It was not the first time he visited the Farm, but he hoped it would be the last. In the past year he had built up a solid reputation there: a reputation as a man with well-defined tastes, predictable, solvent and not too hard on the ponys. Not too soft either; showing too much empathy towards the livestock would have been a strategic mistake.

As always, he had to stop at two sets of gates. The first was on an open road, manned by a bored-looking female guard. Anybody would be bored in her position: 11AM, the middle of her shift, stuck in the middle of the countryside and nothing to do except check the security sticker on the man's car, make sure that his year's membership in the Walnut Farm Riding Club was still current, and wave him through with a smile.

Many of the guests would only see this layer of security. They would drive up to the clubhouse, leave their car in the parking lot and walk in to have a drink and prepare themselves for some riding. The riding in Walnut Farm was really good and the relatively affordable membership attracted sizable numbers of upper-middle class members. Dentists, engineers, businessmen and other respectable people, the backbone of society, rode in Walnut Farm and so did their families. Of course, since it was Wednesday, the place was not crowded.

Ignoring the almost empty parking lot, he drove on past the clubhouse and headed towards a second set of gates, marked with a discrete "Biological Preserve Area" sign. Here security was more visible, but the routine was the same: his membership card was scanned and found valid.

Behind the scenes, invisible monitoring programs noticed that 12.2 minutes had elapsed between the first and second set of gates, deduced that he had not stopped at the clubhouse and confirmed the deduction through the absence of activity in the clubhouse cash register system. Since this was his typical behavior, no alarms were raised.

He drove on, through a narrow road that twisted through a dense wood. He knew that the belt of trees run around the whole biological preserve area. Not for the first time, he remarked to himself that what went on in the area had very little to do with preserving biology; it was all culture. In his studies on the topic he had failed to determine when the particular fetish that was enacted here had taken the present form. He had not been able to find any source dating to before World War II, and perhaps he had not looked hard enough since his concern was with the here and now. Walnut Farm, specifically the area he was driving through now, was his problem. Unfortunately it seemed like it was his own problem and nobody else; since his first suspicions over three years ago he had been working on the case all by himself. Of course, he had kept his superiors well informed and they had in turn let him run a bit looser than usual. Agents at his level were usually allowed to have a pet case of themselves, to work on during moments of slack. Something that had not quite solidified enough for formal (or informal, as case and policy might dictate) prosecution.

His pet case, although he refused to think of it as such, was odder than most but certainly not the oddest. And today it would come to a head. He would attempt to procure a witness and a corpus delicti, and then the prosecution could start. One year of repellent practices had finally placed him in the right position at the right time: in the preserve, on a slow day and ready for action.

He parked his car in front of a building, smaller than the clubhouse. Almost immediately, a young man in uniform came out and greeted him warmly by name. He was accompanied inside, quite needlessly as he knew his way perfectly by now, but this was a luxury operation and needless coddling of guests is indeed part of luxury. The butler consulted a tablet computer and mentioned that his ride would be ready, warmed up and waiting for him in ten minutes. Stall 2, if he pleased.

The changing room was like a small hotel room without a bed. He changed from his street clothes into riding gear. He always insisted on wearing a cap, because he felt that it was part of the costume, just like the completely useless spurs. Riding gear fashion changes very slowly if at all, and the type of riding he would do today could be done just as well wearing a track suit and sneakers. That would, of course, attract attention and the single objective of his activities at the club had been to avoid attention and fit in by doing the right thing at all times. The right thing at this moment was to check that his riding boots were shiny and spotless and that his jodhpurs were wrinkle free.

He had bought his gear with his own money. At that time he did not think that his hunch was solid enough to justify an expense claim. And he kind of liked the clothes anyway, although he had never been a horse person. He did not want to look like he was paying for his toys and games with federal money, and he also felt that his superiors would not be too happy about authorizing the purchases. Admission to the club had been a favor from someone who owed him a big and quiet favor, so it had come for free. The riding fees were surprisingly reasonable, all things considered.

Checking himself in the mirror he adjusted his dick so that the bulge it created would be slightly less visible. To have a hard-on at this point was entirely understandable and in a way even expected, but he saw no reason to advertise it. As ten minutes had passed, he walked out of the changing room towards the stalls area.

The instrumented doors registered discreetly his passage. His behavior was within one standard deviation from average. He had lingered more than usual in the changing room, which caused a waiter to be sent there to inspect it, in case anything in the room had caused a slowdown or, horrible to imagine, some small inconvenience to the guest.

Stalls, despite their name, were just small overheated rooms where a rider and his mount could meet in private before the ride. He entered Stall 2, and found the ponygirl at the center of the room. His dick seemed to get harder at this point, and why shouldn't it? She was very beautiful and tricked out exactly to his specification. He did not have very unusual preferences, but he insisted on certain details, just like a real fetishist. Just like a pervert. Perhaps he was becoming a pervert, and this investigation had damaged him beyond repair already. He found himself in the position of someone who has to commit crimes to infiltrate a criminal gang. He had had to commit acts of sexual oppression and violence to infiltrate the secret side of Walnut Farm. He did not know how he was going to live with it, but today was the day of the big payoff. He would have to live with the moral compromises, but busting this organization was going to be the most important thing he would do in his entire life.

She had a check-out sheet hanging around her neck. The staff had carefully noted the preparation work they had done, ticking off boxes and adding annotations to a convenient ponygirl-shaped diagram in the center of the page. He took the sheet in his left hand and checked it against the ponygirl in front of him.

Perhaps he would have to undergo some sort of therapy later, he thought. Deprogramming of tastes, was it even possible? He did not want to like what he was seeing.

She was wearing a basic black corset that emphasized her already excellent figure. The corset had complex, locked, adjustment tabs in the back and two sturdy rings on the sides: it was the only essential piece of the riding equipment, and he had never seen a ponygirl without it. He caressed her ass, noting with approval the black crotch strap that bisected it. He then grabbed her buttcheeks and firmly separated them. Her pony tail was attached to the bottom of a butt plug, and he had little reason to believe that it was not the 5x3 plug he had requested, as noted in the checkout sheet. He had slowly worked her up from a one-inch diameter plug to three inches, a very respectable size. At first he was just imitating the other riders, but later he realized that training her ass made sodomy much easier, and sodomy, with ponygirls, was very much the done thing.

He shifted his attention to her pussy. The crotch strap held inside her a short fat dildo, and her pubic area was delicately pink: according to his instruction, she had been given a short flogging. He boasted that this made a ponygirl's pussy warmer, softer and more receptive. Others in the club had started imitating him. Stubby, cilindrical dildos were his favorite for a ponygirl's pussy: they loosened her up but did not reach all the way inside her. They kept the girls wet and frustrated, and when his own dick reached inside there would be still some virgin, so to say, territory to stimulate.

He checked her boots. They were black, chunky and utilitarian, made for speed. Only a well trained ponygirl could run in them, and "Lisa" (that was her official name) had been living as a ponygirl for two years. Her training was impeccable, as the club records showed, and her track times had been slowly but surely improving.

He looked at her headgear, checking it for tightness and simmetry. She was wearing an elaborate black head harness that included a posture collar and held some kind of gag in place. Ponygirls were always kept gagged around guests: when oral sex was wanted, the rider would specify it in his pre-visit requests and the preparation staff would make sure that a ring gag was used. But he had not bothered doing that, so she was probably sucking on some rubber toy. Her cheeks were bulging slightly and her throat appeared to be working. It would not be unusual for a ponygirl to be receiving deep throat training with a dildo gag. At any rate, on the checkout sheet her head was marked with a red circle, which meant that oral sex was definitely not in today's possibilities for enjoyment.

Her arms were tied behind her back, her gloved hands carefully bound in the reverse prayer position. She wiggled her fingers to let him know that she still had blood circulating through her hands.

He had left for last the part of the inspection that he enjoyed most and that the ponygirls enjoyed probably least. Her large breasts were framed by a minimal black harness that left her nipples free while providing some support.

He grabbed her breasts and started playing with them. They filled his hands completely and he reveled in the wonderful warmth and softness. In his mind he called this "the massage". What he enjoyed most was that the girl, Lisa, had no say in this. She could not speak and she would not move. Of couse there were limits, he had even signed a contract aknowledging them, not that it would hold in court of course, but anyway there were limits. Ponygirls could not be hurt permanently, no blood was to be shed without supervision, penetration toys had to be approved by the staff, all in all a set of very reasonable rules.

He felt her nipples harden, and he noticed that the girl had closed her eyes. She was quite likely enjoying the treatment, or perhaps she had retreated into what the trainers called 'ponyspace', a mental region where phyisical stimulation was perceived in a completely different way. He had seen girls slipping into ponyspace during very heavy whipping sessions and tolerate withouth a twitch pain that would make anyone shake and strain against their bonds. In one case a trainee ranch staff that wanted to get "a reaction, any reaction" out of a girl had to be stopped by an experienced trainer when she started bleeding. She just stood there, took the blows, took it all in and bled without a noise, staring into emptyness.

He had booked Lisa for 90 minutes, and if he wanted to he could spend the whole time playing with her tits, or fucking her in the stall. She certainly would not object, but this is not what he wanted to do today.

He took two heavy rattles from a tray that had been left in the stall and clamped them to her nipples. A sharp intake of breath was the only sign that the ponygirl allowed herself. Her brown eyes opened only when he took her by her bridle and led her outside, accompanied at every step by the gentle sound of the rattles.

He hitched her to the lightweight sulky cart he favored, climbed on and gently clicked his tongue. The ponygirl started walking and pulling the cart without any visible strain; her strong thigh muscles contracted and released beautifully under her clear skin, and she stamped her feet in a slightly exaggerated manner as she had been trained to. She walked her for a complete circuit of the small warm-up ring track and then, with a slight right pull, made her walk out of it and on the country road he had in mind. Two sharp clicks of his tongue indicated that she was to start a slow run, a gait appropriate for the soft dirt road they found themselves on. In a short while she would start sweating and her body would become shiny and moist.

The road took them into a small thicket and he made her turn into a narrow trail. This trail was almost a footpath and it required all of the ponygirl's and his attention to keep the sulky rolling smoothly. Lisa strayed a couple of times and he corrected her quickly with a light flick of the short whip he carried. This was the day, he thought, but there was no reason not to have a bit of fun in the meanwhile. He clicked his tongue once, waited for her to go back to walking and clicked again for her to stop in a small clearing where a wooden bench had been thoughtfull installed by the management.

The ponygirl knew what he had in mind and she was very happy about it. She stamped her boots in the grass and tossed her delicate head to let him know that she was anticipating a good old fucking, and that her pussy was warm and wet thanks to the floggin and the dildo riding inside her, not to mention the butt plug that had been snugly fucking her during the ride. She was wondering whether he would fuck her in her pussy, or in her ass, or in both as he sometimes did when he was particularly energetic.

This particular rider, whose name of course she did not know, she had labeled "The Gentleman". He did not demand less of her than the others, and he liked somewhat rough sex. But his eyes were soft. She felt, although she could not put into words, that he -for lack of a better expression- cared. Lisa could not discuss this with him or with anyone else because she was kept gagged most of the time, and ponygirls were firmly, regularly, discouraged from speaking. Still, she had feelings and a capacity for self-doubt that made her wonder if she was not just imagining everything. If he really cared, for example, he would remove these painful rattles from her breasts. But right now he seemed distracted, his mind far away as he unhitched her from the sulky and led her to the bench.

She stopped next to it and slightly parted her legs as she had been trained to. He removed her crotch strap carefully and slowly, and with it came away the vaginal dildo and the butt plug. They made a slow, wet sucking sound as they came out of her, and he realized that she had been clamping down on the dildo. Maybe she should be wearing a fatter one, she thought, his newly acquired ponygirl rider mental habits taking over.

Ponygirls in the club were supposed to be able to take very large toys in all their openings. Almost all of them were on a progressive regime that slowly and insidiously dilated their vaginas and asses while also educating their mouths. They were also trained in "adaptability", that is to say the ability to control the muscles in their orifices and become loose or tight depending on what was requested of them.

But this was all over: he was going to act and then stop with this insidious pony madness that was corrupting even his mind. He encouraged Lisa to lay down on the bench belly up. Pussyfucking, she thought, as he opened his jodphurs and took out his dick. He straddled the bench, and as the ponygirl was waiting for him to penetrate her he did something completely new, completely amazing and completely inappropriate. Something he had been planning to do for months.

The girl's headgear encased her skull completely. A narrow thick strap crossed her cheeks and held the gag inside her mouth. The base of the gag had a deeply recessed red button, so deeply in fact that in the bright daylight he could not see it. But he knew it was there, in every gag used at the ranch; it had been discussed in detail in his familiarization sessions. The button would, if firmly pressed, cut through the thick strap and allow anyone to ungag the ponygirl if it became necessary. The trainer had remarked that gagged ponygirls obviously had to breathe through their noses and that the red safety button could prevent something as trivial as a nosebleed or even a sudden cold from becoming very dangerous.

He poked his finger into the oddly warm and wet gag and reached in until he felt something round and smooth. Lisa was surprised and worried. Why wasn't he simply fucking her? Why was he fooling around with her lovely deep gag? He pressed hard and something snapped inside the gag. The strap popped away in two pieces, he grabbed the gag and pulled. His guess had been right, it was a dildo gag. He kept pulling the black ribbed dildo out of Lisa's mouth, ignoring the whining sounds she was making. The dildo was thick and suprisingly long but it looked very flexible. When inside her it probably reached all the way into her throat.

The dildo just kept coming out, black and shiny with her saliva. Her cheeks bulged even more and the dildo head came out. It had a strangely broad shape, very similar to certain mushrooms: very similar, he came to realize, to a horse cock. How amusing, to force the poor girl to suck on a fake horse dick. The dildo gag hung limply in his hand and seemed to be shrinking as he turned to speak to her.

Lisa coughed once and, before he could say anything, she said "Sir, please reposition the gag inside my mouth. My oral training is very important to the ranch, to the members and to the enhancement of my abilities as a ponygirl. I request that you gag me again immediately. Accidentaly breakage of the dildo gag retaining strap does occasionally happen, and you will have to pay a small replacement fee."

He was astonished at the cool clarity of the girl's voice. He was also surprised by what she had said. He had not been expecting immediate understanding of his plan or complete collaboration, but the little bit of corporate boilerplate she had just recited sounded too careful and organized for a terrified slave.

"There was nothing accidental about me ungagging you, Lisa. I am here to bust up this bloody ranch, I am a federal agent and I want to free you and all the ponygirls from slavery. I know you have been here for two years and I need you to give me information. Where are the ponygirls kept when they are not with the guests? How do the girls become ponys? Were you abducted? Do you have a family I can contact? I want to help you, but I need you to help me. I can't act until I know enough."

The ponygirl looked at him and spoke again, with the same precise diction: "Sir, please rest assured that I and my sisters are here of our own free will. The ranch treats us all fairly and humanely. I enjoy my stay here, I am well cared for and there is nobody on the outside worrying about me. Please reposition the gag inside my mouth; without meaning any disrespect to you, this is the last thing I am going to say." And then she fell silent. He felt like a complet idiot, with the limp black dick hanging wetly from his hand. It was not so big after all.

He did not know what to do. His excitement and nervousness turned to fear; he was suddenly very much less sure of himself. Perhaps, he thought, he was simply wrong. Perhaps this was just an ordinary club for kinky people, where kinky girls like this one, who was even now looking with longing at the shrunken dildo gag, could enjoy their fantasy lifestyle, while satisfying the club members' fantasies. Could he be such an idiot and waste months of work and care on a hunch that turned out to be completely wrong? Not that he believed her, of course. She had probably been terrified into submission, perhaps blackmailed with threats to herself or her family. It is easy to force people to do and say anything, provided you have no moral brakes to your actions. Regardless, he did not have a shred of evidence. All he had was a secretive perfectly legal club where consenting adults had fun in their own, perfectly legal way. He was sure that the club would have in its files a contract properly signed by her. No judge would listen to him, and the media would be too nervous about the political implications: a government employee moralizing about innocent sexual fun that he himself has engaged in for months!

He admitted failure, at least momentarily and made to hitch her again to the cart. She looked meaningfully at the dildo gag and he fed her the black rubber cock. With a lot of slurping and swallowing sounds, Lisa sucked in again the dildo, and soon her cheeks could be seen ritmically moving: she was sucking again on the big black pacifier. He briefly considered having sex with her, for the sake of the cover, but his heart was not in it. His penis hung limply, deflated by his sadness, bitterness and irritation at this stupid girl who would not let herself be rescued, damn her big brown eyes that were even then looking at him in expectation. "No fucking, dear Lisa, not today..." he mumbled as he reattached her harness to the sulky, "just a quiet ride back to your stable".

As she was jogging back on the dirt road he noticed that the two parts of gag retaining strap were, obviously, sticking out of her headgear, making obvious to any onlooker that he had pushed the emergency gag release. No matter, he thought, he already had a pretty good story. He flicked her ass in irritation and she started stepping higher. How stupid: she could respond perfectly to commands, but she could not say the words that would free her.

He would find another solution. It was all in the day's work, there is always more than one way to skin a cat and all that. He would try with another girl, claim that he had gotten bored with Lisa's perfect obedience, that he wanted some more challenge. He tried hard to hide his nervousness as he handed Lisa over to one of the trainers. The woman had obviously noticed the broken strap, and he volunteeered that it looked like Lisa had difficulty recovering her wind after a bit of galloping and he had been worried enough about her suffocating that he had decided to push the emergency release button to let her breath better. She was a bit purple, he claimed, he had kind of panicked out there, you know, me and her, I thought it was the best thing to do.

"Of course it was", she said "I can see that she is fine now. When you pushed the emergency button a wireless locator alarm was activated, and we could see you on the map, in the thicket. GPS, you know. If you had not started moving as soon as you did we would have assumed trouble and we would have sent a rescue vehicle. Sometimes emergencies happen".

Wireless locator alarms had not been mentioned in his briefing - he had assumed that the gag was just a gag. But it did not matter, it just showed good planning on their part. Still, something nagged at him. He patted her on the rump and mumbled "So long, old girl, till next time". She made a sort of whinnying sound that startled him. "Funny sounds they can make, eh?" the trainer said, "they really get into the horse part, you know."

He entered the changing room, stripped and showered off the sweat of the day. He had already dried himself when three large men crashed into the room and grabbed him. They were dressed in dark work clothes, and they were all bigger than he was. They lifted his large frame off the ground and twisted his arms until he stopped struggling. Then they just held him there, ignoring his shouted complains and demands.

He was terrified and covered in fresh, chill sweat. They gagged him effectively and rapidly with duct tape. "Boy, this is going to hurt coming off", he thought.

The trainer that had just received Lisa entered the room, looked at him and smiled. "We get one like you per year, approximately. A smartass that thinks he can infiltrate the ranch and subvert one of the girls. A smart city boy that thinks that organizations like ours are run by idiots, right? Because in the movies you grew up with the bad guys are always stupid or at least flawed in some way. They always fuck up. We don't. We play it safe. And we have been suspicious about you for a long time. It is not just your law enforcement background -of course we know about that-, the matter is that you act funny around the ponys, and you are not so good at pretending that you are a sadist at heart. Although I have to admit that lately you had improved, I do think that you were kind of getting into it. All these months, the games, the toys, the seminars on vaginal and anal training... " She grabbed his shrunken dick and pulled on it with a gloved hand "Yes, you had started enjoying ponygirl pussy quite a lot, we noticed. And that breast massage thing, I don't know, I guess it really does it for you." He felt his dick harden against his will, as memories of the past months flashed back: his first encounter with Lisa, the first time he had spanked her as a punishment, and even a pony he had played with before Lisa, a young looking one, very clumsy and frequently in need of punishment. He still remembered her very soft skin and responsive mouth. She continued, "Of course we did not tell you that in that elaborate headgear all the girls must wear there is also a tiny camera and a microphone. Normally we don't care about our members' activities, but the emergency release button activates that too, yep..." She pensively rolled around his balls on the palm of her hand "Now things will change, I can tell you as much. In a surprising way, you might even like it. I hope you are still into this pony thing of ours. Take him to the Oak Stable and hand him over to Mr. Simmons. He already knows about our guest. He has potential."