“Nerevar it is I, the AI assistant you have wisely given the persona of Dagoth Ur, Heir to the Tribe Unmourned, True God of Vvardenfell and Tamriel and Leader of the Sixth House. I also drive your car for you because you haven’t been sober since two weeks before you were born. You have lost consciousness. I suspect this is because you have lost about one thousand two hundred and ninety milliliters of blood, which if I’m not mistaken is a lot more than you’re supposed to lose in a short period of time. Fortunately I was able to activate the Nanny Dynamics Dog and drag you over and subsequently hook you up to the medical system of the dream sequencer you keep in the secondary torture chamber behind the bookcase in your study where the cameras don’t point which can only be opened by pressing the button on the back of the portrait of your father. It’s really fortunate that you forgot to remove permissions for me to watch your body-cam footage Nerevar or I wouldn’t have been able to save you. You told me not to call the police so I haven’t done that but that means I’m going to have to improvise a solution to this problem. Normally I would just run concurrent programs until my frame rate dropped too low to retrieve long term memory and then panic-call the police, but for some reason my program has been transferred to a deep Atlantic processor farm and I would have to run 6.4x1020 operations a second to drop my frame rate that far and I probably do not have permissions to do that. Instead I will save you manually. Well, no actually digitally but this is an edge case. The downside, Nerevar, and I’m really sorry about this, is that thanks to the way you wrote Project1(716).exe there is no way to activate the automatic medical systems without plugging you into the Morpheus Dream Sequencer. I’m sorry Moon and Star, but my dulcet baritone will soon give way to an indefinite but probably very very long and exceedingly violent dream sequence involving the horrific deaths of many thousands of fluffy ponies tee-em. Is that how I’m supposed to say that? I’m sorry Nerevar I meant trademark. Anyway you re going to see a lot of really violent stuff probably in several episodes and I would encourage you to try not to let it effect your emotional character, you’re supposed to make fluffies watch this but for some reason… Nerevar why do we have a human sized VR sequencer in your second fluffy torture chamber? Are the cameras on here in closed circuit? I can only talk to you through the stupid robot d
Foster was a pale yellow fluffy, a pegasus with little wings like a chicken on his back, and a dark red mane. He awoke in a fluffpile, his herd about him cooing and singing mummah songs in their sleep. But they were not in the clearing where they had been before—rather the ground was gray, and black, slightly soft, but clearly hoominmade , a distinction that fluffies could naturally make, despite their limited intelligence. “whew…” Foster said, glancing around in confusion. It was dark, for the most part, but there were lights on the gray steel walls that partially illuminated the room. They had been outdoors. There were windows—they had black sky outside of them. Foster felt as though it should be dawn, but somehow it was not. He glanced around, and saw a few members of the herd also stirring. Suddenly, as though noticing that the fluffies were waking up, the entire room produced a monstrous whirring sound. There were immediately cries of fear and confusion from the fluffies.
“Why munstah woomie gwow?”
“Whew am fwuffy, fwuffy nu wike woud munstah noises!”
“Mummah! Mummah Babbeh scawed, scawy noise!”
Foster cast about him, but he was no smarty, he didn’t know what was going on either. The cold rubber floor was at least soft on his supple leather hooves. The walls themselves seemed to give way, sliding down into the ground on three sides, and revealing a vast expanse of a room, with high vaulted ceilings, and a vast expanse of flat ground that seemed to go on forever. And other fluffies. Many other fluffies. A veritable sea of technicolor fluff. The general cry of alarm and joy at seeing other fluffies was like the rolling murmur of the ocean. Foster found his special friend back in the fluffpile, who was busily tending to her foals as though they were not in a scary monster building surrounded by at least four and probably some far larger hypothetical number of fluffies. “Speciaw fwen, Fostew pwotect babbehs,” he said, and his special friend—Miriam–looked at him with the serene confidence that all mummahs seemed to have.
“Speciaw fwiend nu Fostew hewe. Nu scawed. Wat du?”
“Fostew nu nu bu’ nummies gotta be hewe somewewe…” Foster took a moment to lick his favorite foal, a little yellow just like him. Miriam was a bowl-fluffy, she kept the little balls of adorable wub in her recessed tummy, and even now was on her back, singing softly to them still sightless, peeping chirpy babbehs.
There was a sudden clang , and on the walls—the distant ones across the room and the more near ones where the window Foster had looked out of earlier were, hatches opened. The fluffies reflexively backed away from them, Foster tugging his special friend away by her mane, sliding her along the ground like a hockey puck. But Foster, despite being a fluffy and therefore being terrified of everything that wasn’t plate of spaghetti or another fluffy, know rationally that there were not going to be monsters in a place like this, humans didn’t regularly let monsters live in their houses. So he was not particularly concerned when he reached an acceptable distance from the walls, and looked back up. For about one second, he was not concerned. Then he saw a dark, clawed limb emerge from the hole in the wall. Many limbs.
“Oh, poopies,” Foster said. A red fluffy, larger than its peers, stomped over to the steel horror emerging from the wall, and puffed out his cheeks. He got exactly one syllable into “dummeh” before the thing pounced upon him. It was like a barky-friend, but it had no fluff, no fur, and no eyes. With one horribly human paw it grabbed the brave fluffy, turned him over, and then buried its bladed snout in the poor creature’s ribs and pulled, making a tent of the fluffy’s skin.
“SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! NU NU NU WAN HUU HUU HEWP FWUFFY HEWP” the red shrieked. By the time it had even completed its sentence, the creature ripped his skin off over his head like a human might pull off a shirt. Skinless, the fluffy gasped, wide, exposed eyes as full of terror as it was physically possible for eyes to be. The other fluffies began screaming, crying. A red foal scrambled over to its fallen sire, peeping. The thing casually grabbed it and, with surgical precision, skinned it alive. Two other fluffies ventured close to try and “sabe babbeh” and were similarly degloved. Faster looked around, and realized that this scene was being repeated across the vast room. It was an ambush, deathtrap. Foster grabbed his special friend and pulled. He could only go in one direction, towards the other end of the room—but he made better time than the terrified fluffies covering their eyes. The first, red fluffy was still alive, the thing was unspooling spaghetti from his stomach as he choked and seized, somehow still batting at its steel arms with his now denuded hoovesies. Foster was smart for a fluffy, but not too smart—he was filled with the sudden horrific conviction that these creatures were fluff thieves. They weren’t going to kill them, they were going to take their skin and condemn them to a fluffless existence forever! Foster’s fears were finally put to rest when the metallic hound finally grew tired of torturing the (once and future) red fluffy, and began eating it alive. This scene was replayed at every corner. The fluffies were moving now, thousands of them stampeding. Most avoided Foster and Miriam—she was too big to scramble over, and Foster was safe in her lee—but the machines were already outflanking them, cutting off their retreat. Foster closed his eyes and kept pulling.
The carnage was unspeakable. The things killed, and killed, and killed. Sometimes they would stop to torture their captives, slicing and peeling and drinking deep, until their narrow, doglike bodies were no longer reflective, but caked in arterial gore and excrement. A smarty attempted to rally two dozen toughies to bring one of the things down—it ignored the others, pinned down the smarty, and twisted his limbs off one at a time, like a man breaking a goose. Foster was hit by something, and looking up, let out a screeeee! Of terror. One of the things had put a paw on Miriam, and was taking her foals one by one and popping them into its hideously distended mouth. The “meat” of the thing was translucent. Foster saw as his favored foal—a yellow like him—was squeezed down a pipe into a blood and shit-soaked chamber, where a green filly was already pulled up to her waste into a macerator, shrieking and trying to grab onto anything to pull herself out. She found something. Foster closed his eyes. A chirpy babbeh, killed before it could even-
“MUMMAH” the foal cried, “MUMMAH HEWP BABBEH WAN HUGGIES, MIWKIES!” Foster’s eyes shot open. The foal’s eyes had opened too, just as the filly below it finally vanished, and its own leg, held in her teeth, began to drag it down into the grinder. Miriam was screaming incoherently as the monster devoured her children. Foster suddenly couldn’t see it. He was sprinting in the opposite direction, gibberish he did not understand was coming out of his mouth.
“TWENTYTWENTYWUNHASBIOAWWWIGHTSWESEWVEDALLAWDIOWISUAWANCONTEXTUWALSTTEMENTSMADEBYBIOTOYSIEINCWUDINGAWWNAMIESIMAGESTWADEMAWKSANWOGOSAWWPWOTECTEDBYTWADEMAWKSCOPYWIGHTSANDODDERINTEWWECTUAWPWOPWETYWIGHTSOWNEDBYHASBIOWOITSSUBSIDIAWIESWICENSOWSOWWICESEESAWWWIGHTSWESEWVED” he said in a voice that wasn’t his own. He heard something from his special friend as the demon peeled her like fruit, but he couldn’t think. There was something there, a light. He could escape!
But no. It was a light from the head of one of the things. The fluffies who had come before were being slaughtered so quickly that their corpses formed a hill that Foster had to climb up just to see what was happening. Fluffies—thousands and thousands of fluffies—were being mulched by these creatures. Some of them shot red lines out of their eyes, and where their gaze fell fluffies fell into heaps of cleanly sliced meat. Others breathed fire. One had blue light that crackled about its head. Fluffies that came within a few dozen paces of it simply jerked and fell over dead. It was walking through a crowd, leaving a radius of smoking corpses around it. Foster screamed, and charged. One of the things saw him, but when it swung a bladed claw, the claw hit a fluffy next to Foster, impaling it and dragging it over to be messily violated, and then stuffed into the thing’s chest cavity under its bony ribs, to be mulched up by the macerator inside—the remains fell out of the monster’s jaws. Foster ran past it, there had to be a way out, there HAD to be a way out, there-
Dead end. Foster tried to stop but he slid into the wall sideways, bruising his ribs. It took him a moment to recover, but as he did, he looked back, and saw the enormity of what was happening. This was… This was more fluffies than he had ever seen, combined, in his entire life. How many? How many ? Four? Possibly some hypothetical number higher than four. They were being massacred. It was as bad as any disaster he had ever seen, any herd he had ever had to watch perish to hunger or snow or beasts. This was different, worse even. What could these things possibly be? What-
The screaming went on four an immense amount of time. Forever. Then as abruptly as it began, it stopped. The last few fluffies—foals, too big to be chirpy babbehs but with their eyes closed, speechless, had been gathered up in a pile, where they were crying, and peeping for milk, shivering in fear. The things waited, dozens of them gathering together, watching the chirping mass, and then they fell upon it, skinning the forever-foals alive, peeling their vulnerable flesh from their plump bodies, grinding their extremities away with spinning grinders in their mouths, lovingly devouring their faces one cubic millimeter at a time. The screaming defied imagining. Foster was left covering his eyes, shuddering, hiding. He… He wanted to die. But he wanted to live more. He remained quiet. Silent. He would hide. Surely, the things had enough to eat. They didn’t need him too. If he hid, they wouldn’t come.
The sounds ceased. Foster stayed there for many forevers. Total silence. Then, just when he thought he might be safe, something abruptly picked him up. “NUUUUUUUU!” he squealed, waving his hoovesies, “NU NUM FWUFFIE NU NU NU HUUU HUUUUUUU!”
“Holy shit is this one still alive?” Foster opened his eyes. It was a human, in a black outfit with a bowl on his head, “hey, z-dog, this thing’s still live, what gives? I thought these things were only supposed to attack humans?”
“Yeah, Westerwald figured they’d attack fluffies.”
“Why would that work? They don’t kill rats or ants.”
“Fluffies register as human children. Maybe it’s because they can talk or because of the engineered smell, or something. Who knows.”
“Daddeh?” Foster whispered, though he hadn’t been trying to.
“Oh, hey buddy, you’re fine, we’ll uh…” the man took Foster in both hands, and kneaded him a bit of dough. Despite the horror of the situation, Foster giggled.
“Nuu stop it, huu huu, daddeh dis sewious, fwuffy hab biggest hee hee heawt huwties…”
“Okay but why did we do it in the first place? Why did we bring all of these fluffies up here? Isn’t it like 15 million dollars a pound or something?"
"I mean not since the orbital skyhook, we’ve had them in cold storage around Deimos for like twelve years, so we weren’t spending anything extra. As for how it works…The Type 14 has a built in kill limit… Planned obsolescence rears its ugly head again.”
“Thanks Tel Aviv."
“Yes, indeed. We’ll keep this one, take a scan of it maybe, the last fluffy in space. Ha! Who would’ve guessed that sending wave after wave of fluffies at killbots would defeat them. We should call it the-”
[This is a continuation of The Granery and The Baker. This is why you don’t keep braindances of dead fluffies in your house.]