Commission for @Draculaflow
“For Christ’s sake, Dino! Don’t leave your vape on the floor! Now we’ve got a pregnant mare with a nicotine addiction!” Charlie huffed as she started snatching up foals from their mother’s cages, much to the distress of the mothers.
Charlie was a short woman, chubby, always wearing a forest camo hoodie four times too big for her, with a head of messy chin length brown hair and a fringe that covered one of her soft blue eyes.
“Well gee, sorry. I was just taking a nap.” Dino grumbled back.
He was tall and thin, slicked back black oily hair, slight olive skin, and always wearing an old unbuttoned bowling shirt with a black tank top underneath, and adorned around his neck was a silver chain with his mother’s wedding ring, a momento to remember her by.
“You’re a fucking bum, is what you are, Dino.” Charlie chided.
“Bad wowdsies!” a light green mare gasped.
“Ah shit, sorry Mint, didn’t mean to.” the woman sighed.
“BAD WOWDSIES GAIN!” Mint complained as she covered the ears of the only chirpy she was allowed to keep in her cage; a pretty emerald green foal with a sunflower yellow mane.
“Ah, cra-” she went to instinctively react.
“Yo, Charlie, knock it off!” Dino said as he reached over and bopped her on the head with a wide, empty cardboard tube that they used to collect the dead foals in.
“Hey, don’t hit me with the corpse stick, that’s gross.” she grumbled.
Charlie and Dino both worked part time at Deacon Farms… well, the American branch; Chicago, to be specific.
The two early twenty some things were both fresh out of college and had very little going for them in the way of prospects. Outside of coming here to work, Charlie was a shut in who’s only boyfriends had ever been long distance.
As for Dino, he was one of the very few cases of a kid ending up in foster care, only for his real mother to show up and take him home again once she got her life together.
The two of them needed work, and had been at Deacon Farms since early 2023.
The agenda today was the same as always, wrangling foals and mares that were un-sellable and taking them to the tower for disposal.
For as troubled a guy as Dino was, he didn’t enjoy hurting fluffies, they were cute, and his ma liked them alot when she was alive. And Charlie, well, she was kind of morbid, but all things considered, not a bad person, just had some weird interests.
“-So on the forum, they’re saying that this ARG is about finding a fluffy with super intelligence who escaped a shady government lab, isn’t that cool?” she said as she followed behind Dino as he pushed a trolley full of kibble, slowly filling up each dispenser for the penned fluffies.
“And that’s why you gotta find the purple squid symbol on the site, it’s a reference to-” Charlie tried to continue, before being cut off by the horrific sound of a wailing foal.
“Shhhh bebbeh! Nu be wude!” a sparkling silver mare hushed her tantruming foal in one of the mummah pens.
“We got a live one.” Dino sighed as he reached down and tried to snatch the defective product.
“NU TOUCHIES BEBBEH!” the mummah screamed before lunging and digging her teeth into his hand. In truth, it was nothing more than a light pinch at best, but Dino still jumped.
“figlio di puttana!” Dino instinctively yelped as he pulled back.
Charlie took the telescopic cattle prod from her belt and shoved the two prongs into the mare’s neck before pressing the red power button.
“SCREEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeee!” with a loud a terrifying crackle, the mare’s body convulsed and writhed as twenty thousand volts ripped through her like a tidalwave.
Charlie hated this part of the job, so much. But it was company rules. A violent fluffy willing to attack humans was unfit for purchase. She was, unfortunately, too old to go directly into the grinder, too much fur, so they’d have to prep her first.
She picked up Nimbus by her scruff and the shivering child too, before her and Dino carried the troublesome duo off to the tower.
They laid the mare down onto a steel table, a few feet away from the industrial grinder, and slowly she came to, just soon enough to watch her foal fall from Charlie’s hand and into the grinding teeth of the machine, breaking and contorting, peeping violently until the pressure caused its eyes to explode from its head, it’s tongue to stick out, and its body to freeze, before vanishing under the iron teeth, never to be seen again.
The conveyor belt below started and a red paste slowly escaped before going directly into an industrial processor, and then, the oven, to become low grade kibble to cut costs.
“BEBBEHHHHhhhhhhh! Nu!” Nimbus cried in the deepest utterance of pure maternal agony.
“Sorry girl, you know the rules, bad fluffies go to the tower.” Charlie sighed.
Dino held the mare and squeezed the shit from her into a nearby receptacle.
“ACK! H-HUWTIES! N-NU SMEWW PWETTY!” Nimbus gagged before having her face be held down on the table, so that Charlie could grab the filleting knife and make her first incision.
Cold steel bit into Nimbus’ spine, and expertly dragged its way all the way down to the root of her tail.
“OWWIES! P-PWEAS STAWP! NU MOWE! A-AM GUD FWUFFY! PWEAS!” Nimbus begged for her life, but there was nothing to be done. This wasn’t sadism, or cruelty for the sake of cruelty, this was company policy, no matter how much the two humans present hated it.
With the skill of a girl who had done this a thousand times before, Charlie stuck her latex gloved fingers under the skin and began to rip skin away from muscle and fat.
“EEEEEEEEEE! NIMBUS THOUT CHAWWIE WUS FWEND! PWEAS NU! WAN WIBE! WAN WIIIIIIIIBE!”
And much like a skillful rabbit hunter, in one quick motion, every inch of skin was de-gloved from the screaming and flailing creature.
Blood began rapidly pooling from around the mare as exposed veins leaked their precious cargo.
Dino grabbed the slippery flesh mound and held her over the grinder.
“Pweas… Dee-nu… Nimbus wub yew…” she begged weakly, reaching out to try and offer him a hug with her moist and skinless front legs, staring at him with her terrified and rapidly fading grey eyes.
Dino didn’t say a word, he just dropped the mare and started taking his latex gloves off
“…Gesù Cristo…” Dino grumbled to himself as the mare reignited in horrified screams before joining the mulched remains of her foal on the conveyor belt.
“It’s-a-livin’, Dino.” Charlie replied with a defeated shrug as she wiped down and disinfected the area.
The two returned to the main mill’s warehouse and began doing what they always needed to do after a trip to the tower, therapy.
Dino sat with the nurse mares and listened to them gossip and talk as they fed the excess foals.
“Hewwo Dee-nu, Sass-pah-wiwwah missed yew!” a brown, two toned unicorn with an off-white curly afro smiled excitedly as she nursed two foals.
“Yo, how’s it goin’ Sarsaparilla?” he asked her.
“Oh, id am goin’ awwite, Sass-pah-wiwwah guessie. Dummeh mawes, Cowncob an Cheesecake keepies weavin dewe bebbehs behind in da pway pen. Sass-pah-wiwwah am gettin weaw sickies ob dem dummehs.” she huffed. “An wat bout Dee-nu? Am yew otay?” she then asked warmly.
“I’ll be real with you, Sarsaparilla, nah. This job is ruining my head… It’s that fottuto maledetto tower.” he sighed, and as soon as the word left his lips, Sarsaparilla’s ears pinned back.
“Oh… yeh… da towew…” she shook.
“I’m not aloud to tell you what goes on in there, but it’s bad, Sarsaparilla. Whatever your head can think up, it’s that but worse.” Dino assured the trembling nurse.
“O- oh…” she nodded, somehow even more terrified by the mythic tower than before.
“Wy send bad fwuffies dewe doe?” she asked.
“Bad fluffies hurt other fluffies, and that hurts humans. That’s why.” Dino sighed.
In truth, he did believe that, but it wasn’t how he’d of said it. It was exactly how his employers required him to respond to a question from the livestock about the tower.
Fear is the currency that pays for discipline at Deacon Farms; fear of punishment, fear of the unknown, fear of authority. After all, there was no respect without a little fear to season it.
The mare swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded.
“Otay, mistah Dee-nu. Sass-pah-wiwwah thinkies unastan naow.” she said with a tremor in her tone.
As for Charlie, she sat with the foals, well, laid down with them, letting the tiny creatures crawl all over her, forming a flat pile of about forty or so.
The cooing and giggling was almost deafening to everyone but her, but she needed it. She stared at one of the warehouse’s fluorescent ceiling lights as she quietly slipped off into a state of disassociative bliss.
“Just one more month of this, just one more month for savings and I can move out.” she said to herself..
“Peep-peep. Mobe ou? wat dat?” a purple filly with a dark blue mane asked.
“When you grow up, you gotta leave your family and friends behind. Time to leave the nest.” she lamented.
“Wy?” the foal ask as he stood on her forehead and looked down into her eyes.
“Because it’s what we do. It’s how we know we’re real adults.” Charlie sighed.
“Weww… bebbeh nebah wan gwow uppies. Wan be wid mummah fowevah.” the foal declared with an indignant huff.
“It ain’t that simple, kid.” the young woman explained, “Life doesn’t happen for you, it happens to you. You don’t really get to pick how it turns out, just how you react to it.” she tried to explain, although in truth she was rather trying to sort the mess of her own head out.
“Wat gun habin tu bebbeh?” The foal asked with shivering concern.
“If you’re good, you’ll grow up a little, get an owner, live to about nine years old on average and die in your sleep at an old age.” Charlie said bluntly.
Once their break was over, the duo got back to their job of sussing out problematic shitrats in the pens.
Dino and Charlie both shared a glance, they both hoped and begged in silence for no more tantrums, no more trips to the tower for unwanted product, and then the most dreadful sound came.
“Dummeh poopie bebbeh! Mummah nu wub yew nu mowe!” came from one of the pens.
“Well… It’s-a-livin’.” she groaned before reaching for the foal tube, a sorry stick, and began making her way towards the disturbance.