After School

Chapter Two-1

Chapter Two

Valania

The Valania School for Young Women was nearly the antithesis of the Vermont Riding School where Lucy learned a few things about bondage, s*x, submission and the art of being a ponygirl. Where the Vermont Institution was well known for its riding instruction and combined training of horse and rider, Valania totally focused on training and adapting the pony. The school’s charter contained nothing that even recognized the rider or riding skills. Therefore, Lucy’s transition from riding school to a pony school was more or less the perfect compliment, or so at least that’s what some people thought.

The Cloister at Valania had been operating for centuries as a retreat for an obscure, closely sequestered order of sisters devoted not only to modest restraint, chastity and silence, but also to a diet of unusual vegetables and fruits. The sole source of income for the order, known as The Valanian Sisters of Restraint, (VSR), was supposedly from the sale of a potent liquor made from the crops the nuns grew on the adjacent hillside and processed in an ancient distillery inside the triple-walled keep.

Over the centuries, priests, bishops, cardinals and more than one Pope, supposedly concerned about the alcoholic preoccupations of the order, conducted secret reviews of the Valanians after hearing hushed complaints from several influential quarters. The complaints always seemed to turn out to be unsubstantiated and the church’s blessed resources devoted to such esoteric matters moved on to other topics.

Not surprisingly, no records ever mention that a significant portion of the church’s clergy still seemed to frequent the cloister, partaking of the sacred liquor and of other more earthly distractions. Oddly enough, no one complained about the non-sectarian sporting events held inside the cloister’s ancient fortress and vast, walled compounds. It was said, (only in hushed whispers), in the nearest village that naked women had been seen pulling carts and running foot races while the members of the order and visitors looked on; in silence, of course.

It was also rumored that dreadful punishments were frequently meted out to the nuns and their subjects. The details were for some reason always sketchy, but more than once, a village maiden suddenly disappeared from the fields or from her home and later was found to have been “acquired” by the order in the cloister. The usual answer as to why these unsuspecting young women suddenly and at times unwillingly found themselves locked away in cells and cages in the old castle was that they were suspected of harboring unhealthy thoughts. The beauty of this system was that even if the young women harbored no unclean thoughts before they were taken, their experiences in the cloistered enclave soon changed that. They quickly gained firsthand knowledge and experience in all manner of human perversions. They also learned that to gain acceptance into the holy order, they had to learn and accept concepts that were initially foreign to them. The nuns were helpful in this regard and usually convinced even the most reluctant women that if they suffered enough, they would find not only salvation, but also acceptance among their peers and their betters. What was needed was education and training and the nuns excelled at both.

While hanging nearly nude in heavy chains, suspended by their thin wrists, usually with leather and iron devices locked to their heads and s*x, the novice women absorbed a broad range of knowledge about things which most of them had never even dreamed about. Those who were overweight soon discovered that the diets they suddenly experienced drastically reduced their perhaps too well rounded figure to a far more attractive and seductive level. Those who were too thin were slowly rounded out to present a more appealing figure as well. The cloister’s vegetarian diet and hard work, coupled with daily and nightly sessions in the dark and frightening “Question Rooms” of the ancient fortress were the church’s solution to such heresy. There was nothing really new or unusual about any of this. For centuries, the church encouraged and supported what some might consider to be radical practices as it solidified the faith and understanding of its millions of followers. The Inquisition and similar fact-finding procedures carried out at local levels were nothing more than bumps in the highway for true believers and similar undertakings were still condoned and accepted.

Few citizens or officials challenged this divine work. Those who did so often met with unfortunate changes in their lives. Some simply disappeared. Others, if they were young and attractive females, were absorbed either into the order or, after a short visit and intensive “cleansing” interrogations and interviews with the Mother Superior, returned home somewhat dazed, assuring everyone that all was well and that God was watching over the order and its deeds. History indicated that some who disappeared were later discovered in distant cities as missionaries or prostitutes or wandering, deranged creatures bearing terrible scars on their bodies and a total loss of all mental faculties. Given this reputation, the order was usually left to its holy work and few outsiders interfered.

Mother Superior Bolia Sadisi, the VSR’s top official and head of the convent, worked feverishly, year after year, to keep the school up to what she believed to be the highest standards of female education; seeking young women, who were often from troubled homes, to join the student body and eventually merge into the order. The church considered Mother Bolia a bit of an eccentric, but no one challenged her dedication and skill at reforming the bodies and minds of the students. Her methods were somewhat dated, at times cruel, crude and anachronistic, but given the overall direction of the order and its refusal to adopt modern technology in any of its activities, church authorities tended to look the other way.

Nevertheless, at times the local villagers, who swore they heard horrible screams emanating from behind the high walls, picked up pitchforks, brooms and shovels and marched by torchlight to the main gate, demanding to see the Mother Superior. Although this sort of event might have seemed to strangers as a stereotypical scene from some old horror film, it was real enough to the villagers who lived under shadow of the cloister. They wanted answers and Bolia was the one in charge. Given her talents and former occupation, she was always successful in placating them. Complainants who became too vocal were either paid off or suddenly vanished, leaving notes indicating their spontaneous desire for immediate missionary work in some distant, primitive country. One local politician, asked about the reputedly horrid goings-on at the cloister, replied in typically Bulgarian fashion that he didn’t see any reason for concern and that the nunnery was essential to the economy and one of the historic treasures of the region.

“It’s like the distillery your grandfather runs up in the mountains,” he said to the local tavern owner whose attractive daughter had quietly vanished one night, leaving behind a scribbled note that said that she was answering God’s call. “All that goes on there may not be legal, but who in their right mind would put a group of dedicated nuns out of business?”

When Lucy von Holt arrived at the cloister, she was escorted to a small room where she was told to sign several documents, none of which she would understand or read, but which, the sisters assured her, were essential to her forthcoming extended education. Bewildered, Lucy signed page after page, noting words and phrases that implied, and in some cases, clearly indicated that she agreed to the training and supervision that was to come and that she made no claims of virginity, purity or acceptance of any other gods. Then, the sisters provided her with a cold shower in one of the stone washing cubicles and put her into the uniform of the students, who the nuns usually referred to as inmates. Once she was fitted with the once again all too familiar collar, bridle, bit/gag and full body harness, they silently placed Lucy in a holding stall in one of the underground dormitories situated below the old fortress that was the order’s sequestered home. The harness was a cleverly designed combination physical and psychological controller. It was carefully fitted to the figure of the wearer and seldom removed. The waist belt, which was really a short and heavily boned leather corset, was the basic anchor for the rest of the harness. Two additional, thinner belts encircled the torso above and below the breasts and connected to shoulder straps linked to the collar. Two thick leather bands fit at the top of each thigh. This was the core of the system to which additional elements were added or removed for specific functions. The most used and common accessory was the onerous crotch strap that began at the waist just below the navel and passed through the s*x, up the anal divide and locked securely to the waist at the base of the spine. All of the straps were adjustable and well padded to permit suspension and other restraints. Lucy’s harness wasn’t new, but it fit her as if it was custom tailored for her. After nearly twenty-four hours of travel, she collapsed on the stone floor of the stall and slept for nearly a day. No one bothered her, but every hour or so, the patrolling duty sister looked in through the barred window of the stall door. She did this just to make sure that the new inmate was not getting into any mischief or trying to remove the tail plug that was well up her ass or the equally onerous black metal dildoe filling her cunt, both held there by the locked body harness. They strapped Lucy’s arms behind her, wrist to elbow and mated to the harness. Her ankles were bound with leather hobbles. Another, larger set of these cuffs held her legs above the knee. Exhausted from the trip, Lucy seemed to disregard these restraints and simply wanted to rest.

Sister Angel Fabrizzi, herself a relatively new member of the cloister, seemed to immediately identify with Lucy. When it was her shift to patrol the ramshackle stables, she spent more time observing and training Lucy than the other duty sisters did. The first night of Lucy’s stay, Sister Angel, feeling that the new guest wasn’t getting the most from her restrictive, but not especially uncomfortable bondage, unlocked the stall door with her massive set of duty keys and entered the cramped enclosure with its straw-covered floor. Using equipment hanging on the wall, she added a full hog tie to Lucy’s bound configuration.

“This will help you learn faster,” Sister Angel said as she shortened up on the chains.

Sister Angel, formerly inclined towards the Goth lifestyle and at one time somewhat radically oriented in her former life, specialized in female bondage. She knew how to wring pain from any woman’s body and was most patient about doing it. Had she lived in an earlier time, there is little doubt that Angel would have been happy and successful as a witch finder or prosecutor during The Inquisition. Adroit at the use of rope, chain and leather straps, she took considerable effort to make sure that her charges were always tightly and uncomfortably bound and kept dangling on the edge of endless, screaming contortions, seeking any release they could obtain from the Sister’s ministrations. When her charges seemed both literally and figuratively at the end of their rope; when they were unable to tolerate another notch in the rack’s winches, or another stroke of the cane, or another centiliter of fluid being pumped into their stomach or rectum, she obliged them by offering at least two options: they could go further up the chain of pain and perhaps fail to survive…or they could channel their pain and suffering towards God. They usually accepted the latter alternative, when offered, at once, but Angel’s victims always failed to realize that this meant finding God through intense and prolonged s****l stimulation ending in mind-rending orgasms. While most survived this ultimatum, some did not. The survivors, Angel often pointed out when giving silent lectures on the subject of inmate training and interrogation, were often addicted to the divine experience and thus very useful to the order. What the outside world would have diagnosed as severe nymphomania was, in the order’s view, a high devotion to serving God….and anyone else who happened to visit the cages and cells where these creatures lived.

Seeking to carry Lucy along the road to adaptation, compliance and redemption, on this particular night, Sister Angel placed a wide leather strap through Lucy’s ankle hobbles and then ran the end through a steel D ring mounted on the back of her heavy leather collar. Pulling the strap tight, she forced the girl’s head back nearly to the point where it touched her backward stretched feet. The position created a choking pressure on the girl’s collar, so Sister Angel remedied that with another strap attached to a ring on the front of Lucy’s collar. Pulling that strap equally tight, she ran it down between the girl’s jutting breasts, through her already strapped crotch and attached it to her thigh hobbles. Lucy, exhausted and drowsy, did not resist this modification of her restraints until she realized the impossibility of it. If she stretched her head back to relieve the pressure on her throat, she pulled the crotch strap more against the double impalements in her ass and p***y. If she tried to ease that strain, she forced her ankles back even further and put greater stress on her bow-like, backward bent body. Sister Angel watched Lucy’s eyes as she tightened the straps even further, one notch at a time. She listened intently to the girl’s whimpering and gurgling protest as she tried to mumble through the mouth-filling bit and gag.

The sounds pleased Sister Angel because it was her experience that as long as the victim of her work was able to protest vocally, all was well. Should the noise stop, then Sister Angel, in her ever most merciful manner, would perhaps loosen the straps a few centimeters and see if the protests again emerged from the bit-distorted mouth, the widely stretched jaws and the collar. She would now and then add some incentive by flogging any available girl flesh that she found, often choosing the enticingly presented breasts, n*****s or the most deliciously tender area at the inside top of the thighs. This always elicited verbal commentary by the victim and pleased Angel enough to allow her to proceed with her bondage work.

Since there was never a word spoken in the cloister, the restraints used on Lucy and the other students always included gags of the most oppressive and burdensome type. Indeed, Mother Bolia proudly maintained a fascinating collection in her private museum totally dedicated to gags, bits, bridles and head harnesses, virtually all of which were designed to suppress even the most strident of vocal complaints. Each sister in the order had extensive firsthand experience with such devices and could not only testify to the efficiency of each design, but also knew from personal experience what combination of bridle, bit and gag would work best on even the most recalcitrant student. Thus, the bond between student and instructor, (or more accurately between captive and captor), was initially created. Sister Angel became Lucy’s primary mentor and trainer and the Sister delighted in tormenting Lucy almost as much as Lucy, the reluctant guest, hated everything about the cloister. In short, no matter how bad she thought the school was going to be, it turned out to be much worse.

As the days passed, Lucy found that this institution had much in common with the one in Vermont, only it was, as far as she could tell, more extreme. This was perhaps the reason why she was now here, constantly kept in solitary restraints, gagged, bitted and bound in harness straps or chains and increasingly subjected to exhausting pony or horse work.

Of course, her s*x life also expanded. The sisters had full reign over their subjects and used this control to provide entertainment for themselves in cloistered secrecy as well as for paying guests, clergy and others. The funds they obtained from providing subjects for the dominant inclinations of these visitors exceeded the funds derived from the sale of their specialty liquor, but used in the right combination, the God/s*x/booze arrangement usually yielded generous donations to VSR.