The Piper at the Gated Lawn

by AugieDog

Rating: everyone
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Comedy, Snails, Slice of Life, Snips
Length: 6134

Snails has a secret: a secret power only he can wield, a secret batch of knowledge only he can grasp, a whole secret world over which he rules as an absolute monarch. Secret except, y'know, it's right there on his flanks...

Snails has a secret: a secret power only he can wield, a secret batch of knowledge only he can grasp, a whole secret world over which he rules as an absolute monarch.

Secret except, y'know, it's right there on his flanks. And I'm getting pretty sick and tired of it making that bean-brain act like a complete and total jackass!

No offense to any donkeys reading this...

An entry in Imposing Sovereigns IV, using the prompt Snails/Knowledge (Or Lack Thereof), this story received an Honorable Mention!

Published 2023-11-25 19:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2023-11-25 19:40:01 UTC

The Piper at the Gated Lawn

Destiny? I hate that stuff! The way it gets all over everything, it's worse than flea beetles on eggplant!

And there's nothing you can do! Magic, soap, diatomaceous earth: everything you try, the stupid little bugs are still there! And the next thing you know, you and your best buddy in the whole world are battling each other through the streets of Ponyville like Tirek and Princess Twilight!

OK, so maybe it wasn't that dramatic. Maybe it wasn't even as dramatic as Applejack and Strawberry Sunrise shooting dirty looks and nasty comments at each other on market day. But for me and Snails, it was a pretty big deal.

'Cause that bean-brain and me were friends from the minute he tripped over his own hooves and fell into the mud castle I was building. We didn't even have our cutie marks yet and were maybe still in diapers, though I'm not sure about that. But I do know that Snails wasn't talking when we first met.

That was OK, though, 'cause I could jabber enough for three or four ponies. I had a buncha my brothers' little wooden action figures—well, not a bunch. They'd set most of 'em on fire over the years, but the ones I ended up with were just a little ashy. And I had everything about each figure all worked out: which one was the queen, which one was the king, which ones were the princes and princesses and soldiers and everything. They all had their own voices, too, and I played every part before Snails crashed sideways into their little world.

He was taller than me, and at that point, that was pretty much all it took. I used my sputtering hornglow to push the king figure toward him and told him that's who he was playing. I also told him exactly where the king was supposed to go and kept doing the character's voice. So I guess it was less him playing the part than me adding him to my collection of action figures.

Like I said, though, Snails didn't talk a lot the first couple years when we were playing, but he was definitely paying attention. Wherever I told him to put the king, he sparked up his horn and put the king there. And he always got this intense look on his face, even more intense than when he was trying to make his horn work—we weren't either of us what anypony'd call magical prodigies, after all. But when I was talking, telling the whole story we were acting out with the little wooden figures, he was obviously following along.

'Cause the first words I remember him ever saying to me were, "I'm the king."

We were both definitely out of diapers by then, but I don't think we'd started school yet. Neither of us had gotten our cutie marks, I know, though some of the other foals in town had started showing theirs off.

I don't mean they were showing 'em specifically to us. Me and Snails, we weren't the sorts anypony really paid much attention to. Even the times I'd go to his house to see if he could come out to play, his folks would blink at me for a couple seconds like they weren't sure who I was or who I was talking about.

And it's not like his folks were dumb—no dumber than him or me, I mean. It's just that they were busy, y'know? But then that's why his folks and mine knew it was OK for him and me to play together. My folks doing construction and his folks sweeping up around Ponyville to keep the streets clean, they all saw each other every day at their jobs.

They just didn't see either of us very much.

Which was totally OK. Making castles outta mud in the spring or sticks and twigs in the fall, outta rocks in the summer and snow in the winter, we had each other and our stories. Or at least my stories. Till Snails came out and said, "I'm the king."

I think it was summer when he said it—yeah, the summer before we started school. We were deep into wunna my major epics with ponies and griffons and minotaurs and everything, and it took me a minute to realize that he'd said those words instead of me.

For another minute, all I could do was blink at the bean-brain while he blinked at me, the little king figure on top of the mud tower between his front legs. Then I asked, "What?"

"I'm the king," he said again.

Now, I wanna make it clear that I'm pretty sure they weren't the actual first words he ever said to me. I mean, we'd been hanging out together every day for a couple years by then, and he had to have said something in all that time, right?

But they were the first words I remember him saying 'cause they were so weird.

Not that my memory's, like, the best in the world, and summa the stuff I'm writing down here that I remember ponies saying, it could be they didn't actually say it. But they said something like it; I'll swear up and down about that. And I'll swear even more that I couldn't tell you one thing Snails said to me before that moment when he came all over stone-solid serious like he'd just had some sorta sudden realization and said he was the king.

I was confused, not a weird thing for me to be then or now. "Well, yeah," I said, poking a hoof at the king figure in front of him. "You've always been the king."

His eyes went wide, and he nodded, but I was already back into storytelling mode, giving him instructions about where he needed to move the king for the next scene.

And less than a week after that, right before school started, we both got our cutie marks. Yeah, we got 'em at the same time, but no, there weren't glowing lights or wavering music or anything. There was just me and Snails and our usual bunch of mud.

This time, though, the mud was in the front yard of old Ms. Organdy's house. She'd been the schoolteacher before Ms. Cheerilee and had lived just down the street from me and Snails and our folks for longer than forever. Me and Snails were trotting past the front gate in her little picket fence on our way to our morning castle-building-and-adventure session in the park, and Ms. Organdy was out there, too, with some clippers in her teeth working on her dahlias.

I said, "Good morning, Ms. Organdy" to her 'cause, y'know, that's the polite thing to do, and Snails gave her a nod 'cause even if you're a bean-brain, you can still be polite.

"Good morning, boys," she said, but when she said it, her clippers fell out of her mouth, and, well, so did her teeth.

At which point, I did not—and I can't emphasize this enough—did not squeal like a little filly and jump behind Snails. I mean, my grampa had false teeth! There's no way I woulda been scared like that!

Either way, Snails just stood there, and when I looked out around his front leg, I could see Ms. Organdy bending her neck and kinda laughing as she fitted her gums around her dentures. "Getting too old for this," she muttered, shaking her head, and when she straightened up, she aimed a big toothy smile toward me and Snails. "Say, now. How'd you boys like to pick up a few extra bits helping an old lady out this morning?"

Even then, I knew the value of a bit. My folks didn't have all that many of 'em, after all, so the things figured into a lotta the conversation I heard when they were trying to line up which bills to pay when. So the thought of me maybe getting some money I could pitch in the next time they started getting all pinch-faced and unhappy about it, it burst into my brain like the fireworks I'd sometimes see when the Riches were having their parties on the other side of town.

I could help Ms. Organdy! And then also be able to help my parents! It wasn't anything I'd ever so much as imagined before!

"Sure thing, Ms. O!" I said without even looking at Snails. I marched over to where she was standing, let my hornglow crackle and pop to pick up her clippers, and gave her my biggest grin. "Whaddaya need us to do?"

She started listing regular gardening chores—pruning, weeding, checking for pests, like that—and I glanced up and over to see if Snails was getting all this.

He wasn't, though. He wasn't even standing beside me where he usually always was.

I blinked at the empty space, then cranked my head further around to where we'd been standing before Ms. Organdy had said anything. And sure enough, he was still there, his whole face one big wrinkle of confusion.

Keeping one ear pointed to Ms. Organdy, I gestured with a hoof for Snails to come over. It took him another minute, but he did finally, dragging his legs like he'd slept on them wrong and they weren't quite ready to work yet.

Ms. Organdy's voice poked me back to paying full attention to her. "That sound all right, boys?" she was asking.

Now, I just wanna stress that I hadn't heard exactly what she wanted us to do. But I knew. Because I'd been playing in the mud my whole life, right? And inside the mud, there were always seeds and roots and sprouts and plants. So looking at Ms. Organdy's yard with those clippers floating in my hornglow, I maybe didn't know what she wanted us to do. But I could tell what needed to be done.

"OK, Ms. O!" I said. I stepped inside the gate and started right in trimming and weeding.

After a minute of watching, Ms. O. seemed to get that I knew what I was doing. 'Cause she said, "I'll be right inside if you need me," and practically galloped up the little walkway to her front door.

After another minute, I looked up from behind this weird, wonderful feeling of doing something right for once in my life and saw that Snails, that bean-brain, still hadn't come in through the gate. "But," he said, and he waved something at me with his own magic: his usual little king figure. "I'm the king."

I didn't even think. I just pointed a hoof at the dahlias. And because they were dahlias, they had snails on them. "Be the king of the snails for today."

It's his name, right? And looking at the snails and looking at Snails, I just put two and two together! How was I s'pposed to know that it was gonna turn into a huge giant thing?

I mean, yeah, maybe I could've guessed it when, a half hour later, I looked up again from the hedge I had snipped into perfect shape, and there was Snails with eight or ten snails sitting on the grass in front of him. He was looking down at them with his eyes wide, and they were looking up at him with their eyestalks spread.

And that moment right there? That was the exact moment when I got these little snippers on my flanks and Snails got that big snail on his.

Which is s'pposed to be this major thing in a foal's life, right? S'pposed to be the instant everything comes clear, and a pony sees the first step on the road to wherever.

Well, all I thought was, I guess I get to play in the mud forever, then, and went back to working on the bushes.

By the end of the morning, I'd turned Ms. Organdy's front yard into something out of a fancy magazine, and Snails had coaxed a couple dozen snails away from the shrubs and into the group following him around. Of course, they didn't move too quickly, but, well, neither did he, and it really didn't matter while we were working 'cause Ms. Organdy doesn't have that big a place.

When we were done, though, and Ms. Organdy had brought us out a couple glasses of lemonade and five bits each, I had to turn to Snails and ask, "So what're you gonna do with 'em?"

He'd been looking down at them, and like before, they'd been looking up at him. But now, him and his little flock all turned to look at me. And the expression on Snails' face, it was like the question I'd just asked, the only question anypony could've asked right then and right there, was something that hadn't even occurred to him.

So I tried to help him out the way I always do. "You can't leave 'em here," I told him, gesturing to the shrubs around us. "They'll just go back to eating Ms. Organdy's dahlias. So you've gotta, I dunno, do something with 'em."

I didn't wanna say he needed to squash 'em or anything like that, but if I'm being honest—and when aren't I?—I hafta say that I couldn't see what else he could do.

I guess that maybe he started thinking that, too, 'cause his eyes went even wider, and he looked back down at the whole bunch of snails, all of them still sitting there in the grass with their feelers stretched up toward him.

But then he looked over at Ms. Organdy. "D'you have a box I could borrow, ma'am?" he asked in that slow, thick voice of his.

She did, and I couldn't believe it when he set it down and motioned for the snails to all slither inside. It took 'em a few minutes, sure, but they all did it. And when they were done, he picked up the box in his magic and said, "I'm just gonna take these guys home, Snips, then I'll meet you in the park, OK?"

And what else could I do? "OK," I said back. I put my bits into the bag with the action figures, and we went different ways outside Ms. Organdy's gate: him back toward our houses and me toward the park.

I'd gotten the castle built and all the figures set up by the time Snails showed up, but we didn't really play the way we usually did 'cause Snails just wouldn't stop talking! And not about the storyline we were in the middle of, either. No, he was going on and on about his snails!

"I didn't even hafta say anything to them!" he blurted out more than a couple times. "But they listened to me anyway! 'Cause you were totally right, Snips!" And each time he said this, his voice got even lower and slower. "I'm the king of the snails..."

He kept going on and on about all the things he was gonna do with the snails now, how they would all come to live at his house and be our friends and everything. It sounded a little slimy to me, but I just nodded instead of saying that. Then he started talking about how the snails could help out with the castle and the action figures and the story and all, and that got me a lot more excited. A whole new bunch of characters we could add!

So we spent all day tossing ideas back and forth about that, and you know? It was a lot more fun than I thought, him adding stuff to what I was thinking. Like I said, he really had been paying attention the whole time we'd been playing, and he'd even noticed some things about the characters that I hadn't. And by the time it was getting on toward sundown and we were walking home, we had a whole lotta things we were gonna do.

But the next day when I went to his house to get him, his dad said Snails was grounded.

I asked why, and his dad sorta shivered all over. "I don't want to talk about the vermin," he said, his voice deep and slow like Snails's, and he shivered again.

His folks, remember, worked for the city, cleaning up the streets and all that, so I can only guess how they maybe reacted when they came home and found their house full of snails. And yeah, my folks didn't go all overboard like some folks do when they'd seen I had my cutie mark last night: my mom had a little cake she'd been saving in the freezer to celebrate, and we had that after dinner which was nice.

But nobody'd used the word "vermin."

And when I said that I could only guess how his folks maybe reacted? That's 'cause the next time I saw Snails a couple days later, he didn't wanna talk about it. He didn't wanna talk about anything, as a matter of fact, just looking at the ground and plodding along beside me like when we'd been way younger.

We didn't make castles and play our stories too many times after that.

School started pretty quickly anyway, and what with one thing and another, fifteen or twenty years went by.

A lot happened, sure, but not a lot of it happened to me. I'm just not the kinda guy things happen to—other than, y'know, Trixie and the Ursa Major and the Alicorn Amulet and ev'rything, but none of that stuff was my fault, really.

But Snails? Snails went out and had his whole buckball career while I stayed in Ponyville and started my gardening business. By the time we were both maybe twenty-five, I was working for half the folks in town, watering their yards and keeping their flowerbeds all nice and pretty, and he was one of the greatest buckball players to ever trot the field.

It was weird—I mean, really heavy-duty weird—how famous he was with him on magazine covers and billboards selling soda pop. Though if you ever looked inside the magazines, you didn't usually find an interview with him or anything. It was more that they talked about him but they didn't talk to him. Turned out that he was really good at playing buckball, but he still wasn't all that good at talking. Or at least talking and making sense 'cause, y'know, he's a bean-brain.

And even worse? The whole time he was playing buckball, whenever he came to visit during the off-season or whatever, he always stayed at one of the hotels down on the town square. And while he always stopped in to see me, he never once went down half a block to his old house to see his parents. Never once!

I tried to ask him about it, but, well, when it comes to that sorta stuff, I'm no better at talking than him. I'd say, "You gonna see your folks?" and he'd say, "Nope," and that'd be it. A couple times, we'd be sitting out in my front yard just doing nothing, and his folks would go by with their magic working their sweepers, and neither him nor them would even look over: not a wink or a wave or anything!

What it was about, though, I was pretty sure, was his cutie mark and them calling his snails "vermin" way back when. But it just didn't make sense! The way it looked to me, his folks didn't want him doing anything with his "king of the snails" magic, and he wasn't doing anything with his "king of the snails" magic! They shoulda been in perfect agreement!

But instead? He didn't talk to or about them, and they didn't talk to or about him. They were all being total jerks because of his snail magic, and I just plain couldn't figure it out.

So I didn't even try. I just felt kinda guilty every time I had to put down snail poison when I was working on wunna my clients' lawns.

And then he had his big magical accident or whatever it was. Suddenly, no matter how he moved his bucket, the balls swerved around it and slammed themselves right into his head. It was pretty much the damnedest thing anypony ever saw. Every time he stepped onto the field, wunna the balls would suddenly spark up, and wham! He'd get knocked out cold.

They brought in unicorn magical specialists from all over Equestria to squint at him, and he even had a meeting with Princess Twilight herself at the castle in Canterlot to see if she could figure out what was going on with his magic.

But she couldn't. So one minute, he's riding high, and the next, he either has to retire or end up more bean-brained than he already is.

They had a big ceremony, of course, everypony talking about the records Snails set and the example he gave to all the colts and fillies looking to get into buckball. Then they retired his bucket to the Buckball Hall of Fame in Appleloosa, and he asked them what train would take him to Ponyville.

A lotta ponies met him at the train station, all cheering and waving banners: Ms. Pinke Pie and Ms. Applejack and Ms. Fluttershy 'cause, y'know, they'd been his teammates or coaches and all that. The party started there, stretched with singing and dancing downtown to Sugercube Corner, and went on till after sunset. But when it was over, it was just me and Snails standing there in the street staring at each other the same as always.

"So," I asked him, the lightning bug street light behind us making a little glowing puddle for us to stand in. "What're you gonna do now?"

He gave one of his really slow blinks. "Well, the league always used to pay for my hotels when I went places, but since I'm not in the league anymore, I'll prob'bly need a house or something."

I let him sleep on the couch at my house that night, and the next morning after breakfast, we went down to the bank. And, well, that was when we discovered that Snails didn't have any money.

Oh, he'd made a lotta money in those ten or twelve years playing buckball, but the guy at the bank magically called up his records or whatever it is banks do—I don't go into banks much—and said that Snails had exactly 38 bits left from it all. According to the guy, Snails had invested all his money for the past decade in some Griffonstone start-up company called Vippary, and it hadn't paid off even a quarter of a bit in that whole time.

"Huh." Snails blinked at the guy. "Whadda they do?"

The guy squinted through his glasses at the records. "It's a privately held company, sir, so it doesn't say here."

"Huh," Snails said again, then he turned his blinking toward me. "I don't s'ppose you know?"

I didn't, and that's how Snails came to work for me in my gardening business. And that's when this story really starts.

Even though I've, like, written two or three hundred pages here already! Or at least it feels like two or three hundred pages... I mean, who knew the story of me and Snails's life was gonna be so involved!

Anyway, this is where ev'rything really starts 'cause the first thing I asked him the next day while we were walking across town to Tender Taps and Sweetie Belle's place was, "Can you still do that whole weird snail thing?"

"Weird?" He stared down his snout at me, and if I hadn't known him forever, I might've thought he almost looked upset. "D'you mean am I still the king of the snails?"

That got a little pinch clenching my snout. I mean, he'd been the king of buckball until he suddenly wasn't anymore, and now here I was, helping him out, and he was still being a jerk about his whole weird snail thing! So I said, "No, I mean can you still do that whole weird snail thing."

His mouth kind of went sideways, but he just said, "Yeah, I can still do that whole weird snail thing." His mouth straightened, and he cocked his head. "I mean, I guess I still can. I haven't done it in, like, twenty years. But, I mean, once the king of the snails, always the king of the snails, right?"

"Yeah, sure, whatever." It was kind of annoying that I still had to tip my head back to look him in the eye, but, well, if I never did things I thought were annoying, I'd never do anything at all. "So when we get to Sweetie and Tender's place, I'll start trimming the hedges in front, and you go around back and call all the snails out."

He nodded. "So we can take 'em home."

And like always, I wasn't really thinking. "No, not to take 'em home, you bean-brain. To squash 'em! I mean, what else're we gonna do with a whole big buncha snails?"

I kept trotting along in the silence after that, but only for a couple seconds. 'Cause that's when I noticed Snails wasn't trotting along beside me any more. So I stopped, looked back, and—

The look on his face wasn't hate. I honestly can't imagine ever seeing Snails looking like he hates anypony—or anycreature for that matter—not even when he wasn't talking to his folks all that time. He wasn't mad really either, though I think there was some of that. No, I think his wide eyes and tight jaw were more about confusion and disappointment, like he couldn't believe I'd just said what I'd just said.

Heat flushed all over my whole face and ears and even partway down my neck, but that just made me grouchier. "What?" I tried to yell it at him, but with my voice, it came out more like a squeak.

Twitches pulled at his snout and lips. "You..." he got out like the words were getting caught in his throat, "you wanna squash my snails?"

"Well?" I waved a front hoof and asked again, "What else are we gonna do with 'em?"

That was when his forehead wrinkled and his eyes narrowed. They started glowing, too—his eyes, I mean—and he sort of leaned forward to glare at me. "I'm gonna do this!" His horn flashed, and—

And, well, nothing happened, actually, as far as I could tell. We just stood there on the sidewalk sorta sticking our chins out at each other, a wavery little glow surrounding his horn.

"Umm," I said after a minute or two. "You sure you're doing something?"

Tendons were standing out along his neck, tiny drops of sweat running down his face. "I'm...the king!" His legs were wobbling, too. "And I'm...summoning my...subjects!"

And sure enough, right then, the boxwood bushes growing through the fence between the sidewalk and Ms. Carrot Top's place gave a little rustle. I blinked at them, and a couple snails inched out from the shade inside toward the end of a twig.

But when I say "inched," I mean, like, "quarter-inched." They were snails, right?

I looked at 'em for a while, then I looked back at Snails. "They gonna attack or something?"

Snails was almost doubled over on the sidewalk, his whole face scrunched up in concentration, every part of him now dripping with sweat. His eyes popped open after I asked my question, though, and he straightened up, the whole glow around him snapping off like somepony'd thrown a switch. "They shouldn't attack," he said in his regular slow, weird voice. "I was thinking I'd have them cover me all over so I could transform into this giant snail/pony monster thing and rampage through town." His snout wrinkled. "But that'd really be kinda gross, wouldn't it?"

"Kinda." I thought about it a little more. "Kinda cool, though."

"Yeah." He gave a big sigh. "Except I'd hafta be attacking, y'know, you."

"Me?" As much as I didn't want to, I took half a step back. "What did I do?"

He waved a hoof at the boxwood where six or eight snails now were rampaging toward us. Or at least I think they were still rampaging toward us: it's kinda hard to tell with a snail. "You wanna kill my subjects," he said. "What kinda king would I be if I didn't try and stop that?"

"Oh, c'mon!" I gave another quick look to make sure the snails hadn't picked up speed—they hadn't, so I figured I had a little while before anything serious started—then I turned back to him. "They're snails! They eat plants ponies don't want 'em to eat, then they lay their eggs, then they die! It's not like they're building pyramids or writing symphonies or anything!"

For a minute, Snails stood there all straight and tall, but then with a sigh, he slumped back onto his haunches. "I know. I just... It'd be nice if they did something, y'know, instead of just being vermin. Like, making a real, positive difference in the world." He slumped even further. "But, I mean, I'm their king, and I haven't had anything to do with them in twenty years!" I didn't think he could, but he slumped even further. "My folks were right. They're just like me, nothing but—"

"Monsieur Snails!" a voice called out above us, and when I craned my head around to see who it was, a big gray and white griffon was landing in the street beside us. He had a red scarf sorta thing around his neck, a couple saddlebags thrown over his back, and these two long, thin, curling black feathers sprouting out above his beak like a mustache or a snail's feelers or something. "Sacre bleu, but you are a difficult fellow to track down!" And he puffed out a big breath.

I blinked at him, then I blinked at Snails and I saw that he was still blinking at the griffon. "Huh," Snails said. "I don't try to be difficult." He turned to blink at me. "Do I?"

I was going to say that sometimes he did and sometimes he didn't, but the griffon gave a big laugh and stepped up onto the sidewalk to clap one of his eagle claws across Snails's back. "Ah, monsieur! Such humor! Such joie de vivre! It's why I knew you ten years ago to be the perfect pony to partner with in my great gastronomical adventure!"

Snails did some blinking at him, then some more blinking at me. "Doesn't that mean looking at the stars?"

"OK." I tightened my jaw 'cause I realized that once again, I was gonna hafta take charge of the situation if we were gonna get to the bottom of it. So I marched right up to that griffon even though he was taller than Snails, and I asked him. "Who are you, anyway, and what're you talking about?"

"Ah!" The griffon put some talons to his chest and bowed. "Forgive me, monsieur! I am Gustave le Grand, chef extraordinaire and Monsieur Snails's business partner in Vippary, the most exciting development in griffonique cuisine since King Guto's day!"

Then, well, then he launched into this whole story that I'm not even gonna try to remember and write down here. But the gist of it was that griffon ladies need to eat a lotta what they call calcium so their eggshells'll come out all right when they lay their eggs. But with so many griffons living in Equestria now, they couldn't get calcium the way they always used to and the way they really preferred: from the eggs and bones of animals they attacked and ate.

That got both me and Snails a little nervous, let me tell you!

But Gustave, he'd come up with a plan for griffon ladies to get their calcium how they liked it—by eating other creatures—but without totally grossing out their pony neighbors. "And now," he said, his voice even louder and fancier than it had been when he'd started, "after ten years of spending your money to set everything up, Monsieur Snails, I am here at last to collect from you the pearls, the oysters, the crème de la crème that will allow our venture to proceed!"

"Wow," Snails breathed beside me, and I've gotta admit, I was leaning forward pretty eagerly, too. "But, uhh..." His hooves shuffled on the sidewalk. "What exactly am I s'pposed to give you?"

Gustave laughed. "The snails, monsieur! For heliciculture will provide the one calcium-rich animal we griffons can eat and receive our pony neighbors' blessings!"

Now, I had totally not seen that coming, and from the gasp next to me, it was pretty obvious that Snails hadn't, either. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it kinda made. "And," I said out loud, poking Snails in the side with a hoof, "didn't you say that you wanted the lives of your subjects to mean something? They could be helping these griffon ladies with their eggs."

Snails was staring straight ahead and kinda vibrating where he sat on the sidewalk. "I..." he said. "I...I...I—"

And that's when the snails attacked.

But again, like I said at the beginning, it's not like it was all that dramatic. Sure, forty or fifty snails, each maybe a quarter the size of my hoof, came slipping and slithering out in a couple long lines from under Ms. Carrot Top's boxwood hedge, the sun kinda glinting off their slime and their bodies stretched forward like they were running full tilt. But, I mean, they were snails. We might not have even noticed if we hadn't already been talking about snails for, like, the last twenty minutes.

"Ah, monsieur!" Gustave said with something like awe in his voice. "You have once again anticipated the needs of our company and have the livestock prepared as per our agreements!" He slung off his saddlebags, and the metallic clinking they gave off, well, let's just say that I know the sound of gold coins clattering together when I hear it. "Here, then, is the first of the many payments you will be receiving! For as soon as I saw your cutie mark at that buckball game, I knew you would be the savior of the griffons!"

Somehow, Snails's eyes went even wider, and he looked back and forth between Gustave and the rows of snails. "Savior?" He stopped then with those wide eyes fixed on Gustave. "Not vermin?"

And that's how Snails stopped working for me in my gardening business. Well, kinda. He still goes with me on my rounds every week or two and does his Piebald Piper routine to call the snails out through the fences and gates of lawns all over Ponyville. He also visits other parts of Equestria to pick up snails from there to get different flavors for the griffons. It turns out there's some they like a lot and some not so much, so him and Gustave hafta experiment to see what's good.

Oh! And when they went to make some magazine ads for Vippary, they wanted to take picture of Snails on a buckball court, right? And Snails did the whole shoot before he remembered that he couldn't set hoof inside a buckball arena without the balls flying up and smacking him in the head. And he didn't remember because it didn't happen! They were there a couple hours, and not a one even tried to smack him!

It turned out that he'd been blocking up his snail magic for so long, it got all tangled up in that bean-brain of his and started pulling in the closest things to snails that it could find. But once he was doing what his cutie mark told him again, everything went back to normal. He even went to visit his parents for the first time in I dunno how long, and yeah, things're still a little tense there 'cause, y'know, "vermin," but it's better'n it was between them now.

So I guess destiny got back on track, and I get a few extra griffon coins for hanging out with my best buddy a couple times a month when he takes my customers' snails away. And Snails got his bucket back from the buckball museum and has taken it to the championships a couple times since then.

Which makes it happily ever after for everyone! Except maybe the snails, but I try not to think about that too much. And I know Snails doesn't think about it because, y'know, he really is a bean-brain.