Chapter Five: Littles

I awoke in the infirmary with little memory of what had transpired. As I roused to consciousness, I gradually realized what had befallen me and, upon inspecting my emasculated groin, transitioned into silent weeping. I curled into a ball on the little leathery infirmary bed, unable to take my mind off the strange sensation of being without my cock and balls for the first time in my life. And neither was I now a neuter. It was difficult to get comfortable, as I was unable to take my mind off the strange sensations between my legs and within my abdomen - I suddenly had different equipment and a whole host of rerouted nerve endings. The whole geometry of my groin was pushed down and back and partly inverted, and I could feel every millimeter of difference. I rolled to a sitting position, which felt more neutral than a fetal curl, sniffling until my fear and grief ebbed into a dull throb of loss.

"Are you ready to go back to your room?" the doctor's assistant asked with a hopeful inflection.

How long had she been there watching my emotional turmoil? Probably a while. I sighed and nodded. "I guess."

I cinched my robe tight around my waist and shuffled through the darkness, our path dimly lit by the assistant's flashlight. The night air was cool and the campus was dark, save for a few errant windows in the dormitories. As with last night, the southern sky pulsed with a nebulous glow and the stars shone with a brilliance never seen near the city. I shuffled after the girl, trying in vain to find a walking gait that didn't bring constant attention to my emasculated (or enfeminated, if you're a glass-half-full type) anatomy.

"Are you a Beginner Girl?" I asked the attendant.

"I'm Advanced," she said. "I've been here two years."

"You're a little?"

"How can you tell?"

"You're very helpful and not intrusive. A good little nurse's attendant."

She snorted, but didn't say anything. Not for a minute. As we approached the Beginner dormitory, she hazarded a glance at me. "I used to be headstrong. I was willful. But I'm a good girl now - I haven't been punished in months. You've been punished twice in two days." She tapped at her temple with a slim finger. "If you want to stay you, you'll fall in line. Last year, we had one new girl punished ten times in a month."

"What happened to her?" I asked.

She shrugged. "She's the maid in the Advanced dormitory. She only takes one class a day anymore. Best Behavior, of course. The rest of the time, she tidies things and does what anybody else says - even us littles."

"So... bottom of the totem pole?" I said.

The girl nodded. "Bottom of the bottom. Here we are."

We were at my dormitory, so she bade me adieu and headed back to her shift in the school infirmary. I sighed and trudged back to my room - our room. The lights were out when I entered, but Cassie immediately turned her desk lamp on. She looked like she'd been crying, so that made two of us. I made fleeting eye contact and plodded to my dresser, pulling on my pajamas and hanging my robe on the little coat hook on the wall.

"Are you okay?" Cassie asked in a small voice.

"I'm not okay," I said, climbing into bed.

Cassie turned out the light, and we lay in the darkness on our respective beds for a moment. She shifted on her mattress.

"I'm really sorry. I... I thought."

"I don't care," I said. "Those girls used you, and now I'm one of the girls. No more awkward erection in the closet, but I might PMS on you. I hope you feel like shit."

"I do," Cassie said, and I almost felt sorry for her.

"Good. Remember that feeling. The next time you have a choice to fuck me over to earn brownie points with your new besties, I expect you to do the right thing."

"But..."

"But it's expected that Bigs can control their littles," I said. "It's how things work around here. So here's the deal: you've seen what they do when they're pissed. You don't want to be on their bad side and, ideally, want to be on their good side. I get it. So I'm going to play nice when it's reasonable to do so. But, in return, we're equals in this room and whenever we're alone, and when it counts… when it really counts, you've got my fucking back. Friends don't fuck over friends, even if they're littles."

"I don't think you're really a little," Cassie said. "Maybe there's no such thing as a real little and it's all show, or maybe you're just different. Or maybe you'll change. Maybe I'll change. But I hope I never forget how shitty I felt when I betrayed you and that I never think that's okay to do. This is the last time I'm going to say I'm sorry, so you're just going to have to trust me that I mean it. I'm sorry, Natalie."

"Tentatively accepted," I huffed, not quite ready to relieve her emotional burden. "You'll have to prove it with your actions. Those girls will never be your friends, Cassie. And right now, I'm hurt and angry at you, but I won't be forever. I still want to be your friend. We're sisters now. Sisters have one another's backs."

"You... you have my back?"

"Yes."

"Okay," she said. She shifted on the mattress again. "Natalie?"

"Hmm?"

"What we did in the shower was really good. Even before we, you know, fucked. I never did anything like that before. But... I might like to do it again."

Despite my fatigue and distress, I almost cracked a smile. "Me, too, Cassie. Now go to sleep."

+++++

The next day at breakfast, my fellow littles were none too happy with me. Their Bigs, demanding at the best of times, had been raging bitches after yesterday evening's fracas. Their mood had improved slightly after I was dragged off for another round of humiliating punishment, but they were still on hair trigger. Thus, most of them were piqued because they'd had their own aggravating evenings - no matter that my evening had been much, much worse... theirs had been pretty bad.

"Cecilia made me clean our room last night - twice. Just to make me do it," Michelle complained. She wasn't wearing her service uniform today, but I could see that she had it in a little pack by her seat.

"What's the deal with the maid costume? I got one, too, in Best Behavior, but it's not like St. Circe's needs fucking maids."

Michelle shrugged. "It's a service uniform. According to my father, I was..." she took a deep breath. "I was an 'ungrateful, entitled little slut'," she said, blushing slightly. Her dirty blonde hair was still done up in high pigtails that dangled to the middle of her back and, judging from her overall frame and the youthful innocence of her face, I'd have guessed her to be twelve, though I knew her to be much closer to my apparent age. "My father and the headmistress thought a year of servitude might help with my attitude... and they sucked the puberty right out of me. I hope I get it back."

"Well, they took my johnson," I said. This garnered a table of confused faces, so I clarified: "I had a dick and now I don't. They did some dark ritual rigmarole and pulled the cock right off of my body."

"I used to have a cock!" Emi said a bit too loudly. She wiggled in her chair and twirled her golden hair. "Now I have boobies and a pussy."

Helena rolled her eyes. "Yeah, we know. And every time you act up, they add to your boobs and nerf your IQ."

I'd heard something along those lines the day before, but I'd taken it to be euphemistic. Maybe I shouldn't have. "They... they can do that?" I said. "Really change your brain?"

"Not exactly," Simone said. It was the first time I'd heard her speak. She was a lanky black girl, pretty but bean-pole thin, with gray eyes that contrasted against her mocha complexion. She was also, it so happened, a bit of a brain. "For Emi, they've got some sort of special... thing... they employ."

"Define 'thing'," I said.

She shrugged. "We've never seen it, and it appears to be a one-off. And we're not even sure what it does. But let's ignore that for the moment. We've come up with some rules that their 'punishments' appear to follow, whether you're a little or a big or, like most students here, neither. First off, they can change your body pretty much however they like, but only a bit at a time. Our plans specify sets of changes and rank them, and then the faculty works down the list as we fail to meet their expectations."

"Why employ the changes as a punishment at all?"

"Because they can," Helena said, unconsciously lacing the little silk ribbons that adorned her uniform. Most of us had straightforward uniforms - the tartan skirts, beaver-brown belts, white blouses, and navy-blue blazers with the St. Circe's crest. Hers, though, had extra bits of ribbon and lace about it, as if to emphasize its femininity. "It's all about getting us to behave the way we ought to. The physical changes are secondary. They can't change how we think, but they can change our bodies and how we behave..."

"Isn't how we think and how we behave basically the same thing?" I asked.

"Not really," Michelle said. "They can only change your mind if you consent to it, or at least that's what we've gathered. But they can put compulsions on you..."

"It's like a hypnotic trance," Simone interrupted. "Your body does certain things against your conscious volition... like in the physical conditioning class. You take that class with me, so I know you've felt it. They can change our bodies - I used to be three hundred pounds, and now I couldn't keep on weight if my life depended on it. And I used to love, love, *love* sweets... and now I feel like shit whenever I eat them. That's the difference. I still like sweets, in principle, but they've conditioned an aversion in me by manipulating pain and pleasure. They can't just go in and fuck with my dietary habits..."

"Well... if our quiet little group aren't a regular bunch of Chatty Kathies today," Jordan said from behind me. I scooted around in my seat to scowl at her.

"Aww. Our newest little isn't having a very good morning, is she? Cat got your tongue? Or did it get... something else?" she smirked. I'd later find out that the news of the nature of my punishment had basically become common knowledge across the whole of the St. Circe's campus. "Three punishments on your first day, and I hear that third one was a doozie," she giggled.

My immediate impulse was to be snarky and angry, and my second impulse was that it wasn't worth it and I should just submit to the hot, imperious red-head. But my better thinking overruled both. "I'm trying to enjoy my breakfast," I said, making eye contact with her, even as the other littles avoided it like the last slice of cake. I made what I hoped was a quixotic smile. "Why don't you go back to yours, Jordan? Have you been enjoying your milk? It's extra creamy today, don't you think?"

She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. "What did you do to the milk?"

"Me? Nothing. I just prefer orange juice."

Jordan shuttled back to the Bigs table and conferred angrily in whispered tones. Cecilia and Hailey poured their own glasses out. Cassie shot me a confused look and then sniffed at her own glass before pushing it aside.

"What did you do to the milk?" Simone asked.

I shrugged. "Whatever I might have done can't possibly be as bad as what they'll come up with."

+++++

After breakfast, of course, was Best Behavior. Now that I was more familiar with the class, or at least the littles who made up about half of the students, it didn't seem so bad. When Ms. Sturm commanded me to put on my service uniform in front of the rest of the class, I did so without complaint.

"Don't be shy, girl," she said. "Turn around."

I'd disrobed with my back to the class. I blushed a bit and did as she commanded. Whereas yesterday I'd had an unsightly bulge at the front of my crotch, now it was quite uncomplicated. In the little white and blue-striped panties, my lack of male equipment was quite evident, as was the little thigh gap that my lithe frame sported. There was nowhere for any boy bits to hide. I pulled the dress over my head and pulled my hair through. I was still getting used to having so much hair - and, I suspected, something in my punishment at Best Behavior from the day before had emphasized the already considerable volume of my coppery curls.

Ms. Sturm tapped the front of my black skirt with her chalk holder, and I flinched in surprise. "The only reason you're not getting a punishment from me today is because you got a shellacking last night. I heard about what you did at dinner, and I'll have none of this impertinence. We obey our betters, Natalie."

I nodded. "We obey our betters," I repeated. "May I add something?"

"Tread carefully," Ms. Sturm said flatly.

I cleared my throat. "We girls are here because we don't yet understand our place. We are impudent and entitled. The world owes us nothing until we prove ourselves worthy of it."

Ms. Sturm nodded. "Very good..."

"The Bigs are impudent and entitled. They are not our betters. They must prove themselves worthy of respect before they can demand obedience."

"It is not your place to decide who your betters are. It is your place to obey."

"Whose place is it, then, to tell me who my betters are, Ms. Sturm?"

"Mine."

I turned myself toward her ever-so-slightly. In the corner of my vision, I could see the rest of the class looking on in abject astonishment at our dialog. "Is it your opinion that the Bigs are not impudent and entitled?"

Ms. Sturm tapped the toes of her gray flats against the floor. "I am not their instructor," she said eventually. "Take your seat before I change my mind about punishment."

+++++

That interaction got me a bit of notoriety with the littles, and across the Beginner Girls more generally. In fact, I'd quickly built up a reputation - as the girl who was secretly a boy, but who was now a girl, but who upstaged Ms. Sturm in her own class and didn't even get punished for it. Whether or not I'd handed the Bigs a lesson in humility was a matter of more nuance, as they'd collectively managed to get a far worse revenge on me. Still, in a way, the joke was on them: they'd played their trump card. They couldn't take my manhood twice. Though, I would later learn, they had another ace in the pocket.

"I can't believe you got away with that in front of Ms. Sturm," Michelle said. "Any one of us would have been toast."

"Maybe she felt sorry for me?"

Helena laughed. "That woman isn't sorry for anybody. You've got a magical tongue."

"That's what my girlfriends always told me." That earned a few embarrassed gasps among my fellow littles.

Having a way with words was a bit of a family trait, actually. Cousin Vince had turned it into a successful legal career. I'd mostly used it to punch above my weight class when it came to bedding beautiful women. It seemed that I could also do it to do a bit of nuanced manipulation of my teachers at St. Circe's. That was good to know.

Over the next few days, I settled into a routine: breakfast with the littles, class, dinner with the littles, and evenings hanging out with Cassie. Sometimes the Bigs had social activities after the school day, and so I'd creep out and corral my fellow littles into our own secret 'little' club where we could discuss our lives and socialize without being under the domineering gaze of our Bigs. It was imperative, though, that we return to our rooms before those Bigs got back - not so much for me, because Cassie and I had an understanding. But the others weren't so lucky.

Cassie was punished once more later that week - for what, she couldn't or wouldn't say, and she looked and acted more like a Big by the day, taller, firmer, hotter, and strutting around, black berets in her glossy chestnut hair, her hazel eyes half-lidded as if she was already bored by the place. Still, it was an act - I managed to keep her grounded and the other Bigs were none the wiser. For instance, I'd make a show of serving her at meals but get little things wrong on purpose - too much salt? Orange juice instead of pineapple? - and it was her job to grin and bear it.

I earned no favors among the Bigs, but neither did I do enough to provoke their ire. They were satisfied for the moment that I'd learned my place, and I was content playing the part of the not-quite-cowed little. That isn't to say I went completely unpunished - I suffered exactly one smack on the butt from Ms. Sturm, who was unhappy with how casual I was with Cassie when she'd spotted the two of us approaching class one morning - barely any change at all, and certainly nothing worth writing home about. Which, of course, I couldn't do - who could I write to that the mail censors would approve? I was walking on eggshells, but I didn't feel like I was gradually losing myself into meek submission. The only real conditioning that I underwent was in Physical Conditioning, and I wasn't especially opposed to that. With each round of feminine training, I learned to fit in more inconspicuously without feeling that I was sacrificing anything of note. I could belch and adopt a plodding 'dude swagger' if I really wanted to.

On my sixth full day at St. Circe's - the last day before our once-a-week reprieve from classes - Cassie had another one of her evening events with the Bigs, and so my fellow littles and I padded out to the common area for our now-accustomed powwows (I'm told that this is culturally insensitive, but that's what we called them).

"I wonder what they're doing," I said. "I know some of the girls do tennis and gymnastics, but I doubt that's what they do in the evenings. Cassie doesn't take her gym clothes or anything."

"I think it's magic," Simone said. That earned a giggle from Helena.

"It's not magic," Helena said. "Do you think Cecilia wouldn't be torturing us with voodoo every day if she could, like, curse us? She'd never let us live it down."

"We're not supposed to know about it yet," Simone replied. "Look, we know there's magic at St. Circe's, right? The proof is here in front of us - all of us have been changed by it. And don't you think that at least some of the girls here are probably learning it?"

"Yeah, but what's your proof?" I asked. "It's possible, but why assume it?"

She held up two thin fingers. "Two reasons. First, the little green book. Jordan's got a little book in our room that I can't see. I've spotted it twice in the mirror, but when I look at her desk, I can't notice it. I know it's there, but my brain tells me it isn't. Then, when I look back to the mirror, it's suddenly gone. I think they've got some kind of magic books that we've been conditioned not to look at. And the second reason? I've heard that the Advanced Bigs have contests to control their littles - to make them do anything."

"That's just conditioning," I said. "No need for magic."

"I think it's way beyond conditioning. Like, it's some sort of test to see if they can do the same kinds of compulsions that the headmistress, Doctor Sauvage, and a few of the teachers know how to do. That's part of the reason why we're here with the Bigs - to be their little test subjects for magical control."

"That's fucked up," I said. "But it makes sense. Cassie would have told me... but maybe she's not allowed to. What's that one class that all the Bigs have? The one that isn't in Masters Hall?"

"Classics," Simone said. I nodded - presumably Homer, Virgil, Cicero, and so on... but maybe not. I don't think Cassie had anything Latin or Greek on her study desk.

"I also take classes," Emi said, tuning in from whatever happy thoughts had been flitting through her head. Unlike the rest of us, with our sensible comfy pajamas - dark cotton with long pants and long sleeves and a little St. Circe's crest at the breast - she'd been issued a gossamer, frilly, cream-colored nightie. She absently played with the laces along brief hem. "But all of mine are in Masters," she added.

"Classics, Emi," I clarified. "Do we even know where Classics is taught?"

"A010… I think it's the empty room next to Doctor Sauvage's," Simone said. "But we can't..."

"Field trip," I interrupted. "We're going to explore the Classics classroom tonight. As soon as the Bigs are asleep, we meet back out here, and off we go."

"This is a bad idea," Michelle cautioned.

I nodded. "Most great ideas are."

+++++

If the plan to sneak into the Classics room to poke about sounds reckless and foolish, you're absolutely right - it was exactly that. But keep in mind my state of mind at the time. It had been a few days since my last real punishment, so that salience had dulled, and I was as determined as ever to figure out how to get my manhood and my old life back. More determined, even - I had new friends who I might help in the process.

There was a second rationale behind my urgency that sounds even more foolish - the sensation of needing to pee. Perhaps you've never paid close attention to it, but when you need to urinate, there's a certain urgency in your bladder (this is essentially identical, regardless of your other equipment) as well as an anticipatory feeling along the organ where the urine emerges. For a few days, I'd had intermittent ghost sensations from about an inch and a half in front of my smooth groin. My body was indistinguishable from a slim sixteen year-old girl's, but my mind remembered, and I had the ghost dick sensations to prove it. But they'd become less and less frequent - and for the past day or so, I'd had none at all. I was worried that between the passage of time and my Physical Conditioning, I was crossing some threshold where I might forget what it was like to be male, that I might lose my desire to become myself again. I couldn't be complacent. So, naturally, when the possibility of snooping into the school's occult powers arose, I jumped at the opportunity. And a big part of that was because it felt different when I needed to pee.

Cassie and the other Bigs returned from their activity an hour or so later with another few non-big girls, all of them giggling and slightly drunk. Cassie had been fitted with a blue and yellow athletic shirt labeled 'CREW' with two oars beneath it. When she wandered into our room, I pretended I'd just dozed off, even though I'd dashed in perhaps a minute before her, as soon as we heard the dormitory's front door creaking open with the giggling and chattering of the tipsy girls just behind.

"The school has a crew team?" I asked.

Cassie shrugged. "Yeah. We went out on the water and they showed me how to row. And it was sooo fun… and I was pretty good at it! We only compete a few times a year... apparently, there's other special schools?"

She stripped the shirt off and proceeded to get entirely naked. I couldn't help but take a peek as she did. She pulled her pajama tops on first and then bent over to find her bottoms, sticking her own shapely bottom out in my direction, the taut mounds of her labia barely visible between increasingly lean, toned thighs. She caught me looking and giggled.

"Sorry!" Cassie said. "I promise I'm not a bitch... it was just super fun."

She rolled into her bed, turned out the light, and was almost immediately snoring. I tiptoed over to make sure she was asleep - no doubt there - and then crept out into the hallway, out into the Beginner Girls' dorm common area. Simone was the only one out before me. She sat cross-legged on one of the big couches, knobby knees sticking out, nose-deep in a differential equations book with an equation-strewn practice sheet to the side.

"Differential equations, huh?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "It's..."

I shrugged. "I know what differential equations are. I'd love to brush up on my diff-eq if you want a study buddy." I'd taken it years before as an elective during my economics degree - I didn't particularly want to brush up on diff-eq, but I wanted Simone as an ally, so I'd bite that bullet.

"You're a math kid, too?" she stated happily.

I nodded - I was neither, but maybe I could be, at least for a while. "Let's see what you're working on."

We didn't get far. Michelle padded out maybe five minutes later. Another minute or two later, Helena came out with Emilia following happily behind.

"She insisted on coming."

"I want to see the magic class," Emi said.

"Are we really going to do this?" Michelle asked quietly.

I nodded. "Don't you want to get to the bottom of how they're changing us? If we can't figure it out, we don't have a chance of stopping it or slowing it down. If not tonight, with our Bigs snoozing off a few too many wine coolers, then when?"

"I just don't want to get in trouble..."

I shrugged. "Then don't come. Participation in Club little is voluntary, Michelle. Are you with us or not?"

"With you," she stated. "Let's do this thing."

We crept out from the dormitory and across the night campus, venturing out into the cool night air and across the moonlit lawn. We wandered off-path and over the curated lawn, over little plaques and patterns of stone in the grass, past the curlicues of perfectly-sculpted topiaries, and over to the administration building. There, we found the side door unlocked - it was always unlocked, as there was always somebody in the infirmary. That meant, of course, that we might get caught if the nurse's assistants changed shifts or just happened to wander out to the bathroom. The Night Matrons also visited the building on occasion. And, on top of all that, Headmistress Lily, Doctor Sauvage, and the rest of the administration weren't known for keeping predictable hours.

We were lucky, though: we saw nobody and nobody saw us. We crept along the corridors, noting the room numbers as they advanced, switched a digit, and then descended until we were at the other side of the building.

"There's no room A010," Michelle said. She pointed to the placard above the last room in the hallway: A201. "We've got the one hundred wing and the two hundred wing - no zero hundred wing."

"There's a basement," I said. "Who wants to bet they learn magical stuff in the basement?"

I showed them to the stairwell just beyond the end of the hallway. There was a stairway leading up to several meeting rooms and overflow space, which Helena scouted out and reported to be the A300 rooms. That left down. There was a nondescript door that might have been another custodial closet, but it opened to a downward flight of stairs, down to a cramped corridor with dim emergency lighting and walls that hadn't been painted since the Carter administration.

"A001," Simone said. "Good call, Natalie."

We proceeded down the corridor and the numbers went up. I didn't mention that there was another smaller, creepier staircase that led even further down. It led down to the circular ritual room where Doctor Sauvage and her taller, creepier colleague, Doctor Heirophant, had emasculated me in a dark ritual. I didn't want to go down there, and I very much doubted that the Bigs (and whatever other students were learning magic) would want to go down there, either. It was just too creepy. We got to the end of the corridor, to room A009. The opposite side of the corridor was simply a blank wall. No room A010.

"Is this a joke?" Simone stomped a spindly leg. "What the hell, guys?"

"It's not a joke," I said. "It's a trick. Watch."

I stared at the wall and then turned my head. Slowly, I turned my head, keeping my gaze fixed straight forward as I did. The blank wall passed from my central vision, into the periphery, and then slowly edged out, until... pop! At the last possible second, the vague shape of a door popped into my peripheral view. I reached for where I thought the knob was and pulled it open.

"Gaah!" Michelle gasped.

"Shh!" Helena hissed.

"How'd you make a door?" Emi squealed.

"Shh!" Simone hissed. "She didn't make it, Emi... it was obscured. But... I guess we can all see it now that it's open?"

"I sure can," Michelle said. "Holy shit."

She wandered over to the frame and ran her small fingers along it, marveling at the door. Michelle had taken her uniform-mandated pigtails - big, perfect corkscrews of glossy dirty blonde - and bound her disproportionate mass of hair into a neat bun. She looked practically mature, pondering over the suddenly-there door. To be honest, though, there wasn't much to ponder. It was a very ordinary, very boring, very old door. Also last renovated in the Carter administration. But it led to a dim classroom, and if I'd had any doubt that we'd found the right place, I was quickly convinced those doubts were unfounded.

For one thing, there was a giant spooky voodoo-doll-looking mannequin at the front of the classroom. Right above it, was a sign that said... I couldn't quite read it. It was too dark. The classroom was illuminated by nothing but the after-hours hallway lighting of the basement hall.

"I can't see a thing," Helena whispered. She flicked at the light switch, but nothing happened.

"Maybe you need to say a magic word to turn on the lights," Simone observed. "Like lumos."

With that, the lights blinked on. She gasped. I gasped. Everybody but Helena gasped.

"It was the other switch," Helena clarified, flicking it off and on again.

Oh well. Not magic. But the room certainly was. The sign above the creepy mannequin said 'Know Your Hexes!'. The blackboard was covered with arcane symbols, diagrams, and semiotic progressions.

"That doesn't look like any math I've ever seen," I said.

Simone nodded. "Me, either." Between the two of us, that meant it probably wasn't math.

When Emi pulled the door behind her, it disappeared into the wall. She turned around, confused, and felt for the handle, fumbling over it a few times before finding it again. She opened and closed the door, giggling.

"It's a trick door!" she said.

"Stop doing that!" Michelle hissed. "We need to stay quiet. What if somebody comes by?"

We looked through the classroom's contents - little practice voodoo dolls resembling the bigger mannequin, some bits of gaudy jewelry that gave me an uneasy feeling to touch, discarded note sheets with more-amateurish versions of the progressions on the chalkboard... one of them signed in neat, curly script at the top by 'Cecilia Montaine'. And several battered blue copies of a textbook entitled 'Transitional Symbols: An Approach to Intermediate Spellcraft'.

"Yup, magic," I said, taking a copy of the book.

Helena cracked open another copy and flipped through its yellowed pages. "It doesn't look like anything," she said. "I mean... they aren't symbols. They're just gibberish."

I wondered for a moment what she meant. In semiotics, some symbols are pictograms that visually resemble what they represent. But most aren't - no letter of the Latin alphabet looks like anything in particular. Even complex character systems like modern Chinese don't resemble anything - but, even if you don't understand them, you can easily understand how they might be symbols. To me, the markings in the book didn't seem any different from a complex mathematical notation from a class I hadn't taken yet. Simone seemed to have a similar opinion. Everybody else agreed, though, that they didn't look like anything.

"I mean... how could they be symbols?" Michelle asked. "It's just like... gibberish on a page. You know?"

I shrugged, not wanting to pursue the matter. It was clear that the three other littles had some sort of perceptual block over the symbols - they literally couldn't perceive them as notation. What that implied about Simone and myself I could only speculate. Then I looked over to the blank spot in the wall where the door was and concentrated, knitting my brow and frowning at the spot. Sure enough, I could see the fuzzy outline of a door resolving itself. What did it mean? I picked up a piece of the costume jewelry and turned it over in my slim hands, looking for marks or symbols denoting magical properties.

"Turn off the lights! Turn off the lights!" Helena hissed.

"Eep!" Emi said. She flicked the lights off and shuffled to the back of the classroom.

Out in the hallway, we could hear muffled voices. Muffled footsteps. Muffled jiggling of doorknobs. They were approaching... approaching... they stopped at the door. I could barely make out the words as they spoke outside.

"I appreciate that you think you saw someone, Karen," the Ms. Rust said. "But there's nobody here. What student would be foolish enough to break into the administration building at night and then come down to the basement of all places?"

"Can I look, at least?"

The Night Matron sighed. "I'll look."

The door cracked open and the fulsome frame of Ms. Rust leaned into the room, silhouetted against the pale hallway light. She fumbled at the wrong light switch and entered the room another step. When she found the actual light switch, she was going to find us. She couldn't help but see us.

"How do I turn the lights on?" she muttered.

"There's another switch somewhere," the nurse's attendant said. She wandered into the room and started feeling around the wall.

I could see three of the girls... Michelle, Simone, and Helena, barely-visible in the darkness right next to the real light switch. The moment Karen found the real light switch, the three of them would be found out. Emi and I, huddled near the back, might take another five seconds to spot. Then the jig would be up. I wished I could disappear, that I could take whatever magical power existed in the room, or in the little tourmaline bangle I was clutching, and will myself right out of the room. It would be a shame if the others were caught, but in that moment, I just wanted to be out of there, myself. A moment of dizziness passed over me, as if I was drawing energy from somewhere and it was pulling me away from the room and into a realm apart from the world entirely... and then the bangle I was holding popped in a sudden flash of polychromatic light, bits of metal and crystal ricocheting about the room.

I shrieked - an embarrassingly high and girlish shriek - and Emi shrieked at my shriek. She bolted for the door and was quickly intercepted by the nurse's attendant, who struggled to keep her away from the room's exit. I stumbled away from my spot, scooting across the room on my butt and staggering to my feet just in time to get collared by Ms. Rust.

"Natalie Bryce! What in the world are you doing here? I should have known you'd be up to something - this is a Level 4 reprimand, girl! You and your friend both! Now!"

Ms. Rust was a large woman - above average height, with a very curvaceous figure and, apparently, a fair amount of muscle. She wrapped her hands right around my Collar of Contrition and dragged me right out of A010. Emi had already been subdued out in the hallway and was openly weeping and playing with the hem of her nightie to soothe herself. As for the other three, I didn't see any sign of them - my distraction, it seemed, had allowed them to make a clean escape.

+++++

Ms. Rust dragged me out of A010. Emi was also being transported, but I was in no condition to concern myself with her fate. I was on the verge of panicking, myself, up until it was clear that Ms. Rust wasn't dragging me up to Headmistress Lily's office. No, she was dragging me down… down the narrow stairwell and into the ritual room. Suddenly, I was well past the verge of panic, sobbing and screaming and struggling against her pull. At the door to the sub-basement room, she pushed me against the door and looked into my eyes. I could see that she, too, had been crying - the magnitude of my panic had moved some core of empathy within the Night Matron.

"Woman up," she said. "You did the crime, you take your lumps. If you're going to behave like a child, at least take your punishment like a goddamn adult."

"Please, don't..." I said, wiping the snot tears from my nose.

"If you didn't put me into this position, I wouldn't have to. Do you think I like casting hexes over sobbing young women in the middle of the night? I don't. Now... am I going to have to get somebody to help me shackle you or are you going to take your punishment?"

"Wh... what are you going to do to me?"

Ms. Rust shrugged and pulled me, now more compliant, into the familiar ritual chamber. "When Karen returns with your behavior plan, we'll know. Whatever that says."

It wasn't to be random transformative torture, then. I was frightened, but no longer panicking. Knowing that there was an official punishment scheme somehow helped. St. Circe's had an official scheme for everything - including, I imagine, when and where to go off-scheme. I suppose that's what happens when you operate a magical all-girls school for four centuries running.

The nurse's assistant - Karen, I suppose - returned. She brought with herself a frightened Emi, copies of our green cardboard-bound behavioral plans, and a vial of phosphorescent yellow stuff in a black velveteen pouch. Ms. Rust flipped through our plans, nodding to herself, took a few notes, and got to business. It turns out that the Night Matrons and most teachers at St. Circe's simply don't have the level of juice needed to carry out a Level 4 punishment without assistance. Headmistress Lily and Doctor Sauvage can do it, as well as Ms. Law and one or two of the other teachers. The rest require substantial assistance, either through a second practitioner or by using the extra juice of a ritual room, with its myriad energies and enchantments.

"Bend over the ritual table, butt in the air," Ms. Rust said.

I complied - there didn't seem to be much point in resisting. I climbed upon the altar and stuck my butt in the air. A long minute passed. Ms. Rust muttered some... words. They weren't nonsense like the chants I'd previously heard. They were in a language I didn't yet know, but they were language. I felt energies at the edge of my perception coalescing. I felt her hands at my pajama pants, pulling them down enough to expose my bare butt, and then I felt the whacks. She hit me eight times in all with some sort of magically-infused paddle. It hurt a bit, but I didn't cry out. I huffed at each strike, from the little sting of pain and from the wash of energy that pulsed through me each time, changing my body.

"All right, off the table," Ms. Rust said.

I eased myself off, struggling with my pajamas. Where they'd been a perfect fit before, now they were loose all over. I'd shrunk again. It was only a few inches, but I'd already been verging on petite. Now I'd marched well through petite territory and was knocking on the door of conspicuously small. I'd later measure myself on the infirmary scale at just south of ninety pounds and five feet on the nose. I was about the same size as Michelle now, though at least I had breasts and a butt as tokens from the puberty fairy - the fairy simply hadn't given my current body any height to speak of. And it disturbed me that that small reassurance calmed me, as I still wanted to harness whatever magic would return me to my old life. I didn't want the tokens of bourgeoning womanhood. Did I?

"We'll have fitting clothes delivered to your room before morning," the Night Matron said.

"Th- thanks?" I said weakly, wobbling away from the altar.

Emilia was next, bending over and flipping up her nightie when asked, exposing a lacey, thong-clad ass. And what an ass it was - and getting better! First Ms. Rust had Emilia drink a sip of the phosphorescent potion... all that was left in the bottle, it would turn out. Then she got her own round of chanting, ritual, and paddles on the butt. I watched carefully as Ms. Rust went through the ritual, chanting over a series of gems, waving them in patterns, and placing them about the room with the care of a feng shui master. Then she took the jewel-encrusted wire mesh paddle she'd used on me, took careful aim, and smacked Emi's plush behind.

Whack-whack-whack! She smacked it six times in a row. Each time, Emi went a bit cross-eyed and let out a little moan of arousal. And each time, her body changed ever-so-slightly. I'd have missed it if I wasn't paying careful attention - her body filling out, her hair growing out a half an inch or so each time, her overall look becoming more sexualized. When she slid from the table, her eyes glittered alluring azure and her nightie struggled to contain an extra cup and a half of bust. She looked at me, cocked her head, and giggled.

"You're so little!" she said.

I sighed. If I had to guess, that potion had somehow rendered her even more air-headed than before, and before was plenty. I'd got of comparatively lightly. I'd lost maybe fifteen percent of my overall body mass and was now a shrimpy little thing, but at least my brain was intact. Right? I tried to think of the symbols I'd seen in A010 and had no particular trouble doing so. I'd always had a better memory than I deserved, and that hadn't changed.

"What now?" I asked.

Ms. Rust pursed her lips. Her hair was a mess and she looked visibly taxed from the whole affair. "You go back to your room, you try to get some sleep, and you think about what you've done. You're lucky Doctor Sauvage isn't on call right now... you got off lightly with old Ms. Rust tonight."

"You're not old!" Emi giggled and jiggled. She'd definitely be needing new bras.

+++++

After our punishment, Karen (the nurse's attendant) escorted us back to the dormitories. The whole way back, Emi tugged at her too-tight nightie and I struggled to keep my pajama pants up. I'd only lost about five percent of my previous height, but it turns out that's a lot of lost volume overall. Maybe it was my imagination, but everything looked noticeably bigger. I crept into my room, rousing Cassie, but she probably just thought I was returning from the bathroom or something and she settled right back down.

I was awoken the next morning to a tapping on the door, and I opened it to retrieve the cardboard box full of all my new clothes. The box was heavier than I expected, and I realized that I'd probably lost some strength, too. My arms and legs were slender little things and making a muscle didn't produce much visible difference.

"You got punished again?" Cassie yawned, rolling out of bed. "Good lord, you're a little thing now. What did you do?"

"I don't want to talk about it," I said.

"Last night?"

"Yeah. Emi and I..."

"Is that the bimbo girl?"

"We call her the ADD girl," I said. I shrugged out of my pajamas and started to don my school uniform.

"Wow... you're, like, a little kid," Cassie giggled.

I turned back to her, topless and glaring. I pointed at a smallish breast - much smaller than Cassie's now were, but definitely a breast. "Little kids don't have boobs. I'm just short. I'm still a grown-ass..." I almost said man... "woman, however much size the school spanks out of me."

Cassie giggled again. "They spank you?"

I sighed. "Yeah. It's in my plan. Can we just get to breakfast? I'm starving."

I indulged the Bigs in tolerating some half-hearted ribbing and accepted the condolences of my fellow littles. We were fortunate that only Emi and myself had been caught and punished - it could have easily been all five of us, and I suspect that the school would have cracked down upon an all-little conspiracy even more than on a mischievous duo.

"At least I'm not the smallest, anymore!" Michelle chirped.

I rolled my eyes. "We're the same height! And I bet I'm heavier than your scrawny ass."

We compared weights, and I was right… though not by much. Whether I had two or three pounds on the smallest little wasn't much consolation. And, as if to add insult to injury, I wasn't even through with my punishments. The morning after my paddling, I got another spanking in front of my Best Behavior class. Ms. Sturm (and, I imagine, all of the faculty) had heard about my exploits the night before and was, therefore, especially mindful of me, Natalie Bryce, her most strident student. She strode up to me, looking down her nose with a snide imperiousness.

"Stand," she said. I did, of course. She pulled my rule book out of my St. Circe's backpack and flipped through it. "You are below five and one quarter feet in height and, therefore, are required to wear high or mid pigtails when in uniform. To be secured with a blue or green ribbon or similar."

"I... I didn't know."

Ms. Sturm shrugged. "Your ignorance of the rules doesn't exempt you from following them. On my desk now, Natalie, butt in the air. Sadly, you already know the drill."

I did know the drill. Thankfully, a dress code violation wasn't nearly so severe as sneaking into the campus's magic room. In fact, Ms. Sturm really laid down the law - five smacks with the palm of her hand against my pert little butt - and it was still a lot less severe. I'm not even sure what those punishments of hers were supposed to do - I always ended up looking vaguely cuter for them, my hair and natural coloration looking more cosmetically-enhanced. And I always felt an urge toward docility and submission, at least for a few minutes. And then, before you knew it, I was right back to my rebellious, bratty self again. Part of me knew it would feel good to just submit, but I was too goddamn stubborn to ever do it. It felt better to watch the likes of Ms. Sturm frown in exasperation at their inability to rein me in.

Afterward, she retrieved a pair of blue ribbons from her desk and had one of the other students show me how to arrange my hair. I felt absurd, with those twin coppery masses curling out and dangling down from my head, bobbling about the middle of my back. It felt like a little girl's hairstyle, but I suppose that was the point, and I was stuck with it for the time being. I avoided trouble for the rest of the day - in fact, I avoided further trouble all the way until the school pageant.

+++++

We littles had heard precious little about the school pageant, nor about the 'formal' that was to occur soon afterward. As somebody who'd been almost a decade out of high school, I could still remember the host of high school activities that teenagers got excited about, and my sensibilities weren't too out-of-date. Homecoming, formals, prom, holiday pageants, and so on. In fact, I'd frequently participated in these events in some capacity, mostly because it was a good way to hook up with the more sociable girls at school, and those tended to be the lookers. I'd never been very invested in school events, though, and I completely forgot how excited teenagers (especially teenage girls) could get about these things.

"Isn't it exciting?" Cassie gushed. "Oh! You're so cute in your pigtails!"

"Shut up," I said, and immediately untied the ribbons. I had a lot of hair now, thick tresses tumbling down to the middle of my back. "This stuff takes forever to wash, by the way."

"Tell me about it," Cassie sighed. "I never had hair past my shoulders, and now it's like twice that long."

I took a second glance at Cassie - she'd changed again, too. Her changes were subtler than mine, but they were still pretty evident. Where she'd been average height, chubby, and cute when she first came to St. Circe's, now she wasn't remotely any of those things. She fit in perfectly with the Bigs - in fact, she was better than average among them. She gave Queen Bee Cecilia a run for her money if you asked me.

"You got in trouble again?"

She shrugged. "I sank a school boat on purpose. But Cecilia was being a bitch. We all had a good laugh about it... well, except Cecilia, obviously."

"Obviously,"  I said. "But you were telling me about this 'Harvest Pageant'?"

Cassie filled me in on the details, about how there'd be a festival in a week's time to celebrate the coming of autumn, with crafts and decorations and demonstrations and activities and on and on... lots of things. This was news to me - I didn't know that the St. Circe's campus even had seasons, and the days were still warm, the nights pleasantly cool, and the trees as green and verdant as ever. The Harvest Pageant would initiate a week of autumnal festivities and be capped by the Harvest Formal, where the girls from St. Circe's and the boys from St. Lovelock's (a similar academy for boys, I gathered) would wile the equinox night away in the Old Abbey under minimal school supervision.

"How minimal?" I asked.

"Reports vary," Cassie shrugged. "But very permissive, in any case. Are you going to shower?"

"I was about to," I said.

"Cool. I'll come with." I didn't miss her sly smile.

This was our first time in the shower together since the fateful night that had seen me unmanned. I wondered, therefore, whether there was any ulterior motive behind her coming with me. Maybe she just wanted somebody to talk to in the next stall over. I ran through my rule book, scanning for anything that might be an opprobrium on a little friendly shower time with my roommate. The closest thing I could find was Honor Code Violation #2:

'No publicly engaging in activities unbefitting a lady that might cast the school in a poor light.'

I considered that shenanigans with one's roommate might count... but Cassie hadn't been punished for fucking me in the shower, and we weren't in public, so this appeared to fail the metric on multiple accounts. The only rule preventing us was now moot: I no longer had any male organs to have revoked.

In my too-large robe (they'd neglected to replace mine with a smaller size), I padded after Cassie and into the shower. Somebody small was already in one of the small stalls, humming away in a high and pretty voice. Michelle, probably. I stepped into the other small stall - Cassie was larger and could make better use of the large stall. But, before I could even turn the water on, she grabbed me by the forearm and pulled me in after her. As small as I was, she didn't have to pull very hard.

"What the fuck, Cassie?" I whispered.

"You wash my hair, I'll wash yours," she said. "We've both got a lot, and this should make it easier. And more enjoyable. Or..." she gestured to the stall door. "I'm not going to keep you here."

I reached toward the stall door, reached up (a lot higher up than before), and slid the privacy latch shut. Then we showered. It started out chastely enough, standing under the hot spray, rubbing myself down, getting my hands all lathered up with shampoo, and then going to work on my roommate's thick tresses, autumnal chestnut gone dark in the water. I had to really reach to get every bit of her head, standing on tiptoes as I ran my fingers through to get everything in, caressing her scalp with my little fingers and running my hands down the cascades of her hair and, incidentally, her smooth, muscle-taut back. Even from behind, she was breathtaking - tall and well-muscled with a very slender waist and a firm and perfectly-rounded ass. I could do squats for a year and not have an ass like that, nor those firm thighs framing a perfect little gap from behind. I ran my fingers along her hair, down her tresses, hovering at the curve of her ass with a little press and squeeze, before returning back to her scalp. Rinse, wash, grope, repeat.

Then Cassie did likewise for me, her fingers running firm but heavenly against my scalp, taking care to be gentle with my hair. It felt really comforting and I basked in a vulnerability that I was, frankly, a bit uneasy with. Given our relative sizes, she could do anything she wanted with me... like the attention she was giving my ass. There's no way my ass was as nice as hers, but she seemed happy to give it little squeezes and pinches as she reached the ends of my hair. And if she didn't want to stop, I'd have to hope that asking politely would be enough.

Then we both heard Michelle turn off her shower, dry off, and pad out to the hair dryers. As soon as the roar of the hairdryer started up, Cassie grew more insistent. She held my hair gently but firmly with one hand and slid the other across my chest and down. I gasped as her fingers ran across my achingly erect nipples and had to bite my lip to stifle a groan when her fingers struck paydirt along my little nub.

I'd done a little self-exploration, but perhaps less than I would have liked. I was hesitant about what exploring my womanly parts would signify after the loss of my manly bits. To be sure, it felt good to rub around down there... and enough rubbing let to a warm, full, vaguely damp feeling… but I didn't progress beyond that for lack of privacy and for fear of where my explorations might lead. I had a sensitive little nexus at the front of my groin and a slightly less-sensitive zone all along my legs and between my thighs. When Cassie caressed the sensitive skin of my inner thigh, I let out a little sigh and pushed back into her. Her strong arms wrapped around my smaller body, and I didn't even think to resist. When she grabbed my Collar of Contrition to adjust my stance, I melted into her, moaning as she had her way with me, groping at my breasts and rubbing soapy fingers all along my most sensitive parts. The sound of my own little squeaks and moans turned me on, too, high and soft little intonations of surrender to pleasure.

I felt something shuddering within me, felt my knees start to buckle (though Cassie easily held me up) and was sure that this pleasurable temblor was an orgasm. It was very nice. But Cassie kept going, and that something kept building up inside of me, something powerful and warm rising up within my sex, within my very womb, and pulsing out from me. I screamed in pleasure, and Cassie had to clamp a hand over my mouth to keep everybody at St. Circe's from hearing my throes of passion. Some vaguely-realized energy pulsed out of my body and one of the fluorescent filaments above us exploded in a blue-white pop.

"Wow," Cassie laughed, gradually releasing her grip around me. "That sounded fun."

I recovered, still panting. "I'm not sure fun is how I'd describe it." I giggled, giddy in the aftershocks of a real blitzkrieg of an orgasm.

"Now..." Cassie said, turning her back to me. "Your turn to soap me up."

Her own screams a few minutes later busted the second filament, and we giggled under the hot water, fumbling over one another in the darkness.