You are Anon Anonalewsky, former fluffy “bug tester” for HasBio and current professional brainwasher whose experiment is not going well. At the start, results of the chemically-assisted aversion therapy were promising, with a fluffy by the name of Walter (tagged as A-1, but reinforcement guidelines recommended using names) is a particularly good example. The injection that the subjects, all problem animals who dubbed themselves “smarty friends,” served as a nauseant with mild paralytic qualities, disabling the muscles that made vomiting possible through the nervous system.
Unfortunately, it also seems to be the root of the problem that’s going to have you moving to an entirely different experiment. After a week of use in tandem with a harness and video screens displaying the behaviors the project wished to curb, the fluffy subjects were beginning to show a desirable change. The actions themselves, whether the serum was injected or not, were causing psychosomatic symptoms to manifest.
It is a month later, and you’re walking into a laboratory that is becoming ever more quiet. After that week of daily injections, A-2 began showing signs of ulcers, with blood in his copious amounts of stool. Your hunch turned out to be correct; within four weeks, only the control and fluffies who received only the first week of [REDACTED] injections are reasonably healthy. Even when the sessions were reduced, the problem of stomach and intestinal lesions forming proved inevitable for the serum as is.
Flipping through the overnight notes from the care staff, the outlook is grim. Stool samples collected by the caregiver staff have been either black sludge or curiously non-existent. You set it aside and address the remaining fluffies, “Good morning everypony,” before hitting the release on their cages. The remaining healthy subjects waddle out, and begin their usual spiel, at least until the programming gives them dry heaves.
Another problem is beginning to emerge: The simple forgetfulness of the fluffy mind. With the exception of Walter, the more distant the injections and “therapy” become, the less effective their psychosomatic response. In short, the programming isn’t sticking, and the fluffies who have been kept on it are dying. The placebo injections and continued therapy portion has had almost no effect in maintaining the treatment.
Some who were taken off before the ulcer symptoms began seem to be having difficulties as well. They are bloated, endlessly complaining of “tummeh huwties,” and sit with bowls full of stale kibble. “Whewe stuffy mawe fwiend, dummeh coat daddeh?! Bawwew wan’ good feews!” blurts A-6, puffing and stomping just the same as the day he came in. You ignore him, stepping over the divider; as dumb and over-confident as the smarties are, when you cross into the pen, they know it’s time for your Sorry Gun and some TV time.
You look at A-9, a particularly miserable green pegasus that doesn’t even bother with his smarty spiel, “Huu huu, wowstest tummeh owwies… mista hewp fwuffy?” Without ceremony, you lift the creature up, who immediately begins shrieking in pain; curiously, not a single turd forces its way out from his ass. After setting him on the table, his smarty syndrome’s usual symptoms assert once the pain of whatever is going wrong in his guts subsides, “Why huwt bestest fwuffy?! Nuu bad fwuffy, Awoe am GUD SMAWTY! GIB… SOWWIEST… POOOOOPIEEEEEES!”
He keeps his rear trained on you, pounding the table with increasing force and growing more pained and irate as he strains to force something, anything out at you. Yet again, a fluffy in your lab forces his organs out through one of his orifices, but this time it is the other end: A-9’s rectum prolapses with a small squirt of blood. “Whuh…? Sowwy poopies no faww… whewe poopies?” He begins circling, the quarter foot of his rectum hanging out, badly irritated but relatively clean.
Reaching into the first drawer of the examination table, you retrieve a scalpel, an electric shaver, and force A-9 on his side; again, he squeals in pain, forcing out another inch or two of his lower intestine. Amidst his wailing you strip away the fluff from his belly, not caring about the blood as the cheap clippers knick his flesh, nor when he begins screaming for his “tummy sketties” to stay in as the scalpel opens him up. One knick of his stomach, and it becomes obvious what had gone wrong.
Out of his stomach flows a fetid slurry that had been rotting in his guts. By the looks of it, the [REDACTED] had over time paralyzed the nerves that allowed for vomiting and passing chyme into the intestines. In all likelihood, this fluffy was either going to starve to death on a full stomach or die of septic shock. By comparison, bleeding out on the table would be a mercy.
A-9 was weakly trying to pull his intestines back in, mostly just clumsily mashing them into the examination table as you finished writing up your findings on potential neurological damage. “H-hewp get tummeh sketties back in, mista… Awoe wuv ‘ou…?” Amazingly, he wasn’t dead from blood loss or going into shock, adding another note to the report: “possible application for ‘Abuser’ customers.”
With that complete, you pick up the disemboweled fluffy, and for a few moments, he clearly thinks you are trying to hug him better. In reality, you’re just holding his guts in long enough to drop him into the biohazard bin with all the assorted sharps, yesterday’s dead fluffies, and a cheeseburger that you pitched in there because the normal trash can was filled.
About a week later, the project lead gives you the news; the drug was being rolled out with a warning label, a blu-ray of “therapy videos” of common behavior they wanted to curb, and you were getting a paid week off. The members of the text group would be shuffled off to other behavioral therapy tests, and considering “Baller” could still be heard squeaking demands from your lab neighbor with the electrodes, he wasn’t in for any better of a time.
There was a fly in the ointment, however: you would start it by keeping Walter for observation, as to see if the most successful example of the aversion therapy was actually sticking, and to make sure there weren’t lingering effects down the line.
Still, it’ll be with a sizable bonus to cover his needs and compensate for the added responsibilities, so better this than burdening one of the caregivers. All else fails, they’re accident prone enough he won’t be a guest for long. It all depends on how well the therapy holds, otherwise a little debugging will fix any problems…