This is my entry for the Open collab offer. There are plenty of cities around the world waiting to be buried under cute little bundles of fluff! If you’re interested in adding to the chaos, check in at the Collab thread or message me!
The Last Stand of San Antonio by Motowhed
The city of San Antonio in the state of Texas, USA, boasted itself as a hub of craft beer, artisinal foods and the home of one of the great last stand battles of history. The site of the battle of the Alamo was dedicated as a shrine to the men who gave their lives in pursuit of liberty and refusal to be ground under the heel of tyranny.
The night life of San Antonio was really something to behold. Tourist traps changed their demeanor after dark, catering to a more mature clientele. Clubs began to wake up, bars kicked off their night. It was another warm, starlit, rowdy night.
So rowdy no one noticed a few fluffy ponies wandering through the street. Or a few dozen. It was only when the streets began to choke with the bodies of thousands upon thousands of fluffies that peopl began to call the authorities and each other. The issue would most likely have been noted earlier, had the fluffies behaved normally, with their constant babble and incessant questions, but these fluffies stared glassy eyed around them, silent save for rhe soft pffpffpff of leathery marshmallow hooves on concrete.
The first sign of trouble came when a group broke off from the horde of fluffies and pressed themselves against the door of a convenience store until it opened. They made their way inside and began tearing open bags, pooping on the floor and dragging down the lone customer inside. The store clerk tried to shoo them away as more fluffies poured in. The kept piling on top of each other until the glass store front was filled with nothing but day-glo balls of fluff, each “pressing the ham” against the windows until the glass reached critical mass and shattered and the fluffies rejoined their waddling comrades in a silent multicolored tide.
The fluffies reached the famous downtown district, home to the RiverWalk and tourism quarter. Men and women alike were aghast as the fluffies swept over them, trampling humans under thousands of tiny, chubby hooves. A police officer arrived and attempted to contact his dispatcher, only to be bowled over from behind and suffocated under a gentle bed of rainbow cotton. He panicked, drew his side arm and fired into the crowd of waddling invaders.
And all hell broke loose.
The innumerable herd washed over the city, a tide of corgi sized creatures eating, beating, and relieving themselves on everything in sight. The Texas Rangers stationed as an honor guard at the Alamo retieved patrol rifles from their vehicles but the weaponry barely made a dent in the millions deep mass. Light poles toppled, wires from signage were chewed, fires broke out and were spread through the city on the backs of galloping fluffies running in circles. The fire department desperately tried to race an apartment complex that had caught fire, only for the engine to bog down in the mass of fluffies. The apartments explodedrainkgn boards, glass, flaming furniture, and blazing fluffies down on the stree.
A Marine veteran, long since retired from service glanced out his window and suffered a wartime flashback. He rushed downstairs from his apartment carrying an enormous belt fed machine gun with an attached grenade launcher in one hand, and a flamethrower in the other. Standing alone in the street he faced off against the oncoming herd. At first his machine gun and flamethrower cut a horrific swathe through the advancing mass, fluffy bodies vaporizing as bullets tore through them, or burned like matchsticks under the flow of napalm. He fired until he ran dry then he used his grenade launcher, the round ricocheted off a curb, slipped into a rain gutter, slid up, and flew out over the street in an extended arc.
And came down on the pumps of a gas station.
The resulting fireball could be seem from the all over the city. It cleared a block sized crater, scattering small burning bodies like fireworks, sharrtering windows for miles. But the never ending tide of silent fluffies still came. Out of ammo and fuel, the former Marine saluted as he was borne down and smothered by a mount of cottony fur and trampling hooves.
A gaggle of gun nuts from the edge of the city banded together with a street gang to hold the streets leading to the Alamo. They may have been country boys and city boiz, as different as could be, but for one night they were all Texans, and they upheld the battle cry of thier state’s independence. A massive pickup truck was parked nose-to-nose with a chromed out G-wagon holding, the staccato reports of automatic weapons barely audible over the thunderous “pitpatpitpatpitat” of millions of little hooves. The group yelled encouragements, asked each other for ammo, and finally shouted at each other in panicked voices as the fluffies first pushed back their line, then buried their cars, and then swallowed each of them. The last two visible, a cowboy and a street dealer, hands clasped desperately, were borne away from each other in a sea of crayon bright fluff, promising each other to meet as friends at the pearly gates.
The AT&T center resisted the fluffy herd for a brief period. Doors and gates locked, security usung every weapon they had or could cobble together, the building was impenetrable…save for one small side door with a broken lock. In a moment of capricious glee, the universe sent a gust of wind to swing the door open a few inches, and that was all it took. Fluffies filed in, pushing the door wider, piling themselves against the entry gates until they collapsed. They bit and booped the security guards with marshmallow hooves, slowly burying them under mounds of shit they seemed to save for just such an occasion. The herd filled the floor of the stadium, stacking on top of each other, legs, wings and tails wiggling as they piled upon each other higher and wider. They reached the ceiling of the stadium, and for a brief second the building strained, paused…and then cracked apart and collapsed. Millions of fluffies were squished under falling metal and masonry and the tumbling bodies of their herd mates. Yet not one uttered a sound. And their numbers only seemed to swell with the chaos they caused.
A neckbearded hipster, covered in maritime themed tattoos (the irony being he had never so much as dipped a toe in anything larger than a bathtub), tried to ignore the rising cacophony outside his gastropub, pouring himself a pint of small batch IPA and turning the sound higher on his vinyl record of Arcade Fire. Fluffies were a pest in his opinion, though for the sake of meta he made sure to leave scraps in the alley behind the gastropub (not restaurant, restaurants were pedestrian) every night. He had just taken a sip of his vile beverage, which he told himself was fantastic and people just “didnt get it.” when the windows crashed in and fluffies began to fill every square inch of space. As he was swallowed by fluff the hipster had one final moment of self indulgent smug irony before darkness took him. What the irony was, he took to his grave, not that anyone cared.
The city was now ablaze, buildings crumbling, sewers overflowing as many of the empty gazing, silent puff balls made good poopies in the storm drains or gutters. A spark from a blazing pecan tree drifted lazily in the wind, and settled on a mound of fluffy crap…which blazed instantly, shooting along the fumes from the waste of the tiatanic herd, and causing a city wide firestorm.
As dawn approached, the first mobilized units of the Texas National Guard arrived at the outskirts of San Antonio, and pausedn. It was already over the only thing they could do was set up a perimeter. The fluffies moved along toward thier next target, which appeared to be the city of Austin. Nobody moved to stop them, for eyes were brimming with tears and hearts were breaking. What was once one of the most revered crown jewels in the Lone Star state, had been Spurs City, home of the Alamo, and the fortress mission of old, a place of refuge for those fleeing tyranny, was now a burning, rubble strewn ruin.
And the Titanherd, still glassy eyed, still mute, still shuffling along as if controlled by an outside force, began their migration anew…