“SCREEE! MUNSTAH FWUFFY! NU WIKE!”
The orange foal darted out from behind Gerard in a blind panic, running back to the living room to hide in its can the moment it caught a glimpse of Ashleys cybernetic eyes and legs.
He was certain that if he wasn’t still being emptied by the can until mere moments ago, he would be needing one of the house drones to clean the floors.
“M-munstah?! Ashwey nu am munstah! Huu huu… Babbeh am meanie! Huu huu huu…”
Ashley buried her face into the sheets and began to cry into her metal forelegs. Gerard shook his head, pressed a hoof to the bridge of his nose and let out a heavy sigh.
He wasn’t sure what he expected in retrospect.
-=-
It took Gerard longer than he would like to admit to draw the little orange foal back out of its can, and a fair bit longer still to get Ashley to stop crying.
Eventually, he managed to slowly reintroduce the two of them to each other. The as yet unnamed orange foal was terrified of Ashley and as became apparent very quickly, she was not enthused about the new foal either.
“Ashwey nu wike meanie babbeh! Babbeh caww Ashwey meanine namsies!”
“Huu… Babbeh scawed… Munstah nu hewt babbeh…”
“ENOUGH!”
Gerard stomped his hoof against the tile on the floor, causing both of the foals to jump at the loud noise. Ashley turned her head to her ‘father’ with a concerned expression, while the orange foal wet himself and curled into a ball on the floor beside Gerard.
“Ashwey nu be mean to widdle owange babbeh. It am onwy babbeh, he nu no any bettew. Gerard scolded the little foal, causing her to look away from him and droop her ears.
“Sowwy daddeh…”
Gerard nodded, before bringing up one of his hooves and brushing at the tuft of pale yellow mane she had coming in. She cooed and brushed her head against the side of his hoof.
“Nu feew bad Ashwey. Yu am stiww weawning.”
Gerard turned his attention back to the smaller orange foal, quietly sobbing and marinating in a small puddle of its own pee beside him. He’d need to get that cleaned later.
Kneeling down, he plucked the foal out of the puddle by the scruff of his neck plopping him down on a dry spot on the other side. He looked at the trembling foal for a few moments before it eventually peeked out from behind its hooves.
“Babbeh…”
“Peep!” The foal squeaked as it moved its eyes behind its hooves again, trying to hide itself from the disappointed look on the much larger fluffies face.
“Nu! Nu hiding!”
Gerard poked the foals hooves with his nose, gently shoving aside its hooves and looking at it in the face. The foal looked at him with a distinct look of fear in its eyes while he addressed it.
“Babbeh say mean words to Ashwey, caww Ashwey mean names. Babbeh nu du dat nu mowe. Onwy bad babbehs du dat. Otay?”
The little orange foal looked at Gerard and tried to process his words. The word ‘bad’ seemed to make the little creature wince as it looked up at him, and by the time he was done talking it angled it head down and started to sniff and sob lightly.
“Otay… nu…sniff nu bad… nu bad babbeh… huu…”
Gerard nodded again, content enough that the two of them seemed to have gotten the point before bending down to nuzzle his nose against the orange foal as a conciliatory gesture. The foal hugged his nose and sniffled in response.
Although, Gerard found in very sudden retrospect that he perhaps should not have proffered his nose for the foal to hug, as the smell of fresh urine soaking into hair besieged his senses.
Gerard drew back a little from the foal and picked him up gently by the scruff again, motioning with his neck for Ashley to follow him as he made his way toward the bathroom.
“Yu nee a baff.”
The foal tried to turn its head to look at him, only making it far enough to cast a wayward glance in his direction, clearly afraid of the ‘baff’ without actually knowing what it was that Gerard was talking about.
“Wah…wah baff?”
-=-
A good half hour of screaming and protestations later, Gerard had learned a valuable lesson about fluffies and water. He also was reliving some of his worst memories from the earlier years of raising his human children.
He managed to get the orange foal calmed down enough to was him while Ashley stared in rapt fascination as Gerard stood in the shower, apparently immune to the imminent danger of the water running over him.
It took him the better part of two hours to get the orange one settled down, during which time he had to scold him twice for continuing to refer to Ashley as a monster, something that he never seemed to learn despite the reprimands.
While Gerard using the holo-TV’s to steam some childrens cartoons for the two of them, he resolved that he would need to find a solution for that.
Even though the orange foal didn’t mean anything by it, he could see that it hurt Ashley deeply each time he said it.
Drifting his mind through his neural link into cyberspace, he began searching the web for forum posts from other fluffy owners on why the little orange foal was behaving that way, and what he could do to remedy it.
The initial results were… less than promising.
He found a number of articles detailing similar behavior encountered by adopted foals toward Alicorns and ‘bad colored’ fluffies, which he was surprised to discover included himself and Ashley by most peoples standard.
But he was more surprised by the most common treatments for that problem, while there were some that suggested the use of trained nurse mares and specific songs that may help break the habit, a large majority of them simply suggested beating the foal until it stopped doing it.
And if it didn’t… Jesus…
Pulling his mind away from that as quickly as possible, he found himself looking into some highly rated recordings of different nurse mares that seemed to work on most foals. It took him a while to search, but at the speed of though he eventually managed to find one.
It was generic enough to apply to Ashley and would hopefully wean him of any alicorn fear that may crop up in the future, something he may take the liberty to have Ashley watch as well for the same reason.
Placing an order for express delivery, he started a countdown in the periphery of his vision for three and a half hours via drone delivery. And began the relatively simple process of arraigning a small purchase in his brain while the TV blared in the background.
“-d your name is Simon, S-I-M-O-N, can you say it back to me?”
“Si-mon? Babbeh name am Si-mon? Babbeh wub nyu namesie!”
“Umm, daddeh…”
Finishing the process, he closed out his neural link and returned back to the real world.
Looking back to the trite children’s programming on the vid screens before his eyes wandered across his orange foal, happily waving its hooves at the VS in a makeshift dance and down to Ashley who was tugging on his leg with her metal hooves with a concerned look on her face.
“Si-mon wub mummah!”
He didn’t have the opportunity to ask what was wrong before the orange foal proffered the answer to him as it spoke to the SV screen and clumsily waddled over to hug at the flat glass panel.
“Ah, uh… Ah guess yu name am Simon nao… Dis am gonna be hawdew dan Ah though…”
-=-
Hours passed, long enough that lunch was made for the three of them. Milky rice porridge with added vitamins for Simon and the same but with small pieces of vegetables and soft meat for Ashley, although the former lamented the presence of rice in his ‘milkies’.
Gerard to chance their still developing bowels.
Although in Simons case it turns out that it wouldn’t have mattered, as the little foal paused mid watch along a few minutes after lunch to drop a rancid spray of liquid feces in the middle of the living room carpet, much to his and Ashleys horror, before gleefully returning to its dance routine.
The shower that followed that unfortunate accident was disliked by Simon as much as the first one he was put through, and the subsequent lecture about doing his business in the litter box seemed to fall on deaf ears.
He had closed off the living room until he could program the cleaning drones to do a deep clean on the carpet to remove the rancid stench, but he honestly believed that he may just have to ditch the carpet entirely.
An unintended consequence of which was that Simon, now bereft of his ‘nyu mummah’ on the TV, threw a loud and overdramatic tantrum at not being able to be with his ‘nyu mummah’ until Gerard had to step in and try his best to put him down for a nap to quell it.
It took the better part of an hour and a half before it worked, all the while a part of him wanted to punish the little orange foal like he would a human toddler who misbehaved like this, but a little voice in his head urged him to hold off until he understood better how to do so without doing harm.
When Gerard left the little side nest he had set up for him, he found both that the timer on his delivery was now ticking toward ‘imminent’ and that Ashley had put herself down for a nap in his bed while he was trying to get his other foal to sleep.
He breathed a sigh of relief at the quiet that had settled into his house, although doubts had begun to play at his mind, he could at least take a moment to breath as he approached the hatch that led to the outside.
He trotted out to the small concrete pad that acted like a makeshift landing strip for quad-copters carrying goods for him and wanted on the counter to tick down.
In the absence of anything other than wide forest to look at, he turned his gaze back to his garden.
His plants were looking in a bit more of a sorry state than they were before, but between Ashleys adoption and todays business he hadn’t really had time to tend anything out here.
If he wanted to keep the garden going, it was looking more and more like he wound have to automate.
Just as he began to think on the particulars of ‘how’ he was going to automate that process in the future, he heard something. The faint sound of rustling leaves just beyond where his tomatoes were.
A brief bit of wary dread shot through the more fluffy-like part of his mind. Although he was far from what people would consider a ‘normal fluffy’ a wild dog or other such creature was more dangerous to him now than it normally would be.
He cast a part of his mind into his houses security system and activated one of the two sentry drones he had installed in the house to keep squirrels and cats away while he slowly inched toward the source of the sound.
He had expected to find a rat or perhaps a squirrel chowing down on some untended part of his garden.
He hadn’t expected to find a fluffy, although with a bit of hindsight, he realized that was probably the first thing he should have expected to find.
It was a small creature, maybe a little older than Ashley at about the midpoint between foal and fluffy, with short darker blue fluff and an oddly clashing light brown mane and tail.
Gerards eyes were quickly drawn to a large star shaped splotch on its right eye in the same color as its mane. He also noticed several smaller star shaped ‘spots’ on its body at seemingly random locations.
As the fluffy bit down into one of his eggplants that it had apparently plucked for itself, he looked toward its hind and realized two things.
First, that judging by the buildup of grime and other dirt this was clearly a feral. And second, that it was a colt.
The colt was making noises as it ate, which Gerard could loosely pick up as fluffspeak. In response, Gerard pricked up his ears and began to try and hone out some more details, using his neural link to filter some of the ambient noise.
“-tu mummah, make mummah feew bettew, am gud nummie findew!”
It was singing to itself, a short and off-key tune about being good at finding food and bringing a share back to its mother, it was almost endearing in a weird sort of way. Gerard considered addressing the colt.
BZZZZ!
Right up until the moment the sentry drone buzzed over the garden to try and better assess the situation.
Before he had a chance to chime it off or speak to the colt, the creature looked up startled at the sentry drone, grabbed the partially eaten eggplant in its mouth and bolted down the hill.
Gerard, for a reason he didn’t quite understand, decided to chase after it.
(Huu huu huuuu… 
)