Sink or Swim, Part 4 – Vanner
“Bad uppies! Bad uppies! Nu wan! Nu wan!”
It wasn’t like Bob to complain about things, but he clearly didn’t want to be in this harness. I’d suspended him above the treadmill in a sling so that he could learn to use his legs in concert. Otis too was suspended in his hamster sized sling, and hurling insults at me as he hung above his running wheel.
I don’t know if you’ve paid much attention to how a fluffy pony walks, but it’s more of a waddle than anything else. Watching Bob and Otis shuffle from place to place reminded me of the time I saw a fat skunk trundling at full speed away from the garbage cans it had been raiding. At any rate, it was not a motion conducive to swimming and teaching them to do otherwise was proving more difficult than I imagined.
“Nu wan,” Bob complained as he hung limp above the treadmill.
“It’s really easy,” I said. “Move both of your right legs at the same time, then your left.”
“Wha wight?” asked Bob.
“The ones on this side,” I said, poking his right foreleg.
“Wha weft?”
“The ones on this side,” I said, poking his other leg. “Come on now. Right legs forward.” There was an uncoordinated scrambling for a second before Bob went limp again. Otis wasn’t fairing much better, his leg flailing at random as he wheeled in the air.
“It might help to count as you move,” I suggested.
“Wha cownt?” asked Bob. I could only respond with a heavy sigh. Of course Bob couldn’t count; what was I thinking?
“Don’t you have any coordination at all?” I asked.
“Wha cow-owd-din-ashun?” asked Bob. Otis just continued to call me “dummeh,” “poopie” and “fawker” as he hoofed uselessly at the air. This was nothing like teaching middle schoolers, and I don’t know why I assumed it would be.
“Alright, let’s try something different,” I said. I went to the closet and found a pair of wooden hangers. They’d work well enough for Bob, but I needed something smaller for Otis. A quick rummage through a kitchen drawer produced a pair of chopsticks which would serve well. I thought briefly about duct tape, but I really didn’t want to rip either of their fluff out. Twine was the solution, and I came back to Otis out of breath and grumbling. Bob just hung quietly complaining about “bad uppies.”
Bob’s protest against having hangers tied to his legs was his usual limp defiance, while Otis made a spectacular display of bitching and trying to shit on me. Luckily, it’d been a few days and his tactics hadn’t evolved from the first time he tried that. Amy suggested he might be a “smarty” but I’m pretty sure he was just a cranky old asshole of a fluffy who didn’t want chopsticks tied to his legs.
“Why weggies haf sticks?” asked Bob.
“So when you move one, it forces the other to move,” I said. “I want you to get used to moving both of your legs at the same time so you can swim.”
He experimentally moved a front hoof and dragged his rear with it. He tried it again on the other side and got the same results. It took him a few more tries before the idea seemed to sink in, but soon he was cycling both legs at the same time. Otis just continued screaming obscenities and flailing his chopsticked legs to the beat of his own cursing rhythm. I wasn’t even sure why I was trying to train him to swim; I just needed him to test my theory about making fluffies float. Probably because it annoyed him, which was a good enough reason for me.
Bob seemed to take to the idea of pacing his legs together after a few minutes, so I turned the treadmill on to low and lowered the sling to let him start walking. Left, right, left, right, left, right. He had a nice trot going on and for a moment he looked almost elegant. Then a single misstep toppled him to a heap on the belt. Bob lay on his side as it slowly slid him off the treadmill and onto the floor. He struggled for a moment, legs unable to bend enough to right himself.
“Tink Bawb did someting wong,” he said, laying wrong way up on the floor.
“Wucky haf weggies!” Otis shouted. “In Owtis day…”
“Shut up, Otis,” I said, righting Bob. “Good job, buddy.”
“Fwuffy name Bawb, nawt Buddeh,” he said. I paused, rubbing my forehead in frustration.
“I want you to keep practicing walking like that for an hour every day,” I continued. “Can you do that for me, Bob?
“Wha houh?” asked Bob.
I knew most fluffies couldn’t read, count, or tell time, but it was frustrating to come face to face with the staggering depths of their ignorance. I couldn’t tell if a lifetime of feral living had robbed Bob of any sort of functional education or if he was just kind of dim. I suspected it was a bit of both. Still, he’d taken to the task I’d given him thus far with ease. He’d been excellent about his litterbox usage, he stayed in the room, and he’d picked up pacing pretty well until he face planted.
Otis, meanwhile had shit all over his enclosure, tried desperately to escape, and was just generally an asshole. He obviously was smart for a fluffy and was deliberately being obstinate. I’m glad he was a micro, because if he were a regular sized fluffy, I’d have dumped his ass at the lake by now. I untied Bob’s legs and took the bag of fluffy treats off the table. Bob looked at the bag expectantly, but without saying a word.
“Sit.” He plopped on his fluffy rump, and wagged his tail. “Up.” Bob pushed himself to his back hoofs, balancing himself into a teetering upright position. “Down.” He dropped to a crouch, still wagging his short grey tail. “Good Bob.” I gave him two fruit flavored treats from the bag.
“Fank you Wogeh,” he said with a happy crunch. “Tweats so tastee.”
“Gif Otis tweat?” Otis asked/screamed. I wasn’t sure if he was yelling at me because he yelled everything. I’m guessing his former owner was nearly deaf and shouting was the only way he could make his tiny squeaky voice heard.
“Show me three complete paces and I’ll give you a treat,” I said. He flailed for a minute, cursing and panting as he finished.
“Gud enuf?” he demanded.
“Try again.” He grumbled and flailed a bit, approximating a pace. He knew how to do what I was asking of him; he was just an asshole. “Three more.” More grumbling, but he halfheartedly flailed a bit more. I broke a treat into tiny pieces and put the crumbs into his enclosure. I untied the chopsticks from his legs, and he bounded over to the pile of crumbs. He looked up at me and scowled.
“Why Bawb git two tweats an Otis git cwumbs?” he demanded upon seeing the pile of crumbs.
“Because Bob is a hundred times your size,” I said. “Plus he did the exercises without being a jerk.”
“Yu a jewk!” he shot back. He shoveled the crumbs into his cheeks and dashed beneath his tiny house.
I really didn’t know what I was going to do with Otis once I’d used him for this experiment. Maybe he’d make a good class pet when school started up in the fall, though probably not. He’d wind up teaching the sixth graders new curse words and telling them horror stories about getting castrated. Not that he had been; he just liked talking about it.
For the next week I worked with pacing, and while Bob took to it immediately, Otis didn’t seem to care one way or the other if he got it right. Moreover, he’d taking to yelling at the TV whenever someone appeared on it that he didn’t like which was nearly everyone. When it was time for our appointment with Floofe Brother’s I packed Otis into his carrier, and put Bob on his leash.
Floofe Brother’s Engineering turned out to be in the industrial district in a desolate part of town. High weeds grew in the sidewalk across the street from a squat warehouse of a building with an amazingly green lawn surrounded by a high chain link fence. A few fluffies of various species waddled around the lawn, generally not paying attention to anything going on around them. Typical fluffy behavior. It all seemed quite pleasant until I opened the front door.
The warehouse was what I imagined hell for fluffies looked like. Kennels full of fluffies lined shelves in the middle of the room, each one labeled and tagged through the ear with a barcode. Machines whirred and spun along the walls, some with fluffies in them, others without. A few jars with what looked like brains sat on another set of shelves, the speaker attached to each one quietly begging for death. Several giant biohazardous waste containers on wheels were strategically placed around the warehouse. A man in a lab coat had a brown pegasus strapped to a table, poking at its brain through a sawed off section of his head. I didn’t have time to run before he turned up to see me.
“Ah, you must be Roger,” said the man. “I’m Dave, founder of Floofe Brother’s Engineering. Come in, pull up a seat. Is this your fluffy?” Bob quailed behind me.
“Pwease dun wet dat guy neaw me,” Bob begged. I looked at Bob for a moment while Otis wandered from one side of his carry case to the other in an attempt to take in all the sights and sounds of horror.
“Now dis wha fwuffy ‘sposed be!” Otis said. “Industwial abwuse! Big huwties! Saddies forebah!”
“Oh, no, no,” said Dave. “There’s a little bit of suffering, sure, but it’s all in the name of science. Now if you want needless suffering, you’ll have to wait till Dale gets back into town. He’s the one with the body count in the hundreds of thousands.”
“Look, I gotta go,” I said, edging towards the door. “I don’t know what I hoped to find here, but I don’t think…”
“You wanted to teach fluffies to swim, right?” he asked. “How do you plan on solving the wet fluff issue? What experiments have you done so far? What’s your methodology? Have you published yet?”
I was only vaguely aware of what this guy was talking about, so I told him what I’d done already. He nodded as he listened, occasionally jotting down some notes, before I got to the part about sea fluffies. He rubbed his chin, contemplating my words. There was no telling what he was thinking, but he finally nodded with a quiet noise. He pulled a bottle off a shelf and handed it to me. It was small, no bigger than a perfume bottle and viscous like a thick extra virgin olive oil, but deep black. I read the printed label. “Sea Fluffy Oil.”
“Do I want to know how you got this?” I asked. He thumbed over to a roller press sitting in the corner, fluff still clinging to the gears. I winced, not wanting to think about the sea fluffies that likely gave their lives for this tiny bottle.
“This should be just enough to coat a micro, though I haven’t tried it,” he said. “I can’t find any micros and foals just straight up drown when you put them in water.” He looked at Otis for a bit, then back at me. “How old did you say Otis was?”
“The shelter said he was eight,” I said.
“And you want to use such an old micro for research that might drown him?”
“He’s not that old,” I said. “Fluffies can live till twelve, right?” Dave shook his head.
“Micros live about seven years on the outside,” he said. “Have you really looked at Otis?”
I looked at him for a moment as he sat babbling to himself about “huwties for dummehs.” What I thought was just weird variations in his blue fluff was actually a pronounced grey around his ears, joints, and muzzle. I hadn’t realized it, but Otis wasn’t just a cranky asshole; he was something I didn’t think fluffies could be.
Otis was old.
“I’m all for science, but let’s reconsider what you’re doing to Otis,” said Dave. “Have you taken them to a vet? Let me give you the name of one of my associates in town. She and I worked on sea fluffies together and she’s the top vet in the country. I think she’ll be interested in Otis.”
Still puzzling over what I’d learned, I looked back to Bob, who was busy chatting with the brown pegasus with part of her head sawn off.
“So, head cowd?” asked Bob. “Pwetty fwuffy wan huggies? Huggies make betteh?”
“Wan die.”
“So nu huggies?” asked Bob, a master conversationalist, clearly in his element. “Hungie? Wogeh usuawwy haf tweats.”
“Wan die.”
“Yu haf specaw fwiend?” Bob asked, casually, voice hopeful. I looked at Dave, and shrugged.
“Any suggestions on making him float?” I asked.
“Change out his skin for of sea fluffy skin?” said Dave. “Their naturally repellant fluff sheds oils quickly. It’s part of what makes them hypoallergenic.” I looked at him skeptically.
“You’re joking, right?” I asked. “You can’t just take a fluffy’s skin off and replace it with another’s.” Dave only smirked.
“You really don’t know anything about fluffies, do you?”