Chapter One: The Arrival

Sitting in the front passenger seat of her father’s car, Emily adjusted the hem of her skirt, and picked off a tiny piece of lint. For the dozenth time she flipped down the sun visor to check her hair and makeup in the small mirror. She tried telling herself that she wasn’t nervous, but that simply wasn’t true. Apprehensive and excited certainly, but nervous just the same. With every mile that passed under the tires bringing her closer to Rattangrove, it was an understandable feeling.

All her life she had lived under her parents’ strict and watchful gaze. Every report card scrutinized, her curfew always earlier than those of her friends, and every misstep swiftly and soundly corrected; almost always with her vulnerable bared bottom paying the price. Even at 19 her parents maintained a very firm and unwavering commitment to corporal punishment and she had long abandoned any hope of changing that. Attending the famous Rattangrove Academy held so many possibilities for freedom for her, despite its somewhat fearsome reputation.

Rattangrove Academy was well known as a very old fashioned school. Academically, it was unquestionably outstanding, but their famously “spare the rod, spoil the student” philosophy was arguably more famous than their academic record. For most students it would have been an unthinkably regressive and punitive place, but to Emily it was the gateway to a level of freedom she couldn’t have dreamed of having at home.

Certainly she would be supervised, and almost as certainly she would end up punished from time to time, but being one student among thousands had to be easier than being her parents’ only daughter.

Thinking of her parents and their strict adherence to their inflexible moral code, Emily’s hand wandered up to touch the shiny silver key that hung on a slim necklace around her neck; the metal cool against the skin between her breasts. It was the key to the steel chastity cage that she had worn for almost as long as she could remember, and a totem of her position in society.

Very seldom removed for anything apart from hygiene, and even then only for very brief periods, it meant that while Emily certainly wasn’t a blushing virgin, at least as a bottom, the small and incredibly sensitive little organ inside the cage had never known any pleasure apart from the very infrequent touch of Emily’s own hand. That wasn’t going to change at Rattangrove, and indeed it was rare that she was allowed to touch the key at all.

Even on the rare opportunities Emily was allowed out of her cage either to wash or for... relief, her father was the only one who handled the key. She had caught him glancing at her nervously in the passenger seat, the very idea of her having possession of it, even sitting in the seat next to him, made him visibly nervous.

Idly, Emily wondered what would have happened if she’d announced she had to pee when they stopped for gas an hour or so ago and then ducked into the ladies restroom. Would her father have burst in after her? What if there had been other women in the room? She smiled at the idea of her father blushing and offering flustered apologies and explanations, though she’d never have really tried it.

However uncomfortable it made her father it was a Rattangrove tradition that locked girls arrived with their keys displayed on a necklace. An easy way to tell the locked girls from the free ones, both for the Rattangrove faculty, and for anyone else who happened to be watching. Emily wasn’t thrilled about announcing her status to the entire student body upon arrival, but she would be far from the only locked girl at Rattangrove.

It was no good complaining about it in any event. She wanted to go to Rattangrove, and she knew better than to tease her father when he was already on edge. She wasn’t sure if it was just seeing her with her key, or if it was the fact she’d be away from home for four moths straight. She had no reservations about giving him a hard time, but he was clearly a little on edge and the idea of getting a dose of her father’s belt on the side of the highway in full view of traffic was a sufficient deterrent.

Instead, she contented herself with watching the countryside fly by through the window and thinking about her future life at Rattangrove. She reached up and touched the key again; aware that her father was almost certainly watching her do so. She didn’t bother looking back, but she maintained a tiny spark of hope that the school might not be quite so attentive, and that the opportunity might present itself for her to slip into an unattended restroom for a few moments of illicit pleasure. It had been months since she had been allowed anything like that at all. Her attending Rattangrove was all about opportunities, after all.

For girls like Emily, the world held one of two possibilities: At age 18, a girl’s parents or guardians would decide for her whether she would be Free or Locked.

Free girls generally came from more modern, forward-looking, progressive households of Hartia. The luckiest of these girls wouldn’t have ever known the tight steel embrace of a chastity cage around their most intimate parts. For most of them, they’d have been locked from time to time, but only for a few days or weeks, and purely as a punishment. They were still a minority of trans girls, but there were more and more of them with every passing year.

These girls would go out into the world at 18 with every opportunity available to them, just as it would be for anyone else. Most would attend schools that were far less demanding and rigid than the one Emily would be attending. Indeed, with Rattangrove’s reputation for hard rules and strict punishments, Emily doubted there would be very many free girls among the student body. If you could manage to attend anywhere else, most girls would take that option.

For most girls, including Emily, that meant being registered as Locked when she had turned 18. That meant a harder life, and most likely one of servitude. Emily harboured no illusions or hopes of her parents spontaneously deciding to free her at age 18. They had been very clear from the start that she would be a locked girl for a good portion of her life; her cage removed intermittently at best, and depending on her future key-holder maybe not at all.

Most locked girls would “graduate” from her parents holding her key to a Master or Mistress who would keep her on a tight, strictly supervised chastity regimen, just as she had been at home. Locked girls, the traditional narrative went, couldn’t help themselves otherwise. A successful transition, one where they abandoned all masculine aspects and fully embraced their femininity, had to be supervised. Enforced.

Locked girls needed a firm hand, one who would guide them to the feminine ideal that they sought, in exchange for a lifetime of servitude and submission. Locked girls were too headstrong to fully accept the changes it would take to complete their transition. Denial and chastity were the levers by which they would be brought to heel, moulded into the young woman they ought to be. It wasn’t cruelty, or even slavery, at least not exactly. It was societal tough love that theoretically ensured a flawless transition.

As a result Locked girls generally had their key sold off after they came of age. The more sensational stories about Hartia insisted that it was done at a public auction, which occasionally still happened, though it was rare. Far more often a girl’s key was sold to a family friend or acquaintance that their parents trusted would treat them well. Going for anywhere between $325,000 up to $500,000 the girl would follow her key to whoever bought it; serving as their maid, nanny, or concubine in exchange for supervision and guidance.

It wasn’t slavery, the girls themselves weren’t property and they were paid a wage. In theory, a girl could choose to take only a small part of her wages in cash, using the rest to pay back her key price and earn her freedom, but it was a very large debt to pay off. The pay wasn’t great either; once her key was sold, the girl had virtually no bargaining power; she would take the wages offered, no matter how humiliating.

It wasn’t unheard of for a girl to pay off her key price, but it was far more common for her to eventually give in and start taking her full wages in cash, discouraged by a debt that could take 25 or 30 years to pay off while living as little more than a slave.

It was a very old system of indentured labour, and one that was strongly slanted in favour of the Master or Mistress. Most treated both the key and the girl attached as investments: ones that earned a small amount of interest. A girl could take her full wages in cash, but the price of her key would rise over time, and her chance of ever getting it back would approach zero after a decade or so as the price slowly rose.

The other option was to accept The Collar Service: She would get room and board, clothing and all the basic necessities provided, but 95% of her wages would go towards paying off her key price, and it was the work of decades to earn it back. Emily knew more than a few girls from her graduating class who had chosen that option. She had considered it herself, even taking a gap year to think it over after high school, but she was sure it wasn’t for her.

Rattangrove offered Emily another option: She had just barely earned the grades she needed for the scholarship, and had worked hard in her gap year to raise the rest of the cash, but she had managed it. Girls who were attending or who had graduated from a college couldn’t have their key sold without their permission, so she was safe for as long as she stayed in school. Better yet, once she graduated the government would purchase her key from her parents for a flat $250,000 and hold it interest-free for up to 20 years while she worked to pay it off.

Better yet, she was free to negotiate her own employment contracts. She could take a normal job just like anyone else, and pay off her key almost like a mortgage. Or she could take a placement with a Master, but she would be able to negotiate her wages and her chastity schedule, at least a little. It would take years to earn her freedom, but compared to even the most generous traditional indenturement it would take less than half the time.

The program was fairly new, and came with so many benefits. Not only would she have her freedom sooner than she could otherwise have hoped, but if she didn’t accept an indenturement she would be able to live in her own little apartment. Admittedly, probably with roommates, as paying off her key price would take most of her income, but it was still a wonderful dream.

She would have a government inspector who would drop by for surprise inspections, and who would be authorized to use corporal punishment to keep her on track, but from what she understood those inspections were rare. Even better she would be unlocked monthly in the post-grad program, assuming she chose not to accept indenturement somewhere. A nearly private unlock, up to fifteen minutes all to herself with the inspector supervising through a one-way mirror. It seemed like such an impossible luxury, but it wasn’t even the best part.

After 5 years in the post-graduation program she was even allowed to bring a date to “help” with her monthly releases. She wasn’t allowed penetration, but she was allowed almost anything else. She closed her eyes and imagined having the cage off, letting her fingers glide over her skin, so incredibly sensitive from a lifetime of denial. She imagined the sensation of having a lover gently touch her for the first time; teasing her to firmness, not worried about her admittedly rather petite size, stroking her… she felt the cage tighten as her shaft tried to harden in its little steel prison.

Emily bit her lip and opened her eyes, trying to clear her mind. It would be absolutely mortifying to have her father look over and see her having a “private moment” like this. Blushing furiously, she turned to the window and tried to focus on the scenery flashing by outside the car’s window. It was definitely a goal to aim for, but it was a very long way off even if everything went perfectly to plan.

In time, the ivy-covered brick walls of Rattangrove Academy appeared on the horizon, and her father looked over at her with a proud smile. He didn’t say anything, but he reached over and gently squeezed Emily’s knee in a warm, paternal manner. She smiled back at him. He was a strict man, and Rattangrove was certainly an exciting new world, but she was going to miss him very much. Suddenly, for all her excitement, she realized that she was going to be homesick, and how much she was going to miss both of her parents.

Emily’s father slowly navigated the narrow cobblestone lane that lead onto the campus, a road that was already barely wide enough to accommodate a modern car was clogged with proud parents dropping off nervous daughters for their first day of school. Finally spying a spot to pull over, he swung the car in against the curb with the satisfied sigh of fathers everywhere who manage to get a better parking spot than they hoped. They were only a few feet from the front doors of the school, parked behind a long, black, and extremely expensive-looking sedan.

Emily got out of the car and gave her dad a long hug goodbye. The school didn’t allow much for outside belongings, so apart from her phone, her laptop, her charging cords, a couple of books, and her toiletries, she would have no comforts from home. It all fit comfortably in just a small backpack. She could see her father struggling not to cry as she gave him one last excited wave and walked up the stairs into the school.

Aurora sulked in the back of her father’s car. This school was a dump. Her lip curled into a derisive sneer as she watched a dark haired girl with braces stand almost in awe of the ugly, dumpy brick building. How could she have ended up here? None of her friends were going to attend Rattangrove. They had reasonable parents and were all off to more fashionable schools where they could have a car, and wear their own clothes, and have a life.

Her grades hadn’t been perfect, admittedly, but 54% was still a pass. She probably shouldn’t have gotten expelled from her first high school either, but that happened to a lot of girls, at least ones who didn’t slavishly obey every single little rule.

There were always so many stupid rules! To Aurora’s mind rules were for the locked girls, not free, modern girls like herself. Well… formerly free. As she climbed out of the car she could feel the metal ring of the cage chafe against her skin. She couldn’t believe that her father had registered her as Locked. Admittedly, for all her bad behaviour she really hadn’t seen that one coming.

Aurora hadn’t worn the cage growing up. That was for… other people. Lesser people. The sort of girls that Aurora had ruthlessly bullied in the locker room. Definitely not her or her clique, who were the prettiest, the most popular, and for the trans girls in their little group: universally unlocked. Her family definitely didn’t need the money from selling her, and she had grown up used to having her freedom. To end up here... like this... it was humiliating. She slammed the car door without saying goodbye to her father and stamped up the steps to the school, still fuming.

The school had insisted that since she was registered as Locked that she arrive caged with the key around her neck like all the other locked girls. She saw the way other girls without keys around their necks looked at her. She knew what they were thinking: just another pathetic subservient girl just waiting for someone to come along and collar her. It made her want to be sick. She pushed down her anger and frustration and forced herself to meet their eyes straight on. She wasn’t going to look away, cage or no cage she knew who she was. Besides, she had a plan.

She had been forced to sell a little bit of jewellery… and go on some questionable “dates”... but she had managed to put together an extremely tidy amount of cash. The knowledge that it was there at the bottom of her backpack kept some of the looming dread at bay. From the looks of this place they probably didn’t pay well. Certainly a few thousand dollars in the right hands would ensure that this whole “Locked” business was all just a silly misunderstanding and she could go back to the way things ought to be. She was young, rich, beautiful, and this silly little mistake would all be sorted out shortly.

Failing that, she could just suck off whoever was in charge. That usually worked. As long as her grades were where her father needed them to be, the details were almost certainly irrelevant.

She stopped at the threshold of the school, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her father had five years to change his mind. Or rather, she had five years to change his mind. She could be re-registered as Free right up until her 24th birthday. All she had to do was graduate from Rattangrove with something close to a respectable GPA, and she could go back to the life she knew. Her father had promised her that, and even if he was a fucking prick who had sent her to this dreadful school, he would keep his word.

She couldn’t look at it as a problem, or as a punishment. This was just a brief, mildly unpleasant stop on the road to somewhere better. She would flirt and bribe her way to the closest thing this wretched place had to a luxury apartment, keep her head down, write a few tests, get her stupid piece of paper to satisfy her father, and put this whole nightmare behind her. She looked back up at the doorway, a newfound resolve in her green eyes.

With confidence, as well as a little residual anger, she stepped through the well-worn oak doors of the academy, into the dimmer confines of the Great Hall. Aurora had to admit that even she was impressed. Compared to the dowdy and uninspiring exterior of the school, the Great Hall was both beautiful and imposing. Century old Tudor panelling the colour of honey were bathed in the warm, multifaceted light that shone through mullioned stained glass windows.

The floor was pale marble, well trafficked but spotlessly clean. The place looked... monumental; like it had been built to last much longer than the hundred years or so it had existed. Everything from the water fountain taps to the doorknobs were heavy and well-worn brass, the benches were thick planks of the same oak as the walls. It gave Rattangrove an aura more befitting a cathedral than a school. Aurora begrudgingly admitted that she might have misjudged Rattangrove just a little. Her reverie was broken by a rumbling but very polite voice.

“Your bag, miss…”

Aurora spun on her heel, surprised, and found herself facing the largest human being she had ever seen. He wasn’t fat… exactly; he certainly wasn’t thin either, he was just… huge. He positively towered over her, his upper arms far thicker than her thighs. A little bit of surface fat couldn’t hide his strength; muscles swam like krakens beneath his skin with even the slightest movement.

A mountain of a man had seemed an impossibly trite description to her up to this point, but the phrase sprang unbidden to the front of her mind. He was an incredibly imposing figure; his security badge seemed a child’s plaything when pinned to his continental chest. At his full height he positively loomed over her, and as he leaned down to speak with her Aurora took a step backwards.

He frowned, seeing her nervousness, and then smiled in a reassuring way. With a single thick finger he pointed at the sign hung on the wall just to her left. “No Outside Goods Past This Point.” it read.

“I’m so sorry miss, but you can’t bring your backpack in with you. You’ll have to leave it with me to be searched...” He rubbed the tips of his two index fingers together nervously. “...you’ll get it back... after they search it of course. It’ll be delivered to your room sometime after the big assembly.”

The guard leaned down, hand outstretched to take her backpack. His face was earnest and kind, but there was no doubt whatsoever that he was in control.

“But… I…” Aurora backed up further until her back hit the wall, trapping her backpack between the oak panelling and her own small frame. Fuck. What was she going to say? I have eight thousand dollars cash in the bottom of my backpack to bribe my way out of this cage? Yeah. That’d go well. Her mouth went dry.

“Ummm…” Aurora tried desperately to buy time, but all her well-practised lies fell apart in the presence of this unexpected gentle giant.

The guard pulled a small tag and a marker out of the breast pocket of his shirt, either not noticing her hesitation or simply used to this reaction from new students. The pen looked laughably small in his hands but he didn’t struggle with it, his penmanship was surprisingly neat as he wrote the time and date of her arrival.

He held his hand out for her bag courteously, and after a moment’s pause while she desperately fought for a reason why she should be allowed to keep it Aurora handed the bag over meekly. She couldn’t fight him, she hadn’t come up with an argument, and even if she ran she’d still be locked in this damn cage. Her cunning plan had fallen at the first hurdle.

Even her backpack looked small in his huge, careful hands. “What was the name, miss?” The guard was so earnest and helpful. He seemed to be overcompensating for how intimidating he was. He was like a puppy the size of a freight train. Ordinarily, Aurora could have made a man like this putty in her hands in seconds, but his size had caught her completely wrong-footed.

“Erm… Aurora? Aurora Idris.” She managed, trying desperately to pull herself together. To fight.

The guard wrote her name down on the tag, and attached it to her backpack.

“You’ll be assigned a room after orientation. That’s in the building across the central plaza unless…” his eyes fell on the small key between her breasts. To her shock, the guard blushed and looked away.

“Er… In that case…” He swallowed hard, an Adam’s apple nearly the size of an actual apple moving under the skin of his throat. “It’s the two story brick building on the left side of the plaza; Agnes Hall. Right next to the bike racks…” He cracked his knuckles nervously. “I’ll also need you to give me the key, miss. Regulations and all…”

Aurora again thought about running, but the hall was jammed with arriving students, and Rattangrove was in the middle of nowhere. Apart from a tiny village that supplied both Rattangrove and St. Jeremy’s it was nothing but fields of wheat and cows for miles around. Running might buy her a few hours, maybe a day at best, but ultimately she had nowhere to go. She’d be caught and probably punished. That thought gave her pause. She had heard… rumours… about punishments here. In the end she simply handed it over.

The guard placed the key, along with the necklace, in a small envelope and wrote her name on that too. “Right… So yeah... Agnes Hall. You don’t have to check in right away though; there’s lots of clubs to sign up for, and food, and there’s a DJ later...” Aurora was already tuning him out. She didn’t want to deal with clubs or any of the rest of it. She was furious at herself for not fighting back, but the guard was still talking. “...I’m actually off shift in about an hour…”

Aurora sighed and turned around, assessing the guard a little more carefully. He was cute and vulnerable when he was flustered. He wasn’t bad looking at all, if you were into men the size of small buildings, and if his cock was anywhere near as large as the rest of him well then... She sighed and shook her head. This wasn’t the day for this – she’d happily have dragged him off to bed if it had gotten her out of the cage, but she was in no mood for sweet, well-intentioned boys today.

She thanked the guard and let him down as gently as she could under the circumstances and followed the crowd of young women through the hall and out onto the immaculate lawn of the main plaza.

Emily had already handed over her backpack and key to the easily flustered guard, and she was standing just outside the rear doors of the Great Hall looking out onto the plaza. Dozens of tents and tables were spread out across the cobblestone square, spilling over onto the manicured lawns that surrounded it.

Bright posters and banners advertised the Rock Climbing Club, the Chess Club, the Badminton Team and dozens more. There were booths handing out samples of food and drink from cafes both on campus and down in the village. There were jugglers, mimes, and comedy troupes from the arts programs at the school, and music of nearly every description fought to be heard over the din. It was an explosion of noise and colour and culture, and Emily was drawn straight into the heart of it. She was handed a small coffee at nearly the first booth she approached and she sipped it as she wandered from table to table.

Everything was so loud, colourful, and vibrant. From the brochure Rattangrove had seemed serious and strict, and drab. None of that was on display out on the plaza today; clubs vied for her attention, businesses handed out flyers even though she wouldn’t be allowed down in the village until her second year. It was far different and far better than she expected, and her nervousness fled before her sheer joy of new people and experiences, free from her parent’s supervision.

She did stop to pick up a tryout flyer for the soccer team, her scholarship required her to participate in at least one sport or activity, and she preferred the soccer team to any other choice. There were other options, but she was hoping to hold out for soccer. She checked her phone: 11:15. The last check-in for orientation was at 3:00PM so she had some time to herself. She wondered if anyone was giving away tacos...

She walked from booth to booth, making new acquaintances and picking up free samples. From her preparations with her father she knew that “orientation” for the locked girls wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience, but she wasn’t going to let it ruin her excitement for now. So she delayed, and wandered, and played a little pickup soccer, and got another coffee. The sun was bright and the chill of fall hadn’t yet begun to encroach on the last days of summer. It was a wonderful time to be outside.

Much later, as she was walking away from the Darts Club tent, her phone chimed. “How was orientation?” read the text from her father. Her stomach dropped. Was she late? The clock on her phone said 2:52. She could still make it if she ran, but this was not how she had hoped to start her time at Rattangrove.

Emily tossed most of the flyers into the nearest bin and sprinted for the building that she had been told to report to. It was long and low, clearly not a dormitory, it looked more like a strip mall than it did a place of higher learning. Taking the steps two at a time she flew up the stairs and into the building. The line was short, with only a couple of girls in line ahead of her. Emily’s shoulders sagged in relief, and she jogged to the end of the line, behind a slightly taller girl with strawberry blonde hair.

Having a moment to catch her breath Emily looked over the girl ahead of her in line with a touch of disbelief. She certainly didn’t look like a Rattangrove student. She was wearing a leather skirt with cut up tights and a denim jacket covered in patches for what Emily assumed were bands. Either that or this girl was really into the general concept of “Tower of Bleeding Skulls”. Hearing her approach, still panting a little from her sprint, the girl looked Emily up and down, and then turned away contemptuously. Emily rolled her eyes behind the girl’s back.

Great…. Aurora thought. The little brunette from earlier. She must be so excited to be here! I’ll bet she owns nine books on horses and wants to be a veterinarian so she can pet all the pretty animals… Her shock at losing her backpack and the failure of her plans had worn off and now she was just sour.

The food outside had actually been pretty good, but she didn’t feel like any of the clubs were for her. She didn’t like debate or foreign films, chess and poetry definitely weren’t her scene, and she really wasn’t the sporty type. She hated that this place already seemed unsuited for her and she just wanted to get this over with so she could just go to her dorm room in peace. Plus the cage was chafing – how did these locked girls deal with it?

“Next” the matronly receptionist motioned her forward. Aurora stepped towards the desk, looking down at the plump woman as she tidied the paperwork on her desk, seemingly eager to go home.

The receptionist gave her a tired but polite smile. “Now then, I’ve only got a couple of girls left on my list. What’s your name?”

“Idris. Aurora Idris” Aurora answered.

“Ah yes. I’ve got you down right here and… Oh!” The woman adjusted her glasses, and flipped back and forth between pages.

“Er… Young lady?” she was looking past Aurora, to the dark haired girl behind her. “Is it Miss Black?”

“Um... Yes, Miss. Emily Black.” The girl said, hesitantly. “I’m sorry if I’m a little late…”

The receptionist didn’t answer. She picked up the phone and dialed an extension.

“Yes Headmaster. They’re here. Both of them. All right, I’ll just get the paperwork started.”

She gently replaced the phone in its cradle, and stood up.

“I’m sure your parents told you, but for our locked students, orientation does take a little longer.”

She smiled in a way that was almost sympathetic, but still remained a little unnerving. For Emily it was because she knew what was going to happen next, and for Aurora it was because she didn’t.

“The Headmaster himself will be overseeing part of your orientation, and we mustn’t keep him waiting. Oh no, that wouldn’t do at all…” She tutted to herself as she led the pair of girls down a brightly lit hallway lined with doors on either side.

It was a short walk down the bright white hallway; identical grey doors faced each other in pairs on each side as they walked along the polished tile. It wasn’t a grand building like the Great Hall, it was plain and institutional. The receptionist stopped and opened a door, motioning the pair of them inside.

The room itself resembled a doctor’s office, with a trio of examination tables along one side and a stainless steel-topped work bench along the other. Glass-fronted cabinets displayed both medical equipment as well as an array of small steel cages that looked regrettably familiar to both girls.

The receptionist took a pair of thick plastic bags from a dispenser next to the door and handed one to each girl. “You can get undressed. Your clothes go in the bags; we’ll clean them and return them to you shortly. You won’t be wearing anything apart from your uniform on school grounds, however, so you won’t miss them.” She paused for questions for a moment, before nodding curtly. “The Headmaster will be along in a moment.” she said on her way out.

Emily was a little speechless. She had expected her clothes to be confiscated, but she had assumed that it would be private. Having to strip down to her cage in front of a complete stranger was more than a little uncomfortable. This wasn’t at all how she had pictured today going, and she bitterly scolded herself for leaving this to the last minute.

She looked at Aurora, who sniffed dismissively at her, and then began undressing. Hearing footsteps returning down the hallway, Emily began taking off her clothes as well. She had picked her outfit so carefully, wanting to make a good first impression with whoever handled her orientation. That had been a complete waste of time... She was still sliding off her panties when the door opened.

Through it walked a man Emily immediately knew to be the Headmaster. Tall, slim, incredibly well-groomed and impeccably, if conservatively dressed. Not a single silver hair on his head was out of place and his pale grey eyes looked her over from head to toe without lingering on her bared breasts or her cage. He seemed in total control both of himself and the situation. He had a presence, a gravitas that Emily, so very used to authority figures, felt immediately. He reached the centre of the room and folded his arms behind his back.

“Ms. Black, Ms. Idris. Welcome to Rattangrove Academy. I am the Headmaster of this school. You may call me Sir, or Headmaster, either is perfectly acceptable. I am so glad that you have finally…” his eyes flicked towards the clock on the wall. “…decided to join us this afternoon. You will be rejoining the rest of the students shortly, but there are some matters we need to take care of first.”

The Headmaster smiled, confidently. He seemed very aware of the effect he had on nervous young women. “No need to delay, girls. Up on the examining tables with you, we need to get you into your school-assigned cages.” When neither girl moved he rapped the toe of his shoe loudly against the hard tile floor. “This isn’t the part of the orientation where I test out the paddles on you girls, but if you don’t get moving you’ll both be getting a sneak preview....”

Aurora hopped up on the examining table hurriedly. The part of the orientation where WHAT?! She knew Rattangrove still used corporal punishment, but she still held on to the belief that it wouldn’t really happen to her. She was going to be spanked?! Like a child?! She wanted to say something. To throw something. This wasn’t supposed to be happening to her.

In Aurora’s world things like this happened to that obedient, doe-eyed little brunette over there; she would look just about right getting her pale little ass whipped red over the old man’s lap. Aurora felt suddenly a little warm picturing that... But this wasn’t the way it was supposed to have gone at all… not for her.

As the girls waited silently, the Headmaster quietly busied himself over at the work station, arranging items on a small metal tray. He seemed in no hurry for someone who had just scolded them for being late, and Emily tried to make herself comfortable on the hard metal table. Oddly, she didn’t feel uncomfortable being nude in the Headmaster’s presence. He seemed… above crude sexual urges somehow. It was like being at the doctor, she felt.

After a moment he returned, approaching Emily’s examining table first. The Headmaster placed the tray on the table next to Emily, and pulled the small envelope containing Emily’s key from his pocket.

“Thighs apart please, Ms. Black.” It was an order not a request, no matter how gently and politely he said it, and Emily complied, leaning back on the table to give him access to her cage. The cage she was wearing wasn’t terribly different from Rattangrove’s own design: A fully enclosed steel tube with a small hole on the end to allow her to urinate attached to a simple steel ring. The Rattangrove cage would be white and a little smaller, but they were otherwise nearly identical in design.

The Headmaster inserted the key into the locking pin, and with a twist, Emily was unlocked for the first time since her cage fitting.

She gave an involuntary twitch and whimper of pleasure as the Headmaster slid the tube of the cage off of her. The sensation of the slick metal sliding against her extremely sensitive organ was more than she had felt in a very long time. Gently he removed the ring as well, placing both tube and ring on the tray leaving Emily completely nude and feeling exposed in a way she hadn’t with the cage still on.

Moving swiftly on the Headmaster picked up what appeared to be a small, silver blowtorch from the surgical tray. “This is an infrasonic epilator.” the Headmaster explained; “It is completely painless and will ensure that you do not need to be unlocked to shave while you are here. Assuming you do not receive another treatment, hair growth should start again in approximately eight to nine months.” The Headmaster turned a dial on the epilator, and although there was no flame, Emily could see a faint blue glow at the tip of the device.

Emily had always kept things fairly clean and tidy so far as hair went. It made wearing a cage much more comfortable, and she thought it made her seem less... petite. She didn’t have a lot of hair to lose but as the epilator passed over her skin she watched as each hair shrivelled from the root upwards then dropped away. It was painless, but she still felt a cold tingling as the torch passed over her skin. The Headmaster was slow and thorough, removing every trace of hair before brushing her clean with a small shaving brush.

Satisfied that she was entirely hairless, he picked up a small tube of clear gel and rubbed a generous amount into his hands. Firmly, and without any hint of getting any pleasure from it himself, he applied the surprisingly warm gel all over Emily’s recently freed parts. Emily bit the inside of her cheek at the sensation, intensely pleasant after so long denied, but she also knew that she would be utterly mortified if she started getting hard.

The Headmaster’s hands were strong and ever so slightly rough, but she wasn’t in a position to complain. The gel started warm and finished tingly, smelling strongly of antiseptic and alcohol.

“The gel won’t keep things clean forever.” The Headmaster said, “But from your records, I assume you won’t need any help keeping things clean and tidy with the cage?”

Emily shook her head. No. She knew all about that. Honestly not having to shave for the next few months would be really nice, and once you were used to it keeping your locked bits clean was really quite simple even with the cage.

She looked down at herself, pink and soft and free at long last. Seeing herself without the cage was always a little surreal and she had no idea when she might be unlocked again. She quietly willed the phone hanging on the wall to ring so that she might sneak a quick touch while the Headmaster was distracted, but it remained frustratingly silent.

The Headmaster picked up the ring of her new white cage and slid it over her testes, and then over the shaft, expertly manipulating the skin so that the cage didn’t tug or bind. The tube was next, and the titanium locking pin sealed both sides together with barely a visible seam. It had taken only a few short seconds to seal her back into chastity once again.

The Headmaster exhaled quietly with the satisfaction of a job well done. Emily got the feeling that seeing her unlocked, even for such a brief time, had made the Headmaster slightly uncomfortable. She looked down a little sadly at the snowy white steel that was her penile prison for the next few months. It really was smaller than her old cage...

“You may relax Ms. Black. We will begin the next part of your orientation once Ms. Idris has been fitted.” The Headmaster returned to the work station to prepare Aurora’s cage, slipping Emily’s key into his pocket.

Now it was Aurora’s turn.

Read Chapter Two HERE

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Artwork by VoidNosferatu