Tim was a fluffy
But not any regular fluffy
Tim was a legit Hasbio-branded first generation fluffy.
Came with a certificate of authenticity and a laser-etched serial number under the fluff of its flank.
Mr.Chandler bought it for his daughter right at the official Hasbio store a week after the official launch.
A cyan earthie colt with a dark purple mane and magenta eyes.
Art by @KerosineCannibal
It was $13,000 plus tax.
You might think Chandler here is a rich man.
And you would be wrong.
He is at best upper-middle class.
However hardly anyone who knew his life story would think Chandler was a privileged man.
Born in a poor formerly blue-collar town in the rust belt he had to fight for pretty much anything he owned.
The trauma of a childhood devoid of toys and even some bare necessities left a big mark in his mind and he compensates for that by giving his only daughter anything she wants.
And that includes the newest and some say biggest toy in history: the fluffy pony.
Needless to say his daughter, little Stacy, was the envy of every other girl in her entire school and the whole gated community.
Tim really put the Chandlers in the map, they went from being just another family living in a prefab mcmansion with two mortgages to having everyone in the community paying them a visit just to see the fancy fluffy pony live, and perhaps even touch it.
After all the only Hasbio store was 60 miles away and had been sold out for a month.
Tim had a nice life.
Sure it didnât have all of the Official Fluffy Toys currently available in the Hasbio Catalog since the Chandlers had maxed out their credit cards just buying it in the first place but still its life was far better than the one the average domestic fluffy would have in the future, let alone compared to feral and stray fluffies which were unthinkable at this time.
However Tim did feel a bit lonely being the only fluffy in town.
Its insanely high price meant it wasnât allowed outside the house since Mr.Chandler had read in the 400-page long Official Fluffy Pony User Manual (part of the starter pack given by Hasbio with every fluffy sold) that fluffy hoofs werenât designed to walk on asphalt, concrete, rocks or dirt and such use of the fluffy was against the EULA and could void the warranty.
For Mr.Chandler and many other early owners a fluffy was not just a pet but an investment worth protecting.
Some people thought fluffies were costly to make and speculated that prices would rise.
Thus more of a reason to keep the fragile biotoys safe.
So Tim could only walk inside the house, spending most of its time inside the designated âsafe-roomâ all owners must have without their knowledge to compensate for Hasbioâs many mistakes when making these biotoys.
But Timâs loneliness wouldnât last.
Neither would its fame nor the Chandlersâ position in the community as the sole owners of the coveted fluffy pony.
Enter Mrs. Stein, the Chandlersâ nextdoor neighbor
That wasnât her original name mind you, but Mr.Steinâs, aka Stu.
She used to have an unpronounceable south Asian name which she got rid of after marrying the loveshy Stu Stein for a greencard at first.
And then for the money which became plainly obvious when he divorced Stu and took everything he had.
Mr.Chandler liked Stu, he was a good man. He felt bad when Stu was reduced to live in his car.
Mr.Chandler didnât know but a couple days before he bought Tim his old pal Stu Stein had died when run over by a truck near a construction site.
Mrs. Stein knew, and she couldnât care less.
Because she wasnât going to let his former meal ticketâs friends the Chandlers be the most popular family of the suburbs she got her own fluffy pony.
And not any fluffy pony: a high-end monochrome white pegasus filly, MSRP $17,000 plus tax.
The name of the fluffy was as pretentious as its owner: Princess.
Fortunately the filly didnât share the same attitudes of its owner and was friendly towards all.
Mrs. Stein let Tim hang out with Princess not for the sake of its filly but because she wanted a photo-op of the two fluffies playing together to post on her Instagram account.
She even pretended in her posts that Tim was also her fluffy so people would think she was some kind of millionaire to be able to afford two fluffies.
Tim was nonetheless very happy to finally be able to play with another fluffy, and so was Princess.
Tim didnât want babbehs. Not that it could have any given it had its âwumpsâ removed shortly after birth.
Neither could Princess which was completely sterile.
But Tim didnât want any foals for the same reason Princess didnât want any foals: both had received additional programming by Hasbio to simply avoid the subject entirely.
It was part of Hasbioâs system to protect their monopoly on these biotoys.
The fluffies living inside Hasbioâs factories were on the other hand fully fertile and programmed to always want to breed.
This combined with insane breeding rates to lower costs and increase yields would eventually turn fluffies into a plague.
For it was those fluffies that got out in the woods of Georgia, carrying with them not only the ability to breed which all commercially sold fluffies lacked but an implanted imperative to do so that Hasbio didnât predict they could pass on to every subsequent generation.
This happened 4 months before Timâs first birthday.
There were bigger news at the time, and quite frankly everybody thought Hasbio would get the fluffies back and everything would go back to normal.
It didnât, and eventually wild fluffies became the ânew normalâ.
Only a month later Stacy saw a girl in her private school flaunting two unicorn foals, one a red colt with a purple mane and the other a yellow filly with a green mane.
They were smaller than Tim was when her father brought him from the store.
Thatâs because Hasbio wouldnât sell foals that were that little.
And indeed Hasbio didnât sold them to her.
The girlâs father bought them on Craigslist from an illegal fluffy breeder in Georgia.
At $5,000 for both it was a steal.
But the biggest difference is that both were fertile and would be able to breed when they reached adulthood in only 3-4 months.
In short Tim was no longer an investment.
Mr. Chandler made an even biggest mistake when he refused to sell Tim for roughly 1/3 what he had paid for it.
The more he waited the more the price went down, until it was simply pointless to do so.
The Chandler family was still paying the installments for Timâs +$13k price even as far more valuable fluffy foals were going for as little as $100.
Then the first industrial fluffy mills went up, foals were now being sold for less than petshop puppies or kitties.
Then less than rabbits and guinea pigs.
Then less than hamstersâŚ
By this time everyone in town already owned a fluffy or two.
Some even had fluffy families since their fluffies could breed, unlike Tim and Princess.
Shortly after that came the first strays.
Then the first feral fluffies.
Tim, still not allowed to leave the house, would sometimes see the herds walking down the street.
Nobody cared at first, some people were even curious and wondered how these artificial biotoys would still behave like real animals would.
As these herds destroyed and soiled the expensive landscaping of the mcmansions the homeowners lost any empathy towards these things they were now calling âshitratsâ.
Tim saw how old man Ross who used to pet him as a colt took a shovel and decapitated an orange mare with 7 hungry peeping foals in its back without any remorse.
The famished mare had dared to eat some of the award winning fancy plants he had in his front yard.
Still to Tim this was insane, a level of cruelty its tiny brain engineered to live inside an imaginary cartoon world couldnât comprehend.
A couple years ago this situation wouldâve been unthinkable, after all Ross was taking a rusty shovel to roughly $100,000 in fluffies.
But right now that shovel was worth more than the mare and foals did alive, let alone headless and beaten to a pulp.
Despite fluffies becoming not only cheap but âshit petsâ with no rights the Chandlers still kept Tim around.
Princess next door wasnât so lucky.
Mrs. Stein who only cared for it to increase her own status had no use for the pegasus mare anymore.
Tim hadnât seen Princess in a while.
The last time he did it was through a window.
It saw an angry Mrs. Stein carrying a stained cardboard box towards her Bentley SUV.
Mrs. Stein wasnât good with money, she simply flushed the late mr. Stein life savings down the drain.
She wasnât wise enough to sell the fluffy when she could still get some money for it.
As the debts from her lavish lifestyle began to mount and the value of her prized fluffy spiraled down to nothing she took her anger out on the biotoy.
And so when she opened the hatch to her car and shoved her hand in the box Tim could see it.
It was Princess, dangling from a broken coat hanger shoved into her skin.
It had patches of fluff missing, the rest stained with blood.
Some of its skin showing, red gashes the product of a very rough careless shaving.
Burn spots from cigarettes and hot knives.
All of its teeth were gone, knocked out by Mrs. Stein many drunken binges after talking with her accountant.
Two of Princess âweggiesâ were missing, torn out and stumps hastily stitched or glued together.
Both of its wings were gone.
Tim remembered how proud Princess was of its wings.
How it thought it would one day fly for its human mummah.
But Princessâ mummah didnât care about that.
Neither she cared about the big teal eyes of the mare when she burned them with a hot metal spoon.
Tim put its pawn on the window as Mrs. Stein threw Princess in the trunk of her SUV hard enough to kill it, but unfortunately for the fluffy it was still alive.
That was the last time anyone saw Princess or its owner ever again.
The bank seized Mrs. Stein house the next day. Some say she sold her SUV and fled back to her country.
But Tim had nothing to fear, the Chandlers decided that as worthless as it had become they would still care for it, unlike the former owners of the many stray filthy fluffies that Tim saw rummaging through the trash at night, many of them with the unwanted chirpie foals that got them kicked out into the streets for daring to do what they were programmed to do.
Things changed a bit though.
Tim no longer had a safe room, the Chandlers instead deciding to rent it to a college student living off campus.
They needed the money to make ends meet.
And so Tim now lived in the laundry closet which was fine except for when the washing machine was running.
It also lost most of the expensive Hasbio-branded fluffy toys.
While Tim had a negative value the official Hasbio toys the Chandlers bought had now become sort of rare collector items since Hasbio itself no longer existed.
Also gone was the premium kibble, the canned FluffSketti, the special fluffy gummy treats.
Timâs food now consisted mostly of whatever leftovers the Chandlers put in its bowl and some bargain economy kibble that was mostly made with feral fluffies bought from overflowing shelters.
The stallion would sometimes choke on the fluff fibers in that kibble.
So abundant it was that some of the brown pieces had technicolor streaks from the fluff of the countless fluffies and foals grinded alive to make it.
Overall Tim now lived a far more impoverished life than it did as a foal.
But still he was grateful for at least he wasnât starving like stray fluffies did.
Or being killed in the fields and forests like feral fluffies were.
Let alone suffering at the hands of an abuserâŚlike Princess.
Eventually Tim reached the end of its genetically-engineered planned obsolescence.
Its fluff suddenly started to gray, it could barely chew its food anymore.
There was nothing to do.
Tim was simply dying as Hasbio had intended.
Dying so its owners had to get a new fluffy.
And so he did, Tim was found lifeless in the ratty cat bed that had become its ânestieâ after his official Hasbio Nestie Housie was sold âforeversâ ago.
His final resting place was inside an old orange Nike shoe box buried in the back yard.
The Chandlers never owned a fluffy again.
They decided to get a more prestigious pet like a breed dog instead.
After all fluffies were now considered a cheap pet for people who couldnât afford anything better.
Or an inexpensive meat replacement for those who thought canned Spam was too rich for their blood.
The only exception were the still expensive and rare alicorns but the Chandlers werenât going to fall for that again.
It took them yet another year to finally pay the debt for buying TimâŚ
poor princess. 
