Christmas Gift

BANG! Neil Fain winced as the door slammed behind his live-in girlfriend, Cindy.

He sighed. He might as well admit it, he thought, this relationship was going down the drain. He could always make it up to her, but she’d find something else to complain about until she finally got up enough of a head of steam to leave permanently.

His eyes strayed to a framed certificate on the wall, headed “True Love And Eternal Devotion”, and surrounded with a wreath of roses and hearts: “To my Darling Neil, I, Cindy Pawlson, am your obedient and devoted love slave for ever and ever.” At least she hadn’t thrown that out. Yet.

His eyes narrowed. He took the frame off the wall and removed the certificate from its holder. As he thought, there was a very official looking number on the back. He put the certificate back in the frame and sat back to think.

“Hey, Dave, how’s it hanging, man?” he waved at an acquaintance. Dave had a reputation for getting things done. There were a couple of rumors that he’d made a couple of inconvenient girlfriends vanish to nobody knew where.

“Things are moving right along, guy,” Dave answered. He dropped his voice. “Heard you and Cindy are having a bit of a spat.”

“Might blow over, might not,” Neil grimaced.

“From that expression, you’d like to see the last of her, eh?”

“We had some good times, but yeah.”

“She seems like a vindictive bitch,” Dave offered.

“That’s what worries me.”

“That could be bad.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. By the way, I found this on the back of that ‘True Love and Eternal Devotion’ certificate she gave me.”

Dave looked at the number. “Think I’ve seen something like it before. I’ll ask around, guy.”

“That’s a pal.”

Dave waved at Neil from across the Student Center’s main room. Neil wandered over.

“What’s up, man?”

“Got a firm offer. Two thousand, contingent on pickup.”

“Oh? What do I have to do?”

“Exercise the option and then transfer her contract into escrow.” Dave nodded to the line of contract machines on the wall.

“How do I do that?”

“It’s simple. Stick this in the slot and the procedure will come right up.”

Neil looked at the plastic rectangle. He made up his mind and walked toward the contract booths.

“You’re Cindy Pawlson?” the man who had magically appeared in front of her asked.

“Uh, yes, I am. What’s this about?” she reacted to the vaguely official outfit more than to her questioner.

“We have a pickup order on you.”

She stared at him. “A pickup order?” she repeated woodenly. She didn’t notice the man who walked up behind her and aimed a somewhat pistol-shaped gadget at the back of her head. It brushed her hair to the side and spun a red ribbon around her neck. The ribbon tightened to where it was snug, but not overly tight.

Her hands went to her neck.

“Come along quietly,” the first man said as he backed up a step.

She took a deep breath. The second man pushed a button on his gadget. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.

“Those things can paralyze the vocal chords, you know,” the first man said conversationally.

She pulled her arms back to attack. The second man pushed another button and then moved forward to catch her as she slumped, unconscious.

“They also have a takedown,” the first man added, not that their victim could hear him.

Cindy suddenly realized she was sitting in a chair, her head dropped forward on her chest. She lifted her head to look around.

“I see you’re back with us, Miss Pawlson,” the man behind the desk said.

“Uh, where am I?”

“In a chair, talking to me.”

“That didn’t help,” she snapped. “What the fuck’s going on?”

“Language, language,” the man shook his head. “You may remember that the pickup team said they had a pickup order on you?”

“Yesss....”

“You struggled a bit, so they had to put you out. Now you’re here.”

“And where is here?”

“You already asked that, and I told you.”

Cindy levered herself out of the chair, and strode toward him. Halfway across the room she said: “eep” and her hands flew to her throat. She fell forward, face down.

The man came from behind the desk, picked her up and deposited her back in the chair. Then he went back and sat behind his desk again.

Cindy suddenly realized she was sitting in a chair, head forward on her chest. She lifted it and saw the same man sitting behind the same desk.

“This is Hell, isn’t it?”

“Nope. You’re still on earth, still alive and still not asking the right question.”

“And what’s the right question?” she spat.

“What you need to do next.” He paused very slightly. “I’ve got work to do, so I’ll cut the next 20 questions short.” He pointed at the wall. “You go over to the contract machine and identify yourself.”

“And what will that do?”

“It’ll tell us whether we picked up the right person.”

“And if I’m not the right person?”

“We apologize abjectly and give you an indemnity for your time and trouble.”

“Oh. And if I am?”

“We’ll do the next things specified on the pickup order.”

“Which are?”

“If you’re not the right person, it’s none of your business, so I’m not going to tell you. If you are, you’ll probably figure it out from what the contract machine tells you.”

“Oh. And you’re not going to tell me one damn thing more until I do, right?”

“Got it in one.”

Cindy levered herself out of the chair for the second time and marched over to the contract machine. She pulled her ID card from her purse and slammed it down almost hard enough to break the surface. Then she put the brain scan helmet on her head, put her hands on the plate and snarled: “well?”

The plate in front of her lit up. “Emotional level too high to confirm ID. Please calm down.”

She thought she heard a chuckle from behind her. She whirled, but the guy seemed to be absorbed with something on his display.

She took a deep breath, turned back to the machine and straightened the helmet. She put her hands back on the plate.

“Cindy Pawlson. ID confirmed.”

“Control Collar detected: Capture Collar.”

“Control Collar Authenticated.”

“Slaveholder’s Consortium ID # 678-3684-93395

“Current Owner: Premier Ponygirl Organization, Inc.

“Owner’s ID: PPO-2033-926.”

“Authentication Complete.”

She stared at it and then took off the helmet.

“I’m a what?” she asked the man behind the desk.

“You’re going to be a ponygirl. You’ll probably be a good one.”

“And if I don’t want to be?”

He shrugged. “You don’t have a choice.”

She stared at him, and then her shoulders slumped a bit. “So how did this happen?”

“Look at the display.” He pointed at a wall display. “I’m putting your contract history on it.”

She looked.

“You’re telling me that the Eternal Love declaration was a Slave Contract?”

“A six month renewable option on a slave contract, to be specific. You had to have renewed it at least once, the option can’t be exercised before it’s renewed.”

“Damn.” She looked at the next entries. “So that unmitigated antormaxy scoundrel Neil exercised the option and then sold me for only TWO THOUSAND?”

“Yes.” She could swear she heard a bit of a chuckle. “He should have waited for more bids; someone like you should fetch at least five thousand untrained.”

“So now what?”

“Ponygirls don’t wear clothes, so take them off. Right down to the buff.”

She started to say something, and then noticed that his hand was hovering over a button. She reached behind herself and unzipped her skirt.

She heard the door on her side of the room open and close. Two men had walked in, carrying stuff. “Turn around, arms behind you, hands folded,” one of them said as he took what looked like a large funnel of some kind of material and slid it over her arms. It twitched and then tightened. She felt her shoulders begin to complain. It loosened slightly. Then he took out a pair of what looked like boxing gloves. He pried her hands apart and put one glove on each hand, carefully folding the fingers and thumb.

The other man took what looked like a tangle of straps and draped it over her head. It tightened in place. Then he fastened a strap between her ankles.

The second man tugged on the rope and said: “Follow.”

A ways down the corridor they turned into a room that looked like a small medical clinic. One of the technicians said: “She causing you trouble?”

“Nah, she’s going to be a ponygirl. Start her out right.”

“Oh. We don’t get a lot of them. Over here first, girl.” He pointed at something that looked kind of like an exerciser. She walked over. He adjusted the height and then strapped her to it so she couldn’t move. A minute later she gasped as the needles of a tattoo machine injected her skin with her Slaveowner’s Consortium registration number, using a DNA ink that would never come off except with a countering DNA mod or surgical removal of her skin.

Ten minutes later, it was done. The technician unstrapped her. “Sit over here, girl,” he patted a chair. Then he took out a medical light and looked in her ears. He nodded and got out a couple of small cylinders and slid them in. Then he told her to open her mouth. He looked at it, put in a dental block to keep her from closing it, and then put a device against the top. He held it there for a minute.

“OK. Now over here and lie down.” The still stunned young woman walked over to the table and tried to lie down, but her pinioned arms kept getting in the way. Finally he said: “OK. On your front will do.” She complied, and he pushed a button that sent her head-first into a robot surgeon.

Ten minutes later she came back out. The technician looked at her head and put a small glob of antibiotic and a bandage on three almost microscopic punctures in her skin. He did the same to two small punctures on her abdomen.

“All done, you can take her out.”

The new ponygirl looked around, puzzled, but obediently followed when her lead was tugged. One of the men took her to a loading dock and wrapped her leash to a handy ring, leaving her in a row of slaves that were likewise tethered to rings.

Then he walked away.

She looked around. There was a row of cages, each containing a naked slavegirl. The girls were sitting on their heels, hands bound behind them. For some reason they were either looking around curiously or else dozing off. She was in a second line standing against a wall. All the slaves in this line, except her, seemed to be dressed in some version of a single shoulder slave tunic. She was the only one that was naked. There were a few males, but not as many as she would have expected. She listened to the ebb and flow of sound. It sounded like conversation, but she literally couldn’t make out a word of what they were saying. She found she had no trouble understanding the tone of voice when someone who looked like he had to be the dock foreman started chewing out one of his subordinates.

She shook her head ruefully. It had been, what, only an hour or so since she’d been a college sophomore. Now she was a ponygirl, whatever that meant.

She kept watching. Dock workers came from somewhere, bringing more boxed slavegirls on small fork-lifts. Others were led out and were added to the line of standing slaves. In a little while a truck backed up to the dock. The dock workers unloaded several boxed slavegirls and then loaded the truck with the ones that were waiting. Then a mini-bus came for a lot of the rest.

Finally, after her calves had started screaming at her, a pickup with a covered bed and a rather short and tall trailer backed up. One of the dock hands opened it and led her in. She discovered herself standing on some straw to the left of another naked girl, arms bound behind her the same way as hers. This girl, however, seemed like she had a tail. She wasn’t quite sure. She thought she’d seen it as the dock worker had led her in, but it was hard to be sure because the four foot high wall, topped by a loose mesh of small bars, blocked her view. The back door was only inches from her ass. That made it, she supposed, a ponygirl trailer.

The girl to her right also had her head encased in a bridle. Interestingly, the various straps merged into each other rather than being attached with rivets. There seemed to be two horizontals: a brow strap and a second strap that ran from rings on either side of her mouth. There were also two verticals: one that ran from her control collar over her head just in front of the ears and back down on the other side; the other ran from the lower horizontal in back over her head and split to join the two rings. There was also a strap that dropped from the two rings to run under her jaw. Cindy supposed it made sense: if ponygirls were at all like horses they probably did wear bridles much of the time.

As the car pulled the trailer out of the city and onto the highway, she thought she smelled something. She looked, and she was right: her companion was taking the opportunity to piss. That brought home the state of her bladder with full force. She tried to ignore it for a while, and then gave up. Her bladder emptied, and then her bowel decided to join the occasion. She thought she heard her companion giggle. When she looked, yep, there was a smirk on her face.

Cindy stuck her tongue out, and a moment later they were nuzzling through the bars that separated them.

After a while the sun started to go down, and Cindy’s stomach started to rumble in sympathy. Where was the food?

She didn’t have that long to wait. The pickup and trailer pulled into a motel whose sign said it had overnight accommodations for horses. In fact, the sign not only said that, but it also had pictures of a horse and a girl with a tail and one foot raised in the air. She supposed it was a stylized ponygirl. Sure enough, after the driver got out and vanished into a room a groom came out of the stable, opened the back and led the two ponygirls out. Cindy almost tripped as she stared: her companion not only had a tail, she had hooves!

The groom led them into the stable, past several rows of horse stalls, and then to a row of somewhat smaller stalls. He hitched Cindy’s lead rope to a post and then led her companion into the stall. He snapped a light chain to her collar, and removed the arm binder and hobbles. Then he came back out and did the same to Cindy.

She heard the click of a latch as he closed the stall’s gate. Then she looked around. It seemed to be a basic stall: straw on the floor, something in a corner that was probably one of those things you went in that she’d read about from the Dark Ages. What attracted her attention was two bowls set into a ledge inset in the back wall. One contained what looked like water, the other some kind of multi-colored pellets. The inset was barely large enough for her to stick her head in.

She looked over the wall into her companion’s stall, and sure enough, she was on her knees, ass somewhat in the air so she looked like a Z, and head plunged into the wall. Her hands were on the floor, but didn’t seem to be supporting her weight. The sounds indicated she was working on the mound of pellets with enthusiasm.

Cindy promptly decided to follow the leader. She dropped onto the floor and plunged her head into the dry food. Once she’d figured out how to use her tongue to get some into her mouth without losing too many of the pellets, she decided that it wasn’t all that bad. Not really good, but not at all bad. And it was definitely filling.

About the time she sat back, having licked the bowl of pellets clean and finished up all of the water, she heard a sound in the corridor. She stood to see what it was. It turned out to be one of the attendants leading two more ponygirls into the stable. These two, however, were a bit different. Their hair seemed to be arranged in a mohawk, or possibly a mane, and they didn’t have tails. They also wore some kind of boot with a hoof on the end, and their arms were held behind them crosswise. The other thing she noticed was that, while their breasts were larger than hers or her companion’s, they didn’t wobble when the girls moved.

She watched the attendant put them in stalls and then leave.

Cindy shrugged. Apparently there wasn’t any standard way of treating ponygirls. Larger breasts that didn’t flop around would be cool! She’d always been a bit ashamed over hers; they weren’t much larger than an ambitious A-cup.

A short while later the LED area lighting on the ceiling started to go from sunlight to evening reds. Cindy shrugged. It had been a long day, even though it had started out furious, then pure terror, then total boredom. It was time to lean back and think things over.

What did she know? First, whatever blocked her from understanding what people said didn’t apply to writing. The road signs had been perfectly clear. So was the sign telling the grooms to wash their hands after shoveling horseshit. That, in turn, meant that she wasn’t, in principle, locked out of talking with people. How remained to be determined.

The second thing was that they did seem to be serious about treating her as if she was a horse. The arm-binder, gloves and hobbles certainly said that, so did the ponygirl trailer. The level of DNA mods implied by the other girl’s hooves and tail certainly indicated that they were serious, and the way the other girl had simply went when she had to, and the way she plunged right into the food bowl said the same thing.

What else? Cindy shrugged. Tomorrow would undoubtedly bring more challenges.

Then another thing occurred to her. The way she’d taken things in stride was, to put it mildly, weird. If she was honest, her style was more scream and throw things. All the girls in the cages seemed to be taking it in stride as well. So something was definitely going on. Since the caged slavegirls seemed to be doing the same thing, it probably wasn’t anything specific to ponygirls, or to her owner. After a bit of reflection she decided it was probably a good thing; the kind of discipline they’d have to do if a girl panicked didn’t seem to be really attractive.

She drifted off to sleep.

The next morning dawned as the ceiling lighting went through a morning sequence. She woke up, turned over and froze in place: something scratched. She opened her eyes cautiously and saw she wasn’t in her bedroom. After a moment of frozen terror, the previous day came back to her. She squeaked; that’s the only way to describe the noise she made.

She looked at the gloves covering her hands and then bent over to look at her belly. Sure enough, there was the line of purple numbers that was her Slaveowner’s Consortium ID. She got up to look around. Her companion of the previous day was in the stall to her left, and one of the new girls was in the stall to her right. They were both just beginning to move. She shrugged and decided to sit down.

A few minutes later, there was a rumble of some kind of machinery from behind the wall. She heard something in her companion’s stall, and then a stream of water and a pile of pellets fell from the top of the ledge into the two bowls. Breakfast! She got back into the only position that would let her stick her head into the slot and scarf up the food.

Then she wrinkled her nose and stood up to look over the wall. Sure enough, her companion was up and squatting in the corner. She looked on the other side, and the other ponygirl was doing the same thing. She shrugged. When in Rome...

It wasn’t that long before one of the stable attendants came in and took the two other ponygirls out. Then it was their turn. She obediently let him put her in the arm binder and hobbles; there really wasn’t any point in irritating the workers at a motel! Especially when she didn’t see that she had any options or would get anything from it.

Not too long after that, she stood in the ponygirl trailer, watching the countryside roll by.

They stopped briefly a couple of times to change fuel cartridges, but otherwise rolled on to sometime past noon. She’d given up trying to hold and had emptied her bladder on the straw twice. The sounds indicated her companion had done the same thing. Eventually the driver pulled into a ‘horses welcome’ rest area with a little ponygirl on the sign. He led them out to the ponygirl section and tethered them to a post. One thing Cindy noticed almost immediately; the other girl had a second, bright emerald green, tattoo immediately under the Slaveowner’s Consortium tattoo. It said PPO-2031-148.

He took what looked like a traveling feeder from the pickup’s back and loaded it with water and pellets. The two of them lost no time in digging in.

He pulled out a picnic basket and had a leisurely lunch, leaving his two ponygirls to their own devices.

Eventually their driver finished. After he cleaned up he looked at his two ponygirls. Cindy noticed that her companion looked back, rather obviously aroused. He grinned and walked over. The other girl promptly fell forward and braced herself as he dropped his pants and took her. She came with a shout.

Ten minutes later, the car with its two ponygirls in the trailer pulled out of the rest area. Cindy had to endure her companion’s smug look for positively miles and miles.

Later that afternoon, the pickup turned off the road into a private drive that cut through woods. She saw a sign that announced they were at the Premier Ponygirl Organization’s Training Stable Number 2. By that time she was feeling a bit queasy.

However, she forgot the queasiness as the pickup towed the trailer very slowly down what might have been the facility’s main street. They had to go slow, because it was stuck in traffic behind a carriage being pulled by two ponygirls. There were more carts and carriages being pulled by one, two and occasionally four ponygirls. She also noted, with somewhat horrified fascination, that there were several ponygirls with riders, and a number of saddled ponygirls that were tethered in front of buildings, their reins tied to hitching racks. All of the ponygirls seemed to have hooves and tails; a few had the mohawk hair style she’d seen at the motel, but they were in a distinct minority. The ponygirls pulling things all had their arms tethered behind them in arm binders; the ones being ridden had their arms tethered crosswise. Of course, while mares were in the vast majority she did see several stallions. Something about them puzzled her, but she didn’t have the time to sort through it before the pickup and trailer pulled up in front of one of the buildings. She had time to note that the sign said, Training Stable 6, before a pair of grooms came to open the trailer. They led her into the stable.

They didn’t give her very much time to sight-see as they led her to one of several corridors that led deeper into the building. This corridor seemed to have ponygirl stalls on one side, and a wall with lots of hooks but not much else on the other. They put her in the fourth stall from the end, dropped a bridle over her head and removed the arm binder. Then they shot the bolt on the stall door and left.

She saw there was a sign above the stall that said: PPO-2033-926. The three stalls to her left also had numbers; two of the stalls to her right had numbers, but the other four didn’t seem to. She noted that the numbers seemed to be in sequence, but they weren’t together. She had 919, 922 and 924 to her left, and 932 and 935 to her right.

Her food bowl seemed to be full. As soon as she noticed that, she found her face planted on top of the pile of pellets almost without thought.

When she finished, she sat back to think. The queasiness she’d noticed came back. She held her arm up to her head and noted that she seemed to be running a fever. She was also feeling cruddy from not having any kind of shower, bath or whatever for over two days.

The latter turned out to be swiftly solvable. A groom came down the corridor and took her out of her stall, leading her to an open area that looked remarkably like a gym’s shower room. That’s what it turned out to be. He tethered her arms up and to the sides, removed her new bridle, and then proceeded to thoroughly wet her, lather her, scrub and rinse. He finished up with a hot air blow dry, including blow-drying and then brushing out her hair.

Once he’d finished grooming her, he put her bridle back on and then took what looked like a strip of paper and plastered it on her abdomen just under the Slaveholder’s Consortium ID tattoo. Then he sprayed it with something, and left her tethered for a few minutes.

When he came back, he took the paper off and took her back to her stall. She looked at where it had been, and there was a new tattoo, in emerald green: PPO-2033-926.

The rest of the evening was totally boring, with nothing to do but stand, sit or lie in her stall and feel sick.