The Actuarial Snails of Eastthorp spend their lives worrying that something dreadful will happen. They live in a constant state of anxiety, fearing predators, disasters, and social ineptitude, and then they worry about the toll this anxiety is taking on their tiny invertebrate hearts and stomach linings.

As a defense mechanism, in order to get anything done, they have therefore evolved the ability to figure out exactly what the odds of any given dreadful thing happening, to six decimal places. This allows them to go about their normal lives relatively unconcerned about things like meteors or rogue wildebeests, while still flinching and sliming madly for cover whenever a snailhawk passes over head.

As a result of this peculiar skill, the Actuarial Snails have been hunted extensively for the accounting trade, where they are kept in large, well-appointed terrariums and given all the office supplies they can eat. Almost all major corporations have an all-snail bookkeeping staff, and employ keen-eyed typographers to transcribe the tiny snailscript into invoices that their customers can read. While increasingly rare in the wild, the Actuarial Snails have crunched the numbers and found that far fewer dreadful things happen in their nice terrariums, and so are, by and large, fairly content.

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Just a small quick silliness this morning, 8 x 10 mixed media. (It keeps me amused...)

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