Its not the fluffies themselves that triggered him
It was the memories…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said that if all the suffering in the world was put together and then distributed in equal parts to everyone most people would rather keep the suffering they already had.
That’s because while most people suffer a little some people suffer terribly.
Ned was the latter case…
He didn’t have a nice upbringing, there is really no other way to describe it. Saying his dad was absent would be putting it lightly, he was one of those guys who only got married and had a kid because that’s what you do, what society expects. As such Ned practically didn’t know his father, he was raised by his mother.
Ever heard the phrase “your mother did a number on you”?
Ned’s mom was a disaster, plain and simple. Granted, she grew up in a place where people simply didn’t talk about mental health and if you had any issues you were supposed to keep them to yourself. That didn’t mean she couldn’t get therapy on her own as an adult but as far as she cared she didn’t have any issues to begin with, so why bother?
She was still able to keep a semblance of normal motherhood, but when Ned was around 10 fluffies happened. To be precise fluffies were already a thing, just a really expensive one only the rich could afford. But after the industrial accident that freed an entire breeding facility in Georgia fluffies became both common and inexpensive things.
And things got ugly for little Ned.
His mom was never much of an animal person, but biotoys sort of changed that. An MLP fan when she was a little girl she quickly latched on these new pets.
First one, then two…and before you know it she became a fluffy hoarder with tens of the things running around the house…and breeding.
She loved the tiny foals but would often “forget” to put them for adoption, and so when the little things grew up nobody wanted them which gave Ned’s mom an excuse to keep them. Then there were the ferals and strays that showed up for scraps and instead she would adopt them thus adding to the problem.
Suddenly Ned’s house became a nightmarish place full of tiny disgusting pseudohorses that shat and pissed everywhere. His mom couldn’t care less as her mind was somewhere else. His dad barely went home anymore. And soon nobody did: Ned’s friends refused to go to his house because of the putrid smell of overflowing litterboxes and urine soaked carpets. And soon enough nobody at school wanted to hang around with him as his clothes always had a faint stench of biotoy feces and strands of cyan and pink fluff which were on nearly every surface back home. Ned was mercilessly bullied during middle school and eventually dropped from highschool as he couldn’t take the abuse anymore.
He became stunted, he missed most of the experiences that molds people and help them grow up. Socially inept to an absurd degree he learned to stay quiet least he became the target of ridicule again. The only jobs he could get were the kind that nobody wanted or paid peanuts. His dad died from a heart attack during a business trip, his mom dilapidated whatever savings they had just like she dilapidated everything, mostly by buying every kind of fluffy toy and related paraphernalia for her army of tiny mass-produced chimeras.
She was found dead at 65 due to the unsanitary conditions she lived in. The house was condemned, floors and walls corroded by decades of fluffy piss and shit soaking into the material.
Ned wasn’t there to see it, he had been living in a crappy apartment in the bad part of town ever since he got a job that paid enough to leave that hell behind
Still it hit him hard.
Its not that he felt bad for his mother, he felt bad for himself.
He was near 40 and it finally clicked: this is it.
This.[sub]Is[/sub].[sup]It[/sup]
This was his life.
The good times were not coming back, in fact his life at this point had been mostly bad times, the good times so short and so far away he often wondered if those happened at all or if his life had always been this horrible, if he had always been this miserable.
And things were not gonna get any better. Unlike when he was in his teens and twenties he couldn’t simply delude himself into thinking that things would somehow work out, that his life would get better.
This was his life: his dad was never going to change and be the father he never was.
His mother was never going to stop being a hoarder lunatic and care for her son more than she did for synthetic lifeforms.
His friends from elementary school were not coming back for him, in fact they didn’t even remember he had existed at all.
An old song from the late 90’s played in his head…
This is your life, this is your life, this is your life, this is your life
Doesn’t get any better than this…
This is your life, this is your life, this is your life, this is your life
And it and it’s ending
one-minute
at
a time
Ned was the very definition of a loser not as a joke but in every conceivable way, for everything he had attempted he had failed at, even when he mustered every bit of effort he could things just didn’t work out at all.
If he died tomorrow nobody would care, he would be found weeks later by his cheapstake landlord or his methhead neighbor when she tried to break into his apartment looking for something to steal.
There wouldn’t be a funeral, no theatrical ending to his life like in the movies…
Just “lights out”.
Forever.
And so Ned simply continued to exist.
Not live, he wasn’t “living” his life anymore, he’s just an empty husk running on autopilot, just going thru the motions.
One thing he did though was stay as far away as possible from fluffies.
Else the bad memories would come back.
And with it, the anger
Not any anger but the kind of anger that leads to pure hatred and levels of violence most people would think is impossible until they witness it.
Fortunately for Ned and unfortunately for fluffies, the legal and social condemnation that come with such actions don’t apply when the victims aren’t legally alive, as in biotoys.
You don’t arrest a man for kicking a trash bag near a dumpster, why would you arrest him kicking a fluffy near a dumpster?
If anything most would say he’s doing the world a favor.
But fluffies rivaling microplastics in how commonplace they are these days its really difficult to not stumble into one of these things.
And when Ned encountered a fluffy in some alley he felt as if everything around went quiet. He couldn’t hear anything, not even the deafening screams of the fluffies as he ripped them apart with his hands like old rags.
REEEEEEEEEEEE! STAPH! PWEASE! EEEEEEEEEE-RRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHH! -screamed the filly as its entire body was twisted-open by his hands.
Blood gushed yet Ned didn’t care. He couldn’t see Hasbio’s QuickCloth™ trying to save this formerly state-of-the-art expensive biotoy now reduced to the status of common vermin.
Ned couldn’t hear the screams, he couldn’t hear a thing, because he wasn’t there at all. Somebody else was ripping the filly apart, and he was just in for the ride…
After there was nothing left to tear Ned would just stand there looking at nothing, at nowhere.
In this part of town nobody gave a damn about the screams of fluffies, hugboxers didn’t even bother exposing abusers there, it was pointless.
Eventually Ned’s brain would restart, autopilot back on and then walk back to his dingy apartment.
Ned would not just kill but obliterate any stray or feral fluffy he encountered, he didn’t care if it was a designer or an alicorn that could net him some good money.
He didn’t even think about it…it-just-happened.
Avoiding fluffy parks and stores where fluffies with owners are was relatively easy, but the strays and ferals were unavoidable, specially because the government didn’t bother paying for fluffcontrol in the poor part of town. It was the methadone clinics or paying to get rid of the shitrats.
Violent addicts vs annoying biotoys.
Guess which one they choose…
However Ned had a particular kind of hatred towards mares. While his hatred towards fluffies in general was almost “mechanical” in how it happened, when it was a mare its like a switch flipped inside him.
A bad one, the kind of switch that would get someone involuntary committed…if the victim was a person or a real animal.
But fluffies? who cares? plus new studies showed that in many cases violence on fluffies lowered the probability of violence on people, so now you had actual advocates for abuse whose entire proposition boiled down to “better the fluffies than us”.
And so Ned was more or less unleashed.
May there be mercy on fluffies and its creators for their sins.
It was then that a pregnant stray mare crossed his path…
