//------------------------------//
// Snails -- Snails Does His Homework 
// Story: The Album 
// by Peregrine Caged 
//------------------------------//

Written by: funkyferret
Rated Everyone



The afternoon sun shone down through the window, casting its light across the kitchen table and highlighting the golden coat of the colt who sat before it. The young unicorn was staring vacantly at the sheet of paper before him, which held a few simple math problems. A pencil hung out of the side of his mouth, coated with drool.  He would chew on it periodically, black eyes unfocused on the words and figures in front of him.  Despite the sun being in his eyes, the pony seemed to have little regard for his surroundings.
 
Snails was having some trouble with his homework assignment.  It wasn’t the actual math problems that bothered him; they were absurdly easy.  Rather, he found himself musing over the idiosyncrasies that the theory of mathematics itself presented.  Who decided 
that one plus one equals two, anyways?  The ponies of yore could just as easily have decided to set it equal to four, or made up a different term entirely, like eleventy.  The only reason one plus one equaled two was because some scholar in the past had decided to label it as such, and the rest of Equestria followed the decision without question.  Scholars… what made them so special anyways?  Their theories were flawed.  Geometry and Calculus were even more arbitrary than simple addition.  The number pi was simply created to fill in a gap that the scholars could not explain.  And who decided to name it pi anyways?  Some old nag with a sweet tooth, that’s who. 

As for the sciences, they were absurdly flawed as well.  These attempts to explain how the universe worked were far from complete.  For example, if the theory of conservation of energy was to be believed, magic shouldn’t be possible.  The “great minds” were still trying to find a way to fill in the gaps that their own leaps in logic had created.  He tried to not let their theories affect him, but he had to admit that he himself often wondered about the properties of magic.  His head would get so full of reasons why magic should not be possible due to the current mathematical theories that explained the universe, that his capacity to perform said magic was severely hindered.  The whole lot of it ought to be tossed out so that a new generation, like he himself, could start over from scratch.  But then, he would be the one defining things all willy-nilly in an attempt to explain the world, and they would inevitably end up in the same position as before, only this time he would be in the hot seat.  There wasn’t any real clear solution on how to approach such a conundrum; he would have to give the whole situation a lot more thought.  Perhaps he had best go back to the beginning and start working from the ground up…
                    
The pencil slipped from Snails’ mouth, leaving a smear across his homework assignment.  The paper was still void of any answers and would likely remain so for quite some time to come.  A goofy smile was plastered across his snout, and his eyes had wandered to stare blearily at the kitchen wall in front of him.  A fly landed on his ear, but he did not even twitch.  Mouth open slightly, he stared into space, seemingly without a care in the world.  The afternoon wore on, with barely any movement from the young unicorn, save for the occasional slow blink of his eyes.  His homework assignment was going to be late once again.





            
        
Cheerilee sighed as she looked over the crumpled assignment of one of her more troubled students.  The paper was smudged and bore a variety of scribbles and odd drawings.  Only a few of the questions were actually answered.  She tapped her pen against the top of her desk in an absent manner.  “I should have expected this,” she said to herself.  “After all, he’s always been a little... slower than the others.  I may have to speak to his parents again.”  She began to grade the assignment, marking the mistakes with her red pen.  So intent was she on her work that she did not notice the black eyes watching her from outside the classroom window.
                    
Snails backed away from the hiding place from which he had been observing his teacher work.  He sighed.  He’d let himself get distracted once again and his work had suffered as a result.  He knew Miss Cheerilee didn’t mean any harm with her comment; he wasn’t even supposed to have heard her say it.  He was used to hearing such things anyway.  He was going to have to work on not being so easily distracted, lest this “slow” label become permanent.
            
Still he was left wondering what defines the terms “fast” and “slow” in the first place.  Surely it was all relative.  To the lowly gastropod, the turtle moves at great speeds, while the reptile would find the snail to be slow.  And yet both such creatures are considered slow by pony standards.  To the agile hummingbird, the entire world would seem slow.  Would the energetic bird even recognize the turtle or the lowly snail as a living being, or treat them as rocks due to its inability to distinguish their movements due to their very different metabolisms?

Even with metabolic rates itself aside, there was the psychological issue as well.  Each creature views itself as “normal” and judges others based upon such an assumption.  If this view varies between each individual, then can any behavior truly be called average?  If so, then by whose definition is the meaning of the word average defined?  Indeed the attempt to conform to such a generalized view of the world would leave those at both ends of the bell curve in trouble.  Perhaps trying to define everypony by some rigid standard was not the proper method at all.  New ideas usually came from those outside the norm after all.  Perhaps society’s desire to define what is normal was in fact crippling its own development.  He shook his head.  He did not need to change in order to avoid such pointless labels.  There were so many more interesting things he could be doing with his time, like unraveling the true secrets of the universe.

The lanky little unicorn stood there in the middle of the road with an absent-minded smile on his face.  Those passing by who stopped to observe him either shook their heads sadly, or sighed at his behavior.  They did not know of the complex thoughts that went on behind those black eyes.  Someday they would see the truth... just not today.