The Alphaville Herald

Frankenschnail chapter II

by kris on 03/06/08 at 11:26 am

by Happy Trails

The lab was a wreck. Someone or something had smashed anything breakable and a few things that weren’t. This was quite an interesting laboratory Oozeff had built. I had never been down here before, and the first thing I noticed was the large gurney in the middle of the room. There were thick leather straps lying broken on the floor beneath it. I looked for a slime trail. I could see Oozeff’s where he came in, but the trail that went from the gurney and disappeared into the wall……was huge…and it smelled bad.

I snatched up Oozeff’s journal and packed it into my shell then felt around on the wall for the secret door release. When it finally popped open I followed the path down to the riverside where it opened out onto the beach. That’s where I lost the trail, so I made my way back to my place.

When I got there, the door appeared to be wide open. As I got closer I saw that there was no door. I turned the house inside out; Escargot was missing, and the place smelled of foul slime.

Now my first instinct was to go out blindly searching for my baby, but I realized that without something to go on I would be wasting my time. So I gave the police a call and reported the break-in and possible kidnapping.

I didn’t tell them about Frankenschnail or the strange happenings over at Shelly’s. I let them go flail about wildly while I poured myself a brandy and began going through Oozeff’s journal.

My God, what Oozeff had done! I felt my body tuck back up into my shell as I read- he had collected pieces of dead snails and reattached them to make a body….then reanimated it:

“…my last experiment was a complete success! The creature was breathing on its own. I had sewn together extra parts to give him the size of a large slug. I only hope the leather straps can hold him. My assistant, Byron (his parents were uneducated and could not spell ‘Brian’), helped me roll the gurney over by the wall. Even though Byron had a bad deformity, he managed to get around well enough.

Oh no! Byron has moved the gurney too close to the torch and the creature is going wild! I must go help him to calm the….”

His journal ended there. This was puzzling; I did not see three slime trails in the lab. Perhaps whatever Byron’s deformity was would explain this. I gave Shelly a call.”Yes, I can tell you about Byron”, Shelly said, “Poor creature! He was born with small legs and feet, like the humans-except one of his feet looked like a club”.

That explained why there was no slime trail. His slimer never touched the ground. And the creature, being large enough, and given a suitable shell for his size, could easily have tucked Byron and Oozeff into it for travel.

I got out a map and studied it. I drew a line from Shelly’s to the beach, then up to my place…and extrapolated beyond. I figured the creature was making for high ground, following natural instinct. Hopefully Oozeff didn’t build a cannibal.