In 2022, the Hasbio Company unveiled their newest invention… Fluffies! On the heels of a turbulent start to the second decade of the new millennium, it was hoped the cute and cheerful arrival of the new bio-toys would sell like hotcakes. Indeed, Hasbio stock prices shot through the roof. Not only could these little miracles be used to cure loneliness, or even to let off a little steam… No, they could also be revolutionary in the field of medical research.
Finally, a test subject that could verbally communicate its symptoms, even if they were grating to listen to after a while. Yes, it seemed that Hasbio had a bright future… Until, as we all know, PETA had to foul things up. The infamous raid on the Hasbio Lab left fifteen dead, and released hundreds of highly fertile fluffies into an already unstable world. Some of these fluffies had been specially designed for use as medical subjects, making them a new and unexpected vector for contagious diseases.
Hasbio’s stock tanked within a month, and once more the world found itself in the grips of a small pox pandemic. It was a far deadlier strain than any that came before it, and spread by an exponentially growing population of fluffies… These, thankfully didn’t live for very long, just long enough to deal a crippling blow to any nation unfortunate enough to have them arrive on their shores… Which was to say all of them.
Crops were quickly eaten away, millions starved, all of which lead to ‘The Collapse’… China and the United States, the global superpowers, crumbled into countless smaller disparate factions. Other countries suffered similar fates… By 2024, these factions coalesced into semi-functioning states, the larges of which being the Mountain State Coalition. From Montana down to Texas, it split the continental US in half, establishing strictly enforced ‘Quarantine Zones’ along its borders, abandoning those outside to their fate.
The last herd of disease spreading ferals died out by 2025, but by then they and their non-contagious brethren had done enough. All six inhabited continents now had at least one active warzone, famine was common, and millions lay dead…
For twenty years the people of the world scraped by, as though it was not brought about by some great blaze of Nuclear annihilation or bloody protracted World War, it had been the end of the world as they knew it. Gradually ferals went from hated menace to food supplement, and eventually they were even accepted again as ‘bio-toys’… Most would spend their lives suffering the retribution of a shell shocked and vengeful populous, others would once again find use as lab subjects, and a scarce few would even become beloved pets.
The Mountain State Coalition would deploy the ‘Feral Containment Services’ branch of its armed forces to patrol the Q-Zones, which by this point had been so contaminated by fluffy waste that few doubted they could ever support agriculture again. The FCS would spend its time hunting down roving packs of ferals, either for extermination or capture for food. They would also face those surviving beyond the Q-Zones… A great many FCS officers would lose their lives staving off roving hordes of bandits and other malcontents.
Looking back, it was hard to imagine a world without fluffies, and equally hard to imagine what the world may have been like, had they never existed to first utter those immortal words.
“Hewwo! Wiww nice mistuh be nyu daddeh?”
Who could ever have thought such an innocent, infantile, brainless creature could cause such devastation. Oh, it would be a better world, a sane world… For in the grim dark future of this one, there is only fluff…
So, that’s my headcanon, one of them at any rate. I’m pretty sure I tagged this right, since it’s primarily to show off the comic, but I felt it necessary to also give a slight backstory to what happened in it. I don’t know if it’s any good, but I like writing creative stories about fictional countries, so I think it’s pretty nifty… I might draw more stuff in this world, I also might write stuff for it too. I hope you liked it, or not… That’s okay too.