So, back when Fluffybooru was still up, I had a story called “The Fuzz” going, which was about cops investigating fluffy-related crimes. Now that this new site is up, I’ve basically turned the whole idea on its head. I’m not sure how great this is, but I had fun writing it, and I have something of a story arc planned in advance. Enjoy.
()()()
Lorne Miller was at his favorite part of being an abuser. He loomed large, casting a shadow over a quivering pillowed soon-mummah in a cellar lit by one ceiling bulb. Her name was Toothpaste. She had been with him for two full years, her blue fluff—what remained–shaggy and graying at the ends, white mane long gone, leaving a bit of white fuzz growing in its place. Scars and bruises pock-marked her body like a patchwork quilt detailing all two years of her misery. Her eyes stared up at him, trying to communicate a message to him that her mouth dare not speak for fear of further punishment: “Please. My heart hurts. Please don’t take away my babies again.” For Lorne, it was all the better that this was the last batch she’d ever have, since she was too frail to handle another litter.
In the corner of the room, a pink Pegasus filly was sobbing and covering its eyes with its hooves. It sat in a foal-can that was barely big enough for it, and though it was so young and had never known the touch of another living thing, it knew intuitively that the legless mare across the room needed huggies badly, and that she was in no position to give them to her. Fluffies—especially foals—had a bad habit of feeling the sadness of another nearby fluffy against their will, and Lorne used this to his great advantage. This pink filly was going to take this Toothpaste’s place as victim after he was done. He’d be pillowing it tonight.
Suddenly, the pills that Lorne force-fed to the soon-mummah to induce labor kicked in. Her breaths became fast and labored, tongue lolling out between two incomplete rows of stained, dying teeth. “BIGGES’ POOPIES!” came out of her mouth involuntarily. Shit and blood painted the gray concrete wall behind her. A little Easter basket had been placed underneath her vagina, a landing point.
“Let’s see how many of these live,” said Lorne, lips pulled back in a death’s head grin. That was right around the point the cellar doors swung open.
“POLICE!”
Lorne felt his heart sink. The two fluffies in the room let out cries of fear at the sudden loud noises. Light spilled into the room, the smell of grass and hot summer air cut the humid shit and fear smells that had been dominant. Three men rushed down the stairs in a single file line, the one in front with fair skin, blue eyes and black hair holding a device Lorne recognized immediately as a GPS chip sensor. It dawned on him right away how they’d found him.
“Hands in the air, dipshit,” said the stocky, square-jawed beat cop the back of the line. Lorne had about a second to refuse before the cop in front butted him in the stomach with the hard plastic handle of his chip tracker, knocking him on his ass. He lifted his hands when the cop swung his hand back for another blow.
“Cuff him to that chair in the corner.”
The middle cop—a tall, older black man also in a beat cop’s uniform—pulled Lorne up roughly by his arms and pushed him into a steel chair in the corner, then cuffed his hands behind him.
“This one’s giving birth!” shouted the stocky cop. “Mike, quick!”
The mare was in utter, abject terror and pain as her babies pushed themselves out one by one. With each new baby, her heart sank lower; none of them were chirping or even crying, which could only mean…
“Shit. They’re all stillborns.”
“She was already giving birth when we got down here—this was all him.”
“Wait, wait, that one’s moving.”
Sure enough, the last foal that broke free from its mother was letting out some weak peeps and reaching its front hooves out. The mare gasped. “Babbeh?! Make chiwpies fo’ mummah?!”
The mare tried and failed to turn around, forgetting in its happiness that it had no legs. The stocky cop pulled a tissue out of his back pocket and very gingerly scooped the foal into his cupped hand. He then pulled out a small milk bottle, no bigger than a thumb, and let the newborn suckle on it. Lorne looked on in a rage—he was hoping for exactly that outcome, all of them dead instead of one foal that he could torture in front of her.
“You goddamn cops—you put chipped foals in that can machine, didn’t you?”
The guy whom one of the others called “Mike” turned and smiled at him. “Can machine? Is that where you got that foal over there from?”
“Don’t play stupid!”
“Who says I’m playing?”
The other two cops were still huddled around the mummah and her mostly-dead litter. “Will,” the stocky one said to the black cop, “this yellow foal that lived is an alicorn. We can’t show it to its mother, she might try to kill it.”
“Who said we were even going to, anyway?” York said, still facing Lorne. “This one’s for us. Selling an alicorn on the black market, even if we split the profit three ways, that’s our salary for a month easily. Besides, this mare’s not fit for parenting, and it’s too beat up to be sold to anybody. Which leaves us with one option.”
Lorne tilted his head to look over at the two cops behind Mike, a little bit taken aback at what he was hearing. Were these badge-shining hugboxer cops actually talking about stealing a newborn foal and selling it while it was unchipped?
“Mummah wan’ see babbeh!” the pillowed mare shouted, tears streaking her sunken cheeks. This was her first time in over a year she had birthed a live foal, both because of the premature labor-inducing and because of her advanced age. For her, a fluffy old enough to be a great-grandmother, this was nothing short of a miracle. “Bwing babbeh tu mummah, nice mistahs. Babbeh nee’ wick-sie cweansies, nee’ huggies and miwkies. Huu huu, wan be gud mummah. Pwease?”
“I just scanned the pillow—it’s unchipped.” said Will to the stocky cop. “We’re in the clear.”
“Hang on a second.” Vince said, pocketing the now-empty mini-bottle. “Hey, Mike!”
Mike took their prize alicorn catch off of Vince’s hands, holding it close and patting it for comfort. Vince then turned around and grabbed the foal in a can, which was still covering its eyes and shitting uncontrollably into the hose jammed in its anus. He pocketed it, then nodded to Will. Will pulled out a small syringe and, while the pillow-mummah was still babbling about her babbeh, jammed it into the base of the mare’s skull, making her let out a small “scree” of pain. He emptied the full syringe into the mare and before she could properly bawl, her eyes closed and she was still, one final hoarse breath exiting her open mouth.
“You killed my fluffy…” Lorne stared with his own mouth hanging open. Will put the lid on the used syringe and pocketed it. “What the fuck is wrong with you guys?”
“Oh, fuck off, Miller,” said Vince. “You were going to kill it, anyway. We just did it humanely.”
“But—it wasn’t dying! Aren’t you only supposed to do that when they’re already dying?”
Vince shrugged. “It was probably gonna go into the ‘wan die’ loop after I took its last baby away.”
“You aren’t supposed to do that, either!” Lorne struggled against the chair he was confined to. “You’re the police! That’s not how this is supposed to work!”
Inspector Mike slapped Lorne upside the head hard enough to make one of his ears ring. “I’ll let you know when we decide to take an ethics class from an abuser. Come on, guys. Boss needs us back in thirty minutes with the canned foal and this idiot.”
()()()
Inspector Michael York and Officers Vincent Ulrich and Willie Olson made it to the precinct with their catches about 45 minutes later. They walked down the hallway carrying a dead mare, four dead foals, a chipped pink foal, and a seething Lorne Miller. “You’re late,” said Captain Molly Weston as they passed by her as she was trying to get something out of the vending machine. Captain Weston was a small, hard-faced woman with short brown hair and piercing green eyes. York swore they seemed to grow brighter when someone was lying to her.
“Our new friend gave us a bit of a hard time,” replied York, clapping Lorne on the shoulder. Lorne jerked away from him and fixed his gaze on the captain.
“What kind of fucking cops are you hiring?!” screamed Lorne. “These assholes killed my fluffy and stole its foals!”
“All of which were dead, thanks to Mr. Owner of the Year 2022 over here,” Ulrich said. “I don’t know why he’s so worked up over a few more corpses.”
“You fucking piece of shit! One of those foals is still alive and—”
Ulrich jabbed an elbow hard into Lorne’s side. “Throwing out accusations like that will get you another charge, asshole. You really want to add lying to the cops on top of the five dead fluffies you’re already in the shit for?”
“Lying to cops is not a crime!” Lorne said, then paused. “Not that I’m lying. Listen, miss—”
Captain Weston put up a hand to silence Lorne. “Where’s the fluffy you guys found at the scene?”
Olson opened the carrier containing the dead fluffy and its foals. Captain Weston’s eyes hardened when she saw the shape the mother was in. “You son of a bitch.”
“She was alive!” Lorne struggled against Olson and Ulrich’s grips. “She was alive, and these cops killed her!”
“We didn’t do a damn thing,” Olson said. “It died of heartbreak right after birthing four still-borns.”
“They’re all lying! I’m innocent!”
“I’ll bet. Officers, take this idiot to a holding cell,” said Captain Weston. Olson and Ulrich led their suspect across the room while York started up the stairs.
“Inspector York!”
York cringed and turned around. “Yes, Captain?”
“Did you remember the canned foal you used for the bust?”
“Oh—yeah, the pink foal. Vince has it.”
“In his pocket? He knows he’s not supposed to put those things in the dark!”
York sighed. “I’ll get it from him real quick.”
“When you do, I want it taken upstairs to be prepared for adoption.”
“Already? I thought we could at least get a couple more uses out of it. Maybe track down who’s buying up foals and forcing them to eat cockroaches.”
Captain Weston shuddered. “I wish you wouldn’t remind me of that case. No, that one’s too old to fit in a can anymore. It needs to be adopted out while it can still be socialized.”
“Yes, ma’am.” York hurried over to Ulrich to get the pink foal, then he had a call to make concerning their newest find.
()()()
“Shit!” Officer Ulrich shouted, smacking the steering wheel. Olson and Ulrich had already been called to another fluffy-related incident, a fat soon-mummah was stuck in a hole beneath a fence and was at risk of miscarrying. But Vince had his mind on a whole other group of foals entirely. “And I guess we’re going to be expected to pay out-of-pocket for five new foals to put in that can machine?”
“Unless you can convince the city comptroller to allocate more money for the purchase of fluffies by the police department,” Olson said, barely able to finish his sentence without laughing. “Another two or three ought to do it.”
“Still, that’s like 40 bucks a pop, Will! We’re looking at a hundred dollars just for foals!”
“And they’re going to be sold ‘unchipped’ in that machine for $200 each.”
“None of that profit goes to us!”
“It goes to the guys that let us run that machine in their cellar in exchange for that profit. Calm down, Vince, we aren’t missing a huge payday there. The real money’s gonna come from… where the hell did you put that alicorn?”
“Oh, him? I gave him to York. He needed the pink one anyway, I just handed him both.”
Olson stared at Ulrich. “You fucking brought it into the station?”
“I gave it a sedative shot, chill out. What was I supposed to do, leave it in the fucking car while it’s 100 degrees outside?”
“Take it home!” Olson said. “Put it somewhere in your damn house, make it a bed!”
“It’s a fluffy foal, Will. Those things can break their legs by rolling around too fast. I wasn’t going to leave it by itself.”
“God damn it,” said Will. “Then you should’ve handed it to me, I have a kid at home who could look after it.”
“But then she’d know about our racket, man!”
“She’d know I brought a foal home from work for an hour, I can think of a million explanations off the top of my head for that.”
Ulrich wiped some sweat from his forehead. The AC in his squad car was a fucking joke. This job had him going crazy, too—he was imagining his engine as a few fluffies on hamster wheels trying and failing to generate enough power.
“From now on,” Olson said, “let’s not bring shit into work, alright? God only knows how we’d explain it if your pocket started peeping and Captain Weston found out you were hiding a foal. That’d be the one Jenga piece that sends the whole fucking tower crashing down.”
“You’re right,” said Ulrich, not really believing it but also not in the mood to argue. “I’ll be more careful.”
()()()
Inspector York pulled up to the corner of Bryson and Cherry to meet up with his seller. He’d been working with Old Pete (an ironic street name for a 23-year-old) for a couple months now, and so far he’d been delivering.
Old Pete opened the door and got in the passenger side. “Just do some circles around the block.”
“Sure,” York said. “So, hey, check out the new find.”
Old Pete was handed an old Tupperware container with several holes in the lid. In it was a pile of tissue and a wriggling yellow alicorn foal not more than two hours old. “Damn,” Old Pete exclaimed, “now that is a prize catch!” The foal started to peep and chirp, awoken by the loud noise. York sighed.
“I was hoping we could have a little conversation, but we gotta shut that thing up first. Here.” York pulled one of the foal-sized milk bottles out of his car’s center console. “Feed it this.”
Old Pete grabbed the bottle. “You sure this shit ain’t curdled, man?”
“I change them out every other morning. If it’s bad, the foal will just spit it out. Go on.”
Old Pete shrugged and started feeding the foal, whose chirps quickly changed to muffled coos as its little hooves reached out to knead the breast that wasn’t there. He used his other hand to stroke the fur on the foal’s head, knowing that foals needed regular contact to function socially as they matured. “You cute little bastard. You don’t even know you’re worth at least three of my friend’s paychecks. Speaking of that, Inspector, I got a job for you and your guys if you’re interested.”
“A job?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry, it involves you using your badges, not your guns.”
“…I’ll listen to your proposition,” York said. “But first we gotta talk about payment for that little darling you’re feeding right now.”
Old Pete’s brow tightened. “You’re going to sell an alicorn through me? You know my cut’s still 40%, right? Shouldn’t you be branching out by now?”
“We don’t know the market like you do, and we aren’t willing to make ourselves that visible. It’s worth paying extra for us to remain distant.”
Old Pete laughed. “Well, any time you guys want to take off the training wheels, you let me know. I have a lot of people I can introduce you to.”
“That’s what worries us. Now, what is this job you were talking about?”
()()()
“No way. He’s telling you a load of bullshit.”
York scoffed. “Come on, Olson. You really think, after thirty years, it’s impossible for there to be a brown fluffy?”
The three were sharing a single squad car, on their way to a suburban cul-de-sac not far from the main drag.
“Listen, I was stomping these creatures with my buddies in the exterminator crews back when you were in diapers. I bet I fucking took out a thousand grown fluffies before it was all said and done, and I didn’t see a single full-grown brown fluffy pony, EVER. Being brown-haired is a death sentence for a foal.”
Vince, now sitting in the back seat, opted to keep quiet. This exchange sounded like it was going in an awkward direction.
“What about foals that were born in controlled environments? Raised by humans?”
“What about them? Find me any fluffy on this planet who will fuck a brown fluffy and pass along that gene, I’ll show you a flying pig. Not even brown fluffies want to fuck other brown fluffies. As far as these things are concerned, brown is the color of dirt and shit.”
York remained silent for a moment as he pulled into the neighborhood his source had him directed to. “Suppose… you were able to take a brown fluffy and spray paint it a different color. What then?”
“Then you’d have a fluffy dying of inhaling spray paint toxins, if it didn’t have a heart attack because it thought you were spraying it with water first.”
“Even if this brown fluffy does exist,” Ulrich chimed in, “this guy we’re stealing it from has been out on his abuse charge for three years, hasn’t slipped up once. Framing an abuser is one thing, but an innocent guy? I don’t feel right about that.”
“We’re not framing him,” said York. “Our source spotted him entering his home with a brown fluffy in his arms. This guy is not supposed to own a fluffy ever again, and what’s worse, my GPS chip tracker detects no signal from his house. He’s breaking the law and we have proof.”
“Yes, but if we sell the fluffy instead of turning it in as proof, as far as the captain is concerned, we just broke into a guy’s house and harassed him,” Olson said. “Inspector, are you sure you’ve thought this all the way through?”
York again fell silent. Truth be told, he hadn’t thought it through past stealing the fluffy. “We’ll threaten the guy to keep his mouth shut.”
“I agreed to steal some fluffies from abusers for extra cash,” said Ulrich, “not to be a fucking mafioso, going around breaking peoples’ legs. Count me out of this one.”
York hit the brakes, jerking them all forward, causing Olson to spill the thermos of coffee between his legs. “Fucking shit—Michael!”
“Listen, you two!” York said in almost a shout, before taking a deep breath through his nose. He clenched and unclenched his hands on the steering wheel a couple times. “I’ll tell you what. This guy turns out to be a non-abuser, we can take the fluffy into evidence. But if he’s abusing it—and I’d be very surprised if he’s not—we document it. We get pictures, then the fluffy somehow gets lost.”
Olson snorted. “How? The fucking things can’t run ten feet without falling over.”
“It doesn’t have to run away. It just has to be somewhere unreachable.”
()()()
Paul Rippentrop’s house was one of many same-y two-story white homes in this neck of the woods. The kind of place where “idyllic” is shorthand for “comfortably mediocre.” Many of the yards were fenced-in and had outside animals—but not fluffy ponies, this was a fluffy-free neighborhood—snoozing in the dull, thumping evening heat.
York, Olson and Ulrich pulled up in front of the house and walked up to the porch. A single orange light illuminated the table and chairs Mr. Rippentrop had set up. An empty bottle of beer and a deck of playing cards sat. Everything had a nicotine tinge, particularly around the doorknob.
“Do you guys smell that?” Ulrich said in a whisper.
“Yeah,” said Olson. “Whole place smells like a giant cigarette. Makes me wish I had one.”
“That’s what I thought it was at first. But now, it’s smelling more like… meat?”
York shrugged. “Maybe he had a barbecue.” He pulled out his night-stick and rapped on the door with it. “Mr. Rippentrop!”
A man’s voice was heard yelling “shit!” Ulrich peered over at the window by the door and noticed a dense vapor lingering up toward the ceiling.
“Mr. Rippentrop!” York rapped on the door again. “Open up now, sir!”
“Go away!” came a barely-audible reply. “I’m trying to get some sleep!”
Ulrich hopped off the porch and got a closer look through the window. A haze of smoke had washed over everything. The sound of a smoke detector began to blare. “Fire!”
The taller Olson joined Ulrich at the window with his gun drawn. He smacked the butt of the gun against the window a couple of times and the glass gave way. Cursing as the glass around the edges cut his hands, Olson climbed into the bedroom of the house through the busted window, immediately smelling what Ulrich was talking about and feeling his stomach knot up. And yes, the sound of a smoke detector was cutting through the night air, but there was a different, piercing sound that Olson didn’t need to ponder for even a second.
Olson kept his gun drawn and walked through the bedroom into the living room, where a shirtless man wearing faded jeans and sporting a graying blond beard had a baseball bat ready to swing. Upon seeing Olson’s gun, he dropped the bat and threw his hands up. “What do you want from me?!” came out in a slurred drawl. Next to him sat a little metal tub for cleaning fluffies. A little smoke was rising from it.
Olson started to speak but York darted past him, going straight for the metal tub. “Ugh!” He started to cough and guarded his mouth with his hand. “What started this fire?!”
“I don’t know,” Rippentrop said.
“Hey, guys.”
York and Olson turned around and saw that the kitchen was completely ensconced in terrible gray smoke that smelled like a cross between burning flesh and cotton candy. In the middle of it, barely visible, was Officer Ulrich, staring at a black pile on the ground. The pile was whimpering and panting. Olson stepped closer, York stayed put, afraid of what he might find out.
“It’s… I think it’s the fluffy. I—” Ulrich gagged and went for the sink, orally ejecting the Papa John’s calzone he had for lunch. Olson knelt down and got a closer look at the fluffy. Indeed, its fur—what hadn’t been burnt off of its body—was brown. The tail indicated it once had a dark blue mane. Its entire back and much of its left flank was burned beyond recognition. Only the head, the tail and the two front feet were unscathed. The fluffy’s mouth was open. It was letting out a constant “scree” that was interrupted only by the occasional breath. It was crying from its one un-melted eye but its tears were evaporating on its smoldering cheek fur. Olson knew what he had to do, rifling through his pocket for a lethal sedative until he was interrupted by a crashing sound from the living room.
York had Paul Rippentrop pinned to a wall with one arm and was brandishing his gun like a club with the other. “Tell me where the fuck you got that thing,” York said through gritted teeth, pale face reddening, “and maybe I won’t give you the pistol-whipping you deserve.”
“It was an accident!” Rippentrop said, his voice a reedy and frantic screech not entirely unlike a fluffy’s. “I-I fucked up, I was going to give it a bath and my cigarette fell in its mane! I swear to God! I didn’t want to burn it to death!”
York dinged Rippentrop’s forehead with his gun hard enough to leave a cut. Blood oozed down the man’s thin nose. “You know what? I don’t care if you tell me the truth about abusing it, you piece of shit. Where. Did you get. The brown fluffy? Who fucking sold it to you?”
“I bred it!” cried Rippentrop. “Look, look in the back room if you don’t believe me!”
Olson grabbed York by the shoulders and pulled him off of Rippentrop. “York, it’s done. We need to call this in.”
“He burned that fluffy to a fucking crisp, Willie!” bellowed York. “That was the easiest money we could have ever made! Do you want to clean up dead shitrats for the rest of your life?!”
Olson shook York hard enough to make his neck crack. A fire that was in York’s eyes went out all at once, leaving dull gray in its wake. He looked at Olson in a daze, then looked down at his gun and recoiled, almost dropping it. Panicked, he untucked his shirt and wiped the gun handle off. Rippentrop dropped to a sitting position against the wall, sobbing quietly.
“You lost it for a second,” said Olson. “Why don’t you just go outside for some fresh air, Inspector? Let me and Vince handle this.”
York nodded, then turned and sauntered to the door. Ulrich, vomit still staining his chin, watched the inspector leave and realized he looked like a kid who got caught torturing a bug. He stepped out. The night air felt cold on York’s sweat-shined skin. He’d never needed a drink quite so badly in his life.
-TO BE CONTINUED-
I pray she can at least see the suspect argument as something to think on.