Note: read “Gaspode the Wonder Fluffy” first.
In Manhattan, in the dead of night, a lone foal wanders through the alleyways.
The last survivor of an alley cat attack that wiped out his family.
The filthy little colt is scared, and sad, and lonely…
But he’s also hungry.
He knows that his mummah can’t give him milkies anymore. But he also knows that there are other fluffies living in the alleys, including other fluffy mummahs.
Mummahs, who have milkies for babbehs.
Fluffy dams react poorly to anyone who isn’t one of their foals helping themselves. The thought of their milk being stolen deeply, instinctually unnerves dams.
And it’s not just strange foals they’ve got to worry about. Some fluffies refuse to be weaned. They’ll insist on drinking milkies long after they should have switched to solids.
Many a breeder has witnessed this happen, even in FauCorp’s breeding facilities. The Faucheuse brothers and the Nerd Squad have studied the phenomenon, attempting to identity the cause of it.
With time and effort, a milk bandit’s habit can be broken. Deston has treated his fair share of milk junkies.
But on the streets, milk bandits are a plague upon the fluffy population. Many a feral stallion has woken up to find, to put it in human terms, a stranger sucking on his wife’s tit, and snatching precious food out of his children’s mouths.
And the stallions don’t like it any more than their special friends do.
The Death of Fluffies has reaped his fair share of milk bandits.
Fortunately, the foal is in luck.
He finds a cardboard box, much like the one he was born in.
It’s an identical box, they came from the same company.
Makes you wonder who’s leaving all these cardboard boxes lying around, huh?
And in the box, a fluffy family, getting what little rest they can get on the streets. No stallion, unlike the wayward foal’s late family.
The foal doesn’t know this, but this feral mare seduced someone’s house fluffy to get that litter. And ran off as soon as the cry of “GUD FEEWS!” rang out, drawing the stallion’s owner’s attention.
To this day, the stallion insists to his owner that his special friend will return any bright time now.
His owner thinks the situation is too funny to punish the stallion for it, or to break his heart with the truth.
The foal sees a decent food stash, enough to last for a night or two. The foal can’t num it yet, but he knows that mummahs need nummies to make milkies for babbehs.
So he knows it’s not a dry well.
Just as the foal starts creeping towards the nest, he hears a hoomin speak up behind him.
Or at least, someone who sounds like a hoomin.
“Don’t do it, lad. Don’t stoop to that level.”
The foal turns around, seeing…
The filthiest fluffy he’s ever seen. An earthie stallion, probably grey under all the filth.
Of course, the foal only has the other fluffies in these alleys to compare the newcomer to.
“Chirp. Wuz dat yu?”
The filthy stallion rolls his eyes.
“Nah, it was the ugly bugger standin’ behind me. Yes, it was me, I was bein’ flippant, mate. Christ, was I this dense as a foal?”
“…Fwuffy nu sown wike a fwuffy. Peep.”
“I get that all the time. Issa long story, mate. The name’s Gaspode. I’m just gonna assume that you don’t gotta name. Look, why’re you out here, alone, in the middle o’ the night? I can tell time, lad, and it’s no time o’ night for a foal to go out on a moonlit stroll. Don’tcha gotta mum o’ yer own?”
The foal shakes his head, and explains his story, to the best of his ability.
Gaspode gives the foal a look of pity.
“Parents gone? Christ, I’ve bin there. Me parents went and did a runner, left me and me siblings huggin’ a brick. Or maybe they got kilt. Dunno, never saw ‘em again. Between you an’ me, laddie…”
Gaspode points a hoof at the ferals in the box, still fast asleep.
They’re heavy sleepers. Not all fluffies are, though.
“…I had to do what you was about to do to survive. And it got me siblings kilt. So I’m not proud of it.”
“But babbeh nee miwkies. Chirp.”
“I know, mate. I know. I was young once too. You fink you can ‘ol’ on forra few minutes? Here, lemme give ya a ride.”
Gaspode carefully lifts the foal onto his back.
“Gaspode nu smeww pwetty…”
“Lad, you don’t exactly smell o’ roses right now, either.”
The foal concedes the point.
So Gaspode waddles through the alleyways as quickly as he can without dislodging his passenger.
Gaspode knows his turf like the back of his… hoof. This gives him an advantage over the average fluffy, who can get lost a foot away from home.
Gaspode knows the days of the week, too. He can tell time, and read. If the magical mishap that granted Gaspode the gifts of humanlike speech and thought could be replicated, it would be a gigantic leap forward for fluffykind.
Unfortunately, the wizard whose garbage Gaspode happily nummed passed away not long after the incident.
As did everyone around him, when his magical experiment went horribly wrong.
Since magic was, at the time, a secret to most, the explosion was chalked up to a gas leak.
Of course, most people figured out what really happened after the public reveal of magic.
Gaspode exits an alleyway, seeing his destination across the street.
The local branch of the Faucheuse Foundation.
“Bloody ‘ell. Thissis the 'ard part, lad. Word o’ advice, never cross the street without a human, some nasty buggers’ll go outta their way to run a feral over.”
“But we nu haf a hoomin. Peep.”
Gaspode eyes a streetwalker, standing on the corner of the street.
A rather fat, ugly streetwalker who doesn’t know how much makeup is enough, but she’ll do, Gaspode reckons.
“We got one now, laddie. Watch this.”
He waddles over to the streetwalker.
“Won’t you help the nice fluffies cross the street?”
An interesting phenomenon occurs when Gaspode addresses most humans in his human voice.
Their brains simply refuse to accept a fluffy talking like a human, so whatever Gaspode says, those humans will regard as their own thoughts.
Gaspode quickly learned how to exploit this. And he’s bilingual, too. If someone’s onto him, he’ll switch to Fluffspeak to allay suspicion.
He doesn’t enjoy using Fluffspeak, but he can’t deny that it’s got its uses.
The streetwalker peers down at the two fluffies.
“You need help crossing the street?”
Gaspode answers in Fluffspeak.
“Yus, nice wady! God, kill me now…”
The streetwalker doesn’t catch that last part, which Gaspode muttered under his breath, and shrugs.
“Follow me.”
Once across the street, Gaspode and the foal thank the streetwalker for her time, and head into the Foundation’s lobby.
The Foundation is open 24/7. There’s fluffies in need at every time of day, after all.
One of the employees on the graveyard shift, manning the counter and browsing the internet on his phone, notices Gaspode waddle in, and the passenger on Gaspode’s back.
“Yo, little dude. You bringing another stray in?”
This branch of the Foundation knows about Gaspode. He’s brought a few ferals here by now. But they don’t know about his talents.
Gaspode nods.
“Yus. Babbeh whowe famiwy gu foweba sweepies, Gaspode am su saddies. I really am sad about that, but I’m gonna cringe meself to death talkin’ like that.”
“What?”
“Nuffin, mistah.”
“Oh. Okay. I think Dr. Temple’s got the night shift, she’ll take a look at him…”
The employee walks out from behind the counter, and gently picks up the foal.
“He’s gonna need a bath, too.”
And Gaspode follows them, to ensure that the foal will be accepted.
A short while later, Gaspode exits the lobby.
The Foundation has offered to take him in, unsubtly hinting that he’s in dire need of a bath, but he politely refused, and they respected that.
He worked for his stink.
The foal was deemed to be healthy, if a bit malnourished. But Flufftopia has a formula designed specifically for malnourished foals.
And one of the rooms has a kindly mare, born without a uterus and milkie places. A rare genetic mutation. The vats can’t regrow body parts that weren’t there to begin with.
But the Nerd Squad is aware of that, and have multiple different solutions to that problem.
So the foal has an auto-feeder all to himself, and a loving adoptive mummah who definitely appreciates having a real live foal to take care of.
She wasn’t happy with the Bestest Babbeh Friends the Foundation had gifted her. For some mares, Bestest Babbeh Friends fall right into the uncanny valley.
Gaspode smiles, feeling proud of himself for once in his life.
His smile quickly fades when he smells someone approach.
A human, who smells a bit like fluffy.
Like fluffy blood.
He sees a teenage boy walk up, not paying attention to Gaspode, and not stupid enough to attack a fluffy right outside the Foundation.
He sees blood on the soles of the boy’s sneakers. Fresh blood, and bits of fluff stuck on the soles, too.
And he recognizes the smell of the fluff. The feral family who were about to become victims of milk banditry.
But now, they’re victims of murder.
Gaspode scowls, and bides his time.
Just as the boy walks past, Gaspode makes his move, lowering his voice so only the boy hears him.
“You got an itchy bum. Really itchy. Prickle prickle prickle.”
The boy stops, and turns to Gaspode, finally noticing him.
“Did you say something, shitrat?”
Gaspode, a expression of feigned innocence on his face, looks up at the boy, suppressing the urge to laugh when he sees the boy already scratching his rear end.
“Nyu fwend?”
The boy scoffs, and turns to leave, still scratching his ass.
“So, so itchy. So itchy it hurts. Prickle.”
The boy yelps.
And Gaspode laughs as he heads back into the lobby, to warn them about the boy.
“Works every time.”