There were always little rituals to be observed and even the smallest of goals to be achieved in the space of a day. They were the routines and the mental talismans that kept Hannah's overactive brain in check and allowed her to manage the obsessive nature of her thoughts from one hour to the next without spinning out of control. Deprived of their comfort and familiar nature she was often scared to imagine what might happen to the complicated interior world that was her own mind.

The chance to leave the backstage area and make it to the tour bus before any of her band mates was just one of those rituals. One that was harder than most to manage and the importance of which would have been lost on the guys with whom she shared the cramped conditions while they were on the road together.

She could have simply made her needs in this area clear to them and they would have probably understood and been accommodating towards her. But there was a deep streak of stubbornness that ran through Hannah's character, only made worse by her obsessive nature and the all too real lack of acceptance for women in the world of a touring band. This kept her from opening up and meant that her problems remained her own.

On another level, it also meant that she had earned a reputation in certain quarters as something of a demanding bitch.

The truth was that she simply felt the need to acclimatise herself to the space in which she would soon be forced to spend the best part of a day with three men before the offending parties arrived on the scene.

Hannah was as close to her band mates as it was possible for her to be on a platonic level and the band prided itself on the fact that they had managed to avoid any messy romances between the members. But no matter how much she loved the men she worked so closely with almost every day of the year, they were still men and there were just some things that one gender needed that were totally alien to the other.

Most of the time she would have been happy to hang around with them, play on the console, swap jokes and maybe even work on a song if the mood took them. It was just a fact of life that she needed no more than a few minutes to, she hated how pseudo-spiritual it sounded, centre herself and see to her more feminine needs. Once that was done she could cope with the testosterone addled minds of the guys and more often than not give back as good as she got.

But that was touring, a fine balance of grasping personal space for mind and body so that you could cope with the body odour, snoring and general mess that the other members of the band generated in order to keep working as a unit rather than descending into a fight over some stupid and pointless issue.

Tonight she had been lucky enough to be able to use one of the inevitable character flaws of the average heterosexual male against her band mates and escape the usual clamour for photos and autographs by the back entrance of the arena. The majority of the fans waiting for them had been female, and while her own admirers were by no means all male, this crowd had been more interested in the other three quarters of the band. No amount of modern male sensitivity and supposed respect for women was going to keep the guys from basking in the adoration of two dozen adoring fans.

Hannah welcomed the feeling of the air con as it hit her and then enveloped her totally with the door sliding closed behind her. She had been raised on the east coast and the ever present heat that some people in other states seemed to take for granted was hard for her to cope with. Coming back to the bus after hours spent in the relentless dry air was a little like coming home and always made her able to begin to unwind.

She savoured every second that she had the cool, shady interior of the bus to herself, thankful for the blacked out windows and the way the sounds outside were blunted and indistinct. As her mind truly started to come down, there was a moment of pause when she realised that someone must have been on the bus while they were still onstage. It was not an unusual thing to happen and she could not see that anything had been disturbed or taken, but still the interior seemed cleaner or less cluttered than she recalled.

It was, she concluded, most likely nothing.

Perhaps one of the crew had been through and tidied on a whim or cleared the space while on an errand for one of the guys.

The only reason she noticed was the damn tendency that she had for obsessing and scrutinizing the smallest detail. Anyone else, anyone normal, would have just walked into the bus and not seen that there was a difference in the way they had left it at all.

Frustrated with her own inability to turn off her thoughts, Hannah slumped onto her bunk and sank her head into the pillow.

She took a deep breath and tried to relax.

It was to no avail as she sat straight back up and stared in surprise at the bedclothes.

They were clean and fresh, as though they had just been laundered.

Now she was irate.

It was another odd little quirk, but she had made everyone who needed to know well aware of the fact that she was in charge of changing her own bedding. Some kids had grown up with security blankets, but Hannah had always been comforted by the familiar smell of her own sheets. It quite weird and more than a little filthy, she was well aware. Never the less she slept far better and woke far more refreshed when she was sleeping on bedclothes that had her own scent well and truly worked into them.

She pulled her satchel out of the locker beneath her bunk, meaning to write an entry in her journal in the hope of getting the emotions out of her system. But when she opened the flap, she found that there was nothing inside save for two or three reams of copier paper, still sealed and unopened. Her books and journal were nowhere to be seen, as if they had been replaced with something of the same size and weight in order to disguise the fact that the real contents had been removed.

Under the same circumstances, another person might have been disturbed by the realisation that their possessions had been tampered with. Hannah was different in that respect, hardened to more than a few years of oddball attention from fans who were more than capable of performing bizarre acts to show their devotion or stealing personal items as souvenirs. She was fairly sure that she could have coped with the bedclothes being taken, but her journal was a step too far.

She tossed the bag onto the floor and stormed the length of the bus, back to the door where she had climbed on board only minutes before. Not in the mood for delicacy, she hammered her foot into the bar that opened the door in a move that she hoped would facilitate her exit from the bus while at the same time bleeding off a small portion of her anger.

In the end it achieved neither as the bar refused to budge an inch and she succeeded only in jarring her ankle in the effort. Hannah tried again, this time pushing the bar by hand. But there was still no movement and the door remained firmly closed.

Before she could ponder the mystery of the uncooperative door any further, Hannah was forced to brace herself against the nearest wall as the bus lurched beneath her feet and the sound of the engine filled her ears. She had spent long enough cooped up in vehicles of its type to be perfectly aware of the sounds and sensations that meant the thing was starting up and preparing to get back on the road.

In that moment, none of it made sense.

Why would someone steal her journal, lock her on the tour bus and then drive the damn thing away while she was still stuck inside? If she was being kidnapped, her abductor had chosen the single most conspicuous vehicle possible to drive her away in. The bus was massive, cumbersome and had the band's livery painted on almost every surface in rather vibrant colours as well.

Hannah's overactive mind clambered over the situation until a thought occurred to her; the bus was the worst choice for a kidnapper, but then there was far more to be said for something that might at first seem to be the tour bus when in fact it was a different vehicle altogether.

It had been the realisation that the objects in the satchel had been almost a perfect match for what she expected to find inside in terms of weight and heft. What if the idea was to simply make the whole thing look like the real bus at first glance? Just enough to fool the eye for long enough so that a trap could be sprung?

She made her way carefully back along the corridor that ran the length of the interior of the bus, stopping to examine things as she passed that had seemed perfectly normal and innocent only minutes before. Guitar case opened to reveal nothing but blocks of heavy plastic moulded in the shape of the absent instruments. Bags that should have contained clothes and shoes were simply stuffed with bundles of fabric that mimicked the form and weight of the items that should have been within. Nothing that she could find inside the bus was as it should have been, noting was genuine and everything was a fake.

By now she was aware of an increase in speed as the bus seemed to have left the relatively narrow streets around the arena behind in favour of more open road. Hannah could only guess that the vehicle had reached the outskirts of the city and was now driving on the multi-lane highways that linked it to the other municipalities in the same state and beyond.

The one thing that she was determined not to do was give in to panic in the face of her being kidnapped. There was no way that she could break the windows of the bus with what she had to hand and she was not about to try to use the intercom to speak with whoever was up in the driver's seat. So she resolved that the only thing she could do for the moment was to keep herself as calm as possible and make her attempt to escape when the bus finally came to a stop and the kidnappers made their next move.

It was times like this that she really regretted the rule the band had stuck to for so long, the one that banned them all from taking mobiles anywhere near the stage. At the time it had been a stroke of genius intended to keep them focussed on the task at hand, but who could have known how it would come back to bite her in such a way?

"Sit down and relax."

The sound of a voice over the intercom took Hannah by surprise, which was only added to by the fact that it was clearly a string of words that had been edited together from a number of different sources. The pitch and volume jumped between each separate word and it was clear that the original source had been taken from a recording of someone singing rather than speaking.

"Believe me, you'll make it easier on yourself if you don't resist."

Hannah realised with a sense of disgust that she was listening to her own voice, chopped and sampled from songs that she had written and performed herself. Whoever was responsible for her abduction was using her own words and even her own voice to urge her to cooperate.

She found the nearest intercom panel and literally pounded on the button that would allow her to speak to the person on the other end. But all that she was rewarded with was the sound of a catch being released perhaps a foot below the intercom itself.

Before she could glance down and see what was responsible for the sound, there was a noise that could have been a sharp shot of air and no more than a fraction of a second later a cold sensation began to spread out from her stomach.

Hannah stepped back a pace and looked down at her abdomen to see a small object pinning her T-shirt to her belly. It was no more than half an inch in length and as she gingerly pulled on one end, a pointed tip emerged from where it had been buried in her flesh a moment earlier.

She had time only to regard the thing for a few seconds, coming to the conclusion that it looked just like a tiny dart even as her thoughts began to grow slow and clouded. The cold sensation had spread through most of her body by that time and as it reached her hands, she dropped the dart onto the floor.

There could not have been another ten seconds between the thing landing and her legs folding under her as she joined it upon the floor of the bus.

The bus pulled off the highway and into a deserted warren of streets that were populated with vacant lots and slowly decaying industrial buildings. There was no sign of a living person for blocks in any direction as it passed and it was alone on those empty streets as it had been on the highway before them.

There had been no reason for anyone to suspect or follow the tour bus, because despite the gaudy livery in which it was covered and the large number of fans that jostled to see the members of the band, there was still a seemingly identical vehicle parked outside the arena from which it had come. A clever trick of switching performed just at the correct moment had allowed this decoy to snare its target and then leave the scene of the crime with no witnesses and arousing no suspicions.

Still alone and unseen, the bus turned off the road and into a nondescript compound surrounded by a chain link fence and characterised by nothing beyond grey concrete in the middle of a landscape that was made of the same material. It came to a halt in front of the only building on the plot, a vast and impersonal block of brick that could have served any number of purposes; such was its anonymous shape and lack of external features. Only a vast sliding door that stood at the top of a wide ramp could be seen as a means of entrance and it was towards this that the bus drove once it was within the limits of the compound.

The door slid open with a speed and silence that was seemingly at odds with its outer appearance of rust and neglect and it was not long before the bus had disappeared inside. As soon as the vehicle was inside, the door began to sweep closed with the same speed, sealing the building and whatever lay inside from the sight of the outside world.

Unforgiving artificial lighting guttered into life, illuminating every corner of the chamber into which the bus had driven. There was no proper way in which the space could have been described as anything but a chamber; it was a vast expanse of grey that stood fully two stories in height and was empty save for its new occupant and a number of metal doors set into the walls at floor level. The only sound was that of the bus as it filled the space with noise that dwindled to nothing as it came to a halt and the engine was brought to a stop.

The bus stood still and silent for a number of minutes until the sound of the nearest door sliding open broke the silence. The way in which the door slid to one side and revealed only a small space beyond instantly gave away the fact that it was the entrance to a lift, rather than simply a portal into another room on the same level. The interior of the lift car was barely large enough to accommodate the two men and the medical gurney that they wheeled out into the chamber; but if they had been cramped during the course of their ride the men made no show of discomfort.

In reality they made no show of emotion whatsoever as their faces were hidden behind breathing apparatus that formed part of the white jumpsuits that each of them wore. The suits covered them from head to toe and made the men appear to be prepped for handling the most hazardous materials imaginable. But there was no sign of danger to them as they made their way quickly to the closest door of the tour bus, making no sign of reaction as the door that had refused to open for Hannah, hissed quietly and swung open at their approach.

One man boarded the bus as soon as he was able and made his way to where Hannah's unconscious form lay, blocking the corridor. As he began to make what looked like a rudimentary examination of her condition, the second man climbed aboard and watched his progress from a distance of a few feet. When the first man looked back over his shoulder and nodded to the second, he closed the space between them and helped as his colleague began to lift the girl gently off the floor.

The first man stepped over Hannah's body and grasped her beneath the arms while the second seized her around the knees. Together they carried her carefully off the bus and laid her on the gurney, taking care to strap her down at the hands, ankles and across the midriff. It was impossible to tell if this was done to keep her from falling off the thing or in order to prevent her struggling should she regain consciousness. Possibly there was a measure of both concerns, but in all likelihood it seemed that the true reason was the latter rather than the former.

With their charge strapped to the gurney, the men retraced their steps to the lift.

Some form of mechanical courtesy that was more often than not absent from such contraptions elsewhere in the world had meant that the door remained open, as if awaiting their return.

They wheeled the gurney inside and flattened themselves against the walls as the doors slid shut once more and the lift began to descend silently into whatever basement levels lay below.

The lift doors opened to allow the gurney to be wheeled out into a corridor so utilitarian and devoid of features that it might have been the interior of a fallout bunker. The same strip lighting as served on the floors above lit the corridor, but down here it did not reach every corner and strange shadows lurked on the edges of vision. There were no marks or signage to differentiate right from left as they emerged from the lift, nevertheless the men took no time to pause as they turned to the left and made their way off down the corridor.

They frequently passed heavy metal doors on either side of the corridor and from behind them were audible only a faint hint of what was going on behind them. The corridor itself was silent apart from the sound of the gurney and the feet of the men as they ignored every passing portal and hurried onwards, making one turn after another seemingly from memory alone.

All at once they stopped, standing before a door no different to the eye than any other.

This one they turned the gurney towards and entered as one opened the door and the other wheeled their charge inside.

With the door closed behind them, the men flipped switches to light the interior of the room.

They were standing in a space that had been fitted with what could have been mistaken at first sight for an operating theatre. There was a metal table in the rough centre of the room and the walls were lined with what could have been diagnostic instruments. But closer examination revealed the lack of any actual medical supplies, no drips, scalpels or clamps could be seen. In addition the devices that could be noted would have been more in keeping with household maintenance, including what looked like adhesive guns, staplers and sheets of plastic or tarpaulin.

The room now fully lit, the men unstrapped Hannah from the gurney and placed her on the table. This done, one of them made a final appraisal of her while the other plucked a clipboard from a nearby work surface and proceeded to scribble down some notes on the paper it held.

Before he was finished making his notes, the door to the room opened and they were joined by four men in theatre robes that seemed to incorporate many of the features of the first men's hazmat suits. The newcomer closest to the man who had been writing on the clipboard plucked it from his hand and made a motion towards the door without a second glance at him.

Without a word or gesture of objection, the first man made his way to the door where he was joined a moment later by the second. Both exited the room, closing the door behind them and leaving Hannah with the new arrivals.

Almost the moment that the original men left the room, those in theatre robes who had been doing little more than standing still all the while, suddenly seemed to come to life as they moved off to different corners of the room and began to prepare various items the purpose of which was truly baffling to the casual observer.

The man who held the clipboard walked over to the table and spent a few moments studying the contents of the notes and the girl lay out upon it. He repeated some of the checks that had already been completed such as taking her pulse and studying the reaction of her pupils to a small torch produced from his robes.

His examination was soon over and he returned the clipboard to its place before carrying a small metal tray back to the table. On the tray were an unlabelled vial and a syringe, filled and ready for use. The man located a vein on Hannah's left arm and sank the needle into her skin. He had worked out the dosage based on the time elapsed since the dart had penetrated her skin and taking into account the size and age of the subject, the injection would ensure she was out for longer than was strictly necessary.

As with any drug, a larger dose was more risky than a smaller one, but there was no room for error and no one in the room wanted the subject to wake up in the middle of the process they were about to perform.

The men behind the masks may have been anonymous and devoid of all identity, they may have been total strangers to Hannah even if she had been conscious and given the chance to see their faces. But the same could not be said for the girl on the table in relation to the men in the masks. They knew every inch of her body and were familiar with her physical form to a degree that was simply not possible without intense study over a prolonged period and with a definite purpose. They knew Hannah's petite frame from top to bottom, were familiar with her feminine and yet slight body in every way possible.

The man who had administered the drug was joined by one of his colleagues who carried a roll of cutting tools and wheeled a sturdy bin on castors behind him. At a nod from the first man that seemed to be a signal to proceed, he busied himself with the task of removing her clothes.

Hannah had been offstage for no more than a few minutes when she had reached the tour bus and she was still wearing the clothes that she had performed in that night as a result. She had never been one to choose elaborate costumes for the bands gigs and she was convinced that she did not suit overtly feminine garments. The fitted red T-shirt that she wore above denim shorts was testament to that conviction, and while she chose to cover her legs with tights that were divided between yellow on her left and red on her right, a pair of canvas trainers completed the outfit. In combination with her choppy hair, dyed a similarly vibrant orange, Hannah presented the image of a woman who was more pixy then siren.

The laces of her trainers were simply sliced through with a pair of clippers and then pulled off her feet, revealing them clad in the tights that were now visible from the tip of her toes to the point where they disappeared into her shorts. The man dropped them into the bin without a backwards glance as he worked.

He undid the button at the waist of her shorts and pulled down the zipper to reveal Hannah's groin beneath the thick nylon of her tights. A firm tug dragged the shorts under her buttocks and started them down her thighs and then to her knees. When they reached her ankles, the man lifted her feet enough to pull them off completely and they joined her trainers in the bin.

Though he had taken the time to undress Hannah below the waist, the man chose to take the clippers to her T-shirt instead of peeling it off her body. He lifted the bottom of the shirt and sliced through the front, parting it so that the two edges fell to either side of her chest. Cutting the T-shirt from sleeve to collar on both sides took only seconds and the tattered remnants of the garment were soon yanked from beneath her.

For some reason the man turned next to her tights, pulling them away from her body and rolling them down her legs. His manner in doing so was by no means slow, but even a casual observer would have been able to wonder why he took more time and care with Hannah's legs than he did with her torso. Was it possible that one of these men who had shown no emotion whatsoever towards the girl on the table was trying to secretly indulge himself without being noticed? Perhaps it was so, but the moment that another of the men glanced over to see how matters were progressing, he hurried his efforts and completed the task of stripping the tights from the legs.

Beneath her clothes, Hannah had been wearing simple and rather nondescript underwear that consisted of a strapless bra and panties. Her skin was pale and patterned with the hint of delicate freckles in certain places, the hair that became visible as her last items of clothing were removed was a dark brown in colour.

Now that she was naked, another handing over took place as the man who had stripped her was replaced by another who carried a bowl of water and a simple disposable razor. He was more efficient in his work and soon began to shave Hannah's body of all the hair that he could find save for that on her head and her eyebrows. When he was done there was nothing left but smooth and slightly raw skin to be seen.

A more complex stage of her treatment was announced by the arrival of two of the men to handle the next task. They brought to the side of the table what looked at first glance to be a jumpsuit of some exceptionally pliable material, yellow in colour and with an appealing texture that resembled lycra. But upon closer inspection, the thing could be seen to be open at the back while having a hood attached at the collar and the shape of the sleeves and legs were very unusual indeed. Rather than ending in a cuff or incorporating a glove or sock for the appropriate appendage, the ends of the limbs instead flared out to accommodate strange shapes that flared out from the line of the suit and ended in circular pads perhaps four or five inches from one side to the other.

The men began to guide Hannah's legs into those of the suit, pulling the material over her skin and pushing her feet down into the strange shapes at the end. There her feet sank into a firm and yet at the same time yielding substance which seemed to swallow them whole and grip them tightly. It hugged her claves where it was little wider than her own legs and then gradually became wider as it reached the bottom of the legs, only stopping to form the circular base that replaced any defined foot.

The rest of her legs were soon covered as the suit was pulled tightly over them and it became clear that the garment had been made specifically to fit Hannah's dimensions as more of her body was swallowed beneath the yellow material.

At her groin the material was fitted to her crotch just as tightly before being stretched across her stomach and over her naked breasts. Each of these was slipped into its own sheath within the suit, fitting their shape perfectly so that once they were inside they stood as pert and round as they had before. But the difference was also plain to see, now that they were covered in the same yellow as two thirds of Hannah's body. The delicate nipples were picked out in a shade of orange that contrasted well with the more dominant yellow, smoothed and rendered in thicker layers of the same material.

Hannah's slender arms were placed into the sleeves, her hands sinking into the same material that had claimed her feet. The effect was more subtle here though, the size of the rounded shape in which the arms ended was more in keeping with her own hands and the lines from the wrist followed her own limbs. As the material engulfed her hands, it was clear that while she would be unable to move her digits in any way, Hannah would retain the ability to rotate her wrists while wearing the suit.

With all of her limbs in place, the hood was pulled over Hannah's head after a cap had been applied to cover her hair and make her appear bald. The features of the hood were an uncanny likeness to her own, different only in that they seemed to have been designed as an exaggeration of the real girl rather than a simple copy. Plumped lips in a shade of orange that matched her nipples pouted in a way that Hannah had never been comfortable with and her eyebrows of the same colour somehow managed to make even a neutral expression into a lusty sulk. Her eyelids were matched by the hood as well and in the same orange, long lashes spreading from their edges like the flapping wings of a butterfly.

One of the men turned her onto her back once she had been fully dressed while another used a small device to seal the edges of the suit together, fusing the material so that there was no need for a zipper.

Moments later the cellular adhesive lining the inside of the suit became active and began to bond to Hannah's skin as the material pulled ever tighter to her skin. Soon there was no way to differentiate between the suit and the woman wearing it, so strong was the effect of the adhesive on her body. The lines of her vagina became visible, the definition of her nipples stood out against her breasts and the lips of her mask opened as they covered her own.

With a painful attention to detail, the men examined the openings and orifices of her body to ensure that the suit was perfectly aligned with the girl beneath. Gloved fingers probed Hannah's mouth, vagina and anus to be certain that she would be able to function without impediment now that she wore a new and artificial skin.

Seeing that Hannah's mouth had opened slightly at the pull of the adhesive, one of the men took the opportunity to slide a small plastic device between her lips and push it to the back of her tongue. The presence of the device made her swallow in an unconscious effort to clear the blockage, but the device had been designed to take advantage of this reflex and the action only caused it to slip further down her throat. Eventually it came to rest against her vocal chords where it lodged itself firmly. The thing would present no impediment to her breathing nor stop consuming food or drink. But it would have a profound effect upon her voice, as she would later discover.

For the final touches to her new body, Hannah was turned onto her stomach with her head propped upon a foam pillow so that, had she been awake, she would have been looking straight ahead.

Two of the men approached the table carrying what looked like elaborate hairpieces in an orange that was a little darker than the colour of her lips and nipples. The first they attached to her seemingly bald head, strong glue holding the thing in place as it extended down the back of the neck and only came to a tapering halt in the middle of her back. The effect was a mane of hair that stood semi-erect and flopped over Hannah's face, framing her yellow features in orange.

The second hairpiece was longer and ended in what looked like a plug of some kind with sharp needles protruding a good inch from the end. The man holding the thing located a socket at the base of Hannah's spine and just above her buttocks, into which he thrust the plug so that the needles sank into her flesh. When he removed his hand it was clear to see that he had fitted a long, glossy tail to the girl's rear that matched her new mane perfectly.

He prodded the bottom of her spine with a metal probe and watched as the tail responded as if it were a part of her. As it was the thing had been plugged into her nervous system and would move in the same manner as any other of her natural appendages.

Finally one of the men placed what looked like a high-tech version on a branding iron to Hannah's right thigh, just an inch onto the buttock. There was a sound like that of a large stapler being depressed and when he removed the device it had impressed upon her skin the stylised image of a heart in the same orange that coloured her hair and various parts of her body.

The addition of the tail meant that Hannah could not be turned onto her back, so the men simply left her where she lay and retired from the room once their work was done.

Only when one took a step back and appreciated the strange features of Hannah's new body did it become apparent what had been done to her. Alone the elements were puzzling and alien, but taken together they began to make some kind of disturbing sense.

The rounded extremities were not simply blunt stumps, they were exaggerated hooves.

The hairpieces were not outlandish when they were taken as a mane and a tail.

The heart on her thigh was not a tattoo at all, it really was intended to be a brand of some kind.

Hannah's body had been transformed from that of a woman to that of a cartoonish equine. Her skin replaced with smooth lycra, her hands and feet turned into hooves and her hair replaced with a more fitting mane and tail.

All in all she looked like nothing more than a human being melded with a Pony Pal, the ubiquitous brand of plastic ponies that children the world over played with and collected with the devotion of a cult.

None of this seemed to matter to the men in the hazmat suits as they returned to the room and lifted the unconscious human pony from the table and back onto the gurney.

Maybe they had seen stranger things in their time, or maybe they knew to keep their thoughts and observations to themselves when presented with such things.

Either way they wheeled Hannah out of the room and away in silence.

Hannah woke slowly, the pleasant sensation of a deep and truly refreshing sleep proving strong enough to keep down the odd feeling that something was wrong. For a time there were only the vague details of her surroundings, fed to her without conscious thought by her senses as they came alive a little more with each passing moment.

She knew that she was warm and lay upon something that was very comforting, the feeling of it pleasant against her skin. She was also aware that there was an almost sweet smell on the air that she could not place in her semi-aware state, it was clean and simple in nature and not at all familiar to her nose. There were also faint sounds that reached her on the breeze, sounds that reminded her of birdsong heard from a distance.

It was only when she finally opened her eyes that Hannah finally remembered that none of those things were consistent with the sights, sounds and smells she associated with a morning on the tour bus.

She glanced around and saw that she was laid on top of what seemed to be, of all things, a pile of hay and inside some kind of small structure with walls made of wooden planks. There were no windows that she could see; only a door in the middle of one of the narrow walls that seemed to be cut into two halves with the top open to admit daylight.

So, she thought, it was a kidnapping.

Hannah wondered for a moment if she was in the hands of some demented fan or at the mercy of a more sinister and dangerous type of person.

Her thoughts became more urgent as she realised that the hay was rubbing against her skin in a way that would not have been possible had she been wearing clothes. Things only got worse when she made an unconscious effort to cover herself and realised that she could not feel her hands.

Things must have been serious if her kidnappers had stripped her naked and bound her hands.

Hannah decided that there was nothing else for it; she would have to make herself known to whoever was behind all of this and see what she was dealing with.

She drew in a lungful of breath and tried to shout, hoping to attract someone's attention.

The noise that emerged from her mouth took her totally by surprise.

"Hello, is there anyone there?"

That was what she had intended to say, but instead she had uttered a sound that was part whiney and part snort. She tried again, but was once more only able to produce sounds in a similar vein that more resembled an animal snorting than human speech. It was as if something were stopping her voice forming the words that her mind willed it to speak. She had no way of knowing what was causing the phenomenon and she was more than a little scared by the experience.

Of course the cause of the change in her ability to vocalise was a result of the device that had been implanted in her throat. It was a complicated thing that functioned to alter the movement of Hannah's vocal chords whenever she tried to speak. Instead of words, the device would alter the sounds to replace them with noises more fitting for an equine than a human being.

It was when she raised her hands to her throat that Hannah first realised the extent of what had been done to her.

Rather than the sight of her own extremities, she instead saw the rounded yellow pads that covered her hands. Her eyes widened in shock as she moved her altered limbs and saw them react in the same way her former body had done.

Hannah followed the line of her arms until she was gazing down at her chest, trying to take in the changes that had been wrought. She saw her breasts, thighs and then her feet all changed to the same yellow and beneath a new skin that was clearly not natural but rather a stretching and moving lycra.

Her modified hooves explored as best they could, brushing the hair of her mane into her face so that she could see the intense colour and reaching behind her to locate the tail that she was suddenly aware of as though it were a living part of her body. She almost screamed in horror when the tail moved as she thought about the thing.

Still reeling from the sight of her new body, Hannah tried to get to her feet.

It was a daunting task with her feet trapped in the broad hooves of the suit, but she managed to struggle to a standing position after a number of failed attempts. The hooves forced her feet into a position similar to that of a person walking in high heeled shoes, and as it was years since she had worn anything other than trainers, Hannah took a long time to get used to the sensation.

When she was confident enough with her balance, she made her way to the door of the structure in an effort to explore her surroundings. As she reached the two halves of the door, she realised that she was actually standing inside a stable intended for housing a horse. Glancing through the door she saw that the stable had a small porch outside and a number of racks on the wall that held a collection of what she assumed were riding tackle.

Hannah pushed the bottom of the stable door open with one of her hooves and stepped out onto the porch. She was surprised to see that the small wooden structure was not standing in the middle of a field, but was actually very much indoors. The whole thing stood in the middle of a single room with three plain white walls and a third composed of floor to ceiling glass that looked out over a wide and unfamiliar cityscape. The floor of the room was carpeted with what Hannah assumed was some kind of synthetic turf, as it looked too pristine and even to be real grass. There was even birdsong being piped into the room by means of some hidden speaker system and perhaps that was the feature that she found the most disturbing of all.

The glass of the windows afforded Hannah her first chance to see her own reflection from head to toe and it was a sight that instantly caused her a confusing rush of emotions.

She was a horse, she realised as she noted the shape of her hooves and the way in which her mane and tail cascaded over her yellow skin. Or more aptly, she was a pony. She had been changed to resemble a cartoon-like rendering of a humanoid equine, hooved and sporting recognisably animal features and yet retaining the shape and sexuality of a human being.

As a woman in who lived and moved in the music industry and particularly a part of that world that was still woefully male dominated such as rock, Hannah had been unknowingly conditioned by the urge to defy the expectations placed upon her gender. She was more aware than most of the assumption that a woman only fronted a band on her physical merits rather than her talent and knew all too well the reality that a strong-willed female would be thought of as a pushy bitch where a male with the same attitude would be lauded as a maverick and a rebel. She had tried to escape these stereotypes and gain acclaim for her ability as a vocalist and writer, but there was always the fear that if she showed too much of her feminine side she would satisfy the prejudices of her male audience while at the same time alienating the female as well.

Perhaps her mixed reaction to the sight of her altered body was partly due to the fact that she had spent so long toning down her natural sexuality. Now that she was confronted with such a blatant display of her own body, a naked image that provided her with no way to escape the sight of her form and shape it seemed almost stranger to her than the changes that had been made to it.

There was no question that a more rational element of Hannah's mind was incensed at the fact that she had been turned into something that was more a fetishist's fantasy than a real woman.

But at the same time there was that little voice that she had unknowingly forced to be silent for so long that was actually trying to remind her of the fact that she was only human after all. It quietly spoke to her, reminding her of the last time that she had allowed another person to see what she was seeing in reflected in the glass. It had been a long time ago and the experience had been tainted with negative emotions that had resulted in yet more effort to withdraw into herself and hide her body under the same clothes that the other guys in the band wore and make the woman beneath anonymous.

Now there was no way to hide the sight of her body and the fact that her hands had been replaced by blunt hooves meant that she could do nothing to cure her nakedness. Deprived of her usual methods of escape and the familiar defences she had come to rely upon, Hannah could do nothing but confront the reality of her own sexuality.

All the time that the rational part of her mind was screaming that she should have been searching for some way out of her captivity, anything that could give her a chance to escape whoever had done this to her.

But the voice was getting smaller and quieter all the time.

The obsessive nature of Hannah's mind became ever more focussed on the sight of herself in the surface of the window and she soon forgot everything else as she knelt down in the artificial grass and curled her legs beneath herself. She examined her strangely equine features as best as she was able with her hooves, feeling the tactile sensation of her lycra skin as one limb ran over another rather than with the fingers that were trapped inside them.

She found that she could move her tail with a little effort and let out a sound that could only be described as the merging of a whiney and a delighted laugh as she watched it shake and twitch over her buttocks.

Hannah remembered the affection that she had always held for horses as a child, tempered as it was by the fact she had grown up in an urban environment and in a family for whom economic reality had rendered contact with the creatures almost as likely as contact with moon dust. But they had always stirred something in her as they did with so many people and she found them filled with a natural grace and beauty that was hard to define and yet impossible to deny.

They were elementally beautiful and they were spirited; then they were broken and tamed so that they would take a rider.

What a sensation that must be, she thought absently, to be taken and ridden.

To be desired so strongly that a battle of will had to be fought and afterwards there was either victory or the submission to the wishes of the one who had broken you; something that was by no means in her thoughts a shameful defeat, but rather an exhilarating sense of being taken and mastered.

Hannah's eyes drifted slowly to the riding tackle that hung from the wall outside the stable as she bit her lower lip.

She had always loved horses, but had she really been in love with the idea of being one?

I was an insane thought, but the more she looked at the tackle the more she could imagine the sensation of the halter around her head and the feel of the bit in her mouth.

The hint of movement caught in the corner of her eye stirred her from her thoughts and she turned her head to see that she was no longer alone in the strange room.

A section of the wall that stood to her left had slid silently aside to reveal a hidden entrance to the room. It made sense that there had to be some concealed method of entering the room, but in her distracted state, Hannah had not considered the fact seriously and so the sudden revelation of its existence took her by complete surprise.

Alone maybe the hidden door would have remained only a surprise, but with the figure standing before the entrance it became more of a real shock.

The man was tall, well-built and covered from head to toe in a body stocking that rendered him anonymous. He stood silently with his arms by his sides, only the fact that his head was pointed in her direction could have told Hannah that he was looking at her.

As he walked further into the room, she shied away from him and crawled backwards across the artificial grass until stopped by the glass of the room's outer wall.

She did not cry out, but her heart was pounding in her chest as she watched him make his way to the stable.

The Man in Black turned his back on her while he busied himself with the racks of riding tackle on the porch of the stable. Hannah heard him sorting through their contents and taking items that caught his eye according to criteria that she did not understand. As he turned to face her, she saw that he was carrying in one hand a full set of harness and bit, while in the other he gripped a short riding crop.

Hannah felt her stomach muscles tighten and her buttocks clench at the sight of the crop. She was pressed up against the glass to such a degree that as she pushed herself to her feet, her yellow backside was almost flattened against the smooth surface.

When the Man in Black was within a few feet of her, she made a half-hearted effort to launch herself forward and flail at him with her arms. But he simply stepped backwards and out of her reach, allowing her momentum to carry her forwards and down onto her knees in the fake grass.

He dropped the crop and quickly took advantage of her disorientation to slip the bit into her mouth and then the rest of the harness around her head. Hannah began to recover from her tumble just as the leather straps tightened around her face, pulling her head backwards in a motion that she was powerless to resist.

Filled with humiliation and panic, Hannah surged to her feet as adrenaline flooded her body. The Man in Black did nothing to stop her rising from the floor, but he kept a firm hand on the reigns that were now attached to the girl's head and made sure that no matter how hard she struggled he was totally in control.

Hannah fought with all the strength she could muster, she shouted and swore while she tried in vain to twist out of her tormentor's grip. At least she thought she swore. In reality the device in her throat turned her words into the angry snorting and protesting sounds of a young pony. She kicked and lashed out on the end of the reigns as her emotions took over completely and in that moment it would have been impossible to tell that it was a woman on the end of the leather tackle and not an actual pony in the process of being broken to take a rider.

Eventually she was forced to her knees and found herself braced over the Man in Black's own thigh as he reached down and retrieved his riding crop from where it had fallen in the grass.

The blows that fell upon her buttocks were not brutal or likely to raise welts upon her flesh, but Hannah still cried out in alarm as the sensation of pain reached her with each pass of the crop. With the passing of each swipe, a little more of the fight went out of her muscles and she began to loosen up bodily so that she offered less of a firm target for the leather as it connected with her backside. Soon she was only being kept from collapsing to the floor by the efforts of the Man in Black and his firm hold on her reigns.

Finally he allowed her to slump to the ground and fall onto her knees, where she simply remained still and took deep breaths as her body still refused to offer any resistance.

Hannah did not see or hear the Man in Black remove his penis from a well hidden opening in the front of his body stocking. It was by now erect and covered in a dark latex sheath that served the same purpose as a more common condom and he was well versed in its use.

The first thing she felt was the sensation of its head, brushing against her bruised buttocks. There was no conscious reaction to the feeling, but somehow she knew what was expected of her and slowly moved onto all fours. Without knowing that she was doing so, her tail raised to allow his member better access.

As his penis slipped between her legs and he entered her, Hannah wondered if there was a moment in which a horse felt this same emotion once it had been taken and tamed. This was not sex as she had known it in the past, not the mutual experience that could be shared between two equal partners. This was a consummation of the confrontation that had taken place moments before in which the Man in Black had attempted to assert his will over her and she had resisted. It was a struggle that she had lost and now she was subject to his whims and powerless to fight back any more.

The movement of his member inside her was confusing more than anything else. Hannah rested her hooves that had replaced her hands on the grass and found that she was quivering with the sensations of the intercourse in a way that she had never done before. For her the entire experience once she had stopped resisting had become passive and she simply allowed the thing to happen to her, feeling her body react to his attentions with no thought of when it would end or what would come next.

Part of her knew that she could have kept on fighting, struggled for all she was worth.

So why had she folded?

All she knew for sure was that she had no answer to that question there and then.

The Man in Black pulled out before he was spent and gave a gentle tug on her reigns so that Hannah instinctively rose to her back hooves. He pushed her back against the glass and picked her up so that she was forced to wrap her legs around his waist. She weighed little in comparison to him and he had no trouble in supporting her weight and allowing gravity to make her sink back down onto his penis. He began to move once more, this time looking her in the eye as much as possible behind his own hood as he did so.

The change in the dynamics and the positions baffled Hannah. One moment she had been literally been in the middle of being dominated and what she could only describe as fucked. The next she was being held in a position and entered in a manner that some might have described as being made love to.

On a sane level it made no sense at all, but perhaps in the world where one kidnapped women and turned them into anthropomorphic ponies it made perfect sense. Perhaps now that she had been dominated, it was time to show that there was a softer and more sensitive side to the relationship between horse and rider.

Where before the Man in Black had been dominating and determined, he was now gentle and seemed to be intent upon sensing Hannah's own reaction to his attentions. He moved in a way that heightened her sounds of pleasure and played with her nipples when he saw that she was excited by the act. Soon she was on the brink of her own climax and though he came before she did, he made sure she was not long behind him.

When it was over he let her down onto the grass and led her back to the stables by the reigns. She was exhausted by the experience and could think of nothing but sleep. Sinking down onto the thick carpet of hay that lined the floor of the stable she was unable to resist as she fell into a deep slumber, haunted by troubling dreams.

Hannah was jolted awake by the familiar feeling of the tour bus hitting a speed bump while travelling at a speed that the object was supposed to discourage. She shook the sleep out of her head and sat up so fast that she almost collided with the low ceiling above her bunk.

She looked at the hand that she had saved her skull with and saw that it was perfectly normal, pink and possessing the standard five digits.

A quick glance in the mirror that was attached to the wall at the foot of her bunk showed her own face staring back at her.

Before she could even think that the entire thing had been a dream, she was suddenly aware of the fact that her backside was simmering in pain despite the fact she was back in the real world and seemingly no longer a lycra pony.

Hannah had no idea how she had been returned to the bus without, it seemed, another soul knowing she had been gone. It was a mystery that she could not begin to fathom, but she was strangely sure that she would not be sharing her experience with anyone else for a long time.

The sound of her band mates staring to stir in their own bunks sealed her determination to keep this whole thing secret. The last thing she needed was for people to start thinking that she had made the entire thing up and she was convinced that in conjunction with her more eccentric mental habits that would be construed as the beginning of her finally losing her marbles.

She would keep this to herself and get on with life.

But the mere thought of anything equine made her shiver with a guilty sensation even as she pushed it out of her mind.

The Man in Black swung the crop through the air and tried to distract himself from the music that was filling the room with the sharp crack that it made. He was no true fan of the band themselves, but as he had just done something with their vocalist, Hannah Watson, that many would have considered a heinous crime and it seemed the least he could do to punish himself.

Casanover were never going to be something that he would have listened to under normal circumstances and it was not even their music that had brought the erstwhile Miss Watson to his attention in the first place.

He recalled all the interviews in which he had seen her voicing her opinions so loudly and with such conviction born of youthful innocence and a natural intelligence that he had been instantly intrigued by her character.

The Man in Black supposed that had he been a more normal human being, he would have simply ascribed his interest down to finding her attractive or being stimulated by her character. But as he was so painfully aware, he was not a normal human being and so he had devised a scenario in which he could come into contact with her and test her will against his own.

The thought of riding a real horse had never occurred to him, but he suspected that after riding Miss Watson, the experience would be something of a disappointment.

He dropped the crop from his hand and prepared to endure another track.

He had to admit that to his ears at least, she whinnied better than she sang.