1.
If you ever want me to give you a ride, you’ve got to seem incredibly pure. At least as simple and undeceptive as a human child to get more than a snort and a tossing of the mane before I bolt away.
That’s probably where all those rumors came from about only maidens able to tame an individual of my kind – the Middle Ages, a time when men dressed in kitchen cookware and tried to leap onto our backs. I am aware the men did not want to get hurt from our hooves, horns, or teeth, but our kind is usually gentle. We just do not enjoy something that thinks it is smarter than us digging into our flanks with metal exoskeletons and roaring into our ears every five minutes. If humans wanted to do that, they should have gotten themselves a pony.
I really shouldn’t be telling you all this, but my kind have become incredibly lax in which standards we choose to uphold. I am one of the few old souls trying to keep to the traditions as much as possible. However, being helpless or by yourself might help you get a ride. Flattery also helps, as a feature common to all unicorns is that we are incredibly vain. Any little girl who cries, “Oh, you’re mane’s so pretty!” will immediately turn the head of every unicorn within a kilometer.
And if you give us sugar, even the processed kind, we will take you to the moon. It has happened before that a small boy got lost in a crater and his ride at the time, a unicorn by the name of J.R. Sussisparkles (embarrassing, but it was a family name) spent over an hour calling, “Jimmy! Come out of the moonlings’ dining rooms! You have to be invited first.” He told me that himself. But that is a different story.
But you wanted to know about me. Well, there is not much to tell. I grew up without brothers or sisters. My mother ran off with a centaur when I was a foal. I am still in the process of looking for my father. I am supposed to be named after him: Octavian Silverhorn, the Second. Have you heard of that name? Of course you haven’t.
Yes, I was an orphaned unicorn. Not the best situation, but I made the best of it. Mostly I wandered around Griffith Park. I had not yet learned to be invisible yet, so a couple of times I was almost detained by animal control.
That’s kind of how I met Larry.
Oh, Larry’s another unicorn.
It’s just Larry. I don’t believe he has any other name.
He leaped off the observatory and kicked some humans as they threw a net over me. They were in the bushes when he did a sort of jig with his hooves to make them forget us entirely. My kind can do that: we make humans forget the last few minutes, or hours, or days. Otherwise every human who has ever ridden a unicorn would tell their friends. The collective magic of our species is weakened by such things.
I had seen the strange dance done before, but I only knew a few basic things I was too young to use at the time. Anyway, the humans got in their car and drove away afterward. Like I said, unicorns are usually gentle.
Larry said, “Hey kid, where’s your parents?” And I said I did not have any. He told me that was fine and that I should run with him for a while, if I wasn’t busy.
A young foal like me did not have any plans. Larry took me down the hill to Pasadena. My kind is built for distances, so it was not that far. The only things that gave us any trouble were the bumper-to-bumper cars pumping exhaust into our nostrils.
We passed a couple of days at his apartment eating his sweets supply bare. In between binges we explored the observatory. Sometimes kids left food hanging around the exhibits. Larry got his candy that way.
Or so I thought.
