What Tiger Was I Smoking When I Wrote This?

Blog Number 74: Chocolate-Chip Swordfish Edition

I found an old entry for a monster anthology!

Way back when (October 2018, to be precise), there was a collaborative anthology project called The Smoking Tiger Collective. The plan was originally to create an anthology for a bunch of exotic Equestrian creatures, the weirder and more apocryphal, the better.

As of April 2019, there have been no further updates on its progress, and frankly I forgot about it until I dug up my own would-be entry recently. Since I dislike seeing work fall by the wayside (which accounts, alas, for a sizeable quantity of my unhappiness over time), I thought I'd take it off Google Docs and give it a home here. So... here it is!

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Bit of background, first: the creature is supposed to be alluded to in several historical documents, the point being that these are apocryphal creatures. The more varied the accounts, and the more interesting the accounts themselves, the better. Obviously, Equestrian versions of real-life people abound.*

* I'm not a huge fan of the "take a real-world name and shove a horse pun into part of it" mode of world-building. It strikes me as a tad uninspired and a missed opportunity for some genuine alternate take on history. Still, this was part of a collaboration, so some cross-author consistency was required. Plus, I'm preserving the original form here. Otherwise, I'd edit at least a couple of these names on the grounds of "do not want".

For my part, I thought, basically, "No one's going to have a creature starting with the letter X!", and then I had a flick through the letter in a dictionary (I think - this was way back, after all) to see if I could pluck some workable words out of same. At the time, I crossed "xiphias", which meant "swordfish". That was my starting point.

Then on a completely independent case, I stumbled across Central American cultures - hence the chocolate connection, chocolate being originally derived from Mesoamerican drinking practices** - and the word "Axolotl", which caught my eye because of the "x" and the exotic tang, as well as the fact I quite liked the little amphibian oddball. Throw in an invented mock origin for the word "chocolate" - as deriving from "xokolotl" - in Equestria's fictional world*** - and after this Frankensteinian crossword-puzzle-of-a-world-building-exercise, you get...

** Something I also used in an old fic of mine, An Old Tale in a New World. By "old" I mean "published before I got my act together in 2016". It must be said I'm not a huge fan of my own early work.

*** Etymology is an eye-opening linguistic subject, especially when you transplant our real-world English into a fictional world and then ask the question: "How did they get the words?" Fictional etymology is a little-known pleasure of world-building, don'tcha know?

At this point, authorial impartiality forbids me from saying what exactly I got, for the same reason parents don't get to grade their own children's exams. I'll, uh, let you be the judge of the result:

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Xokolotl

Of all apocryphal creatures, the Xokolotl is arguably the most embarrassing. Dubbed Chocolaticus xiphiamimus by Cart Linear in the speculative chapter of his Systema Supernaturae, the creature is consistently described as a swordfish-like amphibious beast with literal swords for fins and irregular dark lumps (believed by some scholars to be chocolate chips) embedded in its scales. Naturally, it’s considered as ungainly as it sounds.
 
The most credible sighting was provided by Humbolt in Le Voyage aux Régions Equinoxiales. He described stumbling upon a specimen in the Amaponian rainforest and was immediately confused when it started warbling at him. Upon telling the native tribesponies, he was astonished when they subsequently laughed it off.
 
They explained that the Xokolotl always sings to lure victims towards its river before drowning and eating them. At least, it tries to: in practice, the creature is tone-deaf, possesses the predatory instinct of a muffin, and is completely useless at ambush tactics. Despite its fearsome appearance and earnest attempts, they called it the least threatening thing in the rainforest, including the trees.
 
Humbolt took a shine to this creature, noting rather poignantly that, of all the species he had researched throughout his travels, this was the only one whose name started with an X. Because it’s self-conscious about this – at least according to Humbolt – the Xokolotl gets dangerously annoyed if ponies refer to it as “the one that starts with an X,” a contingency which is recorded in every single account of the animal (including Aristrottle’s History of Animals, where the beast is first mentioned in a throwaway passage). The Amaponians believed that the Xokolotl was capable of exhibiting a broad range of emotional expression, but Humbolt himself witnessed “nothing other than a permanent sulk at its lot in life.”
 
Apart from various compendiums, the beast occasionally appears as a pathetic starting obstacle in epic tales, usually because its appearance is dramatic enough to offset its awkward mobility problem. Most famously, in the first edition of The Collected Exploits of Commander Hurricane, it was originally the first monster encountered. Later editions expunged it to preserve Hurricane’s reputation, since the encounter was “not worthy” of such an illustrious leader.
 
Strangest of all the Xokolotl’s features is its alleged chocolate-producing ability, considered by scholars as far back as Star Swirl to be one of the beast’s few good points. Bizarrely, this ability was never mentioned by Humbolt, but it is a regular staple in other accounts. For instance, Hoovier in his letters to Dour Whinny proposed that chocolate was originally made in liquid form by this creature to run in natural rivers like water. This was before the modern milk-and-cocoa-bean version replaced it, “apparently for reasons of hygiene.”
 
Hoovier was not the first to propose this origin for chocolate. In Guide to Magical Pedantry, Star Swirl claimed to have encountered these creatures and to have actually recovered the “brown elixir” directly for use as a relaxing beverage. (By contrast, Clover’s Chronicles claimed that they both learned the recipe from an enigmatic enchantress native to the “southern lands” who had stolen it from the beast herself.) In both accounts, it’s telling that the resultant brew is described as “hot xokolotl.”
 
Most scholars take after Dour Whinny, who dismissed Hoovier’s Xokolotl-Chocolate connection as an old Amaponian “just-so” story. Loony Pasture agreed in his Études sur le métabolisme, going on to note that, though he found no medical benefit, the chocolate drink was a useful psychological aid for victims of “morbid sadness.”
 
One might presume the original animal would have found this highly ironic. Inevitably, other compendiums and even Humbolt’s account discuss the Xokolotl chiefly in relation to its low self-esteem and fragile ego, especially when compared with other, more illustrious, monsters.

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Well, I just thought I'd share that with you. Time to celebrate another job... done.

Impossible Numbers, out.

Comments

[Super Trampoline]

Huh, I forgot about that too. With all the frenzy around the Tiger King shockumentary on Netflix, now seems as good a time as any to prod Horizon and Aragon to get it up and running again.

Also, obligatory since you mentioned the fantastic axolotl:

[Impossible Numbers]

5244582

Hm, not sure about that. I presume they dropped it due to real life priorities, in any case.

Also, that vid. I like the lesson on neoteny, but damn was that weird.