My first One Piece fanfic. And it's about snails. Of course. If you dislike snails... why did you even click this? Either way, they're mostly nice snails. I guess my biologist nature's showing through.

Mori Helix was a scientist. She worked in the World Government's science division, more accurately, in the snail department. She was very proud of this. Her department had seen to quite a few of the most important breakthroughs of the last age.

Yes, just a few years earlier, one of her colleagues figured out how to breed tone dials on a large scale. Quite a feat when you consider that even keeping them alive outside of a sky island had been seen as incredibly difficult, maybe impossible, and even the shells of dead dials were rare and precious items on the blue seas. Not without reason of course, as once the cloud-sea living animals were fully grown and dead, their shells could be used to record and hold sounds for an incredible amount of time. Truly, mass-producing these was a feat worthy of the new age.

Although dial research was currently moving in leaps and bounds, Mori was not planning on falling behind. Her work revolved around a distant relative of the dial. A blue sea exclusive, land bound creature: the transponder snail.

The transponder snail had been man's best friend since its domestication some thousands of years ago. In fact, the ease of which the most common species of wild snail could be adapted to human use made many scientists believe it had descended from escaped individuals that had already been domesticated for several centuries. The earliest estimate for the first case of snail domestication was over ten thousand years ago. Of course, it was only the last hundred years people had started adapting electronics to work with them.

The lab Mori worked in was the leading lab in snail development. They were in charge of breeding and genetically engineering new snail species with specialized uses, and today it was Mori's turn to feed the snails.

She pushed the huge trolley down the hall and pulled to a stop in front of the door to the stock room. (The wheels on the trolley were perfectly oiled and in working order, so pushing it was not actually difficult, but it was still heavy enough that stopping was a challenge.) To get through the door she had to swipe her card, enter her personal code and present her fingerprint. It might seem excessive, but she knew the revolutionary army were extremely interested in any research happening here, and some of the snails behind this door were unreasonably valuable even without the necessary electronic additions.

Opening the door, she pushed the trolley through the metallic netting of a faraday cage. As transponder snails are very susceptible to radio waves of any kind, blocking these out is an essential part of keeping the stress level of large groups acceptable. In this room, proper testing requirements were so important that any individual – human or snail – found to be causing the snails stress would have to be removed instantly. Mori did not worry. The snails knew her.

Past the netting, she entered a huge room full of differently sized vivariums.

The closest vivarium kept a large selection of completely normal transponder snails. These were, in certain ways, possibly the most interesting of all the snails in the building. These particular ones were rather active as they pushed to get the cabbage and salad she dumped into their box. As she picked one up to check what looked a little like a crack in the shell, she could clearly feel the slime it secreted on her skin and it squirmed a little to try and get to the food. She put it down again (there had been nothing to worry about) and it joined the others in eating greenery until there was nothing left, but Mori knew that if she had instead removed it from the group, within an hour it would have become entirely immobile and its skin would have turned dry and silky. This extreme physical and behavioural change was entirely unique to the common transponder snail, and was seen purely as an adaption to human use.

The next vivarium held one of the ongoing projects: dwarf transponder snails. Each one was the size of a baby common, but they were fully-grown and had a stronger signal. The point was to breed a mobile and practical snail with the signalling power of a large snail. The signal was not yet on the level of normal transponder snails, but the breeding programs were working well, and the project leader was sure they would be ready for the final electronic adaption in just a few generations, around the end of next year.

The last box on that row was a project Mori had a little soft spot for, because it happened to be her own: micro transponder snails. They were about the size of small buttons, and were meant to be hidden on clothes or even in people's ears. If the project was successful, they could be invaluable for infiltration work or simple, hands free communication, possibly many things she could not even imagine. There were always many uses for miniaturization. As it was, she still had to report suboptimal signal strength and clarity, and persistent problems with slime production. She gave a little sigh as she watched them chew happily away at the salad leaves.

Black transponder snails were something of an oddity. Though relatively closely related, in nature they had little in common with the common species. The black snails were parasites. Though not very mobile and incapable of sending signals on their own, they were exceptional at picking up signals directed at other snails. Using these, the black snails would pinpoint the position of the larger snails, find them once they had fallen asleep, and hide inside their shells. There, the parasite would live off the larger snail until it found a way to get rid of the thing. Figuring out how to adapt the black snails for intercepting conversations was the success that kicked off transponder snail development for real. Mori did not feed the black snails with salad, but with a porridge like substance she would rather not think too much about. She thought it was probably a good thing that most people did not know the truth about black transponder snails. Sometimes she did not want to know, but she was a scientist, and disliking parasites was not rational.

The white transponder snail was even more amazing anyway. It had been discovered only a bit over a decade ago, on a tiny island on the grand line. Scientists had been interested in the island because it emitted radio waves that did strange things to snail signals. The scientists found that a native species of transponder snail dealt with this quality by blocking outside interference and encrypting its own signal in an extremely complicated manner. Common snails could learn to decrypt this signal through conversation, but it turned out, to the government's delight, that black snails completely ignored the encrypted signal. When a certain researcher found a way to electronically adapt the white snail to encrypt conversations between common snails, the government ordered every white snail into captivity. Suddenly extinct in the wild, the snail proved itself to be unusually hard to breed artificially, and was currently extremely rare. Even the research facility only had five individuals, three of which were not fully-grown. Mori fed these with a special mix of plants from their native island, and then made a note for the researcher in charge of them. It seemed like one of the babies was getting sick. Sometimes Mori wanted to take the rest of the white transponder snails and release them in the wild where they belonged, but she was a scientist, she was rational, and she knew doing something that stupid could get her executed.

Next up were the surveillance snails, the camera snails (new development), the visual snails and the self-propelled visual snails. Some of these were almost as tall as she were. The self-propelled ones even moved, and left behind a thin, clear trail of slime that evaporated quickly. It was developed to keep an eye on an area and immediately report anything it saw. Even when she walked up to it with a bucket full of fruit and vegetables, it kept one eyestalk fixed on her. It gave her a bad vibe. Not that a bad vibe would be scientific or rational under any circumstances.

Then, the giant. The next gastropod Mori was to feed was without doubt the most ambitious project the department had ever dealt with. The relay snail. You see, the thing was, no matter how big a snail you had, you would never be able to call someone on the other side of the Red Line (or far enough on the other side of the world). It stood as a massive barrier, stopping any and all transmissions between the seas. That is where the relay snails came in. The project had been started decades ago, and the first finalized relay snails had hatched around ten years ago. Still, not a single one of them had yet reached full size. They would be placed in different positions along the Red Line and on strategic islands in every sea to act like relay points. They would catch signals from all kinds of different snails and resend them so that they could reach globally without problems. The only problem was that for this task they needed to be huge. The largest individual in Mori's research facility, the one currently in front of Mori, was just above six years old, and she knew it had to be shipped out to its relay point soon, before it grew too large to move. She had seen some of the eggs they hatched from before, and they were already the size of large footballs. The thing in front of her was nearly spherical, though the spiral shape of the shell was still obvious, and about one and a half time her height (she was average, for a woman). Out of the opening in the armour like, dark brown shell in front of her came two enormous, lazy eyestalks. They followed her movements slowly, and retracted as she deposited the food in front of the opening. A mouth soon stuck out of the opening and started chewing up the high-energy, high-protein gunk that the mountain ate at least a metric ton of every few days. Even though the thing intimidated her, she could not help but put her hand to its side as she passed by, her trolley considerably lighter. Behind this shell was one of the world's most powerful biological computers. She did not know if it was intelligent, but she liked to think it was. At least that was somewhat rational.

Next, the last stop in this room, the silver and golden transponder snails. Whether or not the relay snails were intelligent, these things were stupid. The golden snail could send one single signal. It had been reduced so much Mori had to physically put food in its mouth, not that it needed much. The silver snail could receive that exact signal and set off an alarm. It had been similarly reduced. While the other snails in this room could be called creatures, these things were only very simple tools, and Mori knew very well what they were meant for. She very much disliked them, and she thought, that at least, was entirely rational.

Exiting the faraday cage, she entered the room for the wild, unadaptable species of transponder snail. These were kept exclusively for breeding and genetic purposes, and Mori liked to watch them crawl around and chatter amongst themselves. As she fed them and watched them she felt her mind returning to other things, like her testing and her research team and the interesting results they had gotten from the gene splicing with a certain New World species and an offer one of her partners had been talking about a few weeks earlier and that guy from the sea stone department who sometimes got her coffee and that bug she saw this morning which looked like a scorpion fly only four times bigger. And then she got back to work.

"So this is it?"

"Yeah, the entire box. There's just about thirty of them, but they're pretty easy to breed as long as you treat them well."

"I see. They're really small."

"Yes, that is kind of the point."

"Sort of slimy too."

"We still haven't fixed that I'm afraid. They can still be a little flighty too, is that going to be a problem?"

"Nah, we can deal. I heard there was a problem with signal strength though?"

"Officially. This is a new batch. It's still not even on the level of a baby transponder snail, but it should work well enough over short distances. We're planning on announcing that we fixed the signal problems whenever we fix the slime thing, but until then, the higher-ups don't know these things exist. So, um, we'd rather it wasn't discovered that you're using these."

"I understand. We will be careful."

"Right. I should get going."

"Of course. And miss Helix? As always, the revolutionary army is extremely grateful for you and your colleagues' help. If you are ever in trouble…"

"I know. Until next time."

"Until next time."

So? Did you feel it was clishe? Did you think my speculation about a fictional species of telepathic snail was interesting? Let me know.