She liked the way her thoughts simplified when the collar snapped on.

She wasn't supposed to like it. It was supposed to be a curse. But the curse was lifted whenever the collar came off, and the collar always came off before work the next day at the latest, so Mags had nothing to worry about. This was mostly because Paul, her owner-slash-boyfriend, was so trustworthy, though it helped that she payed two-thirds of the rent, and needed to make it to her job with her mind intact.

When he put the collar on her - and despite all the stories she'd read on the subject, it is actually quite difficult to put a collar on another person without their consent, so while they both enjoyed thinking of it as a decision he made, it truly was one they made together - Mags' worries melted away. She became something else: she became a pet. And pets don't have human problems.

Pets do have pet problems, of course. Pets can be very needy. They need the proper attention and praise, and sometimes they needed to work for that praise. Mags was very willing to follower her owner's every command if it meant she could receive head scritches and be called a good girl. This was a fair trade as far as her simple mind was concerned.

When the collar came off, she tried not to get too embarrassed about some of the things she did. As a pet, Mags would eat food from a dog bowl on the floor, wag her butt with excitement, and get very invested in smells of all kinds. As a person, this kind of performance was beneath her. And she wasn't the sort of person who got off on the humiliation, so for the most part she and Paul never really discussed their collar-related activities when she was a person, aside from a few rules and limitations for safety.

Pets don't really understand the concept of a safeword, though they can growl if they're really not liking the direction something is going. That only really happened once with Mags and Paul, and they stopped playing shortly after to talk it through. It was just about the healthiest dynamic you could have when playing with a cursed artifact.

Supposedly, the collar once possessed far greater strength. It would curse the wearer with a wolf-like form, and a territorial aggression toward all those other than he who was deemed the wearer's owner. At the height of its power, the collar could not be removed while the wearer still drew breath.

That's what Paul's friend Lucille told them when they showed it to her. She was a witch who ran a coffee shop he used to stop by on his lunch breaks at his old job. According to her, the curse was lifted when one of its victims was instructed to hold his breath, which technically fulfilled the conditions to remove the collar. This demoralized the collar so significantly that its power waned, and it was never the same.

"So curses can get depression," Mags had mused at the time.

To this, Lucille laughed. "Everything can get depression."

They were told that as long as Mags didn't find a way to breathe twice at the same time, the collar would never return to its old strength; but if it did, there was no reason the same trick shouldn't work again. Mags didn't worry - especially not while she wore the collar. The collar had been domesticated like the wolf it had fashioned itself for.

The only time there had ever really been a problem was the first time Mags put on the collar. There was nothing about it visually that would indicate it was cursed. Even if it had been marked in some way, to truly appreciate that sort of warning still required an understanding that curses were in fact real, and before her firsthand experience with them Mags had no reason to think they could be.

The only hint that magic was real and that this collar could be dangerous was how exactly Mags acquired the collar. Which is to say, it just sort of showed up. She was moving into a shared apartment with Paul, and the collar simply found its way among her things. There was no reasonable explanation. She'd never owned a dog, and it was far too big for the cats she had grown up with. Neither of them had seen it before, but it was a mundane enough object that they shrugged off the strangeness and went about their unpacking.

It took months for the collar to show up again. This was long before Mags developed a taste for collars, praise and obedience. She was, at most, slightly submissive before her foray into the deep end.

Mags found the collar while cleaning the place. They'd never figured out where to put everything, and so the collar was just put in the laundry room where it eventually fell between the washer and drier. She fished it out along with a bit of loose change and the other half of three different pairs of socks.

For the first time she really examined the collar and made the connection that it would probably fit perfectly around her own neck. Curiosity made inevitable what happened next.

Thoughts of cleaning escaped her as she sank to all fours. The laundry room was too small for her so she crawled to the living room, where Paul was reading a book. He glanced at her, a bit confused but wanting to at least finish his paragraph before asking any questions. Mags began to get bothered by the cloth things covering her body, so her coordination returned to her just long enough to strip off her shirt and pants.

"What are you doing?" Paul chuckled, equal parts amused and nervous. Lacking the dexterity nor the mechanical understanding to unclasp her bra, Mags yanked it over her head, bark-grunting with effort. Paul's amusement gave way to concern. "Babe?"

Paul stood, and Mags fell into a play bow, panting and smiling. He took a step toward her and she dashed away, then paused to make sure he was still chasing her. When he stood still, she barked at him.

"Mags, what's, are you okay?" At this, mags crawled toward him and sat on her hind legs, her paws up. She sniffed at his waist, enjoying his scent of who she perceived to be her owner. He smelled good broadly, but she associated the scent so strongly with comfort and safety. He unconsciously put his hand on her head. and she leaned into the pat, enjoying the touch. "If this is a weird game," Paul said, "that's fine, I just want to be told ahead of time."

Mags ran back to her previous position, and play bowed again, barking. She wanted to be chased. She wanted to have fun! When Paul took another step toward her, she wagged her butt and bolted, running as fast as her four legs could take her, which was faster than Paul expected but still not all that fast.

She made it into the bedroom and pounced on the bed right as Paul entered. She turned around when she heard the door close behind her owner. "This is the kind of stuff that needs safewords, Mags," Paul warned. "I need to know you're not having a psychotic break. Cause if you're not, it's pretty hot, but if you are I need to call someone."

The puppy pounced on her owner, knocking him into the wall and slobbering on him with her tongue. She barely registered that he was upset and just wanted to love on him, she felt so—

"Heel!"

Immediately Mags got off her owner and sat her butt back on the bed, looking up at him for her next command, or permission to keep playing.

Paul's eyes widened. "Okay, that worked. Um… Speak." Mags barked. Okay, he shouldn't have expected that one would work out. "Good girl?"

Mags smiled wide and let her tongue fall out, panting excitedly, but she stayed sitting on the bed, wearing nothing but her panties and…

"Where did…" Paul reached out for her collar, trying to see if there was anything special about it. Mags leaned into his touch but otherwise stayed still. He found the clasp and undid it, grasping at some explanation, maybe on the inside of the collar, for her behavior. Unfortunately after a brief inspection there was nothing remarkable about it.

Paul turned his attention back to his girlfriend, and was surprised to see a head on her hand, a bewildered expression on her face. "Whoa," she said slowly. "What just happened?"

"You tell me!" insisted Paul. "You just had some kind of episode. You were acting like a dog."

"It was the collar!" Mags pointed at the thing in his hand. "I put that on and it was like my whole frame of mind changed. I became…" She looked down at her own naked flesh. "I stopped understanding what clothes were. I hope I didn't tear anything in my bra."

"It was kind of scary," Paul said. "Are you alright?"

Mags thought about it. All of her daily concerns were safely back in her own head, plus the new concern about the bra, and the one about finding an explanation for this whole situation. That collar had drained her of all of that. "I'm fine," she said, eyeing it. "It was actually kind of fun."

Paul laughed nervously. "What, you want to put the collar back on and go back to being a dog?"

"A dog that you said was hot," Mags pointed out. She took the collar from him, holding it up for them both to see. "I want to prove to you it's the collar that did it, and I'm not going to make you put it on yourself. If taking it off turns me back to normal, I don't see the harm."

Paul eyed the collar suspiciously, and then looked back at her. "You're sure you're okay? And, well, beyond that, what would we, uh, be allowed to do while you're wearing the collar?"

Mags laughed. "It wasn't just hot for you. I was getting worked up, especially when you gave me those commands. Maybe you can teach me some tricks." She put the collar around her neck. "Or just fuck me. The point is, I want the choice to be yours." And with a click, her eyes unfocused, her arms dropped to her sides, and her tongue fell out of her mouth once more.