Sylvain tests the Boom Box on a friend.

The more Sylvain thought about it, the more he felt it was his responsibility to figure out the nature of the Boom Box. In his head, he imagined delivering it over to the head of the church, Rhea, only for the blasted thing to turn out to be a trap, going off and forcing the green-haired, saintly lady into an undignified series of gyrations just like Anna, shaking her exalted ass and occasionally teasing glimpses of her long, lovely legs beneath the hem of her gown...

... What was intended to be an illustrative warning played in Sylvain's head longer than strictly necessary, and he had to work to break the spell. "No, before I cause a national incident between House Gautier and the Church of Seiros, I ought to study how this magic works. I mean... It seems powerful, but is it dangerous? As far as I can tell, it only forces women to dance..." The student muttered to himself as he left the square and began wandering aimlessly towards the stables, which were relatively free of a crowd. "If I am going to test it, I'd like to start in private. It'd also be great if I could pick a target I won't lose any sleep over..." He wouldn't say it out loud, but his mind was already conjuring up a list of the most shallow and attractive noblewomen that might be eligible targets...

His better nature won over, and he shook himself free of that petty spite. "No, that's no good. If I start thinking of this thing as a tool to settle scores, I'm headed down a dark path, already crowded shoulder-to-shoulder with noble nitwits. The right way to do this is to be objective. I'm testing this thing for everyone's safety, and because I'm confident it's harmless. Shouldn't matter at all who I pick, then. Let's go with the first woman I seeeeeee...!"

Immediately, Sylvain felt himself being punished for his choice of words. There was exactly one other person in the stables, and if he'd had his head on straight, he might have guessed who it would be. Tending one of the few Pegasus the school stabled was his childhood friend, Ingrid Brandl Galatea, gently grooming the beast's white mane. Sylvain hardly needed this as an example of how much pride Ingrid took in her duties or how much pride she had as a Pegasus-riding knight in training. With her fair skin, neat blonde braid, clear green eyes, and attractive figure, one might normally think the pretty would-be lady knight to be the perfect target for a hormonal young man thinking about scoring a free dirty dance.

However, one would be wrong. Sylvain and Ingrid might be close, but the specific way she was close to him was usually tugging on his ear and giving him a stern dressing-down for his poor behavior. That was the image currently occupying the young man's brain. "Oh, no," he muttered under his breath. "Anyone but this." He thought about how fast rumors traveled on the isolated campus, and how they tended to mutate. It could be she'd already heard stories about Sylvain harassing a female merchant with a magic music box! ...Well, that wasn't likely, seeing as she was here calmly brushing her steed instead of giving him the business, but it wasn't impossible.

"Okay, I get it. Going with the first woman I see was careless. I need to think up a target, carefully..." The student had no trouble thinking of women he'd like to get a free dance from, but the problem now was that every mental image he conjured was ended by Ingrid arriving, cursing him out and wagging her accusing finger. "If word gets out... No, when word gets out, Ingrid will be letting me have it sun up to sun down, no matter who I pick..."

"Unless..."

Sylvain adjusted his thinking and came up with the only answer.

Ingrid gave a small sneeze, then let out a groan. "Don't tell me I'm getting sick on a nice day like this... I can't afford to get sick! Who'll take care of you if I do?" she asked her stabled Pegasus in a babying voice she was careful to never let another soul hear, patting it fondly.

In response to that gesture, the beast randomly kicked one of its feet into the mud where it had just been washed, coating its own legs and a bit of Ingrid in new muck.

Ingrid frowned and growled in frustration. "Look, I know a beast is going to do as it likes, but can't you at least pretend you're going to stay nice and shiny until I'm out of the stable? Well, I'm not giving up! Let's go for washing round two, if you're so determined to get dirty."

Suddenly, a deep male voice shouted from behind her. It was loud, but it was also distant. Ingrid turned to face it with a sharp movement and a slight snake of her back, not distinct enough for her to notice. The voice was quiet, and she had no idea what it had said. It was easier to imagine she was mishearing some altercation elsewhere, so she grumbled and turned back to her Pegasus.

Laying low in the grass of the nearby field with his heart hammering in his chest, Sylvain wrapped his arms around the Boom Box, smothering it with his body to muffle the noise. He'd borrowed some upper clothes from a scarecrow and equipped the garments himself, hoping that on the bad luck he was spotted, he could at least hide his identity. All of this added up to him feeling more like a spy conducting espionage than a student playing a prank. "Okay, so the green triangle lever plays the music," he whispered to himself. "Glad we've established that. Now which one turned it off again? The one she called 'pause...'"

While he was looking for it, Sylvain ended up brushing the dial on the face instead, causing the music briefly to crank up so loudly it made his eardrums hurt. Feeling like his head was stuck in the church's organ, he tried to undo what he did, this time managing to cut off the volume entirely. Carefully, he turned the dial clockwise, hearing the volume gradually grow again. "I can turn it on... Turn it off... Make it loud and make it quiet. That's a start. Now, the song that the box is singing is different from the one Anna made it sing. Is there any way to control that?" Sylvain went with his gut and tried the button with two triangles, assuming he'd simply forgotten which made Anna's song play before.

As luck would have it, the box went quiet only briefly, then started up with a new song he'd never heard before. Again, it was full of some instruments he couldn't recognize, but at the very least there was a drum and a cymbal. What's more, it had lyrics, and ones he could almost recognize every word of! If he was really lucky, he might even be able to determine if there was a connection between the lyrics and the effect... Slowly, still keeping himself hidden, he began to crank up the volume. He peered through the reeds and the bottom of a fence towards the barn.

Ingrid continued the thankless task of cleaning the Pegasus that seemed determined to keep itself dirty. What's more, what Ingrid had thought of as an altercation was now clearly identifiable as a carnival of some kind. The idea of a frivolity happening somewhere while she cleaned her ungrateful companion soured Ingrid's mood further. Someone was playing music in the distance, and a man was loudly shouting nonsensical lyrics. Ingrid never had a care for such things, but since she was otherwise alone with her thoughts, she tuned in. "... Huh. Is this one of those funny limericks Annette comes up with?" Ingrid mused to herself, uncertain how else to make sense of what she was hearing. "Imagine, a grown man singing about cherry pie, even crying about it... Must be quite a pie. I admit it's catchy, though! Her lyrics are questionable, but Annette certainly has a way with that."

The music was so catchy, in fact, that Ingrid had begun to hum along with it, Somehow, she felt like she'd heard the lyrics before. She could predict the next line, sing along if she liked, and even perform some choreography.

"Swingin' to the left!

Swingin' to the right...!"

As Ingrid followed the lyrics in her head, she seemed to be getting into the groove, jerking her bottom to either side in time with the words. She didn't know what "baseball" was, but she was beginning to feel good, like she could, in fact, "swing all night." Matching the beat of the drum, her hips swung easily and automatically, but dynamically.

Before she realized it, Ingrid was doing circles in the air with her butt that were getting more done than the circles with her grooming brush. She continued giggling to herself about the lyrics, amused that a grown man would apparently get so excited singing about baking fruit pies with his lover. In a moment, however, she began to get the feeling she wasn't in on the joke. Even as she turned and began thrashing her hair powerfully in alternate sides to the shake of her hips, having forgotten her brushing entirely, she tried to puzzle the lyrics out with an unfittingly pensive expression. "Screaming? Why would people be screaming for her? Wait a moment..."

Suddenly, a thought popped into her head when, as a naïve child, a friend had tricked her into singing a bawdy rhyme without her realizing it. "This is a dirty limerick, isn't it?! I'm... dancing to a song about fornification, aren't I?!" The blonde's big green eyes made an interesting accompaniment to her continued sensual movements. At some point, she realized she'd dropped her brush and had just finished teasingly unfastening the last button of her uniform jacket, allowing it to hang open and reveal the white dress shirt she wore beneath. That garment was stained with sweat from both her earlier actual work and her newest "work," entirely inappropriate to be shown in public.

Ingrid did what she thought was a conservative move and pivoted on her heels to hide her chest... Only to find herself bending over, continuing to jerk her ass side-to-side for an unseen audience as she picked up the water pail from the dirt. Once she had it aloft over her head, she upturned it to a lyric about a "cool drink of water," giving herself a lukewarm shower and soaking her white shirt to a transparency that revealed plenty of skin, along with the utilitarian white bra she had underneath.

Her sexy shower evidently wasn't enough to appease whatever spirit she now believed had possessed her, as Ingrid found herself whipping her damp hair back from her face, then leaning against her spooked Pegasus and snaking against it. She raised one slender leg high enough to let her skirt slide and display her slick blue leggings and the curve of her thigh in profile. To her horror, she found herself reaching beneath the skirt for her hips and beginning to tease her leggings down her body, baring more and more thigh before snapping the garment back up with a wince.

A lyric spoke of the singer's father's disapproval of the singer's character, and Ingrid blushed furiously, unable to avoid imagining her own family's reaction to what their noble daughter was doing while training for the military. "If someone were to see this, how could I begin to explain it? I have no idea what's happening to me...! Surely, though, I look like either a cheap tavern dancer or a woman gone mad..."

Even more worryingly, she recalled the lyric about "swinging all night long." What if there was no end to this? Terrified by the possibility, Ingrid swallowed her pride and did all she could think to do...

Sylvain had been watching the show with a dry throat, imagining what it would be like to be ten feet closer than he was to the show going on in the only occupied stable. Seeing his childhood friend doing that put to bed any fears he'd had that someone was playing a prolonged prank on him. He'd never seen Ingrid move like that, even in his dreams... It was quite different from Anna's, but it was still undeniably sexual.

Unlike Ingrid, Sylvain had been aware from the get-go that his music wasn't an innocent kid's song about pie, and he'd expected to get an interesting result. He'd thought this would feel like a joke, like giving Ingrid her come-uppance for always having a stick up her ass. The fact that he was getting uncomfortably hot and bothered by her raunchy dance made him realize this had gone a bit farther than a juvenile prank.

"This is Ingrid! She's..." He couldn't finish saying it, but Ingrid was practically a sister to him. That thought made him feel sick... And, yet, he couldn't tear his eyes away. The dancing skills the box gave her were certainly no joke: matters of taste aside, every move seemed perfectly timed with the music and perfectly orchestrated to show off her assets.

She began shouting for help, which snapped Sylvain back to reality. Apparently, the loss of control of her body had gotten obvious and concerning enough that Ingrid had decided she'd risk being humiliated if it meant someone could free her. Hearing a cry for help from his friend almost **** Sylvain to leap from his hiding spot, before he remembered that he was the perpetrator in the first place. Doing the next-most-noble thing he could think of, without bothering to think of a plan first, he hit the Boom Box pause button.

Ingrid paused mid-jerk, still dripping wet and feeling her knees shake from having carried her in so many unexpected directions. Somehow, she'd been freed, as if all the music had wanted was for her to beg for it to stop.

Well, that mental image ticked her off. When she thought of it that way, it was like she'd cried "uncle" and given up in a competition. Someone had just had their fun at her expense, and now they were staying silent, probably waiting for her to get back to her task so they could start the trick over again, or waiting to cackle as she ran away crying.

Ingrid had no intention of granting her assailant that satisfaction. Heedless of the danger of provoking her unseen controller, Ingrid grabbed a wooden training spear and began storming towards the field where she'd placed the music earlier. "If you're there, stop this sorcery, step out now, and make peace with whatever gods you worship!" In spite of her spirited speech, she gulped, gripping her weapon like a totem and praying that whatever was waiting for her couldn't exert its control again...