Decoy

A few days passed pleasantly, the construction work tiring but satisfying, with the occasional opportunity to sneak off with a pony and fuck. At night, the four roommates would find something sexy to do together, although the mare who slept above him stayed away from any actual sex. She kept flirting with the edge, though – kissing a pony while somepony else went down on them, or helping hold them down while they orgasmed.

Decoy was past the uncontrollable hunger stage, and while it still enjoyed sex, it had mostly stopped actively seeking it out. For better or worse, though, it had acquired a reputation, and ponies would come to it when they wanted a quick screw and didn’t want to risk the other pony saying no. So it never said no, unless there was no way to fit them into its schedule.

Some of the ponies wanted very strange things. A couple of them wanted to hurt it, the sight of it in pain what got them off. Neither of them was at all bothered by it turning down its sense of pain until it was something bearable, as long as it didn’t hold back its screams and struggles.

“You like that, don’t you,” said one of the sadistic mares, her teeth locked painfully onto the back of its neck. “I bet you’d come right now if I just crunched down and crushed your spine.”

Decoy doubted that, even though a certain amount of pain was… if not exactly pleasant, or arousing, then at least satisfying to endure. Still, there was no reason for that sort of injury to cause it any more pain or damage than the usual kicks and bites. A little bit of shapeshifting to support the scene, and it would just be a slightly more visceral bit of playacting.

“Do it,” Decoy moaned, as the mare twisted its elytra painfully. “Do your worst.”

“Um…” she said. Letting go of it. “Seriously?”

“If you warn me ahead of time, I can endure it without serious injury,” it explained.

“Can I… tear off your leg?”

“Sort of,” it replied. “Watch.” It held up a foreleg, and shifted it away, leaving a blank spot on its shoulder. Then a new leg grew, identical to the old one, except for being a ‘new’ limb with no proper analogue. “This isn’t really my leg. You could do whatever you wanted to it, and I wouldn’t be hurt.”

She took it in her teeth, and wrenched it painfully, tugging and twisting. Decoy gasped, playing up the muted pain like it usually did, and closed its eyes and looked away. She continued to work at it for half a minute or so, leaving it with aching muscles and tendons, but failed to actually remove the fake limb. “Ugh. This is harder than it looks.”

“Ponies aren’t fragile,” it said. “Realistically, you’d need tools.”

She was too embarrassed to approach it again, at least for the next few days. It was a little disappointed, since the challenge she’d presented was interesting, even if the sensations hadn’t been pleasant in the traditional sense.

===

One morning, the roommates were woken up by a knock on the door, followed by it magically unlocking itself and swiftly opening. Decoy was in the pegasus’ bed, having been trapped there when she fell asleep on top of it after a long session of slow, gentle lovemaking the night before. It had altered itself to be a softer cushion for her, and its hooves were stuck to her sides (although that was a natural changeling ability and not something it had had to shift).

“So it’s true,” said the unicorn coldly, staring down at them.

Decoy looked back up, twisting its head 180 degrees to face him right-side up.

“What are you talking about?” groaned the flirty mare, from where she’d slept alone in her bunk. It was a little earlier than any of them would normally have awoken.

“Did you really think you could keep it a secret? Everypony in the building knows what’s going on in here. Sooner or later one of them was going to mention it to me.”

“Yeah, they have sex,” the mare said. “Oh no, you discovered that we’re all adult ponies. I’ve been keeping out of it, though, like you asked.”

“You really expect me to believe that?” the unicorn said. “Vertical said she heard your voice talking while the… while the noise was going on.”

The pegasus had been awake but frozen since the unicorn had barged in, squeezing Decoy tighter and tighter. Now she stood up over it, sliding it’s cock out of her with a messy splash of fluids, and shouted, “Get out of my room! What do you think you’re doing barging in here? Do we look like we’re ready for visitors?”

The unicorn scoffed “So now you’re pretending to care about decency?”

“Argh,” the mare said, squeezing her head between her hooves. “Why can’t you just trust me?”

He looked down at Decoy, then back up at her. “You want me to trust you? Fine.” His horn lit, brightly, and the mare squealed as she was lifted slightly off of her bunk. There was a brief flash, and she settled back onto the mattress. “Don’t lie to me again,” he snapped, turning to leave. “I’ll know.”

“What a creep,” the pegasus said, as the door closed and re-locked itself behind him.

“What did he do to you?” asked the mare above them, who’d been huddled silently through the whole confrontation.

“Something that makes my crotch tingle,” she said, rolling on her side and rubbing at it with a hoof. “Not in a good way.”

“Probably an alarm spell,” Decoy said. “I’ve heard they itch.”

“Do you want me to murder him for you?” the pegasus asked.

“I’ll let you know at lunch,” the mare said. “If it’s still itching then, get your axe.”

===

Decoy didn’t get to check in with them at lunch. A runner called it back to the office to talk to its caseworker. She wasn’t in her own office, instead standing in a conference room with a large, scarred landshark and his dragon bodyguard. Decoy eyed the bodyguard suspiciously – was she really a dragon? Dragons were notorious for being unmanageable as employees unless you trained them from a young age. Then again, the nearest population of landsharks was in Kludgetown, a notorious haven for slavery and crime, and they certainly wouldn’t be above kidnapping a baby dragon to do just that.

“You understand that she’s not a slave,” the pegasus said, probably for Decoy’s benefit.

“Yeah yeah,” the shark said. “Indentured for a hundred years, though. That’s basically the same thing. How much?”

“We couldn’t let her go for less than five hundred thousand bits.”

“You’re fucking with me,” the shark said. Turning to his dragon, “She’s fucking with me. Doesn’t she know what happens to ponies that fuck with me?”

The dragon smiled, showing off her glittering fangs, and flexed her claws. “Obviously not, boss.”

“She’s a valuable member of our team,” the pegasus said. “Easily as productive as a master builder, although not in the same way of course. If you calculate the present value of her contract, assuming a 10% return on investments as the opportunity cost, you get a figure in that ballpark.”

“You’re wasting her talents,” the shark said. “You have her building crap. Seriously? That’s the best you can think of to do with a shapeshifter?”

“So…” the pegasus said, “you’re saying we should charge more?”

“No, I’m saying that you have a moral duty to sell her to me,” the shark snapped. “You’re never going to keep her attention for a hundred years. You’ll be lucky to get one! I’ll pay you ten thousand, cash on the barrel.”

“That’s… significantly less than we paid,” the pegasus said. “Absolutely not.”

“Twenty thousand, then,” the landshark said, leaning towards her and baring his teeth. “That’s an offer you cannot refuse.”

The pegasus didn’t flinch. “Bite me.”

The shark stared at her for a few more seconds, then backed off. “I’m so, so tempted, sweets. You got guts, at least. How much do you think you’d go for?”

“I’m not for sale.”

The shark laughed. “Yeah yeah, but you could make a lot more working for us than you do at this joint. Straight work is for suckers.”

“This conversation is going nowhere,” the pegasus said. “I called Dee down because you said you wanted a demonstration of her skills, and I thought you were going to make a serious offer.”

“We’re deadly serious,” said the dragon, puffing a cloud of smoke at her, that she dispersed with a flap of her wing.

The pegasus narrowed her eyes. “Then let’s get right to the demonstration. Dee, please remove these ruffians.”

“Dragons are problematic,” Decoy said.

The landshark laughed, and took a step towards the pegasus. “Bad move, sweetheart. Guess she wasn’t as good an invesss… muh… wha?” He spun around, putting a hand to the sharp sting on his neck, then collapsed, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, although his chest still rose and fell with his breath.

“Landsharks are easy,” Decoy said, now in possession of a scorpion tail, “but I can’t pierce dragon scales.”

The pegasus looked down at the shark, then up at the dragon, who looked like she was about to get over her shock at seeing her boss taken down and attack. “I’ll pay you two hundred bits to take your boss and leave. Nopony has to get hurt.”

“You’ll regret this,” the dragon said, scooping up the much larger landshark and slinging him over her shoulder. She left without taking the bits.

The pegasus let out her breath and seemed to deflate, although she stayed standing. “That could have gone better. But I’ll take it.”

“Would you really sell my contract to a Kludgetown slaver?” Decoy asked.

“This is a business. We’re literally in it for the money,” she said. “You’re a valuable member of our team, specifically one valued at approximately five hundred thousand bits.” She sighed and shook her head. “If I thought there was any chance of ever getting you back, I might have offered a rental.”

===

At dinner, it met up with its pegasus roommate to ask about the potential murder of the unicorn.

“It stopped itching, so she’s going to talk to him about it instead,” was the answer. “I hope they’re breaking up. He’s such a creep.”

“I think the relationship is bad for both of them,” Decoy said. “I liked him before they were a couple.”

“Maybe it’s just relationships that are bad,” the pegasus said. “I haven’t been in one that didn’t go down in flames. Just screwing around with friends is so much easier.”

“That’s how changelings deal with sex,” Decoy admitted. “You’re a pony, though. You’ll eventually want a weird pony relationship. Ponies always do.”

“I guess I do want foals, eventually,” she said. “And we don’t get to just dump them in a hatching chamber for somepony else to raise.” She pouted. “I don’t suppose you can bite me and turn me into a changeling?”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Decoy said. “If we could do that to ponies, it would have been a lot easier to make them disappear.”

“What did you do instead?”

“I thought it was common knowledge now?” Decoy said, frowning at her. “We gave all the details at the public trial. There were thousands of spectators, and journalists and everything.”

She shrugged. “I don’t pay much attention to politics.” She grinned. “Did you kill them? With a bloody axe?”

Decoy shook its head. “We sold them into slavery in Kludgetown. The bits were useful.”

“Wow. You were really evil back then,” she said.

Decoy was somehow smart enough not to defend its past self, this time.

===

Decoy, shifted into the form of a cursed, black changeling, hissed in the quiet mare’s ear. This time it failed to elicit the desired reaction, even when it nipped her ear with its fangs.

“Oh, this isn’t working at all,” she said, fidgeting under it. “I think we used this shape too many times, it’s not really scary anymore.”

“She could bite you for real?” suggested the pegasus. She was sitting in the other top bunk; not hers, but it gave her a better view, and the mare that sometimes slept there was still out talking to her coltfriend.

The mare under it squeaked, and tensed up a little, but shook her head. “There has to be something else you can do!”

“Spiders?” it suggested, shifting into a big fuzzy tarantula with all eight legs clenched around her sides.

“That’s… not that creepy,” said the pegasus. “That’s adorable.”

The mare under him didn’t seem to agree, whimpering slightly. She started to squirm when a swarm of smaller spiders emerged from its fur and started to crawl their way over and around her, one of them crawling down her forehead to perch on her nose, turning to wave its pedipalps an inch from her eyes.

“No, no no no no no no!” she squealed, squirming and shifting and – “No, stop! Stop!” she rolled over, nearly crushing it as it scuttled off her and onto the wall, then thrashed around flinging the smaller spiders every which way.

“Too much,” Decoy said, gnashing its fangs in frustration. This was hard to get right.

“Oh no!” the mare said, calming down a bit and finding several smashed spiders in her bed. She held one out to Decoy on a hoof. “I crushed you!”

“It’s fine, they were only puppets,” it said. “I didn’t put many pain receptors in them.” Most of the rest of them, that hadn’t been crushed, had torn free and were ‘dead’ now, curling up and ceasing their movement. With a flash of green fire, it reabsorbed the few that it still could.

The mare lay on her back, panting. “That was too scary,” she said, then looked up at it and smiled. “Do it again!”