finding himself in isotion most of the time. He scored terribly on any test they threw at him: no strength, no fitness, a weak psyche.
The boy is pretty too, the kind of pretty that will turn into a truly incredible girl two years down the line. Not that he is proud of that fact. He hated being looked at, squirming in his chains, trying to cover himself. Of course, he couldn’t do so, not with his hands chained to the ceiling, his body exposed to anyone who would even bother to look.
His background is a nine out of ten— he’s going to adjust well, at least when he gets over his childish ideology. But once he does, he’s going to become even more valuable. People like a good story, after all, and what better story is there than making an anarchist submit so utterly to an absolute authority?
Which makes the asking price extra enticing. Ten thousand dolrs. The cheapest sve she's seen in months. Of course, the price makes sense — based on the description, he doesn’t seem particurly fit for industrial work — so most buyers would think he’s a waste of time. Their interest is only piqued by the fact that he is nearly free, but even then they won’t bother with him.
If not for Celine, he would have ended up being sold to become, at best, two holes to keep in the basement and use every now and then. Might go to a real freak and end up dead.
Which would be such a waste! Sure, the boy is useless, but the girl might be something amazing. Her spreadsheet agrees with that judgement. It reckons she can sell her for up to ten million dolrs after training. A thousand-fold increase over little more than a year. One of the best investments imaginable, and extremely low-risk at that: she's not putting that much money into him in the first pce. There's no staff to pay at her home, Elo?se's bour being rather free— marginally, that is. There's not even an opportunity cost to the purchase!
It's the perfect investment.
Of course, she couldn't make that kind of money from her facility. The sves sell for good money, no doubt, but she can't ask ten million for a product from there, even if the girl is pretty. They’re too standardised for that. No, if she wants to make that much money on an investment, she has to train him herself, and then sell her within her personal circles. Her long-term clients, the ones who would trust her to find any sve and turn it into gold, the ones willing to put down multiple lifetimes worth of income for what is, in the end, a somewhat more useful pet. Sure, a fun one, one who will do your chores, then take care of your children and be useful in bed ter at night, but still a pet.
Not that being a pet is a bad fate— it’s the best fate a sve can hope for, at least once they accept the fact that they are just that. They get to participate in a high-css society of their very own, under the caring and watchful eyes of their owners. They get to be like people again, just subservient ones. Completely and utterly subservient ones, in every sense of the word.
Wherever these boys end up, however well they do in training— they should be grateful for the opportunity offered to them. Celine is offering them the chance to end up in a good home and live in retive comfort. They get a chance to be truly reformed, to be truly devoted. They get the chance to be loved, even if it is as a beloved pet or servant. They're offered a second chance in life and Celine can only hope they take it.
She gets paid when they do, after all.
