Hoofbeats slept in Monday morning because fuck school. Fuck people. Fuck getting up and showering.

She had barricaded her door to prevent anypony from getting in. She could not, however, barricade the ceiling. Suddenly and unexpectedly, a blue-gray pegasus crashed through the thatched straw roof so that half her body protruded into the bedroom. Startled, Hoofbeats jumped out of bed. The pegasus pulled out a clipboard, looked at it with one eye and let her other eye wander around the room. She squinted really hard so that she could read the order.

“I have a delivery for Miss Hoofbeats,” she said.

“Um, yeah, I’m Hoofbeats,” said Hoofbeats.

“Ok, sign here please.” She handed the earth pony the clipboard. “I’ll just bring these crates down to the front.”

“No need,” was the reply, “You can just drop them in here I guess.”

So the mailmare clumsily carried several heavy wooden crates in through the premade hole in the ceiling.

“Sorry it’s a little late,” said the pony, “I know they said your rubber would be delivered by dragon, but I sort of lied on my resume about that.” She frowned. “I’m a bad dragon.”

As she flew off, she threw in one extra comment. “By the way, great cutie mark! I love bananas!”

After she left, she flopped back onto her bed and stared blankly. Even a visit from a canon character was not enough to cheer her up although the tag might rake in those sweet views. She sighed. Being the crafty pony in the family, she would probably have to fix the ceiling and that fourth wall she just broke, and on top of all that she would have to open up all those boxes and process her rubber and make her merchandise. But she already made the effort to talk to someone today, wasn’t that enough?

A cheery stallion flew above her roof. “LOL, Dickbutt!” he said.

She held up a hoof at him in an attempt at some unknown gesture buried deep within her subconscious. He shrugged and flew off.

She couldn’t understand what it was exactly that upset her so much about yesterday. It went exactly as she expected, and she had stood her ground. She should feel satisfied but instead she felt all gloomy and nauseous. Perhaps it was the confirmation that she was really alone in this town. (Plus her family but they don’t count.) Maybe it was the stress of knowing that now she was a social outcast and she’d still have to try to run a public business.

She did some quick math in her head. She had to make 500 dildos in ten months. That’s fifty a month, about two a day, plus school. She shook her head. “It just can’t be done,” she thought, “Not if I have to get out of bed.”

Five hours later, the need to go to the bathroom overrode the desire to stay in bed all day. She rolled out of bed and essentially melted down the stairs. She went into the bathroom and shut the door behind her. There was a knock at the door and she heard her mom’s voice.

“Honey, are you ok?”

“I’m fine,” she replied shortly.

“So you’re going back to school tomorrow, right?”

Hoofbeats groaned. Her mom continued, “You don’t really care what those ponies think, do you?”

“I wouldn’t if they weren’t the only other ponies around here.” She washed her hooves and stepped out. “Not only that,” she continued, “but I can’t match expected production in under a year.”

“You just work after school and weekends and you will have extra work time during the summer. You can’t just give up without even trying.”

“Can’t I just drop out of school?”

“No, you can’t put all your hope into a business that hasn’t sold anything yet. I support you but you need a backup plan.”

Her heart sank. Ponies had a relatively high dropout rate, since there really is no need for generalized education after receiving your cutie mark. Words like that were usually reserved for garage band musicians and hoofball players. Ponies with dumb, childish dreams that Hoofbeats always looked down on. She began to realize that “dildo maverick” was probably also not a viable career option. She shook those thoughts out of her head and stomped upstairs.

She thought it might actually be therapeutic to get some work done, to feel the soft rubber, to let her hooves sculpt and immerse herself in her work. Then she remembered that the rubber had to be processed first, so she just stared angrily at the crates for a few minutes.

Eventually, she sighed and decided to turn on autopilot and just get the damn job done. She mixed and measured a few liters of the raw latex rubber and laid it out to dry on the roof. She sat there for a minute in the sun and considered maybe not fixing the roof and just having her own personal skylight. But she probably couldn’t bribe the entire weather team with sex because of the disproportionate female to male ratio in Equestria.

She got hungry and tried to eat part of the roof, but it tasted like roof. So she went down to the kitchen and ate an entire head of cabbage.

“Roof’s broke,” she said to her mom.

“Can you fix it?” was the reply.

“Yeah, but I don’t wanna.”

The rest of the day just kind of droned on like that. Hoofbeats processed a little bit more rubber, but other than that, it was just a depressing episode. Little did she know how helpful yesterday had actually been to her cause.

Author's Note

Alternate names considered for this chapter were "I Ship It" and "Oh, Doctor, Please Derp, Derp, Derper".

D-d-d-d-d-d-derper