Gerard came to consciousness in a series of fluttering blinks of his eyes.
Taking in the dimly lit but slowly brightening sight of his ‘master bedroom’ as the automated systems began to open the shutters to show the first lights of dawn beginning to crest over the hills and trees a ways past the town.
He felt something small move his midsection and turned his gaze downward to take in the sight of Ashley sleeping soundly within the folds of his fluff, her cybernetic leg harness coiled into a tight ball as she cooed lightly beside him.
He leaned down and brushed her messy yellow mane with his face, causing the little foal to wiggle a little in her sleep and stretch out her hooves away from her body.
She mumbled a little bit as she did so, her sleep only slightly disturbed by his touch.
“Hmmm…wub daddeh…suu…yawn…muchies…”
Gerard carefully stood up from his bed, grabbing the edge if the sheet in his teeth and tucking it over the foal as she slept.
It had been only about a day since Ashley was brought home from the Fixers clinic, but she had been stuck to him like glue since the moment they got back.
She had also been calling him daddeh, which was something that was eating at him a little bit.
Although he had saved her from a short and miserable life as a pillow fluffy, when she first saw him, she called him her ‘daddeh’ and said that even though he had ‘gwown wingies’, she always knew that he would come back and save her.
As he walked to the kitchen to get their breakfasts started, silently chiming the auto chef with his neural link, he caught himself brooding on the matter.
She was obviously mistaking him for her biological father, which implied some truly unfortunate things about when she was turned into a litter pal.
If she was old enough to remember that her fathers color was similar to his, she was old enough to remember the horror and pain involved with the procedure that she was forced to undergo.
As he reached the kitchen, he heard the whirring of the auto chef as it began cooking and composing breakfast for two.
By his figuring, Ashley was old enough to be eating solid food as opposed to just milk, and he figured he would give her a try on one of his old favorites.
He’d read some articles online about the adverse health problems caused by feeding fluffies human food, but he found half of them to be dubious at best and actively shilling different brands of kibble at their worst.
After consulting on an ‘owners club’ forum for a while, he figured he would start off light and make his own conclusions.
After all, he ate human food all the time and he never had any bowel issues. Although some of that could be either his augments or his training paying div-
DING!
The chime of the auto chief completing it cycle and beginning to plate out breakfast snapped him out of his mental ramblings and he watched two plates slide out onto the counter.
One fair sized, for a fluffy, plate of eggs, bacon, sausage, home fries, pancakes and fruit and another much smaller plate of with a single syrupy pancake and some fruit on it.
“…Hewwo? … Huu… nu wike dawk… hewwo?..”
A slight noise drew his attention to the living room. He looked over the holo-panels to check and see if he left a show on resonate so it wouldn’t bother Ashley. Seeing nothing, he approached the living room causing the holo-screens to flare to life.
“-oking at another week of warm days turning a little colder in the evenings, yes folks, it looks like autumn is finally starting to settle into the valley and surrounding areas. Better get yourselves ready and start digging out those jackets cau-”
”EEEP! Hewwo? Huu…”
The weather network sparked to life as he looked around, and he swore he heard the sound again. As he scanned the small gallery room for a moment until his eyes fell upon the colorful decorative cylinder sitting on one of his couches.
He walked over to the can, noting that the milk cup on the top had a small needle on the top measuring how full the can was with milk that was hovering near the bottom, just above a small cartoon of a happy foal bursting from the can with confetti.
The second thing he noticed was another needle on the bottom half of the can for waste that was sitting just about at the top.
He felt a chill run through him for a moment at the though of having to manually remove the catheder with his hooves that quickly subsided as he saw the giant ‘auto-release’ sticker on the side.
Seeking to confirm his suspicions, Gerard knelt down and pressed his ear to the side of the can.
“Sniff…Huu…nu wike cansie…pwease wet ou…”
Gerard pulled back from the can and walked over to his kitchen, chiming open one of the drawers and grabbing a small stylus in his mouth before returning to the can, kneeling down beside it.
“Hewwo in dewe…”
“Hewwo?! Fwuffies?! Fwuffies hewp babbeh?!”
“Yus. Ah’ww hewp yu ou of can. Ah am gonna open can nao. Babbeh am gon feew sumting wiewd in poopie pwace, otay?”
The foal in the can let out a brief distressed peep before it replied that it understood him and could be heard bracing for something to happen.
Gerard put his head close to the release switch, pressing down with the stylus while gripping the lid with his hooves and slowly twisting the top of the can until it made an audible pop.
“EEP! POOPIE PWACE! BABBEH NU WIKE!”
Gerard heard the unmistakable sounds of a automatic catheter and waste pipe detatching and retracting into the cans structure as he kicked the lid of the can off with his front hoof and spit the stylus a short distance away.
He waited for a moment, listening to the somewhat rapid breathing from the foal in the can until he moved his head to look inside, eliciting a slightly distressed peep from the foal inside as its only field of view was filled with one of Gerard cold blue eyes.
“Yu can come ou yu no… Am nu am gon hewt yu, widdwe babbeh.
Slowly, tentatively, the little creature managed to crawl its way out of the can, blinking as it was exposed to the lights on the inside of the house until it was all the way out and looking around the room.
It was a pegasus, colt by the look of it, with fluff that had the color of dried grass that was broken by thin stripes of pumpkin orange that also ran through the tiny feathers on its back and colored the tiny mane he had started to grow.
“…Hewwo…”
“Hewwo.”
The tiny foal, who was initially apprehensive of his presence and even flinched just now while he was addressing him, quickly grew more cheerful as it realized that it was in no danger and that it was in the company of another ‘fluffy’.
“Nyu daddeh?!”
“Don no… am yu a gud babbeh?”
“Yus! Babbeh am gud!”
Gerard raised an eyebrow at the tiny pegasus, who looked back at him hopefully.
“Hmmm, teww yu wah, Ah am gon teww widdwe babbeh wuwes ob dah housie. If babbeh fowwow wuwes an be gud babbeh, Ah’ww be youw nyu daddeh. Deaw?”
Even though the foal was barely a week out of stasis, Gerard could tell that it at least grasped the basic idea of what he was telling it. The little pegasus nodded its head vigorously before addressing the much larger pegasus before it.
“Babbeh pwomise! Babbeh be gud!”
“Gud babbeh.”
Gerard stood to his full height and looked down at the tiny creature.
“Fowwow meh, we gon gu wake up yu sissie.”
“Babbeh hab sissie?!”
He walked toward the bedroom, the tiny foal waddling after him as he chimed the auto-chief to take the food back in and keep it warm while also instructing it to begin preparing a dish of warm milk substitute and some vitamins for both the new foal and Ashley.
The two of the arrived at Gerards room, the sound of their approach waking the sleepy foal from her early morning drowsiness. Her cybernetic eyes flared to life and she smiled sweetly as she saw him.
“Gud bwight time daddeh!”
The unbridled joy he saw in her eyes when she looked at him was enough to put Gerards earlier brooding to the far back of his mind, and he felt a smile begin to creep across his face.
“Gud mowning Ashwey, Ah hab sumwun Ah wan yu to meet dis mowning.”
-=-
Tyler Kensington paced uneasily in front of the innocuous park bench he had been told to wait by, taking another nervous drag off of his e-cig and feeling the assorted cocktail of narcotics work its way into his body and calm him down.
He hated waiting, he hated waiting before when he had the money not to, now it was almost an insult with the amount of time he was expected to waste waiting on for the types of people he would never even have given the time of day if he was… he was…
“Errrgh…”
The moment he found where his fucking bastard father stashed his real inheritance, he wouldn’t be caught dead slumming it with the type of ‘people’ he needed to look for it. All he needed to do was find it.
Perhaps then John would finally shut up about him being the family screw-up…
As Tyler stewed on the though of his father and brothers, he looked up toward the ever-surging crowd of people that passed the entry to the small park he stood in and took another drag off of his e-cig.
Just in time to see a familiar looking woman in a dark colored coat break from the throng and make her way into the park. The detective approached him and offered him a hand to shake, but the withering look of distain he shot back quickly caused her to retract it.
“Well?! Did you find anything?! Where did my father stow my money?!”
The detective looked up at him with something resembling frustration, but she seemed to choke it down before she spoke.
“Yes and no. It’s not that simple.”
“What the fuck do you mean ‘it’s not that simple’, I paid you to find out where my dads money went after he died, what the fuck am I paying you for if you can’t even do a simple task like th-”
“SHUT! UP!”
The audacity struck Tyler harder than the shout. How dare someone on his payroll talk like that to him like that, he was Tyler fucking Kensington! The help did not talk to him like that, if they were ever allowed to talk to him at all!
The detective, taking his moment of stunned silence to compose herself, decided to elaborate on her point before her rich boy client got it in his head to Karen out on her again.
“Like I was saying. Not that simple. Your dad was a crafty bastard, sewed up his affairs tightly and discreetly.”
“It’s nightmarish trying to find the details about what happened to his money after his death, beyond the donations and investments listed in his will…”
“…That being said, I did find something. Although his neural like was scrubbed post mortem, there was a fragmented history of conversations stored in it.”
“I could maybe have a couple of Slicers piece it back together, but I’d need money for that.”
Tyler looked at the detective with a dawning look of confusion spreading over his face.
“Why haven’t you started already?! I told you money was no object here, so hop to it!”
The detective returned his confusion with a distinctly forced grin.
“Well, Mr. Kensington, you haven’t actually paid me anything except my basic hourly. This will require more, as listed under my ‘reasonable expenses’.”
“Moreover, if you’re fixing to play the ‘what do I even pay your for’ card, I’m gonna have to insist on money up front.”
Tyler looked at the detective with a look of disbelief, that she coldly returned with a smile before extending her hand and making a ‘pay up’ gesture with her fingers.
“…fuck me…”
