With the sky so deeply overcast, the fog had not cleared. Mist and water filled the various reaches of the damp forest, a place that had taken on a far more distinctly sinister character as Fluttershy found herself moving deeper and deeper into it. The trees had grown far larger here than in the outer places, and their forms were disturbingly linear. As if they were purposely trying to replicate or even actively graft themselves to the eldest of the ruins that occasionally breached the wet, infinitely deep swamp-soil.
While ominous, Fluttershy was had already substantially habituated to her new environment. This was in a sense similar to Stockcolt Syndrome, a phenomenon she was especially prone to, but in this case relied on the fact that, in generally, there were very few actual specific things that Fluttershy feared. Her fear was overwhelming and all-encompassing, but almost wholly limited to social interactions.
She was growing increasingly accustomed to her surroundings. Further, she had realized that of course Eternity had been lying. Whatever monsters she had envisioned in her mind had been replaced by actual visions of carnivorous, parasitic, predatory, or outright grotesque gastropods—and being real, those things were far easier for her to deal with. They were, after all, animals, and therefore inherently adorable and innocent. Regardless of what they were.
In the absence of surprises—like being chased by a snail she had neither expected nor been introduced to—her fear slowly seeped away, replaced by the wonderment of meeting so many new and slimy friends. Some, surely, were dangerous—but Fluttershy had come to understand that dangerous animals could be easily overcome with conversation, reasoning, and kindness.
She in fact began to notice that the population around her had started to change. For a time, there had been few if any creatures—but as they got deeper and deeper in the forest, more toward the center and toward the ruins, more came. Except that instead of snails, Fluttershy found that almost all the gastropods around her were, in fact, slugs.
They were highly sociable. Curious, even, although not all of them. In the distance, Fluttershy saw them moving rapidly among the trees. Some were far larger than her, but they moved with odd dexterity and silence, their bodies moving rapidly between the trees with a squish and a squelch.
She stopped, watching one pass by. It was an impressive specimen of leprous brown, held aloft by hundreds of spider-like legs, slime dripping from its underside as it moved. It paused, its cloudy stalked eyes glaring at her, before it let out a gibbering laugh and climbed up a tree.
“I know, right?” agreed Fluttershy. She looked down to see that several much smaller slugs had begun to crawl up her body. “Oh my,” she said. “Well, I suppose I do taste delicious.”
She turned back to see Snails, but was surprised to see that she could not see him at all. She paused, confused, and looked up to find him desperately clinging to the bark of a particularly large tree.
He was pale and wide-eyed. “Slugs,” he squeaked. “Why did it have to be slugs?”
“What’s wrong?” She looked down at them. “They seem to be friendly. Oh, look!” She reached down and unfastened an especially large specimen from herself. It was almost as long as one of her legs and a brilliant yellow color. “Look at this little guy! You know, when I was a little filly, I wished I could be a banana slug. They have no natural predators. That must be nice…”
Snail’s eyes widened even further. “B...banana?”
The slug looked up at him and opened its mouth, extending hundreds of fangs as it let out a long, hissing scream. Fluttershy smiled.
“Look, he wants to greet you!” She paused. “Or ‘they’? They’re hermaphrodites, so the don’t want to misgender them...but ‘they’ always felt like a plural?” She shrugged. “But I guess it’s a case-by-case basis…” She looked up again. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can...if I can come down.”
“Why?”
He seemed to be on the verge of spilling his oats. “They’re just so—ACK! They’re too scary! They’re all wet and slimy and full of mucous, I can’t, I just can’t—”
“Snails! You’re being offensive!” She brushed the slugs off her. “They aren’t that much different from—”
“Don’t you say it! Don’t you dare say it! It’s not the same! THEY’RE NOT THE SAME!”
Fluttershy looked up at him and, slowly, it donned on her.
“You’re terrified of slugs, aren’t you?”
He nodded, clearly ashamed of himself. “They’re the face of pure evil…”
“Well that’s just mean. And also untrue. I’ve seen pure evil’s face, and she’s not a slug. Usually.”
Something rustled behind Fluttershy. She turned, and almost cried out as a skeleton lurched through the ferns, stopping to stare at her—but she laughed at herself when she realized that it was not an undead at all. It was of course a skeleton, but it was animated by a colony of pitch-black slugs intercalated to the bones of a long-deceased pony.
She smiled. “Nature is so fascinating!”
The colony stared at her, then limped off. Two or three more followed it. Fluttershy wondered if she could ever be a colony of slugs. Unfortunately, she knew that she could not. Her bones, if they could be called that, would make a poor home for any living creature.
“If I didn’t know better, I would think you’re not taking this seriously,” snapped Snails.
“I am. But we need to keep moving. You’re the only one who knows how to set up the traps.” Fluttershy did not know what kind of traps, exactly, but assumed they were probably harmless if not hilarious in nature. Just enough to slow down the mechs until they could convince the advancing force to turn back. Like in the old Foal Alone movie reels that had terrified her as a child.
“Those are just the little slugs,” said Snails, quickly growing more and more distressed but forcing himself to climb down the tree. When he reached the bottom, he was shaking. “Snails? Snails I know how to deal with—but slugs aren’t snails. Not even close. It’s like how bananas are the natural enemy of apples.”
“The natural enemy of apples is vampire fruit bats. And also mildew. Trust me on that one.”
Snails seemed to grow more serious. “The little slugs are bad enough—but you haven’t seen what I’ve seen. What’s in there. It’s not fun.”
Fluttershy nodded. “Then we can work through it together. Okay?”
Snails started to nod—but blanched as he saw something behind Fluttershy. Fluttershy, likewise, felt both a sudden wave of unpleasantness as well as an unusual heat.
She turned slowly to see that an enormous slug was approaching her from behind—and it reared up behind her, releasing a low growl.
As beautiful as it was, Fluttershy realized that it was, in fact, on fire—and that the mucus left in its wake was likewise burning.
“Don’t move!” hissed Snails. “Fire slug! FIRE SLUG!”
“I can see it,” hissed Fluttershy. Then, clearing her throat, she took a step forward.
“What are you doing—?!”
Fluttershy gave the slug her best smile. “Hello Mr. Fire Slug, we don’t mean to intrude. We’re a little lost. Can you help us find where the Golden Abalone lives?”
The slug began to gurgle, its projections shifting violently as its body accumulated more and more heat.
“Oh no,” said Fluttershy, feeling herself flush.
“What?”
She turned to Snails. “I think I may have misgendered the slug…”
A ball of magic ignited over the slug’s head, held aloft between its glowing antennae. Fluttershy saw this, and was promptly thrown to the side by Snails’s magic as the slug fired its laser.
The trees behind her exploded in plumes of fire and smoke, boiled from the magical blast. Had Fluttershy possessed eyebrows, they would surely have been burned off her face—although she felt herself becoming singed from the pure force of the blast.
The slug did not hesitate. It lowered its head toward Snails. Snails cried out.
“You’re gonna want to run, Fluttershy!”
And with that the snail charged him full speed, a dash across the landscape that Snails barely managed to doge—and one with such force that the bark of the tree he had been nearest to splintered as the slug ricocheted across it.
In the distance, Fluttershy saw another group of fire slugs approaching—and saw them stop as something rumbled beneath them. Something that almost seemed to speak.
She was almost knocked over by the vibration—but in the distance, she saw one of the colony-undead. It nodded to her, and she understood. She ran.
“OVER HERE!” she cried. “I TASTE DELICIOUS!”
The extra fire slugs, the ones that had not yet noticed Snails, heard her—and they pursued with unnatural speed, leaving trails of burning slime as they went. Another laser shot by, partially singing Fluttershy—but she dodged, continuing to run, slipping in the mud as she dashed past ruins and corroded warehouses.
From above, a large and particularly venomous spider-slug dropped from the tree, preparing to coat her in paralytic slime—but Fluttershy was too fast. Her hyper-advanced self-preservation instincts had been honed the year before when she had dealt with a friendship problem deep in a forest infested with drop-bears. She fell forward onto her hooves, and then pushed back, sliding herself onto the slug’s back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But...um...if you don’t mind...YAH!”
She dug her heels into the slug’s sides, and its eyes looked back at her, filled with confusion—and then it began to scuttle forward with great speed, apparently as afraid of being eaten by fire slugs as Fluttershy was afraid of being incinerated.
Riding a slug was far more difficult than riding a drop-bear, but not harder than riding a snell and certainly not harder than riding a draconequus. Especially a greased one.
Fluttershy held firm, directing her steed to safety—or so she thought. Until she reached the cliff.
It did not bother to stop. Rather, it just went over the edge, clinging to the side—and Fluttershy was tossed into the fissure with a squeak. From below, in the darkness, a terrifying flying slug shot upward, its mouth opening wide to consume her—but its aim was poor and she bounced off where its nose would have been had slugs had noses.
“Sorry!” she cried, rolling down its back and plummeting through some thick shrubbery—before falling hard against the ground with a thump.
Her wind was knocked out of her—and, considering her soft and timid nature, she had precious little wind to begin with. What she had left came out in a squeak as she rolled over, curling her legs up in pain.
She remained like this, hearing the sounds of things moving in the brush around her, and wondered if Snails had been right. Perhaps she had been unprepared for this environment.
She was forced to dismiss this thought. They had simply gotten off on the wrong foot. And slugs, like snails, did in fact posses feet.
She brushed herself off. Or tried to. The mud was oddly tenacious when combined with slug slime, or snail slime. Or any sort of slime. And as a pastel, Fluttershy stained easily—although not nearly as often as Rarity, who needed to be bleached constantly. Or, as Fluttershy suspected, dipped in optical brightener.
She looked at the ground and saw several small snails fleeing—and, as they fled, collapsing into multiple extremely small snails. Tiny snails that themselves may very well have been made of even smaller snails. This made her wonder just how much of the world was in fact made of snails. She assumed—and hoped—not much.
Something rustled in the brush. Fluttershy’s ears pricked. “Snails?” she called, hesitantly.
He burst through from a bush, falling on his face and sending snails scattering in every direction. “Ugh,” he said, brushing himself off. “Now, I’m not the kind of pony to tell you ‘I told you so’.” And then he stopped talking.
Fluttershy, though, nodded. “You got away, though.”
He smiled, but weakly. “Sure did. Fire slugs. They’re not nice at all. Never are. Real common near the edge. I use their mucous to start my fires…” He shivered. “But seeing them in person isn’t fun, eh?”
Fluttershy chuckled and approached—only to stop. She paused, sniffing the air. “Huh…”
“What?”
“Did you...step in something?”
Snails checked his hooves. “Looks like it,” he said, gesturing to the mucous that was up to his elbows. “I really, really don’t like slugs. They’re real scary, don’tchaknow. And their mucous naturally repels snails. I feel...kind of sick.”
Fluttershy looked up. “I can’t fly my way out of here. Do you know a way out?”
“Sure do. This way.”
Snails led the way, and Fluttershy followed.
“Don’t know if I’m gonna get to set any more traps,” he sighed. He shivered. “This far in, it isn’t safe. I think…”
“What?”
He sighed. “Maybe we should turn back?”
Fluttershy gasped. “But what about saving the Golden Abalone?”
He looked over his shoulder, appearing conflicted, but closed his eyes and nodded, clearly resolving to remain brave. Fluttershy gave him a weak smile of her own.