Slugland in BREACH | World Anvil

Slugland

I suppose they'd be just as horrified at a basket full of kittens as we are at a basket full of baby slugs.
— Evan Clark, BREACH operative

Sluggish

The breach point opened by a narrow paved road running between neatly-ploughed fields, with farmhouses visible in the distance. A few cars, looking to be 1920s-ish, drove by. Everything seemed bucolically normal, until they came on a man staring disconsolately at an overturned horse-drawn delivery wagon. The horse, however, was missing. The team, seeing an opportunity to ingratiate themselves with a local and get the lay of the land offered to help, whereupon the man pointed to a ditch wherein the horse had become stuck.

Except it wasn't a horse. It was a horse-sized slug.

On this world, for reasons yet to be fully understood, virtually domestic animals are some species of slug, snail, or other mollusc. Surprisingly swift slugs gallop... well.. undulate... around the racecourse. Armored snails carried knights into battle. Farmers have egg-laying slugs, pig-sized slugs, and cow-sized slugs. Faithful hunting slugs follow their owners as they shoot down birds (which are birds, at least). Another species hunts pests in barns, when not haughtily demanding affection or napping in the sun. Desert-dwelling slugs are ridden across the Sahara, while steppe-slugs carried the Mongols on their conquests. Tiny slugs run mazes under the careful eyes of scientists. You get the idea.

Species which were never used as a primary food or labor source by humans remain in their ancestral forms, while those which were have been replaced. The Great Plains were covered with thundering... er... squelching... herds of furry, horned, slugs. Greek myths had slugtaurs, and Thor's chariot was drawn by wildly thrashing, furious, slugs. [H2]BREACH[/H2] Other than the whole slug thing, this world is a close parallel to Baseline in 1925. The breach point opens in northern England, a few years after the end of the Great War. It defies most theories of parallelism, divergence, chaos, and history, and yet, here it is. As it is currently a relatively peaceful time, with just enough technology to provide common creature comforts without the kind of infrastructure that makes it easy to track strangers and verify IDs, it has become something of a vacation spot for English-speaking breachers. Just don't think too hard about where the sausage, bacon, and especially the eggs in the breakfast at the Bed And came from.

World Type
Alternate History
Divergence
Unknown
Current Year
1925
TL
6

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