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Slugs, Snails, and Suckers
Those slimy crawlers, found throughout the
multiverse from crawling around on the Plane of Earth, to the common variety seeming to
pop up anywhere persistent sods try and make gardens. I hear the old gardener at the
Gatehouse, Pekan Shu, has twenty different ways to get rid of the pests, and only two of
them involve any type of poison. He'd have trouble with the creatures we have the darks on
here though, some of strangest and barmy things to slime there way across the ground and
end up damp stains in a foot print.
Razorvine Slug
"So there I was, already to sneak in the tower and steal that
magical trinket, the only thing in my way a patch of razorvine, but I was prepared. Steel
toed slippers, light weight gauntlets, three types of clippers all equipped as I started
to weed my way through the patch of vine. It was a bit weird though, not as much razorvine
as I had expected. Then about half way up I suddenly feel this damp wet thing slide across
my leg. I looked down, and this, this, slug was looking at me, bloody thing must
of been a foot across as it sat there chomping on the vines. And then I started to
slip..."
- Cippet, a thief recovering from multiple blade wounds.
The Razorvine Slug, truly a sodding strange creature, has been found almost anywhere razorvine manages to grow. The slug somehow is able to eat the bladed vines and leaves, and at a mass rate at that, but instead of being able to totally wipe a patch of vine out, it helps it grow. See, the slime the slug emits is some type of chemical that helps the vine grow, and the slug manages to produce it in vast amounts, leaving behind globs and globs of damp slippery slime wherever it crawls. The Razorvine Slug is very large for its type, being able to grow about a foot an length, and though variations have been spotted it is usually a brown greenish color, easily blending in with the vines. Berks using razorvine to guard their houses have happily added the razorvine slugs in, their patch growing stronger and being slick enough to foil any thief.
Happy Sucker
"Those sappy celestials are so obvious it makes you want retch.
So the dark comes out that we baatezu have engineered the brilliant spinal leech, and
how do the celestials respond to this? They try and make their own leech! The over cocky
insanity of it. So they put their best minds on it, hah, and come up with the Celestial
Leech of Harmony or, what everyone else calls it, the Happy Sucker. And they don't even
get it right! It doesn't even suck anything. It just hangs around like the sappy
celestial creation it is, being annoying like every other other puny good creature, why
it... Argk, glok, blah... Eek! Get this bloody Happy Sucker off me!"
- U'Btsa'rd, Cornugon
The Happy Sucker, as U'Btsa'rd said, was engineered by the Celestials, though I wouldn't called into engineered, they just took some Solar belly button lent and had a Coure talk to it until it tried to crawl away, to counter the fiends in some way. It appears as a slightly off blue fluffy cute looking leech about 3 inches long. It does work pretty good against evil creatures, at least to annoy them, as it excretes a substance identical to holy water in its fur, causing it to slight burn or irritate fiendish skin. In fact it doesn't even attach to a fiend, it just crawls up under an arm and hangs on to the hairs like mad. The sucker also has the interesting property of rusting blood war weapons, like green steel, as the celestials always say, its not fiend that kill people, its long pointy things that kill people. The suckers are now usually carried in a pouch of any traveling to the lower planes, as throwing a handful of Happy Suckers, or even some fluff, now tends to make fiends scream and run the other way.
Gloom Snail
"Gloom, Gloom, the snail crawls
Crawls around its shell and bawls
Forever and ever torturing it's soul
Gloom, Gloom an evil of old"
- A Bleaknik on the Gray Waste
The Gloom Snail is a creature of the Gray Waste, found on all it's layers. It is also the most evil creature in the multiverse, more foul then any of the fiends. How can this be you ask? It is because it tortures itself and no other, always trying to find new torments. It crawls around it's shell, which has two openings, always crawling around and around, eating itself. It nourishes itself from it's very body, chewing painfully, as there is nothing on the waste healthy enough to eat. Not that it'd want to, for as I said, it tortures itself. If it finds a patch of razorvine it will roll in just to cut itself up, and is always looking for place where it can fall off and hurt itself. They are the most evil and self-loathing creatures, even fiends like themselves. Needless to say the fiends are a bit awe of the creatures, and the Gloom Snails are considered the most wonderful delicacy to lower planar denizens.
Another fabulous bit of work from the Barmy Shorts Company, barmiest bleakniks you'll ever meet. I was actually sent a pair of tickets in the front row for this one, they had a bit of drool on them already though, so I got an up close look. The bit where they brought a sheep in was truly inspired I thought, don't see many insane sheep now a days. I thought he acted the part very well. Find out more in The Black Sheep Of Doom And Destruction
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Text and Graphics Copyright 1999 Jeremiah Golden