“So, Trixie, are you an alicorn princess?” I asked her.

“No… ” Trixie looked away.

“What are you then?”

“Um, I’m a unicorn magician?”

“I don’t think that captures the gist of you. Try again!”

“I’m a performer?”

“Still holding yourself on a pedestal, ey?”

“What?”

“What do you have to show for yourself?”

“I can do pretty good magic tricks.”

“The first thing you did when you came to Ponyville was hurt ponies and bring an Ursa Minor to wreak havoc.”

“I didn’t know that would happen—”

I hit her.

“Auch! I didn’t—”

I hit her harder.

“—Aaa! Please, hear me out. I wasn’t—”

“What is going on here? I see your mouth moving, yet all I hear are excuses.”

She pressed her eyebrows together. “Snips, and Snails—Aau! Please stop hitting me!“

I focused my magic on her mouth and forced her lower jaw to move up and down while I spoke. “Excuses, excuses, excuses!” I hit her again.

“Auu! Please!”

“And then the second time you came to Ponyville—”

“It was the alicorn pendant that made me do it.”

I pounded on her relentlessly.

“Auu! No! Aaaa! Stop… please… No more… ”

“You used your tricks to hurt ponies. You think using magic in that way is an accomplishment? It’s nothing of the sort! So again, what do you have to show for yourself?”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing doesn’t hurt ponies.” I lay my scepter on her back and slowly slid it along the shiny, tight fabric toward her flank. Her body shivered.

“Something?” she said.

I lifted the stick and struck her.

“Au! Please stop. I don’t know what you want me to say… ”

“Something would be helpful to ponies. Nothing wouldn’t affect them at all. But you did neither of those things. So, what do you have to show for yourself?” I lifted up the scepter.

“Less than nothing?”

“That’s right.” I lowered my scepter to the ground. ”You’ve accomplished less than nothing. If you accomplished nothing it would be an improvement for you. So, what does that make you?”

“Less than nothing—maker?”

“It makes you evil!” The scepter ruffled her mane. “Are you evil, Trixie?”

“I’m… ”

“Yes? Go on.”

“I’m…” her body twitched. “It wasn’t all my fault! Please, Twilight, just let me explain! You don’t know about my past.”

I pounded on her with extreme prejudice.

“Aaa! Please… Ugh! Tw—aaa! Stop! Aaa! Don’t, please! Aaa!”

“I don’t care about your past, Trixie. I judge your actions on their own merits. Your past does nothing to justify or excuse them. And If I were you, I’d worry more about your future than what has been.” I kept thrashing on her twitching body.

“Aaa!” She slammed against the frame, uselessly. “No! Aaa! No... ”

Not even Big Mac could put a dent in these steel bars. She was only hurting herself by not staying still.

“I’m—aaa! Stop! Aaa! Evil! Aaa! I’m… I’m evil!”

I stopped hitting her, yet she kept on yelling.

“I’m evil! I’m evil! I’m evil!”

I lay down my scepter on my captive and the yelling ceased. Her teeth clenched tight.

“You think you’re evil, Trixie?”

“Yes, I’m evil!”

“Indeed you are. Do you think evil should be left unpunished, Trixie?”

“I don’t know.”

I lifted up the scepter.

“I… I deserve,”—She bowed her head.—”to be punished.”

“I think we’re making great progress Trixie. You’re a good student, or just mentally weak; I haven’t fully concluded where to fit you yet.”

“Why do you hate me so, Twilight?”

“I don’t hate you. In fact, I kind of like your physiology. From what I’ve witnessed in our last encounters, the neuroplasticity in your horn base must be astounding.” I floated up a nearby scroll and quickly scribbled on it with a quill: ‘measure the conductivity of Trixie’s magical neuro link’. She jerked as I turned back to her, “I can see a lot of potential in you, my little unicorn. There’s just so much bullshit on top of it that it's getting wasted. I will help you remove all that BS.”

“Please don’t help me. I can’t take it anymore.”

“No, Trixie, you’re wrong to think like that. Friends are important and I want to be your friend. The thing that friends do is help one another and learn from each other. Here’s a bit of a lesson for you. Did you know that loyalty is an intrinsic part of friendship? Let’s start with that. Be loyal to me!”

She sobbed. “Twilight, please… ”

“You think this is easy on me Trixie?”

She sniffled.

“Do you know how hard it is for me to forgive you after what you did to all the ponies and me?”

“I’m sorry!”

“It’s okay, Trixie. I’ll work really hard to forgive you.

”It may take quite some time and a lot of hard work on my part. But I will forgive you eventually.”

“No… ”

“I’ll tell Spike that you decided to leave us if—” I clenched my teeth and breathed in. “When he comes back....”

“My friend Starlight Glimmer or the dragon are sure to find me. You should let me go before that happens, for everypony’s sake.”

“Not quite, Trixie. Starlight Glimmer is on a chronic friendship mission. As for Spike, when he overreacted when I ran some relatively non-invasive experiments on Sweetie Belle, I forbade him from coming to the basement. I only meant it as a temporary ban, but now that I have you down here I’ll just make it a permanent one. Soundproof doors should help with muffling your screams of agony. I should write it down on my to-do list right away, else I might forget about it. We’ll need lots of discretion when we work on your forgiveness points, and some other morally—distinct experiments I have in mind. Oh, so much to do, so little time...” I looked around for something. “Where did I put my quill and scroll?”

“Morally distinct experiments?” She distracted me.

“Oh, Trixie, you don’t have a clue how many ideas I have floating in my mind right now. They’re already all planned out, but I don’t want to spoil the surprises that are in store for you. I will just give you a snippet of one of many things to come: Alchemy drugs, developed by me, under a recursive acronym PAIN: Pain and Anguish Induced Nuisance. They’ll be like painkillers, just the exact opposite, amplifying everything you feel. What do you think?”

“Fuck!”

“It’s okay, Trixie. Relax. I know for absolute certain that everything is certainly fine.”

“No, it’s not fine, Twilight. Everything you say turns out twisted and terrible. You’re bucking mental!”

“You seem upset, Trixie.”

“Upset? Am I upset?”

“Is something bothering you?” I elaborated on my question.

“Are you freaking kidding me?”

“This is about me destroying your trinket that allowed you to perform your mind transfer with me, isn’t it? Now I just feel terrible for smashing it to pieces like I did. How will we be able to circumvent and rise above the ordeal, I wonder...”

“It’s not about the trinket, which you had no right smashing. It’s about you abusing me. How dare you!?”

“I really feel like I should give you something as compensation. Oh, I know, I happen to have some of my own trinkets with unique bio-magical effects.” I walked to the wardrobe.

“It’s not about the trinket!”

“This one for instance,”—I opened the drawer of the wardrobe in the corner of the basement and floated up a black chained necklace.—“disrupts your inner flow, preventing you from focusing any of the magic to your horn. As a side effect it causes you to feel really sick.”

“I said...” Trixie started but a surprise gag in her mouth stopped her in the middle of her blabbering.

“You said a tad too much!” I booped her on the snout and continued. “All the changelings kept overreacting whenever I strapped it over their necks. They kept bashing against their frames and screamed as if they were in agony. The necklace doesn’t have any physiological effect, so I got curious about what all the fuss was about. After some hesitation, I tried it on for a moment. Big mistake. The haze in my head forced me to lay down. I’d probably have thrown up on the spot if I hadn’t ripped it off of my neck right away. I really can’t see myself wearing that thing for more than a few moments.”

The chain with a crystal embedded on the bottom floated before her.

She shook her head. “N-nn!.”

“We are all born with our inner flow structure, which doesn’t change throughout the course of our lives. But you probably already know all about the inner magic workings from kindergarten.”

Her eyes shied away, tail drooping to the floor.

”Oh, you didn’t go to kindergarten? How sad.” I cocked my head and made a sad face.

I lifted up her chin with a hoof. “My point is that you won’t become tolerant to the effects. Perhaps you’ll get used to feeling shitty all the time...” I thought for a moment. “No, that won’t happen either, but it’s okay. I already have a mechanism thought out, that will keep the force-fed food in your stomach despite your pharyngeal muscles being perma-active.”

She leaned away from the talisman, but that was just a useless attempt to avoid it on her part. Futile and pathetic.

I wrapped the chain around her neck. “My gift to you, Trixie.” I closed the lock on the trinket.

“Nnnnn… ” Her eyes rolled up, ears flattened to her head while the weary body swayed left and right.

“Don’t worry Trixie. It won’t be like that for much longer. You’ll get tired and you won’t be able to fight it anymore.”

I charged my horn and floated a dildo from the table, levitating it in front of her face. “I’m not a professional performer like you had tried to be, but I’ll see to it that your stay here won’t be a complete bore to you.”

“M-mmm.” She banged her body all around again.

“Relax!” I laid my scepter on her back.

The pet stopped thrashing around. She jerked a forehoof as far as the chains would allow it, trying to break free. The binds held firm.

I stood up and walked past her head to her back, slapping my tail against her face. The dildo floated downwards, brushing against her back. “Oh, I’m merely teasing you, pet. I won’t ravage you just yet. We’ll get to that soon enough.”

She twisted her body shuffling from left to right, trying to scream something through the gag. I wasn’t in the mood to guess her mumblings. There was a task at hoof, that needed my attention.

Author's Note

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