“Da-a-ad, y’know how you asked me about my birthday?” Jess began, holding something behind her back.
“Yeah, I remember.” Her father replied.
“And how you wanted to know if there were any particular gifts I wanted this year?”
“Yeah…?”
“And I said I wanted to think about it?”
“Yeah, go on.”
“Well… I thought about it.” Jess ended. “And I think I’ve found something.”
And with that, she pulled out her phone, showing her father the picture emblazoned on the screen.
It was a fluffy pony, but not just that, one of a rare few ‘Princess Celestia’ types, with both a horn and wings, and with brilliant white fur and a three-colour mane and tail.
They were, apparently, something of a collector’s item.
“Wha… a ‘Celestia’ fluffy pony?” He asked. “But I didn’t think you were interested in fluffy ponies.”
“I dunno… they’re pretty cute. Suzy Wilkins in class has one, I saw it when I was over at her place doing homework last week, it was so adorable how it tried to throw a tantrum and puffed up it’s cheeks!”
Her father thought about it. Jess was turning 9, she wasn’t some stupid kid anymore (not that she’d ever been stupid in the first place, but anyway), it might be a good idea for her to start taking responsibility for a pet…
“Well… let me talk it over with your mother first, okay?” He said. Jess lit up.
“Thanks dad! Love you!”
“Yeah, love you too, kiddo…” He said, pulling out his own phone to start checking prices.
Two days later, he was about ready to leave town and go live in the desert somewhere.
This was impossible.
He’d looked everywhere. Amazon, specialist breeder sites, Fluff-Mart, even the local pet-shops, but nobody could offer him a Celestia fluffy for less than $1,000. He’d been willing to go slightly over, but even then, the cheapest was $1,200, and that one had been one of those foal-in-a-can monstrosities that’d been left stewing in it’s own shit for god only knew how long.
Frankly, he wouldn’t have paid $50 for that thing, let alone the $1,200 ‘Joe’ was asking for.
Jess’s father was about to give up hope, when he finally decided to try something he’d considered from the beginning, but hadn’t actually dared to do.
He opened up a new tab, clicked on the search bar, and typed in four letters.
E-B-A-Y
With the online marketplace’s page loaded, he searched for the keywords ‘fluffy’, ‘pony’, ‘celestia’, and ‘alicorn’. As per usual, he had a lot of overpriced results, with high-quality pictures taken by professional photographers and descriptions proudly stating ‘I know what I’ve got’ and ‘comes from an abuse-free home’, etc…
Once again, Jess’s father was ready to throw in the towel… but then he had one last idea.
An idea he didn’t necessarily like, but it was about all he had left.
He clicked to sort the results, which had defaulted to ‘relevance’, and changed it to ‘price - lowest to highest’.
Instantly the results changed. Now he was looking at nothing but trainwrecks. Most were in ‘used’ condition, covered in dried blood and with expressions of misery on their faces. Most came from breeding mills and had been finally ‘used up’ after a lifetime of suffering.
Others were, of all things, ‘customs’. Fluff that had been bleached snow white with harsh chemicals, manes and tails that had been dyed with even harsher chemicals, resulting in fluffy ponies that looked patchy, terrified, and in some cases, even brain-damaged.
There was one he found which actually had a pair of wings stitched onto it’s back. He’d clicked off the page as quick as he could, managing to stifle his vomit just in time.
But then, with one final downwards scroll, he found it.
The perfect specimen.
The pictures were immaculate. The store had a positive rating. The cost was only $100, shipping included. Okay, it was coming from China, but it was probably a specifically manufactured thing just for this purpose. If anything, getting it for that much was a steal, no matter where it was going to come from.
Jess’s father clicked ‘Buy Now’ and let the browser fill in his payment details.
He went to bed that night confident in his abilities as a father, because if nothing else, he’d made sure his little girl would be happy.
Almost a full month later, the box finally arrived, while Jess was out at school.
“At fucking last!” Her father hissed as he carried the box through to the bathroom.
He hadn’t expected it right away, obviously… but surely there was some kind of ‘rush’ system in place for the transportation of live animals, wasn’t there?! The fluffy he’d bought had been in transit for a full 30 days, trapped in a box with whatever food and water they’d stuffed in with it… god alone knew if it had even survived the trip or not.
He ripped off the tape that sealed the box shut and grimaced at the smell that wafted out. He pulled back the cardboard flaps and saw that, surprisingly, not only was the fluffy pony still alive, but that it was also very clean.
He gingerly reached in and lifted it out, carefully placing the creature in the bath-tub as he looked it over.
It was a Celestia-coloured Alicorn alright, with both wings, a horn and the right colours in the hair. But something about it was… off. It’s body was almost perfectly round, granted fluffy ponies weren’t exactly slim but this thing was closer to a soccer ball than an actual animal.
Then he noticed where the smell was coming from.
The poor animal had actually been fitted with a diaper before shipping, which was not only covered in numerous still-damp stains of brown and yellow, but was also sagging heavily.
30 days was a long time to go without shitting, he figured.
He turned the fluffy pony around to look at it’s face, and then saw something.
It had something attached to it’s mouth, it looked almost like a gasmask but with some plastic bags attached to the air-hoses, the insides of which were smeared and smudged with what looked like food stains. As he looked it over, he saw the fluffy look back at him… and noticed it’s eyes were moving separately, and in completely different directions.
Grimacing, he reached out and carefully removed the mask from the creature’s face. It’s breath stank of old food, but it was alive enough.
Then it started to speak.
“HURL-OH DUR-DEE!!!” It bellowed in a deep, heavily accented voice. “I’M CELESTIA! PRINCESS OF DURR SUNSHINE!”
He looked at the fluffy again. Something was wrong with it, that was for sure.
“Uh, hi.” He replied. “Are you… can you, uh… do you want to play?”
“YURRR!” It babbled, flailing it’s limbs. Then he noticed what was wrong there too. Two of it’s legs, the front left and back right, were shorter than the other two. He placed it in the bath-tub and watched it as it hobbled around, wobbling and shaking as it paced back and forth across the length of the bath.
“UHR-OH!” It bellowed. “CELESTIA GOTTA GO POTTY!”
Then, with an almighty ripping sound, the fluffy pony shit itself. Jess’s father watched as another wet brown stain filled the diaper, spreading across it from top to bottom and adding another weight to the sagging pile at the bottom.
“Oh, god…” He said, grimacing at the stink. “Let’s get you out of that horrible thing.”
“OKAY DUR-DEE!” ‘Celestia’ replied… before flopping back to sit down on her rear, landing with a heavy, wet ‘SQUELCH’.
He resisted the urge to vomit and began the process of removing the diaper, after which he lifted ‘Celestia’ out of a heap of her own filth and placed her near the taps.
Tossing the diaper in the cardboard box, he then spun the cold and hot water taps, only realising at the last second that fluffy ponies were deathly afraid of water.
But before he could do anything…
“YA-A-AY! WATER TIME!” ‘Celestia’ sang, prancing around under the flow from the taps. “I LOVE WATER! WATER IS MAKES FOR THE BEST PLAYTIMES!”
He slumped down against the side of the bath, putting a hand to his head.
Something was definitely wrong.
He’d done his research, he knew how these things spoke. He intended to get it ready for Jess’s birthday by talking to it, showing it pictures of her, maybe even getting the fluffy pony in on the ‘surprise’ by having it hide and jump out on cue. To that end, he looked up how these things spoke and how they understood things, but this… this…
This thing was not a fluffy pony.
It didn’t talk like one at all. It didn’t even act like one. It should’ve screamed and cried at the water, it shouldn’t have been capable of using terms like ‘I am’, they always referred to themselves in the third person.
This thing was not a fluffy pony, it was impossible.
This thing was not a fluffy pony.
At least… it wasn’t an official one.
Jess’s father shut off the taps and pulled out his phone. He opened up Google and typed in three words:
BOOTLEG
FLUFFY
PONIES
Immediately he was swamped with results, all recent ones too, of various websites warning about this exact thing. News pages, the official Hasbio subreddit, the fluffy pony care websites, even abuse forums were all talking about it.
A post from ‘SkinEmGood’ read:
‘Yeah those things are wack. Like, regular fluffies are one thing, but this shit is Grade-A bonkers. They don’t talk right, they don’t look right, they’re some vat-grown mass-produced things that don’t even feel pain properly, they suck as alternatives to fluffies, even for some torturing.’
Jess’s father found a report in the news about the source of these things. As the abuse forum poster had said, they were apparently grown in labs in China, coming out all stunted and misshapen, but as long as they were barely alive, they were given a pass and shipped out to people all over the world. At the end of the day, it was no worse than any other ‘Chinese bootleg scam’ story, and since fluffy ponies didn’t count as living things, nobody really cared. Jess’s father noted that the news story itself was actually in the ‘business’ section, since it was just treated as any other product report.
He put his phone away and looked at the misshapen thing spinning in circles in his bath-tub.
The rotund body, the dead eyes, the wobbly legs… as he watched, it proceeded to take a shit as it was walking, and he realised that the main reason it was wearing a diaper was because it probably couldn’t control it’s own bowels properly.
“Hey, Celestia.” Jess’s father said. It didn’t hear him until he said it three more times, at which point it finally registered he was speaking.
“HURL-OH MUH-MEE!!!” It bellowed in it’s ‘tell me about the rabbits, George’ voice, and Jess’s father grimaced.
“Do you want some, uh… ‘sketties’?” He asked, probing it for any semblance of normal fluffy behaviour.
‘Celestia’ looked at him, face turned towards him but it’s eyes rolling in different directions.
“WHAT’S A SKUTTIES?” It asked him.
A few hours later, Jess got home from school. Her birthday was tomorrow, and she was so excited!
That is, until she got in and saw her dear and devoted dad sitting on the couch, looking deeply worried.
“Dad? What’s up?” She asked.
“Huh? Oh, nothing… say, Jess… y’know how you asked me about your birthday?”
“Yeah, I remember.” Her father replied.
“And how you wanted to tell me there was a particular gift you wanted this year?”
“Yeah…?”
“And I said your mother and I wo-”
“Oh, the fluffy pony?” Jess asked. “Actually… I kinda wanted to talk to you about that.”
She shuffled nervously and looked to the side.
“Can I… not get one?”
“What?!”
“I’m sorry, dad! But I was over at Suzy Wilkins again the other day, and her fluffy pony… dad, it took a shit on the floor!”
“Jess, language!”
“Sorry! It… it took a poop on the floor. All over the kitchen floor. Suzy’s dad was furious at it! Suzy was too! Apparently he does it all the time!!!”
Jess’s father looked at her, his daughter was genuinely upset about it, torn between sadness and anger.
“And I kept thinking… I don’t want that, and I don’t think you or mom do either. I felt real bad since I’d already asked for one, and you’d probably gone and bought it all and… and I’m sorry dad.”
“Oh, Jess, honey…” Her father said, pulling her in close for a hug. “It’s okay kiddo. Honestly… I was going to say I couldn’t find one.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you wanted that… that Celestia thing, right? Well, I looked as hard as I could, but I couldn’t find 'em anywhere.”
“Oh, thank god!”
“Jess, language!”
“Sorry dad… but I’m so happy!”
“I love you, kiddo.”
“Love you too, dad.”
In the trash can by the kerb, the bootleg fluffy pony lay with it’s diaper stuffed into it’s mouth, smothered by it’s own runny shit, wheezing and gasping and desperately attempting to call out to anyone who might be able to hear it and come and help it.
But nobody could, and did.
The next morning, as Jess celebrated her 9th birthday, the trash-men came and emptied the black plastic sacks into their truck, carrying away with them yet another piece of cast-off junk from across the seas.
One of many cheap bootlegs bought in haste, and regretted in leisure.