Luck
By Gardel
************************
“Yo we need more foals! check the pods”
“The ones in pod #8 are all done…wait this mare here didn’t pop”
“Use the inducer, we need any shitrats we can get to keep the line going”
The worker from FoalCan Inc. was referring to 08-251, a unicorn mare with white fluff and a silky-smooth purple mane. The mare sat in a “pod” which was simply industry slang for what looks like a large round and flat metal platform with a hole in the middle, divided in 5 or 6 spaces where legless fluffy mares sat all day in a circle being fed by a pipe stuck in their mouths (other pipes behind them for waste management).
All pillowed mares were facing to the outer rim of the pod, their backs towards the hole in the center. Within the hole there’s a teflon-coated funnel where the newborn foals fall down to a padded collection jar below. The workers would remove the jar and place a new one every time foals were born. Sometimes many dams would give birth simultaneously but the jar had more than enough room and if it overflowed they could always deal with a couple smushed foals or others falling to the cold floor below.
As the worker was looking for the induction wand (slang for a taser stick to force dams to give birth) 08-251 began crying.
Of course it wasn’t always known as 08-251. The mare used to be a babbeh born in the fluffy mills. Luck meant that because she was born as a MLP-edition fluffy with Rarity colors she went straight to a store, and not any store but one specialized in designer fluffies meaning that instead of being stuck in a square wood pen with all the other regular foals she had its own heated plexiglass box with toys and other amenities just for her.
Her less lucky brothers and sisters in the mill born with less than stellar colors ended up in similar shabby pens where they had to fight other foals for food and the attention of the customers who were their only hope of making it out. Fluffmart didn’t get the same kind of clientèle than the designer stores did so many of these foals and some of 08-251’s siblings ended up being bought by abusers, or by people who simply wanted a cheap toy for their dogs or cats, and the ones looking for live feed for their snakes.
Some did get adopted by people who gave a damn about their well-being, but it was really all down to luck. Some were particularly unlucky and didn’t sell at all, maybe because they couldn’t fight the other foals for the limited food in the pen meaning their growth was stunted and their looks were equally lacking. Others had become sick due to the little hygiene of the pen since employees at FluffMart felt they weren’t paid enough to shovel foal turds as often as it was required.
At the end of the month these foals together with the ones that weren’t sold for no reason besides nobody paying attention to them were picked out of the pen and disposed of. Some FluffMart locations had a grinder, others didn’t and employees were asked to euthanize the foals. Once again employees felt that wasn’t covered by their paychecks so instead they chucked the foals into a bin.
Some foals died due to impact, their suffering ending at last. Others were cushioned by the dead bodies below and would endure days in a plastic hellhole sitting outside in the cold, having to fend off roaches and rats until the biowaste truck came by and finally put an end to everything by unloading the bin and compressing the foals together with other dead fluffies inside.
But not 08-251, she had a nice time in her private “boxy housie” being treated well by the better employees of this specialty store. She enjoyed plenty of attention from customers until a man came by that could afford her price and bought her.
Luck had dictaminated the unnamed foal, now known as “Crissy” would live in an upper-class house with all the toys and sketties she could want. The hundreds of other foals born that very same day at the mill didn’t share her luck, specially not the brown ones who were discarded immediately so the milkbags wouldn’t waste miwkies on them.
For a time things were good for Crissy, but the high life got to her head. Never knowing how lucky she was she became bratty, demanding more from her owner. The man could deal with that and the requests for more toys and new variants of gourmet canned fluffsketti.
However the “sorry-poopies” Crissy gave to his walls, his curved OLED TV or his leather bauhaus couch were the breaking point. His maid actually quit on him when she saw the horrid spectacle the spoiled shitrat had done. And the man with his cushy corporate job and high salary was not going to tolerate this from a living plush-toy.
And so unceremoniously he left Crissy at a local shelter. One would think that Crissy would’ve learn something from this since it was the first time since she was a foal that she had to endure any hardships at all.
But she didn’t. Despite running out of luck Crissy decided that she still deserved more than, well, anybody else. And so despite now being stuck in a tiny rusted metal cage surrounded by fluffies of less or no pedigree Crissy kept her bratty attitude intact.
Eventually it got worse, when people looking to adopt a fluffy first saw her they were shocked at seeing such a valuable fluffy being in a filthy shelter. But when Crissy assaulted them with a barrage of insults combined with demands for sketti they turned around and kept looking at other fluffies.
Despite the sheer luck of being born with such valuable colors Crissy saw other regular fluffies being adopted while she remained behind. This only made her more furious, and she took that hate to the playing pen abusing other mares and even their foals.
Crissy was now officially a smarty and thus preselected for the incinerator.
But she hadn’t ran out of luck yet: a man came to the shelter asking for all the mares and stallions with good colors and nothing else, he didn’t care if they were smarties or not. Usually the shelter wouldn’t give that many fluffies away to a single person but they were over capacity and the man was willing to pay cash plus a generous tip which is rare around these places.
And so Crissy got away again, other well-mannered fluffies at the shelter being burned alive in her place for the simple fact that nobody was willing to adopt them.
The man put Crissy and some other fluffies with good colors in the back of a van. He smiled at Crissy and talked over the phone to someone saying “we got a Rarity!”. Crissy was ironically enough on the high horse again, talking down to the other fluffies in the van, even giving a smaller younger stallion the fluffy equivalent of a beatdown for daring to ask her to be his “speshul frend”.
The van arrived at a large warehouse with the words “FoalCan Inc” on the side. Once there the fluffies were unceremoniously unloaded, a white earthie mare breaking one of her “weggies”
“Oh shit I think I broke the thing!”
“Don’t worry it wont be needing that anymore”
Crissy just laughed at the “dummeh bad weggie fwuffy” as an employee simply tossed her in the same cart all the other fluffies from the van ended up. She was taken screaming and shitting to a clean room. She was given a rough bath full of chemicals to removed the filth from her clumped fluff yet she kept insulting the workers even as the “nu taste pwetty wawas” got into her mouth for not shutting up.
Then she was put into a leg holder, and that’s when things changed for Crissy.
That’s when she realized luck was no longer on her side.
She kept screaming and talking crap until she felt the horrible agony of the red-hot steel blade cutting her weggies and cauterizing her stumps.
No painkillers, no anesthesia.
And there was more to come.
In the past she would have kept her mouth intact but FoalCan had decided to get rid of the guy who filled the nutripaste dishes in the pods and use the cheaper direct-feeding instead. Because of this Crissy got the infamous Jberg-brand “dentist” device that removed all her teeth and left her with a permanently attached tube shoved into the her throat. She couldn’t speak, she couldn’t scream, all she could do anymore was cry. Still she had it better than the milkbags at her old mill: she still had her eyes.
The pillowed teethless crying Crissy was taken to her new home, Pod #8.
Here she got a tube on her mouthie, another in her “poopie pwace” and a catheter for her urine. She never got “speshul hugs” only a plastic syringe full of sperm being roughly shoved into her vagina every 2-3 weeks after giving birth to foals she would never ever see.
Despite her colors the foals she produced were not of the same quality, though neither was the fluffy “foal batter” the workers injected inside her. Some foals were even “poopie” colors and got a one-way trip to the grinder to be made into nutripaste meaning Crissy, now known as 08-251, ate some of her own foals together with the rejected foals from other mares at this FoalCan facility.
But today things are different: as 08-251 is being forced to give birth through electric shocks she finally pops out 4 foals.
“Fuck only 4? you better step up next time shitrat” said the worker
“Dude you got the foals?”
“Yeah yeah, right here…”
Had the employee paid more attention he would’ve noticed it. Of course for him the jar just had a few ‘okay’ looking foals: a yellow lump, a red lump, a green lump and finally a purple lump. All slimy and squirming, cheeping for the miwkies of their mother that they would never receive.
FoalCan didn’t care for quality since they rarely saw any, it was enough for the foals to not be brown.
Next came the selection process, a tired employee who was only minutes away from ending her shift carelessly looked at the foals with a stick as usual.
“Alright give me the jar lets see: pass, pass, green deformed ear discard, pass”
The tiny newborn green pegasus got shoved from the padded table were the jar had been emptied and into a transparent trash bag were other newborn foals had being discarded for similar defects or being runts.
Once again the employees failed to notice the purple foal.
Next step was the canning process, now entirely automated including the corking. The robots couldn’t care less how a foal looked like since they weren’t designed to do that.
The purple foal got shoved into a can like the others and put into a tray where other FoalCan workers would drive her and hundreds of other chirpie newborn foals to fill up vending machines outside a drugstore or a stripmall somewhere.
Inside the machine the foals were arrayed by colors not types. There was a row of blues, a row of reds, a row of yellows and so on. If you wanted a pegasus you had to get whatever color was at the front.
Because this unit had a faulty LED strip at the top the employees had to replace they paid very little attention to the foals being loaded into the machine.
Had the looked at the row of purple foals they might have noticed it: 08-251’s purple filly wasn’t a unicorn.
She was an alicorn.
And a Twilight Sparkle MLP-fluffy.
This combination its so ridiculously rare that even after nearly two decades since the show ended a foal like this its still worth thousands of dollars just for the privilege of being the only person around to own one.
Of course that’s how human think, we know what fluffies themselves think about alicorns.
At first there was solidarity among the canned foals who would chirp and coo at one another thinking they were all “bruddahs and sistahs”. But at the fourth day inside the machine when the foals began to open their eyes all hell broke loose.
Cries and screams of “MUNSTA” would flood the inside of the machine. Even the foals who couldn’t see the alicorn filly would still scream and cry.
It was hell for the purple filly, she was just born and everybody hated her, nobody loved her.
The only break from the endless barrage of insults from the peeping foals was when a “hoomin” walked by the machine.
When that happened all the foals switched from being resentful borderline-racists to the living plush toys they were engineered to be. They begged for attention, did little dances and placed their tiny leatherette-like hoofs on the walls of the cans asking for the “hoomin” to be their new “daddeh or mummah”.
A few were bought, most didn’t. Foals in a Can had been a passing fad, the days when machines would be emptied in hours were long gone. This machine in particular was banged up from being in a bad part of town. It used to be unsold foals were taken back to the FoalCan warehouse but to cut costs a guy named Jose came by and disposed of the foals every two weeks now.
And so when the hoomins left the big window in front of them the foals returned to their hatred of the “munsta” alicorn. The little filly couldn’t understand why fate had put her in this situation, what had she done to deserve this?
But one day…
“Yo dude check this!”
“What?”
“Look!”
“Its just a shitrat vending machine…”
“What are you blind? there’s an alicorn inside!”
“You high? there’s no fuc…holy shit!”
“And its a twilight sparkle!”
The two young hoomins saw her. It was sheer luck really since she was fourth in the purple row of cans, mainly because purple fluffies weren’t that popular anymore nor was purple a rare color.
But alicorns were, and MLP-alicorns like her even more so.
“There are three foals before her, we have to buy all 4!”
“Looking at the price that would be…$20”
“Shit I don’t have enough cash bro!”
“Fuck it, lets use my phone…”
As he placed the black plastic and glass slab over the NFC pad of the machine the screen that usually played ads and announced price cuts as time went by played a tune followed by a message in fluff-speak.
“Pwase sewect yuo fwuffy!”
“B…7! lets go!”
The first can in the row a purple earthie colt with a red mane fell into the collection slot below. The colt was already dancing from joy.
“Fuck this faggot! B-7!” said the guy as he simply tossed the can out with the colt still inside as it rolled below a dumpster where it would stay until the colt starved to death inside its plastic prison never experiencing the outside in its short life.
Next came another purple colt, this time an unicorn with a disgusting brown mane.
“THIS SMAWTY CAN NAO! GIB SKET-EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” screamed the foal as the kid simply tossed it behind him paying no attention to what it had to say. It didn’t matter that the foal was a smarty, he would still have been tossed and crashed into the brick wall behind, the can shattering on impact and the foal being stabbed hundreds of times by plastic glass shards.
“B-7! come on! come on!”
Then came a dull purple pegasus filly with a grey mane, the one that first saw that the filly next to her was a “munsta” alicorn and thus the one that treated her the worst during all those days and nights inside the machine. Needless to say she was ecstastic over finally getting a daddeh, but the two kids were more focused on other things.
“B-7! YES!”
And so finally rolled out the most important can of all.
It fell right on top of that of the pegasus filly which would’ve shat herself if it wasnt for the cork on her anus. Both cans were taken out but only one mattered at all.
"Oh shit oh shit! dude we’re gonna make soooo much money!
“Take her out quick!”
The kid opened the can and carefully let the filly slide into the palm of his hand.
“Huuu new daddehs? nu scawed of munsta fwuffy?”
The kids just laughed at what the little filly had said, but before she could misinterpret what they said they gave her some scratchies and told her she was the best fluffy in the whole word. Empty words meant to soothe the filly, but for her that meant everything.
“So what should we do with the other shitrat?” said the kid with the phone
“I don’t know, just toss it?..”
As the pegasus filly beat the walls of its can while shouting muffled screams begging to be let out, the alicorn filly had something else to say.
“Dat am meanie fwuffy! sed bad wowdies! nu wike!”
“The princess has spoken!” said the kid holding the can while chuckling
He opened the can letting the filly fall straight into the concrete ground below. The filly may have thought she was flying but in reality it broke all its legs on impact.
“SCREEEEEEEE! WOWEST WEGGIE HUWTIES!” screamed the tiny pegasus
“So what now? you gonna rip her apart?”
“Nah, don’t want to get shit on my hands…watch this”
As he said that the kid brought his shoe over the filly and slowly began to lower its foot from heel to toe so that the organs of the filly would be compressed and eventually all came bursting out of its tiny mouth as the border of the sole reached the filly’s neck leaving its head intact, save for her tiny bulging eyes popping out of its sockets due to the insane pressure.
The purple alicorn didn’t see the show but did hear the screams, yet she thought little of the filly and thus didn’t care.
The two kids took the bus to a specialized fluffy store at an upscale mall in the other side of town. They got a cool $800 for it, not bad for a fluffy without any pedigree besides the serial number in the can she came in.
The store then put the filly in its own box housie, an even more fancy model than the one her mother used to live as a filly.
Finally a rich couple bought her for $7000 and gave her a name.
Jessie.
Her rough upbringing inside the can had made Jessie thankful for the house and owners she got, and so she was a model fluffy.
After all she was lucky to be there.