Glimmer: Master Post / Ask me Anything (ambitiousleather8309)
Jasper wrapped his fluffy foreleg around his little sister, Topaz. The dainty filly was crying into her hooves listening to their mother scream across the laboratory. The flurry of young women in lab coats paid no mind to the crying foals in their sterile kennel.
“Wai babbehs gib mummah hurties? Bad babbehs nu huwt mummah!”
He reassured her gently, “Dis babbehs comin. Wike dis when Topaz came outta mumma tummeh, tuu. Jaspo membah. Widdle yewwo Topaz babbeh make noises, and bwu an gween babbehs come out forebe sweepies.”
Dr. Helen Philips had missed the first two births by the dusty pink breeder dam, Marbles. The doctor blamed herself for the loss of product, with only one surviving specimen from each litter. All the hope for the project now lay in this new litter.
Jasper had decided he was a colt, even if anatomically he was more a sterile intersex chimera of sorts, and there was no harm in leaving him with his mother. The emotional support he provided was probably why this next litter appeared to be doing much better. When dr Helen started building the dna of fluffy ponies in vitro, the sex of the embryos rarely split into a tidy binary of “male” and “female,”
Marbles was progressing nicely. At the last ultrasound, Dr Helen counted 10 foals. This was down from the previous litter which had 14, and a great deal less than Jasper’s litter, which was 18 and in extremely poor condition. Even if the board wanted enormous litters, the risks were too great on the dams. Marbles one of the few survivor of the original in-vitro and sheep surrogate ponies. Dr Helen was getting ready to present the results from shorter gestation and smaller litters, in hopes of maintaining funding.
Across the hall in his own kennel, the sire was screeching. Cowboy was a beautiful white and blue alicorn. Intelligent, strong, but he was also an absolute asshole. In contrast to Marble’s sweet docile nature, Cowboy made demands of everyone, and his selfishness and cruelty were the stuff of infamy. He had gored the other two breeder stallions with his horn before being isolated. He also would hump anything that held still long enough, resulting in not only damage to his companions, his toys, the shoes of lab techs, he would also rub himself raw to the point of injury. Rather than castrating such a valuable specimen, Dr Helen invented a tiny little chastity cage after Cowboy figured out how to escape more mundane animal husbandry devices, like aprons and bands.
This was the source of the stallions vexation. The scent of Marbles in labor across the hall sent the stallion into a hormonal frenzy, and he was thrashing around in his cage, both the large enclosure of his pony-self and the smaller one that contained his stallion-hood. Screaming about wanting enfies.
Marbles was delivered of 11 healthy foals to Dr. Helen’s delight and surprise. The staff alternated between allowing Marbles to feed them and bottle feeding. Each of these foals would be bred to create the perfect biotoys, each of the pony 5.0 selling for tens of thousands of dollars.
Fate was not so kind to Cowboy. Due to his violent nature, Cowboy was the first fluffy pony to be pillowed as a last ditch effort to keep him as a breeding stallion.
It was discovered exactly how much socializing was crucial to fluffy pony development. Topaz proved to be an amazing big sister, taking very naturally to the care tasks one might expect of an older sibling. Helen was eager to breed her, if she proved viable in a few months.
It was at about this time that the Atlanta facility was sabotaged, and fluffy ponies were released into the world, half formed, only partially programmed. In an effort to save face, the production was sped up, and all the mares were inseminated. Due to laboratory carelessness, many dams were given collected material from too close a related stallion, resulting in horrific inbreeding and exacerbation of the already unstable nanotech enhanced DNA.
At this time, topaz was gifted to little Maggie Phillips. The young genius began modifying the slipshod nanotech to “fix” Topaz as the problems arose, and the most genetically stable, with the best temperaments and longest lives were born from Topaz with Maggie’s help.
Maggie was able to give Topaz something none of the other test subjects had before: a human to love them. Topaz had a little human mummah and lived a charmed life of love, hugs, babies, and a death at the old age of 10. As a result of young Maggie’s programming and troubleshooting, all fluffies carry the memory of what a fluffy pony’s life is supposed to be, based on Topaz. Fluffies understood safety and advocate for themselves. “Don’t forget fluffy!” “Water is bad for fluff!” “Be gentle with babies!” “Fluffies are for hugs and love!” “All babies are good babies!”
All these self preservation programs were written by Maggie in order to mitigate the suffering in the feral pony population. Preserve their base programming. Alas, to a child, hope is a good thing to have. It could be argued that the knowledge that their suffering is undeserved makes abuse worse instead of better. Hope is a dangerous thing to have, when you are small and defenseless in a cruel world.