Turbo Pudding
Every Fluff in Fluffenders is a soft, round little animal with one trick. A firefly glows, a snail pulls into its shell, a hedgehog has spines, and a frog has a tongue. It’s Thursday, so here’s the real story: the real animals do all of that too, and some of what they do is stranger than anything we put in the game.
The picture at the top is a night in the Whispering Woods. Three Lumi Fireflies glow on the left, Gulpy Frog sits near the top, a Glowshell Snail and two Prickles Hedgehogs wait in the middle, and the Rollys, our rolling hedgehogs, line the left edge.
Fireflies: glowing from the start
Fireflies aren’t flies at all. They’re beetles, and more than 2,000 species have been identified around the world. Their light comes from special organs in the body, where a chemical reaction with oxygen makes it glow. It’s often called cold light.
All fireflies glow as larvae, long before they have wings. For them, the light works as a warning: most fireflies taste bad to the animals that might eat them. Grown-up fireflies flash mainly to find a mate, and each species has its own pattern. In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, home to 19 kinds of fireflies, one species flashes all together: five to eight flashes, then eight seconds of darkness, then again. The National Park Service says the show starts once the forest is completely dark, usually around 9:30 at night, and the season lasts only two to three weeks a year. Its peak has fallen anywhere from the third week of May to the third week of June.
Lumi Firefly does it the game way. She costs very little stardust, glows a little at first and grows brighter once she grows up, so the game’s tip is to plant her right away. And when the Fluffs set out into the woods, Granny Hoot tells them: “Follow the fireflies, little ones.”
Snails: a house to hide in
A snail’s shell is big enough for the whole animal to pull inside. When the weather turns dry, many land snails go still and seal the opening with a lid of their own called an epiphragm. Usually, it’s just dried mucus. Some snails make it harder with chalk, and the Roman snail spends many months buried in the soil behind a hard lid with a tiny hole left open for air.
A real glowing snail exists, too. Quantula striata lives in Southeast Asia and on Fiji, and in Singapore, it turns up on lawns and walkways. It’s the only land snail known to make its own light: short yellow-green flashes, from half a second to six seconds long, while it crawls. Even its eggs and newly hatched babies glow.
Our Glowshell Snail does both jobs. Its shell lights up the mist around it, and when a Grump nibbles it, it hides in its shell and holds on. And for a Fluff that costs so little, it’s tough: four times as hard to nibble through as a Bubbun.
Hedgehogs: spines and a roll
A hedgehog’s spines are hairs: hollow ones, made stiff with keratin, the same material as our fingernails. They aren’t barbed or poisonous, and unlike a porcupine’s quills, they don’t come out easily. Young hedgehogs lose their baby spines as grown-up ones come in, which is called quilling. When a hedgehog is scared, it rolls into a tight, spiny ball, tucking in its face, feet and belly, and two big muscles along its back point the spines where they’re needed.
Fluffenders has two kinds of hedgehogs. Prickles lies flat on the lawn, and Grumps walk right over it, say “ouch” and then yawn. Nobody ever nibbles Prickles. The Rollys wait by the tree, one in each row, and when a Grump gets too close, they curl up and roll. The Grumps once even wrote to the Fluffs about it: “we are NOT scared of your rolling hedgehogs. Not even a little. Please roll them slowly.”
Frogs: a tongue and a gulp
A frog’s tongue lies folded in its mouth, fixed at the front and free at the back, so it can flip out and snap back very fast. Its spit gets runny as the tongue hits and thick again as it pulls back, which helps the catch stick. Frogs shut their eyes as the tongue goes out. Their teeth are too weak to chew, so they swallow food whole, and the eyes help with that: they sink down through holes in the skull to push the food down the throat.
Gulpy Frog shoots out a pink tongue and gulps a Grump into a sleepy bubble. Then it closes its eyes for a long nap and wakes up with a burp.
The first two nights of Fluffenders are free to play in your browser at fluffenders.com. The full game is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on the Fluffenders page.
