You are Actiasu.
You’ll spare the talk about “the infinite multiverses within the vast cosmos” and get straight to the point.
You are a Changeling King; a sort of insectoid mimic that takes the form of a pony, and feeds primarily on emotion. Love is addicting, and tastes like chocolate, but you can feed from all the fonts of emotion. Your hive is strong thanks to the diversity in it’s diet, whereas most hives starve due to gorging themselves purely on love.
Anyone looking in on you would know what you are and where you are; you’re in the My Little Pony universe. At least, one of them; one of the far-removed ones, where magic and friendship is supplemented by proper logic. You know you’re in an alternate dimension because you stumbled upon a bit of magic a long time ago that allowed you to see into other worlds.
About four months ago, in early December, you stumbled across the Fluffy universe.
At first, you were disturbed; a mix of Pony and Happy Tree Friends, where the order of the day saw tiny, cute, babbling little critters get brutalized, murdered, even tortured in increasingly unforgiving ways. At first your heart ached, and you could ONLY watch the hugbox videos.
And then HE showed up.
You assumed it was a He, at least. It was hard to tell what gender an amorphous mass of flesh and eyes was, but when it crept up and spoke into your mind, you got the impression that if it were to conform to general concepts such as gender, it would probably, maybe, most of the time, call itself a “he”. You knew better than to make deals with Eldritch entities, you thought, so at first, you turned it away, avoided it.
A month later and you were left feeling empty. You’d watched over a dozen hugbox videos, and you wanted more, but you couldn’t bring yourself to watch any more. And then He showed up again. He said he would deaden your senses, only a little, just so you could keep watching without so much pain. After all, they’re not REAL, at least to you. The catch? Oh, no catch, he said; he would just let you keep reading. Consuming the knowledge of the Fluffyverse, as it were.
You should’ve known right then and there it was not just figurative consumption.
You watched more; abusebox, moronbox, hugbox, mixedbox, weirdbox, horrorbox, ALL the boxes. More and more you watched, diving deeper and deeper into a rabbithole you were sure you’d never come back from, and didn’t seem to care anymore if you did. After all, you’d seen worse. Movies about clever traps ripping people apart, the aforementioned Happy Tree Friends where mutilations happened for no good reason anyways. Fluffies were no different.
And then one day, you came across a story by one of your favorite artists, NekuChan: “Difficult times brings timeless traditions”. A typical story; a farmer discovers a soon-mummah, who gives birth and dies overnight, leaving the chirpy babies all alone. The farmer discovers that the mummah turns to an almost plastic-like substance upon death, and as she stands with the babies in a dustbin, one falls into the fire. She tries to save it, but it’s already dead; it’s little leg flakes from it’s body.
You suddenly realize you’re salivating. Slightly, subtly, moisture collects at the corner of your mouth. You watch as she snaps the neck of the next baby and cooks it in a pot, displaying the results. The uncooked dead fluffy was plastic; the cooked-after-death fluff was tough, and burnt. The one that was cooked alive was described as “able to be handled like any meat”.
The first time you thought “I wonder what they actually taste like”, you should’ve recognized the signs.
It’s now early March. Another timeline you’ve taken to viewing is one in which Surge the Tenrec has raised a little bowl-fluffy named Lil Asskicker. You vaguely wonder who’s writing these stories; for a brief moment, you think you wrote them, but you’re just the observer, you think. You’re not going to deal with the logistics of multiverse authorship while you’re reading your nice relaxing Fluffy stories.
And then Surge takes three little fluffy foals and dumps them in a pot of seasonings, and that itch in the back of your mind takes over. You watch her and Lil Asskicker eat a plate of badly-cooked burnt spaghetti. The sauce is horrendous; she burnt the garlic horribly, and added too much of one seasoning and not enough of another. But her little bowl-fluffy takes a bit of meat, and says it tastes good despite being burnt.
You realize you’ve had enough. You need to answer this question. You need to know what they taste like.
Breaking your own rule you crack through one of the windows and drop through, your chitinous hooves clacking hard on the tarmac and your dense mane drooping over your face. You flick it back and stride - no, stalk - like a panther, looking for the alleyway you’d just seen.
A mummah sits at the end, staring into a Foals-4-Sketti machine. The plate of sketti she’d gotten for the Bestest she’d put in sits empty, and her soft “huuhuus” fill the alley. “Bestest, pwease, com back. Mummah sowwy, nu knu what du, but nebah du 'gain, pwease com back Bestest!” she squeals, masking the sound of your approach.
Your horn lights up yellow, and she turns to look up at you. You taste her fear on the air; like sour gummy candy. A familiar taste, one you adore. Your horn is covered in yellow light, and that same light condenses, forming a massive clawed hand that launches forward and grabs her. Her scree is cut off as you take her back to your own dimension, hurrying to the kitchen.
You smack her down into the sink, and her scaredy-poopies run down the drain as you turn the water on full blast. As she squeals from the assault, you quickly light a fire under a frying pan, tossing a clump of butter in. No seasonings; you want the FULL deal. With her final scree echoing in the small room you form a second clawed hand and rip her messily in half.
You tear her into chunks and throw them in the pan, keeping one of her legs out for yourself. With the sharp teeth of your species, you can supplement your diet with meat if not enough emotion is available. As you stir the pieces of Fluffy in with the sizzling butter, you chomp down on the raw leg for an initial taste test, and finally realize why no one’s described the taste of these things.
You’ve got no idea what’s on your tongue. It’s meat, that’s for DAMN sure. Just like the comic mentioned, it’s tender, falling apart in your mouth as you chew, and you have to take great care not to drool all over yourself. You’d compare it to some kind of fowl, but nowhere near as dry as turkey. Tastier than chicken, that’s for sure, but stopping just short of where you could consider it beef. The bones are so brittle they vanish within the chewing of the meat, and you spend several minutes idly stirring the pan with a makeshift spatula before you’ve swallowed the last of it.
By the time the meat in the pan has been cooked brown, you’re already aching to know what it tastes like after cooking. Magically grabbing a piece, you blow on it and toss it into your mouth, chewing noisily.
By the time you’ve realized what you’ve done, half the pan of tender Fluffy meat is gone, and your tastebuds are going wild.
The spaghetti it had eaten earlier had added a natural flavor to it; it’s teats had cooked similarly to bacon fat, crisping on the outside and remaining soft on the inside, and the rest of it’s body had been cooked medium, as all meat is intended to be eaten. The seasonings within the foal-made sauce and the carbs within the pasta it had eaten shortly before death made it SO much more robust than the raw leg you’d had before, and you supposed that the closest you could come to comparison is a duck that had gotten mildly frisky with a chicken. Despite being made specifically to be pets, they tasted gamey, as if made for hunting. No WONDER they were attacked on sight by dogs and cats.
You finally knew what they tasted like, and as you tossed the rest on a plate and chowed down, you looked up to one of your drones standing on the ceiling.
“Prepare a chamber for storage. I’m adding Fluffies to the menu.” you tell him, and walk back to the viewing room, chewing down the rest of the once-mummah more slowly.
Now you know; they taste almost like duck.
