I really like Aloe. She’s my poggers little chud. At some point I’m going to write a GoT-style herd drama about her reign.
You are no longer Sugarflake, because Sugarflake is once again unconscious.
Though you are still a fluffy, and you’re not all too far from Sugarflake, either.
You have a deep green coat with a sprinkling of white spots, and bristling in your fur are several nubby, keratinous quills. For this reason, you are named Aloe.
You were once a considerably overpriced designer fluffy, not that you have ever understood what that actually means. All you understand is that when your mommy wasn’t hitting you, she was calling you a worthless waste of your money, and when she wasn’t saying that, she was threatening to have you pillowed and sent to a breeding mill where you would be raped and have your babies torn from you.
In due time, you learned to resent your mommy back, and eventually, you decided you’d be better off without her.
You are one of the few runaway fluffies to ever be correct in this assumption. After months of humiliation and suffering, you have risen to be a smarty, though the title refers to your place in the hierarchy more than your temperament. Most of the time.
Right now, you’re reeling at the fact that the rumors you heard are right.
There is a herd of feral fluffies who do nothing but play in a human’s garden and sleep and eat all day. They don’t even seem like they’ve done anything outstanding to deserve it, either! You’ve seen them shit where they eat, kill each other’s foals, bicker over small things, bully the poopy colors, and somehow, they have this special paradise to live, while you’ve been spending the last… very long time wrangling your disorderly herd and choking down garbage and sleeping on rocks and dirt.
It makes you mad! It makes you so mad you could run down there and say mean things to them and give them sorry hoofies! But you don’t, because you’re being sneaky right now, and giving them sorry hooves would get you found out.
It’s evening, and you watch as the fluffies in the garden settle down for the night, wryly noting that they haven’t posted any sentries to watch for monsters that might sneak up on them.
Satisfied with your scouting, you return to where your toughie-friends have corralled your herd in a grassy clearing in the adjacent woodland. A few look to you eagerly, but most are distracted talking amongst themselves or staring off at something else. That will change.
For as nasty and mean as your old mommy was, she was always watching other humans give things called “speechies” on the teebee. You’re no sophist, but you’ve picked up a thing or two, and you’ve become quite good at riling your followers up or down when you need to. It’s part of why you’re a smarty-mare, even if you aren’t the biggest fluffy in your herd.
The fact that your mouth is lined with two rows of unusually sharp designer teethies probably also helps.
“Fwiends, Mawes, Stawwions,” you announce, swiftly drawing the full attention of the herd. “Da wumows… awe twue. Dewe is a hewd of fwuffies who do notin’ but pway an’ eat aww day.”
“And not betause dey good fluffies!” you continue, emphatically stamping your foot. “Dey bad fwuffies! Awoe saw! Awoe saw stawwion gib stompy-ouchies to babbeh, an’ eat bewwies wite aftew! Awoe saw meanie-mawe take bes’ sweepy spot from nyu mommah! An’ Awoe am tink, whai dat happen? Whai goo’ things happen tu bad fluffies?”
Babbles of “fwuffy nu’ know” and “dey nu’ desewb dose tings!” rise from your gathered herd. You hadn’t actually been asking them the question, of course, but it was one of the “weh-tow-ick-aww” things you saw a lot in the speeches on your old mommy’s teebee, and it works quite well in keeping them engaged.
“Awoe think, ‘whai dat not happen to Awoe hewd?’ Awoe wan’ eat bewwies. Awoe wan’ sleep in bes’ sleepy spot. Do YUU wan’ tu eat bewwies and play in flowers an’ sleep in bes’ sleepy spot?”
You pause, again, and bask in the chorus of cheers that come from your riled herd. You won’t ever show it— to do so would be a sign of weakness— but you’re deeply satisfied by how closely they’ve grown to trust your decisionmaking.
“Su come wit’ Awoe We gon’ make meanie hewd weave gawden’ o gib biggest ouchies! An’ we gon eat bewwies! An we gon sweep in bestest sweepy spot! Come wit’ me!”
And with that, you march your herd over the hill.
=========================
You are once again The Geneticist, and it is fairly late for someone of your age. Nonetheless, you are in your basement and performing an ovarian harvest on an anesthetized Sugarflake.
After reviewing how Your Perfect Rufus played with the fluffy trainer, most notably how quickly he became attached to talking with the handpuppets, you’ve concluded that yes, he will need a sibling if his cognitive development is to be healthy, and no, a baseline fluffy will certainly not suffice.
It is with this goal in mind that you have set about on the first of many steps in yet another multi-month journey of painstaking genetic manipulation, cloning, iteration, and further manipulation. You don’t doubt that it’ll be easier with your notes from Rufus, though no two fluffies are the same, and so, no two modifications will be the same, either.
A thump against one of the windows pulls at your focus, followed by the distinct sound of a fluffy crying. You ignore the distraction, quickly tuning it out as you continue slicing through the supple layers of tissue in Sugarflake’s abdomen.
Unless you wish to harvest a sample, as with little Sugarflake at the moment, you have no reason to interact or pay heed to the specimens in your backyard. You’ve already taken the due diligence to catalogue each of their genomes, and you’ve already conditioned them to ensure that they don’t make too much noise. They are your library, nothing more.
Making a mental note to discourage further scuffles, you continue on with your work, only to have your focus broken by a second thump and much more crying. And then a third thump.
It is at this point that you stop humming and set your scalpel down. What is happening out there?
You clamp the bleeding veins with a hemostat and make your way to your back patio’s sliding glass door. The muffled sounds of fluffy violence spills into your makeshift surgical room when you open it.
Illuminated by the glow of your porchlight is an open and vicious melee between tiny horses on your back patio. You recognize several fighters as belonging to the herd of the herd you have painstakingly taken the time to catalog, though far more numerous are unfamiliar, invading fluffies.
Worse still, the foreign herd appears to be handily winning. What little resistance your test subjects present is far less organized and spirited than the new ferals, and so you watch cooly as the hapless defenders are surrounded and beaten into submission if not outright killed.
Were you an ordinary fluffy owner, this might be the point at which you went outside and brought down the wrath of humanity on the fluffies, perhaps killing the invaders to the foal, or perhaps brokering a peace deal and forcing reparations.
You are not an ordinary fluffy owner, however. You are a fluffy creator, and so you do nothing as you watch all your painstaking work over the last several months is crushed underhoof or driven into the night. Almost all of your work. Rufus, of course, is upstairs and fast asleep in his bed. You would do many things if he was killed at this point in the process, none of them particularly pleasant for anybody.
Why should you care if one group of ferals is victorious in subjugating another? You have no reason to intervene, no deeper connections with them beyond some token efforts of bringing the specimens to heel.
If anything, this havoc is the result of your own inaction. Yes, you had conditioned the ferals to behave acceptably, and yes, you had made your Perfect Little Rufus, though nothing you have done actually addressed the broad-reaching failures of fluffy ponies themselves.
Their gene pool was tainted. It had been tainted since the days of Hasbio, and the rot had only spread. Like a garden without a caretaker, it had burgeoned until it could no longer support its own growth, and now festered and wilted in its own writhing excess.
Creating one perfect fluffy will never be enough.
You will have to… uproot the weeds. Trim the hedges, cull the pests, destroy anything not growing in perfect lockstep with everything else. Not just create one perfect little flower to sate your own ego.
Mmhmm. Yes, that would be nice. You smile at the notion, even as you watch a cowering foal stamped into paste beneath your porch table. Actually rectifying the broad-reaching failures of your earlier work would be difficult, yes, though not impossible. You needed eugenic facilities, mass scale cullings, in-vitro fertilizations, ways to disseminate worthy genes, and… another helper, perhaps.
A… sibling, for Rufus. An agent that could interface with and live among fluffies as one of them, but something that would still carry out the cleansing you know he’s far too gentle a boy for.
You head back to Sugarflake and collect the ketamine syringe you’d used to anesthetize her, inserting it into her brachial artery. With steady hands, you depress the plunger past the safe dosage, past the recommended dosage, past the maximum dosage, until you’re sure she’s overdosed.
Sugarflake was a good candidate, yes, though her predisposed demeanor was far, far too docile for what you’ll desire your New Perfect Fluffy to do.
Another thump sounds against the window, and you look up this time, watching your defending smartie be pinned against the sliding glass door by a deep-green fluffy. He struggles fruitlessly, and you watch the green one open its mouth to reveal… are those designer fangs?
They are, you note, and after the fluffy speaks several words that you cannot hear, it sinks them deep into the neck of the defending smartie.
A smile breaks across your face as you absentmindedly depress the plunger all the way to the base, forcing the final droplets of sedative into Sugarflake’s bloodstream.
Perhaps it was… serendipity that a new batch of specimens found their way into your hands.
Perhaps you will need Clairdeharte’s daycare services after all.