And so we come to the finale. I appreciate all of you being patient with me, I clearly didn’t get these done in the timeframe I wanted. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more, so I wanted to show the requests I liked but couldn’t get to. The fluffies mentioned in order were requested by @mario1992 , @grimbusiness , @BunnyBean18 , and @Goomy . These were some really interesting ideas so I hope you’ll enjoy this consolation prize.
Here’s to another year of fluffy suffering!
The same shit, every goddamn year.
You pulled your scarf over your nose, the early January air cold enough to make the short walk from your car to the shelter door miserable. Still, you lingered for a moment before entering.
This was the worst part of the year. Your coworkers called it “return season”, when everyone got rid of all their unwanted christmas presents. Long lines formed at every customer service desk, local buy/sell pages were loaded with gadgets and decor no one wanted, and whatever couldn’t be returned or sold was thrown away.
Including fluffies.
You opened the door to the high-pitched misery of more than a hundred fluffies. Well over capacity, but they just kept coming in. Didn’t matter that you had no room for more, this was a county shelter and so you had to take what fluffcontrol gave you. You had to make room. Even if it meant keeping them three to a kennel or more, you made room.
And when there was no way to jam the kennels any tighter, you had to make room the only other way there was.
During the rest of the year each fluffy would get a post on the shelter’s website with a name, photo, and a small writeup of their personality and four weeks to wait for someone to request to adopt them. After that, you’d have the vet come in and take them to skettiland. These four weeks only started once they were cleared for adoption as well, if they needed any medical care, training, or weaning of either themself or their foals you’d have that taken care of before their timer started. When the shelter hit capacity that time dropped to two weeks, which was unfortunate but necessary. During return season? They were lucky to get 5 days. Not enough time to bother with a profile and pictures. Very few people were looking to adopt this time of year anyway.
The doors to each set of kennels did very little to muffle their grating voices so you threw your headphones on. This wasn’t a task that most had the stomach to do, sorting out who lived and who died was a rough task even for the most heartless of volunteers. As one of the few paid members on staff the task usually fell on you, years of retail work and cleaning dead fluffies from the streets had numbed you to their plight.
Pulling out one of the wheeled bins from the storage room you decided to start with the stallion kennels. You hit play on your phone before opening the door, the sounds of heavy metal quickly overpowering the cries of the biotoys inside.
Normally there was a whole system for who ended up at the top of the euthanasia list. Temperment and behavioral issues first, then fluffies with injuries that affected their quality of life (amputees mostly), and then traits that made a fluffy unadoptable to the general public like poor colors or deformities. It certainly wasn’t fair to the crippled fluffies but if they weren’t going to get adopted you might as well end their suffering quickly.
During return season that all went out the window. Whoever had been here the longest would get pulled, even if they’d only been here a few days. At times you’d had almost a 24 hour turnover.
You popped open the first kennel, the three fluffies inside rushing forward expecting food. You grabbed them each by the scruff and dropped them into the bin, not bothering to close the kennel before moving on. No time to clean between occupants, if disease spread it gave you an excuse to open up more room for intakes.
The next kennel had a fluffy you recognized, a scarred black fluffy that wouldn’t even look at you as you picked it up. You’d seen the scars on his shoulders and forehead, he must have been an alicorn once. A valuable one, too, if the stubble of his rainbow mane was anything to go off. Why someone would buy such a valuable fluffy just to tear it apart bit by bit was beyond you. Without his wings and horn he didn’t get the usual alicorn appeal and he arrived neutered so breeders wouldn’t want him. No one would adopt a scarred, depressed amputee no matter the color so in the bin he went.
You continued down the line, emptying kennels as you went. You couldn’t possibly remember every intake you’d seen, but sometimes a certain one caught your attention. While passing a foal cage you saw a little green earthie with bright red hooves. He’d come in with a note that was still pinned to the staff bulletin board explaining that he was meant to be some sort of corporate Christmas bonus. A clearly shitty one, as his prior owners agreed. The family that he was delivered to was Jewish and none to happy about the situation. The volunteers found the situation hilarious so they saved the note for others to read. You pulled him from the mass of begging older foals, he was just barely able to walk and still needed formula fed. Not something you had the manpower or funds for currently. Into the bin he went. Ironic that the hastily scribbled note would outlive him.
Once you’d hit the end of the stallion room you had a full bin of complaining fluffies. Ignoring their protests, you bobbed your head to the music while making your way to the euthanasia room.
The room was plain, a small entryway with a heavy metal door. You pushed the tub in, tipping it on its side and dumping the fluffies onto the concrete floor. Moving quickly you got the bin back out before the fluffies could recover enough to rush the door.
Next, the mare kennels. They were packed just as tight, if not tighter with the litters of young foals by their sides. Mothers got none of the usual special treatment they usually did, you tried to have no more than two nursing mares in a pen but that wasn’t always an option.
The first fluffy you grabbed was a pillowed green unicorn with a black eye. She barely reacted as you dropped her into the cart. Amputees rarely got adopted in the best of times and due to the injuries she arrived with she’d need medical care before she could be rehomed. She freaked out at alicorns as well, so there was little chance of her getting a home.
A few doors down was the only fluffy to have a private kennel. A heavily modified red mare sobbed in the back corner as you approached, a pair of demonic horns poking through her black mane. One of the younger volunteers said she was based on some popular show you didn’t know. She freaked out every fluffy that laid eyes on her, including herself. Two if the intakes yesterday died of straight up fear after seeing her, so she was given the rare luxury of a solo kennel. You thought maybe someone would come looking for her as the cloven hooves and slitted pupils couldn’t have been cheap to get done but a week had passed and no one ever did. Guess they didn’t think through what their aesthetic choices would do to a fluffy psyche.
You carried Millie under your arm to keep the fluffies in the bin from flipping out as you returned to the euthanasia room. A few stallions were knocked aside as you pushed the cart into the room and you set the demon fluffy by the door to keep anyone from thinking about escaping. Once the mares were dumped in you pulled out the now filthy bin and tightly shut the metal door.
Euthanasia on this scale was an unpleasant matter. During the rest of the year they were done one by one via injection by a kind vet that liked to give them each a small bowl of spaghetti and a cookie before putting them to sleep. He was another volunteer, a semi-retired animal veterinarian that paid for all of it from his own pockets. It was too much to ask him to do this many. Even if he agreed it would take hours and there was no way to get them all done before closing time.
You watched through the small window as you flipped on the machinery. The fluffies jumped at the loud noise of the fans engaging, CO2 being pumped in from the ceiling. You had submitted proposal after proposal to get an upgraded system, one that added a tranquilizing gas first before the CO2. The fluffies in the gas chamber panicked, gasping and choking as they sprinted around the space. They seemed almost resistant to suffocation, you had heard a rumor about it being an early fix to the whole drowning problem but you hadn’t seen any proof. What you knew was that gassing them took forever.
Once the right levels showed up on all the instruments, you stood from the chair, leaving the fluffies to their suffering. Too many things to do for you to just watch them drop one by one.
As you crossed the building you could hear sobbing over the barely muffled din of the kennel rooms. Grabbing an intake packet and pulling off your headphones, you opened the drop-off bin to see a single carrier inside holding a white fluffy foal. You silently thanked the powers that be for an easy morning intake, dealing with the fluffcontrol intake later would be much easier with all the open kennels now.
“Whew am Miwa??” The foal asked.
“That your owner?” You asked, opening the carrier.
The silver and white alicorn stepped cautiously out onto the metal table. You jotted down his type, colors, and apparent health.
“Yus… nee’ gu bak tu Miwa!” He looked around as if she would be hiding around the corner. “Fwuffy wiww be bettah cowwow, pwomise!”
Ah. A surrender then, someone got an out of fashion fluffy for Christmas. Unfortunate for him, but at least he was more adoptable than most of the fluffies in the shelter. “Well, I’ll look for…” Mila? Mira? Who could know. “I’ll look for her, why don’t we get you settled in your kennel.”
He was agreeable enough to let you carry him to the stallion room, you covered his wings as you brought him to an end kennel to avoid a mass panic. Hopefully one of the volunteers could find some alicorn friendly companions for him, you couldn’t afford to have another solo kennel. His owner was not likely to return for him but as long as he was able to get over his grief you could probably get him adopted. You made a mental note to have someone get a picture of him for the website. An alicorn had a chance to survive return season, a small one, but a chance still.
Returning to the euthanasia room you peeked in the window to see no movement. Hitting the button to activate the vent fans, you waited for the lights to turn green before unlatching the heavy door.
Fluffies lay scattered across the room surrounded by splatters of shit, eyes rolled back in their heads. You winced, seeing the small foal stomped to a paste in the panic. Unfortunate, but at least he went out faster than the rest.
You unlatched a grate on the floor and with a large push broom began to shove fluffy corpses down the chute below. When you first started you would carry every corpse one by one, you felt it was important to give them at least a small amount of dignity in death that was denied to them in life.
But you had shit to do. So broom it was.
Once the bodies were jammed into the chute leading to the biowaste dumpster you hosed the shit and blood down with it. Soon you had it cleaned and ready for the next batch of unlucky biotoys, who would be arriving later that day. It seemed like the influx never ended.