Something Unknown

by ReaderReads


Chapter 1: Sweet Apple Acres

He… needed a name. That’s what he had realised in the minute it took him to walk up to the door of the main building of this group that made up what he assumed was Sweet Apple Acres. He really, really needed a name. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t live life without one, but it just felt wrong to go unnamed, to just be a creature. He could think and feel and, he was sure, talk, and any creature with that degree of sapience should have a name.

At least, those were his thoughts on the subject. For now, he would wait until his mother could name him. She was his mother, after all. It wouldn’t be right - even with his degree of intelligence he was gifted with at birth - if he simply named himself while he had a loving parent waiting for him. Those instincts he had been given to replace the Hunting, Expanding, Protecting that had penetrated his every thought in the first few hours of his existence told him that it was the parent that named the child, and not the child that named the child.

Confident in this, he raised an arm - or a foreleg, he wasn’t sure - and knocked three times before lowering his - he had decided it was an arm - arm down to the ground. “Be right with ya,” shouted a voice with a thick cowpony accent from behind the door, “jus’ bear with me for a couple’a seconds!”

He drummed the claws on his right arm against the wooden stoop, creating a hollow tk-tk-tk-tk, tk-tk-tk-tk sound. It felt strange to call the front limbs of his body arms and the back limbs legs when he was most comfortable on all fours, but something told him that they were his arms and that his legs were… he wasn’t sure; no, he knew, he just had to find the word deep in his head, in the information he was still subconsciously sorting through.

Digitigrade legs are what I have,’ he thought, ‘that’s what they are. Wait, I’ve never practised speaking before… I… probably should, just in case I don’t get my message across properly to Ms Cowpony-Who-I-Assume-Is-A-Farmer.

The muscles in his jaw flexed for a second. He immediately realised this was the first time he was actually moving that particular section of his body. His tongue ran over his sharp, sharp teeth softly, and then began to flex as well, meeting some resistance when it neared the top of his mouth. Instinctually, as his tongue brushed against it, his jaw shot open and he hissed as he built up force for something that he thought he should know about but was instead a mystery to him. After a half second, an inner pharyngeal jaw blasted forward before retracting back into the top of his mouth.

...what.

Then, as he finished that very confused thought, he knew. Once again buried knowledge surged forth and he knew what it was, what the purpose of it was. Killing. The structure was entirely for killing. He opted to ignore it for the time being and pretended it didn’t exist. After all, he knew, somehow, that killing was wrong; so, so, so very wrong. Instead of considering the inner jaw, he flexed his tongue. He opened his mouth again.

He hissed out something that was a word. Probably. If you had a really good imagination, it might’ve sounded like something… maybe.

If he had eyes instead of whatever the hell his senses were composed of, he would’ve blinked in surprise. He hissed again lowly, though it was meant to be more of a grunt, realising that it made perfect sense that he didn’t really know how to talk. He knew the language fluently as it was one of the many subjects that had been injected into his mind as he formed inside of his mother, but he had never actually spoken it, and would have to get used to it.

The door in front of him opened, surprising him slightly as he had not been paying any attention, submerged in his own thoughts, to reveal an orange, female earth pony wearing a brown stetson, dried sweat matting her fur. Her eyes shot open in a panic as she took a millisecond to register the creature standing in front of her with too-sharp teeth and too-sharp claws and - what even was that head!

She spun around. He watched on in curiosity, closing his open jaw; he truly had no idea that his appearance was predatory and terrifying. He registered her muscles tensing, and then he stumbled back in surprise at the pain, snarling at the prey that had dared to hurt him, the true apex predator, she would suffer, she would bow down to the hive and would harm him and his comrades in the swarm no more-

He took a sharp, hissing breath, and was calm. He would ponder that outburst later. For now, he had to calm the pony down, who had turned back around and was snarling at him in turn, head low, digging one hoof against the planks that made up the floor in a show of dominance. Reining in the instincts that told him to snarl back and to tear her to pieces for thinking she could harm him, he raised up one hand slowly and non-threateningly, spreading the four claws outwards and leaning downwards in a show of submission.

The pony froze. She had thought that it was a predator that had come for her and her family, but she knew of no predator that would submit itself straight away, especially a predator strong enough to resist one of her bucks without any obvious injury. She stopped pawing against the ground and glared at the creature, as if daring it to do something. So, he did.

He nodded slowly, and placed his arm carefully onto the dirt, rising up, though still on all fours as to not appear too large in comparison to her. He opened his mouth again - making the pony flinch at the sight of his many deadly teeth and long, thick tongue that seemed to be covered in an obvious, odd, thick saliva with hints of toxic green - and began to speak in a garbled voice, throaty but at least able to be heard properly.

“HHHHHello, Ms Cowpony,” he hissed out, sounding like he had smoked twenty a day for the past twenty years, just without the gravelly yet soothing undertone, “ssssssssorry for the s-surprise…”

She blinked, no longer able to say that she wasn’t completely and utterly confused. She knew that this was no Everfree monster now; the farm and orchard were near enough the forest that she knew the creatures that lurked inside like the frog of her hoof. The question, however, was what was it, exactly? She had never seen this kind of creature before. She opened and closed her mouth a few times, apparently to the amusement of the creature before it, and responded rather eloquently.

“‘Scuse me?”

The creature chuckled - a grating, hissing noise. “I,” it cleared its throat, “said, I was sorry for the surprise. Y-You know, the one where you k-kicked me in the face?”

The earth pony was marvelling at the fact that this creature could talk, not really recognising that its voice seemed to improve in quality with every second it was speaking, reaching heavily-accented Equestrian already. “Uh, yeah, Ah guess tha’ was me, uh… sorry?”

It grinned at her. She shivered inwardly at the sight. “T-That’s okay, Ms…”

“...Applejack.”

“Ms Applejack! I j-just came by because, well, I’m looking for my mother, and this was place was close, so…”

She gasped. Whether or not the creature looked monstrous, it was looking for its mother, and dammit any Apple worth their crop knows that family always, always, always comes first. “Tha’s fine! Alright,” she said determinedly, stepping outside the boundaries of the door and closing it behind her though not before shouting a quick ‘gotta go someone’s missing their mother’ to the inhabitants, “let’s getcha sorted. Where did ya come from and where’d ya last see ya mother?”

He was silent for a few seconds. The silence was far from comfortable. He shifted for a second, considering the question, and answered appropriately in a way that would definitely not be incredibly confusing. “Well, Ms Applejack, I came from… up above, and I’ve never seen my mother before.”

Applejack responded just as eloquently as she earlier had, though this time, her voice included an obvious layer of incredulousness. “‘Scuse me?”

“Miss, I was only born a few - minutes ago, I think.”

“...’Scuse me?!”

“Okay, so, it was really bright suddenly, and I kinda ran away, and I just haven’t met my mother and I really want to meet my mother!”

The earth pony was silent. Then she shook her head gently, still very, very confused. “Alright thar’, I think Ah’ve got an idea, jus’ follow me to mah friend, she knows a lot about a lot and should be able to help ya, because Ah jus’ am not followin’, Ah’m ‘fraid.”

Briefly, he seemed downtrodden, though was quickly nodding in agreement with her plan, since he generally had no idea what else he could do apart from follow Applejack, who seemed to know what she was doing - or, kind of know what she was doing. “Alright, Ms Applejack!

“No no no,” she admonished, trotting at a fairly quick pace towards Ponyville proper, following a path that should lead to the resident librarian and Element of Magic within only twenty, thirty at most minutes, “Ah am not old enough to be a ‘Ms Applejack’ yet! Gimme some credit, Ah’d ‘ave thought tha’ workin’ the fields day and night would keep me lookin’ young!”

He chuckled, now firmly believing that he would meet his mother by days end due to the infectious confidence that Applejack exuded, a sound that was no less grating and horrible than earlier, his voice perhaps improving but nearly noticeably, keeping an almost out-of-this-world, terrifying quality, and followed her along. “I meant no offence, Ms - I mean, Applejack. Just being cautious.”

She shook her head, and then seemed stuck in thought for a few milliseconds, inhaling sharply as she remembered her manners. “‘Course! How rude a’ me! Ah forgot to ask; what’s yer name?”

“I don’t have one yet, miss. I was only just born.”

“Well, Ah can’t jus’ call ya ‘him’ or ‘you’ or whatever, can Ah? Go for a temporary name so it’s not awkward, ya know?” She reasoned.

Hesitating for a second, he thought of his mother. Applejack seemed like an upstanding member of society. He thought it over before a name jumped straight to the forefront of his name, and he nodded to himself. Mother would forgive him, and mother would give him a better name too. “Alright, I guess,” he responded in flawless yet ugly, nearly deformed Equestrian, “though don’t tell mum, okay?”

Applejack nodded.

“...call me Strange Form.”

The word that had presented itself to him receded back into his mind.

Xenomorph.