FAIR

Chapter 3


Outside, Cammy's attention was caught by another sign. She pointed to it. "Ponygirl races? I've seen the ones on TV, but I've never been to one. It costs a little money."

Cammy had never seen a real ponygirl, in the flesh. They were woman, of course, not horses, women who had undergone a highly stylized body modification. They ran upright, rather than on all fours like a puppygirl. Though they were slaves, like puppygirls, they were at the opposite end of a spectrum from puppygirls in one sense: where puppygirls were the ultimate submissives, ponygirls carried themselves with pride and self-assurance, to the point that they were never referred to as "pets."

That there were women who chose the permanent surgical body alterations required to serve as a racing pony surprised Cammy, though she could imagine it attracting girls with certain personalities, self-images, and personal fantasies. And she'd just seen mermaids, which seemed even a little more extreme.

Alisa nodded eagerly. "Sure! I've never seen one in person either. I don't really know enough about it to do any betting, though."

Cammy shook her head. "I wouldn't want to. It's kind of nuts to put any money on it unless you really follow the sport closely."

Alisa looked at her and grinned. "That's us, right? We always want to study the reading material first."

Cammy laughed and squeezed her hand, and held it as they walked to the stadium.

The races were inside the football stadium, the only one of the fair's attractions to take place there. Admission was three dollars -- much less than it would ordinarily be for such races, and though the races, according to various visible signs, were an official Ponygirl Racing Association event, Cammy strongly suspected that none of the ponygirls here would be ones you would see in the televised races. Most likely they would be novices, at an early stage of their training.

Inside, there were several hundred onlookers, not nearly as many as would attend a football game, so there was no requirement to sit in the grandstand, though some did. Most were on the field, ringing the outside of the running track. A lot of them had taken places near what was obviously the finish line, with sparser crowds at other points along the track.

Alisa pointed. "It's not too crowded there, behind the starting line. Is that okay? They won't be running right in front of us, but we can still get a good look from there, without too many people in the way."

Just as they arrived at their chosen location, a voice over the stadium's sound system announced the next race, the last of four one-hundred-meter heats. Eight ponies, walking with their grooms, approached the starting line.

These ponygirls, who had been assembled on the infield with the others who were still awaiting their turn to race, approached the starting line from behind it, most of them walking in front of Cammy and Alisa to get there.

The races were organized in a way similar to track and field competitions. There were too many ponygirls for them all to run in a single race, so they ran in separate preliminary heats, with up to eight ponies in each, the top two finishers qualifying to be among the eight ponies in the final. You could bet on each preliminary heat, as well as on the final. The odds for the final changed according to when you placed the bet -- before or after the preliminaries.

One of the ponygirls, assigned to an outside starting position, walked by within just six or seven feet from Cammy and Alisa, giving them a much better look than they had imagined they would get. Cammy sucked in her breath -- the girl was really eye-catching. That was intentional, of course -- each girl's owner received a cut of the betting pool in proportion to the amount bet on the girl, with bonuses added depending on her finish in the race, so each of them was decorated in such a way as to encourage such bets.

Like all racing ponygirls, by long-standing tradition, she had no arms. As with the mermaids Cammy and Alisa had seen on video earlier, they had been amputated at her shoulders, and given attractive rounded knobs at the ends of her shoulders that looked as though she had been born this way. No doubt the plastic surgeons responsible for the mermaids' arm removal had been experienced with ponygirl body modification. For ponygirls, there wasn't really a practical reason for removing the arms. As Cammy understood it, it symbolized the lifelong commitment, as a slave, to a life that demanded full concentration on the abilities and training of her legs. The girl had known, when offering herself as a ponygirl, that once she had undergone the surgery, she could never be anything other than a pony. It was her declaration that she was certain of never wanting to be anything else.

Each pony had her own color, and the girl Cammy was looking at up close presented a bright yellow-green color theme. Her hair, or mane (each girl had long hair combed smoothly back along the top of her head and down her back, the sides of her head shaved, a mane that flowed dramatically behind her as she raced) was dyed that yellow-green color, as were her eyebrows and pubic hair -- the centuries-old tradition of decorating a ponygirl's bush was too ingrained in the culture to allow for any trimming. Her makeup included eye shadow, eye-liner, lashes, and lipstick again in that same color; her nipples and areolae were also yellow-green, likely using the eye shadow; and her leather harness was, again, that same color. All of it had a fluorescent glow that suggested it would be visible in the dark, though it really owed everything to sunlight. Of course, her slave collar matched as well. The collar appeared, to Cammy, to be covered in a fuzzy material, like felt. Aside from her collar, harness, and ponyboots (again yellow-green), the girl was nude, her skin a deep tan from long days of training outdoors.

The harness was mainly a decorative accessory, as she wasn't expected to pull a cart -- there was cart racing, of course, but in this race the girls would be running free. It consisted of straps that ran over her shoulders, crossed between her breasts and the middle of her back to attach, from both front and back, to a belt around her waist. It included cleverly-designed cups attached where the straps passed underneath the breasts, which gave the breasts some support while running.

The "ponyboots" were so called because centuries ago, they had been actual boots. Now they replaced her feet at the ankles -- a surgical-amputation-and-graft treatment. In their design, they resembled hooves. The springiness of the soles of the boots made it possible, after training, for her to run faster in them than any woman with feet.

There were enough different colors to choose from that there usually weren't two ponies with the same color theme in the same race, but just in case, each girl had a number, painted in large digits on the skin of her back, the two digits on either side of the place where the harness straps crossed. This particular girl was number twenty-six.

Aside from a bit of plastic surgery that reshaped her ears to come to a point at the top -- clearly visible with the hair shaved away around them -- the girl's one other significant body modification, completing the transformation of her human body to her chosen animal avatar, was her luxuriant tail, made from genuine horse hair, grafted surgically to her tailbone, two feet long and, of course for this girl, dyed to match her yellow-green color theme. It emerged from just above her buttocks like a brightly hued fountain, suggesting that her body had more beauty than it was able to contain within itself.

Of course, the ponygirl's lack of arms made her utterly dependent on her groom, and there was no other relationship in all the world of slavegirls that was like the one shared by pony and groom. In nearly all cases, or so Cammy had read, a pony racer and her groom had a pre-existing romantic relationship before committing themselves together as slavegirls. The pony loved the idea of being dependent on her groom, and the groom loved, with equal fervor, all of the duties of taking care of her pony: they were never apart, and never wanted to be, from waking until bedtime, and then slept together in the pony's stall -- a stall that included a television and offered Internet access, as well as a bathroom, with a shower and a toilet that was specially designed to accommodate a ponygirl and her tail. So life within it wasn't as bare as the word "stall" suggested. Keeping the ponygirl and her groom happy was a key to running a successful stable.

It was impossible to mistake which groom went with which pony. The grooms were each in a uniform of sorts, each wearing a t-shirt, shorts, running shoes, and slave collar, all in the exact same color as the pony's theme, as if to emphasize that they were a team together. Even the laces of the shoes matched the color theme. The groom Cammy was focused on, the one in yellow-green, had the legend "Banner Stables" on her t-shirt, announcing the ownership of herself and her pony.

Cammy knew that the pony and her groom, together, had eaten the pony's arms, the groom holding the meat for the pony who could no longer feed herself. It seemed to Cammy that it had to be an incredible bonding experience, the two sharing the meat of one's body, the groom making the pony's body part of her own.

Watching the ponygirl move past her, Cammy marveled at the girl's muscles -- not just her stunning legs and perfect butt, but also the taut abdominals, with a well-defined six-pack, and back muscles rippling as she walked. Everything about her said that this was a woman who devoted her life to being as powerful as she could be. The way she walked gave off waves of pride in herself that radiated from her almost visibly in the air.

The girl and her groom had been walking side by side, but as she approached the starting gate her groom came around in front of her, put a hand on each of her shoulders and began talking to her, softly but intently. Cammy couldn't hear any of it, but assumed the groom was reminding the pony about racing strategy and helping her establish her psychological racing mind-set.

The groom's eyes bored into the pony's, and the pony nodded a few times. Ponygirls, like puppygirls, were never heard to speak, though unlike puppies, whose avoidance of language was complete and permanent, using only barking for attention as part of their lifestyle as pure pets, a ponygirl did talk on occasion, but only to her groom in private. It was a necessary break in her animal persona, since some communication was required -- at a minimum, the ponygirl must tell her groom whether her body felt ready to race, whether a particular training exercise seemed to help or not, what muscles hurt and needed attention, and so on. According to interviews with grooms, the question of whether verbal interaction between pony and groom went beyond that minimum varied from pony to pony. In most cases, the pony held it as a point of professional pride and petgirl sensibility never to speak other than for those bare necessities. Not even during sex.

The pony Cammy was watching gave one final nod to her groom, and the groom pulled what looked like a candy bar -- likely some kind of energy bar -- from the satchel she was carrying, unwrapped it and held it up for the ponygirl to take a couple of bites, then picked up a plastic bottle and squirted a liquid into her pony's mouth. The pony swirled it around her mouth and spat it out. Her groom then gave her a quick peck on the lips, then rubbed the side of her head against her pony's -- clearly a minimal intimacy meant to express her love without distracting the girl from her upcoming run. The pony nodded again, and as a buzzer sounded, she entered her stall in the starting gate.

Moments later, a bell rang, the gates sprang open in front of the ponies, and the ponies emerged to sprint down the track, the crowd cheering them on. Cammy found it stunning to watch from this vantage point, different from any she had had on television, with the ponies running directly away from her, their long powerful legs flashing, their manes flowing, tails twitching side to side as if cheerleaders were waving pompons of all different colors. As far as Cammy and Alisa were from the finish line, neither of them could quite tell what the order of finish was. It appeared to Cammy that the girl she'd been watching, number twenty-six, had finished in about the middle of the pack, which would fail to qualify her for the final. Cammy was disappointed on her behalf.

Alisa pointed. "Let's get a view from that end. About thirty or forty feet past the finish there's not too many people."

Cammy nodded. As they walked that way, once again holding hands, Cammy asked Alisa if she'd ever considered being any kind of slavegirl. She found nothing surprising in Alisa's answer -- it was exactly what she'd expected.

"Not really. I don't have a problem with it, except... well, I want to keep learning new things, not settle into a life where you just do one thing. I did think about maybe the Hanging Academy for a while, because you do go to school and learn a lot there, but it's so specialized. I would have liked all the science study, and anatomy and physiology, but it's all aimed at one specific thing, and there's nothing else. It's like being in grad school and skipping the whole general undergrad curriculum. I don't want to concentrate on one thing yet." She smiled and shrugged. "And I'm not that attracted to hanging anyway."

Cammy grinned. "That's what I thought about it too! There's just so much out there I don't know yet. I want to keep digging at it. If we... If you... well, do you think you'd want to be pre-med? Like to get ready to do research for the mermaid program, or Dr. Colton's project?"

"Oh, sure! That'd be fascinating. And I know pre-med is heavy in science and math, but it's still general, until you really start focusing after you get in med school."

Cammy squeezed Alisa's hand still more tightly. Alisa seemed never to say anything that couldn't just as easily have come out of Cammy's mouth. Alisa reacted to the squeeze by smiling back.

As they walked, the speaker system carried the announcement that the preliminary runs at the hundred meter distance were over, and there would be several four hundred meter runs before the final hundred meter run. The trackside crowd began drifting back towards Cammy and Alisa, and Cammy realized that at the four hundred meter distance, a complete circuit of the oval track, the finish line would be at the same place as the starting gate. She and Alisa were now about fifty feet past that point, the bulk of the crowd had moved behind them, and they decided to stay and watch from there.

Once again a group of ponies and their grooms walked out of the infield onto the track. Among these women with muscular, powerful bodies, Cammy's eyes were drawn to one especially magnificent specimen, and not just because she was taller than the rest, obviously over six feet. The girl was walking with such assured authority and pride. She was the archetype of the perfect ponygirl. An odd sudden flash of recognition shot through Cammy, startling her. She didn't know why a racing pony here would look familiar, since she'd already decided none of these today could be at the top level of competition, so none would have been on television. Then she looked at the pony's groom, and made the connection. She raised her hands to her mouth and gasped.

Alisa spun towards her. "What is it? Are you okay?"

Wide eyed, Cammy pointed. "The pony there, the one in violet." Actually the pony's theme was pale version of violet which, like the other colors, seemed to glow of its own light.

Alisa looked in that direction, "I see her. You know her?"

Cammy nodded. "Jenna Selmon. She was the star basketball player at my high school. A year ahead of me, so she graduated last year. The girls' team won the league championship, and it was mostly because of Jenna." Cammy laughed. "They even beat the boys' team that year, and that was a really big deal. Jenna scored thirty points. I used to go to the games." Cammy did love sitting in the stands at a game, where she could feel she was an accepted part of the crowd, with no teachers asking questions that only she knew the answers to, no students seeing her test scores and accusing her of wrecking the grading curve, no one mocking her nerdy choice of reading materials. "And her groom is Tracy Akins. She was on the team too. They were girlfriends, of course. They'd walk around campus and everybody knew who they were."

"Did you know she wanted to be a ponygirl?"

Cammy shook her head. "No idea. Well, I guess it's not that big a surprise, though. She was on the track team, too, in spring. And she was so... intense. Like competition was everything." Cammy giggled. "And she liked the attention, and seemed to like showing off her body. So I guess I could see her going this way."

Cammy had never before seen a slave she had known before her slavery, let alone one who'd been through surgical body modification. That was the main reason she hadn't recognized Jenna immediately, despite her face being so familiar. There was the ponygirl hairstyle and its violet color, so different from Jenna's short brown hair of her high school days. The pointed ears, the lack of arms. And Cammy had never seen Jenna naked before. And of course, there was that tail.

Tracy's violet t-shirt read "Pennock Stables." Cammy had heard the name, which was a sign that they must be one of the elite ponygirl farms.

Cammy wondered how long Jenna would have been in training by this time. She had graduated... when was it, sixteen months ago. But Cammy was sure that a number of those months had been spent recovering from her surgeries, learning to deal with the discomfort of the tail until it no longer interfered with her movements and felt like a normal and accepted part of her body, learning how to walk in the ponyboots with no arms for balance, exercising to recover the pre-surgery strength in her legs after the long layoff -- and her buff body suggested she'd gone well beyond that. It seemed likely that Jenna had only been in full-fledged training for racing for at most six months, maybe less. Probably longer than that for strength training and conditioning.

Jenna was standing now, just short of the starting gate -- though she wasn't really standing, she was bouncing up and down in a way Cammy hadn't seen any of the other girls do. It occurred to Cammy that that sort of bouncing in ponyboots couldn't be easy, with no ankles to help, and required both extra leg strength and a finely-tuned sense of balance.

Jenna suddenly started a set of deep knee-bends, and though Cammy hadn't seen a sign she'd been about to do that, obviously Tracy had anticipated it -- she'd gone behind Jenna to hold her tail up off the ground during each squat. Cammy assumed it was to avoid having the brightly colored tail pick up any dust from brushing the track.

Once again a buzzer signaled that it was time for the girls to enter the gate. Seconds later they burst out of the gate as it opened to the sound of a bell.

The race, at this longer distance, wasn't a full-out sprint this time. The ponies, coming out of the gate, were spread out in a line across the track, but soon bunched together as they approached the turn. Jenna had started from a middle position in the gate, and was in the middle of the pack going into the turn, but soon began moving up.

By the middle of the back straightaway, Jenna was in the lead. Her mane and tail were two violet streams flowing behind her, as if taunting the other ponies. Cammy didn't realize she was jumping up and down and clapping until she saw that Alisa was doing it too -- Alisa was even shouting, "Go, Jenna!"

By the time the ponies came out of the last turn, Jenna was several body-lengths ahead of the rest. The starting gate having been pulled out of the way, the ponies all sprinted to the finish line, Jenna continuing to stretch her lead. She won easily, by a wider margin than Cammy could ever recall seeing in any race at that distance on television. The crowd, perhaps energized by Cammy and Alisa, cheered more loudly than for any of the sprints.

Beyond the finish line, the grooms all ran out onto the track to tend to their ponies. Jenna, barely seeming winded and clearly elated, her whole body glowing now with sweat, jumped up and down excitedly. Tracy ran to her and threw her arms around her, seemingly as much for the purpose of keeping Jenna from hurting herself as in celebration. She managed to settle Jenna down, and they shared a long kiss.

Cammy's attention was caught by a pony in orange, the one who had finished last, lagging badly behind the rest. She was bent over, struggling to catch her breath, and as her groom ran up to her she straightened and collapsed sobbing into her groom's arms.

The groom rubbed her pony's back, letting her cry for a moment, then held her at arms' length, saying softly but insistently, "Cindy, look at me. Look at me. Look at me..."

At last the pony, her eyes red and still streaming, her makeup running, her lips quivering, her shoulders heaving as she tried to repress the sobs, gave her attention to her groom. The groom, still speaking softly, said, "Cindy, halfway through, right there..." the groom pointed towards the opposite side of the track, "You lost your stride. Remember what Coach Penny has been saying about gliding? How you've been using too much energy going up and down while you run? You were doing really well up until there, gliding like Coach says, but then you went back to your old stride and you were coming too high off the ground. And you're way too out of breath now. Did you remember what Coach said about breathing tempo?" The groom pressed her palm against Cindy's chest above her breasts, as if to remind her of the proper technique. "How to breathe at the start so you have more at the end?" Cindy shook her head and burst into sobs again, her face buried against her groom's shoulder.

The groom worked to calm her again. "Hey, shhhh, shhhh, it's okay, it's okay. This isn't a bad thing, honey, it's a good thing. It means you have a way to get better. We know things you can work on and improve on. I know you. I know what you're capable of. I know these other ponies too, they've just been doing it longer than you. You'll have all the experience they've had soon." Cindy, eventually, began nodding, her tears under control, even managing a small, shaky smile. Her groom kissed her on each cheek, as if to kiss away the tears, and then on the lips. "I love you, babe."

Cammy was relieved, and again fascinated by the pony/groom relationship. She'd been worried that Cindy's poor finish might doom her to be sold away from the racing circuit, to spend her life in much heavier ponygirl labor, but obviously her groom anticipated no such problem. Clearly Cindy must be at a sufficiently early point in her training that lapses were to be anticipated and forgiven. And if the loving support of her groom was an advantage, Cindy was going to win someday. Or at least not finish last.

Jenna, on the other hand, was clearly a rising star. She would almost surely be in the televised races in front of crowds of thousands in the near future. Cammy laughed.

Alisa grinned and squeezed her hand once more. "What?"

"I was just thinking someday I could tell people that I knew Jenna before she was a pony... well, okay, maybe 'knew her' is stretching it just a little -- and also that I saw her race before she was famous."

Alisa's eyes lit up. "Yeah, I can say that last part too. Of course, all these people here today saw her, but they don't know who she is, so when she's on TV they won't remember they saw her here. We can remind them."

A thrill ran through Cammy at the way Alisa used "we," as if it was obvious they would be together. She nodded. "Lunch?"

Alisa nodded emphatically. "Sure."



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