Fluffy Runner: Colonel Fluffy
Your name is Jerry Slater, but most people know you as Colonel Fluffy. A frankly ridicules moniker, but that is one of the reasons you stuck with it over the years. It is now part of your brand. A costume you put on for the public so you aren’t mobbed by fans or hug boxing activists outside your work. Colonel Fluffy hosts Fluffy Runner. Jerry Slater spends the money.
Right now Colonel Fluffy is drinking a fine cup of coffee and trying desperately not to spill it on himself. There are dozens of suits in wardrobe, but you don’t really want to change again today. Sipping from your mug you look out onto the obstacle course and watch as the multicolored bio toys make their way across the first set of hazards.
The spiked floor is working well. Dozens of deaths, many of them smarties, have been filmed for use for your website. You can almost hear their plaintive cries from here. The whining, the fear, the pure confusion and stupidity when they can’t figure out what is going on, even if you yourself just told them five minutes before.
The rules are simple for them. Red squares are safe. Run or die. You make sure you never try and cheat them. You never lie to them. If they make it through they keep their little fluffy lives. They’ll continue their eating, shitting, and screwing. At least until you auction them off. Then the bidders can do whatever they want with the little bastards.
Most get bought by breeders so you don’t feel too bad for them. They get put out to stud, and the breeders can claim to have a winner in their breeding pool. Premium fluffies be damned, an offspring of a Runner’s winner never sells for less than double the price of a third generation pedigree.
Back when you started, when you were just a teen living near a junkyard, fluffies where either feral, or store breed. And stores would normally grab the ferals off the street and sell the foals outright without quality control. A fluffy off the curb and a fluffy in the store were just about the same. Some got litter trained, but that was it. Five or ten dollars for a foal, less for damaged goods going as feeders.
Then came the breeders who looked for color or intelligence, some for coat style or tail length. Now, over the years, a well breed fluffy sells for a few hundred. You still don’t understand why someone would pay that much, but you’re happy they do.
You always thought the best thing to spend money on was the elimination of fluffies. They were a huge problem by your house. They came from all around the city and countryside to get into the trash. That you didn’t mind. They were just another kind of gull or rat scrounging for food. It was when they destroyed your lawn, and came begging at your back door in herds that pissed you off.
You tried fighting them at first. You got a nice fence and reseeded the lawn as needed, but they always found a way in. Maybe the mailman or paperboy or a friend didn’t fix the latch on their way out. Didn’t really matter why, they just got in and that is all it took. So you gave up. No lawn meant fewer came up to your door. When those did you just kicked one in the face and told them to scram.
That is until the day you binge watched squirrel obstacle course videos on youtube. Then you wanted to make them for fluffies. The first one was simple, a kiddy pool with a stool in the middle, with a few boards leading up to the bowl of spagettios sitting on top. You just had to yell ‘sketties’ and a few minutes later ten fluffies wandered into the dirt patch you call a yard. Little noses in the air, they found where it was in just a few minutes.
The fluffies circled and cried wanting to get at it for half and hour before one started up the ramp. You said nothing and watched as one after the other attempted to reach the goal. The boards were wobbly, just leaning on the round edge stool, but stable enough. Bless that first shithead; he almost made it to the top the first go. He was just high enough to see the bowl when he yelled down a conformation, made a dash for it, and shit himself in excitement. This caused him to fall off the board into the little pool and drown.
By now the others knew, and they all made a dash for it, pushing each other off, each one drowning in turn. Only one fluffy made it to the top. A grand victory as it ate with vigor. Finally it looked up, mouth and fluff covered in sauce, and noticed his entire herd floating around him. He started crying and backed away from the edge. Being a small stood he backed right of the other side, joining his herd bobbing in the water.
You cleaned out the pool, tossing the bodies in a bag and throwing them in the trash. You did it again the next day, and the next, inviting friends and family to watch. Everyone had a blast. A few ended up taking the winners home, others just bet on which would make it. And you thought of different challenges.
You got really good at making traps. Pit falls, dart guns, buzz saws, shock boxes. You started filming the results, posting them to all the online channels. They went viral. That’s when you learned two things. One was that you could live off the ad revenue. The second was there are some people who would send death threats claiming the value of a fluffy’s life. Really? They didn’t see the irony?
That was when you took a trip to the thrift store and found a few cheep white suits. You also bought a fake beard and mustache at a costume shop. You donned the suit and beard for your videos, and Colonel Fluffy was born. It kept most of the crazies away, and the videos became even more popular.
You had moved the operation to the junkyard when the mass fluffy migration to Cleveland started. The fluffies inside the trash heap didn’t know about fluffy tv shows and their numbers never seemed to dwindle. The day after Cleveland fell, you got a call from every major company selling fluffy control devices, offering a sponsorship. Getting a sweet deal with Nillex, you hired staff and made your game an official business.
Within weeks your state passed anti-fluffy laws, offered bounties on fluffies, restricted breeding laws. It’s been five years now and you have sweet contracts with the city.
Your collectors gather fluffies from around the city, money.
You get credit for each fluffy disposed of on or off the show, money.
You get ad revenue from your website, and all the other video hosting sites online,
You have the contract with Nillex,
You have an official Fluffy Runner betting site,
You auction the winners, so much money.
Right now, you’re not sure how much exactly your investments are worth, but it’s in the high millions. Not bad for a kid who grew up next to the city dump.
There is a knock on the door. Your assistant lets you know the film crew is set up for the next event. You drain the last of the coffee and head downstairs. It’s Showtime.