Question Sted 4 - To Train a Ponygirl

All rights reserved, except for those ceded to the Whateley Academy Author’s Group.

This is fan fiction for the Whateley Academy series. It may or may not match the timeline, characters, and continuity, but since it's fan fiction, who cares?

This is the fourth story about Sted "Ponygirl" Lancaster. The entire series, at least at the present time, is:

*Pegasus (v4)
* * * Deleted scenes
*Welcome to Whitman
*Fragment from It's A Bird!
*To Train a Ponygirl <<<=====
*Aftermath
*Ponygirl's Combat Final (game to come)
*What I did on my Christmas Vacation (second edition)
*Lizards (in preparation)
*Fashion Note
*Aspidistra (Version 2)
*Wine Dark Sea

Out of continuity:

*Roommates

Table of Contents
 
Chapter 1. First, Capture a Feral Ponygirl.
Chapter 2: Next, find someplace to keep her.
Chapter 3: Planning is Good.
Chapter 4: No Plan Survives Contact with the Enemy.
Chapter 5: After Action Report.
 
 
Chapter 1. First, Capture a Feral Ponygirl.

Sted sighed blissfully. The movie’s soppy ending provided a perfect counterpoint to the stresses of living at Whateley Academy. The only downer was that she couldn’t bring either Jena or her roommate along. Jena and Derala would have loved to see it as well, but there was no way the administration was going to let either of them go to Berlin. Dunwich, yes, but Dunwich didn’t have a movie house. Dunwich barely had a town.

She took the earbud out of her ear and dropped it into her purse. The tiny devise did only one thing, but it did it quite well: it linked to any close-by sound system so she could hear it without interference from lovers making out, babies crying and other obnoxious inhabitants. The ‘rents claimed that when they were growing up people acted courteously in theaters. Not according to her grandmother! She claimed that they weren’t old enough to remember when people really did act considerately for others. At least, Sted thought, that one made sense.

She made her way across the parking lot, looking for a secluded spot so she could switch to cabbit form to fly back to Whateley. Between the romantic glow from the movie, and thanking the Lord that Mr. Buttons had finally approved her to fly locally, she didn’t take any note of the two people standing by a small truck.

The nip of the dart brought her out of her reverie, but it was too late. She slumped to the ground, out cold.

Her captors slid her into the waiting cage and then pressed a button. The cage seemed to vanish. They paused on the way out to drop her purse into a dumpster.

The abandoned purse shimmered slightly and vanished.

A couple of hours later, the truck stopped in a secluded area. The driver and his companion got out and stretched. Another truck drove up, and they transferred the cage. The two trucks headed off in different directions.
 
Chapter 2: Next, find someplace to keep her.

Sted moaned softly as she slowly woke. Then she suddenly came awake as she felt a prickling on her back. She jerked upright and then stopped as she felt something that slithered along her skin.
It was a chain.

The chain ran through what looked like a hole in the wall. It seemed to be fastened to her neck with a collar. She tried to touch it, and discovered that her hands were encased in some kind of glove. She tried to stand and discovered that she’d been hobbled as well. The hobble was fairly long: about a foot and a half.

She took several deep breaths, and then took stock. She was in some kind of a horse stall. The theme seemed to be wood. The walls were about six feet high, leaving a couple of feet to the roof. The walls were about four feet apart. The stall was around six or seven feet deep, with a low table on one end that held a couple of bowls. The other end seemed to be closed off with a split door. The bottom part had about a foot of clearance and was about three feet high. The top part came the rest of the way to the tops of the side walls.

On closer inspection the front had about six inches of wall on either side; the doors fit outside of the wall. Even if she still had her hands, there was no way she could get at either the hinges or the latches.

She couldn’t spot any lights until she discovered that the ceiling itself seemed to glow slightly, giving off a completely natural sunlight spectrum. Once she discovered that, she saw that there were almost unnoticeable black lines that presumably divided absurdly large panels.

Horrifyingly, she found that she no longer had any of her powers. She couldn’t fly, she couldn’t shift into any of her other forms. She couldn’t cast an illusion. Whatever was around her neck refused to yield its secrets. She couldn’t cast the simplest kind of spell. She did, on the other hand, still have her strength. A bit of testing convinced her that she could probably rip the door off its hinges if she could get the leverage, and she might be able to rip the chain away from wherever it was anchored. None of which helped except as the last resort.

And she was completely naked – except for the gloves, hobble and collar.

She took another couple of deep breaths. This wasn’t a horse stall. It had to be a ponygirl stall. A horse couldn’t handle the feeding arrangements, and it was ridiculously overbuilt for a horse.

Her dad had let her check out the ponygirl scene on the net in the months before she’d started at Whateley. She’d felt a combination of repulsion and fascination, and had finally decided that she’d had more than enough. She’d seen stories about places like this. She’d thought that’s what they were: fiction. And it had never entered her mind that they might have universal power nullifiers! In fact, she thought those were fiction as well.

She took another couple of deep breaths and started listening to what she could hear. It seemed that there were people walking around doing things. One group of people seemed to stop in front of her stall. The top of the split door swung open.


“So this,” Lady Morigan said, “is our newest acquisition. She looks, um, interesting.”

The girl in the stall did look interesting. She had an inch wide flame red mane that grew from the brow line to the bottom of her shoulder blades, and then fell to her waist. The front spiked up for an inch growing to three at the curve of the skull and to six by the top of the neck. The rest of her hair was an undistinguished brown coat of short horsehair. Her horse’s ears came to a peak level with her mane.

She also had a crimson tail that she swished from side to side. Her legs were covered below the knee with more brown horsehair, ending in hooves rather than feet. She had a crimson stocking on her off hoof.

Other than that, she was a fairly pretty teenage girl who showed promise of turning into a real beauty – at least if one ignored the mane, ears, tail and hooves, and the fact that her breasts were a bit small and her hips and legs were definitely on the large and very muscular side.

Lady Morigan was dressed, or rather outfitted, in a fancy riding habit, as if she was about to take part in a fox hunt. The only strange part of her costume was the rather vicious three-tail flogger at her belt instead of the standard horse whip. Outside of that, she had flaming red hair and green eyes with slit pupils. Her ears came to a slight point, as if they had tried for a real point and couldn’t quite make the grade.

The man who stood behind and to her left was a good head shorter. He wore a neat beard and was otherwise outfitted in brown leather, somewhat like an old-time smith. The man who stood behind her and to her right was even odder: he looked like he had been cut from a block of stone, complete with various different colored veins of rock running at odd angles through his complexion.

The ponygirl looked out of her stall at them, a very puzzled expression on her face.

“Good work,” the stone man said as he clapped the smith on the shoulder. “I love the expression on their faces when they discover they can’t understand a word we’re saying.”

“Almost as good as the one when they discover that they can’t say anything, either,” Sergei replied. “My Lady, she’s certainly interesting; this is the first time I’ve seen a real ponygirl. Where did our suppliers get her?”

“There’s something wrong?” she answered the tone in his voice. She made a gesture. A rune appeared in the air between her and the ponygirl, and then dissolved like mist in the sunlight.

“Damn. You’re right.” She made another gesture, and another rune appeared only to vanish in a moment.

“Jailbait. She can’t be a day over sixteen. If that. And she’s a virgin.” Lady Morigan stared at Sted for a long minute, noting the mane, ears, tail, and hooves.

She shrugged slightly. “A lot of our regular customers don’t care, but there are a couple of nuts out on the net that are making a habit of busting businesses dealing in underage sex, and they seem to be able to get through everything our contacts can do to keep them out. We can’t let her go; she already knows too much. I don’t want to simply dump her down the oubliette. We paid too much, and she’s too good an opportunity. If I can figure out how her BIT works....” Lady Morigan looked at Sted consideringly. “Real hooves and a real tail. I like the coat on her legs, and that stocking is cute. The head and mane? It’s a bit better than what we do, and letting it happen naturally is less work. I’d just as soon not have those ears, but I suppose tastes differ.” She smiled viciously. “We’ll be way ahead of Sir Teliard. Lord Mountebank won’t even be in the running. Besides,” she paused again, “with those hips and thighs she looks like she might be a saddle girl. I suppose I can indulge myself with my own girl.”

She meditated a moment. “Name?”

“How about Goldie?” Jasper said.

“I like it,” Sergei agreed. “We sold the last Goldie what, two months ago?”

“About,” Lady Morigan said. “Agreed. She’s Goldie.”

She looked at the newly named ponygirl, and then took a piece of parchment from her pouch. She scribed the new girl’s name on it and then tossed it into the air, where it hung between the two of them. She looked at both it and the ponygirl intently. The parchment burst into flame. A moment later it had been totally consumed, without leaving any ash.

“Parchment?” Sergei asked.

“I need to do the spells differently on this one,” she answered.

“Oh. So that would be the vermin-proofing?”

“Exactly. I won’t do the gene masking until I’ve got her BIT figured out. There’s no hurry since we can’t sell her for a couple of years. I most likely won’t need the rest of it.”

She paused. “You’re just going to have to forgo the pleasure. Sergei, lock her up.”

“Uh? Where?”

Lady Morigan rolled her eyes. “Not where. I’m sure you can figure out something that will keep the staff out of her and won’t make her too cranky.” She didn’t say fool, but her tone implied it.

Sergei winced. “At once, my lady.”

“As soon as he’s done, start training her. See how far and fast you can push her.”

“Your command, my lady,” Jasper rumbled.

“Good.” She gestured, and the top of the door slammed shut. The deadbolts snapped closed. She turned on her heel and walked off.

Sergei and Jasper looked at each other and shrugged. Sergei walked off toward his workshop. Jasper walked down the line of ponygirl stalls, looking at the notes posted on each door. He stopped in front of one, nodded and flipped the door open. Daylight was sitting on the straw, gazing placidly at nothing in particular. The bay didn’t look all that different from their latest acquisition. Her close-cropped blond hair lay flat on most of her head, except for a mane. Her ears hadn’t changed. She had a blond tail that spread out behind her, and she had hooves instead of feet. She didn’t have the horsehair on her legs; Sergei thought that might be a nice touch, although it would be another minute or so while grooming her.

Both the tail and the hooves were artificial. The tail plugged into a socket that had been set into her tailbone, and was made of strands of her hair that they saved during grooming. They’d removed her feet and replaced them with prosthetic hooves. The hooves worked quite well; Sergei had created them, and Lady Morigan had done the surgery and healing.

The tail and hooves were a lot of bother, but many of their customers liked them. They were also quite useful in conditioning them as ponies.

He tugged on her chain, and she came readily to her feet and pranced out. He harnessed her, and then snapped the reins. She high stepped down the corridor.

Daylight had a typical training regimen. Stamina wheel, racing, some dressage, cart and carriage, with some actual work around the training complex thrown in for variety. The rest of daytime spent in a field with the other ponies. The field had a low fence and a spell that kept them away from it. It also had food and water on a low table that meant they had to stand on hands and feet to eat and drink. They learned. Today the stamina wheel was first; the training staff tried to randomize the training blocks so that the ponies didn’t start to build up expectations of what they’d do next.

Daylight had been here long enough to begin to stabilize. She’d begun regaining her appetite a couple of weeks ago. They hadn’t had to use the whip on her for well over a week, except for the last burst of speed in a race. Her back was well on the way to healing. In another week they’d have to look hard to see the remnants of the whip marks; a week later and they could sell her as unmarked. He reflected that Lady Morigan was a pretty good healer; they’d decided a long time ago that healing whip marks swiftly was counterproductive. Letting them heal slowly served as a reminder. As long as they healed without leaving marks it didn’t affect their sale price.

She was turning into a pretty decent ponygirl. Turning the high and mighty rich bitches into ponygirls quite made up for having to live with Lady Morigan. Although he had to admit that her spell work on the girls had started out good and improved.


Sergei walked into his workshop and threw himself into his favorite chair. Do a chastity belt on the spur of the moment! Hah! If only her ladyship knew what he had in mind for her.

Chastity belts. He went to his terminal and began scanning the net for devisors who did chastity devices. There were more than a few, and some of them talked about how they did it. As well as quite a few analyses of other people’s work, usually with a sneer that they could do so much better.

As he scanned the devices, he made a list of features that looked useful, and stuff he could do without. It needed to be able to be worn full time without chafing, abrading or rubbing the skin raw. It also had to allow a full range of movement and not interfere with waste elimination. Or her period. Or her tail. And it had to keep the skin and hair underneath it clean and healthy. And then there were the control aspects.

A half hour later he had an approach. He moved to his system and brought up a design program.


Sergei hummed as he walked down the corridor of ponygirl stalls. He found the new girl’s stall and flipped the top of the door open. Goldie was sitting, arms wrapped around her knees, and rocking back and forth. Not surprising; most new girls tended to go into emotional shock at first. The best thing was to be gentle but firm. He opened the bottom door and pulled on her chain. She looked at him and didn’t move. He uncoiled the whip at his belt and gave it a snap. Her eyes widened, then she got up and followed him out.

A couple of minutes later he’d gotten her to the outside part of his workshop and had her tethered, arms out and chained to the ceiling. Most girls didn’t need anything more while he worked on them. It took him about a half hour to fit the chastity device and make sure it kept the skin and hair under it properly tended. When he was done he added a nose ring and breast rings. Then he made her a full set of harness, except for the saddle. Most of the girls weren’t suitable for riding; making a riding harness and saddle for them was a waste of time. He thought this one might be, but then time would tell.

He put her in a pulling harness, wrapped her arms crosswise behind her back and led her out to the stamina wheels.


“This is the new girl?” Oscar asked. “We don’t have anything on her conditioning?”

“No, this is the first time. Start a training record. Two hours. Her Ladyship wants you to really push her.”

“Got it.” He walked over to an idle stamina wheel and put a new file folder in the slot. Then he brought the new girl over and harnessed her between a pair of shafts that stuck out in front of the horizontal bar, which in turn stuck out of the central post. He clipped a monitor between her breasts. He thought a second and brought out several low barriers that he distributed around the path. Then he pointed her head at one of the other girls that was doing a high step while going around, and pumped his hand up and down a couple of times. He put in an evaluation program and swatted her ass on the way out.

She hesitated, and the equipment laid a line of fire across her ass. She bolted forward, knocking one of the barriers down, which resulted in another stinging swat across the ass. Then she steadied and began high stepping around the circle, dragging the arm behind her. The fallen barrier popped back up, ready for her to come around again.

Sergei watched her for a few minutes and then considered his schedule. He headed back to the stable and walked down the row of stalls, stopping before one on the far end. This girl had completed training, and they’d been trying to sell her for the last year. However, there weren’t any buyers, even though she was one of the rare, and valuable, saddle girls. He opened the stall.

The paint rolled off the straw and pranced forward to meet him, head out for a nuzzle. He scratched her behind the ears and then held out a small sweet. She used her tongue and upper lip to take it from his hand daintily.

As usual, he spent a long minute inspecting her, and letting her know he approved of what he saw. She still had her original platinum blond hair. It had taken a month to coax most of it to lie flat in a simulation of a horse’s coat. All of it except the mane. That rose in a jaunty peak and fell down her back. It kept growing to the base of her shoulder blades, and fell from there almost to the bottom of her waist.

The ring in her nose gently pushed her nostrils to the sides and fell to just above her upper lip without quite touching it. The flat black of the collar bisected the ivory column of her neck. He’d made very sure that the devise completely blocked her array of powers, as well as blocking speech and preventing her from grasping anything with her thumbs.

He grinned at the thought, knowing that the pony could interpret the expression as approving of her. Most of the ponies weren’t mutants; the power nullifier was unnecessary. However all the people here had enough scores to settle that the universal powers nullifier was quite useful. And it meant that they never got caught by the occasional mutant who had managed to hide her powers when they emerged.

The rings in her breasts sported little bells that tinkled when she moved. Her tail was made of her hair that he carefully saved from when it fell out as he groomed her. It fit into a socket that had been installed in her tailbone. Her hips had expanded a good two inches, and her legs and thighs were solid muscle.

Her hooves were, of course, artificial. That was almost the hardest change: they had to remove her feet and replace the intricate array of bones in her ankles to make them work properly. The hooves were his work; the surgery and healing was Lady Morigan’s.

Altogether, she was almost a perfect work. There was only one defect: something had gone horribly wrong while Lady Morigan was installing the masking gene changes that would keep anyone from identifying her: her skin had toughened up and turned into a piebald mess. That was why she was described as a paint rather than a bay, and why she hadn’t sold.

He’d named her Prideful Sue when she arrived, but once her skin had turned piebald they’d started calling her Patchwork Girl. That name had stuck. He’d trained her to respond to Patch. It made no difference whatever to her; the collar around her neck kept her from attaching any meaning to the sounds her handlers made. The only effect the word Patch had was to attract her attention. If she thought she had a name, it was probably still what it had been before. Not that they’d ever know what she was thinking! The collar made her impervious to telepaths.

She’d been one of the more stuck-up girls in Dickinson, and she’d decided to make his life miserable because he’d turned down the sterling opportunity to become one of her lackeys. It had been quite a few years before their suppliers could acquire her, but then, revenge was supposed to be a dish best served cold. Taming her had taken a while, but the result was, he thought, well worth it. Becoming a ponygirl had certainly improved her disposition, if not her looks.

She was his ponygirl. Everyone knew it. Technically, she was still for sale, but there were no bidders. He thought that her ladyship suspected he had his hand in the result.

He held out her bridle, and she brought her head forward with a soft wicker. He cinched it tight, and then opened the bottom of the door. She pranced out, letting him tether her to the far wall as he swiftly harnessed and saddled her. He swung into the saddle and guided her out of the stable onto one of the bridle paths.

He squeezed her with his knees, and she smoothly stepped up the pace to a fast trot. Almost unnoticeably, he’d quit thinking of what he’d done to her as revenge. Life, at least at the moment, was good. For him.
 
Chapter 3: Planning is Good.

The day had ended. Sted lay on the straw of her stall, curled up and crying. Eventually the mood of self-pity let up enough for her to realize it wasn’t doing her any good, and she let the rest of it out with several deep, wracking breaths. She sat up, looked at her gloved hands, and began to think.

What would her father say? She could practically hear the old man. “Persistence is a virtue,” he often said. “Play to win. You don’t get the jackpot trying to cut your losses.” “If there’s only one way to win the hand, that’s the way you play it.” And finally: “Everything has its story to tell. Wise men listen. Wise guys don’t.”

So. Play to win. She wanted out of here. That meant working on subverting the power nullifier. She thought for a bit, and concluded that being cooperative probably didn’t fall under ‘cut your losses.’ She couldn’t work on the power nullifier while they were training her anyway, and encouraging them to beat on her didn’t seem like it was a winning strategy.

So. Everything has its story. What was she missing? She let her mind wander. About the fifth time it bitched at her about not being able to talk, she straightened up in surprise. Maybe. Just maybe. The speech inhibitor might be the original plan, the power nullifier might be a later addition. In which case…. She thought some more. It didn’t seem like the staff was overflowing with love and affection for the boss lady, and it didn’t seem like she had a very high regard for her minion’s competence. Nothing she could exploit directly, but it did open up a very narrow sliver of a possibility.

She managed to get a piece of straw standing upright. Then she focused all of her determination that it would burst into flame. Nothing seemed to be happening until suddenly a wisp of smoke occurred, followed by an almost invisible spot of red. Then the stalk caught.

She jumped up and put her hoof on it before the fire spread. Then she noticed she was sweating and tense. She sat back down and went through a relaxing exercise. That had been hard! Now she knew what snake-girl down the hall was going through to learn magic without any mutant talent. And why Circe was always after her about focus and control.

Something else niggled at the back of her brain. Oh, right. She composed a small prayer of contrition and thanksgiving for having been shown where she had fallen into the sin of pride. For some reason when she finished she felt both calmer and more confident of winning through the current adversity.

Now. What else? Building her magical capability without access to her mutant talent was going to take persistence, but that wasn’t going to be enough. Throwing spells at random shadows was hardly likely to work, and would undoubtedly get her noticed. What she needed was the gadgeteer talent back. Well, it was probably like her magic: there had been psychics through the ages just like there had been mages, and none of them had mutant talents. That was recent. So….

She rearranged herself so she sat with her legs crossed and let her mind focus on getting the details of the devise that surrounded her neck. As she concentrated the outside world receded and then vanished without her noticing it. A half hour later she came back to consciousness and looked at the result. It was very vague and very strange. She could see a few small details, but nothing else was clear. At least she’d gotten something.

Well, enough for one night, she thought. She sat on her heels to do her nighttime prayers. When she opened her eyes again, the light from the ceiling had changed from the diffuse daylight to strips of red and gold by the back wall, shading through darker blues to black by the corridor wall. She lay down on the straw and watched the ceiling darken. She noticed, with some amusement, that little bits and pieces of how the ceiling panel was built and how it worked trickled into her mind. She fell asleep before it finally faded to complete black.


Lady Morigan Le Fey, as she liked to style herself, settled in her workroom and took her private deck of divination cards from its protective wrappings. She had made it herself; she was still inordinately proud of that working. It was the only Ponygirl Rider-Waite deck in existence. The suits were the whips, the reins, the bridles and the chariots; the court cards were the Owner, the Trainer, the Groom and the Ponygirl. She was still getting used to the cards of the Major Arcana. She had a suspicion that they changed when she wasn’t looking.

She focused her mind on her question: was now a propitious time to investigate her new ponygirl’s BIT? The first card up was the Ponygirl of Chariots. She nodded. That certainly fit! Then she looked at the next card and frowned at it. It said she had better hurry. She asked why and turned another card. It said there was a major change in the offing.

She put the deck back into its protective wrapping and shrugged. That was nothing new! She was planning on her annual move in the next month anyway; the new location was almost ready. It looked like she had to move up the schedule.

She opened her current magical notebook and started an entry for the latest girl to be named Goldie. She made sure she had a sharp pen and plenty of ink and prepared to focus her mind on what she thought of as the third sub-basement of this dimension of reality. It was, after all, where one went shopping for BITs - and other pieces such as the even weirder structures that determined so-called mutant super-powers.

What she saw almost knocked her out of her trance. Her newest ponygirl had a simply amazing array of relatively low and intermediate level powers, some of which she didn’t recognize. Fortunately they were all being blocked. Her BIT was quite clear. Her hand moved unconsciously, making notes in her magical journal which she would study later.


Earl stood in the center of the circle, the reins of Goldie’s bridle clutched in his left hand. Goldie marched around the circle, shifting paces as he commanded all the while letting the reins pull her to the left. He gave a new command, and Goldie ignored it.

He snarled. Then his whip flashed out. The three strands hit with a meaty thunk.

Goldie yelped and then stopped, turning to face Earl. She put her gloved hands on her hips; her tail lashed from side to side.

Earl raised the whip again. Goldie looked at him. He lashed, and she moved faster than he thought possible, catching the whip on her arm and jerking it out of his hand.

He lost his temper and advanced on her. She tried to kick him. The hobble stopped her in mid motion and jerked her off her other hoof. She rolled and came back up.

“What the hades do you think you’re doing?!” Jasper roared from behind Earl.

“Uh...” the surprised trainer said.

“All right,” Jasper said in a quieter tone, “what did you do to start that?”

“She didn’t react to a command, so I used the whip.”

“Why didn’t she react?”

“Uh. She was stubborn?”

“Darn it! You’re supposed to know better than that. Those commands are supposed to be conditioned reactions. She shouldn’t be able to think about them. She shouldn’t know what you’re telling her to do until she does it. How can she possibly be stubborn?”

“Oh.”

“Oh. Exactly. It takes a while to learn that you have to train them like a dog or a horse. Once that collar goes on, she can’t understand what you say. She’ll react to your voice tone and to keywords you’ve conditioned into her. That’s absolutely all. Anything else is a meaningless noise. Now what are you going to do?”

Earl frowned. “She needs a different trainer?”

Jasper looked at him like he’d suddenly grown a second head. One that looked like a drooling idiot. “No, I’m not going to assign a different trainer. You’re going to gentle Goldie down and then continue with the training exactly as if this incident hadn’t happened. You will figure out why whatever you were training didn’t happen, and you will do something effective about it.”

Earl frowned.

Jasper sighed. “All right. Tell me what you’re supposed to get out of it?”

“Huh? I guess it’s like falling off a horse?”

“You guess right. You can’t be an effective trainer if you let your subject drive you off. It shouldn’t matter what she does. If it’s what you wanted you reinforce the association, if it isn’t you extinguish the association. What’s the lesson for her?”

“That I’m in control?”

“Almost, but it’s backwards.” Jasper frowned. “The lesson is that she isn’t in control. There’s a subtle difference. It doesn’t have to do with you specifically. It has to do with everyone who handles her. We want to condition her to obey everyone, which means that we don’t want her to get the idea that she can drive one of us off. You do that by getting in there and letting her find out that it doesn’t matter what she does, it’s what you want that’s going to happen.

“You’re coming along fine.” Jasper clapped him on the back. Earl staggered a moment, and then walked up to Goldie, speaking in a soothing tone of voice.


The doors to the stall swung closed, followed by the almost inaudible sound of the deadbolts being shot home. Sted looked around and took stock. The stable hands had replaced the food and water. She grimaced at it and then dropped to all fours so she could eat.

The welts on her ass were almost healed, and the damage to her arm where she’d intercepted the whip had begun healing. She looked at it thoughtfully. It seemed like she still had her Regen-2. That was a surprise. So regeneration wasn’t a mutant superpower? At least it wasn’t one that the powers nullifier suppressed. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t gone stupid either; her mind was still clicking along. And it did seem like her performance on the stamina wheel showed she was right about still having her enhanced strength. So the whole Exemplar package, at least as far as she was concerned, was probably still available.

So what did she feel about the whip incident? She frowned a bit in thought. He hadn’t used the whip again, which ought to feel like a win. So why didn’t it?

Stone-man had chewed him out, and then they’d discussed something and gone on with the session exactly as if nothing unusual had occurred. Looked at like that, training did seem to be going according to plan. Their plan. She didn’t have a clue what was going to happen next, which was probably the point. Well, she shook her head unhappily, either she managed to escape or she didn’t. If she did it probably didn’t matter, and if she didn’t? Anyone could be broken in time, and she doubted if she was an exception.

She sat back on her heels, the chain drooping from her collar and almost falling to the floor in a gentle curve to where it vanished around the front wall of the stall. The next item on her agenda was analyzing the devise and spells that kept her from using her powers. As she’d discovered, the collar wasn’t going to yield its secrets as easily as the various parts of the stall and the stable. She needed to concentrate.

She straightened up slightly and began the breathing and relaxation routine that she was finding effective before meditating on the devise. A few minutes later she had slipped into a concentration trance.

A half hour later she came back to awareness of the stall around her. She looked at what she had. It did seem like some things were a bit clearer. She was now certain that the collar itself was adamantium, with something else added. It didn’t seem like a physical attack on the collar was likely to succeed, even if she had anything to attack it with.

She looked at it some more. What had previously been an indistinct mass now seemed to be three separate structures. One was embedded in the collar itself; the other two projected from the collar into ... somewhere else. When she looked at them, it seemed like there was something behind them that was even fuzzier and less distinct. And also that was in a ... deeper? ... layer? Her Theory of Magic textbook did talk about other layers or levels or aspects of this plane or dimension of reality. Maybe that was what she was seeing?

She shook her head. Things were progressing. She just wished they were progressing faster. Time to move on to magic practice.

Magic practice was just as frustrating, but in a very different way. She made a note to add a prayer of thanksgiving for the lessons in patience. And tranquility. Mustn’t forget tranquility.

She shifted her attention and noticed several stray wisps of magical energy floating nearby. That was something new in the last couple of days! She’d never been able to see them before, and she’d certainly never been able to use them to power her spells. She hadn’t needed to, but now her ability to power spells from her energizer talent had vanished along with the energizer talent itself. A few wisps weren’t going to let her do anything major, but then doing anything major wasn’t likely to be needed except possibly one final spell to break out. Anything else would likely get noticed by the head mage.

She stood another piece of straw up and then very deliberately began a relaxing exercise before lighting it. This time she slipped into the level of determination required to cast a spell without getting all tense and sweaty. The straw burst into flame, and then extinguished itself with a counterbalancing spell. She nodded in pleasure. This piece was going well. She spent the next half hour practicing a number of other very low power and very unobtrusive spells, finishing with a divination.

As usual, it said that success was uncertain. It also said that nobody suspected she was working on escape. Nothing new there.

The really frustrating part was that she could probably walk out right now. Two deadbolts that she could manipulate magically, and she’d be out. The gloves, chastity device and hobbles would all yield to very small spells. However, she’d still be naked, without speech and with her powers suppressed. It didn’t seem like a major success option.

She shook herself and then composed herself for her evening prayers, remembering to add a prayer of thanksgiving for the lessons in patience and tranquility. As usual, once she had finished her prayers, she felt relaxed and at peace. She lay down on the straw and watched the ceiling panels pretend to be the evening sky. She went to sleep.


The next morning she woke up when the ceiling went through its dawn sequence. She took a drink of water and said her morning prayers. She did some gentle loosening up exercises and then went through as many of the Aikido katas as she could manage while she was hobbled. When she was done, she sat, looking at the four walls of her stall.

She let herself shift into a passively receptive state that she’d found she could maintain easily until one of the stable hands or trainers came to get her for whatever they were going to do first. As usual, more information about how the stall was constructed trickled into her mind.

It seemed that she had been wrong; the walls weren’t wood. They were some kind of plastic that she wasn’t familiar with. The wall she was looking at seemed to be a single unit, six feet high, seven feet long and about two inches thick. The pieces joined together with some kind of slide in place and lock mechanism.

About then footsteps stopped in front of her stall and the doors opened.


Sergei hummed to himself as he measured and fitted the leather straps for Goldie’s riding harness. A half hour after he’d started, he was done. He stepped back to admire the job.

She stood relaxed, reins tied to a ring in the wall. She was looking at various things in his workshop curiously. Not that it mattered in the slightest! Her collar was designed to not come off. Ever. Once they took the gloves off, she might be able to use some things as clubs. That would be the limit of her ability to use tools.

The end of her flame red mane fell over her arms, which were shackled crosswise across her back. The saddle fit tightly in the small of her back, cinched around her trim waist and resting lightly on her protruding buttocks and nestled just under her arms.

He led her out front and tied her reins to a hitching rail. Earl rode up on Patch and then dismounted. *Right on time*.

“How’s it going, guy?” Sergei asked as he stroked Patch’s mane and accepted a nuzzle from her.

“Pretty good. I think Patch likes to see you!”

“Well, of course. How’s it going with Goldie?”

“She’s settled a bit more once we got that whip thing out of the way. She goes into defense mode if I make like I’m going to use it. I think she’s got martial arts training. I’m not sure how that’ll affect things?”

“We get them sometimes. We put it on the sale advertisement. If the purchaser can establish the right relationship they’ll fight to protect him.”

“That ought to boost the price!”

“Sure does. Once they’ve been properly broken, if they look like they’ll make guard animals we do some more training. They’re a lot better than guard dogs: they’re more intelligent. We only get a couple a year, but when we do the bidding goes through the roof.” He paused slightly.

“Demo time?”

“Yep. If she takes to it like I think, I want to ride her around the path a couple of times with you and Patch along.”


“So how’s Goldie doing?” Lady Morigan asked Jasper.

“Well,” Jasper rubbed his chin to the accompaniment of a slight grinding noise, “in some ways very well, in other ways not very well at all. Physically she’s totally outclassed the stamina wheels. The second day she did two hours flat out at a fast trot with the maximum rated drag. She was sweating and breathing hard afterwards, but no way was she bushed. I’ve talked to Sergei about upgrading one of them just for her. I put a hundred pound pack on her yesterday, and it barely slowed her down. We did a two hundred pound pack this morning. It slowed her down slightly, but otherwise she handled it without problems. Sergei made up a saddle and riding harness for her and took her out for a first riding lesson. She got up to a trot with a rider, which is simply amazing for the first week, let alone the first session.

“We’re doing chariot training with a heavy chariot we use for a troika, and we’ve put extra weight in it. That makes her work up a sweat at a gallop! She’s got the races totally outclassed, not that I would have expected anything different: her legs and hips are adapted for running. She’s at least an Exemplar-2, maybe a 3. She’s also improving; it’s almost like those legs of hers were just waiting for an exercise schedule that had some intent behind it.

“She’s learning all the signals, paces and other behaviors pretty much on schedule. Nothing special there.

“As far as adaptation goes she’s being real cooperative. The one small bit of trouble we had was when one of the trainers tried to use a whip on her. She stopped and they got into it a bit. I got him straightened out, and she hasn’t given anyone any trouble since.” He shrugged.

“It’s only been five days,” Lady Morigan said. “Girls do vary. We do get a few that decide to be cooperative in the beginning. Not being able to talk or use their hands wears them all down eventually. Let’s see if she’s still acting like it’s a game after a month.”

“OK. Normally we’d take the gloves and hobble off in a couple more days, but I think it’s too early.”

“I agree. Leave them on until she starts to crack. Discovering her thumb doesn’t work will help that process along. So how’s the planning for the move coming?”

“Pretty good. We should be able to do everything in ten hours this time. Can you hold the portal open that long?”

“Piece of cake,” Lady Morigan said. “We might have to move quickly. Something is building.”

“OK. I won’t start any long novels.”

Lady Morigan laughed.


The stable hand shoved Goldie into her stall, threaded her collar chain off the hook and through the channel, shut the doors to her stall and shot the bolt.

Sted plumped down on the straw, tail out behind her, and started to review her day. The whip marks on her ass had healed, at least as far as she could tell without a mirror or hands. The wounds on her right arm from intercepting the whip stroke were coming along a lot faster than she had any right to expect. At the rate they were healing, maybe two more days.

They were certainly ratcheting up the exercise schedule! The load they put on her back with the stamina wheel had been tricky to balance, but she’d managed it. It hadn’t pushed her to her limits, but damn, she knew it had been a workout!

Whatever they were piling in the chariot was giving her a workout as well. And for the surprise: her trainer had ridden her for the first time. Part of her wanted to say it had been, if not exactly fun, strangely satisfying. Another part of her was totally repelled and just wanted to curl up and cry.

Being turned out in the field when she wasn’t working was new as well. That might have been more fun if she’d had her hands. At least they unhitched the hobble.

What she hadn’t liked, at all, was that they left the chain off of her collar. That had seemed like a good thing at the time, until one of the stable hands had snapped a leash on her nose ring to lead her to the field, and later to lead her from the field back into the stable to be harnessed for the next task. That was embarrassing.

Which brought up the stable workers. There seemed to be one group that did all the scutwork. There were both men and women. The strange thing was that about half of the women she saw in that group wore silver collars. There was something on them that could have been a decoration or writing, not that she could tell the difference. A couple of workers wore steel collars. They all wore tunics; the only difference seemed to be that the women’s boots had higher heels.

She shrugged. Interesting, but hardly anything that would get her out of here.

She added a note to her mental file to do more exercising if she got out. No, she told herself sternly. When she got out. For some reason, that slip really bothered her.

Concluded in Part 2

All rights reserved, except for those ceded to the Whateley Academy Author’s Group.

Chapter 4: No Plan Survives Contact with the Enemy.

It was day 6, Sted thought that morning. She decided she’d gotten everything she could out of how the pieces of the stable she could see were put together, as well as how the walls were constructed, so she might as well continue her examination of the ceiling. She lay on her back and let her attention focus on the ceiling panel above her. The information came, as usual, in a trickle. It was neat the way they connected to the walls and verticals; the modular construction and precise tolerances should let their workers put them together and take them apart quickly.

The material itself was amazing. The surface was, as she expected, almost microscopic LEDs. What she hadn’t expected was that it was a flat, absolutely light absorbing black. There might be night lights in the corridor outside of her stall and she’d never know it. It was also sound absorbent, and it seemed to have infra-red LEDs as well, presumably for heat.

Goldie stood at the hitching rack, reins tied loosely over the rail. Today they’d put checkreins on her bridle, so she couldn’t turn her head.

Instead of letting her mind wander and possibly get into a downer, she studied the exercise wheels. They happened to be in sight, and her slowly redeveloping gadgeteer ability pulled the usual trickle of information about them into her mind.

“Pretty pony,” a voice said from behind her as a surprisingly gentle hand stroked her shoulder and slid down her back. Goldie started slightly and then settled into letting herself be stroked. She felt herself relax even more and lean slightly into the strokes.

A moment later she felt someone unclip the hobble chain and reclip it to the band just below her knee, where it was out of the way but still available for when they wanted to hobble her next.

A woman walked in front of her and unhitched her reins. She said something, and Goldie felt herself bend forward and a bit to the side as the woman put a foot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle. She swayed slightly and then adjusted to the weight on her back.

Her rider spent the next hour putting her through her paces, first on the walking paths and then on the racetrack.

When she was done she left her for one of the stable hands to groom.

That evening, Sted took stock as usual. The only strange thing was that the boss-lady had taken her out riding. It had felt quite natural. She frowned at that; she didn’t want it to feel natural, darn it!

The rest of the day had been more of the same: stamina wheel, luge training, the increasingly heavy cart, being groomed several times, and time in the field with the other ponygirls. The guy who did most of her training had added a few new things today, but Sted was beginning to find it difficult to care.

She decided to begin her nightly practice routine the same way she’d been doing it the last few nights: start by working on unscrewing the inscrutable and follow that with magic practice. The inscrutable was gradually being unscrewed. Every night her vision of the devise that was keeping her away from her powers cleared more and gained more detail. She went into her meditative trance.

Two nights ago the indistinct mess had separated into three indistinct messes. Last night whatever the levels actually were had clarified so she could tell that one of the hazy constructs was a part of the collar, and the other two extended two levels down and interacted with something, or rather two somethings, that were a level below that. Somehow she knew that the deeper structure wasn’t part of the collar; it was there first.

When she came out, she found that the parts of the structure in the collar were now clear. The rest were still an indecipherable muddle. She started studying them. She kept finding her attention being drawn to the part that maintained the collar in one seamless whole around her neck. After a couple of minutes, she discovered why. There was a structure in there that seemed like it opened the damn thing! For a moment she was totally confused: there didn’t seem to be any way of making it work! Then she discovered that there were several carefully concealed triggers. She’d be tempted to call them back doors, except that there didn’t seem to be a front door. They looked like they’d been installed by two different people. And it looked like there were several other back doors that had been detected and closed. Such a touching lack of trust, she grinned to herself. She studied one of them, and suddenly the key came clear. It was a phrase: Morigan Le Fey. She snorted. Compared to Nicki Reilly the boss lady looked like a cut rate department store elf. Admittedly, she seemed to be a pretty potent mage, and she was a good rider as well.

There was something peculiar about the back doors. After a couple more minutes study she had it. They were keyed to specific people, plus an additional key.

She carefully probed one of them with very low power and cautious spells until it accepted her as the boss-lady. Then she pronounced the phrase in her mind.

The collar split in two and fell off her neck.

Calm down! she told herself. The gloves yielded in less than a minute; the chastity device and hobbles took another minute. The rings in her nose and breasts dropped into her hands quickly. She called her purse and utility belt to her and hastily dressed in a backup outfit she kept just in case. She took a quick look at her GPS locater and pressed the memory button.

She dumped the gloves and chastity device into her purse. After a quick look to see if there was anyone in sight, she opened the doors enough to release the chain and put the pieces of the collar and chain in her purse as well. Let them try to figure out how she’d done it! After a moment’s thought she created a delayed action masking spell, set for an hour in the future, whenever anyone opened the stall, or if it detected a scrying spell. Firing the thing off ought to raise all kinds of alarms, but she’d be long gone by then.

She took another quick look around. Nobody in sight. Good. The door unlatched and opened quietly. She dumped her tack off the wall into her purse and closed the stall door. She took a deep breath and shimmered. A moment later a cabbit hovered in the air where she’d been. It vanished.

She slid out of the stable, went up and looked back. It didn’t look quite right. She nodded. The exercise wheels and a lot of other stuff had vanished. She dropped down, still invisible. The scene gradually shifted to show what she knew was there. A pretty good cloaking spell, she thought.

She shifted from cabbit to ponygirl form, still invisible and standing in the air. She began to look around magically. It only took a few minutes before she found the spell that kept the place cloaked. It was a powerful spell that did a lot, continuously powered by a local ley line, but at base it wasn’t all that complicated. She grinned maliciously. If she just twisted it a little bit….
She went up and looked down. Yep. The illusion was gone, although with any luck they wouldn’t discover it for a while. She shifted to cabbit form and streaked toward Whateley.

The burst of a spell going off jolted Lady Morigan out of the paperwork she’d been dealing with. She waved her hand, and an image of the property appeared above her desk, with a fading light in the middle of the stable.
Oh, shit!. Five minutes later she gazed into the empty stall that had contained her latest acquisition. A quick gesture showed her ... nothing. The last week’s events in the stall had been overlaid. She thinned her lips and then nodded. The overlay was more brute force than finesse: she could undoubtedly unravel it and find out what had happened, but it would be a major working and take a couple of hours.

She did a different scrying spell, and discovered a flying cabbit leaving the stable. She saw it circle, come back and then shift into her missing ponygirl. A ponygirl that was fully dressed, missing the collar, with her purse on her shoulder and hovering in midair as if gravity meant absolutely nothing. The girl did something, and then turned back into a cabbit, circled once and dashed away at speed.

She’d done something. What?

Lady Morigan did a quick divination spell. The rune appeared and then vanished like smoke on the breeze. She thought a moment, and then checked the cloaking spell. It looked fine, except ... there seemed to be the hint of a foreign magical signature buried deep within it.

She made another set of gestures and sent a viewpoint high above the property.

Shit! They’d been uncovered for over an hour! She looked back at the cloaking spell. It took her a couple of minutes to discover what that damn ponygirl had done. She quickly set it right.

She stared into the distance and came to a decision. Chasing the ponygirl wouldn’t guarantee that they stayed hidden. Survival came before revenge. She dashed off to rouse her minions into starting the move right away.
 
Chapter 5: After Action Report.

An hour after leaving, Sted decided she’d put enough distance between herself and the ponygirl stable, so she started looking for someplace to eat. She spotted a truck stop and dropped to the ground in a spot where nobody was looking. A moment later a mousy looking woman who appeared to be in her late teens or early 20s walked out of the parking lot into the restaurant, sat down and ordered a large meal.

Once the waitress had walked away with her order, she pulled her cell phone out of her purse and dialed Whateley’s contact number.

“Whateley Academy,” the answering machine said. “Our offices are closed. Your call is very important to us. Please leave your name, number and a short message, and we’ll get back to you in the morning.”

She punched in a random number.

The answering machine hung up. A minute later her phone buzzed.

“Pony?” the voice asked.

“That’s me,” she answered.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“You’re close. I’m in an insecure location so I can’t give you details. I’ve stopped for dinner. Expect me in a couple of hours.”

“Stop here first.”

“Sure. Wouldn’t want to give Ms. Savage a heart attack.”

“Good point. You said a couple of hours?”

“Probably. Depends on how fast I get served.”

“OK. Security off.”

Three hours later the invisible cabbit slid out of the heavens and stopped in front of Kane Hall. It shimmered a moment, and Sted stood there. She hitched her purse on her shoulder and walked in.

“Chief Delarose is expecting you,” the guy at the front desk said. “You know your way back.”

“What kept you so long?” Franklin Delarose asked as Sted walked into his office.

“Had to deal with an Air Force interceptor over Connecticut. Those boys have got something different in the way of detection gear. Whatever they’re using, it isn’t radar.”

“I’ve heard rumors, but nothing concrete. So what did you do to the poor boy?”

“Pretended to be a flying saucer. Circled the plane a couple of times so he got a good look and then streaked off toward D.C. Then I had to hug the treetops coming back.”

“A flying saucer?”

“No cup, just the saucer. I thought of maybe using either a Hello Kitty or Barney pattern, but decided to stick with a traditional floral china pattern.”

The chief tried to stifle a laugh. “Seriously, what happened?”

“I got kidnapped by a group of nutcases that seem to be in the business of kidnapping girls and training them as ponygirls. Presumably they were selling them. I suppose they found a real ponygirl to be just too tempting a target. They had something that suppressed speech and powers, so I really had a time escaping.”

“They had a real universal power nullifier?” Delarose sat up straight.

“It’s a devise, and I didn’t have the time to analyze it thoroughly. I’m not even sure I could. They had their own devisor.”

“It didn’t stop you.”

“I found a way around it. I’m not sure whether I could have either blasted my way through it or deconstructed it.”

“You found a way around it?”

“It’s gotta be in the rules somewhere: the inescapable trap always has a back door. I found one of their back doors and used it. I doubt if the way I found would work for very many other people.”

“Could you ID any of them?”

“They had a speech suppressor; I couldn’t understand anything that anyone said around me. The boss lady was a pretty good mage; a lot better than I am. I didn’t stay around to collect IDs. I’d have to look at the mug shots. There’s one guy that ought to be real obvious. He looks like a rock. Lots of different kinds of rock.”

“Multicolored rock. Hmmm.” The Chief punched in a query and swiveled the display so Sted could see it.

“Looks like him.”

“Class of ‘96.” He punched in another query and then selected an entry.

“That's her. Those ears are distinctive. Besides, she used her name for one of the keys on the back door.”

“Now for a devisor.” He punched in another one.

“Yep. That’s him.”

“They hung out together while they were here and vanished not too long after graduating. I don’t suppose you know where it is?”

Sted pulled out her GPS unit and showed it to the chief.

“Great. We’ll pass that to law enforcement in the morning.”

“Morning may be too late. They’ve got a real sophisticated illusion masking the place. I jiggered it, but I don’t know how long it will be before they discover they’re uncovered. They know I escaped, and I suspect that they’re prepared to move on a moment’s notice.”

“Um?”

“Just general impressions. For one thing, it looked like they’d been doing this for a while, which makes sense if they started right after they graduated. I got the impression the place hadn’t been there that long. Maybe a year or two. It also looked like all their stuff was easy to tear down and put up again. Modular construction, that kind of thing. If their head mage is good enough to set up a portal, and if they’ve got a bolthole prepared, they may well be gone by morning.”

“Could be,” Delarose said thoughtfully. “I’ll pass the word to the Sex Crimes people anyway. Never hurts to be on their good side. Now you head for your dorm. We notified Ms. Savage you were coming back.”

“What did she say?”

“Good. Your roommate was moping.”

Lady Morigan looked at the frantic activity around her. That had been too close!

The move had taken twelve hours, rather than the ten that Jasper had planned. That was still very, very good; the last one had taken three days. They’d gotten everything moved, and the carefully orchestrated set of spells that would deconstruct and cover up the remains over the next week had started to work. Two hours later the Federal strike force had moved in, and she’d had to trigger off the spell that wiped all the evidence in a single massive and extremely obvious blast of magic.

Well, no rest for the wicked, as they said. Her maids were still getting her apartments organized; the new mansion’s staff had barely managed to get breakfast. It was never too soon to begin planning the next move. And to analyze what had gone wrong this time. Goldie shouldn’t have been able to remove her collar.

At least, she thought, she’d gotten a good look at Goldie’s BIT. It might be enough that she could start giving her ponygirls BITs of their own.

“I gather you had quite an adventure,” Dr. Bellows said to Sted.

“You could call it that,” she answered.

“I was going to ask you to come in and discuss it, but you got the request in first. So what’s the problem?”

“Well,” the ponygirl hesitated a bit, “I’ve got a serious conflict. Part of me almost wants to withdraw in disgust. I feel unclean. Another part of me enjoyed it. Another part wants to drop everything, hunt them down and kill them. Slowly.”

“So you’re really conflicted about enjoying parts of it? Sex?”

“No, they put some kind of chastity device on me. No sex.”

“Well, that’s one set of problems. Any nightmares?”

“No. Frankly, given the situation I was well treated. One of the training devices had a built-in whip for slacking off, and I got whipped a couple of other times as encouragement. I had the clinic check when I got back, but they’d all healed.

“It was just being treated like an animal. And enjoying it. That’s what’s got me going. I shouldn’t have enjoyed it.”

“Has that happened before?”

“Dad let me check the ponygirl scene on the net before I came here. There was kind of the same attraction and repulsion. I quit and decided I didn’t want anything to do with it.”

“Anything earlier?”

“No,” Sted shook her head.

Dr. Bellows nodded. “You may be missing the obvious. You’re a mage, what would the Law of Similarity say about the situation?”

“Similarity? It shouldn’t bite that quickly?”

“There’s a thriving fetish subculture built around the ponygirl icon. It’s not huge, but it’s big enough to have built up quite a charge over several centuries. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it hadn’t built up a ponygirl goddess or demon by now. Someone in the Magic faculty could undoubtedly explain it better.”

“So there’s a Class 2 entity involved as well?”

“That would make a good deal of sense of your reactions, but now we’re way out of my area of expertise.”

“So I need to talk to Circe?”

“Or Earth Mother, or one of the other faculty. I’d suggest getting on it quickly.”

“That makes sense.” Sted frowned. “Well, Circe wants to talk to me anyway.”

“Good. That level of revulsion is a normal reaction to perversions. If you find the temptation to take revenge overwhelming, come in and talk. Otherwise I’d rather let Circe see if there’s anything magical going on with the attraction.

“We’re done for the moment?”

“I think so.”

“Good. If Circe doesn’t find anything, make another appointment.”

“So, you really had an adventure,” Circe said. “The last few days in Magic Lab you’ve been doing some quite different things. I gather you learned something?”

“I can do magic without the mutant mage talent.”

“Oh, really! So that power nullifier that Security said you mentioned blocked the mage talent?”

“It blocked everything except the Exemplar 3. Plus speech. And it made me a psychic null.”

“So how did you manage to escape? I wouldn’t think that what you could do without your talent could get by Morigan. She was quite decent when she graduated.”

“Way beyond my ability! I found I could do the gadgeteer thing at a very slow rate. I had to go into trance to get anything on the collar, but I could get information on the stall and other stuff just by looking at it and letting my mind go receptive.”

“So you’ve got a lot about them?”

“Well, how the stable and other equipment works! The people, not so much. The collar took me six days, a half hour a day in trance, to get enough to find a way out. That was in the collar, not in the power nullifier itself. I exploited the hole and got out of there like my tail was on fire.”

“Well, I’d have to say in the same situation I wouldn’t stay around to analyze it either. You probably did some looking, though.”

“Only as part of working on seeing it clearly. I had to be in trance to work on the collar until the final pieces. It looked like it was projecting something into what might be an underlying layer of reality? I think I saw several layers?”

“Now that’s interesting! Did you get deep enough to spot your BIT?”

“Well, maybe. There was some other real shadowy stuff in the layer below where it was projecting, if that makes any sense.”

Circe nodded. “It does. There aren’t many mages that can work on the layers that underly what we think of as reality. Or at least that can get below the first underlying layer. If you could see into the third layer that’s going some. That was without your mutant esper talent?”

“Yes. With it all I could tell is that the collar was doing something, but not what or where.”

“So. That might mean that your mutant talents are blocking some things you could do without them. That’s very interesting. I don’t think you’re ready to deal with the layers that underly reality yet, but...”

She steepled her hands. “Let me speak hypothetically. I presume you destroyed the collar. If, just hypothetically, you brought it back with you, I strongly suggest that you arrange for it to vanish if anyone starts looking for it. There are a lot of people who would like to get their hands on a working powers nullifier. I have lived far to long to have any illusions of what would happen in the long run: it would simply ratchet the level of insanity one step further. Both sides would use it.”

“I can see that.”

“Since you didn’t bring it back, I will have to forgo my rather strong desire to look at it. If I did, you’d still need to make arrangements to dispose of it before it fell into the wrong hands.”

Sted nodded. “If I’d kept it, I can see how keeping it out of the wrong hands would be wise.”

“Speaking of the collar, what’s the possibility of someone getting one from the source?”

Sted sat back. “You know, I don’t know. The collar isn’t designed to come off. There isn’t any way to remove it from outside. If the victim dies it’ll self-destruct and take her head off in the process.”

“Making sure she’s really dead. Ugh. Then how did you get it off?”

“They don’t trust each other. It’s got facilities for opening and closing it, but there isn’t any way of invoking the opener unless you look real close. There are hidden back doors that are keyed to two different people; I faked one of them out.”

Circe laughed. “If they trusted each other?”

“I’d have designed it so that the collar wouldn’t close around certain people’s necks. Then it would remove the closing routine when it fused, and there wouldn’t be an opening routine at all.

“Ah. Nasty.”

She waved the subject away. “Let’s get onto a more pleasant subject. You do realize that this opens up a real possibility?”

“I know there’s lots of stuff you can do if you stay below people’s notice.”

“There’s that, but what I meant is that you have the potential to go beyond what your mutant talent provides. It depends on how much work you want to put into it.”

“Oh? Oh! I see. Relying on my mage talent is a limitation, isn’t it?”

“In a sense. It’s better to have alternatives. Now, Dr. Bellows sent me a note. Something about a Class 2 entity?”

“He said that the ponygirl fetish community might have created one, and that I was being affected.”

“Law of Similarity. He’s absolutely right, if there was one you would be affected. Let’s go into my workroom and do some scrying.” They went into the next room and closed the door.

“This is going to be a bit beyond your capability, so just stand in that circle over there.” Circe pointed at a small circle scribed on the floor. She took a long rod made out of a single crystal from the black cloth covering it, and pointed it at Sted. For a moment nothing happened. Then a gently glowing cloud formed in another circle, shot through with bands of different colors. Sted could see vaguely defined forms inside of it.

Circe looked at it, and then walked around it, studying it from different angles. Eventually she dismissed the cloud, which dissolved and vanished.

“This is about the most secure place on the campus,” she remarked to herself. “It’s a pity you destroyed the collar.”

“You mean this?” Sted rummaged in her purse a moment and brought out the two half-circles, one of which still had the chain attached.

“Right.” Circe took it and put it on a platform. She looked at it, muttering to herself. Then she made a couple of passes over it and handed the pieces back to Sted. “It won’t close on anyone’s neck, and I destroyed the powers nullifier. The rest is still there. It’s safe enough for you to study to learn how to get into the underlying layers, identify the BIT and the structures that create mutant talents.” She handed the pieces of the collar back, and Sted dropped them into her purse.

Then Circe opened the door and walked back into her office, gesturing at Sted to follow her.

“Well, he was absolutely right. It’s a god type Class 2 entity. You know the difference between god and goddess types and other class 2 entities?”

“I think I read the material, but it didn’t make a lot of sense.”

“OK. Briefly, a god type entity is organized around a cultural icon or archetype. If you take any classical mythology or even many current neo-pagan theologies, the gods and goddesses are god type Class 2 entities. With me so far?”

“I think so,” she said a bit hesitantly.

“The big difference is that god type entities interact with everyone who has that cultural icon or archetype; other entities are localized. A god type doesn’t have to interact with just people. One that handles an entire species, or an entire forest, is a god type Class 2 entity. Is this making sense?”

Sted nodded, fascinated.

“The normal type of class 2 entity is an individual. An avatar can absorb a normal class 2 entity completely; she can’t absorb a god type entity without burning out: it’s simply too big and powerful. Some god type entities will allow avatars to absorb small pieces of themselves, and sometimes the avatar thinks they’ve got the entire entity, which simply isn’t the case.

“A god type class 2 entity is still limited to this plane of reality. It might be able to reach into the underlying levels, but it isn’t an extra-planar being.

“As long as one of your bodies is a ponygirl, you’re connected to the ponygirl archetype, and the Law of Similarity will maintain the connection to the entity. You can cut it by maintaining shields and wards. Those are active defenses; if you let them lapse the connection will reestablish itself. The only way to break that kind of connection permanently is to change the structure so it’s no longer similar. That would mean changing your BIT.”

“Which isn’t really possible. In other words I’m stuck with it?”

“While it’s big and powerful, there’s no reason you have to become a good little acolyte. You can maintain a lot of independence. You’ve got other resources. Let’s say that you’re stuck with each other.”

“I don’t understand?”

“The reason you felt good about what they had you doing is that god type entities make their worshipers feel good when they’re behaving according to the archetype. It’s how they maintain and increase the similarity and get energy from their worshipers.

“If you don’t want to find yourself being gently herded into its idea of the properly submissive ponygirl you have to learn how to manage the relationship yourself. It’s got power, you’ve got other assets that will let you maintain a balance.”

“Oh?”

“For one thing, you don’t have to let the attraction take you over. You’ll still feel good when you’re in accord with the archetype it embodies, but you can plant your hooves and say: ‘I want it to work this way.’ It’s walking along the edge, and most people would either get away from the edge or go over. You don’t have the option of getting away from the edge.”

“I see,” Sted grimmaced.

“Let’s get to the core. You’ve got three conflicting sets of emotions: revulsion, attraction and a desire for revenge. Right?”

“Uh. Yes.”

“Well, for most people Dr. Bellow’s approach would be correct: go with the revulsion and work out the attraction. You’re going to have to do the opposite: go with the attraction and work out the revulsion, while still maintaining your independence and your affiliation with our culture. Fortunately you’re a mage, you’ve already got some practice in handling incompatible systems at the same time.

“The desire for revenge has to go. That doesn’t mean we have to leave those people to keep doing what they’re doing, but stopping them has to be done in accord with proper procedures and cultural norms. You can’t let yourself go vigilante or you’ll eventually slide right into the entity’s clutches. If you feel a need to, you should talk to Dr. Bellows about resolving it.

“Long term, you’re going to have to change the goddess so she’s compatible with our cultural norms”

“I’m going to what?”

Circe ignored Sted’s astonishment and went over to a wall and slid a previously invisible panel aside. “I think,” she looked at the array of books and scrolls, “this one will do nicely for starters. See what you can make of the ritual on page 96. You should also look at the material in the Powers Theory and Theory of Magic texts on god type Class 2 entities. There isn’t that much. I’ll see you after classes next Thursday. We can discuss it then. I’ll make this an official project that’s a follow-on to your little adventure so you won’t be overloaded with extra work.”