First off I’d like to say thank you to everyone who responded to my request for help with ideas. I’m happy to say that I’ve got the creative juices flowing again. Even still, I’ll be happy to hear any suggestions for story ideas both about the megaherd and other concepts. I wish every one of you a Happy Holidays.
Name: Vanessa Waters
Occupation: US Military Chemical Corps. Researcher
Age at time of Megaherd crisis: 38
You never know what you’re truly capable of until you’re under duress. Until you have to run against the clock, when there’s more at stake than you can possible realize.
I learned that after the president gave us a direct order to create a ‘fluffycide’ capable of stopping the megaherd. When we asked the Pentagon how much money we had to work with, they just said 'you’ve got bigger problems than a big enough budget. Name it what you need, you’ll get it."
We had a few concepts in the beginning. One idea was a toxin we could slather on crops and other edible plants that fluffies ate. But there’d be too much collateral damage to the ecosystem as well as a risk to humans.
A second option was something with aerial dispersal but we needed something that, again, wouldn’t have such massive collateral damage.
It came to us that the poison we needed for the fluffies was an anti-livestock poison. One we could tailer to affect fluffies and only fluffies. Something that didn’t harm other wildlife and had no chance of ground contamination. We wanted something that we could put in a river that both a fluffy and an elk drank from and only the fluffy would die. Nothing else, not even fish.
One of our researchers who was a history buff pointed out that in Kenya’s Mau Mau Revolt during the fifties, the poisonous latex of the African Milk Bush was used to kill cattle. The poison itself is easy enough to synthesize. But we needed something more. We needed something that wouldn’t kill immediately and we could deploy in a large enough amount that there’d be next to no survivors.
It was a bumpy road getting to the right formula. Our first idea resulted in a pregnant mare going from healthy to puking out her unborn foals in five minutes before choking on one and dying. The smarty we gave it to spent its final moments demanding to know why it couldn’t stop making ‘sicky wawa’s.’
Our second formula was one that caused death by rapid dysentery. That one was a failure as well but goddamn was it funny hearing an entire herd all screaming that they’re shitting uncontrollably before dying. But we had no idea how much food was in the stomach of each individual fluffy. Testing with fluffies who hadn’t eaten in a while were spraying shit like firehoses but were able to survive once there was nothing left to shoot out their assholes.
The magic mixture turned out to be an offshoot of the latex from the Milk Bush but with a few additives. First, Psolaren, which would induce vomiting, diarriah and depression. Not only would the fluffies be puking and shitting themselves uncontrollably, they’d be too sad to do anything about it. For the coup de gras, we picked the active ingredient of the poison found in Rosary Peas which would induce liver failure and death over the course of days. For foals, the kill time could be reduced to hours.
Why did we pick something that would act slowly? Fluffy’s are by no means smart, but they’re very skittish. If a lot of them start dying at once, they scram. Their piss poor survival instinct becomes a whole lot stronger when they see a whole bunch of their fellows eating something and then dying.
We decided to go with an aerosol delivery system that could engulf up to 95% of the megaherd if they were brought to a confined location like a valley.
The results of testing were very, very promising. Fluffy’s were dying an hour or so after exposure, becoming too weak from sadness and sickness to try running anywhere. And we tested everything from individual fluffy’s to groups of over a thousand. We had our Excalibur. And within two weeks, we had enough of the gas for a large scale deployment. We even made it smell like pasta to trick the furry fucks. We decided to call our creation ‘Bad Sketti.’ And it it helped prevent one of the largest potential famines in human history.