This is in response to Wolfysmagic0130’s Goretober 2024 prompt.
The ideas sound interesting and while I don’t think I’ll be able to do all them, if the muse is hitting me on that day, I’ll certainly try to write out a story for it! Thank you for reading it and enjoy!
In a saferoom inside a house nestled at the end of an alleyway, a fluffy chased after a ball.
“Fewix gonna getchu!” The violet pegasus galloped while headbutting the toy and bouncing it from wall to wall. “Heh… heh… Gonna hab da speschul day with daddeh soon! Gonna see fwends! Gonna gwaduate!” The stallion was filled with extra gusto from excitement. Today, daddeh would ‘graduate’ him and allow him to come to the basement with him.
Daddeh never let him down there before. He saw his fellow fluffies be taken down there, but they never returned. Felix always wondered why he hadn’t been chosen, but his daddeh always explained to him it was because the others had finished their tests and they had graduated. When fluffies were good, daddy would test them and if they had passed their tests, they would graduate. Fluffies who graduated were adopted by new mummahs and daddehs and would be taken to their new forever homes.
Only very good fluffies who graduated were adopted by loving new owners, so Felix would be the best stallion he could be.
He never questioned why daddeh sometimes smelled not-pretty or why some of the fluffies suddenly got nervous when carried out of the saferoom and towards the basement.
Good fluffies didn’t question why their owners did their things. Only if they needed his help or huggies.
The door opened, and with a gasp, Felix stopped and ignored the ball bouncing away from him.
“Daddeh!” He ran over and wrapped his legs tightly around the man’s calf. “Wewcum back, daddeh! Fewix miss ou!”
“Daddy misses you too.” The man reached down to pet the fluffy. “Are you ready to graduate and come to the basement with me?”
“Yes! Fewix weddy! Wanna gwaduate and find new mummy and new daddeh!” Fewix wagged his tail before slowing it when a flash of guilt whipped across his brain. He would leave his current owner behind, but that’s what would happen. This daddeh helped fluffies find new homes. He’d miss him, but daddeh knew better than he did, so Felix would be good and not be too sad when he had to go.
“Good, Felix. Come with me.” He scooped the fluffy up in his arms and walked down the hallway. The poor bastard had no idea what he was in for. The order was nearly finished, and with a stroke of luck, he found a violet fluffy just in time. There was no more need to search for ferals on the street or for the adoptables in the shelters.
“Fewix gonna get new home~ Daddy gonna let him go~” Felix sang and cooed, swaying from side to side in the man’s arms while he descended the well-lit stairs. He stopped when the door grew closer and began to wiggle in anticipation at what he would see.
“Felix, you’re such a good fluffy. One of the best I’ve ever met.” The man opened the door and stepped past the threshold. He shut the door, the room was terribly dark and scary to the pegasus, but as long as he was in his daddeh’s arms, he was safe.
“Yus, Fewix am gud fluffy. Daddeh, why take fluffy to dark-HUH?!” He was dropped down onto a hard surface, and the sound of quiet creaking followed by a loud click alerted him. “D-Daddeh!” He squealed as the light turned on and temporarily blinded his sensitive eyes before they adjusted.
“It’s a shame I have you use you for my project, kid.”
Incomprehensible sights flooded his mind as his vision flicked back and forth. Jars with unknown contents lined the shelves and tables covered in congealed blood and a strange red, clear gel. Some of the large plastic sheets daddeh had once carried were discarded in a corner. Each one was stained heavily with unknown substances. The room smelled awful, worse than when daddeh would come upstairs from the basement. It was coppery, and if he could focus his nose, he’d be able to pick up the smell of shit emanating from some area in the large room.
Hanging off of thick hooks attached to the ceiling were huge clear blocks with something unidentifiable inside them. He couldn’t make anything out of them, let alone even have a hint of what they could even hint to be out of the limited archives of his mind. They were all colored and arranged in a specific pattern. Starting in red and ending in indigo.
Felix began to rapidly breathe and track the man’s movements. He raised himself up on his hind legs and pressed against the cage wall.
“Daddeh! Why am Fewix in sorry box?! Why am in scawy room?!”
His questions ignored, the fluffy’s breathing increased and he began to tap against the bars in an attempt to catch his attention.
“Daddeh!”
“Be quiet, Felix.” He spoke with a coldness that shocked the creature into silence. “Felix, you are going to ‘graduate’.” He pulled out several tubes and set them on the table. “Before, you were just a simple fluffy learning how to shit in a litter box and keep yourself clean so my job will be easier. Now you will serve a purpose greater than you can ever understand. You’ll be immortalized and admired for the rest of your body’s physical existence. You will be both art and education.”
“Edwucation?” As the artist predicted, Felix didn’t understand at all. What did he mean by that? Was he going to teach others by being locked up in a cage? But he was a good fluffy! He never went into the sorry box before! The fluffy teared up, wondering what he had done wrong, but he would promise the man he would never do it again.
“Yes, I will take you apart and let everyone see what a fluffy really is. A wondrous and terrible chimera. Nothing more than a product for children, and yet you can think, feel, and even commit atrocities that rival even the darkest minds of man.”
He turned to Felix and grinned, baring all his front teeth towards Felix. “But you are still nothing more than a lowly animal. It is so low that not even the law sees you as such. Felix, you will be reduced to nothing more than flesh, bones, and organs. People will marvel at how we adapted such an aberration to thrive in this world.”
Shaken at the artist gazing at him, Felix backed as far as he could and pressed his rump up against the other side of the cage. “But fwuffy am nawt ab… abahwashun.” He didn’t know what that word meant, but it sounded very bad. Very bad.
“Oh, but you are. You very much are.” When the project he thought was his magnum opus had been ruined by a feral herd, the artist thought he would lose his spark and never find his muse again. But he realized that it wasn’t the end of everything. It was just the end of one medium, then another. These things need to be preserved. In the present, as the potential of such things, an artist can accomplish utilizing the biotoys, and in the future, the consequences of man’s hubris in attempting to monetize a monster he had yet to realize.
“Let me show you, dear Felix. Your ‘bwudda’ will be more than happy to volunteer.”
Reaching up to two of the blocks, he unhooked them and brought them over to Felix. He showed the block with the strange meat-like object inside before placing it down in front of him, another in front of that block, and another. Some pieces contained large chunks inside them, and the man claimed them to be ‘muscles and bones’. Others were hollow, showing the contents, or lack of them within, and smaller chambers appeared as if they had been coiling back and forth. Beside the large hollow cavity was a green-yellow fluid and a solid black line pointing out into the hollow with a number beside it.
Each piece aligned nearly perfectly and slowly began to condense and shrink into a small circular shape with an upper chamber filled with something that looked close to a smooth sponge at the top and a tongue-like lump at the bottom.
Without him realizing it, Felix’s body began to tense up, and the hairs along his back and inside his mane began to stiffen. There was something terrible about this—something he couldn’t identify, but the primal instinct buried deep within did. This was the last thing he would see while he lived, and it would sear itself into his memory until he died.
Felix registered screaming in the room, and it wasn’t until he coughed that he realized he was making the noise himself.
In front of him were the components of Cherry, sliced up into pieces and perfectly lined up to recreate the image of the unicorn. The red fluffy had always thought of himself as the bestest because the man had always paid particular attention to him first before the others. When he was selected to ‘graduate,’ he stuck his tongue out to the rest of the group and told them he would have all the best things in the world. The last words he could recall the fluffy saying while led out in his father’s arms was how he would eat nothing but sketties.
Now he was nothing more than these heinous munsta-bwockies, and his eyes were held open, vacant, and staring directly into his.
Watching the pegasus void his bowels and frantically whip his body back and forth as he searched for an escape with blind desperation brought a smile to the artist’s face. “Oh, Felix. Cherry was like this, too. When he saw what he would be, he thought he could escape.” With the stallion doing the hard work for him, the man would spend less time preparing him.
He delicately placed the blocks back up into their resting spot before opening the cage and reaching in to grab the waste-stained fluffy.
“WAI DADDEH! WAI! MUNSTAH! MUNSTAH!”
This must be a nightmare! It can’t be anything but that! His mind raced, trying to wake itself up. He reached up with a hoof and tried to bite himself, but the man noticed and secured his limbs to prevent his self-harm.
Felix squealed and screeched, begging him to let him go, to do literally anything but turn him into what he had just witnessed before his eyes. The room abruptly went silent when the artist dunked Felix into the bucket, leaving him inside before pulling him back out.
He gagged and sputtered, shutting his eyes tight in an attempt to blot out the stinging pain invading his eyes. He gasped when suddenly placed on the ground and squeezed extremely hard, forcing any remnants of his feces out before he was dunked in once more. The artist was careful not to submerge his snout for too long. He wanted him cleaned, not drowned. He learned a hard lesson in trying to flush out detergent-clogged organs before plastination.
“Good boy, cough it all out.” He lifted Felix and placed him into a mount to secure with straps. He hosed the fluffy down with warm water several times to calm him before leaving him there to dry. Usually, he’d use a blow dryer to expedite the process, but he didn’t have the luxury. He had several more works that needed to be finished, and Felix would have to wait until then.
Closing the fluffy’s muzzle shut with a leather strap, he left the weeping pegasus alone while grabbing his tools.
Felix whimpered and strained against the straps. In between bouts of struggle and exhaustion, he was forced to watch the artist prepare other fluffy corpses. Some were strangely stiff, and others very soft, as if they had died very recently. When Felix focused his vision, he let out a muffled squeal at the sight of foals! It seemed it wasn’t only the adults who were his victims.
Some foals were sliced up down along their length, each one meticulously measured out in thickness before they were laid out on a rectangular container. The artist used lasers and rulers to ensure they were perfectly aligned before slowly pouring the clear resin out over them. Each cross-section revealed the internals of the foal. With a few precise movements and some time, the pieces were arranged up and down in a rectangular column of resin.
Another piece was the skin of some poor fluffy flattened out like a rug. The light green pelt lay on top of a mannequin beside the skeletal remains of its owner. Both were now preserved together when the resin filled the cube.
As the hours passed, Felix no longer made noise. He no longer moved, having exhausted every muscle, and he had no more tears to shed. He had stopped watching and now simply waited for everything to end. This wasn’t a nightmare, but reality. His fellow fluffies and himself weren’t going to forever homes. They were never intended to in the first place. It was nothing more than some kind of project for a twisted man’s mind.
Hearing a loud thump, he wearily looked up at the artist. The man had placed down a large resin block in the middle of a table covered in sheets. He shone a light down on it at every angle, closely inspecting the block before tapping at it in satisfaction. Inside was a bright pink mare with her eyes closed as if sleeping. Her stomach peeled back and cut open, and a litter of seven foals were inside. All beautiful bright colors are still attached to the placenta. Forever suspended in their mother’s womb.
Felix heaved at the sight of a tiny purple fetus. Two violet fluffies at two different life stages now share the same fate.
Sighing heavily, the artist walked to Felix and freed him from his restraints. “It is your turn, Felix. Be a good boy, and this will be quick.” The fluffy barely resisted, simply huffing and grunting when placed on the table. “Come on, boy. Uppies.” He lifted the fluffy and used thin metal stands to keep him standing up.
“Stay like that for me.” He reached up, pulling at the tubes he had now attached to a suspended machine. “This will make you stay upright like your siblings.” He lined another tube against Felix’s neck and quickly inserted it inside. “This will take all the blood out.” He explained. “If this stays inside, it’ll go bad, and you’ll begin to rot, and I cannot have you spoil my artwork.”
Felix squirmed as he looked down and watched the red liquid drain from him. “Fewix no wan… no wan…” He didn’t want to be art or a block of flesh and resin. He wanted to run free, to go to a new home and have a new family. Start his own family. He wanted to keep living. He made one last effort to lift himself off the stand but couldn’t muster more than a couple of inches before collapsing down again.
He was too weak and too tired. The only thing he can do now is to blink and look up at the artist who cared for him until his last moments.
“It’s okay. It’ll be over soon, and you’ll finally rest.” The artist ran his hand over Felix’s head. “For all it’s worth, you are a very good boy. You will be remembered and admired.” He held the fluffy still as he continued to pet him, preventing him from moving while the last ounces of his life drained into the bucket below.
His body exsanguinated. The artist turned the machine on, and it began to whir and pump fluids in to finish flushing the fluffy of all unwanted fluids before he began the dehydration process. The artist took one more look at Felix before he marked his fluff and prepped the slicer, preparing to make the same disc-shaped sections that would match the others.
Days later, a body exhibit was being held at an art center. Plastinated humans were presented to educate, enlighten, and horrify the crowds who came to witness the spectacle. In a smaller room, fluffies decorated the walls and pedestals, each one to be admired, gawked at, and reviled for all time.
The artist, engaging with the captivated group in front of him, shared his process and the inspiration behind his use of fluffies as his current medium of expression.
Beside him was a suspension of fluffies arranged in an arch beginning with Red. Then orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo. At the very bottom was a violet fluffy cut apart and arranged in the same sections as the others above. Attached to the bar above, a name was attached.
Purple Pegasus Fluffy. Felix.