Forewords:
Many have long pondered and speculated what the end of modern society and civilization would look like in fiction. As a result, post-apocalyptic settings are not a foreign concept to the fluffy genre. Most of them are amusing settings, and some incorporate elements of fantasy.
This is an absurd writing, its setting even more removed from reality than fluffies are already. Yet still, there is little amusement to be had, unless you are a little deranged.
Unusual Ordanance
The borders that mankind devised to delegate the boundaries of nations and states are a thing of the past. Only the adversity of the landscape present the unassailable borders. Mountains. Deserts. Hostile jungles and forests.
Oceans.
The sun still shines on this world, unfamiliar yet the same. Waves coalesce and surge upwards in the blue reaches, before crashing into their troughs. The constant undulating surface. Patches of overcast are distorted in the waters’ reflection.
Land nowhere in sight. A vessel crawls along on current: an unkept fishing boat. Its metal skin is bright orange and red where its paint has chipped away, precariously close to the waterline. Fortunately, the most ragged and corroded holes in the hull are located on the cabin structure. The ship would remain afloat for a time more, until fate deemed otherwise. During this time, the modest crew did what they had to to continue living.
Upon this ship, the housing compartment is located near the bow, leaving much of the rear as open deck space, with one bizarre exception. Before the systems that were collapsed, this allowed fishermen to maneuver unencumbered and haul great bounties of fish and other sea life aboard for processing. At present, this space was partly occupied by a contraption cobbled together from sheet metal, crude rivets, piping and scrap appliances.
Despite its unusual components, any eye regarding the object could tell that it was a weapon; a cannon of some sort. Its rotating base was controlled by simple winches and handles on the sides of the barrel allowed the operators to manipulate its range of elevation.
The barrel was low, in a stowed position currently. There was no need to put it to use on these empty seas. The interim of battle was filled with the deceptively peaceful life of seafaring nomads. Fish and seaweed were a reliable source of nutrition.
Below decks, the ammunition for the cannon continued to replenish itself.
The room most avoided upon the ship had amassed a hellish amount of waste. The oldest of it was a solid crust on the rusting walls, layers upon layers of caked up fluffy feces. Within these confines were the perpetual screams of fluffy babies demanding attention that the squalor outright denied them. Their parents rooted through the semi-liquid slime that coated the chamber floor for food. The ones not preoccupied with this fruitless search were too busy making more fluffies in a corner. Their grunts and sexual babbling were drowned out by the tiny voices crying out in neglected chorus.
Many more of these fluffy foals were dead and strewn about the abandoned compartment, as ubiquitous as the rest of the nastiness.
Evey so often, a hatch being opened would let some lucky fluffies catch a glimpse of sunlight before a deluge of seaweed was dumped upon them. This was the only food they knew, aside from the cycle of eating their own defecation to tide themselves through the deprivation.
This was life aboard the castaway ship, above and below its decks. And just as fluffies had a tenuous grasp of time at best-- especially these fluffies isolated from the passing of days in the dim sewage pit-- the people who called it home also learned to put little value in the days and nights.
In the young hours of one fateful day, the fishing ship drifted into the path of another wayward vessel. Its shape was ambiguous in the inky black of the sunless aquatic plain. It would be hours still before the other craft would grow wise to the presence of the ship, when it got close enough for the inhabitants to hear the sloshing of the waves breaking against its sides.
That was when the torches were lit. The orange plumes atop lookout masts revealed the outline of the barge set out on pontoons for buoyancy.
As is often the case in episodes of contact between people, an effort was made to find common language between the two groups. Isolation to pockets of groups made such negotiations tense, for the differing cultures clashing was accompanied by the threat of one group erasing the other.
As is human nature, one misunderstanding on one side led to the decision that the other group’s resources were forfeit. This forced the other side to go on the defensive. Both sides believed they were the defenders of their claims.
The people on the barge had spears with blades that were drawn and hammered out from scrap metal. Crude, but effective. Notably, the ones enhanced with cabling to be used as harpoons claimed lives across the distance between the raft and the ship.
In response, the fishing vessel winched the cannon about to get its bearing on the enemy. Those tasked with raising the barrel were prime targets for the harpoons, but despite the losses, the first shot was eventually loosed.
It began with a capstan being turned. Backs forced into the handles drew the unusual ordanance.
The capstan caused a great net to rise from the disgusting piles on the containment compartment floor. It sifted and separated the fluffies from the waste and drew them up through the cannon’s base, into the receiver.
They were already screaming uselessly about the bad upsies and scary sounds. The screaming turned to shrieks when the ram rod was released. It scraped along its channel, and the heavy mass of metal drove into the fluffies spurred on by the unforgiving laws of Newton. Its flattened frontal point was splattered with blood and entrails by time it stopped. The fluffy bodies were a densely packed amalgam of meat, loaded into the cannon’s chamber by the literal charging bolt. However, some fluffies were still alive despite their broken bodies. They weakly croaked for clemency as they felt the cannon rattling around them.
Then they felt the scalding rush of steam. The vapors broiled the fluffies before the pressure was sufficient to unleash them on the barge. When the pressure was great enough, though, partially cooked bits of fluffy gore were sent flying from the enormous, sordid blunderbuss.
The cannon was not accurate. It did not have to be accurate. The sheer horror it inspired was enough to break the resolve of the people upon the barge.
However, use of the weapon broke something else: the rusting husk of the fishing boat. Its structural spine lurched from the steam explosion, and it just could not withstand it.
After vomiting a display of blood and various organ tissues, the fishing boat’s bow and stern rolled in opposite directions to one another and sheared the vessel in half.
It went down in minutes, taking all hands with it. It was karma at work that Davey Jones took them through the murk of so much fluffy shit.