The rain pattered onto the pavement of a nondescript town. Neon signs reflected off of the bleary puddles and wetted brick walls. The night sky was an inky dark that the streetlights and storefronts fed their electric glow. A black van rolled along one of the roads least tread by human witnesses.
On the sidewalk along this road, there was a stray fluffy in the wrong place at the wrong time. With so many of them out in the world, there rarely was ever a right place and a right time for a lone stray fluffy. It was a stallion, and he was dragging a wet bag of chips along in the hopes of providing the rare meal to his family that was not rotten garbage.
The high beams flicked on. The stallion whimpered and dropped his bounty before shielding his sensitive eyes with his front hooves.
“See-pwace owies! Wai see-pwace gib fwuffy owies? Am bad fwuffy? Huu huu, sowwy see-pwacies, nu wan go in dawkies, buh hewd nee’ nummies! Pwease stahp huwties fo’ gud fwuffy!”
The rumble of the approaching engine made the fluffy void himself on the spot. He lowered his forelegs just in time to see the sleek paneling of the van pull up right next to him.
“Oh noes! Is munsta! Nu-nu-nu-nu-nu…”
The fluffy kept stammering as he hunkered down and awkwardly waddled backwards from the van. The importance of the potato chips was lost in his rising panic. He stepped in his waste. He then lost the rhythm of his steps, and in his confusion, tripped over his feces-covered hooves.
The side-door popped out from its locked position and slid sinuously down the lines of the vehicle. The fluffy bemoaned its poor coordination.
“Meanie weggies! Meanie see-pwacies! Huu huu, munsta am gonna ged fwuffy! Huu huu huu! Nu faiw! Nu faiw!”
Sure enough, the operative in the all-black garb scruffed the feral with hands covered in black leather gloves. The stallion was whisked away in the van. The van kept on rolling.
This wasn’t an extermination effort. This was the exploitation of a mortally dubious opportunity. Stray fluffies were fodder for illicit studies meant to pierce the various layers of the mind. Tearing apart physical brain matter was commonplace in laboratories, where the lobotomy lived on and thrived; but the violent rape of a living psyche was a territory of study shifted from unsuspecting human subjects to the unwitting fluffy population.
The stallion found himself being wiped down with disposable cleaners. The synthetic fabrics and smells were accosting his senses. Though he begged and begged, the person silhouetted by the harsh white lamps did not stop.
Once cleaned, the stallion was bound in the most uncomfortable position for a fluffy pony.
He was posed to stand upright, almost spread eagle, against a metal frame that had rubber restraints wrapped around each limb. Fluffy forelimbs had limited mobility, and their range of motion was limited exclusively to normal locomotion and giving hugs. Fluffies had similar limits to their neck articulation as well. This frame forced the fluffy to hunch his neck over his shoulder blades and stretched the ligaments of his forelimbs to their limits in order to splay them apart as such.
“Owies! Wowstest owies! Nu can moob! Owies!”
The stallion panted in between whimpers. He was made uncomfortably aware of the heaving of his rib cage with each labored breath. Then, there was a solid latching sound as a switch was flipped. The lamps went dim. That was when the stallion realized that the van had no windows. It was dark, but not completely blacked out, in the observation cabin.
The shadowy figure was sitting in front of the prostrated fluffy. The closest thing to a boogeyman for fluffies, if they had the capacity to form elaborate myths of terror to share with one another. If they even had the opportunity to escape the clutches that subjected them to–
The pleading pony was abruptly quieted for a moment when the operator aggressively pried his mouth open and shoved an oversize pill down his throat. The gloved hand slapped the fluffy’s snout, and then lightly socked him in the gut, to force him to swallow the unappealing chemical package.
The stallion gasped, “Wowstest hitties! Nu hit fwuffy no moa’! Fwuffy am sowwy! Am sowwy! Weawwy, weawwy–” He broke down into a sobbing fit. The confusion and fear drowned his sensibilities. The drugs were going to do so much more. So much worse.
The fluffy tensed. His rectum twitched. Instead of loosing stool, the fluffy passed impotent flatulence. The fluffy’s digestive processes were halted. The inability to drop feces from fear was far from the forefront of the fluffy’s concern, though.
The fluffy was no longer conscious of the gentle rolling and rocking of the van. No longer aware of the specter that had been with him before. The van, and all of existence, were distant realms. The fluffy’s normally small mind had expanded exponentially, and like the cosmos, it was mostly…
Empty. So very empty. Terrifyingly bare.
“FWUFFY AM AWONE. NEE’ HEWP! HEWP FWUFFY!”
In an instant, the stallion found himself in a distorted reflection of his family’s nest. His mate and adolescent children were tearing into the bag of potato chips. Their collection of moldy cushions and discarded pillows in the middle of the alleyway were pristinely captured in the fluffy’s memory. The fluffy was not used to remembering things so vividly. He was also unfamiliar with spatial relationships within his own mindscape. His family was simultaneously in hoof’s reach for him, and yet miles away. His perspective fluctuated from him being his regular size, to him being a giant, and to him being incredibly tiny in relation to the other fluffies.
“HEWP! HEWD HEWP FWUFFY! HUU HUU, SEE-PWACIES AM BEIN’ WEIWD! AM GON’ BE SICKIES!”
The stallion hiccuped, heaved, and retched. Luckily for him, his incapacitated bodily functions prevented him from actually regurgitating. In his mind, the sensation was the most intense feeling. The liquid surging up his gullet, the acidic burn, the acrid taste.
The fluffy’s eyelids were forced apart to the maximum by abject fright. His pupils were tiny in similarly dilated irises. Half-formed images swarmed before his mind’s eye. His hearing was overcome by an incessant buzzing noise; a warped rendition of an engine in use.
The boogeyman’s face worked its way in and out of the fractal patterning. The abstract picture was painted in bright crimson. Flashes of yellow tore through the peripheries.
The stallion jittered. Convulsions made his breathing irregular. His lips were partly curled apart as he tried to speak. His words were nothing more than moaning utterances, wholly senseless in their meaning.
He managed to urinate down one leg when his eyes started to roll erratically in their sockets. Then, with one last groaning protest, the fluffy’s heart seized, and its beating ceased.
Some time later, the data collection was finished. Without the vehicle stopping, the van’s side door opened and the twitching corpse of the stallion was discarded onto the road.
Other drivers would run the fluffy over without a second thought, thoroughly destroying the evidence of the nefarious deeds inflicted onto a creature that was only trying to preserve its meager livelihood.