Even I knew that you did not discuss a girl's brand before it had been applied to her derriere. The other girls told me on the first night of orientation that it was never, ever discussed in advance. We were not even to think about it, not our own and not those of the other girls in house. Afterwards we could all look and ooh and aah to our hearts content – but never before. Not so much as a mention.
Bethany broke the taboo. She was the girl who had given me oral training earlier that day. She had then fucked me while I sucked off our Master. We ended the session, after Master was done with my mouth, with me eating her pussy. Then she finger fucked me slowly till I came. But before our cool down she had offered advice to our Master – a very tricky proposition for any girl, even one like Bethany already under the brand. And the advice had implied strongly that I was about to be branded for his house. Bad idea!
To the other sluts the key was not to jinx the girl in question. They were a surprisingly superstitious lot although many of them were quite intelligent and sophisticated in other ways. But I soon discovered that the master's view was different. They implanted in us the belief that the discussion was bad luck mainly in order not to have the girls get big heads. Their view was that an overconfident or cocky slut was an unmotivated slut. They wanted their girls – the new girls especially – to be hungry for it.
About the 'Masters.' I told you that in our house our Master was never referred to as Master to his face. We simply answered 'yessir' – and that was about 95% - or 'nossir' – in the 5% when he was asking a factual question to which that was the appropriate, respectful answer. But of course we girls spend the majority of our time without Master present – and we have to refer to him then in some way. So we used 'Master' in our thoughts and conversations with one another. And of course there were often visitors to whom the only acceptable address was 'Master.' The girls in my house for the most part felt like we were privileged in not needing to use it every day to our Master. It made us so much more his willing slaves.
And about those brands. Even now the idea of the brand is widely misunderstood and reviled in the straight world. Most people still picture a bound, terrified girl being seared with a red hot poker for the sadistic pleasure of the Masters. But far from it. Quality houses like mine treated the branding ceremony with clinical care and precision. Girls were anesthetized, either locally or with a saddle block or, in certain rare cases, with full anesthesia. Masters attended but only to mark the moment of final and complete ownership of the girl. Also to sooth, comfort and love her. The brands were administered by clinicians under the Master's direction. And woe be unto them if they messed up a girl's body with a botched job. We were property, but highly valuable and valued property.
The branding was done as a ceremony, and after it was applied the Master would typically present a gift to the girl – some nice ring or collar or a decorative stone added to her tit or clit. Bethany's mistake was to imply my brand by suggesting that my tits could be pierced during the same ceremony. Bad idea! The newly marked girl would kneel to accept the gift, and then have it fitted on her by the Master. She would then kiss the Master's hand or dick. Then she would be robed and hustled out by the other girls to a slave-only celebration dinner in her honor. She was then fully owned.
Brands had been given a bad reputation based on some of the horrors that appeared on girls in the first year after full legalization of slave houses. Awful, aggressive, unflattering, poorly applied and poorly worn, they scandalized society to the point where there were cries for outlawing the brand altogether. The houses fought that off – and then realized they were devaluing their sluts by marking them so rudely. Nowadays the key concepts in a brand are discreet, feminine and pretty. They emphasize subjugation and submission, but they don't need to be ugly. They are as discreet and feminine and pretty as a brand marking your slavehood can be.
Some houses use the underside of a girl's tit to hide the brand in public, some use the side. Some houses brand the hip or the inner thigh. My house used the underside of the girl's ass. It was very beautiful on girls with the kind of high, rounded asses my Master sought out. On the right girl's ass – and I was convinced mine would be one of them despite the taboo of thinking about it – the brand was basically invisible unless and until the girl was bent over for use.
Every house had a unique brand of course. Ours was a heart shape with double vertical bars inside. The message was voluntary submission and slavehood: the cage is in the heart rather than the heart in the cage. The Masters often added the girl's initials or the date of final subjugation, but I liked the simpler house seal only the best. As I said we girls mostly cared about its being pretty on our bottoms. We liked that it was somewhat hidden.
Girls bragged about going home to their parents for vacation and being able to wear a boy shorts type bikini to the beach with them. Not that any girls parents would not know what her life was – just that there was no sense in rubbing it in on them or scandalizing the neighbors while at home. And of course some girls and families had no desire to hide it anyway. Nowadays one could be proud of the brand – especially those that came from the good houses.
There were now about 20 to 25 registered houses in the Bay area. Most of them were small, specialty boutiques like Rogonfeldt with no more than 6 to 10 girls in residence at any time, and no more than 3 or 4 sales in a year. But there were two super-houses with up to 30 girls and a small number of small houses specializing in male slaves. The male and female slave segregation of the legalization bill had been very controversial at first, but the owners had made it work. The total number of sluts sold in a year was about 120 females and 20 males. This covered most of the market on the west coast, although there were a small number of houses down in Nevada too. The east and midwest had their own houses of course.
The modern era of slavery therefore, which is roughly the last 20 years, has seen no more than about 2,000 girls sent into the life. This meant there might be about 1,000 active female sex slaves for the entire western region, since a slut's useful life is said to be about 10 years. All of them were branded (by law.) And all of them had been trained in a registered house (by law.) Rogonfeldt was acknowledged to be one of the best in quality, and the prices they demanded reflected this. The area average was that girls with about 2 years of house training could be expected to bring somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million dollars at auction. Rogonfeldt sluts were consistently at the high end of that range and had been known to sell for over $2 million in a few instances.
Where Bethany fit in now that she had broken a significant taboo was anybody's guess. She looked so sad that night as we sat at the dinner table. As I said, by rights I could have brought her to bed to eat my pussy, but I took a pass. Tomorrow would be a big day for me – final exams in blowjob training. It was also likely to be a big day for her since Master's decisions and punishments tended to be promptly delivered. I took my self to bed alone (for once) and early (for once) and wrote down my recollections on The Power of the Brand. It's the story of a girl in the house, Emily, who I really liked. And it explains better than I can the reverence with which we girls think of the brand. Here is her story:
The Power of the Brand
On my second evening in the house a girl named Emily told us about being at the beach on vacation with her parents the previous summer. She wore a bikini with a skimpy bottom. Girls were much less self-conscious about being exposed in public now that sexual servitude was established in the law and in the culture. They tended to be proud of their brands, especially the brand of a good house like Rogonfeldt. No one had noticed Emily's brand all afternoon, not until she lay on her tummy sunning near the end of the day.
A mother in her early 30's walked by with two young daughters. Emily told us she guessed the girls were around 12 and 14.
"Mom! Look! She has one!"
"Oh my....she does."
"Oooooh. It's a pretty one too!"
Emily craned her neck back to look up at the girls. It seemed to have been the younger one speaking. She looked up at the mom and smiled. Emily was by nature the open, friendly sort, and she had of course been very well trained to please.
