Cute | Invaders

It was a Tuesday, 7:14 AM, in the sleepy suburb of Maple Grove. Mrs. Albright, who was watering her petunias, assumed the small, gelatinous plop on her lawn was a fallen plum from the neighbor’s tree. But it wasn’t purple. It was the color of a sunrise—peach and pink, with two enormous, liquid-black eyes that took up 80% of its body.

“Oh, you poor thing,” she whispered, picking it up. Cute Invaders

Every Puffball was engineered to trigger a specific, unstoppable chain reaction in the human brain. Their body proportions—oversized heads, tiny limbs, round torsos—mimicked human infants to a devastating degree. Their scent was a complex pheromonal cocktail of fresh bread, lavender, and the specific static-electricity smell of a beloved old blanket. Their vocalizations were subsonic frequencies calibrated to lower blood pressure and release oxytocin. It was a Tuesday, 7:14 AM, in the

Part I: The First Sighting No one sounded the alarm when the first one landed. But it wasn’t purple

Love me. And in return, I will teach you how to be happy again.

Within seventy-two hours of the first landing, 34% of the global population had voluntarily let a Puffball into their homes. They built tiny beds in shoeboxes. They fed them sugar water from eyedroppers. They cooed.