Not all sins begin as sordid deeds.
When Hasbro co-opted Discovery Kids and created their television hub for the broadcast renditions of their toylines – fittingly dubbed “The Hub” – executives in the company must have been overjoyed at the prospect of having a near-monopoly over the attention span of children with their program lineup. For the first time in a long time, Hasbro was contending directly with networks that had made children’s television into a science with the studios they allowed to create their features and the subject matter that they portrayed. And these veteran networks were losing to the new kid on the block in spades.
Why?
It is easy to lose sight of the human element behind corporate logos. The fact that they are designed by every increment to appeal to a psychology that the beholder is beholden to unbeknownst, notwithstanding. Behind the brands, there are people motivated to fill job positions for a myriad of causes that, more or less, relate to preventing personal homelessness. On top of this baser reason for conscription into a corporate legion, however, is the spark of life that not even the cogs of capitalist pursuits can crush between the metal teeth and extinguish.
It is not common in the professional world, due to its very nature, but when the right sparks come together in the right team, something amazing happens. Motivation and novel thinking abound, backed by the resources of a fully realized creative department. Who could have predicted that giving genuine people enough money to make their episodic passion projects would produce quality work?
This is not to imply that the older networks were not producing television with heart and soul, but it is to emphasize the merit of The Hub that their programs were able to appeal to a loyal audience. A demographic Hasbro did not realize it would gain, but would prove vital to the success of their brand, for it had the lifeblood of any enterprise: an excessive amount of disposable income.
The story of fluffies starts, not with hubris and ambition, but with earnesty, and a desire to enrich. The people behind the programs simply wanted to imagine compelling stories with the properties they were allowed to use, and they were successful in making a profit while doing so.
The root of all evil grew a titanic tree.
If there is a profit to be made, then there is a way to make even more profit. That is the mandate of a corporation’s growth. If this seems synonymous with amorphous greed spearheaded by the seats of a board of directors, that is because it is. In a vicious cycle, every venture to make money costs money, so the amorphous greed grows in its bid to feed itself with new revenue. It is from this churning ideology that good men and women were compelled to do the unthinkable in some forsaken year.
This was the threshold that Hasbro reached in its desire to create more demand for its programming, which in turn would create more demand for their latest marketing ploy. This was when Hasbro put its best minds to work applying advancing scientific methods to the field of bio-engineering.
It did not happen overnight.
Quietly, the entire business restructured itself to allow for the movement of funds to bring the outrageous concept to life.
Under coded contracts and labor fronts, facilities were erected in cheaply acquired lots all across The United States so that keen minds could do their work behind concrete walls and chain-link fences. Hasbro chairmen came and went, decisions were made, and eventually, from the franchise beast’s womb emerged its star-crossed offshoot: Has-Bio.
Under the shade of the tree laid the valley of death.
Who could say how many years were spent on this venture. Who could ascribe a dollar amount to its progress. All that can be said for certain is that it worked. Maybe Has-Bio brokered a deal to gain additional funds by letting other organizations dabble with their technology. More likely than that: espionage and subterfuge allowed the bio-engineering subsidiary to leap hurdles in their research and bridge technological gaps, because stolen intel is free, and free is the ultimate profit margin.
No matter the cause, one or the other or some combination of both, what ended up happening was enough information leaked to the general public about what Has-Bio was up to. The tongue-in-cheek name of the organization was not anything to go by because all sorts of companies were identifying as wacky concepts in this era of marketing. Metaverse’s litigation-dodging pursuits were tame in this business environment.
Under this regime of branding, dissent and rage fused into a storm of action that made landfall on Has-Bio’s production facility on a fabled night. Those responsible must have thought themselves vigilantes undertaking a monumentous task under the cover of darkness, but in practice all they did was drive their rinky-dink van up to a well-lit compound situated on an easily accessible service road from an interstate.
From there, they ducked underneath the barrier-gate that would have been operated by the security guard, had said guard not been fast asleep. Then they walked up the main road to the building’s front door, which was, to Has-Bio’s credit, decently locked with mechanized bolts and a series of locks.
A complicated door lock did not stand up well against handheld torch-cutters hooked up to portable oxygen tanks, though. However, this method of entry triggered all alarms that Has-Bio had in place in the event of a breech. Most of the facility’s personnel were rightly at home with their families at the time, but the law was soon to arrive with even more flashing lights and sirens.
And guns.
Through the valley they found the garden.
At this point in the scheme, the intruders must have been overcome with adrenaline. Fear for their lives must have ran high. Their options were death by police officer, or decades of imprisonment, should they be apprehended. Between these two fates, it is not hard to envision a radical’s dedication to the cause.
Security footage captured the black-clad troupe tearing down the halls, following the colored stripes on the floors that directed laboratory workers to the design floor and specimen rearing chambers. As if the hounds of hell were on their tails, these people cut doors off hinges, pulled fire alarms, and threw up haphazard barricades to buy themselves time against the converging units of officers.
When police arrived at the scene, they were beset by the sprinklers flooding every corridor and blaring alarms. Within minutes of the first squads embarking on clearing the building, the generator and back-up electrical grid were torched, plunging the compound into darkness disturbed only by the red and blue lights of the cruisers and tactical vans.
It was not long after this that the fluffies were herded out of one of the emergency exits in droves by the faceless figures.
Post Exodus.
One can only speculate what those black-coated people saw when they uncovered the heart of Has-Bio’s rampant work. The creatures in the cages and pens immediately drawn to the strangers despite their concealed faces, implicitly knowing they were like those in white that had created them.
Whatever they saw was enough to compel them to gather up a number of fluffies even as the region around the facility was gridlocked by police activity. Between the van and operatives on foot, a population of fluffies were let free in Cleveland, Ohio.
Another made it as far as North Carolina.
The fluffies were better off in their cages.
It is unknown if any of the activists were caught and prosecuted for their deed. If they were, Has-Bio must have paid a sum to keep the convictions from the press, as severe as they undoubtedly would have been.
Fluffies are among the world.
What are their stories now?