Headcanon Barrage Part 122: Facts Grab-bag (by ZealousBadIdea)

Fluffies and Water

Believe it or not but fluffies can be taught how to swim. They must be taught from an extremely young age, right around when they are weaned. While starting young is useful because they are more capable of learning new things, it is done at that age more so to get them over their fear of water as it is next to impossible to overcome an adult fluffy’s fear of water. It is also important to keep them in good physical condition if you plan on having your fluffy go swimming as their fluff can get quite heavy when it is wet and can actually cause the fluffy to drown even if they know how to swim. An alternative is to keep the fluffy’s fluff short in order to retain less water but few fluffies like having their fluff short. Certain companies also produce wet-suits for fluffies but these can be prohibitively expensive and not all fluffy are comfortable wearing tight clothing.

Fluffies and Lying

Fluffies are not well know for their intelligence and are not particularly good at lying as they usually lack the mental acuity to process the truth and a falsehood at the same time, ie to lie. As a result fluffies are, to a certain degree, hardwired to always tell the truth by their very makeup. However, certain more intelligent or clever fluffies, usually smarties, actually are capable of this to a degree; while they can lie it is very rarely convincing.

Even when fluffies are better at lying than others, they almost always have a tell that can be easily picked up. If they have a name and try to lie they will forget their name and just refer to themselves as “Fluffy”. An example;
after a fluffy defecated on the carpet and is about to be punished; instead of properly lying and saying “Bonbon nu make bad pooppies on teh cawpet” said fluffy will say “Fluffy nu make bad poopies on teh cawpet.”
The reason for this is very similar to why most fluffies aren’t able to lie in the first place, they are almost incapable of processing a truth and a falsehood at the same time and as such their memory lapses and they temporarily forget their own name and default to just Fluffy.

In a lot of ways, it is how a lie detector works on humans; the stress of processing a truth and a falsehood causes a person’s heart rate to spike in a measurable way thus indicating they aren’t telling the truth.

In this way, seeing how a fluffy responds to itself is a good way for one to tell if a fluffy is being sincere in an apology or not. If they say something like “bonbon am Sowwy” then they actually mean it but if they say “fluffy am Sowwy” then they are almost certainly lying and can be punished accordingly.

It should be noted however that extreme stress or fear can also have the same effect on a fluffy, causing it to forget its name even if it is telling the truth. For this reason, it is important to keep both yourself and the fluffy calm when questioning them.

Fluffies and Chocolate

It is a commonly held belief that chocolate is poisonous to fluffies; this is mostly untrue, however they can be fatally allergic to it. For fluffies, they either have the allergy and it is completely fatal to them and should be avoided or they do not have the allergy and they can safely eat most kinds of chocolate. If a fluffy is allergic to chocolate and consumes some, it’s throat will begin to swell shut in just under a minute and it will die of anaphylactic shock in just under 10 minutes.

Because of the rapid progression of symptoms leading death, it is generally advised to not feed your fluffy chocolate unless you already know it isn’t allergic. You can find out if your fluffy is allergic from your local vet that specializes in fluffy veterinary care or by allowing your fluffy to consume a very small amount of chocolate with a fluffy safe EpiPen on hand and the proper training on how to administer it to a fluffy.

Oddly enough, the distribution of fluffy populations with the allergy differs from region to region. In most areas, the number of fluffies that have the allergy are around 40% but in the Midwestern United States that number climbs to around 56%. In northern Canada and Alaska the percentage is around 92% while in the Southern United States and Mexico, the percentage is only around 11%. Strangely, the percentage of fluffies with the allergy in Russia is less than 0.1%. It is currently unknown why this is.

Fluffies and Curing their Lisp

It is actually possible to “fix” a fluffies lisp. It does however take intensive training, must start before they start talking, and can take over a year to achieve. In addition, it must be reinforced periodically or the fluffy will start to relapse back into its lisp. Another curious side effect of training out the fluffy lisp is that the fluffy will develop a severe learning disability and will no longer be able to retain any knowledge that is attempted to be imparted to it. It is almost as if the required knowledge to get rid of the lisp takes up all the free space in the fluffy’s head. Because of all the drawbacks with little to no benefit, training a fluffy to speak “normally” is very rarely sought out or undertaken.

Fluffies and Fluffy Pony Drowns

It is a very well known stereotype that if a fluffy just looks at water, no matter how small the amount, they run the risk of drowning in place. While this largely false there is in fact some truth to it. Certain fluffies have such extreme imaginations that when they see water, they imagine themselves trying to swim in it. They of course have the instinctual knowledge that they are likely to drown if they did so. This causes a kind of psychosomatic response in the fluffy but instead of the fluffy’s body trying to perform the normal bodily response to drowning, it instead recreates the feeling.
During an episode the fluffy’s throat will swell shut, and in some cases their diaphragm will stop functioning, eventually resulting in the fluffy suffocating. While this is happening, their salivary gland will go into overdrive and fill the throat and mouth with large amounts of saliva to the point that it will overflow and spill out of the mouth. This is why it will look as though the fluffy drowned even if it is nowhere near water.
It should be noted that this phenomenon was almost exclusively used in model I and II fluffies as well as their descendants.

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Assuming a fluffy loves chocolate, potentially as a favorite food besides spaghetti will it have a preferrance for it’s brown babies? Will it decide that non runt brown foals are nummie babbehs because they’re brown and smell good?

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Actually at that point, the brown foal has a good chance of becoming best baby. It’d be something like;
“bwown bebbeh am mamma’s fawat bebbeh and bestest bebbeh cuz bwown bebbeh am bwown like bestest spwesha nummies chwa-ca-lat.”

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See I like this idea that it’s conditioned, because then it makes them simply immature and easily influenced rather than programmed to be evil.

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Good universe expansion, nice use of the fluffie model # to explain behavior no longer seen in modern fluffies.

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Yeah that little bit is from my fluffy timeline post. Basically model I-alphas were the fluffies released by PETA, model I were the ones actually released to the public but really weren’t all that different from the alphas. The model II were only slightly better than the model I. The model III are the ones that are basically what HasBio were trying to make originally. There were also in between releases such as model III-S or model II Legacy.

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I used a simpler thing myself but I like yours better, mind if I reference it.

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Sure go ahead. I find it’s a great way to have terrible fluffies as well as good fluffies in the same world. The good pet ones are later models and the “bad” ones are either older models or descended from the early models

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That and cheep knockoffs also help explain the hellgremlens in a way that keeps them from being reintroduced on a large scale. Very solid world building.

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Yeah, I always explain it the model I’s and II’s had really janky programming that easily degraded between generations. That is why you get so many hellgremlins from ferrals, who are often descended from those initial escapees, or from mills that turn out so many fluffies that programming errors build quickly.

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That would explain some of the rarer types seen in the wild, like canibel fluffies.

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Well those are a genetic mutation rather than a corruption of programing. I always thought it was a mutation that, among the physical changes, also caused predator/carnivorous elements of their DNA to be expressed as well a maybe a small programing error where fluffies are listed as acceptable food.

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Wouldn’t mutation likelihood be higher in earlier gen fluffies since Hasbio had not worked out all the kinks? Or in gen 3 since Hasbio has likely tinkered with the DNA even more.

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The mutation was found during the development of the fluffies, so even before they were released. It is likely that it is caused by the presence of certain gene combination that can potentially spring up in any fluffy breeding. I would liken it something like down syndrome but much much rarer and with more side-effects

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The big ones I know of are christel hearts syndrome and being born without legs

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