Collarblind: Red Scare

Chapters

Dr. Collarblind: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate My Mom
Crunch & Millicent
Epilogue: On His Majesty's Secret Service
[Outline of the Remainder of the Series]
[Outline of the Remaining Chapters]

Dr. Collarblind: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate My Mom

"Sluts and gentlecolts, the balloon will now begin its ascent to Cloudsdale. Please keep your hands and feet inside at all times, thank you."

The perky flight attendant finished speaking and began untethering the hot air balloon from the landing platform so it could begin its rise to the lofty city of the pegasi. Flash Fortune found a space in between the other passengers, leaned back against the railing, closed his eyes and let his mind wander.

If you had struck up a conversation with Flash Fortune when he was just a little colt and asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would have told you excitedly that he was going to be the best magician in all of Equestria. “I’m going to fly around the world, and shoot lasers out of my horn, and build a huge castle on the moon to live in with all my friends!” he would have exclaimed breathlessly, with a toothy smile on his face and a manic gleam in his eyes. “And when Princess Celestia gets tired I’m going to raise the sun for her, and everyone is going to cheer and say “Hooray for Flash!” And Mom is going to stop being angry all the time and Dad is going to come back and hug me and say sorry for leaving and tell me how proud he is of me and . . . “

If you had struck up a conversation with Flash Fortune about a year ago, when he was a fully-grown adult, and asked him if he still wanted to be a magician someday, he would have just laughed. And later, after you’d excused yourself from his cramped little office with the wilting potted plants and the chipped wallpaper and the tiny window that afforded a picture-perfect view of the industrial dumping ground across the street and the tarnished nameplate on the door that read Dr. Fortune, Marriage Counselor, he would have cried.

See, Flash had been fortunate enough to have a smart, honest mother who had wisely instructed him that applying to Magic School to learn to be a magician was, quote, “the dumbest idea I have ever heard,” and instead told him in no uncertain terms that he was going to follow in her hoofsteps and get a real job as a . . . drumroll please . . . social worker.

Nevermind that after graduating from college the only job opening a degree in social work had qualified him for in the entire city of Canterlot was marriage counselor. Nevermind that, judging by his abysmal client retention rate over the first six months, he was possibly the worst pony to ever hold that occupation in the entire city, or in all of Equestria. Nevermind that his pathetic salary had barely let him pay rent on the tiny basement room in some old mare’s house he was renting, much less let him start making headway on paying off the mountain of loans he had taken out to acquire a degree that had proven itself more worthless than the paper it was printed on. Nevermind that instead of using his horn to cast spells, he had been reduced to using it to sign contracts and adjust the thermostat in his office. Nevermind that he’d had to throw the invitation to his latest high school reunion right in the trash because he couldn’t go back and let all his friends see how much of a complete fucking loser he had become. No, clearly despite all of that he had made the right choice, because he’d saved his mother the embarrassment of having a son with a career as frivolous as magic. Sure, maybe he felt like throwing himself in front of a bus every so often, but who could put a price on making their mother happy?

That, in short, had been the state of Flash’s miserable life, and it hadn’t seemed likely to change anytime soon.

And then the miracle happened.

It was interesting how messy and chaotic the beginnings of the best moments in a pony’s life could be. Take the harried last-minute preparations before the start of your wedding, for instance. Or the wild scramble to get to the hospital before the birth of your first child. Or the Fall of Equestria.

At first, like everyone else, Flash had thought the world was ending. Strange invaders had captured the capital, and maybe the entire country. The Twin Princesses were rumored to be dead, or worse, and their six shining champions were nowhere to be found. Buildings were being sacked, ponies were being beaten, mares were being raped. It was only a matter of time until these monstrous Caribou got their hands on him, and then he was certainly done for.

But no came along to rob him, or torture him, or kill him. Instead, one day, a Caribou knocked on the front door of the house he had been renting to inform him, very politely, that its former owner, that the belligerent old crone he had had the misfortune of calling his landlady, had been enslaved. He explained that she had said she was renting it to a stallion, and asked if Flash was the tenant. Flash, after he had gotten over the fact that a Caribou was standing on his porch and talking to him, had admitted in a shaky voice that he was. Then he had stared in mute disbelief as the Caribou pulled out a paper from a stack tucked under his arm and handed him what indeed appeared to be the deed to the house.

And his good fortune didn’t stop there: A few weeks later he received a letter from the bank to which he owed his student loans. Dreading that his debts had reached a critical mass and they were planning to repossess his new house, he had torn it open hastily, but in fact it was just the opposite: The bank itself had been repossessed by the Caribou and was in the process of being restructured, and the past financial obligations of its clients were being forgiven, no-questions-asked.

In one fell swoop, the soul-crushing debts that had been keeping Flash awake at night for years had evaporated. His slate had been wiped clean. He was so happy he could have cried. After years of desperate prayers to the Twin Princesses or whatever gods were out there for help going unanswered, the Caribou had handed him salvation on a silver platter and he hadn’t even had to ask.

Of course, there was still the matter of putting food on the table. Marriage counseling, it went without saying, was a dead art now that every husband owned his wife. For a while, he didn’t do much. The changes in the world were a lot to take in, and it happened that his brand new house had plenty of food and his former landlady had left a sizable amount of bits just lying around, so he could afford to stay at home for a while. It wasn’t like he could just head to his office and start working. So he kept lounging around until one summer day when a familiar stallion had knocked on his door and, unbeknownst to both him, started him down the path to finding his truth calling.

When he had been a marriage counselor, Flash’s clients usually gave up on him after the first visit, so on the rare occasions when they came back the next week their names and faces usually stuck in his mind. That was why when middle-aged pegasus High Skies showed up on his porch, Flash recognized him immediately. High Skies had seen not two or three but seven times. Flash’s first instinct was to explain that he didn’t do marriage counseling anymore, but the pegasus just laughed and asked if he could come inside. Flash, confused but intrigued, showed him in.

Sitting on the couch in Flash’s spacious living room, High Skies explained that he had gotten Flash’s address from his business card and hiked down to his house to ask Flash to talk to his wife, Violet Flower. Flash repeated that he didn’t do marriage counseling anymore, but the pegasus insisted that he didn’t want counseling.

“Truth is, that old bitch has been driving me up the wall,” he’d admitted. It was a little jarring to hear him call his wife a “bitch,” but since the Fall everyone seemed to have taken to calling mares things like that, so Flash wasn’t too shaken.

“She doesn’t listen to me,” he complained. “And she’s always shrieking at me like a banshee about every little thing. I’ve tried to knock some sense into a her a few times—like the Caribou taught us, y’know?—but she just bounces right back to being her old self in a few hours. Maybe she’s too used to me by now to be scared of me, I don’t know. Anyway, finally I got to thinking: Maybe I can’t get under her skin, but I sure as shootin’ know who can!” He grinned.

“And . . . who is that?” asked Flash, nonplussed.

“You, silly! See, truth is, your marriage counseling didn’t really work for me and Violet at all. We still fought all the time, and both of us still hated each other. The only reason I came back so many times was because I wanted to rile her up any way I could, and being around you made her angrier than I’d ever seen her.”

That took the wind out of Flash’s sails a little. He’d had no idea his best customer was just using him to get back at his wife.

“I don’t know quite what it was about you in particular, but for some reason she hated you. Every time we came home from a session, she wouldn’t stop whining about you for hours.” High Skies did his best impression of a shrill, haughty mare: “I fucking hate that stupid sniveling little marriage counselor so much! I hate his stupid simpering voice and his dumb face and his ugly suit and . . . ugh, I just hate EVERYTHING about him. I swear, I’m going to set myself on fire before I let you drag me off to spend one more minute listening to that miserable spineless cretin talk.”

That really took the wind out Flash’s sails. Had every mare he’d counseled hated him that much?

He sighed. “ . . . Look, I think you have the wrong—”

“Wait, wait, hear me out! I don’t want you to make her behave or anything. Of course I don’t expect you to do that. I just want you to talk to her a bit, make her angry, irritate her. I’ll pay you 50 bits.”

Well, that changed everything, didn’t it? 50 bits wasn’t a small amount to earn just for talking to someone, and his landlady’s bit stockpile was running low. He’d need to get out and make money somehow soon, so why not start now? It wasn’t like he had a track record of being too proud to do demeaning jobs to uphold.

High Skies set up the meeting in Flash’s home. He dropped off his wife a few days later with a broad smile on his face.“You two have fun now.” She didn’t look much different than she had the last time he’d seen her. Same lavender coat, same bobbed ivory mane, same stern, disapproving scowl on her face. High Skies had apparently even let her keep wearing modest clothes. All that was new was the silver collar around her neck.

Flash lead her inside awkwardly and offered her a seat on his sofa.

“Hello, Violet,” he’d started uncertainly, in the same calm, placating voice he’d used as a marriage counselor. “It’s been a while. How are you?”

All he got in the way of a response was a condescending look.

He realized suddenly that he hadn’t had a single real conversation with a mare since the Fall. He had barely even seen them. Most stallions had been spending the last few weeks fucking as many mares as they could, but Flash had found himself staying indoors and remaining a detached observer. He wasn’t sure what to think. The Caribou had given him everything he could have hoped for, so surely they were to be trusted. But on the other hand, he’d spent all of his marriage counseling training, and, in fact, his entire life, learning that mares were to be respected and cherished as equals. Should he have been standing up for them? No one else seemed to be. Some ponies talked about a magic spell that had changed the stallions of Canterlot and made them look at mares differently, but Flash, at least, didn’t feel like he was under any supernatural influence. Sure, he had started having these strange, vicious thoughts and impulses about mares sometimes, but he chalked it up to stress. He had a lot of experience keeping himself from acting on dark thoughts.

He resolved to talk to Violet like he’d have talked to any mare before the Fall.

“Uh, I’m still not exactly sure what your husband wants me to do,” he began. “but since we have the whole afternoon together I figured you might want to shoot the breeze a little, maybe play a game—”

“I’m not doing anything with you.”

Flash sighed. “Look, Violet, we’re going to be here for a while, so it would be better if we just got along.”

“I bet you’re really happy right now.”

“Beg your pardon?”

She gestured around her. “I bet you’re really happy with everything that’s happened. Now even losers like you can get laid.” She shot him a dirty look. “Well enjoy it while it lasts, because Celestia is going to come back any day now and put all you dirty perverts in jail.”

He took a deep breath. Marriage counseling was all about keeping your cool. “Violet, please listen to me—”

“Ugh, now I’m picturing you doing it and it’s fucking gross.”

“Please stop.” He couldn’t keep the edge out of his voice this time. Dirty, wrong images of the mare in front of him were starting to cascade into his mind. He screamed at them internally to go away.

“I bet they make you do them from behind so they don’t have to look at your face,” she sneered.

“As a matter of fact, I haven’t even touched a mare in weeks!” he snapped. The scenes in his head were getting more vivid, and more depraved.

She looked at him blankly for a moment, then let out a shrill cackle.

“What’s so funny?” he demanded.

“That means . . . “ She giggled. “You-you can’t even get it up! All this pussy, and you can’t even get it up! Ha ha ha!”

Flash’s hands curled into fists. High Skies’ words rang in his ears: “I swear, I’m going to set myself on fire before I let you drag me off to spend one more minute listening to that miserable spineless cretin talk.” A dozen violent, pornographic clip shows were playing simultaneously in his head.

“Violet, I’m warning you,” he said through clenched teeth.

When she saw the furious expression on his face, she just laughed harder. “Ooh, I’m so scared,” she snarled sarcastically. “What are you going to do, pussy? Stop holding doors for m—”

Before she even had time to finish her sentence, Flash leaped out of his chair and slapped her across the face so hard the crack echoed across the room. He took his hand and wrenched her head back so that she was looking at him.

“You know what,” he said icily, with a smile on his face. “Have it your way. Let’s stop talking.”

He threw her down from the sofa onto the carpeted floor and, surrendering entirely to the impulses in his mind, took a rough hold of her white evening dress and ripped it open. He tugged and tore at it until it was scraps in his hands, and then he tossed it aside and did the same to the clothes underneath until she was lying completely nude on his floor.

He panted lustfully. She was gorgeous. Her physique was slim, curvy and sinuous, and she had melon-sized lavender breasts with pointy pink hard areolas. He took hold of one of them with one hand and squeezed roughly, eliciting a shocked moan from her, and undid his belt buckle with the other. When his cock was free, he looked her coldly in the eyes and impaled her on his cock.

She squealed. He didn’t give her time to recover, roughly thrusting in and out of her, one hand on her hips and alternating between squeezing her breasts and pinching her nipples. She looked utterly terrified, and tears were rolling down her face, but she was moaning sluttily as he pounded her. She started to say something, but he leaned in and shoved his tongue in her mouth to shut her up.

He held her there and fucked her roughly until he felt himself getting close. He ripped himself out of her and crawled forward until his knees were on either side of her head and his fat cock dangled above her lips. A few quick strokes, and rope upon rope of thick white cum splattered all over her pretty face, dripping down her nose and cheeks. She closed her eyes, whimpering in disgust and fear.

“Lick it up.”

“W-what—” He slapped her across the face a second time, smearing the cum that got on his hand onto her breasts.

“Shut the fuck up, cunt.” He’d never called a mare a cunt before in his life. “You heard me.” She just looked at him, horrified, but he just kept glaring at her stonily. Slowly, she brought a finger to her face, and dragged a glob of cum down to her lips. He nodded, and she licked it clean, scrunching her eyes shut in revulsion. He didn’t look away until her entire face was clear. Then he rose, and headed to his closet, leaving her quivering and panting on the ground.

The Caribou had distributed free dildos and bondage devices like candy over the past few weeks, and though Flash hadn’t thought he’d ever have any use for them, he’d taken them because ponies used to living frugally had a habit of taking almost anything if it was free. He’d stored them all in his closet. And, now, he finally had a golden opportunity to put them to use.

When he walked confidently back in the room, the sheer size and barbaric shape of the dildo in his hand had made her scream in horror.

They’d had fun for the rest of the afternoon, the night, and well into the morning, Flash’s newly-tapped reserves of sexual energy seeming to have no limit. When High Skies had come to pick her up in the morning, and found the stern, cocky wife he remembered reduced to a quavering, cum-covered slut, he was shocked . . . and very happy. He’d tipped Flash 50 more bits for his “good work” with a broad grin on his face.

In many ways, the incident had been a wake-up call for Flash. As he came to realize over the next few days, the little voice in his head that had been whispering to him since the Fall that all mares were nothing more than whiny, self-serving sluts who were only good for being fucked and bred wasn’t the voice of lust, or temptation, or wickedness. It was the voice of reason. He’d been lying to himself all along: Mares weren’t kind, gentle nurturing ponies, they were snide, cruel, duplicitous vermin. All from his mother to his condescending mare professors at school to his bitter old landlady all the way up to Violet: mares had been spitting on him and disrespecting him and trying to make him feel worthless since the day he was born.

The Caribous’ real gift to him and to all of Equestria, he realized, was much greater than the forgiveness of debts or the redistribution of property: it was the complete and utter destruction of a matriarchy no one had even acknowledged existed. It seemed so obvious in hindsight. Had anyone ever asked why the two absolute rulers of the land were female? Why the Elements of Harmony were all wielded by females? Why the first appearance of real male power in the land, Discord, had been viciously defeated and imprisoned without even the shadow of a fair trial? Mares had been hoarding power for themselves while keeping every stallion’s nose in the dust and convincing them that they liked it that way. Mares had been the founders of cities, the pioneers of magical innovation, the leaders of armies. Stallions had been cart-pushers and shoe-shiners.

But now it was all over. Stallions had been liberated from chains they hadn’t even realized they bore, and they were exacting justice on their former captors. All thanks to their blessed saviors, King Dainn and his mighty Caribou, no mare would ever deign to sink her poisonous roots into the good heart of a stallion ever again. Even the natural forces of the world, the crop harvest cycle, the weather, and the movements of the celestial bodies, which mares had, in their infinite arrogance, sought to subjugate, were free to occur of their own accord. The world was finally as it should be, and Flash Fortune intended to do everything in his power to keep it that way. Nevermind being a magician, he could see his true calling now, clear as day: to show mares their place.

And, it turned out, he would have plenty of opportunities to exercise his newfound talent. High Skies had many friends, and his immense satisfaction with how well Flash had “cured” Violet lead him to give Flash’s name, along with a glowing recommendation, to every stallion that approached him to complain that there mare wasn’t behaving the way he wanted her to. Flash took every new client (and their bits) gleefully, though truthfully he might have done it all for free. Every day as a marriage counselor he had felt hollow, empty, and useless, but every time he broke in a mare he felt a little stronger, a little more virile, and, most importantly, as if he had paid off a little more of the great debt he owed to the Caribou for his salvation, and to the universe for a lifetime of submission to mares.

As the weeks went on, his fantastic success fixing even the most stubborn mares traveled throughout Canterlot, and by word of mouth alone his calendar was soon overflowing with appointments and his bank account was soon overflowing with bits. He seized on the opportunity. He bought a larger office in a fancier part of town, and, eventually, a larger home in the same place. He printed new business cards billing himself as “Dr. Flash Fortune, Mare Therapist.” He bought advertising anywhere they’d sell it to him: radio, magazines, newspapers, even a few billboards. He supplemented the useful but small collection of sex toys the Caribou had given him with a full array of top-of-the-line dildos, bondage devices, and other assorted tools of his trade.

In a few months, his name and notoriety had spread far past Canterlot. He did radio interviews, at first on small, local frequencies, and later on Equestria Public Radio. He did a half dozen magazine features, and made the December cover of Mares Monthly. He even got a full-page article in the Manehattan Times: “STROKE OF GOOD FORTUNE: How One Enterprising Young Stallion is Revolutionizing the Mare Training Game.” He framed the clipping and hung it on his office wall. Somewhere along the way, some radio jockey or magazine editor had nicknamed him “Dr. Collarblind,” because it had become his habit to boast that he could fix a mare no matter what color her collar was, and the name had stuck.

In his private life, he was no less busy or ambitious. He planned bring his justice to all the mares that had made his life hell before the Fall. Tracking them down was sometimes hard, especially when he hadn’t seen them in years, but when he did their masters were usually more than willing to share them with any stallion who asked (especially if that stallion was famous mare fixer Dr. Collarblind). He punished them all: his college professors, his classmates, his ex-marefriends, his landlady, the mares that hadn’t given him a second date, the mares that had stood him up on their first date, the mares that hadn’t been willing to go on a date with him to begin with.

Gradually his list of intended victims—no, not victims . . . rather, recipients of justice—grew to include even those mares he hadn’t ever felt personally angry towards The way he saw it, even if they hadn’t hurt him themselves, they were all guilty of the crime of allowing a matriarchy to exist through inaction and had to be reprimanded. Unfortunately, the only one he couldn’t seem to find, no matter how hard he searched, was the one that mattered the most—his mother. She seemed to have vanished off the face of the planet after he’d left home and gone to college. Maybe it was for the best that he didn’t find her just yet, because he needed a good long time to decide exactly what kind long, slow suffering he was going to inflict on her. Of course, she wasn’t going to evade justice just because she happened to be his mother. That would have been nepotism. He’d track her down sooner or later, and when he did he’d show her all the mercy she’d shown him.

And that, in short, was the state of Flash Fortune’s magnificent life, and it didn’t seem likely to change anytime soon. Someday, he’d hire the best ghostwriter in town to put the whole story in his memoirs, and sell a million copies and win the Ponylitzer Prize.

He already had the perfect title picked out.

“Sir, the balloon has landed. You can depart now.”

The sound of a soft mare’s voice shook Flash Fortune out of his silent reverie. He turned to her, and nodded absently.

“Right, right.”

The flight attendant gave him a warm smile and a small bow. “Welcome to Cloudsdale, sir.”

He picked up his briefcase, straightened his suit jacket, and stepped out of the balloon and onto the cloudy streets to do his favorite thing in the world: fix a mare.

Crunch & Millicent

Author's Note

Synopsis: En route to his client’s house, Flash reminisces about how he first met the other two members of the Dr. Collarblind family: his stallion accountant, eccentric finance expert Number Cruncher, and his mare assistant, ditzy black collar Millicent.

Crunch & Millicent

“When your mare don’t act,
Quite like she should,
Who you gonna call?
FLASH FOR-TUNE!

When she won’t behave,
When she won’t be good,
Who you gonna call?
FLASH FOR-TUNE!”

—A Certain Ponyville Public Radio Ad

Cloudsdale was like something out of a dream. Not just any garden-variety dream, either, but the kind of dream you had when your mare was sucking you off under the covers while you slept. But Flash wasn’t here to sightsee. He was here to work. He reached into the waist pocket of his suit jacket and produced a slim leather-bound notebook, his daily planner, to double-check the address of this morning’s house call. It took him a few moments to flip to the page for today and drag his eyes down the paper until his gaze settled on the appointment description pencilled in under the “9:00” timeslot:

CLIENT: Thunderlane
FEMALE: Flitter
SPECIES: Pony (Pegasus)

COLLAR: Red

ADDRESS: 1220 Cirrus Circle, Cloudsdale, EQ

The cramped, neat handwriting didn’t belong to him. All Flash did was use the book; the laborious task of filling it with every new day’s house calls, consultations, and conferences as they were scheduled fell—as did so many other tasks vital to the success of the Dr. Collarblind brand—on the stocky but sturdy shoulders of Crunch.

“Crunch” was Flash’s affectionate nickname for Number Cruncher, his indispensable jack-of-all-trades accountant/secretary/receptionist/guardian angel.

Back when Flash was first starting to come into his own has a freelance mare trainer, no more than a month after the Violet incident, it had become apparent that he wasn’t going to be able to shoulder the multitude of responsibilities that accompanied being a small business owner all on his own. Even with only a modest client pool centered in his home city, answering his mail, drafting his budget, scheduling his appointments and all the million other mind-numbing minutiae that fell under the umbrella of “office work” sliced valuable hours out of Flash’s day—hours that could have been spent doing what was important: curing mares! It was obvious that Flash didn’t have the training or skill to handle this kind of work efficiently, and that the problem was only going to grow exponentially as his client pool grew wider and his workload grew heavier. If his budding enterprise was going to survive the cradle, he’d need help. He’d need an assistant.

The first thought that had crossed his mind was: Get a red collar, and she’ll do everything for free. The next thought was: Absolutely fucking not. Plenty of busy stallions, in the business world and elsewhere, trusted their devoted red collars to handle work they deemed too arduous or boring to do themselves, with varying degrees of autonomy. It was a popular alternative to paying a stallion for labor—especially since, no matter what job she was doing, every red collar moonlighted as a free whorse on her off-time. It was a valid idea . . . that is, if you wanted a secretary who answered your mail in crayon, and doodled obscene drawings on your business documents, and had ribald phone sex with everypony who called your phone line. The idea of trusting a mare, a capricious, frivolous, idiotic mare, to get your office work done for you was laughable. It sounded like the premise of one of the salacious porn franchises the once-classy filmmakers of Canterlot had been churning out nonstop since the Fall. The titles practically wrote themselves:

The Sexretary 1: Learning Curves

The Sexretary 2: Getting Fiscal

The Sexretary 3: Appreciating Assets

…

He could do this all day, but the point was that the job had to be done a stallion, even if that meant shelling out a few extra bits for a living wage. So Flash had dug into his purse a little and put a job advertisement calling or a “General Purpose Assistant” in the “Help Wanted” section of the Canterlot Chronicle, a local newspaper with decent circulation and, more importantly, cheap ad space. It wasn’t a particularly attractive offer. At the time he’d only had room in his budget to pay a mediocre fee to new employees, and it wasn’t like there was anything especially prestigious about working for a no-name mare-training firm. He had figured that the best he could hope for was taking on some newly-minted college grad with minimal experience, who’d be willing to work for peanuts for a few months until Flash’s budget had freed up and he could afford to hire a professional.

That didn’t happen. Instead, fortune once again favored its favorite son, and dropped the answer to all of his problems right into his lap.

Number Cruncher hadn’t seemed like much the day he walked into Flash’s tiny office to do his interview, but his mother always told him that great things come in small packages, and even a stopped clock had to be right twice a day. He was a little younger than Flash himself, short and slim, with perpetually-wringing hands, a droopy, slouching posture, and beady, nervous eyes that seemed to flit across every object in the room during their meeting except Flash. His voice didn’t do much more to inspire confidence: he had a chronic stutter, and couldn’t make it through a sentence without stumbling over at least a couple of hard consonants. Flash thought he had him figured out completely the moment he started talking: burned-out college dropout, no future prospects, willing to do anything to pay rent . . . maybe some kind of substance abuse problem, judging by his incessant trembling.

That was until he’d produced a heavy manila folder, and set it on Flash’s desk with a muted thud.

“What is this?”

“M-my r-resume, sir. Don’t you w-want to see it?”

Flash shrugged and flipped open the folder to humor him, expecting to see irrelevant things like: “Volunteered as an amateur marine veterinarian at Save the Whales” or “Played the lead role in the Baltimare Community College production of The Marechent of Venice.” Not even close. As it turned out, he and Number Cruncher had the same alma mater: Canterlot University. And he hadn’t dropped out school, either: he’d graduated magna cum laude with a Master’s degree in finance. As if that wasn’t enough, he also came highly recommended. A cursory look through a few of the papers in the folder showed him that Number Cruncher had spent the last two or three years working accounting and financial consultation in some the leading firms in the city. To put it simply, the applicant sitting in front of him trying to avoid his eyes was a real professional, with real business qualifications.

Now Flash hadn’t been sure why someone with such spectacular credentials had any interest at all in working long hours for low wages in an up-and-coming mare training company that might go belly-up and leave him out in the cold any day, but if the Fall of Equestria had taught him one thing it was this: never look a gift whorse in the mouth. Whatever Number Cruncher’s reasons for taking the job, he was exactly what Flash needed. He hired the stallion on the spot.

To start off with, Flash had assigned Crunch, as he took to calling his new assistant, to the basic day-to-day tasks that needed doing: scheduling appointments, answering mail, filling out Flash’s planner in the mornings. When he proved he could handle all of that, Flash experimented with giving him a bigger job that could take advantage of his background in finance: tightening up the company budget. That was where he’d really proved that he was as good in practice as he was on paper.

Every business that made and spent needed a budget, and Flash’s company wasn’t any different. A mare-training business entailed a number of expenses—mainly mare food, toys, clothes, and other accessories, but also more conventional things like office supplies and travel fare. Flash had never been much good with money management, even in school, and he knew that there were probably a couple places in his financial plan that a more numbers-savvy pony could squeeze out a few extra bits. He figured Crunch would take a day to go over it and come back with three or four minor tips to save him 20 bits. Instead, he’d taken three days to read it (he spent so long out of the office that Flash started to worry he’d come to his senses and quit the job) and when he came back it was a with a new, completely revised plan in hand.

He explained to Flash excitedly, mouth struggling to keep pace with his mind, how by switching mare food providers here and here and buying dildos here but not here and taking such-and-such bus route to work so he could save money on his daily taxi fare and doing a thousand other tiny things, they could cut down on weekly expenditures by . . . a full quarter. Not a quarter as in 0.25 bits, but a quarter as in twenty-five percent. Of course, some things had to be a little too good to be true. Crunch’s explanation had sounded reasonable, sure, but there was no way in Tartarus that he could have mangled the budget badly enough the first time around to waste a quarter of his earnings and not even realize it. Nevertheless, he gave his assistant leave to put his new financial scheme into action—what was the point of hiring a money expert if you weren’t going to take his advice? He expected maybe a tenth or a fifth of what had been promised. Two weeks later, he got every red cent.

“Good accountant” didn’t do Crunch justice. He was a money magician. A wealth wizard. A profit . . . prestidigitator. He had a gift for numbers, and no wonder: they were apparently his special talent. Flash had wondered the first day he’d met Crunch what the large, up-facing black arrow on each of his flanks meant, but it was only a few weeks later that he thought to ask him.

“In the w-world of finance,” Crunch had explained, “A b-black arrow p-pointing up means “p-profit,” and a r-red arrow p-pointing down means “loss.” My c-cutie mark is a b-black arrow because my special talent is turning a p-profit.”

“Well. you’ve done a pretty damn excellent job so far, Crunch. Let’s hope it stays that way.”

Crunch had gotten this weird smile on his face just then, as if an invisible pony had whispered a joke into his ear. “D-don’t worry, s-sir. I’ll m-make sure all you see ‘til the day you r-retire are b-black arrows.”

Okay, so it had to be said: Crunch was a fantastic employee, but as a stallion he could be a little strange sometimes. Moreso than the average nerdy, introverted math enthusiast. The first few weeks he had worked for Flash, the stallion had made attempts to strike up conversations with him in his free time and get to know him better, but Crunch didn’t seem able to hold up a conversation for more than a few minutes if it didn’t involve work. Every time Flash approached him he was gently rebuffed with some off-hand comment about how Crunch had to “get back to m-my desk,” even if every item on the agenda for the entire week had been taken care of. Eventually Flash stopped trying to make friends and settled for just watching his assistant from afar from time to time to try and get a reading on him.

There wasn’t much to see, but there was something. Every free moment that he didn’t have his nose buried in a file or a book or a stack of papers (and there were precious few of those), Crunch only ever seemed to do one of two things. The first was sit back in his chair, pick up a rubber band and a crumpled ball of paper, close an eye, cock his head, and shoot the paper at some point on the wall. It was a pretty normal, harmless way to pass time on a slow work day every once in awhile. That said, Crunch did it almost every day, at the same time, like a ritual. And what’s more, there was something about how he did it that made it seem like more than the idle pastime of a corporate drone. He did it with such a grave expression on his face and such calculated attention to his form and posture that you would have thought he was a world-class athlete doing practice shots for whatever they called that hit-an-apple-off-a-mare’s-head archery competition in the Equestria Games. Flash had no idea how often he hit and how often he missed, because he never aimed at anything other than some undefined point on the wall.

The second thing: he had this small black journal, a bit like Flash’s planner, and he took it out sometimes and wrote in it feverishly for fifteen or twenty minutes before setting it aside. One time, when Flash was still making a concerted effort to break through his shell, he’d stepped up behind him while he was writing in it and casually looked over his shoulder and asked him what he was writing. He’d barely caught a glimpse before Crunch snapped the book shut, and looked up at him with an expression on his face that would have made one think that Flash had caught him in the middle of stuffing his dead marefriend’s corpse in a freezer.

“Whoa, sorry, I was just . . .” Flash trailed off.

“. . . It’s my d-diary,” said Crunch lamely, after a few moments of pregnant silence. “It’s private.”

“. . . Right, right, of course. Sorry, I, uh, didn’t mean to pry.”

“It’s f-fine . . .”

That was the end of that conversation. The subject never came up again.

As Flash approached the house, his reverie about Crunch subsided and he turned his attention idly to the mare at his side.

"Did I ever tell you the story of Icarus, Millicent?”

“N-no m-master . . . I d-don’t think so.” Most mares stuttered when they were crying or when they were scared (or both), but Flash’s tiny assistant Millicent stuttered all the time. The first month he’d had her, he’d tried to train it out of her by hitting her whenever she did it, but that just seemed to make her stutter more and more until her sentences were garbled, unintelligible nonsense. Eventually he’d given up and learned to cope with it. There were more irritating speech impediments she could have had.

The tall stallion and the short mare were standing side by side on the porch of one of the tall Grecian cloud houses that populated the residential district of Cloudsdale. Flash knelt down to her level, and cupped her chin in his hands the way he always did when he started telling her an important story.

“Icarus wanted more than anything to be able to fly. But he was born a unicorn instead of a pegasus, so he didn’t have any wings. So you know what he did? He used his magic to conjure a huge pair of wings. And he flew up, up and away until he could see the entire countryside stretched out before him, and he did twirls and loop-de-loops and cartwheels in the air and had a grand old time.” Flash licked his lips.

“But he wanted to fly farther. So he kept flying farther and farther, away from his house, and his city, and his country, until he was out over the open ocean with no land in sight. And he wanted to fly higher, too. So he kept flying up and up, until even the clouds were just a fuzzy white sheet below him. And do you know what happened to him?”

“. . . D-did he f-fly into s-space?”

“The sun scorched through his wings and he fell into the ocean and drowned,” said Flash flatly. Millicent gasped, and he suppressed a smirk. He liked telling her stories, especially cautionary tales, because she seemed to be too dumb to distinguish between fiction and reality and she always got horribly concerned when one of the characters got hurt and asked desperately if they would be alright and there would be a happy ending. There never was.

“Oh n-no!” she cried like a foal, with genuine worry in her voice. “P-please d-don’t let that b-be the e-end of the—”

“Sorry Millicent, but that is indeed the conclusion of the story. We can learn an important lesson from it, though. Do you know what it is?”

Millicent didn’t answer. Her lip was quivering, and she looked like she was about to start shedding real tears for brave Icarus’ valiant sacrifice. Flash had to exert effort to keep the sigh in his lungs.

“The moral of the story is: don’t take what you have for granted. Icarus had a pretty sweet deal going for a while there. He was a self-made alicorn. But he got cocky, and he got careless, and before he knew it he slipped up and then he died. And he didn’t even die in a cool way. He died by drowning. Like a little bitch.”

Millicent cringed at the word “bitch.” She had a problem with cursing, too. She hated listening to it, and she never did it. Whenever she stubbed her toe or scraped her knee or something, she always said these cute little anti-curses straight out a foal’s cartoon: “Oh s-shoot!” or “Aw n-nuts!” or “D-darn it!” He’d asked her why she didn’t like cursing once, and she had replied innocently that her mommy had taught her only naughty fillies say bad words like that. From then on whenever he was bored he’d entertained himself by making her repeat the vilest, most obscene things he could come up with off the top of his head and watching her silently reprimand herself for being a “naughty filly.” As if cursing was the worst, most illicit thing he forced her to do.

The cursing thing wasn’t unique, either. She felt that way about all “grown-up” stuff (and that’s right, she still called it “grown-up” stuff despite being a young adult mare herself): sex, drugs, rock music and ever other conventionally fun thing was “icky” or “gross” or “yucky” to her. Flash had asked her once what she’d do with her free time if she could do anything she wanted, and she’d replied that she would draw pictures and eat ice cream. Then she’d asked if she could do that and he’d told her to get back to doing his taxes.

Her childlike naivete towards the world was part of some integral aspect of her character that Flash had dubbed her “mental virginity,” and try as he might he couldn’t seem to take it from her. With all his therapy money burning a hole in his pocket, he’d picked up a habit of shelter-shopping for fuck material from time to time, and Millicent had been one such purchase. When he’d first caught her eye, and she’d excitedly asked him he was going to be her new daddy and love her for ever and ever, he’d paid her fee on the spot. Shelter mares were usually the most abused, hardened specimens around—it was rare to see a smiling black collar in a shelter, much less a bouncing, bubbly, chatty one eager to make friends with ever stallion she saw.

On the way back home he’d gone over the two-part plan he used on every shelter mare:
Step 1) Fuck her brains out for as long as it took to get rid of her cheery attitude (probably a week or so)

Step 2) Give her back to the shelter and get a full refund

The only problem was, two weeks later, he couldn’t get past Step 1. He fucked her in her pussy and her ass and tied her up and whipped her and made her bathe in the basin of warbeast cum he had left over from the Nightmare Night party and all that good stuff, and she was revolted by every second of it. But after every depraved, sick thing he made her do, she just sort of . . . bounced back and behaved as childlike and pure and innocent as ever. One time he used magic to fuck her in all three holes with his cock and two dildos, and an hour later she had asked him not to “use the f-word” because it was a “mean word for meanies.” She was like a stress ball: no matter how hard and with how much force he squeezed her, she always popped right back to her original position, good as new. The mare herself was as fragile as a dandelion, but that “mental hymen” was apparently made of bulletproof steel. Go figure.

He’d come up with some theories. Maybe she had short-term amnesia and kept forgetting the sex acts after they’d happened and going back to her old, innocent self. Maybe she had split personalities, one a hardened veteran of the new world and one a naive foal, and she switched between them whenever she sensed impending abuse. Maybe she was brain-damaged and had the mental age of an eight-year-old filly. The last one was particularly compelling given her intellectual capacity.

It didn’t really matter why she was the way she was, though. As soon as he’d met her, Flash knew he had to make her his first red collar. Up until then he’d been something of a new-age bachelor, seeing dozens of mares a month in his line of work but getting sex at home only from rented or borrowed red collars or the occasional temporary shelter adoption. He’d never admit it, but mares were dreadfully boring after they had been broken in, and he always broke them in far too quickly. The perils of being a little too exceptional at your job, he supposed. The average red collar wasn’t good for much more than a few nights’ fun either: their servile attitudes and absurd tolerances for depravity were great and all, but they got old fast.

As such, an infinite abuse sponge he could inflict any torment upon without breaking wasn’t just a peculiar find: it was a godsend.

Millicent, for her part, had been thrilled at the chance to stay with him forever and be his assistant. After she was done jumping for joy, she’d asked him what the word “assistant” meant, and he’d explained patiently that it meant a pony who helps another pony do their job. She’d asked if that meant she could finally accompany him when he went out for work, because she got lonely when she was left at home by herself, and he’d replied that she could. More excited squealing ensued. Thus began a partnership for the ages: Flash Fortune and Millicent, Best Mare Therapists in Equestria (™). Next he just needed a token zebra, and the dream team would be complete.

When he’d told her their next house call was in Cloudsdale, her first thought had been to ask if they were going to fall through the clouds and pass away. Sometimes she censored herself even when she wasn’t cursing: for instance, she always said “pass away” instead of “die,” as if using a different word made the concept any less serious. He had assured her that he could cast a cloudwalking spell on them both so they could traverse the clouds during their time in the city. Just to screw with her, though, he’d added that it might wear off at any moment and send them both tumbling down into the abyss.

No, wait, not just to screw with her. He should have said just to fuck with her. Damn it, she was having a negative influence on him. Who would have thought?

As great as her perpetually-pristine innocence was, though, Millicent wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. That was why, every so often, he had to find a creative way to remind her to stay in line.

“Do you know why I told you this story, Millicent?”

“N-no, sir.”
“Because you’re the Icarus in this situation. You’ve got a really sweet deal going. I’m a good master, aren’t I?”

She nodded enthusiastically.

“Right. But if you make a mistake, you could get into a lot of trouble just like Icarus did. And by “make a mistake,” I really mean scr—er, fuck up this house call like you fucked up that one a few weeks ago You’re not going to do that, are you?”

“N-no, s-sir.”

See, there were a lot advantages to having an idiotic, cowardly mare in your possession, but at the end of the day you were still dealing with an idiot coward. Idiots were clumsy and klutzy and made mistakes. Cowards got scared and careless at every little thing. Idiot cowards did things like jump and run for cover when a fucking bee entered the room through the window (“Help m-me master! It’s g-going to sting me!”) and, in the process of self-salvation, accidentally spill pitchers of steaming hot coffee all over their bosses’ clients’ signed paperwork . . . and crotches. Idiot cowards also did things like get scared and clench their teeth hard when they heard a particularly loud burst of thunder during a heavy storm . . . in the middle of sucking their bosses’ clients’ cock (“I’m s-so sorry! Let m-me kiss it and make it b-better!”).

Client relationships were usually patched up easily with a little sweet talk and the promise of discounts . . . and occasionally a well-placed band-aid . . . but it was always supremely embarrassing for a stallion to have to clean up after his mare’s mess. He always punished her severely when she screwed up like that, but the flip-side of her not getting harder and less innocent when he abused her was her not learning from her mistakes when he abused her. No matter what he did, he couldn’t stop her from making careless, stupid mistakes and making him look bad.

He had been reduced to giving her these stupid pep talks before every meeting, even though he knew the whole effort was fruitless. If she was going to fuck up, she was going to fuck up, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. And, now that he thought about it, there wasn’t even much he wanted to do about it. Every other mare he’d ever met he’d wanted to dominate completely, but with Millicent part of the charm was knowing she’d always be messing up and disappointing him, no matter what he did. She was his little living stress ball, after all, and it was in the nature of stress balls to stay pudgy and useless no matter how hard you squeezed them.

For that reason, the smile on his face wasn’t counterfeit when he said: “Good. Let’s greet the client.”

He stepped up to the door of the cloud house and rang the doorbell.

[Unfinished section]

Epilogue: On His Majesty's Secret Service

[A fragment of the ending conversation of the epilogue, in which a Caribou official recruits Flash to ply his trade for the government.]

“Before we can make things official, I have three questions for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“First question: Have you ever interacted with a blue collar?”

“Well . . . to be honest I forget that that was a designation. What does blue signify, again?”

“Diplomatic immunity. It’s a very rare distinction for a female to hold. We reserve blue collars for visiting foreigners, mainly.”

“. . . In that case, no. I haven’t been with a blue collar,” admitted Flash. “But,” he added quickly, “It doesn’t matter. I’m Dr. Collarblind. Whatever color collar this mare of yours is wearing, I can fix her.”

The Caribou smiled wanly. “I didn’t say she was a mare.”

Flash shrugged. “That doesn’t matter either. Griffon, zebra, cow, it’s all the same to me. I can get the job done.”

“Your confidence is reassuring. Second question: Does the name “Princess Ember” mean anything to you?”

“I can’t say that it does,” said Flash, scratching his head. “This girl you have in mind . . . she’s a princess?”

“She is.” The Caribou paused, and his thin smile widened into a smirk.

“Final question, and be honest with me, Dr. Fortune: Have you ever fucked a dragon?”

[Outline of the Remainder of the Series]

[A brief outline of what would have happened in the series had it continued.]

The progression of stories would have been:

Collarblind: Red Scare (Flitter/Cloudchaser, red collars)

Intro story

Collarblind: Out of the Blue (Ember, blue collar)

Flash is tasked by the government with convincing Ember to join them
First chapter would have been called "Diplomatic Immunity" (because blue collars are for diplomats)

Collarblind: Silver Lining (OC, silver collar)

Flash is tasked with choosing a collar for a mare who has been in a coma since before the Fall
He decides to play a trick on her and convince her he's part of the Resistance and has come to save her from this "patriarchal hellscape" she's awoken in; hilarity ensues
First chapter would have been called "Decisions, Decisions" (because silver collars are for undecided mares)

Collarblind: Nothing Rhymes With Orange (Zecora, "orange" collar)

A joke story wherein the rhyming zebra Zecora spills orange juice on her collar and stains it orange

Collarblind: Collarless (Undecided character(s), no collars)

Flash is captured by a group of Resistance mares who are aware of his infamous exploits across the country and put on trial
Of course he escapes in the end and sells them into slavery, but briefly he gets a taste of his own medicine when they collar him

Collarblind: Blacklisted (Undecided character, silver collar)

Flash is tasked with working with some black collar

Plot points:

Though each of the stories was a self-contained episode of Collarblind, there was a small overarching narrative for the whole series involving the two recurring characters of Crunch and Millicent
Number Cruncher ("Crunch") and Millicent, Flash's nerdy account and submissive assistant, respectively, are actually Resistance members in disguise who have taken jobs with Flash to surveil him as he works for some of the richest and most powerful masters across Equestria
Crunch's black arrow cutie mark doesn't represent the "black arrow of profit," it represents his proficiency with a bow and arrow; he's actually a highly-trained marksman
Millicent is only pretending to be a naive idiot; in reality she's a very intelligent manipulator who subtly guides Flash to do what she wants a la Keyser Soze (she lets slip her true intellect by accident a few times, for example when she reveals she has read the books of Manechiavelli, but Flash is too arrogant and foolish to notice)
The ending of the story ideally would have been that Millicent revealed herself as the hidden genius she was and worked with Crunch to kill Flash once his usefulness had run out
The final scene of the series would have been Flash, mortally wounded, lying on the floor laughing in stunned horror as he realizes his ditzy assistant outwitted him in the end

[Outline of the Remaining Chapters]

[An outline of the remaining chapters that were never written.]

Flitter is a red collar pegasus who wants to go visit her sister, Cloudchaser, who she hasn't seen since they were separated during the Fall. Her owner, a pegasus stallion (I was thinking Thunderlane, but if that doesn't work it could be anyone), doesn't even know where her sister is, so he tells her she can't do that. It happens that her owner is one of the few stallions left out there who's still too soft and squeamish to punish his mares, and up until now he's been keeping Flitter obedient by being nice to her and giving her toys and treats. So when he finally tells her she can't do something, she gets angry and stops respecting him, and he calls for professional help.

Flash arrives, talks to the owner and Flitter, and gets a handle on the situation. He teaches the owner a valuable lesson about how punishment is an essential part of proper mare ownership, and then tells him that to fix a mare as spoiled and arrogant as Flitter he's going to have to take drastic action. Out of curiosity, he researches Cloudchaser and finds out that she's been put to work in some brutal place like a warbeast breeding facility or a rape vine farm. He concocts a plan to "scare Flitter straight": he tells her they're going to visit her sister after all, and she gets really excited.

But when he takes her to the nightmarish place where Cloudchaser has been sent, instead of letting her talk to her sister, he just makes Flitter watch while she's grotesquely raped and abused. Flitter is terrified because she's never seen abuse like this before, and she promises to do anything her owner says as long as he doesn't send her to a place like this. However, Flash insists that he doesn't think she's going to learn her lesson until she experiences for herself the punishments that bad mares get. So he leaves Flitter there for a few days, and when her owner comes back to pick her up she's been traumatized and is completely servile.

Flash goes back to his office and congratulates himself on another job well done, and then at the very end Caribou or some other messenger of the government shows up to offer him a job taming a blue collar to tease at the next story in the sequence.