Mayor Joseph, an elderly man pushing on 80 years old, had only one thought on the brain after getting this meeting going…
This was going to be a waste of time.
He’d seen this song and dance a dozen times and heard it a dozen times more.
“Fix your fluffy problem!”, they’d say. “Make the problems go away!”, they’d say. “Save the yards!”, protect property living and otherwise, remove the source of things variably described as nuisances at best to outright biohazards.
He had seen this sales pitch so many times over the faces and methods really started to blur together. He’d been a long time mayor and that meant being a long time caretaker of a town that barely qualifies as one now. 60 years ago, St. Francis, Florida, was a boomtown with a lot of factory workers, turpentine cultivators, and affluent city goers from Apalachicola looking for a place to shack up in the rural areas of North Florida’s Gulf Coast.
St. Francis used to have a population of a few thousand at its height and only seemed to be going up. Place seemed perfect, stable weather year-round without the freezing snowfall of further north nor the blisteringly hot summers of the Florida Peninsula, nice mix of established urbanized landscape with plenty of surrounding, pretty woods on one side and the ocean on the other.
Going through a list of why everybody, save for a few hundred mostly older folks or poor families, left town over the decades would be an hours long diatribe he’d had made way too many times before.
Going through a list of why there were so many damn fluffies kept showing up here would be almost as long but it all boiled down to two things. Environment and people.
People released the blasted things before they could be managed properly. The environment didn’t handle the problem because a sudden horde of creatures babbling in the language of the most dangerous predator on the planet confused any carnivores who can kept a lid on it long enough for the first few generations to get rolling.
People mass-produced them without taking care of them correctly or weeding out the issues Hasbio kept claiming existed, because for too long of a time there was a lot of money in it. The environment people put them in didn’t stop those problems from propagating even more.
And then people started mass dumping what they had mass-produced. And the very environment that attracted people to St. Francis’ grounds for thousands of years just so happened to be the country was perfect for the fluffies.
Greenery for food year-round, predators massively culled because nobody wanted to have cougars or bears living nearby when the town tried to save itself by selling itself as a vacation home spot a decade ago, and two large cities to the east and west constantly dumping fluffies, denser forests of the north, and an obvious barrier with an impassable ocean to the south. St. Francis had the perfect conditions and the exact right geography to funnel a near never-ending stream of the technicolor fuzzballs right into it.
And Joseph was all to aware, bittersweetly so with more of the former than the latter, that he was the mayor of a town in the boonies that everyone stopped caring about 30 years ago…
Joseph didn’t really have anything against fluffies in general, he’d seen a few of them owned by good folks who showed they could make for pretty good pets- er ‘biotoys’… That term still struck him as odd law-lingo.
Fluffies were very seldom seen as pets in these parts, but Joseph had known some neighbors who took them as such treat them well, be treated well in kind… and then have a traumatic awakening when a smarty invaded their house and either press ganged the pet into joining their herd, took advantage of the ignoramus in more ways than one, were flat-out killing them with brutality he’d never expected for anything based on a children’s show.
A flare of hatred, followed by cold, cold pain surged through his old nerves.
Poor Mr. and Mrs. Applejee, God rest their souls…
Coming home to find thirty of the shitstains had forced their way in through the repuporsed doggie door meant for their fluffy, “Blueberry”. The feral horde had fouled the entire house, and had left their beloved pet bludgeoned and covered in their own foul leavings whilst being forced upon by the smarty and his lackeys. Seeing their pet, and yes it was a pet and not a toy, being gangraped, bloody, and screaming for help was a sight amidst the ruined home they had spent their entire married life in was a vision their old hearts couldn’t take it at their age.
The neighbors, living hundreds of meters away, didn’t realize something was wrong until seeing the literal piles of shit covering the bodies in the doorway.
Joseph could still smell the foul disgracing their bodies when he’d attended their funeral, no matter how much the mortician tried to clean them up. The Applejees had gone through primary school with Joseph, and now he had to be the one to put them in the ground. They were some of the last people who called their mayor “Joe”, now there were only a few and he felt even more bitter and alone.
He made a point to put a load of birdshot through that bastard smarty’s skull himself, damn if it twisted the Hell out of his shoulder to do it, but apparently he had bred with so many of the mares and had so many spawn that looked almost exactly the same, he never could be sure if he’d gotten all of his brood. The strained mayor’s heart and body wasn’t what it used to be to chase them down, much to his earlier days as a hunter lamented bitterly.
The house had to be condemned and burned due to the damages and biohazard risk.
That was when he’d put the first ad out for exterminators… And if there ever was a horde of humans to rival the hordes of fluffies, it was them.
At first Joseph was overjoyed and plenty of them were just matter-of-fact about doing a good job, mostly the ones who were in pest-control prior and just adapted their methods for fluffies. But after going to inspect the work of one very enthusiastic “Fluffy Buster”, he’d found himself throwing up a second time due to something related to the fuzzballs.
The smell, all that blood. The wide, too wide, smile on the exterminator. He’d never seen that on a rat-culler or rabbit exterminator…
Joseph had opted not to explain to tell his colleagues and spouse on what they were doing with sewing needles, thread, rebar, quicklime, a blowtorch, and a machete. The “Fluffy Buster” cashed in the bounty on 40 fluffies and the old Mayor had heard every last one of them screaming “WAN DIE!” before they were put out of their misery. All whilst the “professional” kept eagerly showing off his work, oblivious to how it came off.
That’s how a mayor from the boonies discovered the abuse subculture. And just how many of them were exterminators. And just how many of those completely seemed to overlook that regardless of the law listing fluffies as “bio-toys”, they bled, suffered, and screamed in pain just like any animal. And most people don’t like seeing animals mutilated for the fun of it. This was a community with plenty of hunters, but the lot of them made a point to put the animal down quick as possible. And different than animals, fluffies could at least somewhat articulate, which made their agonizing deaths even more traumatic for anyone who might be horrified at a dog dying in the same way.
And then the other problems… Damage to property for one, some of the sloppier abuser agents had used poison or fires for their methods that didn’t stay with what the intended targets. Turns out a fluffy set ablaze with her babies glued to her legs was still capable of sprinting towards the underside of a house, especially when her shrieking, ignoramus of a mate tried to help her by hugging her and was caught on fire himself. Thing about houses near the woods is they tend to have a lot of flammable materials near them…
Then there was the unsightly business they did themselves with no regard for public decency. The town only had a few children, but that was a few too many that got traumatized when they saw literal heads on pikes in some idiot’s attempt at “psychological warfare” like Vlad against the Turks, despite being in public sight. More so when one of the children screamed out a name of their own fluffy upon seeing it strung up, disemboweled, and still alive, though not for much longer.
Whether the exterminator was telling the truth and insisting “Muddy” was going feral and joining the herd, or the family citing a broken latch on their back window and evidence of a home invasion of the human kind showing the exterminator’s bloodlust was out of control; it gave Mayor Joseph the single biggest lawsuit and personal grievance in the whole affair since the mayor had hired the man. The town was small enough that everybody knew each other and the grandpa who adopted that brown filly for his granddaughter was an old, now ex-friend of the mayor’s
Another friend, another familiar face lost; at an age one had so few to begin with…
And then there was one of the most nagging problems of them all. The observation that short of virtually carpet-bombing St. Francis, nothing seemed to keep the gaudy masses of fluffies away for long. They could seemingly kill every single feral in the immediate area and within a month the problem was virtually right back to where it started. Some of the old factories in the eastern and western laying cities have been converted into mills churning these things out by the truck load. And with an aging town, some of the old-timers around here weren’t spry or active enough to chase off pestering hordes declaring, “DUMMEH HOOMIN! DIS AM SMARTY LAND NAO!” at all hours.
It was like trying to fix a leaking faucet that was spewing at full blast by punching a hole in the floor for the water to drain into. The cure was almost as bad as the ills and was only treating the symptoms. Having seen what some of these messed-up creatures could do himself, Joseph absolutely understood where the contempt for them came from for plenty of people, but plenty of those folks were not the types Joseph wanted in his town.
Between the fluffies causing problems themselves, the problem not going away from those trying to do a good job, and a whole slew of problems from those who use the job for other reasons; he was so much his wits’ end he was prepared to listen to almost any proposal….
And after angrily ordering out one jackass trying to seriously propose mass poisoning the water supplies, he’d had long given up hope when this new blood showed up….
“Run that by me again, I’m starting to think my hearing is going faster than my sight,” Old Mayor Joseph muttered, his hands, thickly calloused with age that showed through his dark skin, reaching up to adjust his glasses.
“Then how about your associates answer the questions I bring up. First off, what causes bad behavior in feral fluffies? Why do they cause much more problems than any other feral or wild animal like rabbits and deer?”
“Beeecause they chew up gardens?” The mayor’s secretary and the town librarian, in a small place like this everyone had multiple jobs, noted.
“True, but wild herbivores raid crops too. What do fluffies do that other herbivores don’t?” Hands were knit together as the lab coated man sat, one leg kicked up on his thigh casually as he leaned back in the chair.
“Well, rabbits don’t exactly walk up to someone and demand things of them?” The librarian shrugged her shoulders.
“Almost all animals react to humans. Either inquisitively in the case of most livestock and pets, or fearfully in the case of wild animals. Some fluffies herds react like one or the other too, which ones don’t?”
The train of thought dawned on Mayor Joseph, who perked a brow, “… Smarty led ones?”
“Indeed Mr. Mayor, indeed,” the bispeckled man adjusted his glasses as he leaned forward, slicked back hair shining slightly in the light, “More specifically those suffering from “smarty syndrome” as it is called. A few feral herds are led by individuals called “Smarties” that garnered their rank from experience and tactfulness. These ones usually try to avoid problems with humans but unfortunately they’re pretty rare."
“Because of bad survival rates and people getting them mixed up with the ones with the syndrome, which are basically killed on sight for a lot of folks?”
“Precisely,” ‘Doctor’ Dorian smiled as he nodded along, “It’s a neural syndrome that can even affect foals. It’s not necessarily a learned behavior, I thought parental favoritism and spoiling can encourage it rather than nip it in the bud. It basically convinces them they are smarter than they actually are, whilst also ramping up aggression.”
“Right, Dunning-Kruger effect in full swing. Tell me something I don’t know, ‘Doctor’,” The mayor noted a bit dryly, suspicious this young thirty something really was a doctor. A few of the unsavory types had tried that prior. He could see the man’s get-up and noticed a few, discrepancies. His degree seemed valid, but what kind of zoologist or biologist walked around, outside, in a labcoat? That was something Joseph had only saw in movies and he wasn’t some dumb idiot to not know otherwise.
This one was a strange one. Maybe up to something…
“Well, you don’t know for instance the reason why the fluffies keep coming back constantly no matter how many traps or removals you do. Carrying capacity. Some golf courses are near ideal deer habitat. Food is plentiful, freshwater is immediately available, there is some brush to get cover, trees for shade, and large open areas so ambushes from the few predators that can live near humans have a hard time pulling it off… So my good mayor, why isn’t every golf course in the United States overrun by deer?”
“Carrying capacity…” The silver haired mayor raised an eyebrow after rubbing his chin, “Because some deer already live their?”
“Precisely!” Dorian left out there being a lot of other factors too, but those wouldn’t be relevant here anyways what was important was the major through line, which just so happened to also be a sales pitch, “You live in prime fluffy real estate, so even if someone wiped out all of them and even made measures to keep the rest of them out, eventually something is going to fill back up the carrying capacity. So long as feral fluffies exist, they will come to St. Francis.”
The weight of it hit the mayor a little harder than the young man was anticipating, enough Joseph saw his calm facade twitch and crack slightly. All the misery and pain, not to mention stress, was starting to hit him all over again and was aging him more than time was.
Face in his hands, the mayor groaned painfully as the memories returned. Fouled bodies of old friends, colorful creatures with their heads literally on pikes, more than a few houses burning down, sobbing children and spiteful grandparents, and a cavalcade of well-meaning entrepreneurs and outright dangerous ignoramuses. St. Francis in one form or another had weathered hurricanes, one European colonization after another, pirate raids, the Civil War, economic boom and bust, and was aging into retirement. And it would be fluffies and all of the mess that came with them that did them in?!
He heard some of his assistant’s say his name, clearly worried and noticing the cold sweats and shaking going through a patriarch of the community. He’s been here long enough that some of the parents remembered sitting in his lap as Santa Claus around Christmas, and seeing a kind old man weep was heartbreaking.
In his mind, Mayor Joseph was in his own personal Hell. Full of fires, fouling smells, and pains of age this fluff epidemic reminded him of most of all. Would this never end?!
His breath quickened, pulse pounding between his ears painfully.
The librarian, even Doctor Dorian, seemed to close ranks around him with concern, the old man looking like he was about to have a heart attack in a very literal sense.
Mayor Joseph, remembering all of his downwards spiral and feeling bitter tears sting his eyes, clutched at his chest. All he wanted was to do good by people. Keep the town alive, don’t let it die or die slow. Watch people grow and thrive, and thrive himself knowing everyone was enjoying their life.
Failure, it was an icy stab through his chest that made his arm go numb.
He- He had a hard time breathing! His heart was sore and clenching- it was!
Soft
The mayor felt something very soft around his shin. Even if it wasn’t as blisteringly hot as it was in the peninsula, this was still Florida and he’d like to think himself a laid-back man. He really had come to a business meeting in shorts rather than his Sunday best.
And something was hugging its little limbs around his shin.
“Cooo cooooo, no hab wowwsties saddies nice mistah,” A very distinctly familiar voice hummed, cooing again as a cheek rubbed empathetically against his knee.
After several moments to finally feel his heart slow down, sometimes not realizing how much anybody of any age might need a hug, Mayor Joseph slowly looked down.
For a very brief moment, he recognized that particular shade of green fur and yellow mane, having looked back at him puffing its cheeks out as he leveled his gun barrel at it. But the starkly different demeanor, clean fur, sparkling eyes, and the knowledge he had killed that little monster himself told him quickly it wasn’t ‘that’ smarty again.
“Who- What is… this…?” Mayor Joseph muttered between dumbstruck remembrance and sheer confusion.
“Am Smarty! Wan huggies for heart hurties?” The smarty squeaked, wagging their tail.
“W-What?”
Doctor Dorian interjected with a hum, safely picking up the fluffy and holding it in his arms without any signs of it struggling or shrieking about “BAD UPPIES!”.
“Before anyone wonders, no this is not one of the veteran herd leaders. Smarty here probably isn’t even a year old. They were a foal with smarty syndrome I found in this very town, and one of the worst cases I’d ever seen. Both parents were ferals and must have spoiled them horribly…”
