- "Life is simply unfair. Don't you think? There are moments when a single snail can make a world go extinct."
- — Zero II, introducing himself to the Decision Game players
The Snail is an animal mentioned in Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma by Zero II. The snail was indirectly responsible for the events that catalyzed the entirety of the Zero Escape series, as well as the apocalypse of 2029 on Earth.
Biography[]
The destruction caused by the Snail: mass graves created by Radical-6, a virus that can be traced back to the Snail's appearance in the park.
Sometime in 2011, a young mother, implied to be the mother of Eric, was jogging in a park and reached a fork in the road. Normally, she went down the right split, but this time, she went left, since the Snail had been on the right. Why she specifically avoided walking down the Snail's path is unknown, though it may be due to fear. Was she afraid of them? Or felt a sense of danger from it? Whatever the case may be, the snail caused her to switch paths. The woman reported to a senior citizen who was familiar to her that she chose a different path to avoid the snail. This led her to the site of her murder by a girl, who is implied to be Mira.
One day, about a month later, a man was falsely accused of being the killer. He claimed innocence, but the jury still found him guilty. The verdict could not be overturned and he was executed. As a result of this, the man's wife took her own life in grief. The couple left behind two young children, Aoi and Akane.
The accused man called a taxi soon before his arrest, but as a result of his arrest, the taxi did not pick him up. Instead, they picked up a surgeon who had been scheduled to perform a life-saving operation on a young boy heavily implied to be Sean, a boy whom a robot would eventually be named after. The taxi was involved in a lethal accident that killed the driver, the surgeon, and by extension, the young boy.
Because 999 would never have happened if the Kurashiki parents survived, and subsequently neither Virtue's Last Reward or Zero Time Dilemma would have either, this Snail indirectly caused the deaths of 6,000,000,000 humans and massive amounts of chaos and suffering.
Trivia[]
- The reason Kotaro Uchikoshi used a snail instead of a different animal is that "Snail" is an anagram of "Slain"[2].
- There are some popular fan theories that suggest the Snail was intentionally placed on the park's path:
- One theory states that that the Snail was intentionally placed on the road by the religious fanatic in an attempt to kill 8,000,000,000 humans. It is possible this terrorist was another Esper who had the ability to SHIFT and/or Mind Hack and could foresee the future(s) this snail would bring.
- Another theory states that Delta placed the Snail on the road, since he has an intricate knowledge of the Snail and its impact on the world. However, Delta may know about the Snail because he was the senior citizen in the story who spoke with the jogging woman, though this is not confirmed.
- The file for Leucochloridium ends by posing that the Snail may have been infected by the parasite, though it is never confirmed either way.
- On September 15, 2018, Uchikoshi posted the above photo of the Snail on his English Twitter while promoting his then upcoming game AI: The Somnium Files with the text "He does not appear in AI though..."