The Fluffy Factory: Sister Act (2/2)

With Whitney here, dealing with the foals is much easier. Now that they've all been cleaned, and returned to their cages, you can finish feeding them. There are quite a few that don't like the food you give them, but you're in no mood to hear their complaints right now. You can't help but keep questioning where that blood on Tiffany's hands came from. Perhaps you should ask Sarah – that is, when you get a chance. It's after nine, and customers are arriving. Most are bringing fluffies in for grooming appointments, so you leave Whitney to her work on the floor and take up your spot in the grooming shop, carrying one or two squirming, sometimes very unhappy fluffy ponies back with you.

“Pwease no wawa,” one such pony asks. This is a dark orange earth pony with a black mane and terrified blue eyes. “Wawa huwt, Pum'kin no wike, pwease daddy?”

You're fully in your element now, petting the scared pony and cooing gently. “I'm not going to hurt you, Pumpkin. I'm going to help you feel nice and clean!”

“Wawa bad...pwease no take fwuff 'way...”

You examine him a little more closely. There are some mats in his fluff, but nothing serious, and nothing that a quick trim won't cure. In fact, you might be able to loosen them up a bit with the special shampoo. To this end, you set a trembling Pumpkin in the sink.

“Dis wawa pwace, no wike!” he yelps, trying to scramble up the sides and failing. “Meanie hooman huwt Pum'kin!”

Okay, perhaps Pumpkin has had a bad grooming experience. No problem, you'll show him that it can be safe and, perhaps, even fun. You move the faucet over to the other side of the double sink and turn on the water, testing the temperature. Once Pumpkin hears it running, he freaks out even harder.

“Nuuuuuu! Pum'kin sowwy, pwease no wawa! Wawa huwt fwuffy!”

“Calm down, I'll make sure the water is nice to you, okay?”

He doesn't heed your word in the least, and has now in fact shat in his side of the double sink. You're a little annoyed, but it's not like he wasn't about to get cleaned anyway. God, though, it smells awful. You grab the sprayer and get to work. The moment the warm – lukewarm, honestly – water touches his fluff, however, he begins thrashing uncontrollably.

“NUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!”

You try your best to steady him, but he's a fully grown, stout earth fluffy, and you cannot control him with one hand. You consider, for a moment, going to get Whitney or one of the people back in the offices to help, but something in your mind demands you man up and handle this yourself. You'll prove to Sarah you can – oh. Pumpkin is now still again, and quiet, too.

“Good boy! See, I told you that the water...uh...Pumpkin?”

In the moment of your mental pep talk, you neglected to notice that the sprayer slipped a bit in your grasp, blasting the hapless fluffy pony right in the face. Come to think of it, that probably explains the thrashing. Your worst nightmare has occurred: fluffy pony has drowned.

“Shit.”

Well, maybe not. You quickly fish the drenched Pumpkin out of the basin and lay him on his back on the counter. This worked for the shelter fluffies caught in rainstorms, it should work here...you slam your open palm down on Pumpkin's chest. A squirt of water shoots up from his lips, and he begins to sob, shitting himself with fear and pain.

“Why huwt Pum'kin, sowwy, sowwy! Pwease no mo' owwies...”

You feel terrible and begin to sniffle. “I'm sorry, that was my fault...let's, um...huh.” You have a bit of a problem here, as the pony sent back for cleaning is now dirtier than when he entered. He has to get a bath, but...mentally, it may break him. You choose your words carefully. “Pumpkin, I have to clean you, okay? I'll be very careful, I promise, but you have to...”

“Pwease no owwies, pwease no wan' wawa, wawa huwt...”

Your heart breaks a little, but this must be done. With a bit more focus this time, you begin scrubbing the filth out of his fluff. He doesn't thrash, instead sitting in the basin and wheezing with pain. Close enough. The orange earth fluffy is again orange, and most of the tangles in his fluff are gone. With the water off, he seems a bit more calm, but you probably hit him a bit harder than you needed to.

“Haf owwies, pwease huggies?”

Gingerly, you hug his neck. While you would undertake a full fluff trim now, you're not sure the poor little pony could handle it, mentally speaking. Or, in fact, phsyically; he is really wheezing. How hard did you smack him?

“Owwies...”

“Sorry, little guy...” Instead, you'll just brush him and towel him off and hope the guy outside doesn't notice much of anything.

You're not even going to make it through one day of work at this rate. Oh well, you may as well go out with a bang. Now that the poor little pony is dried off, you go about brushing his fluff, a process made very easy by the fact that he seems to be in a great deal of pain. In fact, his wheezing has gotten so loud, you fear he may not make it through the rest of the grooming session. Therefore, you start hurrying, brushing him a lot harder than you would normally. He doesn't seem to mind; actually, come to think of it, maybe it's not that he doesn't mind, it's the fact that he can no longer process any more pain. Oh well, the why doesn't really matter. Now that he's brushed and dried, it's time to take him back out front to his owner. The moment you pick him up however, your hands around his torso, he screeches in agony.

“Pwease no gif owwies! Pum'kin sowwy bad!”

The noise is so obnoxiously loud, that Sarah comes back to the grooming shop to see what happened. When she sees the sobbing orange earth fluffy in your arms, she folds hers and attains a rather serious look on her face.

"Did you do something to him?"

You must look incredibly sheepish by this point, but you have no choice but to admit the truth. "Well, um, he was drowning… I had to save him somehow."

Sarah's look might have become a bit more understanding, but it didn't lose much of its annoyance. "I thought you said you knew what you were doing when it came to washing fluffy ponies."

"I'm sorry! I'm just so nervous, it's my first day and all…"

The squirming fluffy pony in your arms begins sobbing again; apparently, you're hugging him too tightly. “Pwease no huggies owwies! So sowwy bad!”

Sarah unfolds her arms just long enough to facepalm. "Just take him back out front before you do something else to him…"

Now you're not so much sheepish as completely and utterly embarrassed. Quickly, you skitter back to the front, the unhappy pony in your arms. The second his owner sees him, he knows something has gone wrong.

"What did you do to Pumpkin?" he asks, roughly taking him out of your arms and, unintentionally, causing him even more pain.

There's really no polite way to put any of this, so you just come out with it. "He… He was drowning, and I had to hurt him a little bit to save him. I'm really sorry…"

He looks at you with some strange mixture of amazement and disbelief. "You… Wait, you actually stopped a fluffy pony from drowning?"

"Well, yes. I used to work at a fluffy pony shelter out East. It rained a lot there, so I learned fast about how to save a drowning fluffy pony. I really didn't mean to hurt him, I was just so terrified…"

Pumpkin's owner seems to be very impressed with you all of a sudden. "Young lady, you have no idea how many fluffy ponies I've lost to drowning. In fact, to be completely honest with you, I was ready to come in here with Pumpkin, and leave with a different fluffy pony altogether. I'm going to make sure Sarah hears about this – as well as all my friends."

After he leaves – and with a newfound burst of confidence – you go about the rest of your day with a smile plastered on your face. Now that you aren't so nervous, you find that dealing with the foals is actually pretty easy. You should've realized it before; fluffy ponies were handbuilt to pick up on human body language. They saw that you were nervous and they became nervous themselves. Now that you're closer to your usual happy-go-lucky self, so are they. Of course, there is still one problem…

Tiffany. Every time she sees you, she flashes you that creepy smile of hers. And she breaks out into a full grin whenever you bring her young fluffy ponies to the storage room. By afternoon you finally realize what she's doing to them in there. Sarah is occupied, as is Whitney, when Tiffany calls you back to the storage room. She tells you you have a delivery to the front to make. That delivery consists of four crying, unhappy young fluffy foals, a green Pegasus, a white unicorn, and one red and orange earth fluffy. They are all missing their legs – the metal pan on the table full of blood indicates exactly where their legs went. Tiffany, as usual, is quite enjoying their suffering.

"Sarah wants you to wash the blood and shit off of these things before she puts 'em up for sale.”

It's been a long, long time since you've seen an amputated fluffy pony. A great deal of owners amputate them so they won't become a nuisance; the vast majority of those either stay in a bowl for the rest of their lives, or die quickly of depression. In the year or so since you opened the shelter, you've only had two amputees come in. Reluctantly, you pick up the metal pan full of foals and take it back to the grooming shop. In frantic, squeaky voices, they beg you for their legs back; all the while, their tiny bodies contort and flex, trying to hug you with limbs they no longer have. On the way there, you run into Sarah. You cannot bring yourself to say a word, but the look on her face says that your message got through regardless.

"What the customer wants, the customer gets," she says, although it seems slightly halfhearted. She glances down into the pan as she walks past, frowning ever so slightly. Once you get to the grooming shop, you begin the process of washing the legless foals, who squirm and writhe in your grip. You almost jump out of your skin when Tiffany appears, leaving a stun gun on the counter beside the sink.

"I forgot to reset 'em," she says, the smile on her face betraying the fact that she did not, in fact, forget. "Can you do it for me?" Of course, she leaves before you can reply in the negative. Once the unhappy foals are washed and dried, you pick up the stun gun. The foal nearest you is the white unicorn. It wiggles about slowly; you can see the muscles under the fluff on its back moving, trying to operate nonexistent legs. With a loud sigh, you press the stun gun to its forehead and press the button.

"You… Never had legs," you stammer out. When the foal comes back to lucidity, and asks the others what's wrong, they tell her. They tell her that she's lost her legs, that they've all lost their legs. The white unicorn replies thusly:

“Wha weggies? Neva haf weggies. Fwiends nee' huggies?”

This is the thing that always bothers you about fluffy ponies. With 10 seconds of electricity, you can rewrite their entire mind. You can make them believe, or do, or say anything you want them to. In this respect, for a fluffy pony, humans are like strange gods. They can rewrite and shape this living creature, this genuine, loving, emotional being, to their every whim. It makes you bitterly uncomfortable. As Sarah would say, however, you have a job to do – and like her, you will make sure it gets done. You reset the other three foals, put them back into the metal pan, and take them out front. Their future owners retrieve them. They go to the window to pay their fees, and you can't bear to watch their happiness.

"Trust me, man, once you've got the fluffy ponies without legs you'll never go back. They are just so much more easy to deal with."

That's about all you can take, and you skitter into the back. You look at your watch. It's 15 until four in the afternoon – your shift is almost over.

You spend the rest of it thinking about how you're going to live with yourself.