Author's Note

Synopsis: En route to his client’s house, Flash reminisces about how he first met the other two members of the Dr. Collarblind family: his stallion accountant, eccentric finance expert Number Cruncher, and his mare assistant, ditzy black collar Millicent.

Crunch & Millicent

“When your mare don’t act,
Quite like she should,
Who you gonna call?
FLASH FOR-TUNE!

When she won’t behave,
When she won’t be good,
Who you gonna call?
FLASH FOR-TUNE!”

—A Certain Ponyville Public Radio Ad

Cloudsdale was like something out of a dream. Not just any garden-variety dream, either, but the kind of dream you had when your mare was sucking you off under the covers while you slept. But Flash wasn’t here to sightsee. He was here to work. He reached into the waist pocket of his suit jacket and produced a slim leather-bound notebook, his daily planner, to double-check the address of this morning’s house call. It took him a few moments to flip to the page for today and drag his eyes down the paper until his gaze settled on the appointment description pencilled in under the “9:00” timeslot:

CLIENT: Thunderlane
FEMALE: Flitter
SPECIES: Pony (Pegasus)

COLLAR: Red

ADDRESS: 1220 Cirrus Circle, Cloudsdale, EQ

The cramped, neat handwriting didn’t belong to him. All Flash did was use the book; the laborious task of filling it with every new day’s house calls, consultations, and conferences as they were scheduled fell—as did so many other tasks vital to the success of the Dr. Collarblind brand—on the stocky but sturdy shoulders of Crunch.

“Crunch” was Flash’s affectionate nickname for Number Cruncher, his indispensable jack-of-all-trades accountant/secretary/receptionist/guardian angel.

Back when Flash was first starting to come into his own has a freelance mare trainer, no more than a month after the Violet incident, it had become apparent that he wasn’t going to be able to shoulder the multitude of responsibilities that accompanied being a small business owner all on his own. Even with only a modest client pool centered in his home city, answering his mail, drafting his budget, scheduling his appointments and all the million other mind-numbing minutiae that fell under the umbrella of “office work” sliced valuable hours out of Flash’s day—hours that could have been spent doing what was important: curing mares! It was obvious that Flash didn’t have the training or skill to handle this kind of work efficiently, and that the problem was only going to grow exponentially as his client pool grew wider and his workload grew heavier. If his budding enterprise was going to survive the cradle, he’d need help. He’d need an assistant.

The first thought that had crossed his mind was: Get a red collar, and she’ll do everything for free. The next thought was: Absolutely fucking not. Plenty of busy stallions, in the business world and elsewhere, trusted their devoted red collars to handle work they deemed too arduous or boring to do themselves, with varying degrees of autonomy. It was a popular alternative to paying a stallion for labor—especially since, no matter what job she was doing, every red collar moonlighted as a free whorse on her off-time. It was a valid idea . . . that is, if you wanted a secretary who answered your mail in crayon, and doodled obscene drawings on your business documents, and had ribald phone sex with everypony who called your phone line. The idea of trusting a mare, a capricious, frivolous, idiotic mare, to get your office work done for you was laughable. It sounded like the premise of one of the salacious porn franchises the once-classy filmmakers of Canterlot had been churning out nonstop since the Fall. The titles practically wrote themselves:

The Sexretary 1: Learning Curves

The Sexretary 2: Getting Fiscal

The Sexretary 3: Appreciating Assets

…

He could do this all day, but the point was that the job had to be done a stallion, even if that meant shelling out a few extra bits for a living wage. So Flash had dug into his purse a little and put a job advertisement calling or a “General Purpose Assistant” in the “Help Wanted” section of the Canterlot Chronicle, a local newspaper with decent circulation and, more importantly, cheap ad space. It wasn’t a particularly attractive offer. At the time he’d only had room in his budget to pay a mediocre fee to new employees, and it wasn’t like there was anything especially prestigious about working for a no-name mare-training firm. He had figured that the best he could hope for was taking on some newly-minted college grad with minimal experience, who’d be willing to work for peanuts for a few months until Flash’s budget had freed up and he could afford to hire a professional.

That didn’t happen. Instead, fortune once again favored its favorite son, and dropped the answer to all of his problems right into his lap.

Number Cruncher hadn’t seemed like much the day he walked into Flash’s tiny office to do his interview, but his mother always told him that great things come in small packages, and even a stopped clock had to be right twice a day. He was a little younger than Flash himself, short and slim, with perpetually-wringing hands, a droopy, slouching posture, and beady, nervous eyes that seemed to flit across every object in the room during their meeting except Flash. His voice didn’t do much more to inspire confidence: he had a chronic stutter, and couldn’t make it through a sentence without stumbling over at least a couple of hard consonants. Flash thought he had him figured out completely the moment he started talking: burned-out college dropout, no future prospects, willing to do anything to pay rent . . . maybe some kind of substance abuse problem, judging by his incessant trembling.

That was until he’d produced a heavy manila folder, and set it on Flash’s desk with a muted thud.

“What is this?”

“M-my r-resume, sir. Don’t you w-want to see it?”

Flash shrugged and flipped open the folder to humor him, expecting to see irrelevant things like: “Volunteered as an amateur marine veterinarian at Save the Whales” or “Played the lead role in the Baltimare Community College production of The Marechent of Venice.” Not even close. As it turned out, he and Number Cruncher had the same alma mater: Canterlot University. And he hadn’t dropped out school, either: he’d graduated magna cum laude with a Master’s degree in finance. As if that wasn’t enough, he also came highly recommended. A cursory look through a few of the papers in the folder showed him that Number Cruncher had spent the last two or three years working accounting and financial consultation in some the leading firms in the city. To put it simply, the applicant sitting in front of him trying to avoid his eyes was a real professional, with real business qualifications.

Now Flash hadn’t been sure why someone with such spectacular credentials had any interest at all in working long hours for low wages in an up-and-coming mare training company that might go belly-up and leave him out in the cold any day, but if the Fall of Equestria had taught him one thing it was this: never look a gift whorse in the mouth. Whatever Number Cruncher’s reasons for taking the job, he was exactly what Flash needed. He hired the stallion on the spot.

To start off with, Flash had assigned Crunch, as he took to calling his new assistant, to the basic day-to-day tasks that needed doing: scheduling appointments, answering mail, filling out Flash’s planner in the mornings. When he proved he could handle all of that, Flash experimented with giving him a bigger job that could take advantage of his background in finance: tightening up the company budget. That was where he’d really proved that he was as good in practice as he was on paper.

Every business that made and spent needed a budget, and Flash’s company wasn’t any different. A mare-training business entailed a number of expenses—mainly mare food, toys, clothes, and other accessories, but also more conventional things like office supplies and travel fare. Flash had never been much good with money management, even in school, and he knew that there were probably a couple places in his financial plan that a more numbers-savvy pony could squeeze out a few extra bits. He figured Crunch would take a day to go over it and come back with three or four minor tips to save him 20 bits. Instead, he’d taken three days to read it (he spent so long out of the office that Flash started to worry he’d come to his senses and quit the job) and when he came back it was a with a new, completely revised plan in hand.

He explained to Flash excitedly, mouth struggling to keep pace with his mind, how by switching mare food providers here and here and buying dildos here but not here and taking such-and-such bus route to work so he could save money on his daily taxi fare and doing a thousand other tiny things, they could cut down on weekly expenditures by . . . a full quarter. Not a quarter as in 0.25 bits, but a quarter as in twenty-five percent. Of course, some things had to be a little too good to be true. Crunch’s explanation had sounded reasonable, sure, but there was no way in Tartarus that he could have mangled the budget badly enough the first time around to waste a quarter of his earnings and not even realize it. Nevertheless, he gave his assistant leave to put his new financial scheme into action—what was the point of hiring a money expert if you weren’t going to take his advice? He expected maybe a tenth or a fifth of what had been promised. Two weeks later, he got every red cent.

“Good accountant” didn’t do Crunch justice. He was a money magician. A wealth wizard. A profit . . . prestidigitator. He had a gift for numbers, and no wonder: they were apparently his special talent. Flash had wondered the first day he’d met Crunch what the large, up-facing black arrow on each of his flanks meant, but it was only a few weeks later that he thought to ask him.

“In the w-world of finance,” Crunch had explained, “A b-black arrow p-pointing up means “p-profit,” and a r-red arrow p-pointing down means “loss.” My c-cutie mark is a b-black arrow because my special talent is turning a p-profit.”

“Well. you’ve done a pretty damn excellent job so far, Crunch. Let’s hope it stays that way.”

Crunch had gotten this weird smile on his face just then, as if an invisible pony had whispered a joke into his ear. “D-don’t worry, s-sir. I’ll m-make sure all you see ‘til the day you r-retire are b-black arrows.”

Okay, so it had to be said: Crunch was a fantastic employee, but as a stallion he could be a little strange sometimes. Moreso than the average nerdy, introverted math enthusiast. The first few weeks he had worked for Flash, the stallion had made attempts to strike up conversations with him in his free time and get to know him better, but Crunch didn’t seem able to hold up a conversation for more than a few minutes if it didn’t involve work. Every time Flash approached him he was gently rebuffed with some off-hand comment about how Crunch had to “get back to m-my desk,” even if every item on the agenda for the entire week had been taken care of. Eventually Flash stopped trying to make friends and settled for just watching his assistant from afar from time to time to try and get a reading on him.

There wasn’t much to see, but there was something. Every free moment that he didn’t have his nose buried in a file or a book or a stack of papers (and there were precious few of those), Crunch only ever seemed to do one of two things. The first was sit back in his chair, pick up a rubber band and a crumpled ball of paper, close an eye, cock his head, and shoot the paper at some point on the wall. It was a pretty normal, harmless way to pass time on a slow work day every once in awhile. That said, Crunch did it almost every day, at the same time, like a ritual. And what’s more, there was something about how he did it that made it seem like more than the idle pastime of a corporate drone. He did it with such a grave expression on his face and such calculated attention to his form and posture that you would have thought he was a world-class athlete doing practice shots for whatever they called that hit-an-apple-off-a-mare’s-head archery competition in the Equestria Games. Flash had no idea how often he hit and how often he missed, because he never aimed at anything other than some undefined point on the wall.

The second thing: he had this small black journal, a bit like Flash’s planner, and he took it out sometimes and wrote in it feverishly for fifteen or twenty minutes before setting it aside. One time, when Flash was still making a concerted effort to break through his shell, he’d stepped up behind him while he was writing in it and casually looked over his shoulder and asked him what he was writing. He’d barely caught a glimpse before Crunch snapped the book shut, and looked up at him with an expression on his face that would have made one think that Flash had caught him in the middle of stuffing his dead marefriend’s corpse in a freezer.

“Whoa, sorry, I was just . . .” Flash trailed off.

“. . . It’s my d-diary,” said Crunch lamely, after a few moments of pregnant silence. “It’s private.”

“. . . Right, right, of course. Sorry, I, uh, didn’t mean to pry.”

“It’s f-fine . . .”

That was the end of that conversation. The subject never came up again.

As Flash approached the house, his reverie about Crunch subsided and he turned his attention idly to the mare at his side.

"Did I ever tell you the story of Icarus, Millicent?”

“N-no m-master . . . I d-don’t think so.” Most mares stuttered when they were crying or when they were scared (or both), but Flash’s tiny assistant Millicent stuttered all the time. The first month he’d had her, he’d tried to train it out of her by hitting her whenever she did it, but that just seemed to make her stutter more and more until her sentences were garbled, unintelligible nonsense. Eventually he’d given up and learned to cope with it. There were more irritating speech impediments she could have had.

The tall stallion and the short mare were standing side by side on the porch of one of the tall Grecian cloud houses that populated the residential district of Cloudsdale. Flash knelt down to her level, and cupped her chin in his hands the way he always did when he started telling her an important story.

“Icarus wanted more than anything to be able to fly. But he was born a unicorn instead of a pegasus, so he didn’t have any wings. So you know what he did? He used his magic to conjure a huge pair of wings. And he flew up, up and away until he could see the entire countryside stretched out before him, and he did twirls and loop-de-loops and cartwheels in the air and had a grand old time.” Flash licked his lips.

“But he wanted to fly farther. So he kept flying farther and farther, away from his house, and his city, and his country, until he was out over the open ocean with no land in sight. And he wanted to fly higher, too. So he kept flying up and up, until even the clouds were just a fuzzy white sheet below him. And do you know what happened to him?”

“. . . D-did he f-fly into s-space?”

“The sun scorched through his wings and he fell into the ocean and drowned,” said Flash flatly. Millicent gasped, and he suppressed a smirk. He liked telling her stories, especially cautionary tales, because she seemed to be too dumb to distinguish between fiction and reality and she always got horribly concerned when one of the characters got hurt and asked desperately if they would be alright and there would be a happy ending. There never was.

“Oh n-no!” she cried like a foal, with genuine worry in her voice. “P-please d-don’t let that b-be the e-end of the—”

“Sorry Millicent, but that is indeed the conclusion of the story. We can learn an important lesson from it, though. Do you know what it is?”

Millicent didn’t answer. Her lip was quivering, and she looked like she was about to start shedding real tears for brave Icarus’ valiant sacrifice. Flash had to exert effort to keep the sigh in his lungs.

“The moral of the story is: don’t take what you have for granted. Icarus had a pretty sweet deal going for a while there. He was a self-made alicorn. But he got cocky, and he got careless, and before he knew it he slipped up and then he died. And he didn’t even die in a cool way. He died by drowning. Like a little bitch.”

Millicent cringed at the word “bitch.” She had a problem with cursing, too. She hated listening to it, and she never did it. Whenever she stubbed her toe or scraped her knee or something, she always said these cute little anti-curses straight out a foal’s cartoon: “Oh s-shoot!” or “Aw n-nuts!” or “D-darn it!” He’d asked her why she didn’t like cursing once, and she had replied innocently that her mommy had taught her only naughty fillies say bad words like that. From then on whenever he was bored he’d entertained himself by making her repeat the vilest, most obscene things he could come up with off the top of his head and watching her silently reprimand herself for being a “naughty filly.” As if cursing was the worst, most illicit thing he forced her to do.

The cursing thing wasn’t unique, either. She felt that way about all “grown-up” stuff (and that’s right, she still called it “grown-up” stuff despite being a young adult mare herself): sex, drugs, rock music and ever other conventionally fun thing was “icky” or “gross” or “yucky” to her. Flash had asked her once what she’d do with her free time if she could do anything she wanted, and she’d replied that she would draw pictures and eat ice cream. Then she’d asked if she could do that and he’d told her to get back to doing his taxes.

Her childlike naivete towards the world was part of some integral aspect of her character that Flash had dubbed her “mental virginity,” and try as he might he couldn’t seem to take it from her. With all his therapy money burning a hole in his pocket, he’d picked up a habit of shelter-shopping for fuck material from time to time, and Millicent had been one such purchase. When he’d first caught her eye, and she’d excitedly asked him he was going to be her new daddy and love her for ever and ever, he’d paid her fee on the spot. Shelter mares were usually the most abused, hardened specimens around—it was rare to see a smiling black collar in a shelter, much less a bouncing, bubbly, chatty one eager to make friends with ever stallion she saw.

On the way back home he’d gone over the two-part plan he used on every shelter mare:
Step 1) Fuck her brains out for as long as it took to get rid of her cheery attitude (probably a week or so)

Step 2) Give her back to the shelter and get a full refund

The only problem was, two weeks later, he couldn’t get past Step 1. He fucked her in her pussy and her ass and tied her up and whipped her and made her bathe in the basin of warbeast cum he had left over from the Nightmare Night party and all that good stuff, and she was revolted by every second of it. But after every depraved, sick thing he made her do, she just sort of . . . bounced back and behaved as childlike and pure and innocent as ever. One time he used magic to fuck her in all three holes with his cock and two dildos, and an hour later she had asked him not to “use the f-word” because it was a “mean word for meanies.” She was like a stress ball: no matter how hard and with how much force he squeezed her, she always popped right back to her original position, good as new. The mare herself was as fragile as a dandelion, but that “mental hymen” was apparently made of bulletproof steel. Go figure.

He’d come up with some theories. Maybe she had short-term amnesia and kept forgetting the sex acts after they’d happened and going back to her old, innocent self. Maybe she had split personalities, one a hardened veteran of the new world and one a naive foal, and she switched between them whenever she sensed impending abuse. Maybe she was brain-damaged and had the mental age of an eight-year-old filly. The last one was particularly compelling given her intellectual capacity.

It didn’t really matter why she was the way she was, though. As soon as he’d met her, Flash knew he had to make her his first red collar. Up until then he’d been something of a new-age bachelor, seeing dozens of mares a month in his line of work but getting sex at home only from rented or borrowed red collars or the occasional temporary shelter adoption. He’d never admit it, but mares were dreadfully boring after they had been broken in, and he always broke them in far too quickly. The perils of being a little too exceptional at your job, he supposed. The average red collar wasn’t good for much more than a few nights’ fun either: their servile attitudes and absurd tolerances for depravity were great and all, but they got old fast.

As such, an infinite abuse sponge he could inflict any torment upon without breaking wasn’t just a peculiar find: it was a godsend.

Millicent, for her part, had been thrilled at the chance to stay with him forever and be his assistant. After she was done jumping for joy, she’d asked him what the word “assistant” meant, and he’d explained patiently that it meant a pony who helps another pony do their job. She’d asked if that meant she could finally accompany him when he went out for work, because she got lonely when she was left at home by herself, and he’d replied that she could. More excited squealing ensued. Thus began a partnership for the ages: Flash Fortune and Millicent, Best Mare Therapists in Equestria (™). Next he just needed a token zebra, and the dream team would be complete.

When he’d told her their next house call was in Cloudsdale, her first thought had been to ask if they were going to fall through the clouds and pass away. Sometimes she censored herself even when she wasn’t cursing: for instance, she always said “pass away” instead of “die,” as if using a different word made the concept any less serious. He had assured her that he could cast a cloudwalking spell on them both so they could traverse the clouds during their time in the city. Just to screw with her, though, he’d added that it might wear off at any moment and send them both tumbling down into the abyss.

No, wait, not just to screw with her. He should have said just to fuck with her. Damn it, she was having a negative influence on him. Who would have thought?

As great as her perpetually-pristine innocence was, though, Millicent wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. That was why, every so often, he had to find a creative way to remind her to stay in line.

“Do you know why I told you this story, Millicent?”

“N-no, sir.”
“Because you’re the Icarus in this situation. You’ve got a really sweet deal going. I’m a good master, aren’t I?”

She nodded enthusiastically.

“Right. But if you make a mistake, you could get into a lot of trouble just like Icarus did. And by “make a mistake,” I really mean scr—er, fuck up this house call like you fucked up that one a few weeks ago You’re not going to do that, are you?”

“N-no, s-sir.”

See, there were a lot advantages to having an idiotic, cowardly mare in your possession, but at the end of the day you were still dealing with an idiot coward. Idiots were clumsy and klutzy and made mistakes. Cowards got scared and careless at every little thing. Idiot cowards did things like jump and run for cover when a fucking bee entered the room through the window (“Help m-me master! It’s g-going to sting me!”) and, in the process of self-salvation, accidentally spill pitchers of steaming hot coffee all over their bosses’ clients’ signed paperwork . . . and crotches. Idiot cowards also did things like get scared and clench their teeth hard when they heard a particularly loud burst of thunder during a heavy storm . . . in the middle of sucking their bosses’ clients’ cock (“I’m s-so sorry! Let m-me kiss it and make it b-better!”).

Client relationships were usually patched up easily with a little sweet talk and the promise of discounts . . . and occasionally a well-placed band-aid . . . but it was always supremely embarrassing for a stallion to have to clean up after his mare’s mess. He always punished her severely when she screwed up like that, but the flip-side of her not getting harder and less innocent when he abused her was her not learning from her mistakes when he abused her. No matter what he did, he couldn’t stop her from making careless, stupid mistakes and making him look bad.

He had been reduced to giving her these stupid pep talks before every meeting, even though he knew the whole effort was fruitless. If she was going to fuck up, she was going to fuck up, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. And, now that he thought about it, there wasn’t even much he wanted to do about it. Every other mare he’d ever met he’d wanted to dominate completely, but with Millicent part of the charm was knowing she’d always be messing up and disappointing him, no matter what he did. She was his little living stress ball, after all, and it was in the nature of stress balls to stay pudgy and useless no matter how hard you squeezed them.

For that reason, the smile on his face wasn’t counterfeit when he said: “Good. Let’s greet the client.”

He stepped up to the door of the cloud house and rang the doorbell.

[Unfinished section]