Wicked Bliss

Life with the Master became straightforward: Rainbow Dash became a pet in the corner. He would regale himself by telling aloud tales of old exploits, anecdotes about his previous victims, musings about life, as though she were a dog who could not understand but would nonetheless respond to his emotion. He would hit her sometimes even if she hadn’t done anything, always with a smile on his face. He would let the drug wear off into the desperation phase, hear her scream. He made a habit of this. Every night he’d wait for her screaming to begin, and he’d let her stew in anguish for ten minutes before administering the dose again. It was his way of telling Rainbow Dash what awaited her if she ever displeased or betrayed him again.

‘I got the recipe from an old friend I met at the lab,’ he said happily as he prepared ingredients for lunch, Rainbow Dash lying tamely in her basket. ‘He was big and handsome … and big,’ he added with a suggestive smile, ‘although not so big once I finished with him. Cooking is chemistry of course and some of the most satisfying to perform and to indulge in. Did you know there’s a perfect way to fry everything? And the variables. There are more than you think! Temperature, thickness, density, cooking surface, surface area, quantity. Yes, it all comes into it. It’s art really, cooking, as is chemistry. Art is variable control, and the more you can control the more of an artist you truly are.’

He took pleasure in feeding her. Almost every day he’d bake seeded rolls for afternoon tea. He had quit his job so spent all of his time at home barring the occasional jaunt outside to purchase supplies. Rainbow Dash was allowed to go by and large where she wanted indoors, but he trusted her with nothing. Every cupboard had locks. Every tool he’d stacked on the trolley had vanished, stored away. Every door that could be locked was kept locked, and she had to ask him for permission to have things. He kept her busy, giving her odd jobs such as washing potatoes and carrots or sewing together his uniform or cleaning the fireplace or sprucing up the living room. He would call her Miss Dash or Radish now after complaining her name was too much of a mouthful to say. ‘Radish!’ he’d shout at her if she was in another room and he wanted to check on her. Most of the time she spent draped on a couch, rolling her eyes in the rapture of the latest high. She had become in a certain way the closest thing to a house-cat that a pony was capable of being, spending more than half her life asleep.

The Master would pat her head, brush her tail, cut her mane. He bought her special shampoos so that she could smell the way he liked. Sometimes he’d wash her himself even though she was capable of bathing alone in the tub upstairs. The pleasure he took from treating her like a lesser being, a dependent, a docile companion, seemed to equal the pleasure he’d taken in torturing her initially. He’d chuckle to himself in the evenings when he saw her shuffle wordlessly across the room to sit closer to the fire and watch the flames.

‘Mares are interesting,’ he mused one night, looking up from his newspaper. ‘I’ve had stallions here, but they’re boring on the whole. Brittle. They resist and resist until they break, and then that’s it. The fun’s over. Mares are more flexible. You can bend them. Shape them.’ He cackled. ‘Only look who I am telling! But you’re a special one, Miss Dash. There’s something about you that I really enjoy,’ he finished, grinning. She watched him through her wide, blank eyes. It was rare to see an expression on her face these days during the wellbeing phase. She was almost completely apathetic except when he would bring out a top-up dose as the equivalent to a treat. Then her eyes would bulge, and she would go to him and show affection, pawing, hugging, rubbing against him. He would grin as though it was exactly the behaviour he’d intended to cultivate all along, and he would give her her shot with a snicker, patting her on the cheek as she slid off into another round of bliss, ‘wicked bliss’ as he called it. The potion was not his invention but an appropriation from his previous victim, the not-so-big-anymore stallion from the lab. But he had perfected it, or so he told her again and again when he felt like boasting.

‘And it’s a mystery of course because of the colour. That’s what I’m really proud of! Oh, ponies would say, “Well, what does the colour matter?” But it does; of course it does! An effective creation is one thing, but a beautiful effective creation is another level of control. And the trick is to change the appearance without sullying the effects. Look at it, that beautiful, shocking pink, invitation and warning as one. You worry about trying it until you have, and then you can’t get enough of it!’

And then he would go out in his new uniform to reconnoitre. She would always be left restrained when he went outside. It seemed that still, even after all the evidence of her total submission, he did not want to risk the chance, however minute, that she could undermine his rule while she had the kingdom to herself.

One night he returned in an excellent mood. He’d even brought back a takeaway. He tossed the bag with his uniform aside for washing and brought out the plates. He served them both a large helping each of curry and rice.

‘I love this place,’ he said as he sniffed his plate and sighed with pleasure. ‘They really know how to do a base sauce.’

They ate in silence, the fire crackling in the corner. It would have been rather nice and quaint if it weren’t for the circumstances. As he ate, the Master commented, ‘She still hasn’t given up on you, you know, that Twilight Sparkle.’ Rainbow Dash didn’t react at all to the name and ate her food as though she hadn’t understood a word. ‘I saw her today,’ he added, smiling as he studied Rainbow Dash’s face like a hunter, searching for a physical response, for a sign that the pet still had a fragment of the pony left inside her.

‘H—how?’ came the reply. Rainbow Dash very rarely replied to anything. She very rarely opened her mouth. The Master took this as the sign he’d been after, but rather than irk him, it placed a purposeful little smile on his face.

‘I’ve been watching her,’ he said softly, scraping up rice with his fork and chewing. ‘I’ve been studying her. She looks very sad.’

‘Wh—why?’

‘Why, because she’s next! That’s why. I’ve decided. I want her. I want to have her here. You do too; I can see it. Think how nice that would be, for you to have another friend. And Twilight Sparkle … Princess Twilight Sparkle … What an accomplishment. What an achievement that would be, eh?’ He laughed and bit into his naan.

‘N—no, I meant …’ Rainbow Dash coughed a little then continued. ‘Wh—why is she sad?’

The Master blinked then grinned. ‘Well, I couldn’t honestly say. Maybe it has nothing to do with you at all. But that won’t do, you see, my dear little Radish, because I’ll be counting on her feelings for you to help me get to her. And counting on you too of course. Oh yes,’ he added, grinning even more widely. ‘You’ll be expected to do your part.’

Insofar as she was still capable of showing surprise, Rainbow Dash blinked, her food forgotten. ‘Wh—what would I do?’

‘I’m thinking about that,’ he said, scooping up the leftover curry with his bread. ‘One step at a time, Miss Dash.’

The plan in the end was simple in essence. The two main objectives as identified by the Master were these: one, Twilight Sparkle had to be successfully kidnapped, and two, the whole world had to believe that she was beyond saving, or in other words dead, which would prevent the unwanted search.

‘You have to be convincing,’ he would tell her again and again and again. ‘You have to make sure she believes you. If she doesn’t believe you, she won’t leave with you. You have to be absolutely convincing.’

If he had any qualms about Rainbow Dash’s loyalty to him (or to Twilight), he certainly made her position clear to her: ‘Remember how you feel every night,’ he would breathe into her ear as she laid at his hooves. ‘Remember the pain. Know that only I have the key to your salvation.’

Coupled with her nightly sessions of agony, the words certainly seemed substantial. In fact you would be hard pressed to say Rainbow Dash showed any signs of conflict at all. She did as she was bade by the Master, helped him fine tune the details of how exactly she would convince Twilight to accompany her to the hit site. The solution to the first objective was that Rainbow Dash would reappear on Twilight’s door, confess to having been kidnapped by a lunatic and tortured to the brink of madness, and say that due to lucky chance she had managed to escape him, but he had pursued her, and in the ensuing struggle she had killed him. Now terrified that she would be branded a murderess, she would beg Twilight for clemency and lead her to his body so that they could move it together. ‘Remember to stress that it has to be just you two. It has to be. The way you do that is through sheer, unadulterated terror. You have to make her feel so afraid for you, for your sanity. She has to feel that if she were to do the sensible thing and have her people deal with the problem, she would in fact be risking your immediate wellbeing. You must be convincing.’

‘Yes,’ Rainbow Dash would say, wide-eyed, nodding. ‘Yes.’

At the hit site would come into play the solution to the second objective. The Master had been constructing a bomb, which they would detonate and in so doing blow up their transport. The Master was sure Twilight would acquiesce to taking a transport as Rainbow Dash would appear too physically incapacitated as a result of her ordeal to fly. Before the bomb went off, Rainbow Dash would inject Twilight with a paralytic, at which point the Master, waiting in position, would transport them all to safety and then eventually back to the house for imprisonment. To complete the deception, a quantity of fur and feathers from each of them would be left on the transport at the time of its destruction. Rainbow Dash would surrender hers on the morning of the attack. Twilight’s they would take together by force.

The Master was fully aware of how entirely the scheme depended on Rainbow Dash, so he doubled her time in agony before the evening doses and increased the dosage of the drug too. The gag found use again, used to stifle her screams so that he could tell her again and again that this horrible fate awaited her eternally should she fail him.

‘If I lose,’ he would finish before leaning over to make the injection, ‘you lose. If we succeed, I shall be eternally grateful to you, and you will never feel pain like this ever again. I promise.’

The pressure of the prospect of failure had gotten to Rainbow Dash because she was now experiencing regular panic attacks, which the Master had to assuage through even further injections.

‘But wh—what if I’m not convincing enough?’ Rainbow Dash would pant, lying on her back in his hooves, tears pouring down her face.

The Master would grin down at her and say, ‘You will be absolutely convincing. Your fear shall be real, terrifying, because you know what awaits you if you can’t get her to follow you alone.’

On the eve of the penultimate day the Master gave Rainbow Dash a new dose. ‘I made it even more special,’ he told her. ‘This is the best there is. Savour it. Remember it. Treasure it. This is what I have in store for you when you succeed.’

By five PM the following night Rainbow Dash found herself on the streets of Canterlot, gazing up at the distant castle, her eyes wide, her lips trembling, her brow drenched in sweat.