The Baying Moon

Moondancer’s soles cooked beneath the thin film of shadowy ooze. Sweat beat down as the infernal oil roasted and wreaked havoc on her hormones. Her toes were bound back to the stocks by the cords. Moondancer swore steam wafted off of her feet, although that could have been from the condensation on her glasses from her heated gasps. Her cuffed cock throbbed back and forth as the glowing rings stimulated it and her testicles non-stop. Moondancer’s hips leapt forward, futilely humping the air. Her head bounced off the headrest and lulled to the side, her metal ear-tag clanged against the chair.

“Quitting on me already, Sweet Thing?” Nightshade asked as she dribbled more of the black oil down her prisoner’s feet and kneaded it in. “Can’t say I’m surprised. It only took half a day for five coat coats to break Twilight’s big brother, but you held up well enough — for some random dweeb.”

“Really though,” she continued, “you should be proud of yourself if for nothing other than you’re contributing valuable data on both the sensitivity oil as well as our denial tech. Isn’t that what a nerd like you’ve always dreamed of, becoming a lil’ science assistant?”

Nightshade tossed a hairdryer up and caught it. She flicked it on and blasted Moondancer’s feet with another wave of sweltering heat. She scooted beside the panting pony, the impromptu scarf of Moondancer’s stolen sneakers still hung around her neck. She flicked her latex-gloved fingers at Moondancer’s painful and stuffed erection, residue oil rained on her sensitive dick. Moondancer moaned and whimpered.

“Listen dork-- Moonflower.” Nightshade corrected herself as if she was doing Moondancer a kindness. “I’m still peeved that those dumb mutts grabbed the wrong pony and I need to take it out on somepony. So if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, really let me feel your anguish. Your sorrow. Your utter defeat.” She pumped an open hand around Moondancer’s erection, not touching it. “And, your lust! I just might feel inclined let you cum if you can convince me.” She lied as her other hand squished the bulge under her own suit.

“Get real!” Moondancer huffed lifting her head back up to face the mare.

Nightshade snorted. “There’s the little firecracker from this morning.” She blew a kiss at Moondancer’s dick. “Sorry little guy, maybe later.”

Nightshade hopped up and lazed over to the crates of torture tools the dogs stored behind Moondancer. The unicorn’s tagged ear twitched and toes shivered as Nightshade rummaged through a number of boxes.

“Feathers? No, I got plenty of those myself; Toothbrush? No; Comb? No; Ear tag pliers? Used them; Gem Polisher? Maybe. Hmm… Ohh, Perfect!”

Moondancer snarled as Nightshade patted the top of her head.

“Now, now geek. Is that anyway to treat the mare who’s going to give you what you wanted, something to read?”

Moondancer’s pupils dilated but she kept her cool, despite the bead of sweat that ran down the side of her head. “What’s the catch?”

Nightshade snorted and slithered behind the stocks. “The catch is,” she twirled an elegant fountain pen in her fingers, “that I’m going to write it on your feet! And I’m not going to stop until you figure out what I wrote and read it back to me.”

The color drained from Moondancer’s face.

“Now that’s the appropriate reaction~”

The golden point of the pen pushed into Moondancer’s right foot. With a snap of her wrist Nightshade drew a tiny circle shooting off into a horizontal line. Moondancer bit her lip and buried her head into the padded chair. Her eyes shook staring up at the ceiling. ‘That was only one pen stroke!’

Nightshade positioned the pen back onto her writing canvas. “Hope you can read cursive! Heh, now all those calligraphy classes don’t seem like such a waste of time anymore.”

She swooped the pen down, made a sharp left, and then swept it back to the right. The line continued uninterrupted spiking up and back down. The trapped mare above her screeched out laughter as ink trailed from the pen on her hyper-sensitive feet. It curved up and to the right and then flew back around, up, down, up into a circle, down and around to a tall and narrow loop-de-loop into a shorter loop. The pen finally lifted off Moondancer’s foot.

Moondancer panted like she’d ran a marathon. Well she panted like some who went outside for more than ten minutes a day who’d ran a marathon. Nightshade jabbed the pen on the foot adding a single dot to what she’d written. Moondancer chocked and sputtered on her breath.

Nightshade moaned in pleasure. “That was only the first word. By the time I finish writing this sentence you’re gonna scream like a filly.”

The pen tip prodded Moondancer’s foot again. Nightshade piloted the pen down and up, it felt like two tall hills were being followed by a slanted circle. The pen lifted off for a moment and touched down to the right. It slashed sideways again making a sudden turn down at a tight angle trailing left and hooked an about-face to the right, drawing a circle, followed by a backwards radical sign[9] and forming another loop before it fluctuated up and down on quick angles. After a sideways loop with a long trail down and around, it ended with another backwards radical sign.

[9] The square root symbol.

“Oh, can’t forget the punctuation!” Nightshade sliced the pen down in a vertical stroke and dotted her work. “Beautiful. So nerd, has that big brain of yours figured out what I wrote?”

Moondancer indeed had screamed like a filly and still was. The words on her oil altered feet continued to send overloads of sensory data through her.

“I HAHAHAHAHATE YOUHOHOHOHO!”

“Nope. Here let me write it again to give you another chance.” Nightshade offered smugly.

The tip of the fountain pen scrawled across Moondancer’s foot over and over. After writing the sentence half a dozen times Nightshade switched to Moondancer’s left foot and sped up. Nightshade wrote small to fit as many iterations as she could on Moondancer’s feet. No matter how small or tightly Nightshade wrote Moondancer could still feel every individual pen stroke. Nightshade wrote with the speed of a mare who’d put off starting a five-paragraph essay until the night before it was due.

“STAHAHAHAHAP! PLEHEHEHEHESE I CAN’T TAHAHAHAHAKE ANYMORE!!!” Moondancer begged. Her leg kicked and twitched but her foot couldn’t elude the pen.

“I guess this is what they meant when they said, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword.’” Nightshade cracked up at her own bad joke.

* * *

Moondancer’s horn ring went off twice as the balls of her feet and heels were coated in the unknown sentence, only her arches remained ungraffitied.

“I feel like a naughty schoolfilly being made to write lines on the chalkboard as punishment.” Nightshade teased. “If you don’t figure this out soon I’m gonna have the dogs come in here to clean off your feet and make them write it, and I doubt they’ll even spell half the words right.”

The pen lingered on Moondancer’s arch. The laughing unicorn sucked in a breath desperate to steady herself. Every movement from the pen had been torture and she’d tried to black it all out but to get through this she’d have to focus on each and every movement.

The first movement was the same a tiny circle with a horizontal line. Moondancer spurted out another laugh. ‘Focus!’ She scolded herself. Nightshade waited until the snickers stopped before she penned the next line. ‘Is she giving me a fighting chance? While I still have my wits. Ignore the cursive flourishes; what letters have a bar at the top? E, F, I[10], sometimes J, T and Z.’ The pen lifted off and swiped down curving to left.

[10] Any font, especially a san-serif font, without the bars on the capital ‘I’ is wrong, that character is a lowercase ‘l’. Fite me.

“J! It’s a J, or maybe a fancy F or T!” Moondancer shouted.

Nightshade gave no indication if Moondancer was correct and kept writing letters. ‘The spike is probably a vowel unless it starts with consonant blend. No!’ “It’s got to be an ‘i’! I know there’s an ‘i’ because of the damn tittle you keep adding at the end!” Moondancer grit her teeth against the tickling sensation.

“The what?” Nightshade asked.

“Tittle, it’s the dot above an ‘i’ or ‘j’”

“Nightmare Moon, I wish there was plumbing down here just so I could give you a swirly for actually knowing that. What’s next, gonna flex about knowing what aglets are?” Nightshade bullied.

The sideways semi-circle was an easy guess for Moondancer but the rest of the word was a jumble of loops. Nightshade ground the tittle in extra hard this time. Moondancer’s mind raced to decipher the first word before Nightshade could continue and derail her train of thought. The first letter can’t be start with ‘J’ if the next two are ‘-i-c’. ‘F-i-c’? Fiction maybe, that could fit a book theme? What else; ficus, fictile, fickle--

“TICKLE!” Moondancer shrieked at the top of her lungs. “The first word is tickle, you bitch!”

“Took you long enough, honestly it was pretty obvious. What about the rest of the words though?”

Quick as a whip scribbled out the rest of the sentence. She paused to give the giggling girl a moment to guess. Moondancer stuttered but couldn’t think what the other words were. The second word seemed like it must be ‘no’ because of the rounded top strokes and the circling end before pen lifted to the third word.

The word was coming up again. Moondancer squeezed her eyes shut right after the tittle and dug her muzzle into her sweater. ‘Down-stroke and up-stroke right on top, small hump-- Gahh is that a shoulder or an arc! Another stem, another hump, it curves into a circle-- No! It’s too loose it’s gotta be an e--’ “ME! MEHEHEHEHE! REALLYHEHEHEHEHEHE?”

“Told you it was obvious. Ya know, for a nerd you’re not all that bright.”

Nightshade carved the last word into Moondancer’s sole. Time would crawl for Moondancer as she ran through every possible word and letter combination in her head with each stroke from the fountain pen. ‘It has to be something degrading. It’s not ‘please’, it’s not her name, it isn’t diamond dogs. Something ‘-er’? Rover? No it’s too short for any of their names.’

Nightshade started on the fifth repetition since she’d guessed the second word. She started with a top bar like the first word.

“AHHH-HAHAHAHAHAHA!” Laughter exploded out of Moondancer unable to resist anymore.

‘If I can’t figure this out she’s going to keep doing writing on my feet forev--’

“TICKLE ME FOREVER!” Moondancer cried out as her horn ring exploded out another search spell.

Nightshade dropped the pen without even finishing the exclamation point of the final line. The Diamond Dogs clamored about around the cell digging up the remaining gems in that portion of the caverns.

“Congrats dweeb, you figured it out!” Nightshade clapped her hands sarcastically. “And here’s your prize, your request shall be granted!”

“LEHEHEHEHEHT MEHEHEHEHEHE GOHOHOHOHOHO!”

Nightshade’s fingers skittered between Moondancer’s toes. The latex coated phalanges skated over ever surface and smeared the ink all over Moondancer’s soles. The poor mare could only laugh and laugh as the ruthless pegasus practiced her finger-painting.

Moondancer’s feet were stained a translucent black. Nightshade covered up the few remaining splotches of unmarred skin and dirtied Moondancer’s toes as well.

“And for the finishing touch,” Nightshade hefted up the hairdryer again.

Moondancer’s pupils shrunk like micro black holes evaporating from Hawkwing radiation.

“Didn’t you wonder why I never had to refill the pen?”

The gust from the hairdryer struck Moondancer’s feet with gale force. The black oil ink melted her soles like lava. No more noise came from Moondancer. Her chest still expanded and contracted wildly, but her laughter had grown silent.