[Author’s Note: While the narrative in this story has some fairly harsh sentiments expressed towards abusers and, to a lesser extent, some hugboxers, this is simply from the character’s perspective and doesn’t reflect my own opinions regarding either group. This is my first post here, so any feedback regarding tagging, etc. is welcome. Many thanks to Karn for the information and Virga for the tutorial explaining the intricacies of making text colors.]
Sam, or Samantha if you insisted on wasting breath, awoke to an unpleasant chill. While it was early autumn, this was the first day of the year to actually experience any temperature below a sort of tepid warmth. After mustering the willpower to leave the warm bed, she got up and walked to her door, shivering slightly and muttering to herself, for the umpteenth time, that she had better learn how to actually use the fancy remote AC/Heater unit that she’d bought a couple of years prior.
Upon opening the door she half expected, despite the incident, to hear protests about the cold. However, there was only silence, as she logically knew there would be. The silence was even more biting than the cold as she walked to the thermostat and adjusted the temperature to a more comfortable, albeit still slightly cold, level.
Sam meandered over to her refrigerator, thinking to herself that the machine must not be doing much this morning, and pulled out a pre-made plate of assorted breakfast, which she placed into the microwave oven to warm. Sam was not a morning person and had long ago determined that if she was to eat breakfast, it would have to require only minimal effort to prepare. Normally she would have just bought instant breakfast food, but she was still leery of processed foods after the incident.
While her breakfast warmed in the microwave, she wandered through the house, deprived of her normal part of the morning routine. Unconsciously, she wandered into the saferoom looking around the cold but still furnished room with a mix of sadness and vague, helpless anger. She didn’t know why she still wandered in here every day, force of habit or to punish herself for something she knew wasn’t her fault but still felt guilty about.
She was startled from her musing by the beeping alarm of the microwave oven, telling her that her food was warm; or rather, that her food varied in temperature from searing to ice-cold with no rhyme or reason. With a sigh, she left the safe room and went to go eat her breakfast. The saferoom was left as cold and desolate as when she entered.
Her mind wandered as she ate, as it always did, and ended up at the same place again, as it had every day for the past three weeks. The celebration gone horribly wrong, the cries of pain and pleading for help. And the feeling of being unable to do anything for the poor creatures who saw her as God but nevertheless died, indirectly, by her hand.
One line of text. Had she read one line of text she would have known better than to even buy that can of so-called food. “Not Fit for Human Consumption.” To be fair to Sam, the text was intentionally printed in tiny script, colored to almost blend in to the rest of the label, so it was reasonable to expect the text to go unread. Nevertheless, she still blamed herself for the disastrous results.
Milly, her yellow fluffy with a red mane, and Milly’s adopted foal, Arch, with his beautiful gray coat and dark blue mane, had been given a can of spaghetti as a celebration of Arch beginning to eat solid food. Sam had bought Skettiland spaghetti, as Milly had insisted it was the best. Had she given it more thought, she would have taken into consideration that fluffy food was even less regulated than normal pet food, and she would have bought ingredients to make spaghetti at home instead. But those horror stories only happen to other people, right?
Immediately after eating their spaghetti, Milly and Arch began to complain of stomach ache and a burning in their throats and mouths. Sam, not suspecting anything at this point, just assumed it was due to eating too quickly and that she had perhaps heated the spaghetti a little too much. This assumption was shattered when Arch vomited blood, gave a horrible rasping gasp, and stopped breathing.
Poor Milly. Although her fate was set in stone the moment she ate the noxious canned food, she still lasted almost an hour after her son expired, wailing as best she could with her throat ridden with chemical burns. She begged, first for Sam to somehow bring her son back, then to be saved herself from the creeping agony, then finally for death. Although Sam rushed her to a vet for emergency treatment, there was nothing they could do besides give medication for the pain.
Industrial solvent. The can was contaminated with a frankly astonishing amount of a particularly toxic industrial solvent. So toxic, in fact, the Sam was sent to the hospital for three days, just in case she’d inhaled too much of the vapor from the warmed spaghetti. Normally, this solvent wouldn’t even be used on equipment used to manufacture ANYTHING that would be even remotely close to humans or pets, let alone used in food manufacturing equipment. Even having this stuff within a thousand feet of a human worker would land a company with so many fines it’d make their heads spin. But as everyone knew, fluffies weren’t pets, or even animals, and who cares if a few “bio-toys” are “prematurely retired?”
After the incident, Sam had looked into suing the manufacturing company, but had found she had no legal recourse. Under the law, she could seek compensation for the cost of the “destroyed bio-toys,” but, given that both Milly and Arch were an adopted feral and a shelter fluffy, that cost was $0. That, and she wasn’t interested in money anyway, she was interested in making the company pay, in dragging its name through the mud so that nobody would make the same mistake she had. There was nothing she could do.
Fortunately, the company was shut down anyway a few months following this story, due to astonishing amounts of tax evasion, embezzlement, and fraud. But that doesn’t effect the events chronicled here.
Sam’s dark musing was broken by a soft, repeated thudding sound coming from her back door. Like many people since the Hasbio breakout, she’d had custom doors installed that changed materials about three feet from the bottom, with the lower material being an easily cleaned, hydrophobic material that repelled fluffy excrement quite well, and as an added benefit sounded quite different from the normal door material. This allowed time to prepare for fluffies before opening the door, without having to waste time, and end up looking ridiculous, for human visitors. The thudding was coming from the section of the door, and although it sounded nothing like the normal pit-pat of fluffy’s “knocking” on the door, she still took the proper precautions.
First was the mask, which had a clear face-plate and air filtration. This mask served two purposes, both of which were vital for when dealing with feral fluffies. The first purpose was to protect the eyes and face from projectile excrement, should the wearer need to get their face within range of a fluffy; getting fluffy waste in your eyes probably wouldn’t make you lose them, but the resultant infection would make you want to gouge them out yourself. The second purpose was to protect the fluffy itself.
A year or so prior, documents had been leaked from a secret division of Hasbio regarding what they called a “pheromone affection facilitator.” These documents contained details as to how fluffies had been engineered to emit a pheromone which increased human affection towards them and increased the chances of a fluffy being purchased. However, this being Hasbio, what the pheromone actually did was to cause most creatures, including a small segment of the human population, to have extremely violent urges towards the little creatures. This effect faded after a few weeks, but was strongest when first meeting fluffies, and should the recipient of the urge act on it, the resulting positive feedback was difficult to overcome; as a result, even the kindest and most even-keeled individual could rapidly become a cruel, abusive monster towards fluffies while retaining their normal attitude towards other life forms.
The air filter on the mask Sam now wore was specifically designed to reduce, but not completely block, this pheromone. Sam was one of the majority of people who didn’t experience any effect from the pheromone, but the eye protection was always welcome. That, and studies demonstrated that there was a small chance that someone who had previously been unaffected by the pheromone could spontaneously become effected when meeting new fluffies.
Next she put on a pair of rubberized coveralls, to prevent her clothes from becoming soiled if she had to interact with filthy feral fluffies, or if a smarty decided it no longer wanted to live and attacked. These coveralls were very easy to clean by simply immersing them in a container of water with bleach, and didn’t stain like normal clothing from the noxious waste fluffies used as their primary attack. It was a shame they made whoever was wearing them look like a mixture of a farmer and a latex enthusiast.
Her last precaution was a pair of thick rubber gloves. Fluffies weren’t generally able to break the skin with bites, with the exception of a few cannibal variants, but the kinds of soap needed to clean your hands after bare-handed contact with a feral fluffy felt like pouring lava on your skin, so Sam preferred to use gloves. That, and it was actually pretty nippy outside, and the added warmth wouldn’t hurt.
Sam, unlike most people, had intentionally installed fluffy-proof rooms between both her front door and her back door and the rest of the house. Most people just turned fluffies away at the door, but Sam preferred to bring them inside to talk before making her next move. Most of the time, she would bring them to a nearby no-kill shelter, but occasionally she would take one in, as she had with Milly and Arch. This room was covered in easily cleaned padding, and had a small bathtub she could use to clean fluffies off before bringing them either into the saferoom or to the shelter.
Sam opened the door, and indeed there were fluffies on her back doorstep. A brown unicorn with a brown mane was standing there, but promptly fell over when it tried to fall into the door and make another thudding sound, only to find the door open. A light-blue pegasus with a yellow mane, quite far along in pregnancy, was resting as best she could while being assaulted with shivering from the cold autumn air. The unicorn, presumably a stallion and the mare’s special friend, struggled to stand, one of his legs hanging limply, before noticing Sam towering over him.
Sam fully expected to hear the usual fluffy burbling, full of “nice wady” and “housie” and “sketties,” and so was shocked when instead the stallion wailed “Pweeeeeeease hewp fwuffy! So cowd, an’ weggie nu wowk, an’ speciaw-fwiend am soon-mummah an’ need nummies fow tummeh-babbehs!”
This was somewhat unusual, as fluffies generally tried to be endearing, rather than desperate, when seeking a new owner. This fluffy, sobbing on the ground after trying, and failing, to stand yet again, was definitely not putting on a show or trying to put himself in a good light. He was just cold, and scared, and probably starving, since with that leg he would be lucky to find any food at all.
Well, the first order of business was to check out that leg, but for now she needed to make sure the mare wouldn’t try to run away if Sam’s suspicions were correct, so she ushered them inside the fluffy-proofed room and shut the door behind them, making them both jump a bit in surprise. However, the warmth of the room soon calmed them down, and they began to mutter to each other about how nice the “wawm housie” was.
“Hey, little guy, can I take a look at that leg?” Sam asked the stallion, who seemed to have forgotten her presence as soon as the warmth had distracted him. Not that such a short attention-span was uncommon for fluffies.
“Weggie have wowstest owies, nu wan touch, bu’ if nice wady wan wook at weggie, fwuffy wiww wet nice wady.”
He seemed fairly well-socialized for a feral, and didn’t seem to fear humans. Of course, with the widespread introduction and use of pheromone-blocking masks, fluffies had a lot less to fear from humans recently. Sam picked the stallion up by his scruff, not wanting to risk injuring his leg further by picking him up normally. This elicited the normal “Bad upsies!” from the stallion, but it seemed to be more from force of habit than from actual discomfort.
As she examined the leg, she came to the conclusion that it was probably dislocated. Having experienced a dislocation a few years back in a hiking accident, she knew just how much pain the little guy was probably in. Well, at the very least the leg wasn’t broken, and she had spent enough time volunteering at the shelter to know how to fix most minor fluffy injuries. But fixing this was going to hurt the poor thing a lot, and she didn’t want to cause it to fear her, so a bit of duplicity was in order.
“Oh no!” she cried, faking distress.
The stallion shook in terror. “Wut am wong wi’ weggie, nice wady?” He asked in a quavering voice.
“Your leg,” Sam replied. “It looks like you’ll lose it. I’m sorry, but you’ll only have 3 legs. so you won’t be able to run or give huggies anymore.”
“NUUUUUUUUU! NU WAN WOSE WEGGIE! PWEASE HEWP WEGGIE!”
“I might be able to fix it,” Sam stated, in a tone of faux gravity. “But it’ll be the worst hurties. Can you be a brave stallion and hold still while I try to fix it?”
The stallion looked full of fear and despair, but nodded. “Wiww be bwave stawwion, pwease fix weggie. Nu wan be nu abwe to wun and gib huggies.”
Sam gently grabbed the leg, causing the stallion to tense and dribble a small amount of waste, and, tenderly put firmly, rotated it back into its socket with a soft, but audible, snapping noise. The stallion wailed in pain and, had it not been starving, would probably have unleashed a torrent of filth. Sam gritted her teeth, sympathetic pain running down her own leg, and set the stallion back onto the floor. Upon touching the ground, the creature collapsed and continued to wail.
After a few minutes, however, the wailing quieted to a soft sobbing, which itself died down when the stallion tried moving the previously dislocated leg and found that it worked once again. Thanks to the miraculous healing ability of a fluffy, it was soon running slow, but joyful, laps around the small room.
“Tank 'ou, nice wady!” it cried. “Weggie work 'gain! Nu mowe huwt!”
Good, it appeared that he associated her with the leg working again and not hurting, and not with the horrible agony of having the leg set back into its socket. While it wouldn’t have been irreparable, the damage to the fluffy’s trust in humans would have taken quite some time to fix if he believed that she had intentionally caused him pain, rather than helping him. While fluffies appeared to begin trusting humans extremely quickly after being hurt, this was usually just due to the fluffy knowing it had no way out, and so attempting to ingratiate itself with the one who had hurt it, hoping to avoid additional harm.
Soon, the two fluffies calmed, and began to look around the room with renewed interested. However, given how empty the room was, they quickly explored the entirety and returned their interested to Sam. This was more or less to be expected, as while domestic fluffies are raised by their parents to always focus on humans, most ferals find that avoiding or ignoring humans in favor of environmental awareness was more important to a fluffy’s survival. Now, however, both fluffies were looking at her with a mix of hopefulness and apprehension.
“Nice wady,” the stallion begain. “Can fwuffy and speciaw-fwiend stay in housie until nu mowe cowd-time? Cowd is nu gud fow tummeh-babbehs. Nu need toysies ow huggies, jus’ need wawm pwace to stay.”
Now it was time for the test. Sam wasn’t really in the habit of picking up random feral fluffies, especially not those with babies on the way, without some way of knowing if they were going to be well behaved. She hated trying to rehabilitate bratty fluffies, since much of the punishment she often had to resort to felt too much like abuse. She was, in effect, a sort of hugboxer, although she didn’t call herself by such, since there were so many stereotypes associated with the name. Regardless, she didn’t like having to beat the little creatures into submission when they became too bratty, and she found that adult fluffies were often quite adept at hiding their nature until they were too ingrained into her lifestyle for her to easily send them to a shelter.
“You,” she said firmly, pointing towards the mare; she’d need both of them to communicate with her for this. “Why don’t you talk to me?”
“Speciaw-fwiend am shy, nu wike tawk to hoomins.”
“I wasn’t asking you,” Sam said in a harsh tone, causing the stallion to cower a bit. “Now, I want you-” pointing again towards the mare “-to talk to me.”
“Wut nice wady wan fwuffy tu say?” Came the reply, with enough attitude that Sam gave up most hope in the pair.
“Why were you two outside alone? Did you run away from home?”
“Nu wun away fwom home. Owd hewd aww gu fowebah-sweepies. Meanie hoomins gib hewd wowstest huwties an’ fowebah-sweepies. Huwt speciaw-fwiend weggie when he twy hewp babbehs. Teww fwuffy an’ speciaw-fwiend tu gu. Say speciaw-fwiend am poopie, su nu gib forebah-sweepies.”
Now it made more since. Her herd had run into Pete and his gang of vigilante-abusers. They wandered around, looking for herds that mistreated so-called “poopie” fluffies and giving them “justice.” In reality, they were just abusers who assume that every herd with a brown fluffy in it was mistreating it, and would use that as justification to get their cruel enjoyment. They used the false premise of their actions to avoid being treated like the scum they were, but they didn’t care one iota for brown fluffies, as demonstrated by how they hadn’t hesitated to injure the stallion when he interrupted their fun.
Unfortunately, this also made things much, much harder for Sam. While the stallion himself was either shockingly mentally resilient or great at hiding his disdain for humans, the mare was reacting as you’d expect from a fluffy whose entire herd was killed by humans but who now needed a human’s help. She wasn’t going to cause problems, but it was doubtful she’d ever be able to fully trust a human. Which just made her that much more likely to fail this test.
Nothing can ever be easy, can it? Sam muttered internally. Preparing for the worst, she leaned over the fluffies. “Before I decide if I’ll let you stay, I have a choice for you to make.”
