Corporal Ponyshment

“Good morning, class!” Cheerilee said with a broad smile on her face, trotting into the classroom just as the bell rang.

“Good morning, Miss Cheerilee!” a chorus of eager young voices answered.

Cheerilee walked to the front of the room and quickly took attendance in her head. “I see everypony is here, so let’s get started! Yesterday we were talking about gravity. Who remembers the value for acceleration in Equestria’s gravitational field? Anypony?”

“Nine-point-eight meters per second squared?” Cinnamon Twist volunteered after a brief moment of hesitation.

“Very good! Now, let’s do a simple problem. Everypony work alone for now.” Cheerilee cleared her throat and consulted the class outline she had written up the night before. “How high in the air does a pegasus have to start diving from rest in order to break the sound barrier before she hits the ground, if the only source of acceleration is gravity? You can assume a spherical pegasus.”

Cheerilee’s students started scribbling away in their notebooks, holding their pencils either with magic or in their mouths, according to their race. Cheerilee walked around the room, checking on the students as they worked. Sweetie Belle definitely wasn’t about to earn her cutie mark in Newponian physics, but Scootaloo had clearly thought about this problem in some detail before today. Cheerilee was just about to ask the orange pegasus to demonstrate the problem on the chalkboard when she saw Diamond Tiara’s hoof dart over to Silver Spoon’s desk and deposit something there.

“Diamond Tiara,” Cheerilee said gently but firmly. “Are you and Silver Spoon passing notes to one another?”

“No,” Diamond Tiara said at exactly the same time as Silver Spoon admitted to it. “Yes,” she corrected abashedly, just as Silver Spoon decided to follow her leader and deny it.

“Well, then,” Cheerilee said in the same tone. “You can both come up front and read it out loud.”

Diamond Tiara’s cheeks flushed red with embarrassment, but she clearly knew she wasn’t going to get out of this one. She walked to the front of the classroom, head held low. Cheerilee didn’t miss the glare that Diamond Tiara shot Silver Spoon as she joined her up front.

Diamond Tiara gulped and started reading. “The large red pony trotted back to the barn, and gently closed the door. He opened a trap-door with his mouth and went down the steps into an old disused apple cellar. Usually it was just filled with junk; scrap metal, old worn out ploughs, old rope and various other bits and bobs that had —”

Cheerilee gasped. She had read this story before, not knowing what it was until it was too late, but she would never have expected to hear it from the mouth of one of her students! “That will be enough!” she blurted hurriedly, before Diamond Tiara could get any farther. “I’m very disappointed in both of you.”

Silver Spoon pouted. “But Miss Cheerilee—”

“Don’t you ‘but, Miss Cheerilee’ me!” Cheerilee snapped, surprising even herself with the force behind her voice. Then she did something she had never done before: she stomped over to the corner of the schoolhouse, to where a dust-covered paddle hung from the wall. “Now, I’m going to enjoy this even less than you are, but it’s long past time you two fillies learned who was in charge around here! Both of you get down and stick your tushies up in the air, this instant!”

Silver Spoon obediently knelt down, staring at the floor with tears welling up in her eyes. Diamond Tiara, on the other hoof, reared up and put her forehooves on her hips. “Do you know who my father is?” she sneered. “Touch one hair in my mane, and I’ll see to it that this is the last class you ever teach!”

That made Silver Spoon decide to be brave. She got up and stood behind her friend. “Yeah! If you so much as lay a hoof on me…”

Cheerilee turned red with fury. Those fillies didn’t yet realize it, but they had just crossed a line. Cheerilee was willing to put up with a lot—anypony who wanted to teach elemanetary school needed to be able to—but nopony stood between Cheerilee and her life’s calling as a teacher and got away with it. “Class,” Cheerilee hissed through the paddle she held in her mouth, “the physics lesson can wait. Today you’re all going to learn about ‘tenure,’ and why it’s a good thing to have.”

With no more warning than that, Cheerilee charged forward, laying about with the paddle. She struck vicious blows to the heads of both fillies, knocking them to the floor and stunning them. Diamond Tiara was out cold. Silver Spoon was marginally conscious and muttering something, but a swift buck to the ribs silenced her.

Cheerilee spat the paddle out of her mouth, letting it fall to the floor. After what the fillies had threatened Cheerilee with, something that pedestrian no longer had a place in her plans for them. “Sweetie Belle,” she said, recovering some of her composure. “Close and lock the door. Scootaloo, latch the windows and draw the curtains shut.”

After what they had just witnessed, both fillies practically tripped over themselves racing to follow Cheerilee’s instructions. Cheerilee, meanwhile, trotted over to a cabinet that held tools and other supplies for conducting maintenance to the schoolhouse. She unlocked it and took out a power drill. She opened up a large case that contained various attachments for the drill and selected a large Phillips-head screwdriver bit, which she ratcheted into place. She grabbed a hoof-full of the longest screws she could find and deposited them on her desk, then picked up Silver Spoon by her mane and flung her onto the desk next to them like a sack of potatoes. The filly landed with enough force that Cheerilee heard something crack—and she was pretty sure it wasn’t her desk. The class let out a collective gasp, but one look silenced them.

It occurred to Cheerilee that in a few minutes, glaring at them might not be enough to keep them under control. She returned to the tool cabinet and pulled out a bag of plastic zip ties. With those in hoof, she went around the classroom and securely fastened each little pony to his or her desk, taking care not to pull any of the ties so tight that they would dig in or chafe.

“Now, class,” she said, putting on a smile. “I hope that’s not too uncomfortable, but this isn’t a lesson I want to have to teach twice on account of truancy. Now, let’s get started!” She hopped up on her desk and spread out Silver Spoon’s unconscious body in an x-shape, belly down with her legs pointed outwards. Taking the power drill in her mouth and placing a screw on its bit, she lined it up over Silver Spoon’s left foreleg, about four inches above the hoof. She pulled down on the trigger and with a mechanical whine, the power drill drove its screw into the soft flesh between Silver Spoon’s ulna and radius bones.

The pain caused Silver Spoon to jerk awake with a terrified scream, but not quite before the screw exited the other side of her leg and buried itself in the wood of Cheerilee’s desk. Cheerilee continued to push down on the drill until the screw head was buried nearly half an inch in Silver Spoon’s flesh. Cheerilee pulled the power drill out. The wet pop as Silver Spoon’s flesh slid into place over the screw head was nearly deafening in the utter silence of the classroom.

“M-miss Cheerilee…” Silver Spoon stammered, her eyes wide with horror. “W-why…”

Cheerilee answered by way of reversing her grip on the power drill and bringing its heavy battery pack smashing down on Silver Spoon’s nose. A spray of blood traced a radial pattern over the desk and the floor below it. That shut her up.

Cheerilee hopped over Silver Spoon’s back and lined up a screw over her other foreleg, but the filly started to thrash. She wasn’t very strong, having relied on others to do the hard work for her all her life, but all the same it proved impossible to hold both the drill and the screw steady while pinning her leg down.

Cheerilee considered bashing her over the cranium with the battery back to stun her again, but quickly dismissed the idea. That might result in brain damage, and she wanted both disobedient fillies fully aware of what was happening to them. Cheerilee set down the power drill just a few tantalizing inches outside of Silver Spoon’s reach, then dropped down off the desk and went back to the cabinet. As she rummaged through it, she could hear the sounds of Silver Spoon banging her hoof against the desk as she tried to reach the drill. The filly was starting to hyperventilate.

Momentarily, Cheerily returned with a nailgun. She was that Silver Spoon had actually managed to move about two inches, causing the screw to etch a seeping gash down her foreleg. It wasn’t far enough, though.

Now that she didn’t have to hold a screw to a bit while taking aim, securing Silver Spoon’s remaining three legs was easy as pie. She followed up each nail with a screw, to make sure Silver Spoon was attached soundly. By now, blood was seeping out of the first injury and across the desk, dripping down to the floor drop by crimson drop.

Before going any farther with Silver Spoon, Cheerilee took four of the remaining zip ties and fastened one around each of Diamond Tiara’s legs right where they met her torso, pulling them as tight as they would go.

“Ah, Miss Cheerilee,” Apple Bloom got the courage to say from her front-row seat. “They’re too tight. She’ll lose circulation.”

“Very good, Apple Bloom,” Cheerilee said with a smile. “By the time she wakes up, her legs will be all but useless. Now, Silver Spoon, you almost did the right thing, earlier. You could have gotten a light spanking, and this could all have been over. Tell me—why did you change your mind?”

Silver Spoon shivered piteously, her mouth moving open and closed but unable to make any sound beyond a low raspy whine. After nearly half a minute, she was able to get out, “D-d-d-d-diamond…”

“Right, because Diamond Tiara set a bad example,” Cheerilee said. “But you chose to follow it.” She turned to face the rest of her students. “Children, our first lesson today is to pick good role models and not to blindly follow ponies who might be making bad decisions.”

With that, she produced a hammer from the tool cabinet. She lined it up against Silver Spoon’s right foreleg and swung the hammer, not hard enough to break the bone but just hard enough to crack it ever so slightly. Silver Spoon gritted her teeth and hissed in pain, squeezing her eyes shut.

Cheerilee hit her in the same spot with the hammer, and again, and then a fourth time, each strike slightly harder than the last. Tears seeped out from between Silver Spoon’s eyelids. “Please…s-stop….”

On the fifth hit, Silver Spoon’s bone shattered. Unable to hold back, she screamed and screamed. Cheerilee waited patiently until her throat went raw and her voice gave out.

“Why can’t the pony scream anymore?” Cheerilee asked the class, smiling. “One point of extra credit on the final grade of whoever can come up with an answer!”

Scootaloo raised a hoof. “Is it because...she’s a little hoarse?”

“Ah ha ha, excellent work!” Cheerilee walked around the perimeter of her desk, banging on each of Silver Spoon’s legs in turn with her hammer. Once the bones inside each were shattered, she returned to the first one she had broken and put her front hooves on the desk, roughly massaging the broken leg so that she forced jagged fragments of crimson-stained bone out through Silver Spoon’s skin.

Silver Spoon convulsed and vomited, spewing the remains of the saffron-tossed wildflowers she had eaten for breakfast all over the desk in front of her. Cheerilee grimaced. She lifted up the front of the desk and placed a pair of wooden blocks underneath it so that the vomit flowed downslope and under Silver Spoon’s prone body.

Cheerilee considered what to do next. She had been able to turn this to her advantage, but she didn’t want an even bigger mess to clean up when she was done. She retrieved a staple gun from the cabinet. Clamping Silver Spoon’s mouth shut between her hoof and the surface of her desk, she went across it from left to right, methodically stapling it shut. Cheerilee stood back to admire her handiwork. Only a muffled murmur could escape Silver Spoon’s lips. It was the most pathetic thing Cheerilee had ever heard.

She was only a follower, Cheerilee reminded herself. She didn’t instigate this—save your worst for the ringleader. Silver Spoon had paid dearly enough for her mistake. Her suffering could end soon.

Cheerilee stooped down and picked up Silver Spoon’s eyeglasses from where they had landed on the floor. She placed them back on Silver Spoon’s nose. She could tell the filly didn’t know what to make of it. That was okay.

Next, Cheerilee placed a burlap bag over Silver Spoon’s head. Silver Spoon twisted her head back and forth inside it as Cheerilee drew a string around her neck and securely fastened the bag in place, but the smaller pony was too weak from shock and blood loss to put up much of a fight.

Cheerilee brought her hoof down on the bag where she thought Silver Spoon’s eyeglasses were, and was rewarded with the sound of rims snapping and lenses popping loose. She stomped a few times more to the sound of shattering glass as she pulverized the lenses.

She grabbed Silver Spoon’s head between her forehooves and started rubbing them back and forth, massaging the glass shards into the filly’s skin and nostrils. The bag started to turn red as the filly’s gurgling became ever more frenetic. Cheerilee slowly worked her way up Silver Spoon’s head, using her hooves to work glass into her student’s eyes. Silver Spoon squeezed her eyelids shut, of course, but it didn’t take more than a few minutes for Cheerilee to grind holes through them. She ground sharp glass into Silver Spoon’s eyeballs until they took on the texture of overcooked oatmeal, then pushed her hooves even farther into the bloodied bag until glass entered Silver Spoon’s brain. The filly’s mouth forced itself open despite the staples, and with one final indescribable sound, Silver Spoon went limp.

Blood flowed freely from where the staples had shredded her lips. The burlap bag was saturated, and now a slick red pool spread across the desk.

Cheerilee took a look over at Diamond Tiara. Her legs were now noticeably paler than the rest of her—good. Cheerilee also noticed a large welt swelling up on Diamond Tiara’s head. She must have walloped her pretty good.

“It looks like your classmate will still be asleep for a while,” Cheerliee said to the class. “I think we can get through the Laws of Motion while we wait for—”

She was interrupted by a retching noise from Silver Spoon. Several of the students gasped, apparently surprised that their classmate was still alive.

Cheerilee had to admit this wasn’t what she was expecting, either. “Colts and fillies,” she said, “I sliced up her brain pretty good, so she’s probably a vegetable. Still, somepony had best finish her off! Any volunteers?”

After a few moments, Apple Bloom hesitantly raised a hoof.

“Excellent!” Cheerilee hadn’t really expected any takers, and she was elated at how engaged her students were in today’s improvised lesson. She trotted over to Apple Bloom’s desk and cut the filly free. The two ponies walked back to the front of the room, where Cheerilee retrieved a blowtorch from the tool collection and passed it to her student. “Now, this is simple: just ram the nozzle as far up Silver Spoon’s tushie as you can, then hold the trigger down. You’ll know it’s done when the meat falls of the bone!”

“Yokey-dokey, Miss Cheerilee!” Apple Bloom eagerly picked up the blowtorch in her mouth. She actually improved on her teacher’s instructions: she rammed the blowtorch more than halfway into Silver Spoon’s butt, so deep that the pressure exerted by her anal muscles as they contracted in her death throes held the trigger down.

The hungry hissing of the blue flame burning between Silver Spoon’s loins cut through the silence. Muffled roars of combustion issued forth from inside her body as various internal organs dried out and caught fire. Within a few minutes, welts had started to open on her back and sides, and steam and smoke escaped from them. Silver Spoon howled and convulsed. The pain must have been truly beyond imagination, and Cheerilee wasn’t sure whether the fact that Silver Spoon’s lobotomized brain could no longer comprehend what was happening to her made the situation better or worse. She frowned, an expression so rare that it felt odd on her face. Something wasn’t quite right. Oh, of course! She knew what she had forgotten. Silly me.

Cheerilee cut the gore-stained burlap away from Silver Spoon’s head. There was more blood inside, of course, and acrid vomit. The face underneath it was utterly unrecognizable, as either Silver Spoon’s face or as a face at all. It looked more like a mound of shredded meat glinting where the light caught shards of glass.

Cheerilee picked up an apple from the corner of her desk and jammed it in Silver Spoon’s mouth, shutting her up. That was better.

Within ten minutes, Silver Spoon had stopped twitching. Within half an hour, she was a carbonized charcoal briquette.

“I think you might have overcooked her just a bit,” Cheerilee said.

Apple Bloom went pale. “I-I’m s-sorry, Miss Cheerilee.”

“Oh, that’s quite all right.” Cheerilee smiled and gently patted her student on the head. “Everypony makes mistakes. We just have to learn from them, and the purpose of school is to learn. You’ll have another chance this afternoon. Now, be a good filly and go back to your seat for now.”