Question Sted 10 - Aspidistra

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 tenth 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


NOTE - incidents leading up to this story are in To Train a Ponygirl as well as the episode on December 28th in What I Did on my Christmas Vacation.

NOTE - This story deals with some rather nasty stuff. You’ve been warned!



Aspidistra, little herb,
Do you think it silly
When the botanizer’s blurb
Links you with the lilly?

Up above your window ledge
Streatham stars are gleaming
Aspidistra, little veg,
Does your soul go dreaming?

The Saint vs Scotland Yard, Leslie Chartris.


Chapter 1.

Natalie Seals looked at the blueberry bran muffin on her plate. She nodded in approval. The cooks made really good blueberry muffins, even with frozen blueberries. They almost made up for the necessity of joining the rest of the staff for meals.

The Sidhe mage looked out over the dining room just in time to see Darlene come in with a plumpish blonde she didn’t recognize. The two women headed for the serving line, picked up some breakfast and then headed her way.

“Natalie Seals, Stacy Nichols,” Darlene told Natalie. “Stacy’s our new hire. Natalie’s our rehabilitation process coordinator.”

“Grab a chair, and we’ll start filling you in while you eat,” Natalie said. “How much did they tell you before they shipped you out here?”

“I thought I got a briefing, but from what I saw last night.... This was supposed to be a rehabilitation project for people who had suffered extreme abuse.”

Natalie took a dainty bite of the muffin. “It is. They just neglected to tell you what kind of abuse, or that it’s a rather specialized kind of abuse. It shouldn’t come as any surprise to know that there are some seriously warped people out there, and quite a few of them have enough money for a cottage industry to have sprung up supplying their rather peculiar needs. Like what you undoubtedly saw last night.”

“Women hitched to carts? I’ve worked with some of the casualties of the kink community before, but I never thought anyone would go that far!”

“The amateurs don’t because they can’t, and to their credit, most of them don’t want to. The people who did this to them are professionals, and they sell their product to people with lots more money than scruples.

“The Sex Crimes people have been recovering ponygirls on raids for some time now, and they discovered that standard rehab doesn’t work. The vendors have done things to them that leave most therapists totally baffled.”

“Telepaths?” Stacy asked.

“There aren’t that many of them, and the various codes of ethics really frown on what I’d have to do to fix them in one shot. Anyway, they decided to establish a specialized rehab project. We’ve found that it’s a lot easier on the girls if they start out with a sane, or at least less crazy, version of what the vendors trained and conditioned them for. It cuts down on their confusion at the start of the process and gives us a starting point on the road map through the swamp.”

“At least if you want to be very, very generous with the term ‘road map’,” Darlene put in.

“Exactly. Here’s a bit of background.”


Cheri felt herself begin to swim toward awareness, as if she was coming out from under anesthetic after some kind of surgery. She tried to move, and found that she couldn’t. Her arms, legs and head seemed to be firmly tethered, and not the way they would be if she was restrained in a bed. There seemed to be something in her mouth, and whatever she was lying on dug into her shoulders and ass.

It didn’t smell like a hospital, she thought muzzily. She tried to open her eyes. It didn’t look like a hospital either. Hospitals didn’t have a mirror on the ceiling. The mirror showed a naked girl spread-eagled and apparently hanging in mid-air, with something in her mouth. The girl looked remarkably like her.

She screamed.

“She’s come around, sir,” a voice said. It seemed to come from a figure in a hooded monk’s robe. The hood shadowed his head so she couldn’t make out any features.

“So I hear,” a voice from another hooded figure said. It was the most intense bass Cheri had ever heard, even in operas. “Prepare her.”

One of the hooded men moved forward and placed a shallow bowl on a stand anchored to whatever was in her mouth. Then he put more bowls on her breasts, her navel and at her crotch. He walked backwards to his original place and then made a gesture and intoned a Word. Whatever was in the bowls burst into flames.

“Let us begin,” the man with the bass voice said. He walked up to a lectern and began reading from a book. His voice seemed to echo oddly while the words seemed to imprint themselves on her consciousness in letters of fire, and then vanish, not to be remembered. Barely visible and oddly colored shapes appeared in the air, and then drifted toward her body, only to sink into it. Strangely they didn’t appear in the mirror.

Another of the men in monk’s robes glided up to her and placed a hinged black collar around her neck. He touched the join. There was an intense flare of light. He glided back to his place as more of the vaguely colored blotches sank into it and vanished.

Another of the hooded men walked up bearing a sword. He swung and chopped off one of her feet, just above the ankle. She screamed. He swung it again and chopped off the other foot. She screamed again.

She tried to take a deep breath. It seemed to help. Oddly, from what she could see in the mirror the stumps didn’t seem to be bleeding.

Then her eyes widened. The stumps seemed to be growing! She watched, spellbound, as more of the indistinct blobs faded into view and then sank into her body, and the stumps of her legs grew longer and began to take shape. They looked like ... hooves?

More time passed as the man at the lectern continued intoning what had to be a spell. Finally, no more blobs formed. He closed the book and said “It ends.” The flames in the bowls went out. The other cowled men walked forward and removed them.

“Take her to the stables,” the mage said. “Call her Jinja.”

Another man walked out of the shadows and bowed slightly. “Yes, Sir Teliard.”


“There seem to be four vendors,” Natalie said. “At least, there are four distinct varieties, and the debriefs show each has a different training establishment. We lump three of them into what we call Group 1, and the fourth into Group 2. We actually do have somewhat of a road map for the three varieties in Group 1, but the final variety is currently a total dead end.

“Each of the four varieties has a unique mix of DNA mods, physical mods, training and deep psychological conditioning. Your first patient is going to be from variety 3. She has real hooves, a real tail, and has been physically enhanced to where she’s got world-class strength and stamina.”

Stacy whistled. “They’re using magic?”

“Sir Teliard, that’s the one who trained her, certainly is. So is Lady Morigan. Lord Mountebank probably wouldn’t recognize a spell if it came up and hit him with a club.” She snorted. “The Equestrian seems to be some kind of devisor.

“That’s part of the reason I’m here: I’m a mage, a magical healer and a practitioner of an odd branch of psychotherapy, so that’s my part of the process: I heal any physical problems they come in with, fix the DNA and then try to replace things like tails and hooves using regenerative healing. I also take the therapeutic club to a couple of conditioning issues that our regular therapy staff would find difficult to impossible to get through in a reasonable amount of time.”

“So I’m part of the regular therapy staff?” Stacy asked.

“Right. You already know Darlene is the psychotherapy supervisor. With a couple of exceptions, the psychotherapy approach is geared toward baseline therapists, not to mutant or other empowered therapists.”

“Exceptions?”

“Yes. One commonality is that they’ve all been conditioned to not talk, and not understand spoken or usually written language.”

“That’s cruel!”

Natalie shrugged. “And the rest isn’t? It’s part of the shtick. Each vendor does it differently. Sir Teliard implants a spell in the collar that does the conditioning. The result is that his victims no longer speak or understand language. You can say anything you want in front of them, and as long as your tone sounds neutral or approving, they’ll like it. They not only think they can’t go back, they’re completely settled into their role. They expect to be treated like a horse and used like a horse.”

Stacy frowned. “Surely you can get rid of the spell?”

“Of course! That’s the first thing I do. The issue is that there’s nothing magical about the process or the result. The magic is simply that the spell is there, all the time, day and night. It’s also quite good at picking out what to reinforce or extinguish. Beyond that, it doesn’t do anything that a sufficiently competent and nasty therapist couldn’t do. In fact, it’s not even all that sophisticated; almost everyone on our staff could probably improve it if they could work the magic.”

“I see. It’s just faster and more thorough. So getting rid of the spell just removes the continuous reinforcement. That’s nasty.”

“Indeed. It’s intermittent rather than continuous reinforcement, which is even nastier. If it was continuous it would start to disintegrate as soon as I removed the spell, or anyone removed the collar. There are a couple of therapists on staff who could work the no talk conditioning through, although they’d take several weeks to possible a month or two.”

“I notice,” Darlene said, “you’ve got the process model of body language on your CV. That’s a good start, but even so you’d have to work with Natalie for a while before you’d be able to do that level of therapy without language.”

“Right,” Natalie said. “I’ve got a spell that lets me see how their brain functions. You can think of it as a combination of EEG, MEG, tensor diffusion MRI and some other stuff that’s been integrated and improved almost beyond recognition.”

“I know brain imaging people who would kill for something like that!”

Natalie shrugged again. “It’s magic, and it doesn’t make recordings, so it isn’t publishable. I’ll show you what it’s like if you want, but unless you’ve got an undiscovered talent for magic, you won’t be able to use it.”

“And even if you learn to cast it yourself,” Darlene added, “it’ll take you literally years before you could cast it reliably and get the experience to use it smoothly. I try to avoid being envious!”

“Talk therapy,” Natalie continued, “is kind of difficult if the patient can’t talk or understand you, so I do that piece myself, right at the beginning. In fact, I’ll do it for your girl before we’re done this morning. I have to do some healing first for variety two: they suppress speech using brain damage, and I’ve got to heal that first. Then you’ve got to do speech therapy on top of the usual psychotherapy.”

Stacy grimaced.

“The other problem is that they’ve been conditioned to believe that they can’t go back -- they’re never going to be able to return to life as a relatively normal person in society. Part of that is that they’ve been disfigured. It’s not that they look bad, because most of them don’t. They’re quite good looking. It’s the hooves, tails and manes.”

“The rest of it,” Darlene said, “is straight belief level conditioning. Well over half the time we can work through that ourselves. The other half? If you’re not making progress after a few months, and the seniors are also baffled, Natalie can crack that one as well.”

“So what needs healing?” Stacy asked.

“Well, a lot of them come in with masses of scar tissue from whippings. We’ve had some come in without arms, and the one variety that still has normal human feet almost always has bad foot, ankle, knee and hip problems. That’s serious enough that I’ve been tempted to just replace their feet with hooves until we get to the point where we switch back. Some of them have brain damage ranging from chemical imbalances and addictions to micro-strokes.

“Then there’s drugs, piercings, tattoos and the Goddess only knows what else! There are a batch of other DNA mods.”

“God! I see what you mean about serious abuse.”

“Fortunately, I can keep up with it and also run the process as a whole. It helps that I tend to be a ‘you get together and run your own process’ kind of manager.”

“For which I am thankful,” Darlene said.

“So how do you deal with, say, a real tail?”

“First we wait until they’ve decided they want to return to normal society. Then I use a spell to restore their original DNA, or get as close as I reasonably can, remove or amputate the tail and both hooves, and then do a regenerative type healing to restore the tailbone and their feet and ankles. The regen takes a week or so, and then there’s another couple of weeks of physical therapy while they relearn how to walk with real feet instead of hooves.

“That hasn’t, however, been as successful as it ought to be. The break we got at Christmas explained the problem, so I’m investigating alternatives. The consultant who’s coming in may be able to help on that as well.”

Natalie looked at her empty plate. “I think we’ve done as much as we can sitting here yapping, so let’s go dump the dishes and look at your first patient.”

“I’ll talk to you later,” Darlene said, “after you’ve had your first session with your patient.”


Jinja woke to the sound of the buzzer and the increased light. She tried to stretch. Her arms stopped moving as something pulled at her wrists. Also, it felt like there was something over her, and it didn’t feel like she was lying on straw.

She managed to open her eyes and look around. This was not her usual stall! She sat up, noticing that a blanket fell off and that a chain slithered down her front. Then she found that they’d shackled her hooves together.

She heard voices and what sounded like hard rubber shod hooves hitting concrete. A parade of naked ponygirls walked past, their hair or manes in a tangled mess and their tails waving behind them. Most of them poked their heads into her cubicle to look, but then they continued on.

She blinked to try to clear her impressions. She seemed to be in an open cubicle with wooden walls about 4 feet high. Her collar was attached to a ring on the back wall with a light chain. Her hooves were hobbled. The wall on the other side of the corridor had what looked like her tack neatly hung on hooks.

She was still looking around when a young woman came in. She was dressed in jeans, a checkered shirt and work boots, with her blond hair tied back in a jaunty ponytail. She gestured and held out a strap. Jinja moved forward and tilted her head back. The woman unsnapped the long chain and snapped the leash to Jinja’s collar. Then she tugged. Jinja got to her hooves and followed, the hobble restricting her movements.

After a turn, they walked into a room with floor toilets. The groom gestured, and Jinja squatted and relieved herself. Then they went out to another room, where the groom looped the leash through a ring in the wall and proceeded to wash the ponygirl down.

She did a thorough job; Jinja felt clean for the first time in she couldn’t remember how long. Then the groom held out a bowl of mixed oatmeal and fruit chunks and fed her.

Finally, the groom led her back to her cot and reattached the chain to her collar. She patted her on the shoulder, said something incomprehensible that sounded like it ought to be encouraging, turned and left.

Jinja sat and stared at the wall on the other side of the corridor. There was, after all, nothing else to do until her new masters, whoever they were, had a task. At least she had learned, out of raw necessity, how to let the time pass without getting either bored or frustrated.


Natalie got up and Stacy’s eyes bugged out. Natalie had a neatly coiled whip hanging from her belt!

“Uh?”

“What’s with the whip?” Natalie echoed the unspoken question. “We maintain control by playing good cop - bad cop, and I’m the bad cop. I’m the looming threat that tells them if they don’t behave, living to regret it is going to be a very pale expression for what’s going to happen to them. I’m setting a rather low bar on behave. All I’m asking is that they do what they’re told promptly, reasonably well and with some attempt at cheerfulness, and that they don’t cause trouble. I’m not setting any particular standard of deportment, ritual politeness or any of that stuff. Partly there’s too much variation in their training, but mostly it’s because we want to get them out of the mindset they’ve been stuck in, not reinforce it even further.”

Stacy nodded. “Deal with one issue at a time, and that’s hardly likely to be the most important one. Right.”

“Make no mistake about it,” Natalie said. “The threat is real. Threats aren’t credible unless they’re followed up, to the letter. On the other hand, I don’t want to do it too often -- that would destroy the image that this is a safe place to recover and experiment with sticking one’s head out of the shell.

“The reason I don’t have to make good on the threat very often is that there are a number of spells on the place that make sure if one of them goes out of control they’re stunned and collapse rather than actually damaging anyone. If all goes well, I’ll never lay a hand on them to do anything beyond healing. It’s not that I won’t, because I have and I will. We just try to arrange things so I don’t have to.”

“Building trust by acting consistently.”

“Right. The only way it’s possible with these people.”

By this time, they’d walked outside and had arrived at a blocky building.

“Now. This building is Group 1, Stage 2. It’s a combined dormitory and clinic. Private and double rooms, therapy rooms, operating theater, the usual.”

“Stage 2?”

“Stage 2 is for after she’s decided that she’s going to make the trek back to being a reasonably normal person in society. We don’t push; she’s got to want to do it for her own reasons.”

“Pushing would probably lead to a lot of pushback,” Stacy said. “I know some therapists like to work with resistance, but I don’t.”

“That was something we looked for in your CV. ‘Resistance is futile’,” Natalie intoned portentously.

Stacy laughed.

“This is also when we replace the manes, tails and hooves. The reason I show it to new hires first is so that you’ve got the progression firmly in your head when you see Stage 1.”

“That’s supposed to reassure me?”

“It had better. Now, Stage 1 is back here.” They walked around a building to see a previously hidden area. Stacy stopped dead.

“Pick your jaw up, girl! Remember I said that we start them off as ponygirls, and they only transition to returning to being normal humans at their own pace?”

“Yes. So this is what the abuser’s establishments looked like?”

“It’s closer to what the training establishments look like; we’ve got a pretty good idea from what they tell us. Considering what the trainers are doing, they’re organized fairly rationally; most of the actual abuser’s establishments aren’t. They don’t have either the space or the expertise, for the most part.

“You don’t need to deal with most of it, and in fact you shouldn’t with any of your actual patients. You’re supposed to be the light at the end of the tunnel, not the oncoming train!”

Stacy laughed again.

“What we need right now is the stable area.” Natalie gestured at the building behind the open courtyard. “It’s kind of a cross between a stable and a barracks. Primitive as it looks, it’s actually a step up from how most of the abusers were keeping them.”

“Which is something we ought to be able to leverage,” Stacy said.

“Exactly. It’s just a row of cubicles, each with a cot and blankets. There’s a spell on it to keep vermin out. We’ve got room for 20, but we usually have around ten; three of them look like they’re going to be permanent residents.”

“They don’t want to quit being abused?”

“They don’t think they’re being abused. Seriously. They look like a weird cross between a human and a horse, and they’ve been conditioned to where they behave much more like a horse than a human, right down to the belief level. Sir Teliard’s victims have been strengthened to where they don’t have any difficulty with the usual run of pulling carts and wagons and carrying riders.

“They’re fed, they’re treated fairly within the constraints of the role, they do things that their managers approve of and that are even useful on occasion. That’s all lots of people expect out of life, and more than many of them actually get. Sir Teliard picked those three out of the gutter. They know they can go back, they simply think this is a better deal.

Stacy frowned. “My first one is also from Sir Teliard?”

“Right. The hard part is convincing them it’s possible to go back. Lord Mountebank’s and The Equestrian’s girls pretty much jump at the chance once you get that across. As far as I’m concerned, if some of Sir Teliard’s want to stay ponygirls, I really don’t care. They’re cute. In fact, I suspect that having a few long-timers helps with the general message that they can take things at their own pace. Unfortunately, the mission statement doesn’t allow it, but at the same time the codes of magical, telepathic and therapy ethics don’t let me take them by the scruff of the ego and kick them to the next stage.”

“Oh,” Stacy said. “They know they could go on any time they want, they just don’t want.” Stacy shrugged. Unmotivated patients were nothing new. She walked into the building with Natalie.

The front was a horizontal corridor that led to a couple of what looked like offices, and then two doors that looked like they led farther back. They did. The corridor that Natalie led Stacy into had open cubicles lining one wall. They were separated by four foot high partitions. Each one contained a low cot, neatly made up. They didn’t look quite as good as a military barracks just before an inspection, but they were close. Each one had a placard on the wall, just above head height, with a one word name, and sometimes a second name under it.

Stacy frowned. “What’s with the second name? Surely you’re not selling them?”

“Or renting them out? Think of it this way: the people who did this to them conditioned in the idea that they’ve got an owner. As you’ll find out, most of them automatically orient on me as The Owner, The Bitch Who Must Be Obeyed, but I don’t have a favorite ponygirl that I use when I want to take one out with a chariot or go riding.”

“Hm. That wouldn’t be a good idea, would it?”

“Not for the therapy staff. However, a lot of them get real itchy unless they can establish a relationship with someone who can play ‘owner.’ We don’t insist on it, but half of the ones here in Stage 1, and most of the ones in Group 2, have that kind of relationship with one of our staff members.”

“Hm. So that gives us a chance to talk the relationship through with a real person and eventually free them from it. That ought to be easier than having to deal with another layer from needing the relationship and not having it.”


Jinja had no idea how much time had passed. Keeping track of time when her handlers didn’t have anything for her to do was frustrating, and getting frustrated always lead to bad things. Painfully bad things. So she just sat motionless on the bed and stared placidly ahead, waiting for something to happen.

She heard a couple of women’s voices from the other end of the corridor. She got up to look, the chains making a soft shirring sound.


Stacy paused and cocked her head to listen. “That sounds like chains?” She looked down the row and saw a brunette head looking at them over the partition.

“That’s the new girl who arrived last night. When they raided her owner’s establishment, she was quite violent, not to say vicious, so they tranked her. She’s being restrained. Also, she hasn’t been oriented yet, so she’d be chained in her stall anyway until I get done with the speech fixes and the stable hands get a chance to show her around and explain the rules. She’s your first patient, so let’s go look at her.”


The two women Jinja had heard talking walked up and looked in her cubicle. One of them was dressed in silk and leather, with a whip coiled at her belt; the other wore more ordinary clothes. The first was obviously the Mistress; she lowered her gaze automatically.

The Mistress gestured with one perfectly manicured finger. Jinja didn’t think, she simply dropped to the cot. The chains were a minor annoyance to the movement, but it wasn’t like she didn’t have lots of practice moving fluidly while in various kinds of restraints.


“Observations?” Natalie asked.

“She’s trained to do that?”

“Yes, that vendor trains that position. A lot of girls feel more comfortable, or at least safer, if you fit into the framework they’re expecting. At least until you start busting it up and replacing it.”

Natalie paused. “How’s she reacting to what we’re saying?”

Stacy frowned. “She seems to be listening, but it’s more like she’s just getting the non-verbals. She’s not reacting to what we’re actually saying. That’s not natural. That’s what you said about being trained not to talk?”

“Right.”

“That’s cruel!”

“And the whippings aren’t?” Natalie gestured toward the girl’s legs, which showed the tracks of scar tissue from many whippings. “Her back’s going to look the same. So. Is she understanding us?”

Stacy frowned. “I’d guess yes, at least on some level. She’s pretending she doesn’t. Or maybe she’s convinced herself that she isn’t.”

“It’s the latter. Before I break the conditioning I’m going to remove the spell on her collar that’s reinforcing it.” Natalie took a piece of paper from her belt pouch and held it up.

“That’s a spell slip?” Stacy said. “I’ve heard of them.”

“Right. I only need this spell maybe once a month; I haven’t bothered memorizing it.” She held it up and then left it to hover in the air between her and Jinja. It burst into flame, and then the ashes dissolved into the air. Jinja’s eyes went wide, and seemed to track something that moved from the spell slip toward her throat.

Stacy’s eyes narrowed at the same time. “It creates a bit of a cloud?”

Natalie smiled at her. “Most people can’t see that. It means you’ve got a basic sensitivity to magic. If you’re interested in learning, I run a workshop that meets several times a week. What Darlene told you is quite true: most baseline mages take a long time before they can do very much.”

“Hm. I never thought it was possible!”

“Most people don’t. Actually, almost everyone can learn some magic; the result is simply not worth the effort unless you’ve got a talent for it. If you want to learn, tell Darlene and she’ll arrange the schedule.

“Anyway, the next step is that I’m going to break her no-talk conditioning. Talk therapy isn’t very easy if the patient can’t talk!”

“I’d say it’s not possible!”

“Pet therapists do it all the time with abused dogs and horses. You were using the process model of body language to figure out what she’s actually doing, right?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Good. That’s what you need to use to get an idea of what I’m going to do with her. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve got a spell that lets me watch directly how her brain is processing, but what I’ll actually be doing is just talking. The spell lets me get a lot more information than I can get with just body language, otherwise there’s no magic involved. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve got a couple of therapists who can do this just from a subject’s body language, but it takes them quite a while, and we don’t have the time.

“What I’m saying won’t make a whole lot of sense until you match it with both of our body language; you can study the recordings.” She gestured at one of the unobtrusive cameras along the ceiling.

Natalie made a gesture, but this time nothing seemed to happen. Then she started talking. Stacy started at the sound. It wasn’t quite what people thought of as a hypnotic tone, but it most definitely wasn’t a magic spell either. Stacy had been present several times while spells were being cast, and she knew how the words of an advanced spell seemed to vanish into the silence, not to be remembered. This was perfectly ordinary speech; it just didn’t make any sense.


The two women talked for a while. It sounded like they approved of her, or at least they didn’t disapprove. The Mistress took a paper out of her belt pouch. Jinja’s eyes went wide as it hovered in the air and then burst into flame. She watched something drift toward her face, and then vanish under her jaw.

The Mistress made a complicated gesture that hurt her eyes, and then started speaking directly to her.

Jinja gasped as images and sounds started tumbling through her mind and various feelings ran up and down her body. After a moment, she felt as if she moved back, almost as if she was watching the images happen to someone else. A lot of the intensity dropped away, but she could still see that something was happening.

Then the Mistress stopped talking. The images went away, and somehow she felt that she’d rejoined her body.


Stacy settled into watching the girl’s reactions. After a minute, things started to click, and she began to pick up how some of what Natalie was saying seemed to be reactions to changes in the girl’s body language, and then how some pieces seemed to precede other shifts in the subject’s body language. Stacy felt something like awe: Natalie seemed to be miles ahead of her process model teacher!

After about ten minutes, Natalie stopped. Then she asked a question.

“Is there anything you need right now?”

“I’ve got to go!” the girl wailed, and then stopped, startled at what she’d said.

“Well, you can hold on for a couple more minutes while you answer one question. Are you going to be good?”

“Huh?”

“Good means that you’ll do what you’re told promptly and well, and not cause trouble. If you’re going to be good, we can get rid of these chains. Otherwise you’re going to be under restraint all the time until you quit causing trouble.”

“I’ll be good!”

Natalie turned her head. “Stacy?”

“I think she means it.”

“I agree.” Natalie pointed at the collar. The leash chain fell off. She pointed at the waist shackle and then the hobbles, and they opened with more clicks and fell off. The girl’s gaze followed her pointing finger, eyes wide.

“You’ve been to the latrine before?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Well, go. Be back here in ten.” Natalie stood aside to allow the girl to exit the cubicle.


Jinja’s mind whirled as she trotted down the corridor to the latrine. One thing really stood out. Crossing that red-headed witch was not going to be a good idea! On the other hoof…. She took a moment to think as she squatted over the floor toilet. Now that she thought about it, she’d simply lost interest in talking gradually during the first few weeks she was being trained. Now the witch had turned it back on, and she could talk and understand people again.

The rest of what had just happened, though. A cot was definitely better than straw, and having the run of the place was better than being locked in a stall!

She got up, wiped and stared in the mirror. Her mane and tail were a mess! She ran her fingers through them to straighten them out at least a little, and wished for a brush. Or one of the stable attendants to groom her properly! The attendant earlier had been delightful, but then she was a woman, and most likely wouldn’t do what she really wanted. Some of the men she’d seen while being groomed looked positively yummy. She felt herself begin to react, and hastily squelched it.


Stacy looked at the girl as she trotted down the corridor. “Her back….”

“Is really bad. She didn’t get that from the vendor. They’re quite good at leaving their victims unmarked — they bring higher prices that way. It’s probably going to take several sessions to heal it all.”

Natalie took her phone and made a call. A couple of minutes later a solidly built man walked up. He was about six feet tall, possibly either Caucasian or a Native American mix, and had a no nonsense air about him.

“George Warner, meet Stacy Nichols. Stacy, George is the supervisor for this stable; all of the stable hands report to him. He doesn’t have that much to do directly with the girls. George, Stacy is our newest therapist. She’s going to be in charge of the new girl. I’ve just broken through the no-talk conditioning and sent her to the latrine.”

“Good. Good,” he rumbled. “You think she’ll settle in fairly easily?”

“I think she’s a lot better than her reaction during the Feds’ raid would suggest. As long as you don’t startle her she’ll probably be fine. Anyway, here she comes, and right on time.”

Jinja trotted up to them and then sat on the little cot, legs spread and tail out behind her.

“Now that you’re back, what is your name?” Natalie asked. “The one you answer to, not the one you used to have.”

“Uh, Jinja,” she said.

George made a note. “That’ll do.”

“Now, Jinja,” Natalie addressed her directly, “Stacy is going to be your therapist. She’s new, and this whole thing is going to take a bit of time to settle for her, so don’t expect her to have all the answers right off. As soon as we get done here, she’s going to spend an hour with you getting to know you, and then she’ll spend an hour or so several times a week working through all the nasty things they’ve done to you.

“When Stacy is done with you today, one of the stable hands will come and show you where everything is and tell you what you’re allowed to do and what’s off limits. Then you’ll go for your first exercise session.”

“You can expect to be in harness for six to twelve hours a day,” George rumbled.

“After the exercise session you’ll have a bit of time to recover, and then I’ll take you for a healing session. From the look of your back it’s going to take several healing sessions to clean all of that up. I presume you’re totally confused. Is there anything you’d like to ask?”

Jinja looked up at the three people towering over her. She shook her head and then frowned slightly as a thought occurred to her.

“Is there anything like racing or shows? I liked it when the grooms raced some of us!”

“We do some racing, and there’s talk of putting on a show. To get in on that, you’ll need an owner.” She pointed at the various plaques over the stalls, and waited while Jinja looked at them and then nodded. “You don’t have to accept the first person who walks up and says ‘you’re mine,’ but once you do, she’ll be the one who makes most of the decisions about what you’ll be getting into.”

“Oh.” Jinja paused. “I think I’d like that.”

“Well, you’ve got the time to think it over,” Natalie said. “Talk with the other girls later; they can tell you how it works. I’m done here, carry on.” Natalie turned and walked off with the stable master.

“Scoot back on the cot so I’ve got somewhere to sit,” Stacy told Jinja. “I hate looking down at someone I’m talking with, and you’ll get a crick in your neck looking up at me like that.”


“Hey, Jinja!” one of the stable attendants yelled across the pasture where she was talking with a couple of the other girls. This first day was turning out to be really different. She thought she could get used to it. Easily. Real clothing, even if it was only heavy winter sweat pants and a sweatshirt, was a treat.

“Bye,” she said as she got up fluidly and trotted over to the stable hand.

“Aspi wants you for a healing session,” he told her. “I take it you don’t know where her workshop is?”

“Aspi?”

“That’s Natalie’s code name: Aspidistra. Where she got it, I don’t know!” he nattered on as he lead Jinja down a path. “She’s decorative enough, but the last thing I’d compare her to is a plant!”

They arrived in front of a small two story building that looked more like a cottage than the modern industrial prefab of the rest of the buildings.

“Go on in and wait in the first room. Don’t explore! Trying to explore in a wizard’s workshop can be very hazardous to your health!”

“Uh, right.”

“When she’s done with you, she’ll send you back.” He hesitated a moment, and then decided not to tell her what was next on the schedule. New girls sometimes took as long as a month before they got curious about what they were scheduled to do that day. Or at least before they felt it was safe to ask about their schedule.

Jinja looked at him and then walked to the door, her hooves making crunching sounds on the crushed gravel of the walk.

The waiting room looked almost like a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room, except that there wasn’t a nurse. There were some chairs and a couple of glossy magazines. She looked thoughtfully at one of the chairs, and then decided that she’d better be safe, so she sank to the floor to sit on her hooves in the prescribed posture.

A couple of minutes later, the inner door opened and the red-headed witch looked out at her. She didn’t seem to be at all surprised to see Jinja on the floor instead of on a chair. She crooked a finger. “Come on in, and stay inside the red lines.”

Jinja rose and walked through the door. She looked around curiously. It both did and didn’t look like a magician’s workshop, or at least it didn’t look that much like one from a video. There were circles embedded in the floor in one area, and a raised leather couch, or maybe examining table, in another.

“Take off your clothes and go lie on the examining table, face down,” Aspidistra said, pointing.

Jinja stripped hesitantly. It wasn’t that she cared if she was naked, it was that she didn’t really want to take her clothes off! She’d had them for less than an hour!

“Would you prefer if I talked about what I was doing, or if I just did it without telling you?”

“Uh. I’d kind of like to know,” Jinja said.

“OK. Now the first thing is that I’m going to record your genetics into this crystal.” She picked up a perfectly formed quartz crystal and showed it to the girl lying on the table. “The reason is that I’m going to have to do quite a bit of work restoring you, and it’s a lot easier on me if I can do the analysis without having you right in front of me.”

She looked intently at a book she had open on a lectern, and then held the crystal over Jinja’s head. She slowly moved it down Jinja’s body, keeping it a steady couple of inches away.

About ten minutes later she had gotten past Jinja’s hooves. She put the crystal in a stand and took another one.

“Now I’m going to do a complete exam using magic so I know what has to be healed. It’s going to look about the same as the last procedure.” She took another crystal and turned the page in the book on the lectern.

When she was done, she looked at the crystal thoughtfully. “You’re actually in pretty good shape except for the scar tissue from all those whippings. That’s going to take three, possibly four, sessions.” She picked up a marker and outlined Jinja’s upper back.

“You need to hold still for this; it’s probably going to feel like something horrible is happening to your back. It may help to concentrate on your breathing.” She moved back and took a crystal wand, which she held horizontally in the middle of the area she’d marked.

Jinja’s back writhed. The scar tissue started to visibly break up and then slowly vanish to be replaced by new skin. After about fifteen minutes, her upper back, down to her waist, looked completely clear. The boundary between the new skin and the damaged area below it was as sharp as if it had been drawn with a knife.

Natalie touched her gently on the shoulder. “You need to rest for a few minutes while your body flushes all the toxins.”

Jinja obediently relaxed; a moment later she began snoring gently. Natalie put the two crystals on a stand and studied them for several minutes, making notes. Then she put them into a small drawer and made up a label. She walked back to the girl on the examining table and touched her to wake her.

“You can get dressed now. Do you know the way back to the place where you relax when you’re not being worked?”

“Uh, yes.”

“OK. Head back. There will be three more sessions; someone will come to get you for each one.”

Jinja hesitated. “Can I ask a question?”

Natalie laughed. “Sure. I won’t know whether I want to answer it until you do!”

“I saw some colors when you did that.”

“Have you seen them before?”

“Earlier, when you made it so I could talk, and then when you made the chains go away.”

“Hm. Did you see anything like that when Sir Teliard was working you over?”

“Sir Teliard?”

“He’s the person who had you captured and trained.”

“Oh. Yes.”

Natalie traced a figure in the air. “Can you see this?”

Jinja’s eyes widened. “Yes.”

“You’re seeing magic.”

Jinja looked at her, mouth open.

“Could I learn?” she asked hesitantly.

“Maybe. The ability to see magic is a good starting point, but there are lots of other factors. Baseline mages usually take years before they can do anything major.” She walked over to a bookshelf and took down a book.

“Read chapter 1 and do the exercises. Tell the grooms to find you a place to keep it where it won’t get dirty. I’ll talk to you more at our next healing session.” She pointed at the door.

Jinja took the book, turned and left.

Continued in part 2

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

Chapter 2


Lady Morigan took a moment to look at the exercise yard. The Lady was a reasonably tall redhead with vertically slit green eyes and ears that looked like they wanted to be pointed, but couldn’t quite make the grade. She was dressed, as she usually was when she was outside, in a riding habit.

Four trainee ponygirls were hard at work at the exercise wheels. She could see the muscles in their thighs ripple as their hooves dug into the ground and they pushed against their harnesses to pull the shaft around against the set tension. Their sweat-soaked tails hung down in back, and their manes were in hardly better shape.

She could tell how far they’d come in their training by the set of their bodies. The one closest to her had accepted that she was, and would remain, a ponygirl. She was pushing steadily ahead, eyes focused on the ground and the gadgets that sprang up in a random pattern so that she had to watch where she planted her hooves. To Morigan’s experienced eyes, it was apparent that the girl was completely focused on her task, simple as it was.

The one on the furthest wheel, on the other hand, was still resisting. Or rather, resisting wasn’t quite the right word. She’d quit actually resisting a week ago, now she was letting her mind wander and getting distracted. The robot whipmaster had already striped her back and thighs a dozen times, once for each time she’d lost focus. She’d be healed by morning, with no trace of the whipping. Fortunately, a whipping still hurt, so they learned from it.

She nodded. Well, watching them wasn’t going to make the process go any faster! She turned to look at the two training corrals. There was a trainer in each of them with a girl on a lunge rein. The lunge was good practice to learn to react instantly and without stumbling.

She strolled to the stable yard just as one of the grooms came up leading a girl harnessed to a chariot. She looked the groom over appreciatively. He was heavily muscled from hard work. The red collar around his neck made sure that he was going to do his job well and not cause trouble; it was a variant on a Gizmatic Obedience Helmet that Sergei had designed, and it wasn’t intended to come off. Ever.

The groom was wearing a simple pull-over tunic and work books. He handed her the reins, curtsied and then walked off to his next task.

The ponygirl had looked at her with a flick of her eyes as she walked up, but otherwise kept her attention firmly on the path ahead of her. Partly that was due to the check-reins that made it impossible for her to turn her head without turning her upper body as well. This particular girl wasn’t outfitted with blinders; at her point in training she shouldn’t need them to avoid distractions.

The black leather of the girl’s harness gleamed in the afternoon light. Morigan liked well oiled black leather; it looked better than work-a-day brown, and it kept the grooms busy keeping it properly cleaned and oiled. Besides, the color complimented the solid black of the collar around the girl’s neck.

Like the groom’s collars, hers was designed to never come off. Also like their collars, it was designed to kill her if anyone tried to tamper with it. There the resemblance ended. The groom’s collars were fairly simple obedience trainers. In fact, she thought, they were a bit too simple. The design had come from a Gizmatic obedience helmet, and had been intended for female servants. Sergei hadn’t been able to change the built-in deportment patterns, so the grooms acted like they were girls. She shrugged. If Sergei hadn’t figured it out after a decade, it was because he didn’t want to. It wasn’t, after all, like she actually cared what the grooms thought.

The girls’ collars were the reason why they couldn’t speak, understand speech more complicated than single word commands, manipulate anything they couldn’t close their hand around or be read by any telepath or empath. They also didn’t have any obedience programming. It didn’t work without speech.

She slid onto the seat and flicked the reins. The ponygirl leaned into her harness and got the chariot moving without any noticeable jerk. Excellent! Especially with the half ton of weights they’d put in the chariot.

She turned to one of the paths out of the yard with just the lightest touch of the reins. Also good. Only the girls who were still resisting needed the really cruel bits; this one had a bit that was designed for long term comfort.

The new harnessing system also seemed to have helped. This girl had her wrists shackled to the carriage’s shafts in front of her; she seemed to be holding the shafts, although she wasn’t exerting any pressure. That was simply a place to rest her hands. What it did, though, was force her upper body to stay straight in the traces, so that a pull on the reins automatically translated into a shift in the direction she was moving.

Not shackling her arms behind her also reduced stress noticeably, which helped her performance. What it didn’t do was force her shoulders back so she presented her breasts more aggressively. That, though, had been fixed fairly easily with a subtle DNA adjustment to her spine and shoulders.

Lady Morigan spent the next hour putting the girl through her paces on the maze of chariot and cart paths that surrounded the main buildings. The paths were constructed so that they twisted and intersected in an intricate pattern, and Lady Morigan and her staff made sure that they never took the same route through it.

This girl was performing beautifully. She never anticipated the reins. She switched gaits and speeds at a word and a flick of the reins, all without a stumble or jerking the chariot.

An hour later she guided the girl back into the stable yard. The pony was covered with sweat, and barely on the good side of stumbling from exhaustion, but she was still answering the reins as well as when she’d started. An excellent run!

Lady Morigan turned the reins over to one of the grooms and looked the girl over as the groom unhitched the traces and unfastened the hip harness. She nodded thoughtfully as he led the girl away. The ponygirl had folded her arms behind her, hands on elbows the way she’d been trained. The groom was, of course, going to wash her down quickly but thoroughly. Lady Morigan wasn’t sure whether he’d put her back in her stall or send her out to the pasture, but in either case she’d probably sleep for a couple of hours while she recovered.

Just then Sergei came up, riding Patch and leading another of the girls. Lady Morigan looked her over. This girl had progressed from simple carrying through enough riding lessons that she was beginning to get her hooves under her. She still looked a bit scared rather than resigned, confident or, just possibly, interested. That was how the Lady could tell if a girl was a natural saddle girl: those looked forward to having a rider.

“Mount.” The Lady pointed to the ground. The girl gracefully sank to one knee so that the Lady could get a foot into a stirrup and swing into the saddle. She swayed slightly until Morigan settled.

The Lady tapped her mount on her shoulder. “Up.” The girl grunted as she came up. This was actually the hardest maneuver; it put a lot of stress on the girl’s legs.

Sergei led out of the yard, the Lady’s mount following easily.

Morigan nodded. Sergei’s new saddling system was exactly what they’d needed practically forever. The shoulder straps were pretty standard; there were, after all, only so many ways of fastening a pack on a girl’s back. The big difference was that he’d finally gotten a counter-motion mechanism that worked. The ride was utterly smooth. The only way she could tell that the girl was working hard as she trotted was the up and down motion against her thighs as they rested around the girl’s waist.

The other part was even more important. The counter-balance was so tightly integrated with the girl’s natural up and down motion that it cut her energy expenditure by close to half. That was probably why they were finding a lot of natural saddle girls. The DNA mods let one of them do a fast trot with a rider for a couple of hours, and she suspected that most of them found carrying a rider a lot more interesting than pulling a cart or chariot.

Sergei’s Patch was an interesting girl. She wasn’t salable. Something had gone wrong so that she had a horribly mottled skin. Sergei had appropriated her for his own use rather than letting her be put down the oubliette. She was so totally devoted to Sergei that it was almost unnatural. Especially since she’d been one of their classmates at Whateley, and had made it quite clear that she couldn’t stand him.

Morigan, on the other hand, had never found a girl that she wanted to keep. Last October she thought she might finally have found her ideal ponygirl, but the ungrateful wretch had escaped! At least Morigan had managed to analyze her genome, and had used it to improve their girls. A year ago they didn’t have any girls that could stand up to their current conditioning regime, today they all did. A year ago only about one in 20 could be ridden by most women or relatively small men, today they could all be ridden by anyone except, possibly, real giants. A year ago their hooves and tails had been cloned and grafted on. Today, they were grown.

Take that, Sir Teliard!

And now the most aggravating of her old school nemeses was about to be joined by that girl. She wondered how they’d do as a pair. Life, she reflected, was sweet.


“Our detectives found where they moved the Rehabilitation Center,” Lady Morigan told the other two people in her office. Well, the other two people that she cared about; the maid passively kneeling in a corner waiting for her mistress’ next command didn’t count.

“I assume you want to do something about it,” Sergei replied.

“Well, it looks like an opportunity,” she answered. “They’ve got it all the way out in Wyoming somewhere, and there’s nothing but jackrabbits, buzzards and sagebrush for miles. We could be in, out and gone long before anyone outside knows anything.”

“And why would we be doing this?” Jasper rumbled.

“Oh, several very good reasons,” Lady Morigan answered. “First, Aspidistra’s there.”

Sergei sighed theatrically. “They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but it’s been 10 years! By now the dish is a biology project!”

“And the other reasons?” Jasper said.

“They’ve got quite a collection of our product, and they’ve been bringing in talent to try to break those collars.”

Sergei grinned. “Without any success.”

“So far. Our contacts say they’re bringing in Ponygirl next.”

“Huh?”

Lady Morigan looked upward as if asking an unknown goddess to give her strength. “It’s her code name. Ponygirl.”

“What’s special about her?” Jasper asked.

“She’s the one we had here that managed to remove her collar and escape.”

“Oh. Her. I’d think she’d be staying as far away from us as she could get.”

“Well, she isn’t.”

“So you want to pick her up at the same time?” Jasper asked.

“Right. I’m pretty sure I know how she did it, and it’s easy enough to make sure she can’t do it again. Sergei’s also right; she can’t break it from outside using the same technique, or they’d have broken them a long time ago.”

“She’s apparently a mage,” Sergi said, “and she’s had a chance to analyze it. I have to agree, getting her off the playing field before she starts telling people makes a lot of sense.”

“Other reasons?” Jasper asked.

“Well, they do have a lot of our product that we can retrain and sell as used, and they’ve got quite a few from our competitors.”

“Hm.” Jasper rumbled. “We’d have to add a whole lot more capacity, and I’m not at all sure there’s a market for that many, especially in one go.”

Lady Morigan smiled nastily. “I’m thinking of eliminating Lord Mountebank. He’s trying to expand at our expense, and his product is an embarrassment!”

Sergei shook his head. “Why anyone wants to buy girls who still have feet is beyond me. Even with custom-made boots they cripple too fast.”

Jasper shrugged. “Sergei can make the buildings pretty easily, but where would we get the staff?”

“They’ve got their own staff.”

“Hm. So you think we just take them too.” The man made out of living stone shrugged again. “That could work. Assuming Sergei can expand our facilities in time. It’ll be a messy few days before they settle, but nothing we haven’t done before.”

“Raids aren’t something we’ve done before,” Sergei said. “We’ve always gotten our intake from the Syndicate. Why are we shifting our policy?”

Lady Morigan scowled. “Our little escapee put an end to our anonymity. They know who we are, so there’s no longer any point in avoiding operations like raids.”

Sergei nodded. “Makes sense. So what’s the idea?”

“The Syndicate offers Rent-A-Thugs at reasonable rates. It’s not like the Rehabilitation Facility has trained combat troops. Rent-A-Thugs are good enough, especially if I back them up with a bit of combat magic. I’ll have to do that anyway because either I’m going to have to be there to handle Aspidistra and Ponygirl, or we’ll have to add a reasonably good mercenary combat mage to the mix.”

“I’d say to do it yourself,” Sergei said. “Syndicate thugs can be kept in the dark, any mage that’s good enough to be useful would learn enough about us to be dangerous.”

“Well, let’s throw some ideas around and then let it settle a bit,” Jasper rumbled.


Chapter 3


The horse flew above the forests, its wings beating a steady rhythm as it maintained a thousand feet of altitude. Sted “Ponygirl” Lancaster luxuriated in the powerful beat of her wings; she didn’t have much of an opportunity to use this body, so the roughly 600 mile flight from Topeka was almost pure bliss.

Stretching her wings felt good, even though most of the lift came from her control of gravity. Whatever had given her this form seemed to know more about mythology than practical flying: the largest bird that had ever flown was about 70 lbs, and it was a glider that needed a running start and the updrafts along the Andes Mountains to get into the air. Her horse form resembled a Clydesdale and weighed close to a ton. Not that little things like that kept some of the biodevisors from trying to create a riding bird.

Using her wings to fly felt right, even though she knew that it was her control of gravity and inertia, plus the devises in her implanted combat suite that did the job. She only knew one person who could do it better, and Tennyo was, well, Tennyo. Even if the wings were pretty useless by themselves, using them still scratched some kind of an instinctive itch, at least for this body. It was a pity she couldn’t do it that much around Whateley.

Another pity was that she had to stay invisible for most of the way. It kept her from being bothered by the buzzards, the eagles, the occasional private plane or whoever might be in the forest below. The big problem with her form of invisibility was that, while it cloaked her from all known forms of electromagnetic radiation, it also meant that equipment inside her effect volume couldn’t detect anything outside. She had a way of seeing out, but her GPS unit might not have existed for all the good it did her. Not that it mattered; she couldn’t use it in her flying horse form anyway.

At least she didn’t have to worry about really advanced detectors out here, somewhere between the far side of Back of Beyond and Frostbite Falls. Powers Testing had found a couple of chinks in her invisibility, like the phase-locked infrared beam that could track her because photons crossing from one side of her effect volume to the other kind of ignored the speed of light, just like they ignored the intervening space. Powers Testing wasn’t sure whether they ignored time or not, and the arguments as the researchers threw theories and mathematics at each other while trying to measure it made her head hurt. Or at least they made her gadgeteer talent hurt. She was sure there was something fundamentally wrong with most of the arguments, but she didn’t have the math yet for it to make sense.

She was going to have to think about GPS. She was pretty sure there was something she could do that wouldn’t compromise her bubble more than she had already.

Meanwhile, she was fairly confident she knew where she was; she’d memorized the detailed maps, and the landmarks simply unrolled beneath her beating wings the way the maps showed them. Fortunately, the forest below had breaks. If she’d have had to use the trees, she’d have been hopelessly lost. Trees were trees. And then there were more trees. Nearby there were even more trees. And when she got tired of looking at the trees, there were more trees to look at. Even in the dead of winter.

About a mile on the trees ended and the terrain changed to scrub, just like the map said. Fourteen buzzards, fifty jackrabbits and one misplaced jackalope later, a cluster of buildings faded into view where there had been apparently empty land just a moment before.

She tested it by making a lazy circle, looking for the edges of the illusion. It felt like the same basic pattern as the one that had protected Lady Morigan’s place; if so they both probably came from Sin d’Rome’s. Not that it mattered in the slightest.

She decided to make an entrance. She dropped the invisibility.

A couple of minutes later, she came in for a perfect four hoof landing in the middle of what passed for a street. She folded her wings back along her body and looked around. She could see at least four ponygirls hitched to carts using hip harnesses and with their hands tethered to the shafts. They were all dressed in fairly loose winter sweats. It would be great to be around more ponygirls, but the confusion if she was going to be in her ponygirl form was going to be too much.

She thought a moment about which illusion to use and finally decided not to bother. She switched to her centaur form.

The cold, fortunately, didn’t bother her. Much. The horse part of her body had its winter coat, and her torso was protected by what looked like a long-sleeved t-shirt with the legend “No Free Rides.”

“Well, you don’t see that every day,” a voice said from behind her.

She turned around to look. “I’m supposed to be expected. Where would I find Natalie Seals?”

He frowned. “Hard to say. Aspi is all over the place most times.”

“Aspi?”

“Aspidistra is her code name; a lot of us call her Aspi for short. Admin’s over there.” He nodded at a squat one-story building. “You might luck out and find her in her office.”

The centaur form had its disadvantages, like closing doors behind it. Fortunately, she had a spell she’d prepared. As long as a door was normally closed, the spell closed it. It didn’t work to close a door that was normally open, but then if it was normally open closing it wasn’t usually an issue.

“Hi. Anybody know where Natalie Seals is at?” she asked after the door thumped closed.

Several people looked up, and then paused to stare.

“And you are?” a hatchet-faced woman behind one of the desks asked.

“Expected.”

“We aren’t expecting anyone named...” she dribbled off when she realized how she’d been had. Then she recovered. “If you’re Ponygirl, the memo lied.”

“Oh, I’m Ponygirl.” She waved theatrically. Space twisted somewhat around where she stood, and when it settled down the ponygirl stood there. “I figure this will cause too much confusion, though, and I like the centaur form.” She waved again, and the centaur reappeared. “I may use this one part of the time, though.” She waved her hand again, and reappeared as a fairly normal looking teenager wearing a fancy cowgirl party outfit.

Hatchet-face muttered something under her breath.

“Aspi’s probably in her cottage,” one of the men said. “I’ll give Ponygirl the 10 cent tour.”

“You do that,” hatchet-face said. “Take Stacy with you. And as for you,” she looked at the pretty teenager, “don’t leave horse-shoe marks on the rug!”


“I’m Mark,” the guy said as he walked back to a corridor. A minute later he came out with a slightly plumpish blonde who was putting on a heavy coat.

“Ponygirl, meet Stacy. Stacy’s our newest therapist. Ponygirl’s here to do something about the collars on the girls in Group 2.”

“Good. Is that all you need to wear?” Stacy asked as she looked at Sted’s party outfit.

“I’ve got my own climate control,” Sted answered. “A bit of scientific demonology.”

“Demonology?” Stacy reared back a bit.

“Maxwell’s Demon,” she answered. The man guffawed.

“Explain, please?”

“Maxwell’s Demon isn’t a real demon, it’s kind of a thought experiment that a guy named Maxwell dreamed up in the 19th century,” Mark said.

“I presume it has nothing to do with coffee,” Stacy said.

“Never thought about that,” Sted said. “I’ve got a TK field that keeps the air inside at a comfortable temperature, and warms it up or cools it down from outside as required.”

“Nice.”

“Really. It’s not all it does, but I’m stronger without it than with it.” She shrugged. “I usually tell people I’m a flying mage-smith, and leave it at that.”

“Darlene mentioned you were a mage in our briefing this morning. You’re what, the sixth or seventh mage to try to do something?”

“And you wonder how a teenager can do anything when there’s been that string of failures, right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Sted shrugged again. “Lady Morigan had me kidnapped and tried to turn me into her personal riding ponygirl. It took me a week to escape from her Little Stable of Horrors, so I know somewhat of how they work from inside. I took it with me, so I’ve been studying parts of it for the last few months. I can’t say I’ve got everything, but if what I’ve got works, you’ll be able to start on a rehabilitation program.”

“Lady Morigan tried her thing on a centaur?”

Sted laughed. “Oh, I’m not a centaur. Or at least I’m not always a centaur.” She waved a hand and dropped the illusion, appearing in her ponygirl form, neatly turned out in her Whateley school uniform. “This is the one she thought she was getting. Since those collars have a powers suppressor, my other forms didn’t matter. Not that they would have even if I’d have been able to access them.” She waved her hand again, reappearing as the teenager in a fancy party costume.

Stacy shook her head slowly. “Well, that’s out of my domain. I’m working with the girls in Group 1. There’s not much we can do with Group 2 until we can get the collars off.”

“Anyway,” Mark said, “this is the main drag, what there is of it. The parking lot is back that way and what passes for a road to what passes for a town cuts just past the fringe of our illusion.

“We just came out of admin. The cafe is next to it, and then the warehouse. The other side is residential apartments, with Aspi’s cottage on the end of the row.

“Group 1 is on the south-west and Group 2 is on the north-east. Each group has their own stable, exercise and so on and so forth. We try to keep them separate.”

Stacy said: “Not that it matters for Group 1; they pretty much know what the situation is with Group 2. Darlene says it’s to keep Group 2 from finding out that we can do something for the others.” She shrugged. “I doubt if it would make any difference; they’re used to their owners acting arbitrarily and irrationally.”


It was, Sted thought, a classroom. The three women seated at the table were relaxed and chatting. They looked around as Sted walked in with Natalie and Jinja.

“Before we get started,” Natalie said, “We need to do some introductions. Jinja here,” she gestured at the brunette ponygirl, “is the first ponygirl we’ve gotten who has a detectable magic talent, and she asked to be trained, so I’m going to see how it goes. I’m going to be keeping a close eye on the process to make sure it doesn’t interfere with the therapy process.”

“Sted here,” she gestured at the redhead, “is the consultant you were all told about at the morning briefing. She’s here to work on the collars for Lady Morigan’s victims, and possibly with a few problems I’m having with replacing the hooves and tails. She’ll be in this group for the next few sessions because she’s a lot closer to her first courses than I am!”

“The rumor mill doesn’t seem to have mentioned that I’m a shifter,” Sted added. “What you’re seeing is the illusion I use for my superheroine form when I don’t want to attract lots of attention.

“What’s wrong with looking like you are?”

Sted laughed and got up from her chair. “This is my usual form.” She waved her hand and suddenly the red-headed ponygirl stood there, dressed in her Whateley school uniform. “Frankly, I prefer it, and not only because maintaining an illusion is a small but continuing power drain. I think it would be too confusing here, especially since I seem to look pretty much like Lady Morigan’s or Sir Teliard’s versions.

“If you heard wild stories about a flying horse and a centaur, those are a couple of my other forms.” She waved her hand again, and reappeared with the cowgirl illusion.

“Right,” Natalie said. “Ponygirl is a Wiz-3, and pretty decent for a high school freshman.”

“You’re going to Hogwarts?” Melanie asked.

Both Sted and Natalie laughed. “Hogwarts is fictional,” Sted said. “What I’m going to say is confidential. Understand?”

They all nodded.

“The school I go to isn’t the comics’ version of Mutant High, but that’s the closest analogy. It’s a combination of a pretty good prep school and powers training facility. Fortunately, I had a mentor before I started there, so I knew the score when I arrived. I’ve seen kids who thought they were going to be the next Champion or Lady Astarte get disillusioned when they discovered they still had to take Freshman English. It isn’t pretty.”

“Sted’s here for the week between terms,” Natalie said. “She’s working on those collars.”

“Isn’t she a bit young?” Doris asked.

“That’s one of the other things,” Sted put in. “I know the damn things from the inside: I’m the one that escaped from Lady Morigan’s Little Stable of Horrors. I’m also a devisor and gadgeteer, and I’ve been working on reverse engineering it part time for the last four months.”

“Good! It’s about time someone did something!” Zoe said.

“We’ll see,” Natalie said. “There are a couple of other reasons she’s in this classroom, though.”

“One is that I’ve got experience with Wiz-0s.”

“Wiz-0?”

“Those are mutants that don’t have a built-in essence gathering and storage ability. That’s really the only difference between my magical ability and yours: I don’t have to go through all that work to gather and store essence to power spells. I had to while I was at Lady Morigan’s though, which is one of the reasons I’ve got a bit of an appreciation of how frustrating it can be. The other is that we’ve usually got some Wiz-0s in class; my school encourages everyone to learn some magic, although most students don’t take up the offer.”

“So I thought she might have a bit more insight into what you’re going through than I have,” Natalie said.

Sted shrugged. “I don’t know about that, but I do keep my hand in on very low power spells.”


Sted looked thoughtfully at the naked ponygirl lying face down on the examining table. She had hooves, a tail, a mane and horses’ ears, as well as a solid black collar around her neck. The collar’s only visible feature was a ring on the front.

“I think I know her.”

“Oh?” Natalie said.

“When I was at Lady Morigan’s, they worked us together on carriage about, oh, three times before I escaped.”

“So she’s recent. That might explain what I’m seeing.”

“Oh?”

“Most of Lady Morigan’s have pretty good strength, but they’re not induced Exemplars like Lord Teliard’s. They just look like most of the normal baseline genetics is lined up right. This one, however, has really strange genetics. I’ve never seen anything like it. Even Lord Teliard’s isn’t at all similar.”

“Really?”

“As far as I’m concerned, he does a better job than Lady Morigan, or at least he does better than she used to. His girls are all induced Exemplar-2s, and they have natural hooves and tails. Hers have grafted hooves and tails. They work just about as well, but you can see the surgical joins if you look for them. Also, healing them is a mess since the rest of the body doesn’t have the genetics to support them.

“Now this girl looks like her hooves and tail are completely natural, and she’s closer to a high end Ex-3 or low end Ex-4. What’s weird is that she doesn’t have a BIT, or at least she doesn’t have a meta-gene complex in her genome.”

“So you think that Lady Morigan copied my genetics?”

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking. If it’s OK with you, I’d like to take a copy of yours so I can compare them.”

“Sure. Let me do a check first, though.”

Sted paused a moment as she shifted to the special state where she wasn’t in contact with her mutant abilities. She took a good look at the girl lying on the examination table. Then she shifted back.

“She doesn’t have a BIT.”

“You can tell?”

“Yes. Circe was quite interested in how I do it. Not that she thought it was new or anything, just that it was a bit unusual, especially for someone without a whole lot of experience.”

“Hm. Let’s get back to the main issue. Can you use her for your experiments?”

“Sure. This first test is going to have to be very, very cautious.”

“Just for my curiosity, why?”

“I know what they look like from the inside, but I’ve never looked at a functional one from the outside for long enough to get a real good feel for the base assumptions. When I was close enough to other ponygirls, I had more pressing things on my mind, and even if I hadn’t, it would have taken a real long time with the powers suppressor running, and I wouldn’t be all that confident of the accuracy. So I need to ramp up very slowly so I can detect any instability before it becomes critical.”

“Ah. Makes sense.”

Sted took something that looked vaguely like a TV remote out of her purse. She put it on the examining table, and extended a wire between it and the ponygirl’s collar. Then she took an Allen wrench and very, very slowly began turning a set screw. She did it so slowly that it was almost impossible to see any motion.

After about five minutes, she shook herself. “OK. It’s in minimal contact, and nothing’s broken. So let’s ramp it up to full contact.”

She took the wire away and looked at it again. “Good.” Then she went back into her trance and continued turning the set screw very, very slowly.

Ten minutes later she came back out of her trance. “OK. I’ve got solid contact. Now let’s see if I can hack the program.” She went back into her study.

Twenty minutes later, she came back out and said: “all unit tests and diagnostics are green.” She hesitated a minute, took a deep breath, and stabbed one of the buttons.

“Whoa!” Natalie said. “I can feel her emotions!”

“Good.” Sted pushed another button.

“Now she’s gone again.” Natalie hesitated. “That’s not what I thought would happen!” She held up her hand to forestall an explanation.

“I take it there’s a reason you’re doing the individual pieces instead of just taking the collar off, so you started with the piece I’d detect and she wouldn’t, right?”

“Yes. We should be able to turn all the pieces on and off individually, but I thought you’d want to discuss what it would do to your process with the rest of your staff first. Also, I’m not at all sure how she’d react if we just turned her voice on and then back off a few times. I know I’d be pissed!”

“Hm. Good thought. I ought to be able to manage that.” She walked to the array of books that lined one side of the workroom, pulled one off the shelf and opened it onto a lectern. “Take a look at this spell while I do a bit of prep work.” She put a second book on a different lectern and began studying one of the pages.

Ponygirl obediently walked over and looked at it. Her Gadgeteer talent woke up, and the various parts fell into place in her mind. It was a bit intricate, but she’d already worked on several that were more complex.

She walked back to the girl, who now appeared to be sleeping, and gently stroked her mane for a moment. Then she cast the spell, and nothing happened. She shook her head and picked up the control. She flipped the switch that turned off the psychic null and cast the spell again.

This time she could see a very complicated network of lines inside the girl’s head.

“How’s it look?” Natalie asked as she walked over.

“The spell is fine, but I had to turn the psychic null off first. I can’t make head or tail of most of what it’s showing me.” Then she laughed.

“Oh?”

“When I said that, I did see how her tail works!”

Natalie laughed and picked up the gadget. She looked at it curiously. “I see. Speech and language comprehension is a double switch. Then you’ve got dexterity, the psychic null and powers suppressor? How’s that work? I didn’t think it was possible.”

“That’s the way this devise works. Sergei appears to think that most powers are due to an external spell that’s been imposed on the person. A very complex external spell that lives in a sub-space or something. The collar blocks access to it, and also to anything wired into the body that isn’t needed for survival.”

“Huh. Oh, right. It’s a devise. It doesn’t have to make sense.”

“Except to the devisor. From what I’ve seen, Sergei is quite good.”

“He did have that reputation.”

Natalie paused a moment. “Well, let’s get down to it. I’m going to impose a block so she won’t be able to remember anything that happens until I remove it. Have you ever seen that?”

“Hm. That’s got something to do with how memory is stored and consolidated?”

“Right. There are people with specific kinds of brain damage who don’t store memories. I’m going to put a temporary block on that section right here.”

Sted saw a different color occur near a structure that looked vaguely like a sea-horse.

Natalie gently shook the ponygirl’s shoulder to wake her up.

“Now I just press this,” she pushed the speech lever both notches up, “and she should be able to talk to us.”

“Huh, what?” the girl on the table said a bit muzzily. Then her head jerked up in surprise.

Natalie put her hand on the girl’s shoulders to press her back down. “Easy, girl! I don’t want to have to heal your neck!”

“I can talk again!”

“For a while.”

“Huh?”

“We’re hoping to get those collars off, but that’s still in the misty future. Right now we’re experimenting. You won’t be able to talk when you leave here, but then you won’t remember this either.”

“Oh.” The girl slumped.

“Buck up! We’re actually making progress. Right now, though, I’d like you to tell me about what your training was like. We really know very little about that facility or what they did to you to train you.”

“I try to avoid thinking about it! This place is a lot better.”

“Well, we try.” She picked up a pen and opened a notebook. “Now what did the stable look like?”


A half hour later, Natalie did another spell that flushed the girl’s working memory and sent her to sleep. She flipped the switches that turned off the girl’s voice and reinstated the psychic null.

“It does look like we’re getting somewhere,” she said. She leafed through the pages of her notebook. “It looks like Lady Morigan started doing the upgrades about a month after you left.”


“It certainly sounds like you’re making progress,” Dr. Nabokov said. “I think some enlightenment about why you’re doing it this way is in order.”

“There are really two different reasons,” Sted answered. “The first is that the features are only loosely coupled to the maintenance routine, so they’re a lot easier to work with. In fact, I don’t have a good handle on how to access the opener for the maintenance routine from outside yet, and I might not be able to get that before I have to head back to school for Spring term.”

“That makes a bit of sense,” the doctor said.

“Also, I’m more of a step-by-step person than a plunge in and see what happens person. Sometimes it’s faster, sometimes it isn’t, but there are a lot fewer explosions.”

Natalie laughed. “I wish more devisors had that attitude!”

“The other reason, though.” Sted hesitated. “Have you told Darlene about the Ponygirl Goddess yet?”

“The what?”

“I guess not. I don’t know if we want to take the time to go through the whole thing now, but there is one, and her portfolio, I guess you could call it, is depersonalization animal role-playing, not just ponygirls. I’m linked to her for reasons that make perfect sense to mages, but not to most other people.” Sted waved the explanation of that point away. “Anyway….”

“Hold on, I’m thinking!”

After a minute, Darlene said: “Well. That might explain some things I was wondering about.” She held up her hand to stop the explanation. “I can wait for the details. Now, you were probably going to say that she wants the collar in working order for something?”

“Right. She really likes the idea of having it more generally available.”

“Color me confused. Why?”

“Well,” Sted sat back a bit, “remember what I said her portfolio was? There’s a huge amount of diversity among her worshipers, but one of the fundamentals is the whole notion of controlling and controlled, or dominance and submission to give it the more common terms.”

“So what she wants out of it is something that can be used for hard-core BDSM game-playing?”

“Right. She wants something that can enforce the submissive role. We’re still discussing Safe, Sane and Consensual. She understands safe, she’s baffled by what we consider sane, and she thinks consensual is hilarious.” Sted shrugged. “Fortunately for my sanity, she does understand that she’s not the only power out there, and she can’t stir up too much opposition.”

“So where do we fit in? Or is she just using us?”

“She’s looking for a way for her worshipers to fit smoothly into the larger context, and you’re helping to close the loop.”

“Hm. Closing the loop would help with a dynamic balance. In other words, we’ve been incorporated into her, um, system.”

“That’s probably a fair statement.”

“So if we’re on her radar, where do I fit in personally?”

“You and your staff are in the Trainer aspect. Dr. Nabokov, Natalie and the staff members who’ve got an owner relationship with a specific girl are in the Owner aspect, and most of the rest of the people here are in the Groom, or support staff, aspect. The girls are, of course, in the Ponygirl aspect, and they’ll stay there even after you’ve finished rehabilitating them and they’re ready to leave.

“Pragmatically, everyone here qualifies as one of her worshipers, and she exerts a small but persistent push toward being a better exemplar of the role. It’s small enough that anyone with a strong idea of who they are isn’t going to be affected very much, if at all.”

“Hm. I think I can work with that. And where do you fit in?”

“Oddly. She’d like me to be in the Ponygirl aspect for rather obvious reasons, but I’ve put my hooves down and balked. She’s not at all happy with me being in the Owner aspect, but we can both work with it, and since we can’t get away from each other, we’ve got an uneasy agreement. You can think of me as being her Paladin or High Priestess, but that’s not all that accurate.”

“So you’re out here working on this because she wants it, right?”

“Partly. ‘The gods have more ways of getting your compliance than you have of avoiding it.’ There are a lot of other reasons I think what I’m doing is a good thing, but she wants it, and she smoothed the way.”

“Hm. Give me a minute.” Darlene paused. “Putting all of the theology aside for the moment, what we’ve got is something where we can switch speech and other things on and off at will for Lady Morigan’s victims, right?”

“Right. At the moment, that’s just one of them; I’ve got to do something so you’ve got a control or something for each of them, and so that you don’t need me to attach a control to a new girl’s collar.”

“I think that clarifies things,” Dr. Nabokov said. “It sounds like you’ve got your work planned for the rest of your stay.”

“Sort of. I’ll have to work with Natalie on it.”

“Oh?” Dr. Nabokov said.

“Attaching a control to the collars has to be a spell. I can do it in devisor mode by matching assumptions, but you don’t have a devisor on staff, let alone a devisor who can match Sergei’s world view. I’m pretty sure we can work out a spell that can do the same thing, but it’s going to take work to design and test. Fortunately, it’ll mesh fairly well with Natalie’s style of magic.”

“Oh, really?”

“Sergei is also one of the Sidhe.”

“So he is,” Aspidistra said, leaving no doubt that Sergei was not on her favorites list.

Concluded in part 3

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


Chapter 4

Sergei looked at the assemblage of men and equipment drawn up before him. It didn’t look like all that much. A dozen rough-terrain APCs, another dozen cattle cars outfitted with CRAPS and the real prize, the WATW HISS. The APCs were almost certainly overkill. If the Heroic Intervention Suppression System couldn’t take care of one high school freshman, an APC was almost certainly going to be roadkill. If it could, well, the security people in the Rehabilitation Facility weren’t combat troops. And it probably wouldn’t matter if they were.

The HISS looked like a big black sphere sitting on a meter thick box that covered the entire bed of a flat-bed truck. It wasn’t rated to handle anyone like Champion, and Lady Astarte or The Magus could undoubtedly toast it from out of range, but they weren’t here. Well, technically, neither was Aspidistra or Ponygirl. Both of them were on the other side of the portal that stood, dark and foreboding, at one end of the staging area. And Aspidistra wasn’t a military threat.

“All right, Captain, let’s do it.”

“Show time, men!” the Rent-A-Thug Captain bellowed. He swung into the lead APC beside the driver while Sergei jumped in back with the first attack squad. The APC got under way and vanished through the portal. The first of the cattle cars followed, then the HISS, and then the rest of the APCs, followed by the remainder of the cattle cars.

They emerged from the other side of the portal into a crisp winter Wyoming morning. It didn’t look like there was anything but scrub in front of them for miles. Off to one side stood a woman dressed in a flowing mage’s robe, a lectern with a book in front of her, something that looked like a back yard barbeque on one side and a table loaded with things the Captain would prefer not to inquire into too closely on the other. She waved at the APC as it went past, turned a page in the book, threw something on the coals, braced herself and began a chant.


“The interesting thing about this complex,” Natalie said as Ponygirl looked at the display, fascinated, “is that….”

Natalie’s voice stopped and the display suddenly vanished, showing nothing but blank wall. Sted felt a wave of sleepiness before her battle implants noticed that their person was behaving oddly and come to full alertness, turning on the psychic null as they did so. She shook her head to clear it and turned to see Aspi slump over the table. She hastily pulled spell paper and a pen from her purse and carefully scribed a memorized pattern. She cast it into the air and watched it flare, leaving a rune behind.

She said a few words a well-bred fifteen-year-old girl wasn’t supposed to know, and then picked Natalie up and carried her into one of the circles inlaid on the floor of the workroom. Two minutes later she’d scribed a number of arcane symbols along the inside and energized it.

“Wha?” Natalie said as she regained consciousness. She looked at the almost invisible boundaries of the circle and then sprang upright. “Someone dares! Are you all right?”

“My shields are handling it just fine,” Sted said. “I’m feeling an urge to get in some target practice, so I’m going out to find some targets to practice on.”

“Give me a minute,” Aspidistra said. True to her word, various things in the workroom flared to life, and a minute later the almost invisible miasma had been driven from the cottage.

Sted walked into another circle and invoked the charm that did her costume change. “One of these days,” she said over her shoulder as she walked to the door, “I’m going to have to find a decent battle cry.”

“‘Oh, shit!’ doesn’t do?” Aspi said as she pulled a volume off the shelf and opened it onto a lectern.

Ponygirl strode out onto the street and looked around. There were a half dozen people in sight, all of whom seemed to have decided to take an early morning nap. She turned invisible and arced into the sky. The battle analysis programs in her visor promptly drew her attention to a line of approaching military vehicles.

She headed that way.


The various sensors in the HISS noted that there was a gravitational anomaly that wasn’t matched by any visuals. A highly specialized sensor noted that the polarization of the sky’s light wasn’t quite what it should be on the same bearing as the anomaly. They passed the information along to the AI, which matched it against the profiles of the several thousand heros and villains stored in its data banks.

Its mission planners had put in the profile of a new superheroine and marked it as the most likely target. A high school freshman, really, but she’d already had a couple of minor encounters, and they had reason to believe she was in the area.

The AI matched the anomaly against what it knew of Ponygirl and drew the obvious conclusion. The black sphere vanished, revealing what looked like a pole and a pipe pivoting on the end. The pipe snapped up and began tracking the anomaly. A highly specialized force field began spitting steel clad depleted uranium balls out the pipe, aimed at where an extremely sophisticated trajectory prediction system thought the center of the gravitational anomaly would be when they arrived. The balls exited with a muzzle velocity more than twice the speed of sound; they liquified from the friction within a few feet.


The sensors in Ponygirl’s battle suite noted something incoming. It juggled profiles for a couple of unhurried milliseconds and then decided that the momentum reverser was the best choice. The flaming balls of liquid steel and uranium didn’t actually stop when they tried to pass the boundary of her effect volume. The momentum reverser multiplied their momentum vector by [-1, -1, -1] in the octonian field, and they hurled back the way they had come without slowing down, stopping or speeding up. The discontinuity in the higher derivatives of their momentum function would have given a classical physicist a migraine.

They did, however, obey gravity, so they didn’t ram back down the weapon’s throat. They impacted the ground behind the vehicle, throwing up a storm of fragmented rock and partially melted dirt.


Ponygirl tried to duck at high speed, but the weapon continued to predict her movements and track her. It didn’t seem to be at all bothered by her invisibility.

She plugged in a chaotic-random anti-tracking program and sighed with relief as whatever it was throwing at her began to miss. She ducked behind a butte and took stock. Energy reserves were down to around 50%. Her battle suite’s log said that it was some kind of projectile weapon that fortunately had succumbed to the momentum reverser devise she’d added to her suite just the week before. Whatever it was would have punched through her rather wimpy TK shell like it wasn’t there.

Well, she needed information. She pulled the Bluebird of Unhappiness from her utility belt and sent it out on a scouting mission.


The sensors in the HISS noted that the gravitational anomaly it was tracking had ducked behind a large rock outcrop and then vanished. It noted a bird coming from the same location. The complex of sensors looked at the bird, and decided that it was ... just a bird. The masking spell kept it from wondering about the presence of a bluebird in Wyoming in winter.

The AI decided it wanted a look behind the butte, so it told the vehicle’s drivers where it wanted to go.


The Bluebird of Unhappiness reported that the weapon, whatever it was, had left the column and was headed her way. The rest of the column had gone around the crater the returned fire had gouged and was approaching the installation. The leading vehicles were inside the illusion. There was a halo of mage-fire around Aspidistra’s cottage, but otherwise Aspi seemed not to be having much effect.

So. Ponygirl decided she needed to take out that weapon, whatever it was, without running herself out of energy. She looked at her pistol thoughtfully, and put in a dozen steel jacketed depleted uranium solids, with the rest explosive and incendiaries.

She ducked out from behind the butte using a high speed randomized course, and opened fire with a six round burst of depleted uranium solids at the highest muzzle velocity her weapon could manage. The half inch spheres literally punched holes in the air on the way to the weapon that was trying, and failing, to track her.

The ever vigilant sensors on the HISS noted the incoming rounds and brought up the vehicle’s force shield. It flared red as it intercepted the first blazingly hot blob of uranium and steel. Then the next ones impacted before it had a chance to dissipate the energy. It went through green, violet and ultra-violet before it catastrophically overloaded with a blast of soft x-rays. The last round plowed into what was left of the complex of machinery underneath the weapon.

Ponygirl backed up hurriedly. The fireball and the blazing fragments were all anyone could ask for. Unfortunately, the explosion was too far away from the column to take out any of the other vehicles.


The Captain looked back at the fireball that had been the HISS. He knew exactly what to do. Fighting pissed off superheros was not in the Rent-A-Thug’s job description. Especially pissed off superheros who could take out one of Wilkinson Advanced Technology Weapons’ products.

“Code Omega!” he barked into his communicator. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

Most of the vehicles were still arriving. They executed neat U-turns and began trundling back toward the portal as fast as their drivers could manage.

The first few vehicles weren’t so lucky. The strike team from the first APC had already unloaded and was loading somnolent captives into the first of the cattle cars.

The Rent-A-Thugs hurled themselves back onto their APCs. In the first vehicle, Sergei hurriedly pulled a couple of devises off of his harness and activated them. That APC seemed to vanish. It roared up the outside of the column, trying to get ahead of the devastation Ponygirl was sure to lay down on the rest of the luckless task force.

For her part, Ponygirl didn’t have any intention of slaughtering the minions. She hovered invisibly, considering what to do. Then she replaced the load in her pistol with steel solids, cranked the muzzle velocity down a bit, and went down the line of APCs and cattle cars deliberately punching one round of molten flaming steel right through the armor and the motor of each vehicle.

That took enough time that the lead APC, with Sergei and the Captain, managed to get through the portal back to their staging area. Lady Morigan, for her part, fired off her first bail-out spell, which unleashed a small horde of special effects, minor nasties and hobgoblins. There was nothing really major in it; it just had enough bits and pieces that it ought to occupy both Aspidistra and Ponygirl for long enough for her to escape.

She tucked the book under her arm and walked through the second portal, which led directly back to her ponygirl training facility. As soon as she left, the portals vanished and the final bail-out spell activated, erasing all trace of the portals and her casting circle in a blaze of chaotic thaumaturgic fury that used up the remainder of the pool of essence she’d provided for the operation.


Jinja woke up to find herself lying inside some kind of a vehicle. A couple of quick twists told her she’d been tied down.

People outside were running around and shouting. There was a loud clang and then a couple of thuds. The vehicle jerked into motion. She wondered where they were taking her, not that it really mattered. She’d find out when they got there.

A minute later there was an explosion behind them, and then another explosion in front. The truck stopped.

“Get them the heck out of there before they fry.” The voice sounded somewhere between pissed-off and exasperated. “Do I have to tell you when to go to the crapper?”

By the time they got her out and the confusion died down, she’d managed to identify the voice. It was coming from a genuine super-heroine. At least, the girl was wearing a green leotard and some kind of headband that concealed her eyes. She was also hovering in the air and holding some kind of pistol like she knew how to use it.

Jinja couldn’t keep from staring. The scarlet mane, tail and hooves were a dead giveaway. This was the same girl who had been assisting Mistress in magic class!


“I really don’t want to push the panic button,” Dr. Nabokov said, “just to get these yahoos off our hands, but I don’t have any ideas of what else to do with them.”

“We have to do something quickly,” Mrs. Stoner, the head of the meal service, said. “I don’t think we can feed them for very long.”

“We can sell them back to the Syndicate,” Mr. Long, the head of their little security department, put in. “Problem is, I don’t have any idea how to get in touch, and they don’t seem to have any contact numbers with them. Or at least, any contact numbers I want to risk using.”

“I can call them,” Natalie said.

“OK,” Dr. Nabokov said. “I don’t think most of the rest of us need to be in on this conversation.”

“When you do,” Sted said slowly, “Have the Syndicate contact tell her from me that the situation isn’t what she thinks it is. She should be able to find out my role by using a bit of divination, and I’m quite willing to schedule a phone call to discuss it further once I get back to school.”

“Will do.” Natalie smiled. Everyone else at the table flinched.


Lady Morigan put down the phone. Fortunately, they’d paid in advance, so the Syndicate didn’t want additional payment for the disaster. The last bit of the message, though, was quite puzzling, and the Syndicate contact couldn’t shed any light on it.

She went into her workroom and took out her specially blessed deck of Tarot cards. She’d energized them a number of years ago, and they’d served her well. The blessing ritual should only have made them a better tool for divination, but it had done something entirely unexpected. It had changed the cards physically. The four suits were now the whips, the chains, the chariots and the bridles, and the court cards were the Owner, the Trainer, the Groom and the Ponygirl. The major arcana were even stranger. It included cards she had never seen before, and they changed. In the years she’d had the deck, she was sure she’d seen over a hundred different cards.

Clearly it was connected to something, but she’d never found out what. All of her attempts at finding out more had been blocked. Well, theurgy wasn’t really her forte.

She unwrapped the cards from the warded silk covering and formed the question in her mind while she shuffled them. Then she turned over the top card.

It was the High Priestess. This High Priestess seemed to be looking out of the card at her. She had a scarlet mane and horse’s ears, and was holding a black collar in her hand.

The only way the message could have been more obvious was if it had arrived with a marching band and carrying a club in its hand. Still. High Priestess of what? She turned another card.