In today’s episode: Rufus is a cutie patootie, the Geneticist reminds us he’s a hollow, cold thing in the shape of a person, and I finally get to the start of the trauma arc. Yippie!!!
Your name is Rufus, and you are a very good boy. Your daddy says so regularly, when he plays with you, and when he pets your fur as he reads in bed, and when you solve the puzzle problems that Mister Mikey gives you.
Mister Mikey also says you’re a good boy, just not as much as your daddy does, because nobody is ever as nice to their fluffy as their daddy or mommy is. Mikey himself said as much, and he can do magic, so it has to be true. It’s been two weeks, and he’s gaught you a lot a lot of things! Numbers, and shapes, and how to solve problem situations, and even a lot of lessons about how the world works through the funny small fluffies he calls puppets.
Despite being a good boy who does not want to let neither Daddy nor Mikey down you do not want to eat kibble.
You really don’t want to eat kibble.
You just don’t! You rest your head on the dining room table and produce a low whine as you look up at Mikey with the most pathetic face you can muster.
He sighs and purses his lips together and reaches over to shake the bowl of kibble in front of you, but he still doesn’t take it away and give you anything else.
“You gotta eat your kibble, Rufus.”
But doesn’t he know that you don’t want to eat it??? You’ve always been given wet food or whatever daddy’s had for every meal and honestly as far as you were concerned that whole arrangement worked just fine. There’s no reason for anyone to go and change things!
“Nu wan,” you sulk. “I wan… uh… uhmm…” You realize you don’t actually know what any foods are called other than sketti. And you know you’ll get in trouble if you ask for sketti. “Nu wan dis.”
Mikey just shakes the food bowl again. “It’s good for you, Rufus.”
What if you ate the kibble and it was actually a monster and you died from it. What then. Boy would Mikey be sorry if that happened.
“Buh… nu wan…”
You look up at Mikey extra pleadingly, and that seems to have finally communicated with perfect clarity the exact point you are trying to make, because he looks thoughtful.
“Look, can you just eat a little for me? Just five? You remember five, right?”
Pshhh— of course you can count that high. You’ve gotten up to fourteen with only a little help just this morning. Basically? You’re a genius.
Sensing a challenge, you grab a handful, count out the correct number, and crunch them down. Mikey offers you an approving smile.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“N… nu.”
“No, of course not.” He ruffles your mane, and you melt into his hands, relishing the experience of his cool fingers parting your fur. Mikey suddenly stops, and he gasps, clearly having only now come up with a genius idea. “I’ll tell you what: if you can eat ten more— that’s two fives— I’ll give you a treat. You like treats, don’t you, Rufus?”
“I may have to interdict that,” your daddy interjects, having silently appeared in the doorway behind Mikey. “I have need of Rufus. With me, if you would, and into the basement.”
Mister Mikey clutches his chest and says a string of many words that you have never heard before, looking very scared at daddy’s appearance.
This is exciting to you! You may have heard of it, but you’ve never actually been in the basement before! You follow Mister Mikey, who follows daddy down a flight of stairs and through a locked door into a dark room full of all sorts of strange things. Everywhere are big tubes of bubbling water and humming white boxes and glowing “teebee” screens and cages and tables with papers and doodads and machines on them. One of the tables, a wooden workbench with straps on it, gives you a bad feeling, even if you don’t think you’ve ever seen it before in your life.
Mikey looks around nervously. “Is this a torture dungeon?”
“Of course not,” replies daddy, “though some of the furnishings have indeed been sourced from those establishments. I do not believe suffering to be so inherently meaningful that I would inflict it for its own sake.”
You don’t know what basically any of those words mean, but Mikey seems both eased and also somehow made even nervous by daddy’s answer.
Daddy holds up a curtain, showing a metal table behind it. “Over here. Mr. Clairdeharte, if you could seat Rufus on the surgical table. I require a blood sample.”
Mister Mikey hoists you up, causing you to coo, but he stops before putting you on the table. “Question: Don’t you have samples for that exact thing?”
“Yes, Miachel, I in fact do,” daddy replies as he assembles something out of a sharp metal thingy and an empty tube. “Though as you may not know, genetic information does in fact degrade in freezing conditions, especially if not thawed perfectly, and I am also due to take a reading on the hormones present in Rufus’ blood. Besides, he’s right here, isn’t he?” There’s an odd flash in daddy’s eyes. “Might it be that you asked because you find yourself feeling protective towards little Rufus, Mr. Clairdeharte?”
Mister Mikey doesn’t say anything to that, he just frowns and sets you down and looks away as daddy feels your arm up, and then jabs the metal thingy into it.
It hurts! It hurts when he jabs it in, and it hurts when he holds it in, and he keeps holding it, too. The table is cold and seeing your boo-boo juice fill up the tube is scary, and you whimper and make a few distressed peeps.
Both Mikey and Daddy are with you, however, and seem to be calm about things, so you do your best to be brave for them. Finally, Daddy seems happy with the amount in the tube, and he pulls it away from your arm, flicking the side of the container twice for reasons beyond you. He turns to you and strokes the side of your cheek and gives you a treat.
“Good boy, Rufus.”
The sweet, grassy, starchy taste of the miniature cookie balms your upset soul.
“Whai… whai Daddeh take Wufus’ boo-boo juice?”
“I need it to help me make your friend, Rufus. Her name will be Sarah.”
Daddy sets the the now filled see-through tube in a special tube holder thingy and walks over to one of the big glass tubes with dark water in it.
He presses a button at the plastic base of the tube and a light turns on, illuminating its contents. Mikey lets out another string of words you’re very unfamiliar with. You scoot off from the table and plop down on the ground, waddling over to the glass tube to better study the fluffy inside.
She’s big, bigger than the four-leggy fluffies you’ve seen through the window, but not quite as big as you, and she has light-colored blue-green hair. Her leggies are strange, like they aren’t quite sized right, but most striking of all are her teethies.
Her teethies are pointy, and spilling out from between them is a fork-shaped tongue.
Rufus’ breath has just started to fog up the class when the Geneticist turns the tube lights off.
You’re weirded out by the fact that he’s apparently decided to make another of whatever these… things of his are called. Especially one that looks this spliced. You need to get the old man hooked on solitaire or onlyfans models or something normal for his age.
“Though… well… it will be some time before Sarah’s ready,” the Geneticist admits, “oh, but I do have a surprise for you, Rufus.”
Rufus, innocent as always, gasps and looks up at his “daddy” with nothing but excitement in his big brown eyes. The Geneticist motions for you to wait before leaving the curtained-off surgical area, and while Rufus tries to be patient and not fidget too loudly, you can’t help but feel a growing sense of dread. He’s so innocent. You wonder if the fluffy will ever have his illusions shattered as to what kind of person his daddy really is.
Not if the old man can help it, you suppose.
Before long, he comes back with what looks to be a modified dog collar. It’s red, and the weave is shot through with reflective threads, with a golden nametag at the front. Evenly spaced around it are several bulky, 3D-printed housings that you can only guess are GPS devices and some other trackers.
Rufus looks like a kid on Christmas morning, and he’s practically vibrating as the old man places the bugged collar around his neck. He moves around behind Rufus’ back to buckle it, and with one hand, assembles an odd syringe-like thing and jabs it into the tissue at the base of Rufus’ spine before finally clicking the buckle closed.
Rufus flinches, but doesn’t seem to pick up on the sleight of hand, and the Geneticist scritches his ears before stepping back to admire his creation.
“I think Rufus looks very handsome in his new collar, don’t you, Michael?"
You stare at him and silently mouth what the fuck was that? before responding, “hhhhh, yeah, yeah, sure, he does.”
“In fact,” the old man continues, using one hand to keep Rufus distracted while he uses the other to place the odd syringe where you can see it, “I think you should take Rufus on a walk in the regional park to celebrate.”
It’s only after studying the bloody utensil for several seconds that you recognize it as a microchip implanter.
Totally oblivious to any subtext, Rufus squeals delightedly at the prospect as his tail starts going at a million miles an hour.
“Hey, wait,” you start, “I thought you said Rufus wasn’t ready-”
The old man clears his throat, cutting you off. “I said, I think you should take Rufus on a walk in the regional park to celebrate his new collar. You wouldn’t want to fail Rufus, would you?”
You balk. “Not at all, sir.”
“Excellent. Won’t you go upstairs, Rufus, so we can have a grown-up chat?”
“Otay!”
“Good boy, Rufus,” the old man coos, squishing the fluffy’s cheeks.
Rufus preens beneath the praise, and stands there in case there’s any more affection for a moment before turning to run up the stairs.
The Geneticist twirls and claps his hands. “Now that that’s sorted, why don’t we have a little chat?”
“I thought you said I wouldn’t have to worry about this kind of stuff for a while.”
“That’s not what I said,” the old man replies. Without Rufus in the room, any pretense of patronly warmth is totally gone from his voice. He turns to the vial of fresh blood, not looking your way as he continues. “I said that you would be expected to do things that might cause a fluffy harm when Rufus came of age. And correct me if I am wrong, Mr. Clairedeharte, but I was under the distinct impression that you neither liked nor cared for fluffy ponies.”
Having poured half the blood into a smaller tube and sealed it, he turns to look at you, and you can’t help but feel like a worm withering away on a sidewalk under his gaze. There’s no anger or malice on his face, just… emptiness. Complete impartiality.
“I don’t hate them. Look- hey, I, uh, wait, I’m not a sicko, okay? And…”
You’re thrown off guard as the Geneticist seems to ignore you and turns to walk away with the second tube, only responding when he stops in front of a large freezer.
“And?”
“And… I kind of do like Rufus.”
“Mmhmm,” he hums, opening the freezer, “How gratifying that you have imprinted on him in such a short timespan. You’re free to go, Mr. Clairedeharte. I still expect you to do what you have agreed upon.”
He waves you off, but you can’t compel your legs to move.
You’re staring at the contents of the freezer, and a vertigo roils in your gut as you start to recognize individual components.
Stacked from floor to ceiling are hundreds of glass containers, and in each, a neatly severed part of a fluffy. The fur on the fast majority of them is red or green, but there’s every color represented— black, yellow, pink, purple, orange, beige, brown— and every feature and organ on perverse display.
The gore is nested, sorted, arranged by numeral labels on the tupperware. Its order is perfect: heads are with heads, legs are with legs, each organ of the digestive system arranged by size, wombs, guts, tendons, bones, wings, eyes, all carefully laid out in a visceral library.
You’ve seen your fair share of fluffy gore, and this isn’t that. This isn’t some loser taking out their anger on a defenseless animal and just so happening to spill its guts in the process. It’s meticulous. It’s the work of someone who has very carefully thought out the best way to chop up a hundred biotoys and stuff the parts of their bodies into a freezer. You feel dizzy.
“Oh, my god.” You gag and cover your mouth with your hand. “Are those-”
“Samples, yes. These are my samples.”
The old man hums an odd tune as he shuffles the jars and tupperwares around, paying you little mind. You try to look anywhere else, anywhere but that freezer, but you can’t seem to tear your eyes away from the visceral display. Your eyes pick out something you realize is a face. The frozen face of a perfectly intact white-and-blue fluffy corpse whose frosted-over eyes stare back at you from behind a barricade of several brains.
You retch a second time, and the Geneticist spares you a short glance as he sets the fresh vial among many others.
“I see you’ve met Scarlet,” he remarks, shutting the freezer door. “Quite the prodigy she is. In the upper ninetieth percentile for many metrics of intelligence. She’s still alive in there— most everything is, I’ve treated it all for cryogenic preservation— but oh, I just don’t suppose I have the time to puzzle her out quite yet.”
You’ve been staring at the matte white surface of the freezer for several seconds now, but you can’t help but still feel her eyes still on you.