When fluffy ponies first appeared, they were considered a novelty by many people, a ‘bio-toy’, a living plaything for children to be amused by. But over time their more negative traits came to light, including their arrogant natures, their bigotry towards their own kind, and most of all, their poor hygiene, and the craze very quickly died down.
Thus Hasbio, and many other companies in the toy market, began looking at ways to incentivize people to buy fluffies again. It started with simple things, like dress-up costumes featuring frilly tutus and little bowties, but again, the market wasn’t interested.
Then they tried more experimental things. Temporary hair-dye kits to give your fluffy a radical new 'do, remote-controlled battery-powered motorcycles for fluffies to ride around on, even an Easy Bake oven with a book of spaghetti recipes… but still, the demographic just wasn’t biting.
Finally, growing desperate, they tapped into the last market they had, the one toy market nobody ever truly wanted to deal with… educational toys.
Toys whose purpose wasn’t to entertain, but to teach. Toys that said ‘playtime is over, it’s time for school’. Toys that made children feel guilty for not wanting to play with them, after they’d been given them as birthday and Christmas presents by distant aunts and uncles.
The results were mixed.
Gone were the colorful dyes, gone were the cute outfits. Instead customers could buy things such as an electronic brain that, when each of it’s areas were pressed, would squawk out in an electronic fluffy voice to name the section and describe what it was used for.
Most of the educational products were even bigger failures than their previous attempts, but each manufacturer noticed something odd. One educational product in particular, one very specific product, had always sold well, even while the others dwindled and disappeared.
The ‘DIY Doctor’ toy, an educational playset designed to teach children about fluffy pony biology by letting them ‘play doctor’ with their fluffies. It came with a child-sized white coat, a novelty head-lamp, a book full of details about fluffy pony biology, a transparent plastic bottle full of Tictac mints (which was labelled as ‘MEDICINE’) some plastic surgical tools with blunt edges, a roll of cheap bandages and some colorful stick-on Band-Aids.
Now, the box proclaimed, you can take care of your fluffy’s bad feelings and owies by fixing them up yourself, just like a real doctor! You can wrap their hurt legs in bandages, and give them some medicine to help them feel better!
The product sold remarkably well. Considering how often fluffies found themselves getting injured, it seemed like customers were regularly buying it so their children could help their beloved pets feel better afterwards. A loose wrap of bandages around a bruise and a placebo pill and they’d be all better in a few minutes. Every child (and fluffy) who watched cartoons knew that was all it took to fix up injures, after all.
But even popular toys lose their appeal in time, unless some particularly creative children happen to think up new ways of playing with them…
“Hey Yoshi!” Billy said, dumping his backpack full of schoolbooks on his bed, simultaneously startling the green fluffy pony awake.
“Whu?! Oh! Hewwo Biwwy!” The fluffy said with a yawn as he drowsily stood up, his legs wobbling slightly on the soft springy mattress he had been napping on. His 10-year-old owner, Billy, seemed very excited about something. “Why su happeh Biwwy?” He asked.
“Cos it’s the weekend! Mom and dad are away until Monday, but since I’m a big kid now, they said I can look after myself!” Billy said proudly. But that wasn’t all. “Plus, I thought up a great new game we can play together!”
“Ooh, nyu gamesy!” Yoshi babbled, bouncing slightly on the bed. “Yoshi wub nyu gamesy! Wan pway! Wan pway wif Biwwy!”
“Hold it,” Billy said, reaching under his bed for something. “I gotta get it all ready first.”
He stepped back and pulled out the crumpled cardboard packaging for the beloved ‘DIY Doctor’ playset, which both he and Yoshi knew well.
“Biwwy wan pway Doctah?” Yoshi asked, confused. That game wasn’t new, they’d played it a lot already!
“Yeah, but with a twist this time!” Billy replied, opening up the box and taking out the white coat and the book of fluffy pony anatomy. “See, last night I was visiting Carl, and Dylan, his big brother, showed us this horror movie, it was totally sick, but it gave me a lot of cool ideas for games we can play!”
Yoshi didn’t know what a ‘hor-orr’ movie was but Billy seemed happy enough about it.
“Yoshi, you go wait in the bathroom, I’m gonna go get the other stuff we need!” Billy said, pulling on the white coat. Yoshi nodded and hopped down from the bed, waddling through to the white-tiled floor of the bathroom next to Billy’s room. He was normally only in here to use his litterbox, he didn’t like it otherwise. It was small and usually smelled bad (thanks to the aforementioned litterbox).
But before too long, Billy returned, holding in his arms an entire drawer he had taken from the kitchen, which rattled and clattered as he carried it.
“Wha’ dat, Biwwy?” Yoshi asked, cocking his head to one side as Billy placed the drawer on the closed toilet-seat.
“This is what we’re gonna use to play!” Billy said, picking up Yoshi and placing him in the bath-tub. Yoshi was about to freak out at the prospect of water, but realised quickly that the drain was unblocked, so clearly he had nothing to worry about.
Then Billy reached into the drawer and took out a long knife with a sharp, serrated edge.
“Okay Yoshi, so you’re gonna be the sick patient again.”
“Otay Biwwy!” Yoshi said, flopping back onto his haunches. “Buh Yoshi nu hab owies.”
“That’s the thing, you do! You just don’t know it!” Billy said, picking up the anatomy book.
“Wha?!” Yoshi squeaked in terror.
“Yeah, look here,” Billy said, showing him the open book. “See, you’ve got all those ‘organs’ inside you, right? Well, something’s gone wrong with one of them!”
“Oh nu!” Yoshi peeped, feeling himself start to cry. How could his ‘orr-guns’ be so mean to him?!
“Yeah, so we gotta get it out before it’s too late!” Billy said, readying the serrated carving knife once more.
“Wha’ Yoshi do?!” Yoshi squeaked.
“Just lie still and try to keep quiet!” Billy said, now fully in play-mode. “We gotta get that thing outta you while we still can!” He said, quoting the movie he’d been thinking about all day.
He put a hand on Yoshi’s neck and pushed him over onto his back, pinning him down against the cold metal interior of the bath-tub.
“Damn, there’s too much stuff in the way!” Billy growled in the best Kurt Russell impression a 10-year-old could muster. He dropped the knife in the bath with a clatter and snatched up a pair of scissors instead, snipping away at Yoshi’s vibrant green fur.
“NU! PWEASE NU TAKE FWUFF!” Yoshi squealed, his previous terror momentarily forgotten.
“I’ve gotta, Yoshi!” Billy argued, continuing to snip at his stomach. “Or else I can’t perform your surgery!”
“O-otay…” Yoshi replied with a weak sniffle, shivering as his bare stomach alerted him to just how cold the air in the bathroom was.
Billy put the scissors down and picked up his dad’s electric razor, flicking it on to clear off the rest of Yoshi’s fluff. As it was scraping back and forth across his belly, Billy glanced down again at the anatomy book. It showed a diagram of a standard earthie fluffy pony, with each of it’s organs and bones helpfully labelled.
The book explained that fluffy ponies were, internally speaking, very similar to regular horses, just on a smaller and simpler scale. They had been designed to handle things like spaghetti, and their genitals resembled a human’s more than a horse’s, but otherwise their internal biology was a fairly close facsimile of a horse’s.
And, according to the book, horses (and therefore, fluffy ponies) were able to survive with only one kidney.
Perfect.
“Okay, time to make the incision!” Billy said, picking up the serrated knife again and resting it’s jagged saw-blade edge against Yoshi’s shorn skin, towards the left side of his stomach.
“B-B-B-Biwwy pwease hewp Yuh-Yuh-Yuh-Yosh-”
Billy pushed the knife forwards, sawing into Yoshi’s body and cutting off his babbling voice instantly. He pulled the blade back, cutting into more of the skin, as Yoshi finally let out a shriek.
“SCREEEE! TUMMY HUWTIES! HUH-HUH-HU-U-UWTIES!!!” He wailed as his legs kicked and thrashed.
“Hold still!” Billy yelled, once more in his action-movie-hero persona. “We don’t have time for any anas… anor… anull… we don’t have time for anathema! We’ve gotta get it out of you now!”
Billy continued to cut until he saw blood seeping out from beneath the blade, at which point he lifted it away. There was now a large, narrow gash cut smoothly into the left side of Yoshi’s belly.
With that done he dug his fingers into the wound and forced it apart, spilling more of Yoshi’s dark red blood as he pulled the sliced skin away from itself.
“SCREE!!! BIWWY, YOSHI HAB BI-I-IG OWIES! HUHUHU!” Yoshi cried, still kicking wildly as pain surged through his body.
“It’s going septic!” Billy shouted, randomly spitting out whatever lines he remembered from the movie. “Scalpel! 50ccs! Stat!”
He pulled the skin apart until he could actually see into Yoshi’s body. He took a moment to admire how cool it was to see a living creature’s organs pulsating and shifting, and vaguely wondered how it would look if it was a human’s body instead, maybe even a naked woman’s.
Putting his Ted Bundy thoughts out of his mind for a moment, Billy glanced back at the anatomy book, confirming he had found one of Yoshi’s kidneys.
“Okay, here we go everybody!” He quoted again, as he let go of Yoshi’s flailing, sobbing, shrieking body and picked up the scissors once more. “It’s mutating! Get it out of him, Harrison!”
He pushed the scissors into the gaping wound he’d carved into Yoshi’s side, prodding with the sharp tips of the scissor blades until he felt them sink into the kidney.
Yoshi, meanwhile, was lost in his agony. His mind was a blank, fogged with nothing other than suffering. All he felt was pain, all he could see was dazzling light, he couldn’t hear anything anymore, even Billy’s voice was just a vague mumbling roar coming from all around him.
But the pain while the pain was constant, it wasn’t consistent. The slicing had been different from the pulling, and the pulling was very different from the jabbing… and now the jabbing had stopped, and had been replacing with another, smaller, but more painful form of slicing as the scissors began to snip at the kidney.
“We’ve almost got it!” Billy shouted, watching as the scissors withdrew from Yoshi’s body, clutching a tiny dark red blob at the end. A very small, very mangled and very torn apart kidney.
“We’ve done it!” Billy shouted, dropping the tiny red blob in the bath-tub, letting it land with a wet splat in a pool of Yoshi’s blood. “We got it just in time!”
There was only one thing left to do.
Close the patient back up.
Billy reached into the drawer again and pulled out a tube of superglue, something his mother always kept handy in case of small emergencies and repairs. He slipped off the child-proof cap with ease and pushed the nozzle into Yoshi’s guts, squeezing it carefully to cover up the bleeding areas that had once been utilised by the recently extracted kidney.
After that, he pulled the superglue tube back out and squirted a careless amount of it across both sides of the gash in Yoshi’s side. While the glue dried, Billy dug into the drawer one last time, and came out with the one thing he’d liberated from somewhere other than the kitchen, namely his father’s study. He held in his hand a common household stapler, which he opened out allowing him to place the tip against Yoshi’s belly.
Billy held the stapler in place with one blood-soaked hand, and used the other to press it down into Yoshi’s tender skin.
Yoshi was still bleeding heavily and was wheezing with every breath, and proceeded to let out a sharp yelp every time one of the staples suddenly punctured his delicate, sensitive body. A total of five yelps later, and Yoshi’s surgery was complete.
“Excellent work, McCarran!” Billy said, high-fiving the imaginary Dolph Lundgren next to him. “We saved 'em! It took everything we got, but we saved 'em!”
Of course, in the movie the alien parasite they had extracted had then mutated and killed them all, but Billy wasn’t going to bother playing that part. He just tossed the kidney into the toilet and used a cloth to wipe up the blood, leaving Yoshi lying on his back in the bath-tub.
His eyes were half-open, he was gasping for breath, and he was in constant pain… but all in all, the surgery had been successful. Yoshi was, in fact, still alive.
Two days later, mom and dad got back. Yoshi had been sullen and slow-moving since he and Billy had played Doctor, but his fluff had already started to grow back in enough time that nobody noticed anything was wrong with him.
Billy put back everything he’d used so his mother and father didn’t know he’d taken anything from where it shouldn’t be, and the ‘DIY Doctor’ kit was put back under his bed where it would remain until a chance of fate would inspire Billy with another 80s body-horror movie.
But Yoshi was still in pain.
His insides hurt. His tummy hurt. The big metal things stuck in his skin hurt.
Not only that, but the metal things had started to go a funny brown color and were giving off a strange smell. The skin around them was starting to feel funny too, and Yoshi was feeling tired more often, and constantly sore all over.
It was just a pity he didn’t know what ‘tetanus’ was.
