“So,” said Sip, “what does a ‘plugwright’ actually do?”

The smallish room where he and the other Quiet were waiting had shelves full of jars and boxes of unknown substances on one side, and enigmatic objets in what he assumed to be various stages of completion on the other. Between them was a small but tidy work table beneath a tool rack on the end wall. Some of the tools looked like they might be used for woodworking; most of them he couldn’t even guess at.

Beating Heart took her helmet off and put it down on the work table. “Far as I know, this one mostly does personal gags. You take your sub here, and the plugwright measures her mouth and then moulds a plug that fits her oral cavity perfectly.” She mimed stuffing something into her mouth. “Oewwy znog,” she gargled, mouth kept open by the imagined plug. “Very invasive. Some of them barely need straps to stay in.”

“I see.” Sip looked at one of the half-finished objects again. Yes, that made some sense – these two ridges would fit in between the teeth and tongue, and that hole at the small end could be a breathing passage. But now those two strange things, looking like upside-down oyster mushrooms . . .?

Beating followed his gaze. “I think those are for ears. Though if you want earplugs, you should try the plugwright down at Overfall Passage instead. She makes some that are completely deafening and have a little built-in tube for squirting in cold water.” She grinned at him.

Sip allowed himself a small wince at the thought. He had begun to suspect that Beating delighted in throwing him off balance by her appetite for rough play. Right now, though, he was in full costume, so she couldn’t even see if he reacted or not. And, well, if her subs liked it that way . . .

The door burst open and Ashen entered, waving a clipboard around dramatically. “Everything looks good,” she half-whispered. “Helmet on, Heart, for the dark mare’s sake! The victim is in cage B-12, bravo one two.”

“Baker twelve, right ya go,” came the cheerful reply from within Star Spur’s mirrored helmet. “We all ready?”

Beating rolled her eyes and flipped her helmet on while Ashen stepped back out into the alley behind the plugwright’s workshop and looked around quickly. After a moment she threw the door wide open. “Clear upwards, clear downwards. Go, go, go!”

The three Quiet filed out of the room and lined up side by side, Sip between Star and Beating. Then they started marching soundlessly around the bend in the alley where it turned to connect to the main street out in front. The show had begun.

“If ya keep goin’ up that alley it keeps twistin’ and turnin’, and at last you come out halfway up the Gauntlet,” Star Spur had explained when they met outside the plugwright’s for a non-dress rehearsal a few days earlier. “So it goes somewhere, but ain’t the shortest way there. It’s quiet enough ta slip into without bein’ seen, and once we get out, ever’pony’s gonna think we came all the way.”

Sip could appreciate the theatrics of it. The Quiet had no barracks, no headquarters, but were just suddenly there and nopony knew from where. But – “Won’t ponies notice nobody ever sees us go in at the other end?” he had asked.

Star nodded. “Might do, if we kept usin’ the same place to start at. But Ashen has, I wouldn’t know, thousands of them sneaky little spots lined up to rotate between. Ponies like the plugwright who owe her favors. Right, Ashy?”

“We have an adequate supply,” Ashen confirmed primly.

As they glided down the main corridors, Sip marveled at how the crowd in front of them scuttled hastily out of their way, nudging and whispering among themselves. Ponies stopped what they were doing and stood out to the side, following them with solemn gazes. At first sight it was just a curious audience lining the streets as the procession went past, but there was also a weird note of the curious audience cautiously backing up against the walls, trying not to attract attention.

It reminded Sip of how he had felt on his first shifts as a volunteer in the slave markets, when he was suddenly a figure of authority that the slaves needed to be aware of, oriented themselves towards or attempted not to be noticed by – but never ignored like a random passer-by. Only this time it was writ much larger. Even the doms stopped and watched the Quiet silently while they went by. The doms wouldn’t be afraid, of course, but Sip thought he glimpsed something else behind their masks. Respect?

This was just as Ashen had predicted, in flowery commentary during the rehearsals. At that time he had thought she might be exaggerating a bit. But if anything, this was more. Or perhaps it only felt larger when it was happening for real rather than being narrated like one of the florid passages of a Daring Do book. Either way, he could get used to this. Everypony’s attention and respect was for his role rather than him, he knew. But it still beat being the nopony he usually was.

A great wave of hushed quiet displaced the normal hustle and bustle of the slave market as soon as they came through the main entrance. There were ponies everywhere, just as there usually were, but they made nary a sound while Sip and his comrades walked a zig-zagging path between the pens and corrals. Sometimes a sub they went past let out a whimper as she thought they were coming for her.

Eventually they reached the block of tall cages they were heading for. Cage B-12 on the right side of the aisle contained a white pegasus with a mint green mane. She looked up when Star Spur pulled the door to the cage open with a loud creak, eyes widening as she realized what was happening.

“No . . . please,” the mare stammered. “It must be a mistake!”

Sip glanced at the ID plaque at the front of the cage, just in case. It said SL-35714 (answers to ‘Sunny Leaf’, brands 7/4/4 or inquire at trading desk for deals), like it was supposed to. But he had also memorized the victim’s mane, coat and eye colors, and her cutie mark matched too – this was their gal alright. He stepped halfway into the cage and held out the scarlet ceremonial gag towards her with a slight bow. After a bit of hesitation she took it, but she was shaking so much that she dropped it to the floor. Sip inclined his head a tiny bit, and she picked up the gag, quenching a sob as she did so. She put it on and stood fumbling with the clasp at the back.

Something was not right about this, but Sip couldn’t quite put a hoof on it. Suddenly Beating brushed past him, ripped the gag out of the mare’s mouth, and gave it back to Sip. He stared at it for a few seconds until it dawned upon him that her safety bell hadn’t sounded. At the Clocktower, nopony puts a gag on anypony without hearing their bell work first – even themself. He held the gag out towards the mare, bowing again. She looked at him in confusion and slowly took the gag and put it on again. Still no bell.

Sip felt lost. He was supposed to be the Quiet, never speaking. How could he make her understand she needed to test her bell? He tried pointing a hoof significantly at her tail, but she stared uncomprehending at him and backed towards a corner of the cage, eyes starting to well up.

Behind him, Star Spur cleared his throat.

“Um, clockface, miss, but yer bell seems ta be on the fritz.”

A dawn of understanding rolled across SL-35714’s face, quickly followed by an embarrassed blush at having forgotten the most basic of rules. She nodded eagerly in apology and flicked her tail.

Ding!

There was something wrong with Sip’s helmet. Suddenly he couldn’t hear anything. He fought an impulse to shake his head to make his ears work again. Then the mare put down her forehooves after adjusting the gag, and he heard them clop against the floor quite clearly.

It wasn’t the helmet or his ears: The whole room had gone silent at the sound of the mare’s bell – all across the gargantuan cavern hundreds of ponies held their breath. He had thought they were quiet before, but not really. Now he might hear it if somepony dropped a pin off the railing at the far end. Ashen had not said anything about this.

Wow.

“Two bells to continue the scene, miss? Clockface,” continued Star Spur in a businesslike tone.

She nodded. Ding ding.

Star began tying his lead line to the mare’s gag, and Sip remembered he was supposed to do the same from the other side too. While he did so – weaver’s knot, just like his cutie mark, he recalled – he couldn’t help but admire how Star had handled the problem. Of course breaking the scene with a safeword had been the right solution. It felt a bit irregular to ask her to ring her bell again to resume – Sip had learned in his classes that both dom and sub should say the ‘clockface’ safeword to end the timeout – but it would probably have embarrassed the mare even more to ask her to take off the gag again just to do that. And it definitely would have been bad to make her ring an entire five-ding ‘clockface’. Everypony who heard that in the sudden silence would have thought she was tapping out and then see the Quiet march her off anyway.

Sip hoped he would one day be wise like Star Spur.

With Beating Heart in front they made their way out of the slave market. Off to one side Sip caught a glimpse of a young volunteer slaver who looked like he was just about to confront them for walking off with the merchandise without paying, before he was hastily reined in by the floor manager. Sip found himself grinning behind his helmet. That could have been him, a moon ago.

Mercifully for SL-35714 – who didn’t look comfortable with being the center of everypony’s attention – it was not far to walk to a door in the side of the cavern, behind which a little-used spiral staircase went downwards. A uniformed guardstallion was standing right in that doorway, watching the spectacle mouth agape, but turned and disappeared down the stairs when he realized they were coming right at him. Sip guessed he was one of Ashen’s countless one-time extras, engaged exactly to make sure the door would be open when they reached it.

The stairs led down to the ‘Branch’ level of the dungeons. Sip didn’t have clearance to go there on his own, so he had been here only once, at the rehearsal. Fortunately all he had to do was follow Beating, who knew which way to take through the corridors. They passed some ponies, but not many – Branch didn’t have the large crowds of the upper level, and their route had been chosen to avoid the busier part of it. At this point in their act, the goal was to let the victim feel alone and isolated, not to parade her in front of an audience.

That was certainly working for SL-35714. She was walking along shakily, sometimes halfway stumbling over her own hooves and then having to trot for several seconds to keep up when Sip and Star Spur continued apace, pulling her onward with the lines tied to her gag. A few times Sip heard her sob quietly.

He couldn’t help being impressed with how completely she immersed herself in the situation, considering that she had just been reminded in the most blatant way that she had safewords to fall back on, and that even the Quiet were only ponies playing make-believe. He wondered if Cirrus would be able to do that.

Cirrus being taken by the Quiet! He could vividly imagine her in SL-35714’s stead, struggling to keep up, looking around desperately with big scared eyes, keeping her wings tightly folded along her sides as if she thought they had forgotten about them and would stop to tie them up if she reminded them. Oh, Cirrus would love that! And the dom who set her up for that trip . . . Sip suddenly realized that he wanted to be that dom, wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything. In a burst of brilliant insight he saw how everything in his life until now, reading Daring do with a flashlight in the middle of the night, joining the Society, all that had been merely preludes to being the stallion who gave Cirrus George C-557 the ride of her life.

Wow. This was what having a goal felt like.

Suddenly Beating Heart stopped walking, and Sip narrowly managed to come to a halt himself without breaking formation too much. He saw that they had reached their goal: a short pier on the bank of a hot subterranean river. Sip could feel the heat through his uniform. Scattered banks of stream rose slowly from the waters and drifted through the cooler air over the surface, illuminated by a faint orange glow coming from the river itself.

At the upstream side of the pier a long black gondola lay waiting, the Boatmare standing like a statue in its far end. SL-35714 had frozen in place, staring into the black abyss of his cowl, but stepped onto the boat with a shiver after Sip tugged on her lead. The other Quiet boarded after them, and with an almost invisible flick of his big oar, the Boatmare steered them out into the stream.

After the pier dropped away behind them, they went around a bend in the river and it opened up into a larger reservoir in a giant cavern. The ceiling was not even visible in the dim light, but Sip caught SL-35714 staring longingly towards it, as though she expected the Princess herself to break through any moment and come galloping down a ray of sunlight to save her.

He imagined Cirrus with that expression on her face. Yes, there was no doubt. This was what he was made for. This was who he was. It felt almost like some of the stories his schoolmates had told about getting their cutie marks and suddenly knowing their destiny. Sip had never had one of those to tell. But – wait! Beating Heart had remarked that Sip’s cutie mark was exactly the knot the Quiet used for tying lead lines to their victims. Could this be it? It had to be. That was why he’d never recognized it before. Silent Pride, lowly fast-food pony and general loser-at-life, was meant to be a Quiet.

He almost had to sit down on the floor of the gondola to recover from the realization. If the boat ride had been much longer, he might have. But just then they arrived at the small island in the middle of the reservoir, built up with the tall stone walls of a nightmare castle, stretching up towards infinity. The Boatmare steered them through an imposing gate into an inner lagoon and the boat came to rest against a short quay. Sip had a job to do here. A job he was meant to do. So do that first; marvel at your fate later.

They led SL-35714 into a big round room with a deep well set in the exact middle. Sip stayed by the door while Star and Beating walked her halfway to the center and Star turned around to face her and made the hoof signal for the ‘box’ position. SL-35714 blinked in surprise for a moment, but followed the order and lay down with her back on the floor, legs folded above her body.

Meanwhile Sip unhitched the wrought-iron suspension frame from its hook on the wall and let it glide slowly in towards the well. The frame hung on a chain from a pulley in the ceiling far above, and Sip only had to pull gently back on the steering rope to stop it right above SL-35714. Star and Beating began hooking each of her slave hoofcuffs to the four corners of the frame, cross-checking each other’s work. Though Sip wasn’t directly handling the victim, in some ways his job was the most important of them all – –

At the rehearsal there had only been the Boatmare to operate the winch, from a hidden gallery halfway up the rotunda, because Ashen was still standing in for the victim. When he took a small break to get a better grip on the crank, and Sip saw Ashen stop rising, dangling upside down from the suspension frame about a pony height from the floor, he thought now was the time. He let go of the steering rope and Ashen began sailing across the room, towards the well in the middle.

As the curve of the swing brought Ashen lower, her mane began to brush against the floor. Sip suddenly realized that in a few moments her head would slam into the low stone wall around the well. “Watch out!” he shouted uselessly.

Ashen kept swinging, but in the last fraction of a second she contorted her body in a way that somehow kept her head clear of the wall, missing it by half a hoofwidth. Then, on the upswing on the other side, she called out, “Towertop!” and the pyromantic safety bolts on her wing clamps went off, allowing her to divert her trajectory away from the well with a few big flaps while Star Spur and Beating rushed to catch and stop her.

Afterwards there had been Words. “What the buck do you think you’re trying to do?” she demanded. “It’s just an ordinary Breaking, meaning her will, not her skull. Not a snuff scene. No, don’t mind me, I’m fine, no trouble – I am a trained lychnopendulist, you know. But the real victim will not be. Could you see the torches on the other side beneath my back before you let go? No, I think not. And you don’t simply let go of that rope anyway; you’ll need it to stop the swing in the middle so you can lower me down the well. What were you thinking?”

“Sorry!” stammered Sip. “I thought –”

“Less thinking! More following the instructions!”

Sip had been sure this was the end of his career as a Quiet before it had begun, but at the end Ashen apparently decided this was the kind of mistake a pony makes only once in his life, so he got to stay on.

This time, though, everything went well. Star and Beating stepped back from SL-35714, and a moment later she was lifted smoothly into the air, Ashen and the Boatmare working the winch together. Then while she rose, Star hurried back to make some kind of last-minute adjustment to her wing bindings, which took until well after she had settled at the correct height. Sip knew a tactful way to prevent another screw-up when he saw one, but he decided to be grateful Star was trying for tact at all.

The victim disappeared slowly down the well, and several minutes later the quiet clanking of the winch stopped and Ashen and the Boatmare came down to the floor. Already the faint echoes of an unknown mare’s villainous laugh were wafting up through the shaft. They nodded to each other – the three Quiet had taken off their helmets as soon as the victim was out of sight – and went back down to the boat.

“Good job, everypony,” said Ashen while they were crossing the reservoir. “Well done, Sip.”

When they got back to the pier and had packed the costumes away, Ashen distributed the pay they had earned for the appearance. Sip was astounded to find he had earned an entire brand for an hour’s work, and even more astounded to learn that their customer, the unseen mare at the bottom of the well, had paid thirty-five of them to have SL-35714 delivered to her with style.

“It’s supply and demand,” Beating Heart explained while she escorted him back up to his own level of the dungeons. “We can’t do shows more often than once a moon or so – the mystique would wear off. So Ashen jacks up the price until that’s how many doms are willing to pay. Most of that goes back to the Society’s coffers, of course.”

That sounded reasonable – even fair, because play money had no connection to how rich you were outside the Society. Still, Sip’s new life goal of giving Cirrus a trip with the Quiet would become rather more expensive than he thought. It was good that he would have plenty of time to save up; gaining Root clearance for them both would take years anyway.

All the better to get started soon, then. He waved goodbye to Beating and set off towards the library to begin planning their next date.

“Now, George,” Sip said when the door had closed behind them, “clockface.”

She blinked and looked around in the small training room. “Is there something wrong?”

“Um, no. But, I mean, it’s looking like we’re going to have a lot more of these sessions.” (Did she brighten up a bit at that?) “So I thought we should take some time to go through some of the toys in the room, to find which of them you’d want me to try using on you. If you want, that is. Otherwise I could take a lot of tries making guesses. And I need you to be out of play so I know it’s what you want, and not just what a good slave should want.”

It wasn’t his own idea; one of the Society magazines had suggested it as something couples ought to do from time to time. But . . . they weren’t really a couple, not yet, no matter how much he planned to stick with Cirrus while they both earned their way towards Root. And it would probably sound creepy to explain that entire plan to her, and getting taken by the Quiet was supposed to be a surprise anyway.

So he was prepared to see her roll her eyes in response. “Aren’t you the dom?” she would say. “That’s your job to figure out.”

But instead she thought for a brief moment and smiled and said, “That sounds lovely.” She even blushed a little. “Where do we start?” She walked over to the tool wall with its array of crops, whips, canes, and floggers on display, scanning it with interest as if it was the first time she saw it.

Sip got down the toy manual and opened it at section one: “Headgear. Bridles, gags, blindfolds, blinkers, et cetera. That’s the drawers over there, beneath the paddles.”

He filled the pages of a notepad with her yeas and nays and maybes. As expected, there were quite a number of nays – she shook her head firmly at the cock gags, and threw ‘The Uvulator’ across the room in disgust when she realized where its thin semi-flexible silicone spike, half again as long as her head, would go. But there were also yeas, some of which he would never have imagined. Nostril hooks? He himself would need some time to get used to that idea.

The maybes were the worst, because he wasn’t sure which of them meant, ‘if you really want this, you can’ and which were ‘please try it, but perhaps I will tap out’. And he couldn’t find a tactful way to ask her to make it clear. He ended up watching her face closely and noting down maybe-but-really-no or maybe-but-really-maybe as his own best interpretation.

“What’s this?” She pointed at a box of what looked like big chubby toddler-friendly mane clips.

“Hmm . . . ah, here: Number 48, non-piercing ear clamps,” he read aloud from the manual. “Pull her ears up or out for posture control in upright bondage, or down to a table or rack. Clamps can bolt directly to floor if she’s lying on her back. Or dangle weights for grace training or punishment. Also see: pp. 78ff for predicament ideas. NOT FOR OVERNIGHT USE. To avoid pressure damage, remove clamps after 3 hours, massage, and re-set.”

“Oh.” She sounded surprised, and looked vaguely puzzled. “Oh. Um, can I try them on?” Her cheeks flushed red in sudden embarrassment. “I mean, right now?”

He didn’t see why not, so he cracked open a pair and mounted them on her ears while she stood with her eyes closed and gasped almost inaudibly when he let the teeth of a clamp bite down on an ear.

She smiled at him with the clamps held high, looking like somepony’s comically failed attempt to construct fake bat-ear tufts for Nightmare Night. “There were weights too, you said?”

The manual page had a helpful table of how much weight a pony ear should be loaded with at various comfort levels. Sip selected the mildest step other than ‘I just like how it looks’, and hooked a couple of standard weights into each of the ear clamps.

Her expression was hard to read this way – excited grin at the front, but ears hugging her cheeks in bottomless depression further back. It was the grin he could trust, of course. “That looks like a success,” he said. “Here, let me take them off again.”

“No!” She shied abruptly away from him when he reached for her head, sending the weights on her ears swinging wildly around her. “Ow.”

If she wanted to wear the ear clamps while they continued, there was no actual reason she couldn’t. “Careful with those things on, George,” he chuckled. “No sudden movements.”

Should he have called her Cirrus instead? They were not in play. He braced himself for failure, but she smiled sadly (no, not really sadly – just those ear weights talking) and said, “Yes, master,” turning carefully back to the toy shelves. “What’s next?”

Most of her maybes tended to become maybe-but-really-no on his notepad after that. She stared long and enigmatically at a pair of teat clamps before declaring them to be ‘another time’, which started a whole new maybe-but-really-perhaps category on the pad. Later she wanted to try on a vaginal spreader ring, but that eventually became a ‘no for now’. No-but-really-maybe?

When they reached a tray of anal plugs she was amazed by seeing how small the one she had worn last week had been. First she didn’t even believe him, but when he stood his ground she ended up demanding to have the next larger size stuck into her right now, and made him promise not to take it out before the session was over.

This was going slower than he expected. Perhaps he shouldn’t just have started at the beginning of the catalog and taken one item at a time? The magazine had been a bit vague about how much detail he’d need. After they finished off the dock rings and tail bandages (yes and yes), he decided to cut his losses and move on to having some actual fun. They could always continue later.

“I think that’s enough of this for today,” he said, doing his best to sound in charge and like this was all according to plan. “Ready to get back into character?”

She let out a small sigh that might be relief, and nodded – slowly, so as not to send the ear weights dancing again. “Okay. Clockface?”

Of course she remembered the ritual. He put his notepad and the toy manual away on the table and picked down a riding crop from the wall. “Clockface. So, slave –”

This training room was quite small compared to most others, but it had something most didn’t: a yard. Its back door led out to a big hall whose ceiling had been enchanted to show a time-shifted view of the sky above the Clocktower, so it looked like you were outside in the late morning. It was a nice sunny day, with little tufts of cloud sailing lazily by. Further down, matching enchantments on the walls completed the illusion of a well-kept sandy paddock surrounded by fields along the edge of a forest.

George gave a small gasp of surprise and delight when he led her out of the small shed that the entrance to the training room had been made to look like. Sip had been right in hoping she didn’t know this existed. He let her have several moments to look around and take it all in, before he barked, “Eyes straight ahead, slave!” and bapped her with the crop.

He guided her out to a weathered old standing rack at the far end of the paddock. Close by, a low hedge separated the training area from a dirt road that connected two sections of dungeon corridor – in fact, part of the continuation of the back alley where his performance with the Quiet had begun on Friday; that was how he’d discovered the paddocks. If he was lucky, George might get to see a pony or two walk past before it was time to take her sight away.

George didn’t have to be told what the rack was for, but climbed onto it and waited calmly while he strapped her hooves tightly to the –

“Howdy, neighbor!”

The voice didn’t come from the road, but from behind him. Sip turned around and saw a big earth stallion waving at him over the post-and-rail fence between his yard and that of the training room next door. He left George with only her hind hooves tied to the rack and went over towards the fence. “Um, howdy.”

“Out enjoying the weather? I’m Carrot Broth.”

“I’m Sip.”

“Nice to meet you, Sip. Good-looking mare you’ve got yourself over there.” He nodded towards George’s butt, raised slightly into the air by the rack.

“Um, thanks.” Sip wasn’t quite certain of the etiquette here. Was he expected to introduce her? Her real name wasn’t his to reveal, and he suddenly felt unsure whether it was socially acceptable to call one’s slavemare George. He looked over at his neighbor’s sub, hoping to find something to compliment about her in return. She was a young sky-blue earth mare with a red mane, wearing a pulling harness from which a loose bundle of thin ropes went back to a low cart that Carrot must just have stepped down from. Sip struggled to imagine their purpose.

“I’m training Cupcake here for line dressage,” explained Carrot who had apparently noticed Sip’s confused look. “Never heard of that? There’s three control lines going to each of her teat clamps from different angles, so by pulling in the right combination I can move it in any direction. And similarly for the buttplug and dildo.”

When Sip looked closer he could see that though the control strings all went through holes in a board mounted across Cupcake’s back, they continued in different patterns around her body, threaded through little rings mounted on the harness. Some of them eventually ended up somewhere under her belly; others disappeared into a maze of straps and rods and strings beneath her tail.

“I see . . .” he ventured. “But what for?”

“Oh, for giving instructions, of course,” Carrot grinned. “Watch this.” He stepped back onto his cart and began nudging the lines where they terminated at a dashboard in front. When he pulled a particular pair of strings, Cupcake smartly lifted a forehoof up to chest height and held it there until he let go. A different combination made her walk sideways in a circle, turning the cart around in place. She didn’t seem to notice Sip as she went past him, staring right through him with her face locked in an expression of deep concentration. He saw she was wearing a black collar, indicating that she and Carrot were a couple. That made sense; what they were training looked quite complicated, not worth it for a casual romp. He wondered if he and Cirrus would end up doing something as bizarre as this, if he managed to keep her interested.

When Cupcake had made a complete circle, Carrot had her do a four-legged jump and a curtsey for a finale. “Amazing,” Sip had to admit. “But why not just shout orders instead?”

Carrot Broth rolled his eyes. “Where’s the fun in that? And it’s against the rules too. At tournament level, ear plugs and muffs are mandatory.”

“Oh, you’re doing competitions?” Somehow it didn’t surprise Sip that was a thing. “Are you good?”

“Not yet. The pros also use a clit clip with three-axis control, but Cupcake responds really badly to that” – Carrot winced – “so we’re trying to replace it with a pair of labia clamps.”

“Ingenious.” In fact Sip had no idea if it was clever or not, but he felt obliged to make some kind of positive comment.

“We hope. But there’s a lot of crosstalk with the dildo signals. Ah well, I think we need to get back to work. Nice talking to ya.” He pulled yet a different set of strings and drove off, Cupcake goose-trotting in front.

“Good luck,” yelled Sip after him, and went back to George.

She looked up at him quizzically, but he shrugged and continued strapping her forehooves in and then fixed her head down to the rack’s chin rest with a blindfold-bridle. The little chat with the neighbor would serve perfectly to prime her to feel outdoors and exposed. Then he took to immobilizing her in earnest, with several tight straps around each of her legs, and a set of straps around the barrel that weaved through and interlocked with her wings in a pattern he had memorized from the Earth Pony’s Field Guide. To make sure she really couldn’t twitch a muscle he also pulled her tail tight up along her spine, fixing it to the wing straps, and for good measure tied the ear weights together below the chin rest.

He spoke to her while he worked: “Now, George, in our last few sessions you have had a certain amount of choice. You could either be good and obedient, and get praise and rewards, or disobey and be punished. This may have given you an impression that being a slave is about having some kind of influence on what happens to you. Today is when you learn how wrong that is. Today you’re going to be helpless.

“In a little while, I’m going to do some things to you. Some of them will hurt. Perhaps others will not. Some of them may even be pleasant. But all that doesn’t matter, because the only reason I’m doing them is that they’re things it amuses me to do to you. There’s absolutely nothing you can do to make me stop, or to make it last longer or shorter. Perhaps at the moment when you think it’s finally over, I’m only making you wait before I continue. Or perhaps when I have done everything, I will find it amusing to start over.

“It doesn’t matter if you scream and whine. It doesn’t matter if you like it or not. And it certainly doesn’t matter what you deserve or not, or if you learn anything from it. All that matters is that you’re in my power and I can do what I want to you, when I want, for whichever reasons I have.”

He almost finished off with, “Do you understand that?” but managed to stop himself in time. He had just gone on at length about how it didn’t matter what she understood. The whole wonderful bunch of lies had come out remarkably well; it would have been a shame to flub it at the end.

Instead he told her to test her safety bell. Ding. Good; the tail bindings did not interfere with her use of the bell. He finished his work by gagging her with a rope muzzle that she had given a solid yes-and-really-yes earlier.

He let her stew for a minute or two while he trotted back to the shed to grab some toys. He didn’t have a fixed plan here – or rather, his plan had been to get some inspiration for an alternative to the cane while they reviewed toys. But they hadn’t even made it to that section of the manual. More or less at random he picked down a small paddle, a silk flogger, a vibrator, and a stiff-bristled coat brush. And, yes, the cane. Hopefully he could make all that add up to something. And if not . . . well, one thing that speech hadn’t promised her was a consistent experience.

When he came back out, George’s exposed marehood was already pulsing and dripping with anticipation. He flipped the flogger’s tails lightly against it, and trailed them gently upwards, over the top of her croup and along one of her sides, across her chest and up the neck. He noted with approval that even as tightly wrapped up as she was, she could still shiver.

Then he drew the flogger back and got down to the real work.

Afterwards, when he had done everything and decided against starting over (ha ha!), he steadied her on the short walk back to the training room. She leaned gratefully into him, and he felt the warm push of her body against his, a different kind of togetherness than the whipping and spanking and rutting that had gone before.

When they got inside, she flopped down on her side on the divan by the door with a long, content sigh. Once Sip’s eyes adapted to the dimmer light, he could see her looking happily up at him. He must have done something right again. He sat down beside her and put a hoof on her shoulder, massaging gently.

He ought to get moving, pull the buttplug out of her and deposit it and the other toys in the cleaning hopper. And then stand her up and begin the long walk towards the aftercare block at Overfall. But she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get onward. And with the scene over, they were equals again; if she needed a pause here, it wasn’t his place to spur her on. He kept massaging her shoulder and stroking her mane with the other hoof.

Eventually she shifted around on the divan, rolling over on her belly so she could raise her head towards him. “Silent,” she said, “I mean, Sip?”

“Mmhm?” He thought she was looking less happy now. Had she been waiting for him to get up and get going?

“Do you think you could go another time?” she asked tentatively. “I’d like to try – if you want, that is – I want to try blowing you.”

“Now? Here?” He remembered how he had forced her to do that weeks ago, how her mouth had felt, how she had surprised him by seeming eager. She had been tied up then. Now she wasn’t even in play; she had called him Sip, not ‘master’.

She nodded, suddenly blushing furiously. “Look, I know it’s not –”

“Okay,” he managed. The erection he had growing up between them wouldn’t have been easy to deny.

She brightened up a tiny bit and lifted herself up on her forelegs. “Just lean back and enjoy,” she said, in a deeper voice than she usually used. “I’ll make it worth your while. I hope.”

So he lay back and thought of Equestria while she licked his shaft cautiously. It wasn’t a bad feeling – in fact, he felt quite hard just from her licking the sides. He would have to order her to do it again in play sometime. After all, her being his slave was at least notionally for his pleasure. And if she didn’t even mind . . .

It sure was odd not to have any control of what she was doing to it, though. He had to stop himself from reaching back there with a helping hoof himself, but it had been unmistakable that this was supposed to be her thing. A moment later, when he had stopped himself a second time, he reached both forelegs up and pinned them under his crest, emitting a satisfied little sigh to make clear he was only making himself comfortable. Just think of Equestria, indeed.

Was this how it felt for a sub when sex was something that was done to her? He must remember this; it would help him make the right experience for her. Of course, real subs had all kinds of cuffs and chains and ropes to help keep them from interfering. He imagined himself like that. What if Cirrus, instead of merely telling him to lie back, had cuffed his hooves behind his neck and tied his hind legs down to the corners of the couch? The idea was strangely exciting. In his fantasies, before the Clocktower, he had often imagined what being the mare would be like. Once it became reality, though, he knew he would never have it in him to allow anypony that kind of power over him. But, perhaps, if she was that anypony, he –

That train of thought derailed forever when Cirrus had enough of his shaft and began running her tongue around the flare. He managed not to spasm very much in surprise, but couldn’t prevent an inarticulate grunt escaping him. She stopped licking, and when he opened his eyes (when had he closed them?) he saw her looking back at him, lips still around the tip of his cock, with her eyebrows raised in a wordless question. “Go on,” he croaked, nonchalantly.

Somehow she broke a smile even with her face full of cock. She resumed tickling him with her tongue, sliding her mouth down over the shaft with – oh, wow! – her head tilted so the tip scraped against the inside of her cheek. She stopped with her lips almost down to the medial ring – and then made a sudden run for it, continuing down with decisive force until he felt the back of her mouth hit against the tip and bounce back. Before, that had made her cough and sputter; now she merely paused for a moment or two before she continued.

By now Sip had given up on noticing the details of what she was doing. He had enough to do with keeping his legs still, keeping himself from shouting out, and remembering to breathe from time to time. He was curiously aware of how his own breath sounded, explosive gasps interrupting periods of locked-up tension, until he realized he had heard that breathing before, from Cirrus when he was rutting her at the end of a session. If that meant she felt like he did now, he would –

And then he came, came, came. He never learned exactly what she had done to set him off, but did have time to hope it was good for her too, before the big wave of good spread out from his loins in all directions through his body and made him lose focus for a few moments.

When he began thinking clearly again, still lying on his back and drenched in sweat, she was sitting up straight in the vee of his hind legs with her eyes closed and her mouth visibly full. Suddenly she scrunched her forehead up tremendously and her ears folded back flat and her jaw clenched, and he saw a small bulge travel down her neck, from throatlatch past her collar to the chest. She did that once more before she relaxed somewhat, drawing deep relieved breaths.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” he said softly.

She shook her head determinedly. “But I want to. I have to learn, sooner or later; that’s how they all – I mean, wouldn’t it turn you off if I went to the bathroom and retched instead?”

Sip wasn’t sure that would be much worse than watching her grimaces. She had a point, though. But couldn’t she just declare oral to be one of her limits? He wouldn’t mind that. They had been very particular about respecting limits in his dom classes.

At the back of his mind, a small traitorous voice was pointing out that if he encouraged her not to learn to swallow, it wouldn’t be as easy for her to find a better dom than him to play with. He shook it off. It was her decision, not for him to meddle either way.

Instead he said nothing, but collected himself and sat up behind her, putting a foreleg around her in a hug. She snuggled back towards him. Good. He took to nibbling softly at her cheek.

She shifted her head slightly, and he had a sudden image of her turning around and kissing him. If she did that, he could kiss back, he resolved, no matter where her mouth had just been. It was the least he could do.

But she didn’t.

Some time later she cleared her voice with what sounded like a small wry giggle. “At one time out there,” she said to the room, “I thought it would end with you and that stallion both taking me, one at each end.”

Sip tried to imagine that. He wasn’t sure he liked the idea of sharing her. Would he be in the front or at the back? In either case he would be looking right at the other stallion instead of at her, and he couldn’t find that appealing. But he could understand that it might be exciting for her. And he had already decided he was in for the long haul. If sharing was what it would take to keep her, perhaps he might as well pony up to it?

But he was getting ahead of himself. When he thought about it, he wasn’t sure if she was talking about something she had hoped would happen, or something she was thankful didn’t. He would have to ask her.

Very carefully, so as not to make it a leading question, he gave her a small squeeze and asked in a casual tone: “Cirrus, is there something in particular you would like us to try doing that we haven’t done yet?”

She thought about that for a long time. “I think,” she said at last (oh shit, here it comes!), “I mean, I’ve thought sometimes that it could be cool to do a really long scene. You know, suppose we go to sleep at the end and when I wake up in the morning we’re still in play?” There was a small glide in her voice at the end that made him imagine her blushing hard, even though she was looking away from him.

He needed some time to get his brain in gear for this new idea. “You want to do that?” he asked stupidly.

“Mhm. Look, I know you’re probably busy –”

He stopped her with a slightly harder bite on her cheek. Silly filly, he would make all the time for her he needed to. It was her who could only be at the Clocktower on Tuesday nights. “You’re the one with the busy schedule. When would be a good time?”

She broke the hug and turned towards him, blinking. “I mean,” she started, “mom and dad are in Las Pegasus next week and Mr. Drizzle owes me a day off, so I could stay the night after our usual . . . unless that’s too soon to arrange?”

Sip was almost reasonably certain he worked evenings next Wednesday. If not, he would wheedle somepony into covering for him. That was just details. “Lady, you’ve got yourself a deal. Tuesday, seven to whenever.”

She nodded enthusiastically. “Perhaps we’ll have time to look at some of those whips?”

So she had noticed too. He reached up a hoof to boop her nose. “Perhaps. Come well rested, though; you don’t know what you’re getting into”.

She booped him back. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”