The Ongoing Epic of [the Alicornatrice Known Simply as] Corncob
by Siegfried Danzinger
Chapter One - The Fateful Checkers Game Between a Squirrel and a Not-Chicken
Tony the Squirrel lowered his mechanical paw towards the board with utmost care and unerring precision. His metallic fingers (more clamps, really) slowly squeezed together with a sound like a toaster doing something inappropriate to another toaster, and the selected Checkers piece was caught in a nigh inescapable grip. You could see it in his beady little squirrel-eyes: Victory was surely his. He made his move; hopping one of his opponent's pieces with an unintelligible - but nonetheless arrogant-seeming - little chitter in, no doubt, squirrel-language.
Corncob was sweating under his feathers. He had to hand it to the guy: Tony had never played so well. While Checkers and board games in general were considered a waste of time by most cockatrices, Corncob had developed a vast love and deep appreciation for the mechanics of the game. And by this I mean that he realized he could move the pieces with his beak without them falling over or spilling off the board. (Chess had been a disaster; he'd managed to swallow a rook.) If he failed to stop his opponent's aggressive, very nearly competent (I mean c'mon, he's a squirrel) onslaught, Corncob's defeat would be so total and so shameful that he may never have courage enough to play again.
And that was when it happened.
Were you sitting in Tony's position, you'd have seen the following: A heretofore quivering chicken-and-lizard-like creature suddenly went quite still. The once apparent fear in his eyes gave way to a seeming emptiness. Which gave way to an appearance of being half-full. Which ultimately gave way to a look of steely purpose. Which momentarily faltered and resembled an unexpected release of gas, which quickly returned to the steely purpose thing.
The cockatrice had never before experienced anything remotely like this. He'd played dozens of Checkers games. Well, maybe not dozens. At least four. Three, and no fewer. His short term memory was very - fittingly if not fortunately - short.
He'd played at least one game; that much he knew. But that at-least-one-game had not so much as come close to pushing him towards the far boundaries of his burgeoning Checkers-related skills. This game did push. It pushed very hard - a shove, really - and promised to deliver the cockatrice to a place well beyond his limits.
"Limits? What are those?" said some new voice in his head. Formerly, that voice would have been a cluck; this one was decidedly in pony-language. (Note: Pony-language is the language most commonly spoken by ponies. This is, of course, assuming you are a chicken-like creature that doesn't particularly follow linguistics.)
There were several explosive bursts of alternately orange and purple lights; Corncob's side of the table was all but engulfed by them. Tony, now contemplating wetting himself, shook violently and clung hard to the table with his metallic appendage. Something like smoke flowed over him, and the suggestion of a shivering silhouette began to form behind a billowy wall.
Alicorns are a thing in Equestria. Ponies with both horns and wings that typically end up in ruling positions because they just do. The way a pony becomes (or "ascends to," if you prefer) an alicorn isn't entirely consistent, but there's one point on which you can usually rely...
...Chicken-lizard things don't go alicorn. Never have. Not once. There was this one dream I had where... But NO. Just doesn't actually happen.
This time: It happened.
The smoke slowly cleared. Tony was still holding fast to the edge of the table; he'd even less cause now to let go. Towering over the terrified squirrel (when you're a squirrel, it's not especially hard to be towered over), noteworthily positioned exactly where that bizarre example of indigenous poultry had once sat, was an orange-and-purple creature several times its original height and bulk. It still roughly resembled the cockatrice known as Corncob, but it was essentially a Corncob that would be regularly suspected of steroid abuse. The fact that he had spontaneously sprouted a spiral horn several feet in length was rather secondary at the time.
But, to the curiously damp squirrel, the real horror lie on the board: Deep, chasm-like scratches clearly marked the path that Corncob's piece had traveled. The cockacor- alicocka- alicornatrice (it'll do) had taken every one of Tony's remaining pieces in but a single move. Defeated and thoroughly disturbed, the squirrel stiffened, fell out of his seat like a tumbling statue, and drifted into a lovely state of unconsciousness on the ground.
Corncob, the cockatrice-turned-alicorn, stood up from the table; ideally, as ominous and overly dramatic music played in the background. He turned his batlike wings over in front of his eyes. Scanned, intrigued rather than surprised, over his new bulk. A sudden instinct (sounds better than throbbing headache) told him that his forehead had done something new with itself lately.
"A horn," rumbled the internal voice from earlier. "And with it, the world."
But then Corncob realized that he wasn't especially evil.
"A horn," rumbled the internal voice from just a moment ago. "And with it... Horn... Related things. Not necessarily evil things. But definitely things."
The newly-minted alicornatrice (it will grow on you) tilted his head to the sky, squinted with a secret purpose (or else the sun was in his eyes), and rocketed into the air. The vertical acceleration tossed about his wattle and half flattened his comb against the peak of his tapering head. He didn't know where he was going. He didn't know why he was going. But one thing was for certain: He was going. For a fowl who had, in the past, favored waddling through brambly underbrush and thought flight was mostly "for the birds" (nobody tell him), he was certainly doing a good impression of an inverted or somewhat confused meteorite.
An unconscious squirrel was later discovered, given inexpert and rather half-hearted CPR, and then tossed into a trash can - more out of tidiness than anything else.