Banditry was among the gravest crimes in the Empire. Murder was just murder, but an attack on the roads was an attack on infrastructure and thus an attack on every citizen. Professor Volmer of the Schola Viscera stood in attendance, rolling a thaumite coin over his knuckles as judgment was pronounced. They were to be made into a centauris.

"Have mercy," the bandit begged. "We didn't hurt nobody. Ask the lady. We didn't touch a hair on her head."

Professor Volmer stepped forward. “This is clemency. Had she been killed, or had it been a scholae caravan, you'd already be dead or worse." He flipped and caught the coin, looked at the result with a neutral expression, and pointed at the leader. "Looks like you're tails. Head between your colleague's legs, please."

The small coin turned to dust, coating the Professor’s fingers with a film of energy. As he laid hands upon them, their flesh softened into supple clay. They shuddered as skin melted into skin.

The Professor massaged along the leader's arm, pushing liquefied musculature into the man's biceps, forming thick thighs. The shape of a foreleg began to emerge. The leader stared down in horror, trying to flex fingers that were now toes. He tried to wrench away but, now partially fused inside his friend, he could just have sooner have ripped off his own arm.

“You are to be delivered back into the hands of the merchant you robbed," said the Professor. "She will allow you to repay your debt to society, shackled to her wagon along the trade road.”

“And when it's repaid, you'll turn us back... right?” the leader gulped hopefully.

The Professor placed a hand on the lead bandit's forehead and pushed, pressing it back into the other man's abdomen. The horrified face liquefied seamlessly into the abdominals, vertebrae fusing with vertebrae.

Only the man's mouth remained. The Professor slipped two fingers between the lips and drew them up and down, twisting the mouth vertical into a tidy fore-vagina.

The rear legs kicked and squirmed as the Professor enclosed his fingers around the base if the leader's remaining manhood, snipping it off with all the ease of a baker dividing dough. He handed the organ to an Adjunct Instructor. The Schola Viscera always had use for a penis or two.

Testingly, he slapped a hand hard against the rear buttock. The former man in front gasped. The Professor smiled to see that their nervous systems had blended.

“You should start to hear his thoughts soon,” he told the man. “But eventually, they will become inseparable from your own.”