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// Fluff and Nonsense 
// Story: Ideas Entwined 
// by FanOfMostEverything 
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Excerpt from Legends on the Hoof: A Field Guide to the Zoologically Dubious, by Dr. Lyra Heartstrings:

Bushwoolie (Mesocricetus amabilis)

Appearance: A bushwoolie is a biped, speculated to be mammalian, standing at roughly 0.4 ponyheights. Mass is unclear, but speculated to be very light for their size, comparable to equivalently sized birds. Bushwoolies are described in the Chronicles of the Magnus1 as having incredibly lush fur, to the point that their necks (if any,) legs (if any,) and arms (which have textual support) can be indiscernible from the rest of their bodies depending on their posture. Bushwoolies come in as many colors as ponies. Whether there is any deeper, more meaningful connection between our two kinds is as yet unclear.
1. See entry for Homo excelsus, p. 89.

History: Mention and depictions of bushwoolies go back millennia; colorful wedge shapes with eyes are an artistic theme stretching almost continuously from the Paleopony Period to verified2 relics from the Discordant Age. The theme continues to a lesser degree in the Two Sisters and Celestial Periods, though decreasingly so, until nearly vanishing in the third century AC. On a hopefully unrelated note, depictions and records of pukwudgies increase along those same timeframes.
2. Verification achieved by asking Discord if he’d done anything to it. Response of “Go away, your insanity has gotten boring” was taken as a negative.

Behavior: Every available source on bushwoolies agrees that they are incredibly agreeable, to the point that they will happily agree that something is false seconds after being assured (and concurring) that it is true. And in both cases, they are sincere in that belief. As such, should you encounter one, please be very careful about what you say to them.

As an example of the risks involved, consider the following excerpt from the explorer Flood Pants’s AC 855 expedition into the jungles of Borneigho:



Must find water soon. Any disease it carries will be better than this thirst. I fear I am becoming delirious. Encountered absurd little fuzzballs upon waking this morning. Not sure what they might have been if my blasted eyes could have focused, but one asked me in halting Ponish if I needed help. I thanked it but assured it a hallucination couldn’t aid me. The whole group agreed they were hallucinations, even if few could pronounce the word. By the time I shook out the last drops from my canteen, they were fading like mist.



Whether or not Sir Pants was truly hallucinating, the risk is clear: A bushwoolie is the philosophy of Haycartes given flesh: It thinks it is, therefore it is. Convincing it otherwise—and it is terribly easy to do so—could be lethal. Evidence suggests that the cooperation between ancient ponies and bushwoolies was in part to protect them from this weakness, in exchange for serving as ponies' manipulators as tactile telekinesis had not yet been developed. If bushwoolies truly are extinct, this vulnerability to doubt may well have been the cause, and we have failed in this ancient, sadly forgotten duty. In this case, let us hope I am mistaken in my understanding of the ancient myths.