Cream opened his drowsy eyes slowly. His head felt heavier than normal, and his throat was dry from mild dehydration. He had vague memories of going to sleep in his owner’s bedroom, on his little pet bed, with nothing particularly remarkable standing out about the day. But something felt decidedly different.
For starters, everything was bright. Like direct sunlight in the eyes sort of bright. When he looked away, it wouldn’t end. Everything was bright white. His already dry eyes struggled to adjust to the new and unfamiliar environment. It was when he stood up that he realized he wasn’t in his bed anymore.
“Wha?” he said aloud. “Daddeh? Whewe am daddeh?” He looked around while an ache started to form in the back of his eyes, and spotted a strange shape on the wall. He walked over to it cautiously, afraid that it would do something dangerous.
His fears were unfounded. Closer inspection revealed that it was a self-dispensing food and water stand. But the kibble he would normally have was all white pellets (unseasoned rice), and instead of water, he was being served milk.
His tiny mind could barely understand what was happening. He searched around the room again, spotting another shape. It was a plain white litterbox, with white litter inside. There was nothing else to furnish the room; it was just plain white walls, floor, and ceiling.
“Daddeh!” Cream shouted. “Daddeh hewp Cweam! Nu kno whewe am! Daddeh!” Only silence met him. Panic set in. He ran up and down the room, looking for something, anything else. A clue as to why, or where, or how to get out. He kept calling for his owner throughout.
After a while of this, he finally collapsed, wallowing in helplessness and confusion. Bereft of answers or a way out, he crawled his way over to the food and water dispensers, and filled himself. With nothing to keep his mind stimulated, he tried to use his poor reasoning skills to make sense of the situation.
Was this punishment? Was this a big sorry-box? He couldn’t think of anything he had done to deserve it. He hadn’t had an accident with any of his owner’s furniture. He hadn’t defecated on the floor since he was a foal (and had received a simple spanking in response to that). Had he been too insistent on having his owner play with him? He hadn’t known of a time his owner had said no to playtime or wasn’t happy to engage with him.
But if he did nothing wrong, why was this happening? Had a terrible monster got him in his clutches, and if so, to what end? Was he dreaming?
“Cweam wan wakies fwom bad sweepy-time picsuwes nao!” He said out loud. “Pwease wet Cweam hab wakies!” This too yielded no results.
The more he thought, the fewer answers he had. He ended up sitting there for so long, thinking in circles, that the food and drink he had digested and he had to use the litterbox. He flopped to the ground in silent frustration, head hurting from thinking so much and the unceasing brightness of his prison.
“Huuuu…daddeh pwease sabe fwuffy soon.” he said aloud.
Hours passed, and Cream only got up to eat, drink, and relieve himself. He tried to pass the time by remembering his favorite FluffTV episodes and the happiest times he had with his owner. It was backfiring, because it just made him yearn for release all the more. After being stationary for so long, he felt restless, so he got up and walked in circles around the room, hoping something would change. More hours passed, and he sat back down.
After an uncertain amount of time had passed, he tried to sleep. But the lights were so bright that he could still feel it through his eyelids. After much time wasted like this, he crawled into a corner to try and block out some of the light. It barely worked. Yet more time passed, and he meekly felt self-pity while hoping that the whole ordeal would be over when he woke back up. When his nap ended and he found his surroundings unchanged, he felt crushed, and cried quietly.
After another long period of sitting around doing nothing, an agitated Cream got up and resolved to figure out something to do. Electing to play pretend, he imagined himself as like one of the generic pony characters in the FluffTV programs he used to watch, on a grand adventure into the unknown. He ran around and hopped about, pretending that he was navigating his way through a thorny thicket. He ran in circles away from imaginary cats and dogs. The room’s silence proved deafening, so Cream started narrating his every move.
Hours of this passed and the sinking loneliness he felt was starting to creep back in, alongside an escalating boredom at repeating the same simple scenarios over and over again. So he started creating imaginary fluffies to engage with.
“Hewwo!” he said to the empty space. “Wha ‘ou namsies?” He paused for effect, his tiny brain latching on to a simple name to easily remember. “Namsies am Bwue? Dat am gud namsie! Wuv ‘ou Bwue!” He mimed hugging another fluffy.
“‘Ou hab daddeh? Weawwy? Cweam hab daddeh tu! Nu kno whewe daddeh am, bu’ daddeh am gud daddeh! Cweam hab sketti days, an fun toysies - wha’ am 'ou toysies?” He struggled to come up with something interesting to pretend to react to, which made him increasingly frustrated and broke his immersion.
“Meybe hab tawkies wif Bwue 'nodda day.” He said, going back to aimless pacing. He tried to inject some life into his walks by humming and singing, but he was having a hard time remembering what his favorite songs sounded like.
Fluffy ponies have a largely innate poor sense of time, and Cream was no exception. In his current environs, it degraded to the point of nonexistence. After all, what was a day without the sun and the moon? What was an hour, a minute, a second without a clock? What this meant for Cream is that in his desperate attempts to stop the soul crushing boredom, he quickly burned out his few tools for staving it off without realizing it. Time would now slow to a painful crawl.
Hours of pacing in circles. Hours more of thinking in circles. Small bursts of sleep every now and then when he felt tired. Eating and shitting when needed. This was Cream’s life now. And he hated it.
After languishing for an amount of time he could no longer quantify, Cream was beginning to catalogue every small detail of his room. So when he noticed that the litterbox never seemed to get full, it piqued his curiosity. Likewise, the food and drink dispensers never seemed to run out either. Even the dumbest fluffy pony would start thinking about these details once they noticed them, and Cream was about average in the intelligence department.
“Meybe dewe a hoomin mistah ow wady hewp Cweam…” he pondered aloud. “Ow…meybe nummies an wittabawks am magic? Huuu…Cweam nu unnastan!” And so, it was back to square one.
Odd dreams started coming to him when he slept. There were times that the room would stretch out forever, and he;d wander into the empty white void endlessly, panicking when he feared he would never be able to find his food and water again. Other times he found himself thrown into a big ocean or lake, drowning. He dreamed of amorphous creatures chasing him. And sometimes he dreamed of happier times, of his owner, of playtime, of the feeling of the grass beneath his feet and the sun on his fluff. Those dreams left him depressed when he woke up.
One time, a particularly disturbing vision came to him. It unsettled him so badly that he could not tell if he was dreaming or still awake. A monochrome creature with a crooked smile just came up out of the ground. It crawled towards him and made disgusting slithering sounds as it moved. He ran for what felt like forever. When it disappeared he resolved to stay awake at all hours, so that if it was real, he’d be ready to run away again, and if it was not, he’d never re-encounter it.
A good amount of his waking hours were getting weird for him regardless. The bright lights were giving him near permanent eye floaters. It was making him terrified to see specks of black or green or yellow in his vision that wouldn’t go away when he moved his head or closed his eyes. Sometimes the shapes would look like a living thing moving out of the corner of his vision, and he’d run around to try and catch it (or run away from it). He was constantly covered in a cold sweat.
No matter how hard he tried, he could not get away from sleep forever. After totally passing out, he had a terrible dream about his owner screaming at him, menacing him, holding a sorry stick threateningly. Everywhere he ran to, it seemed his owner would find him and hit him. He awoke screaming and crying. Or so he thought, because as he retreated into a corner, he found himself falling down as if he’d been chucked out of an airplane.
When he really did wake up, he cried incoherently. He stumbled about in an uncertain frenzy, no longer sure what, if anything, was safe. He hyperventilated in fear and despair, chest hurting from the panic and stomach feeling as though it was twisted.
“Hewb! Peas some one hewp Cweam!” he shouted incoherently. Nauseated and dizzy, he tripped over his own feet and hit the floor, crying some more. He felt like he was getting pulled in a thousand different directions and could no longer tell what his emotions were. The spinning in his head just kept going faster and faster until he puked on the floor and his vision blacked out.
When he regained consciousness his vomit was totally gone. He screamed, so loud that it reverberated off his prison’s walls and beat his eardrums with a painful fury. He ran around and pawed at the walls, gripped by pure madness. He felt like the room was suffocating him.
Eventually he tired, and calm came back to his frayed nerves. He decided that if nothing else, he was going to figure out why the litterbox stayed clean no matter what, and why his food and drink never ran out. So he stared both down, doing nothing else. He stood firm against the malignant visions, fought against sleep as much as he could, watching and waiting.
Once, after failing to properly ward off sleep, he found himself staring down a person, but not someone he could identify as a human being, cleaning out his litterbox, and pouring more food and drink into the dispensers. It was completely white, and made no sound as it moved. It opened up a section of the wall, went through, and just like that, disappeared back behind the wall. Cream shivered in place, not able or willing to know what the thing was or if he simply had another vision. He was too spooked to think of what it would mean if it was real.
More time passed. Cream tried to remember his past life again, but found that he was having a hard time doing so. He remembered he had an owner, but not what he looked like or what they did together. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t remember much of anything anymore. Not the FluffTV episodes that made him howl with laughter, or what his old room looked like, or what toys he had played with. No longer was the sensation of grass beneath his hooves or natural light against his fur familiar.
He backed himself into a corner. His body constantly shivered with fear. His eyes were dried out and pained. He frequently jerked his head around trying to catch better glimpses of the things he thought he could see. Barely visible outlines of faces moving their lips but saying nothing. Bugs and plants crawling back into the walls.
He covered his eyes with his hooves. It was then that he seriously looked at his fur for the first time since he had came here.
Pure white. His fur had always been naturally white. It was the reason he’d been named Cream, after all.
He stared deeply into his own white fur, the uneven clumps and wisps. He felt now that he hated it. That in this hideous void of white, that it was ugly. He was ugly.
He bit into himself. Tear it. Tear it all away. Fresh streams of crimson flowed from the wound. It spilled in a small stream against the rest of his fur and all over the white floor. He bit some more and the sweet coppery taste filled his mouth. The pain was dulled in his mind from the flood of adrenaline.
The dark red stains filled him with a new, crazed idea. Dragging his bleeding body all over the room, he splashed red droplets against the walls. He giggled with a frenzied energy, eager to paint his prison with a new color. He smeared his blood, streaked it across the floors and the walls. When the wound started to congeal, he bit some more and the blood flowed anew, even as the blood was making him sick to stomach. He was a mad artist, and the room was his easel.
He made big hoof prints in blood. He made a big bloody smiley face and named it Red. He tried to make a rainbow even though he only had one color to work with. Bloody clouds, flowers of flesh and blood, and bloody grass to walk on. He would make it all. In blood.
Woozy and delirious, he shambled over to Red while his now deep wound bled heavily.
“Hebbo fbwiend!” he slurred. “Watchu wan? Mowe boo-boo jubce? Fwuffy can gib wotcha dat!” He smeared blood in a little pool in front of the crudely drawn face. He looked back up to the face only to feel as though its cold, dead stare had become piercing. Threatening. It burned.
Turning to run, Cream slipped on his own blood and fell face first on the ground. Pain shot through his lower jaw and his teeth stung. The disgusting blood smears no longer looked inviting, smelling foul and repelling his senses. His head throbbed in pain and his vision blurred. He sat there, his wound stinging agonizingly. It was ending for him now. He could feel it. He looked up one last time to see the big white giant again, just looking down at him.
I take off my N95 mask and pull my white hoodie off, running a hand through my hair staring at the ungodly mess Cream left behind. Dumb bastard must’ve torn one of his own arteries going bumfuck crazy. The red streaks of blood are starting to blacken and dry. Clean-up is going to be hell.
I check my watch. It’s been ten days since I threw Cream in, and I periodically monitored them every day, watching them get progressively crazier from the camera hidden near the lights. I knew a fluffy like him would’ve snapped quickly under the pressure, and wasn’t disappointed. I just hadn’t expected an end as dramatic as this.
I sigh. Sometimes it can’t be helped. This room needed repainting anyway. At least now I won’t need to wear this padding on my feet every time I walk in and out. Makes little to no sound when I walk, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a hassle to get on and off. Next time, I resolve, I’ll just do things more of the old fashioned way.
