Under the Rule of Yaks

After they finish scraping the latrine for the morning, the crusaders wipe their faces as best they can with a dirty towel. Sweetie Belle, being the last to go, barely removes anything, as the towel is more soiled than she is at this point. But they all have tasks that need to be performed, and if they waited any longer, they’d be punished.

Sweetie Belle, for example, was off to dispose of the yak shit. The wagon was heavy, as it contained half the town’s sewage in it. It slopped and splashed and splattered all over as she pulled it down the dirt road.

There were yaks and ponies everywhere. Yakville’s streets had been busy before, and such was still true. But most of the ponies were wearing collars and holding their heads down. Some of the more unfortunate ones had their hooves tied to their shoulders, forced to crawl around on their elbows and knees. Others were blindfolded and gagged, and their yak masters delighted in watching them bump their faces on things. One particularly unlucky soul was being dragged around by his ankle. At least he was passed out.

Yakville survived on entertainment these days. What the yaks were doing was considered “playing,” and the ponies were their “toys.” Just like a doll left on the floor was subject to losing an arm, the ponies walking around were subject to break from time to time.

Physical injuries were sometimes ignored, but if they were bad enough, there was a clinic. It was about a third the size of the hospital, and that was no accident. A lot of the bed restraints for upstart patients were involved in holding down upstart ponies, and the surgical suites were being used for… Something. Sweetie didn’t know what was going on in there, but ponies that went in didn’t look or act the same when they came out. If they even did come out. Oddly, there were ponies that came out that didn’t even go in. She would think an underground passage, but why would the yaks be smuggling ponies out and in, when they did so aboveground with no repercussions?

She shook the thought from her head as she turned down Carnival Road. In the days before, it had been known as Lingonberry Lane, a fun little thoroughfare most days, but on Saturdays, hosted the fresh market, where one could exchange the fruits of their gardens. But since Yakville was no longer an agricultural junction, now being an entertainment center, the stalls were all shows and games. Not for the ponies, but for the yaks and their guests.

Skippidy-Doo, for example, was tied to a wheel. The tomatoes his wife had grown in their backyard were sitting in a bucket on the table, and the aim of the game was to make them splat on him. If it hit the wheel, it was counted as a miss. It had to connect with flesh, and if he yelped, it was double points.Judging by the tomato seeds dripping from his sheath, he’d already awarded double points by being nailed in the crotch.

Next to him was another pony on a wheel, but whether her scenario was better or worse depended entirely on who answered. Golden Thrush was situated next to a bucket of sex toys of all varieties, and the aim of her game was to force her to cum in thirty seconds. It was quite common for the yaks to buy ten games and make it last five minutes. She did have some whip marks on her today, as she was hinted to love being spanked, but it’s possible that this was something made up by her owner, and she was supposed to pretend to like it or suffer a worse fate.

Most notable, however, was a pony who had already been an entertainer. Vinyl Scratch to her friends, DJ Pon-3 to her fans, and a sideshow to the yaks, her once white coat was nigh unrecognisable. Her electric blue mane was now a sloppy green, with clumps of algae and mold growing in it. She hadn’t been home to shower in quite some time, of course. She was trapped in a terrarium, a glass-walled cage on the back of a wagon.

She wasn’t just stuck in there on her own, though. While she was alone, there was a small activity associated with her. For a small fee, her owner would dump a scoop of feces on her. It had started off as a game, where the intent was to hit her and sully her coat, she was no longer running from the shots. In fact, she was eating them.

In the beginning, they had been feeding her the same as everypony else. When she was doing too good of a job avoiding splatters of yak shit, she was withheld from her food to slow her down. Then she started eating the mushrooms that started growing on the walls. When her owner went to beat her, she barely reacted, and dumping her back in the pit had her licking up feces to take in more mushrooms.

Before long, she was an oddity; a mare who loved to be covered in shit and eat it, too. She was unable to form complete sentences, incapable of cleaning herself, incapable of having any say in what happened to her. To the yaks, this was the ideal pony: one who knew her place and was content with it. To the ponies, she was a problem. She had demonstrated that ponies could subsist on yak shit and psychotropic fungus.

“Delivery,” Sweetie Belle said, pulling the cart next to Vinyl’s terrarium.

A large yak looked up from his lunch and chuckled to himself. “Baby pony covered in shit…”

Sweetie detested being called a baby, but she knew better than to argue. She was covered in shit, and that was funny to him. “I’ve come to deliver your supplies,” she stated again.

“Does widdle baby like being covered in shit?” he teased.

There was no good answer. If she said yes, he’d oblige and dunk her head in a bucket. If she said no, he’d do the same, just because he knew it would bother her. There was only one answer. “I’ve brought your supplies for your sideshow, sir.”

“That’s right,” he snorted. “I am sir. You treat me with respect. Bring cart over here, pony bitch.”

Sweetie nodded and pulled the cart over to where he’d said to drop it off. When it was parked, she unhooked herself and started to walk back to her place of residence; where her yak master was keeping her. However, she didn’t make it more than a few metres before the yak running the stall yanked her tail.

“Contraband check!” he shouted, before grabbing her knees and pulling them apart. This was a common enough occurrence that she knew that she was supposed to lift her tail so that he could see inside of her holes.

In all of her experience, not a single pony had ever tried to sneak something away by hiding it up her butt or concealed inside of her kitty, but that didn’t stop the yaks from doing this. She had heard from Apple Bloom that there was this one pony who had, and her punishment was that the yaks shoved a dozen more in there and taped up the hole so that she had to walk around like that for a week.

“You’re clean,” he said, spreading her labia and spitting into it before dropping her. “Tell your master that I lubed you up.” With a hard smack to her flank, she was free to go back home, a task that she was quick to take up, lest she be saddled with more work.

Apple Bloom had her own task to complete; that of verifying the information in the ledgers. While Yakville was now a place of entertainment and leisure activities, it still needed to eat, and more importantly, it needed to feed the yaks. That meant that there had to be food produced here, or at least prepared. And since all stallions and mares of adult age were being used as either entertainers or sex objects, what better source of food was there than the otherwise-useless elderly of Yakville?

Any other slaver party would have slaughtered them. Any other group that took slaves would remove the elderly and the permanently infirm. Wounds heal. Foals grow up. But the elderly were never going to do hard labour for their communities again.

This thought gave Apple Bloom a very small amount of gratitude. The yaks had not just killed off Granny Smith for not being useful. In fact, they had made her useful. Every resident of the Shady Oaks Retirement Home, as well. Any jobs that weren’t requiring heavy thought or a strong back were foisted upon them.

Granny Smith was actually organising the whole thing, plus operating the bakery. She was usually pretty cranky these days, having to be up on her hooves for most of the day and not being allowed to nap, but she made sure everything kept moving along.

In more ways than one, actually. There wasn’t exactly a strong resistance effort in Yakville, as anypony that did try to rise up was usually made into an example for everypony else. But Granny had been around the block before, and knew a thing or two about how to make old ponies do their jobs.

She also knew how to stage an “accident.” She’d raised Applejack to be honest, even to a fault, but Granny Smith was not beholden to the same terms. Granny had always had the capacity to lie, but why bother? Life was better if you were honest in Ponyville. But not in Yakville.

“Granny Smith!” shouted Apple Bloom as she walked into the kitchen, loud enough that the yak guard could hear. “Yesterday, enough stock was used to make one thousand, two hundred and eighty-four meals. And yet, only one thousand, two hundred and eighty-two meals came out of this kitchen. Would you care to explain yourself?”

“Well, some a’ them there meals done fell on the floor,” Granny winked, subtly scratching her nose.

Bartlett, her assistant, caught sight of this and dropped the pan he was washing, drawing the attention of the guard. “Consarn it!” he swore. “Don’t you catch no arthritis, there, little Apple Bloom.”

“Ah won’t,” she promised, tucking away the wrapped-up cloth that Granny Smith had smuggled to her in the confusion.

“Now, Ah know that ponies are allowed to eat meals offa the floor if’n their master allows it, but Ah’m not sure who was gonna be given those two. I’d forget ah mane, if it weren’t attached.”

“So those went to compost?”

“You betcha.”

“Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

As Apple Bloom was walking out the door, she bumped into Mr. Waddle, another elderly pony. He was wearing the wrong glasses, indicating another sneaky trick of Granny Smith’s design. “Oh, excuse me, Sweetie Belle,” he mentioned. “I didn’t see you there.”

“That’s Apple Bloom,” corrected Granny.

“Oops. I guess I mixed them up again…”

It was easy to convince the yaks that somepony in glasses had bad eyesight. He’d be smacked around a bit for his “mistake,” but not too terribly hard, as even the yaks were smart enough to know that hitting him too hard would break something, and he’d be even more useless in their eyes. But as a courier, he was allowed to openly carry contraband and deliver it where it was supposed to go, whether by order of the yaks, or one of Granny’s “special orders.”

Apple Bloom ran back to her bunk and stowed the package in the usual place. The tags for her mattress were not stitched together properly, and she could hide small things between the seams.

Before the package could go in, however, she took a small, discrete peek at its contents. Pulling back a small corner of the cloth, she spotted some croissant dough, and smelled some apples. Turnovers. She’d split these with Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle tonight. Perhaps it would improve their moods a bit.

Scootaloo needed a morale boost right about now. Having been told by her owner that she was inferior was bad enough when it had happened, but now she was being sent to school again. One of the best things about the deconstruction of Ponyville and its subsequent regrowth was that she originally didn’t have to go to school.

Okay, school wasn’t that bad before. In Ponyville, it had given her time to be with her friends, she learned things, and Cheerilee was nice most of the time. Not when she was misbehaving, of course, but Scootaloo was often well-behaved.

It was just Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon that she didn’t like. And she still had to deal with Silver Spoon in class. Granted, she wasn’t as bad as Diamond Tiara, and had even improved a little bit, but she was still a bit of a snob.

The big problem now was that she hated the subjects being taught, and she hated that she had to suppress her resentment of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle that was building every time she would look around the room for help and not find them sitting nearby. Shovelling shit was awful as a job, but her friends were there. Practicing shovelling shit in a classroom setting and not having anypony to confide in and rely on was worse.

She walked in and took her seat, nodding at Cheerilee as she passed. “Afternoon.”

“Smells like you’ve already been to work and back,” sighed Cheerilee. “Good luck today.”

“Yeah, yeah…”

Cheerilee knew why Scootaloo was failing her class. Every day, Scootaloo had to do what she was being trained for twice over. It didn’t make sense to expend the energy to do well on the test and pass, only to be too tired to finish working a few hours later. She’d have to start over at the beginning of the lesson plan. It was a smart thing to just relax on the training test until she had the capacity to do it three times between breaks.

Slowly, the class started filling up. There were kids here, mostly younger than Scootaloo, a few adults that had been brought back in for not doing a good enough job, one teenage pony that had been gagged with his hooves bound behind his back, and while he had graduated twice, he was still being brought into class.

As soon as the last student came in, Cheerilee cleared her throat. “Okay, we’re a few minutes early, but since everyone’s here, what say we begin, hm?”

Scootaloo nodded. The sooner they began, the sooner she could leave. A few other students agreed, but others shook their heads. Honestly, Scootaloo couldn’t really blame them, as this was the closest they would come to a break, as they would be at their master’s beck and call as soon as they left, and that may bring no reprieve.

“Seems like a pretty mixed bag, but I counted eleven affirmatives and only ten negatives, so let’s begin.”

Scootaloo tried to pay attention. She really did. But the lesson was boring, and even more than that, it was something she already knew. She could teach it herself, if she was made to do that instead of just performing it. But because she was so well-versed, she was ready with the answers when Cheerilee started calling out questions.

“Scootaloo. How would you go about doing that?”

Scootaloo stood up. “Your standard bucket needs to be replaced every eight scoops. At six, the contents will be up to the third rib, and that’s your cue to grab a new bucket to replace it. If you do it right, you will put the bucket down as the last shovelful goes into the old bucket, and you can carry that back with you.”

“That’s right.”

Scootaloo sat back down. The clerical section was a breeze. She could answer any question, and easily so. It was actually performing the task that was the problem.

“Why is that? Scootaloo?”

“Because we have shown that we are delicate, like flowers. To become stronger, more powerful workers for our brilliant yak masters, we must be nourished by their manure.”

“That’s correct.”

The first half hour went by oh so slowly. Scootaloo did have to answer a few more questions, as some of the other students were new, and others weren’t as well-versed in the subject as she was. But Cheerilee knew that she could always call on Scootaloo to make sure the question was answered.

Then it was time for the practical exam. Broken into teams of three, Scootaloo was glad to not be eligible for testing today, as she was assigned the role of yak. That is, six teams would be assigned to clean up the messes, while Scootaloo, the youngest filly in the room and the bound teen all sloughed buckets of it all over the floor.

Rather, she was glad at first. Dumping the buckets out was pleasing, in a way. It helped relieve some amount of the stress of her life. It was even easy. But then she remembered how boring it was. Sitting there for minutes on end, waiting for the other students to clean up enough yak shit to allow her to dump another bucket was almost as boring as listening to Cheerilee talk about cleaning up yak shit. At least shovelling it had her up and moving around. That was something, at least…

Before she knew it, though, the room was clean, and everypony received full marks. “Good work today, class,” smiled Cheerilee as they all prepared to leave. “Don’t forget to tell your owners that tomorrow is your oral exam. If you don’t bring them here, you’re going to have to use one of our volunteers.”

A chill ran down Scootaloo’s spine. Both she and Cheerilee knew that Scootaloo’s owner was going to be busy. She was going to need a volunteer, and that was the first yak that they could pull off the street, and that was always going to result in a bad time.

Regardless, That’s what was going to happen, and they knew it. Such was the way things worked in Yakville.