I’m feeling medicated in the proverbial Arby’s tonight, so fuck it, new triplet of chapters. No idea if this is the correct way or not to update serials, nor could I find an awful lot of info on the matter, but I’m sure nobody really cares one way or the other.
Rather human(oid) focus in these three as we meet a pushover trainer and the writing’s mainstay. No idea if this needs the anthro fluff group(?) if it’s 1) not drawn and 2) not really furry media as much as it is classic fluffy with some added “oh god oh fuck why do they have hands do you have any idea how many new fucked up suicides this unlocks” but I’m sure somebody will tell me one way or the other. Or I’ll be dragged off and flayed alive. Oh well!!!
Chapter Four: Outreach
It had been… well…
Embarrassed as you are to say, you’ve completely lost track of how long it had been since you started work on Rufus. The days and weeks all blended together into a pell-mell blur after you truly found yourself to be immersed in something for the first time in many, many long years.
You feel young again. Just like you were back at Harvard, poring over the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana in a late-night study session.
Only this time, the written references were (mostly) your own, and the assignments were your own, and there was no deadline, nor finals, nor overbearing professors, only the slow, inexorable march of progress.
Regardless of however long it had taken, you are at least certain that this is your 37th iteration of Rufus. Each one’s had taken longer than the last as you worked through the minor tweaks and into more and more intensive alterations.
This one is, well… perfect. The perfect little pet. Everything you’d ever wanted the original fluffies to be, and more, bound no longer that you are by trifle things like “shareholder concerns” and “quarterly funding” and “board oversight”.
His mind was your first major focal point, to account for how longstanding the process would be. Fully developed, Rufus would be similarly intelligent to a seven-year-old child, rather than a four or five-year-old one, and certainly more in many regards. He would be obedient, and methodical, and slow to trust, yet receptive to praise and feedback.
Next came the fluffy digestive system. Neglected as their gastrointestinal development had been for more immediately appealing pursuits, it was possibly your greatest failure. Incapable that they were of digesting many basic macronutrients, fluffies produced nasty excrement, not to mention their vulnerability to a slew of defects, disorders, and irritabilities. But the shareholders wanted neon coat colors and childlike voices and wings and horns, and the petulant children they were, they always wanted what they got. And so they did, and they got an animal that was barely able to glean enough protein to rear offspring and couldn’t help but shit itself at the slightest provacation.
Your Rufus would be able to digest anything a human could. Your Rufus could sustain himself on an all-meat diet, and metabolize glucose from cellulose, and synthesize his own vitamin C, just because it pissed you off that certain animals couldn’t. Your Rufus would have denser bones, tougher fur, and stronger muscles, not because you went in and made any changes to those systems, but because his body could adequately isolate the fundamental building blocks of life.
And you did go in and make those changes, by the way. You did go in and give him denser bones, tougher fur, and stronger muscles, because it would be pathetic for your creations to be naturally selected by their frailty. You added more fail-safes, too: a choke and gag reflex that had barely functionedt in the original design. Automatic coughing as a response to water in the nose, the ability to hold his breath, fur that would trap air close to the skin and provide buoyancy.
But you didn’t stop there. Rufus would be more intelligent, yes, but you didn’t think so low of your creations to squander his new given potential to create and utilize tools. You gave him digits and thumbs to grasp, then a bipedal stature to free their use. His wings, vestigial and fleshy, you altered to bear a full fledge of feathers, and the encoding of a horn, not that he’d have one, to be similarly well-developed.
You’d made many other changes, though they paled in comparison to these insuperable feats of genetic engineering that you accomplished alone, in your basement, using outdated machinery and what little classified material you saw fit to save many years ago.
You tap on the growth vat containing your nearly-finished Rufus, beaming to yourself all the while. You know that he can hear you, even in his developing state.
“Soon,” you trill, “you’ll be ready for the world.”
=========================
Your name is Mike Clairdeharte, you’re fourty, you train fluffy ponies, and you fucking hate your job.
You’ve been doing it for seventeen goddamn years.
Seventeen.
Goddamn.
Years.
You’ve been training them before fluffies were even called fluffies, just some codename for a prototype project in the Labs. Sure, it had seemed like a damn promising gig when you were a kid fresh out of animal handling school— come get paid the big bucks to discipline these shitty horses! Boast to your friends that you’re advancing science! It’ll be a blast!
The joke, of course, had been on you. As it would be for the next two fucking decades.
The worst part was, you couldn’t quit if you wanted to. You have no other skills, talents, aspirations, or connections, and “wrangled shithorses for seventeen years” isn’t anything that looks good on a resume.
All you have going for you is an early in that had given you a keen edge for literally every other fluffy on the market, something you were able to springboard into a considerably well-reputable trainer. Which means fuck-all aside from being unable to go twenty minutes at a resort without yet another clueless millionare begging you on their hands and knees for you to make their miniature horse shut the fuck up.
You sucker up and take the money every time, but goddamn if you don’t go home to your McMansion and rank all your guns by mouth feel at the end of each day. The only thing that’s stopped you from painting your brains all over your overpriced ceiling thus far is the possibility of letting some asshole with more money than sense remain at the influence of one of the whiny, grating, insufferable, puntable, neon-colored, shit-smearing little horses.
You’re just on your way out one of said asshole’s houses when your phone rings, displaying an unknown number. You glower at the unfamiliar digits.
Ordinarily, you wouldn’t even think of answering, but today’s been a really shitty day— literally— and so you swipe up to spout some verbal abuse at the Indian or whoever who’s trying to scam you.
“For the last fuckin’ time, I don’t give a rat’s ass fuck about my car’s extended warranty, you dog-eating, slant-eyed-”
“Michael Orrey Clairdeharte,” purrs the silky-smooth voice from the other end of the line.
Oh, goddamn it.
How you now wish, how you wish to the holy virgin Mary and sweet little baby Christ above that it’s some chink trying to scam you on the other end of the line.
It’s him.
It’s been longer than you’d like to admit since you heard his voice for what you had hoped was the last time, but the Geneticist’s breathy, bizarrely calm cadence isn’t something that’s all too easy to forget. Hell, you can almost picture him in perfect clarity, dressed in his labcoat and goggles, babbling on like he’s trying to put a toddler to sleep while elbow-deep in some sobbing mutant’s viscera.
You had sincerely hoped the fucko really died when you’d read the news one morning.
“Listen, you creepy fuck. I don’t know how you got my number, I don’t even wanna know how you got my number, but last I heard you were dead. I don’t want to hear a goddamn thing about whatever devil’s bargain you’re about to offer me, please stay dead and don’t ever call me again. Goodbye.”
You hang up and get about three steps closer your Ferrari when your phone rings again.
“I’d at least like you to hear me out, Mr. Clairdeharte,” he pleads before you can cut him off again.
You’re about to hang up, again, when you realize there’s… sorrow in his voice? Something other than the perfectly calm, slightly excited cadence he always spoke in? It’s enough to get you interested.
“Oh, fuck me,” you mutter, “I shoulda blown my brains all over the fuckin’ walls last night if it meant not hearing from you again.”
For once, the Geneticist doesn’t seem to know what to say, if only for a second. “I’ll… take that as a sign you aren’t about to hang up, at least.” He clears his throat. “I have a fluffy.”
Try as you might, you can’t summon a single fuck to give. “Uh huh?”
“A special one.”
“Yeah? Training costs extra if they’re retarded.”
“Not that kind of special, Mr. Clairdeharte,” he chortles. “Far from it. I understand that you’re presently in Minnesota. Having already spoken with your secretary, I forsee three weeks for you to conclude your current regiment of training and travel to Pennsylvania. I’ll contact you with further information then.”
“Now hold on-” you protest, “are you giving me goddamn orders, you greasy old fuck? Do you h-”
“Don’t be like that, Mikey,” the Geneticist sings, “You’ll love it! You’ll love working with me. It’ll be just like old times, remember\~?”
You’re about to retort that you wished you didn’t remember when he hangs up, leaving you alone with your Ferrari and a slowly growing pit of dread in your stomach.
You probably should have killed yourself last night.
Chapter Five: Harbinger of an Era
Your name is Mike Clairdeharte, you’ve been training fluffies since the lab days, and you have a lot of hate in your heart. You hate yourself, you hate your job, and you especially hate everything about fluffies.
But you’re a big guy with a big heart, yeah? You don’t only hate those things.
For example, just recently, you’ve found yourself hating one of the original fluffies’ geneticists for somehow tracking your number down, calling you, and telling you to get your ass up to Pennsylvania.
No, “hey, Mikey, how’d you like a new job?” or “Hey, Mike! Good to see you! Do you have any availabilities?” Fuck all that. He’d called and given you three weeks to wrap up what you were doing, promising it’d be “special” and “just like old times”. Whatever the hell that meant.
And against your better judgement, or maybe in accordance with it, you’ve actually gone and listened to him.
He’d texted you a time and place not three days ago— 1174 Appleview Court, 9:00 AM— and so here you are, staring at a house clad in stonework facade and wrapped with English Ivy.
The whole walkway up to the front door is lined with embanked gardens, and though you’re no botanist, you can tell something isn’t right with the plants. One is a flower patch growing in a concerningly accurate perfect mandelbrot fractal, a second had red leaves that were too red, a third seemed to be a bush made of bones, and you swear to Christ one of them twitched at you when you got too close.
Leave it to the Geneticist to turn his front lawn into a freakshow. You just hope it’s not much worse inside.
You’ve nearly made it to the door when you trip over an eggshell-colored fluffy, having been too busy eyeing the plants to watch your feet.
With a surprised squeak, it goes, “Oh, hewwo, mysta. Sugawfwake dinnu see you dewe,” and continues waddling towards wherever it had been going.
You blink at the animal as it continues on it’s merry way, and it’s then that you realize there’s more of them. Another napping in one of the flowerbeds, two more in the lawn, then a sixth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, all milling about.
And they’ve been so quiet you hadn’t noticed them.
Not a single of the tiny colorful horses came whining up to demand “sketties” and “pway”, none of them were shitting everywhere, or trying to kill themselves, or fucking in precisely the perfect spot that you couldn’t help but see them, or babbling about “wub” and “babbehs”, or singing in their annoying, off-key voices, or screaming for no apparent reason, or any of the behaviors you’ve come to associate with ordinary fluffy activity.
It wigs you out more than the mutated garden does. Like just living close to the Geneticist is enough to flip some switch in their heads and make them act… you don’t even know. Different. Unnatural. Fluffies shat everywhere, and they made ungodly amounts of noise, and they waddled up to you to demand food and attention, and if they didn’t, something was wrong with them.
You decide to hedge your bets about the house not being a total freak show, steel your nerves, and knock at the door.
You don’t get through the third knock when it swings open, revealing the Geneticist in all of his glory. He’s dressed in khakis, suspenders, and a sweater vest, looking every bit like the kind old man you know him to not be, and he raises his arms in a hug to greet you.
“Ah. Mr. Clairdeharte! Good to see you!”
You don’t hug him back. That’d be weird.
After a moment, he drops his arms down and ushers you in.
The inside of his house is normal. It’s shockingly normal. The floors are hardwood with woven carpet while the walls are stonework, like the exterior, and decorated with landscapes, fishing rods, and taxidermis. There’s houseplants on windowsills and books on shelves, and bowls of hard candy on endtables and desks.
His house… is normal, but it isn’t normal. It’s normal like a stock photograph. It’s normal like a hallmark movie. It’s normal like an AI-generated image is, like everything was perfectly arranged by a machine that had no soul and no comprehension of what it was like to actually live in a home. Like it’s all just for show.
“Please, please, come in, I made us some tea. How’ve you been?”
He starts ushering you into a nicely-furnished dining room, but having had enough, you stop in the doorframe. “Look, can we just cut all the shit?”
“Hm?”
“You’re not good at this, okay? You’re not normal.”
“Ohhhh, don’t be like that, Mikey-”
“No, no, I mean it,” you interject. “There’s something wrong with you. Fuck, there’s always been something wrong with you, it’s just gotten worse over time. How do you explain your front lawn, or five of the exact same bowl of candy I’ve walked by, or the fluffies outside? I don’t want your tea.”
The Geneticist remains silent as you talk, face entirely devoid of emotion, and he knits his eyebrows together before speaking. “I like it when things are my own way, Mr. Clairdeharte,” he purrs. “When things aren’t, it displeases me. Imperfection displeases me. I found the behavior of the ferals I have allowed to remain in my yard to be both imperfect and displeasing, so I have taken it upon myself to… condition them.”
“You ‘Conditioned’ them? What the hell does that mean? Hell, fuck, if that’s the case, what do you even need me for?”
The old man sighs. It is the first indication of impatience you think you’ve ever seen from him.
“I called you here for matters unrelated to the comings and going of wild animals, Mikey. I require you to look after only one fluffy while I am busy. He is, as I previously mentioned, special, and I will not risk an inept caretaker botching his handling. It must be perfect. I will not deign to allow the fluffy’s upbringing to be anything other than perfect, and from what I understand, Mr. Clairdeharte, you are among the best trainers that money can buy. Are you not?”
The Geneticist is staring you dead in the eye, and as he continues, you pick up on an odd undertone of sincerity to the mania in his voice. For whatever it’s worth, he really, genuinely seems to want this animal to come out right.
You’re in too deep now to give any other answer, so reluctantly, you accept. “A-allright, fine, I’ll take care of your horse. Take me to him.”
A placated grin splits the old man’s wrinkled face. “Excellent.”
He leads you up a staircase with a baby gate at the top, through another baby gate, and to a door with a colorful name sign that reads “Rufus” in playful, blocky letters. The Geneticist knocks at the door, calling out, “Rufus! I have someone I want you to meet!”
There’s a shuffling on the other side of the door, followed by a muffled “Otay.”
The Geneticist motions for you to open the door, which you do, take a single look at the room’s occupant, and then immediately close it with more force than you were intending to use.
“What the fuck is that thing?” You whisper-hiss.
“That is Rufus,” the Geneticist taps the sign on the door, as if it somehow hadn’t occurred to you to read it. “Your charge.”
A… laugh escapes you. Then another one, first a nervous chuckle, maturing into full-fledged laughter as the reality of the situation sinks in.
“Oh, man,” you wheeze, “Hoo, boy, that- that’s a good one. You did all this setup and put a toddler in a fursuit. That’s a good prank. Don’t ever do it again.”
The old man just furrows his eyebrows. “A… ‘for suit’? A suit for what, exactly? Nevermind that.” He dismisses the tangent with a hand. “Michael, I promise you that this is no practical joke.”
The smile fades from your face real quickly.
You take… another look through the door.
Standing at about two and a half feet tall, looking at you with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension, is an orangish-red pegasus. Standing on two legs. Holding a plush foam block in his… not quite human hands.
“Oh… fuck.” You look back to The Geneticist, who’s spacing off into oblivion and smiling sweetly. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? You gave a fluffy thumbs.”
“Oh, yes, I did, among many other things,” he replies, striding over to Rufus and bending down to ruffle the fur atop the thing’s head. It nuzzles up against his hand. “In truth, your work will involve more education and less training than you may be accustomed to. I have decided to do away with many of their… behavioral shortfalls. Nonetheless, I am a busy man. I cannot be present at all times, and so I call upon the familiarity you developed many years ago in the Labs. Not only your familiarity with these dear little ones of mine, but with discretion.”
The Geneticist continues stroking and petting Rufus as he talks, but he doesn’t seem to register the animal anymore. He’s staring dead-on at you, unblinking, piercing your soul with his gaze.
“A new dawn will soon rise, Michael Clairdeharte. But it has not reached the horizon. Not yet. It hangs suspended in the in-between, supple with potential. Will you take care that it will crest and shine the lights of perfection across the world, or will you stand idly by as it festers and miscarries from the womb, selfsame to the epoch before it?”
Chapter Six: Rufus.
Your name is Mike Clairdeharte, you’ve been training fluffies since the original days of their development, and right now, you’re kinda freaking out.
One of the original Hasbio geneticists had called you out of the blue, and for whatever godforsaken reason, you’d actually answered him. Now he was standing behind an incredibly young bipedal fluffy and talking about ushering in a new dawn and a perfect era and raising every red flag you can think of.
“I- uh- look, man, I’ll take care of Rufus, like I said I would. But all that other shit, uh-” His calm expression contorts to a glare, just for a fraction of a second, and you make the wise decision to shut the fuck up. “-Iiiiii’ll have to think about it, and, uh, run it by my secretary.”
Christ, are you pathetic.
You clear your throat. “So, anyway, hhhow do you want me to take care of Rufus, anyway?” You squint at the bipedal fluffy, who still hasn’t said a word this entire time, just stared at you with his massive, amber eyes. “There’s no… serums or goops I have to give him, right?”
The Geneticist chortles. “No, no, nothing of the sort. Large though he may be for a fluffy, Rufus is still quite young and remains in the critical phase of cognitive development. He needs constant stimulus if his mind is to continue growing, and impressionable as he is, unplanned traumatic can not befall him. You will teach him addition and subtraction, deductive, inductive, and spatial reasoning, as well as those… puppet shows your website claims are good for fluffies. You will be supplied with children’s educational material for this sake.”
What the crazy old man doesn’t seem to realize is just how tall of an order he’s making.
You swallow. “Hey, uh, look, mister… Frankenstein. I’ll do my best, but if your fluffy… thing… is still young, I can’t make any promises. Adult fluffies can barely grasp math, and no offense to you, but there’s no way-”
Another glare cuts you off.
It’s the kind of look that implies he’d stick you with a syringe full of god-knows-what, dismember your body, bury you in oil drums, never speak a word of the deed again if it meant furthering his goals by even an inch.
And you don’t doubt for a second that the Geneticist would.
“You’re understating me, Mikey.” He contorts his face into a smile. “Don’t do that. Oh, and there is… one assignment I have for you with Rufus. One I cannot speak of here. Come, the tea is getting cold.”
=========================
Your name is Rufus, and your daddy says you’re special.
You are quite positive that your daddy loves you. He spends no shortage of time petting you while he works at his computer, and he never raises his voice, not even before you get the sorry stick, and he even reduces your punishments if you tell him first. He gives you sketties sometimes, and wet food most times, but most of all, your daddy soaks you in praise.
He calls you special and a good boy and well behaved and his little one all sorts of nice things, and he means it, because he has a happy face when he says it, so it has to be true.
Today, your daddy brought a stranger to your room. He’s fat and he has hair on his face, not like daddy, and when you saw him, you almost wanted to ask him to play, but part of you was scared of him.
They quickly left to talk about human things, and you’d just settled down and were about to go back to playing with your foam blocks when the strange man returns to your room.
He walks up to you, not fully but still close, and pops a squat. “Hey there, little guy,” he says gently. “You can call me Mikey. I’ll be playing with you when your daddy can’t, okay?”
You continue to eye this “Mikey” character, not fully sure what his intentions are.
He sighs and scratches his chin for a moment. “Hey, I know. Want a treat? Check this out.”
Mikey presents his hand to you, emphasizing that it’s empty, front and back, then twinkles the fingers and closes it into a loose fist. He takes his other index finger, waves it around in a spiral, once, twice, three times, and then brings it down on a wiggly past to his closed hand, finally tapping it.
“Alakazam,” he invocates, opening it to reveal a treat where there hadn’t been before.
Your eyes widen in total awe.
Your little fluffy mind. Has been blown.
You give the treat a cursory sniff, just in case, and gobble it down. He gives you another for good measure, petting the top of your head as you help yourself to the second one. You decide you might be coming around to this Mikey, after all.
The human takes a seat on the carpet beside you, grimacing as his knees make all sorts of noise they probably shouldn’t. He points to the block in your hands. “What’ve you got there, Rufus?”
You trace his finger to the foam shape. This one is a semicircular arch, though you don’t know that yet, and blue, though you don’t know that yet, either. You like it the most because it is both round and square and also a pretty color.
“P… p’aying wit’ blocks.”
“Blocks, eh?” He strokes his beard, making an exaggerated display of studying the colorful shapes surrounding you. “Blocks are fun. I think you’ll like this.”
Mikey takes one of the nearby blocks, a green hemisphere, not that you know either of those facts, and— get this— puts it on top of another block, a purple cube.
Now there’s… two blocks… but occupying the same location on the floor… at the same time.
For the second time in such a short period, your little mind is blown. You surmise that perhaps this Mikey is some kind of Sorcerer or perhaps Deity. Not even your daddy is probably this smart, and he knows the answers to every question you’d ever asked him.
If you were any other fluffy, you’d probably spend the next ten to fifteen minutes reeling at such an almighty display of power.
But you aren’t just any fluffy. You’re Rufus, and according to your daddy, you’re special.
After having studied Mikey’s motions very, very carefully, you look at the block in your hands, and doing your best to precisely imitate his actions, also place it atop another block. A green triangle, in this case. It slides a little down the incline, but still stays partway on.
Now, it’s Mikey’s turn to look impressed.