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// Plush Pony 
// Story: Chryssi’s notebook 
// by Kryssi 
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The modern department store, the embodiment of consumerism and consumption, was bustling with frenzied customers. Amongst the hum of ponies scurrying past shelves, their trolleys packed full to the brim with goods, two sisters were ambling through a toy aisle. The first, Aether, stopped suddenly to levitate something from the shelf.

“Why the Tartarus are we buying this?” Eddy said. She was eyeing her sister suspiciously, who held aloft in her magic a package of a plush pony.

As with the other dolls on the squeaky-clean shelf, the cardboard packaging was saturated with rainbow colours and colourful rainbows alike. The plush ponies inside fared no better—their coats were a royal blue, and the horn and wings that the plush ponies boasted made Eddy grimace. They stood ramrod-straight with tall statures, and within their manes, stars twinkled and gleamed like the night sky.

“Eddy, what’s wrong with the Princess Luna plush? Her eyes are so cute,” Aether remarked. Unhurriedly, she gently placed the plush pony into the empty trolley and began to push said trolley along the aisle.

Eddy merely rolled her eyes, waving her hoof in front of the price tags under the plush ponies. “What do you mean, ‘what’s wrong with the Princess Luna plush’?” she asked with an incredulous look. “Just look at it! It’s just a whole load of corporate bull making us want to buy stuff.”

Aether glanced at the plush pony and stifled a sigh. “C’mon, Eddy. Maybe forget the corp and open your heart to it or something. It’s pretty cute, if you ask me.”

“I want to, Aether,” Eddy said, dropping to her haunches, “but it’s hard to open your heart to something heartless.”

This time, Aether found herself biting her lip, her eyes avoiding Eddy’s gaze. Resignedly, she joined Eddy on the frigid white floor, slumping on the ground. She let her eyes wander around their surroundings, while the harsh fluorescent lights cast a joyless atmosphere.

In the distance were plush ponies of a carnation-pink winged unicorn alongside a snow-white unicorn, a similarly white winged unicorn, and a lavender winged unicorn as well. The wings of the winged alicorns were awkward in their shape, and in addition, they all wore the same joyous smile, almost forced and definitely artificial.

But when Aether looked at the packaging, realisation dawned on her. “Hey, Eddy?”

“Yeah?” Eddy replied, lying prostrate and splaying her feathered wings on the floor to the chagrin of a group of passers-by.

Aether gazed at one end of the aisle, towards which grumbling ponies were walking back. “Maybe you’re looking at this the wrong way,” she suggested tentatively.

A sceptical glance from Eddy caused Aether to bite her lip. “Go on,” Eddy said.

Lifting herself to a standing position, Aether continued, “Okay, so who are these plushies and what do they do?”

“Well, as a result of their huge advertising budget, I know that the plushies apparently have supernatural powers and that their job is to make their subjects in a utopia happy,” Eddy said. “They’re supposed to be deities, right?”

“Yeah. And foals look up to them, don’t they?”

Eddy pushed herself until she was sitting on her haunches once again. “So you admit that they’re cash cows,” she snarked.

Aether managed some semblance of a hopeful expression. “Well, I was going for ‘heroes’—”

“—but when all is said and done, they’re just doing this for bits.” With a flap of her wings, Eddy took to the air in a low hover.

“Does it really matter, though? That the corp’s making money while providing good idols for fillies and colts?” Aether said. Her hopeful grin grew by every word she said.

Eddy shrugged mid-air. “You sound like a shill.”

Aether hung her head low and brought a hoof to it. “Bleurgh. I’m getting the plushie anyway,” she said, disappointed. As if to make up for her failure to change Eddy’s mind, she furtively levitated another plush pony—the lavender one—to the trolley while Eddy was looking away. “And we should probably get out of here before the manager kicks us out,” she added.

“Agreed.”