Cognac and Cigars

FractalFluff, May 11, 2014; 20:36 / FB 21509
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(Backstory to flesh out my HC a little more. Not really abuse, but not terribly fluffy-sympathetic, either.)

Cognac and Cigars

"Brown? Another brown one? Don't tell me this whole litter's brown too!"

"Christ on a bike. That's what, the fifth month of snake chow running? What are we going to do?"

You're Ozzie Argyle, one half of Argyle Fluffy Nurseries, and you are having a truly terrible day.

Your outfit is best known for producing top-tier fluffies. Your fluffies are famous for having especially good configurations. Your Designers have the luxurious "accessories" and cute little stumpy legs that fluffy-fanciers die for, with a lower rate of the life-ruining arthritis that fluffy-fanciers euthanize for. Your Shirefluffs (can't call them Big Macs without a lot of fussing from the IP lawyers) have sturdy little bodies and perfect fringes of fluff over their hooves). Most coveted of all are your Fluffabellas, graceful falabella-style fluffies for those who want something less like the bastard offspring of a pig-sheep-hamster-gonk orgy and closer to a miniature horse. You also have a higher-than-usual rate of alicorns in the mix.

The most notable feature of an Argyle fluffy, though, is its pink fluff. You've lucked into a couple of strains that reliably produce foals in the most coveted shades of pink. Delicate baby-rose Fluffabellas, head-turning process magenta Designers, opera-mauve 'Macs; Pinkiefluffs and Fluffilees; monocolors and multis; pink'n'whites and white'n'pinks; black-maned, pink-fluffed Allsorts and pink-maned, black-fluffed Neons. Your fluffs have excellent markings: dappled, freckled, even striped. People love 'em.

Of course, nobody's lucky enough to get pink foals every time. Heck, you don't even get them most of the time. The overall majority of foals that your outfit produces are brown. They'll still have good configurations, but their fluff will be the least popular shade after plain grey. Sometimes there'll be one or two that come up a light enough shade that you can call them "cream" without the certifying bodies kicking up too rough, or dark enough to be termed "Liquorice Black"; these go for a reasonable sum. It's rare for the stripes or dappling to come through on a brown, but it does happen, and they sell quite well to breeders; or once in a while they'll have ritzy enough acessories to attract a fancier. Alis always sell for a decent price, although a brown one will still fetch far less than a pink.

Mostly, though, your browns come out... well, brown: standard earthies, unis and pegs, beige through raw umber. It's a fact of life. You don't even try to sell them to the fanciers or the high-toned breeders — that would sully your reputation. You want people to associate Argyle Fluffies with premium colours. You keep back a few of them if they look like promising breeding stock, but most of your brown fluffies are quietly flogged off as "snake chow."

What? Heck, no, not literally. Well, you hear things about some owners, but... anyway. "Snake chow" is just a little breeder's in-joke for less-than-premium fluffies. They're fixed (permanently; brown Argyles can still have pink babies, and there's no sense creating competition), and sold to intemediaries who discreetly pass them on to the middle-class section of the pet market or some other lower-tier operation. They're not allowed to use the Argyle name officially — only your pinks get the Argyle Fluffy tag — but you let them give out the fluffies' lineages. Even with the mark-up that this reflected glory allows, your brown fluffies only make you something like one to ten per cent of what you'd get for an Argyle Pink. With decent-sized litters (seldom fewer than five or six healthy foals) and at least one or two pinks per litter, it's never been a problem.

Until now.

Bruce is sagging against one of the pens, mopping his greenish face with his pocket-square. You can't tell if he's wiping off sweat or tears. "Snake chow," he moans. "Nothing but snake chow."

"The best goddamned yield we've ever had," you mutter, stalking from pen to pen. "Half-a-dozen or more in every single litter... all of them perfect..."

"Perfect disasters!" snarls Bruce.

You pause by Amaranth, one of your favourite pegasus mares. She normally has smaller litters than the others — just three or four — but she's seldom given you fewer than three pinks in any batch. This time out, she's nursing two beige, one tan and two milk-chocolate foals. You scratch her ears, then scoop up one of her "wingie babbehs." She knows better than to resist. All your fluffies learn early on that mares can give you their babies the easy way or the hard way. The easy way means toys, treats, petting and playmates, and keeping their foals a little longer. The hard way involves... other things. The ones that choose the hard way more than once end up finding alternative employment.

"Did we get any creams out of this lot?" pleads Bruce. "Any Allsorts, even?"

You shake your head. Bruce hangs his.

Argyle Fluffy Nurseries (if anyone calls you a mill, they get serious letters from serious men with serious hourly rates) boasts a total of forty brood mares. You breed them in four-monthly cycles, one-quarter on, three-qaurters off. In any given month, one lot will be knocked up, another quarter will be feeding chirpies, and a third weaning and training. The remaining quarter will be getting over their empty-nest syndrome by attending to the pregnant dams or babysitting new foals so that the recent mothers can get some shut-eye. On the next cycle, the mares that just had a fallow month are knocked up and everything starts over. This usually gives you a solid ten or twelve pinks every month — sometimes as many as twenty.

Then in February, you only got a single pink — a Pinkiefluff. That wasn't great.

The following March, you got one pink-and-lavender colt and a skin-of-its-teeth cream monocolour mare. That was no good at all.

In April, you got two pink fillies; one was a runt, and died after three miserable days. That was bad, and was what prompted you to change your breeding cycle just this once. Instead of getting a month off, your bewildered mares found themselves being knocked up again as soon as their two-month-olds were removed and sold off; that meant eating a couple of miscarriages from the stress, but still got you an extra eight litters in May.

But the only pink in the May batch was a watery brownish-orange filly, who you charitably represented as "bisque pink". That was worse.

You ramped things up by breeding the fallow quarter again; and, after a brief tussle with your conscience, the mares who still had four-week-old foals with them. Since you couldn't have lactation kicking down their fertility, that meant taking the foals away a month early and switching them to formula and mash. The mothers had responded predictably. Even though you arranged regular visits to their foals and got your tech guy to set up a video feed so they could watching the babies over the monitors that usually showed FluffTV, they moped. You discovered that ten mopey fluffies can really spread the misery around. Most of them just wept or sulked, but four — Candyfloss, Cameo, Pink-Lace and Piggy, a quartet your staff had nicknamed the Mean Girls — got spiteful. Only a sorry-sticking apiece stopped them bullying the mares who still had their foals with them.

Now you contemplate the results: eighty-three brown foals, twenty confused and anxious mares, nineteen confused, anxious, miserable and exhausted mares, and one dead dam. Poor China; she'd been an older mare and you'd had your suspicions about her heart for some time, but you thought she'd be okay for one more litter. You'd been wrong. Three weeks in, she'd miscarried and the shock had made her ticker give out. Or vice-versa. Either way, the foals had died with her; one, ironically, had been a perfect china-pink monocolour.

This is bad. This is really bad. The snake-chow market is already overloaded, saturated with the additional brown foals from last month's litters. You probably won't even get buyers for most of these. Sure, two of the dams have yet to pop; but even if they squatted out a dozen Pinkiefluffs, it wouldn't be enough. Your business is seriously in the hole at this point.

"Gif babbeh, nice Mistah Oh-see? Pwease gif?"

Amaranth's anxious plea snaps you out of your reverie with a pang of irritation. You're half-tempted to fling the baby into its mother's face; you even imagine the satisfying CRACK of cranium meeting muzzle. But you look into Amaranth's fearful eyes and the fit passes. It's not her fault, and going on a rampage won't fix anything. "Sorry, Amy," you say, as you gently lower the peg back into it's mother's waiting arms — well, forelegs.

"Am gud babbeh," she assures you. "Bewy pwetty gud babbeh."

"Sure," you say, absentmindedly. "She's a very pretty baby."

You turn to your brother. "Fuck it," you remark. "I need a drink."

He nods faintly and follows you off the breeding floor.

Half an hour later you're scowling into your second drink. Bruce is sweating into his third. He futzes with his martin; you tilt your brandy and watch it ripple down the sides of the glass.

"Well hiiii, fellas! How's the two horsemen of the pinkopalypse? Why the long faces?"

You swivel your gaze over to the newcomer. Fucking Randall. This is all you need.

"Geddit? Horsemen? Faces? Gee, tough crowd!"

"Randall," you say, stiffly.

"I keep telling you: call me Randy!"

Fucking Randall is a former colleague from the days before you went into fluffies. You were in the Records department; he was in Sales and Advertising. You became your own boss and he went to work for a dedicated ad agency. Unfortunately, you signed the same agency up to handle your promotions before you realized that he worked there. He didn't manage to wrangle the contract for Argyle Fluffy Nurseries; it went to a hated rival. Now he keeps "accidentally" running into you.

He wants you to call him "Randy". He wants you to call it "brand enhancement." And most of all, he wants to take over the advertising contract for your operation.

As far as you're concerned he's in fucking advertising, he's not getting that fucking contract, and he is and ever shall be known as Fucking Randall.

Fucking Randall orders something unconscionably pretentious, sulks when they don't have it, orders something equally pretentious, sulks again, and then decides to bring a little more ruin to your day by announcing that he'll have whatever you're drinking.

"Soooo!" he drawls, having finished snarking at the indifferent bartender. "What's new with you guys?"

"Not much," you start to say, but the alcohol has loosened Bruce's tongue.

"What's new? Oh, nothing much! Just eighty-odd brown foals! They're new, I guess." He gives a mirthless guffaw.

"Is thaaaat... good?" asks Randall, looking from one to the other. "Bad? Ooh, I'm going to go with bad. How many foals should you have?"

"Normally? Forty a month. Maybe fifty."

"But I'd have thought, you know... the more the merrier?"

"It's not how many," slurs Bruce. "It's what sort."

"Oh, are they those runty things? Smell weird, don't have legs, or whatever."

"Oh no," you find yourself saying. "That's almost the most annoying part." You sip your drink. "I don't think I've seen a better-configured batch the whole time I've been in this business."

"That's true," says Bruce, mournfully. "They're some of the most perfect little fluffies I've ever seen." He takes a gulp of his martini. "Of course, it's too early to tell with this lot, but last month's batch is shaping up so beautifully. Thirty or more of the daintiest little 'bellas. A dozen good solid 'Macs. And the Dezzies... I don't think I've seen better. No sign of joint problems. All trotting around as sweet as you please. And great accessories. Just great. And this month's lot looks set to rival even them." He sighs, and gulps the last of his drink. "And all ruined. Snake chow to a foal. Snake chow."

"Snake chow," you concur.

"Snake chow?" yelps Randall.

"Just an expression."

"But if they're so perfect, how come you can't sell them? What's wrong with them?"

"Wrong? Nothing, really. Just the wrong colour."

"The wrong colour? Oooh! That sounds a little bit... racist!" Randall titters. You let him yuck it up for a while. It's only the fifty-seven-millionth time someone's made that joke.

"Call it what you want, but that's the market. People want pink fluffies. We've got brown." You twirl your brandy some more, inhaling the vapours and admiring the red-gold lights at its heart. Bruce orders another martini.

"Brown..?" coos Randall in that insufferably arch tone of his. "I think you mean... Cognac!"

"What?"

Randall is waving his arm through the air, fingers parted, as if outlining a sign."Cognac fluffies! Chocolate fluffies! Amber fluffies!"

You have no idea what the fuck he's on about, but Bruce is starting to straighten up from his slump.

"Tobacco... fluffies..." he slurs.

"Tobacco! Good one! And how about... Russet fluffies?"

"I have no idea what you two are on about."

"Wood... fluffies... brown... wood... umm... ebony! Antique... teak... mahogany! An' an' an'... wha' bout the blight rown — light... brown... ones? Gold... ummm..."

"Champagne!"

"Champagne!"

"'Champagne'?"

"Champagne fluffies!"

"Yeah, still lost. You sound like my wife with a paint chart. Brown's brown."

"Nuh-uh. Brown, Ozzie, is not just brown. Right now, brown is boring, brown is dull, so brown is cheap. We need to make brown the new pink. We need to make brown fluffies hot. Glamourous! Desirable! We need to make brown fluffies sexy!"

"There is no way in hell you will ever make fluffies 'sexy'," you inform him, but the flood will not be stopped. Randall is having too much fun rattling off all the synonyms for brown that he knows, and he has somehow swept Bruce along with him. You sort of get it. When a drowning man is clutching at straws, it's not hard to convince him that he's clutching at an unstructured organic flotation-enhancement aid. You let the advertising blibber wash over you.

"That's all very well," you say, "but where's the money for this amazing campaign going to come from? We're in the hole as it is."

And that's when Fucking Randall says the magic words...

***

Maybe selling really is a matter of finding the right words, you reflect the next morning. For you, those words were "on spec". You walk from pen to pen, looking at brown, beige, more brown, a slightly different brown, a darker beige; and trying to see café noir, Irish cream, muscavado, caramel, champagne...

The fluffies look up into your expression and cringe, many of them murmiring something along the lines of "Nice mistah, pwease nu hewt gud babbehs?"

Well, it can't hurt to let the little twerp have a shot. It's not precisely "on spec" in the strictest sense; but he's managed to wrangle things such that his proposed campaign is theoretically coming out of money you've already paid the agency — oh, and somehow it involves him rather than the Hated Rival. Blah blah blah. You can't really make yourself care about ad agency politics; the important thing is that your business might be getting a stay of execution.

Randall works fast, you'll say that for him. Within a few days, he's thrown together and launched stage one of the new campaign. The advertising blitz is swift, fierce and tightly focused, targeted at buyers for the high-end pet stores and their more-money-than-sense customers. Not the people that normally take your snake chow; he's shooting for the next teir up.

You get that. If you'd been buying brown fluffies for snake chow prices, you'd be unlikely to suddenly start buying them as "cognac fluffies" for ten times as much.

"Why not advertise to the general public?" you ask Randall

"We'll get to them next. I'm trying to keep things a little lower-key until our cash flow a little more... flow-y. Once the pet store folks start to nibble, we'll broaden our focus."

It's a dicey few weeks. You do shift a couple of the yellowish-brown fluffies, now rechristened as "Baltic Amber", and one tan-and-brown roan (or "Blonde Tobacco", as Randall spins it). One of the two dams who was unpopped when you made your trip to the bar squeezed two dark brown unicorn colts with creamy-white dapples on their hindquarters. You'd love to keep both for stud, but under the circumstances you have to part with one. He fetches you almost as much as some of your pinks.

To keep things moving, you also sell off the Mean Girls. You'll replace them with some of the brown mares when they mature; placed with the right stud, your browns are as apt to have pink foals as any of the pinks.

The Mean Girls are a little on the old side, but they're in good shape and all have great colours. You take a certain satisfaction when three of the buyers want their fluffies fixed. Candyfloss, Cameo and Piggy freak out ninety ways for Sunday when you tell them what their bad behaviour has earned them. Luckily you know enough about fluffies to give them the bad news in front of the entire breeding floor, even having the event relayed to the screens via webcam.

"You see, fluffies?" your giant, magnified face booms down as the mares cover their eyes or clutch their foals. "You see what happens if you're a bad, meanie mare who hurts her friends?" The camera zooms in on tear-stained cheeks, snot-sodden muzzles and bawling mouths, huuhuus amplified and blaring out of multiple speakers.

"Nuuuu! Piggy wan stah wif fwends! Wan haf baaaaabbeeeeehs!"

"Yu meeeeeeeeeaniiiie! Wy bwake Cammie babbeh-pwace? Cammie nefuh haf babbehs 'gaaaaaain! Huuhuuhuu!"

"Waaaah! Wy bwake Fwossy tummeeeeeh? Fwossy gud mummah! Fwossy bestes mummah! Wan hab moaw babbeeeeeehs!"

Only Pink-Lace escapes the knife. She smirks smugly as she's loaded into her carrier and sent off to a breeder, stating: "Wacey gud mummah, Wacey gonna haf wotsa babbehs!" You know she's not getting off lightly, though. You suspect that Pink-Lace won't be getting a lot of downtime anymore; the new owner certainly isn't basement breeder, but he's definitely more interested in the money than in his fluffies' well-being. So are you, but you know that you have to give a little to get a little when you're breeding a creature that's been known to literally explode from stress. You may have just sold him a very expensive object lesson.

It's close, but if Fucking Randall's idea works, you might just make it.

***

Six months on, and you're watching some awards ceremony. Music? Movies? You don't even care; all you know is that some of the celebutants in attendence are toting brown Argyle fluffies. Justine Diaz has a tobacco pegasus fluttering on her shoulder. Jillian Beiber, still flushed with success after beating that parricide rap, is walking the cognac 'Mac that the jury awarded her on a studded leather leash. The Hilton twins, Dementia and Chlamydia — their mother was a stranger to the dictionary — are sporting a matched pair of champagne Designers, their manes coiffed into pompadours.

You've made it. You kind of hate yourself, but you've really made it. It's not just you, either; other previously unloved shades of fluff are being rebranded. Grey is now Silver, Steel, Platinum; green is now Malachite, Creme-de-Menthe, Ocean Dream. Fluffies that had previously had a date with the incinerator are suddenly shifting for fifty times their former price.

It won't last; nothing in fashion ever does. For now, though, you're on the gravy train; and when it finally runs out of steam, you'll have a decent wedge stashed away and some lovely little breeders to fall back on.

But you're still not calling fucking Randall "Randy". A man's got to have some pride.

[end]