It was several days until Sip went to the Clocktower again. He had been told during orientation that the Society frowned slightly on getting too ‘addicted’ to its activities, so he reckoned a few times a week might be a good frequency. And he had plenty to think about, figuring out what exactly he would do the next time he entered the slave pits, when he would not just be window shopping.

Eventually he realized he couldn’t put it off any longer, and went.

He had been given a starter amount of the internal Clocktower Society play-money – enough to buy one of the cheaper slaves on sale (for a limited-time contract after which she would revert to Society ownership), but not enough to bid seriously at one of the auctions he had watched.

That wasn’t so bad. There were several cute fillies among the wares he could afford, and he spent quite some time surveying the offerings. Making the right choice would be important – what if he blew his entire fortune on one of them and then she didn’t want him? Any of them could safeword out as soon as he bought them, and then he’d be back to square one, only with no money to play again for. Or even worse, they might go along with him but still not enjoy what he could think of doing to them. The doms he had met during the welcome course had seemed infinitely competent and imaginative; how could he hope to live up to that?

Perhaps it would be less risky to go for one of the free-to-claim subs? A few of them still scared him, with their open pleas to be taken and degraded, but there were others that caught his attention in a good way. Still, if he could get them without giving up anything himself, didn’t he owe them to make extra sure he could provide what they wanted before he bothered them? And how would he even know what that was? He had been drilled in the Society’s elaborate system of color-coded collars and badges that would supposedly show which kinks each sub was interested in, but in practice he didn’t feel it really worked for learning who wanted something he could do.

At last he did convince himself to make a move on a particularly cute freebie mare, gazing shyly at him through the bars of her cage – but by the time made that decision and went back to her, she was already being tied up and loaded onto a flat cart by two doms in masks, a mare and a stallion. Sip caught a glimpse of her expression when her new owners weren’t looking, excited and apprehensive. He watched them wheel her away, cursing his luck.

Evidently, joining a BDSM club had not come with a magical ability to talk to the opposite sex. Time for plan B, then. With a sigh he left the slave market and made his way to the main dom lounge, looking for the volunteer desk.

The volunteer coordinator turned out to be Pencil Note, the same pony who had taken Sip to his first tour of the Society. He resided in an office that wouldn’t look out of place in any government building in Equestria, at least until you started noticing what the PSA posters on the walls said. By now Sip was getting used to the way the Society alternated between dimly lit nightmare dungeons and pretending to be a world where BDSM was normal and community bulletin boards routinely reminded you of FIVE SIGNS YOUR SLAVE MAY BE DEVELOPING SAFEWORD AVOIDANCE.

“Ah, young Silent,” said Pencil with a smile. “So you decided to join after all. What can I do for you here?”

“Erm, is this where you sign up for, uh, doing chores for the Society?”

“We hope most of them are not that bad,” said Pencil with another avuncular smile. “Do you have anything particular in mind?”

“Oh, whatever you need to have done. Just thought I ought to give back a bit, you know?” This was only half a lie – well, make that three quarters. Or nine tenths. One of his intro lecturers had recommended volunteering as the best way to make connections and get acquainted with much of the Society, but Sip couldn’t quite bring himself to admit he needed that already.

“I see. Very commendable,” Pencil muttered, pulling out a big calendar from his desk. “Let’s see what we’ve got here . . . When can you start?”

Sip spent most of his next several nights as a slave supervisor in the pits, circulating on the main sales floor with a riding crop and whacking slaves that were out of line – looking too resentful, for example, or just not smiling at the customers. The chief slaver who introduced him to the task told him to use his own judgment to set the standard he would enforce. “Don’t worry too much about being fair,” he continued when Sip looked doubtful at that. “A bit of capriciousness is good for the experience. They like it when they can hope to end up with a kinder master.”

Sip thought that made perfect sense, and he allowed himself to feel a bit important as he strutted around in his yellow staff mask, keeping order with the crop. He told himself he was learning – how much force to put behind the whack when he wanted this reaction or that – parts of the mare that were particularly sensitive – how to use the crop not to beat a mare, but to gently caress her with the flap, lifting her tail or chin until she realized who he was with a start.

He learned about himself too: which reactions from a sub he liked. The feisty ones, ever popular with customers, didn’t do much for him, taking every light hit with the crop as an invitation to challenge his authority. Then there were the ones who openly enjoyed being punished but at least made an effort to behave afterwards. He liked best those who acted scared and miserable (at least he very much hoped it was an act; they all knew their safewords, didn’t they?). And the completely apathetic and dispirited ones he simply didn’t understand. He could understand that would be a realistic reaction for somepony who were actually being sold into slavery, but why bother to play-act that? He didn’t get it.

One day Pencil Note reassigned him to the cafe in the doms’ lounge, which was strictly off-limits for subs and so had to be staffed by dom volunteers. Pencil was very apologetic about it: several of the usual cafe staff had called in sick, and Sip was the only volunteer available who already had food safety training from his outside job at The Hayburger. He didn’t really mind; it was interesting to hear what the other doms talked about when their facades where down. Afterwards he would sometimes go to the cafe and order a hot chocolate, just to take in the atmosphere.

Another day he was a supervisor in an eatery off the main thoroughfare in the dungeons where the waitresses were all sub volunteers. He swung his trusty crop there too – though now more against laziness than petulance – and was also responsible for punishing staff that guests complained about, with strokes of a long, flexible cane. The customer’s word was law here, at least when the customer wore a dom’s mask. Once a waitress flat out denied having been rude to a guest, and then he had to punish her both for her rudeness and for calling the guest a liar, tearing into her raised behind while she knelt in front of the customer and stammered apologies between the strokes.

As time went by, he was sometimes given more responsible tasks at his main job at the slave market, such as processing returns or trade-ins. This involved taking the mare in question out to the sales floor and setting her up either in a cage or otherwise on display. Sometimes the sub’s former owner would come along with him, and then she would invariably start begging to be taken back – which was usually successful, though not before Sip had finished setting her up. He tried not to resent his efforts being pointless; he knew he was just an extra in the story they were acting out together.

The job he liked best was being a clerk at Honest Bram’s, a specialty slave dealership in a corner of the slave pits where subs would come to be ‘bought’ by a dom they had already agreed to do a scene with. Sip would receive the sub at a back entrance and find out who she was going to be sold to and how she would be displayed – sometimes her dom would have left instructions in advance, sometimes she would have ideas herself. After the merchandise had been set up accordingly, Sip would show customers around and make sure each slave was sold only to the dom she intended.

The subs at Honest Bram’s were Sip’s favorites among the mares he worked with. He felt he got to know them better than the masses of slaves on the main floor, and in turn they treated him more like a trusted professional or a co-conspirator than like a nameless face of authority. Even when their chosen partner arrived to take them away, Sip could still feel a kind of bond with the mare when she made eye contact with him and nodded almost imperceptibly to signal, this is the right buyer.

It also helped that these mares would often be displayed in rather imaginative ways. Sip got some experience with inserting things into openings he had never imagined he would even get close to without dating the pony with the openings.

Of course, in the nature of things the mares at Bram’s were also, without exception, already taken.

Each night after his volunteer shift, Sip would wander the dungeons for an hour or two, hoping for a sudden miracle that would connect him with a mare who could be his own. The society paid him in play-money for volunteering, and before long he had enough of it that buying a cheap slave wouldn’t ruin him even if it didn’t work out – but somehow that didn’t seem to make it any easier. No matter how much he told himself this was how it was done here, the idea of buying love kept making him queasy. (Would it be love he bought? Should he even think in terms of “love” in this circus? He was as confused as ever.)

When he became fed up enough with himself for being such a loser, even though everything was handed to him, he would go and relieve himself in the ‘cum dumps’ – the deliberately profane (so he assumed) name for a white-tiled hall full of mares strapped into racks and plinths, waiting to be fucked quickly, anonymously, and with a minimum of fuss. That, at least, he could deliver, though he understood these mares even less than he did the slave subs. But it sated his bodily needs, and did it better than the mare he had lost his innocence to that first night – here he could at least take his time finishing.

Still, he made sure to choose ones who were either blindfolded or locked into glory-hole boxes. Looking them in the eye would have been too much.

And then he’d go back home to Baltimare with an empty feeling, until the next time he had a shift staked out in Pencil Note’s big calendar.

One day when Sip came back to the volunteer desk to clock out after a shift at the slave market, Pencil Note seemed to be in a chatty mood.

“So, had a productive day?” he asked Sip.

“Um, yes,” said Sip.

“Actually I was thinking of calling it a day myself. Care to join me for a bowl of carrot soup in the cafe?”

“Carrot soup?”

“Yes – you haven’t tried it yet? It’s almost criminally good. Come, we have to fix that – unless you have other plans?”

“I guess,” said Sip. The only plans he had were another lonely trek through the dungeons. He wasn’t even sure why he bothered anymore. So that miracle could happen, perhaps.

“Excellent!” exclaimed Pencil. “Hey, Swish, mind the shop for a bit, will you?”

“Sure,” answered a voice from a back office behind Pencil’s desk.

The soup really was good, but it was obvious that it wasn’t all Pencil had on his mind. Halfway through his bowl he put it down, and looked at Sip significantly.

“Silent, you’ve been putting in an awful lot of volunteer hours since you joined. The Society appreciates that, of course, but you never really seem to be satisfied when you clock out. You’re not forgetting to take time to have some fun yourself, are you?”

“Well . . .” Sip shrugged awkwardly. That was just the point, wasn’t it: figuring out how to have ‘fun’ on his own. But that wasn’t really an explanation he could use. “I guess I like the work. It’s interesting . . . and easy to figure out, just following the instructions.”

Pencil looked thoughtful. “So you like being told what to do? Are you sure you don’t belong out west instead?”

Sip’s heart sank. That was the thing he had been dreading to hear for months – that he was not good enough as a dom, that it would be either the collar for him or leave the Society as a failure.

Pencil must have seen his reaction. “There’s nothing wrong with that at all, you know. The Society wants all its members to be happy with what they do; it’s a terrible thing for somepony to be unhappy trying to be something they’re not.”

“No, that’s not – I mean, I’m sure I want to be a dom. I just need some time to figure it out, okay? Please?”

“Relax, son, it’s not as if I can decide what you should be. But – if you can forgive me for prying a bit – what is it really you want out of domming?”

Sip struggled to express it, thoughts he had never really put in order even to himself, and certainly not said out loud to another pony. But if he was going to fail and be demoted to sub, at least he could try to go out in a blaze of glory. “It’s – well, there are stories, you know? I read a lot of them before I heard of the Society. About mares being dominated – tied up, beaten, humiliated, forced – and liking it, completely loving it, you know?”

Pencil nodded encouragingly. “Go on.”

“I always thought it was just porn; you can’t really trust that. But here, in the Society, it’s full of mares who’re actually like that. And now, when I remember one of those stories, all I can think of is how I want to make a mare feel that way. I want to take her and be the pony who makes her feel that way. Do I make sense at all?”

“Perfectly.” Pencil smiled. “And it sounds like you’re in the right place after all. But what prevents you from going out and doing that?”

Sip fiddled with his soup bowl. “I’m not sure I can,” he admitted.

Pencil raised his eyebrows. “Have you tried?”

“W-well, not in so many words . . . kinda still looking for somepony to practice with.”

Pencil made a show of looking around the lounge. “Silent, that doesn’t make any sense. This is the Clocktower; it’s positively crawling with mares who’d like nothing better than being practiced on. As you noted yourself just before. Just go out and grab one of them. You know the color coding, right? Red collars are okay with short-time use.”

Of course he wouldn’t understand. Sip made a last attempt to explain himself. “Yes, but . . . it’s also crawling with doms who actually know what they’re doing. I suppose there are mares who’d be okay with getting me instead of one of them . . . but I don’t know how to recognize them.”

“You could always ask.”

“Just go around the pens and ask everyone if they can spare some time to endure a rookie?” Sip rolled his eyes, feeling bitter.

“Hmm, no, that doesn’t sound very dommish, does it?” Pencil sighed. “Look, I’ve known a lot of our subs, and I think very few of them would be too cold-hearted to give a new guy a hoof up – or so full of themselves that they expect every dom they get to be perfect. Certainly not the ones you’ll find on the pit floor; it’s part of the fun for them that they never quite know what they’ll get. Seriously, just pick somepony and drag her off. She’ll tap out if she really doesn’t want to be with you, you know.”

“I suppose so,” said Sip, not convinced, but out of arguments. “I’ll try that.”

He really did try to make himself do that. It was just easier said than done.

About a week later, when he was humping away in the cum dumps, the safety bell in its holder beside him suddenly went off.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Three bells were the non-spoken form of the ‘staircase’ safeword. Slow down. Sip realized he had been rutting the nameless, faceless pony in the box below him pretty brutally, taking out all of his frustration with himself for not having been able to approach anypony yet.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he exclaimed, pulling out. “Really, sorry. Are you all right?” He didn’t even know if the mare inside could hear him. If she could, she didn’t answer him. He knelt down by the side of the box, searching for some kind of latch or opening.

Finally he found a small knob that let the entire side of the box slide off. Inside was a pale blue pegasus mare – he knew her color already of course, from her rump and legs sticking out of the hind end of the box – strapped securely to upholstered supports for her barrel, head and forelegs.

“Really sorry for that, ma’am,” he repeated. “You all right?”

“Sshawhrr. Aesh.” He noticed that her mouth was being kept open and fixed just inside the glory hole in the front wall of the stand by an arrangement of struts and braces.

“If you’re okay, please –”

Ding ding ding ding ding! The mare let out something that sounded like a sigh, staring at him out the corner of her eyes. Five bells for ‘clockface’: Pause the session, communicate, renegotiate.

This made it Sip’s duty to get the mare’s mouth free so she could communicate. But he didn’t quite know how; the struts looked complicated and he didn’t want to do something wrong that might hurt her. The he noticed the big red button below her head marked GAG UNIT QUICK-RELEASE.

“Uh!” gasped the mare as the collection of hardware around her muzzle suddenly pulled away and folded itself into some mechanical pocket dimension. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that you had to –”

“No, I’m sorry –”

“Hey, you two. Not to interrupt that tender little scene, but shouldn’t you ought ta get a room instead?” growled the stallion using the neighboring stall. “There are some safeword rooms out by the entrance.”

“Right. Sure,” mumbled Sip in embarrassment.

By now, one of the maid attendants had been summoned by the sound of the safety bell, which was a good thing because she got the mare free of the stand about ten times faster than Sip would have figured it out by himself. He stood by and watched, feeling useless.

“Let’s go,” said the mare tonelessly after thanking the attendant. Without really waiting for Sip she trudged slowly out towards the safeword rooms, looking miserable. Sip followed her, not in a much better mood himself.

“So,” he said, closing the door to the safeword room behind him. “I’m really sorry about that.”

“No, it’s my fault,” said the mare and dropped herself down in the couch in the middle of the room. “It’s just – it’s the first time I’m doing this, and it began to hurt just a little bit, and I thought –”

“Yes, sorry,” repeated Sip. “I wasn’t being careful. Sorry.” He sat down in an armchair facing the couch. There was a coffee table between them, and a magical fire crackling down to the side, all giving the room an impossibly homely and respectable air. Sip supposed that was the point, creating a clear contrast to the dungeons outside.

“I’m Silent Pride,” he said. She would probably need his full name if she wanted to file a complaint about him.

“Society Slave C-557,” the mare said, pointing to her red collar that showed she didn’t have a personal owner. “At your service, I suppose.”

Sip stared into the fire, not knowing where to go from here.

“Is it always that big a deal to use the safeword?” asked C-557. “I thought I was just asking you to go a bit slower.”

Sip shrugged. “Don’t know. Never happened to me before.” But he realized she was right. She had only used the ‘slow down’ safeword at first, and he had been an idiot –

“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry. I panicked and kinda overreacted.”

“Don’t. It’s better than not reacting, I think.”

“Sorry.”

It occurred to Sip that this was the first time he was actually talking to one of the subs, pony to pony, rather than just playing out his assigned role. He couldn’t let the chance to figure things out better go to waste.

“So, what do you do when you’re not doing the dumps?” he asked casually.

She looked uncomfortable, fidgeting with her hooves. “I’ve done an awful lot of sitting around in a cage in the slave pits,” she said, “waiting. But I don’t really have the bands and badges that make stallions interested, it seems.”

Sip tried to remember if he had seen her there. Looking over at her, he wasn’t sure he would even have noticed her if he had, with her white and pale blue mane that didn’t stand much out from her coat color, and a build that was just slightly taller than ‘cute’. She was on the younger side, though, only a few years older than him, he thought.

“Once I tried signing myself up for an auction,” she continued. “I didn’t even make the reserve price.” She looked down.

Sip wished he had sat down in the couch with her rather than the armchair. She looked like she could use a hug, but moving over to her would probably be too forward, considering she had just tapped out on him.

“That sucks,” he said instead. “I’m sorry you’re having such trouble. Haven’t you been picked up by anypony?”

She shook her head. “That’s why I went to the cum dumps today. They say it’s easier to get something here.”

“That worked better?”

“Mmhm,” She nodded, but without much enthusiasm. “You’re my fifth today. My fifth ever, that is. Unless one of them went twice. It’s hard to tell.”

Sip tried to process that information.

“Can I ask you something?” she said suddenly. “What do doms look for when you’re shopping for slaves? Is it really all in the badges?”

He almost just made something up, to protect his image, but then he remembered that she had just told him of her failures. She deserved better than being lied to. “Honestly?” he said. “With me it’s mostly whether they look like they want to be owned by a bucking noob.”

“How can you see that?” she asked, confused.

He sighed and leaned back, shutting his eyes. “You tell me. Why do you think I went to the cum dumps?”

Suddenly she was laughing. “Dear Luna, we really are bucking noobs, both of us, aren’t we?”

He laughed too – laughed and laughed. It wasn’t really all that funny, but it felt good just to let go and laugh it all away. With someone who couldn’t figure things out either.

When they had no laughs left, she stood up from the couch. “Thanks for listening to me,” she said quietly.

He stood too. “Sorry for breaking your run.”

“Don’t you start again!” she hissed. “See you around, then?”

It was now or never. “Would you like to, um, do a scene?” he asked, as nonchalantly as he could, bracing himself for rejection.

She stopped, thought about it seriously. Then a small smile conquered her face. “I think I would like that. On one condition.”

“Yes?” was all he could say.

“If I need to safeword out again, don’t apologize. Seriously, that makes it completely terrifying to use it, and I don’t think that’s how it’s meant to work.”

She had a point. “By my sacred honor, milady, I do vow to be utterly unrepentant whatever may happen,” he said with a small bow – and then kicked himself mentally for slipping into gallantry in a place and situation like this.

But she just giggled and held the door for him so he could walk out first.

There was a blue supply closet by the entrance to the safeword block, kept stocked with a small selection of essential tools and toys by the maid service. Sip picked out a plain leash, and C-557 lifted her head and blushed becomingly as he clipped it to her collar.

He led her out into the bustle of the main concourse of the dungeons, feeling six feet tall. Here he was, not just doing his job, but leading a mare that was his – perhaps only for a short time, but still a mare who had smiled and blushed and given herself to him.

For the first time in years, Silent Pride felt he matched his name.

This is my slave. There are many like her, but this one is mine. My slave is my life. She is part of me and I of her. I must master her and guide her and comfort and command her. I will learn her weaknesses, her strength, her dreams, her fears, and her limits. I will not fail her. I will hold her and spank her and fuck her and squeeze her, and perhaps – just perhaps! – call her George.