I never understood candy corn.
It doesn’t taste like corn, looks more like teeth than corn, and you can’t effectively put it on a cob or eat it with butter.
Seriously, what flavor even is it? I know what it’s made out of, but flavors are usually made with the intent to be something.
These are the sorts of things that bother me. It’s moments like this I wish the Internet was still functional. Then I could at least get a widely accepted misconception for an answer.
~~~
The candy corn mother beast closed its many eyes and let out an enraged screech, opening its massive maw and ejecting one of its toothy children at Rainbow. In her panic, she could only keep it from biting her, not from hitting her. The extra weight drove her to the ground, kicking up a fair amount of the soil.
“Bleh!” Rainbow spat angrily. “That tastes terrible!”
“Ha! Got her!” Jake called. The corn mother rammed Jake with its nose, tossing the squishy dog into one of the walls. The impact damaged the already ancient artwork further. “Ugh…”
“Running is a good idea!” Finn shouted, flailing his sword wildly.
“Up and out!” Rainbow said, grabbing Finn with her front hooves and flying for the hole in the ceiling. The corn mother was smart enough to know this meant they would escape, so she opened her maw and launched a dozen of her teeth-children at the duo like bullets. Rainbow had to veer out of the way haphazardly, no longer in enough control to get to the hole.
One of the little corns smacked her in her cracked back hoof. The jolt of pain made her drop Finn onto the ground, though he was blessed not to get a mixture of chocolate, worms, and whatever counted as corn creature fecal matter in his mouth. He jumped to his feet, swinging his sword at the advancing corn children.
“Ideas?” Finn called.
“Run?” Rainbow suggested.
“No,” Jake said, prying himself out of the wall and growing three times in size, purposefully exaggerating the shape of his muscles. “I’ll get 'em. Raaaaaaa!” He grew several more limbs from his elbow and started punching the little corns left and right. The mother let out a powerful roar and charged Jake.
“Right where I want ya…” Jake consolidated all the mass in one of his arms into a giant fist, giving the mother an uppercut. “Take that, you overgrown tooth tooth… tooth!”
The mother was unfazed by the attack, but Jake had its full attention now. It took several hulking steps forward, pushing through the bulk of Jake’s punches through sheer force of will. He made more and more limbs, but still the creature pushed forward.
“Geez, you’ve got quite the set of muscles on you…” Jake muttered, still having to create new arms to punch the children trying to eat him. “Little help…?”
“I got you, Jake!” Finn said, jumping onto the side of the mother. He pulled his sword back, ready to plunge it into one of the beast’s eyes. He hesitated. “Wait, Rainbow, what did you say about chilling?”
Rainbow kicked one of the child corns off her. “We’re not winning right now, it doesn’t matter! Fight, please!”
“Oh. Okay!” Finn drove the sword forward, but the mother had wisened up. It slapped him aside with one of its excess limbs. He landed next to one of the mother’s many mouths. It opened wide, ready to devour him whole.
Rainbow flew in, snatching him from the beast’s maw in the nick of time. She carried Finn a short distance away and set him down before sighing. “I’d complain, but I don’t think the sword would have done much anyway.”
Finn rubbed the back of his head. “Ugh…”
“Guys!” Jake called as he was being pushed into a wall. “Do we have a plan!?”
“Flying up is out…” Rainbow muttered.
“We can run through that cavern,” Finn suggested, pointing down the now-empty tunnel the mother had come out of.
“Might be a dead end.”
“Have a better idea?”
“Not really.”
Finn stood up and ran for the tunnel, Rainbow flying close behind. “Jake! Disengage! Flee! Run!”
“This is a terrible plan!” Jake said, smiling despite his sentiment. He shrunk down, turning himself into a slingshot. Through a careful use of momentum, he was able to stretch himself backward and launch like a bullet past the mother’s vicious maw. Unfurling himself to his normal size, he entered a run alongside Finn. “So, what do we do when we run into more problems?”
“Keep running?” Finn suggested.
“We are so doomed,” Rainbow groaned.
Behind them, they could hear the mother roar. Luckily for them, it was large and slow. Its children, unfortunately, were not and had begun to pursue them. Snarling corn children ran after them like a pack of wolves, ready to sink their teeth into the warm flesh of the adventurers.
“Carry me!” Jake said, jumping onto Rainbow’s back. She grunted as he hit, but with an extra push she managed to match Finn’s speed.
Now that Jake was no longer worried about running himself, he focused on creating more and more limbs to punch the pursuers away. The smaller monsters were much more manageable than mama.
Still, it kept them running. They ran through the tunnel in a panic, doing everything they could just to stay alive and well. The tunnel curved up, left, right, then left again, entering a large curve that took them around like a corkscrew. Eventually, they entered a sharply downhill segment.
“Yeah! We’re faster now!” Finn cheered.
“Downhill makes them faster too!” Rainbow shouted. “And I’m only staying back to keep Finn from biting it!”
“Oh. Right.” Finn glanced back at the corn beasts falling after them. “Right... “ He realized how heavily he was breathing. “We can’t keep running like this,” he gasped.
“You can say that again,” Rainbow groaned. “There’s a dead end up ahead.”
Jake recalled all his extra limbs, shifting into a baseball form. “Throw me at the wall!”
Rainbow didn’t question him. She pulled back with one of her wings and hurled Jake at the upcoming dead end. He grew in size five-fold, taking the shape of a massive spike. He drove right through the wall, opening it up to the wide room on the other side. Rainbow flew through and Finn jumped in shortly thereafter.
They were back in the round room they had started in, and mother corn was still there. She roared.
“Seriously!?” Rainbow shouted.
“I… can’t do that again…” Finn panted.
“We can still do this. Look for another cave—” Rainbow was slapped to the side by one of the mother’s limbs. She slid pathetically off the wall and flopped onto the ground, groaning. Jake was on the ground as well, rubbing the headache he had received by using his body to punch through a cave wall.
Only Finn stood. Terrified out of his mind, he hefted his sword and angled it at the mother. “I’m not going down without a fight, corn-wad!”
The mother didn’t care. It opened its mouth, ready to devour him whole. Finn made plans to jump past all the teeth and carve the beast open from the inside. It was a stupid plan, but it was all he had at this point.
Just before he jumped, someone dropped down the hole, landing behind the mother. It was a bipedal creature somewhat taller than Finn dressed entirely in ornate metal armor in a style long forgotten. A warrior.
He drove his curved blade right into the mother’s backside. It stuck there, doing little more than grabbing the monster’s attention. It twisted around, allowing one of its secondary mouths to take a bite at the warrior. In response, the warrior pulled out a rod with a red button on top. As he pressed down, the sword embedded in the beast exploded.
Rearing, the mother forgot all about Finn and his friends, focusing entirely on the new warrior. The warrior, in response, pulled out a trident that crackled with electricity. He jumped over the mother’s attempt at a bite, poking it in the forehead right between two of the eyes. The creature let out an ululating scream as electricity coursed through its sugary body.
The warrior wasn’t finished. Tossing the trident to the side, he pulled out several pulsating discs and threw them on the creature. As he jumped off, all three of them exploded, throwing the massive hulk of a beast into one of the walls.
It had had enough. With a whimper, the mother fled back through the hole she had entered. None of her children were willing to risk an encounter with the warrior. They fled with even more frantic whimpers.
“Wow…” Rainbow said, eyes wide. “That was AWESOME! Thank you, mister! You saved our flanks!”
“Yeah!” Finn said. “How’d you do all that? Where’d you get all the sick loot?”
“I’m a little teapot…” Jake chuckled, rubbing his head.
The warrior stared at Finn for the longest time, the mask making the gaze more than a little ominous.
“Uh… hello?” Finn said, nervous. He wondered if they’d have to fight this guy now.
“I mean you no harm.” It was a strangely normal sounding voice, not at all what Finn would have expected from some legendary armored warrior. “I only seek to help. And to know what you are doing in this place.”
“We’re adventuring!” Rainbow answered. “We uh… got surprised by the corn creatures.”
“Someone said we should let the corn creatures go running back to mama,” Jake muttered, slowly regaining some of his awareness.
“That’s… that’s beside the point!”
Finn rubbed the back of his head. “Yeah, uh, we’re usually a lot cooler than this, mister. Adventuring is kinda our thing. I’m Finn, that’s Jake, and that’s Rainbow. She’s new.”
“Hey!” Rainbow sputtered.
The warrior nodded, only taking his gaze off Finn for a moment. “They call me Jack.”
“Jack?” Finn’s jaw dropped. “Jack? Samurai Jack?”
“Who?” Rainbow asked.
“Samurai Jack! Legendary hero of the south!” Finn held his sword up high. “Traveling the world, being a hero!”
“I am surprised any this far north know of my legend,” Jack said.
“Well, not many do,” Jake said. “We just heard about you from Billy. The guy wouldn’t shut up about you!”
“You knew Billy?” Jack asked, his surprise evident.
“I don’t know who Billy is, either,” Rainbow groaned.
“BILLY!” Jake shouted, strumming on an air guitar after saying the name. “Billy was the best hero, like, ever. Took out the Lich, saved a ton of people, and he was one of our buds! And he liked telling stories.”
“He talked a lot about your adventures,” Finn told Jack. “He said you made quite a team before you went back south.”
“We did…” Jack admitted, posture relaxing as the memories came back. “But he was a hero of these lands. These lands that did not have what I seek. I had to leave him.”
“Oh, I understand. Heroing takes you everywhere, doesn't it?”
“It truly does.” Jack looked at Finn again, staring.
“Okay, what’s the deal?” Rainbow asked. “Why’s Finn so fascinating?”
Jack leaned down so his mask was level with Finn. “You are human.”
“Uh, yeah,” Finn said.
“Wait, what?” Rainbow shook her head. “I thought humans were extinct.”
“We should be,” Jack said.
“We…?”
Jack reached to his head and pulled off his helmet, revealing a pale skinned face with narrow eyes and black beard. The face of a human.
Finn gasped. “You’re human too!”
“Yes. And I have not seen another human in over forty years, Finn…”