A.T.O.M. CREATE A KAIJU CONTEST 3-D!!! ENTRY: LILACORN
Aliases: Last of the Unicorns, Prancing Pony Princess, [various profanities in a Scottish accent]
Date (Re-)Discovered: June 21, 1962
Place of Origin: Scotland
Notable Stomping Grounds: Scottish Highlands, Echidna Island
Height: 80 feet at the withers
Length: 100 feet (excluding tail and horn)
Biology: First discovered in a lilac-forested, Yamaneon-rich Earth hollow beneath the Scottish highlands, Lilacorn is an elegant but bizarre herbivore whose horse-like appearance is only coincidental - many aspects of her anatomy from her three-toed hooves to her rhino-like dermal armor and from her stout tusks to her far more imposing cranial horns set her apart from most conventional equines. The general consensus is that she is most closely related to the much larger, bulkier mammal kaiju, Mastemuth, though her daintier appearance allows her to move at even greater speeds with enough open ground. More unusual still is that the concentration of Yamaneon within her tissues is higher than has been recorded in most other kaiju. This enables her to emit "pulses" of Yamaneon energy - producing an oddly pink glow in her mane, tail, eyes, and horn instead of green as in the normal substance - which can accelerate healing and growth in most other life forms and even neutralize a variety of posions, infectious bacteria, and other biological weapons.
Lilacorn cares little for this strange ability of hers, however, primarily relying on her trampling hooves and especially her enormous, incredibly strong, and lethally sharp central cranial horn, which is comprised of an unknown substance harder than any on record and capable of piercing through even reinforced Xeno-Titanium. Able to outpace most other kaiju before skewering them on that single terrifying horn, the lavender-colored pachyderm needs little more than the standard kaiju power set:
An enhanced healing factor
Bio and Personality: The first appearance of Lilacorn occurred during the short-lived Beyonder invasion, wherein she charged in seemingly out of nowhere, viciously attacked the invading forces in Inverness, and mysteriously vanished after the few surviving Beyonders fled, not giving anyone a chance to study her. Her "official" discovery wouldn't come until years later, shortly after a group of stranded hikers stumbled upon her hidden home, and then herself shortly after. Their celebration upon discovering a real, live "unicorn" - albeit much bigger than expected - turned into a panicked rout when she took their cheering for a threat display and pursued them out of the hollow, and then discovered what had become of the surface world she had once loved. Several brutal town-flattenings followed, followed by an attempt to seal her hollow off by caving in the entrance, only for her to emerge at the last moment and end up being shut out of her original home. Grief-stricken and enraged, she promptly and violently laid waste to the very same city she'd previously "rescued" before being finally detained after simply passing out from sheer exhaustion. The kaiju was swiftly deported to Echidna Island, where she has been regularly harassing the other residents ever since.
Lilacorn's majestic appearance is deceptive - as gentle as she may seem from a distance, she is in fact one of the most bloodthirsty kaiju on the planet. No one can get close to her without being viciously attacked, and she will charge at anything alive that her acute senses detect, either to chase it off, trample it into the dirt, or simply gore it outright. A comparison can once again be made to Mastemuth in that she is similarly compelled to lord over other creatures, but because she lacks the size advantage of her distant cousin, it is her attitude that has to make up the difference, and she delivers it in plenty. Once riled into a frenzy, it's all but impossible to get her to stop, and so she will continuously rampage for hours on end even long after what originally provoked her no longer presents a threat. Between her natural resilience and most other creatures not wanting to end up on the business end of a horn that can pierce almost anything, the majority of her rampages end when she finally runs out of stamina and simply keels over in a tired faint - and if she's nursing a grudge against someone, she will simply track them down and continue her pursuit of them once she gets back up. Furthermore, the kaiju is far more intelligent than her savagery would suggest, and she is always keen on letting everyone know that fact. She will purposely sabotage capture equipment, turn environmental hazards against the opposition, and toy with opponents until they're provoked into revealing a vulnerability which she can exploit with a single stab of her horn. Her distinctive "roar", a raucous cackling mix of a rather donkey-like bray and a deep bellow, is often uttered when she's successfully humiliated or impaled an adversary, and as it's always accompanied by an almost smug expression, it is thought to be equivalent to laughter - a cruel, malevolent laugh befitting an equally cruel, malevolent bully.
It has been suggested that Lilacorn's provocative behavior has a biological explanation, being derived from her species of origin presumably being territorial. Some other quirks of her behavior are a bit harder to explain, however. In particular, despite often trying to make kebabs of even fully-grown kaiju much weaker than her, she seems to shy away from the prospect of maiming creatures that were absolutely helpless when she found them, whether they're too young to put up a fight or have already been injured by something else. If she sees another monster picking on a vulnerable target or even attacking them while they're already down, she will always go for the attacker, especially if it was a child on the losing end - and if she senses that the creature she saved was injured, she will heal their wounds as well. That is as far as her empathy will go, however - once the
deed is done, she will abandon her rescuee without a second thought. Lilacorn has nonetheless unwittingly "saved" baby kaiju enough times that they tend to regard her with gratitude and will try to follow her in a bid to repay her supposed kindness. While she wants nothing more to do with them most of the time, she seemingly can't bring herself to hurt them and will simply leave when they approach, though she will reluctantly make an exception towards younglings who are persistent enough and will let them remain in her vicinity... even if she still absolutely refuses to let anyone get close enough to touch her.
The most likely reason for Lilacorn's refusal to hurt children, ironically, is arguably the very same impetus for her hatred of almost all other creatures. Observers have sometimes reported the beast standing largely motionless on the coastlines of her new home, staring off at nothing in particular and occasionally emitting unearthly calls that sound almost mournful. It's likely that even after all these eons, she still retains a herding instinct of some sort, and in fact may have once been the lead female of a herd of her kind prior to undergoing atomic fossilization, so it wouldn't be surprising if she desired to be reunited with the herd she lost long ago. Unfortunately, since her kind is now completely extinct with the exception of herself, Lilacorn no longer has others like her for company. Her grief and anger over this may have thus transformed over the years into the nasty, spiteful demeanor she has today, believing that if she suffers from her loneliness, then everyone else should suffer, too. Whether she recognizes how flawed her logic is or if she's simply using the stress of her being the last of her kind as an excuse to justify her savagery isn't clear, but that doesn't change the fact that her needlessly brutal conduct towards potential herd-mates who turn out to be too "different" cannot be condoned by most other kaiju, who will often attempt to stop her proactively before she hurts someone she shouldn't have.
For all her ferocity, though, it isn't impossible that Lilacorn secretly wants companionship once again - it's just that her own personal faults are what end up discouraging it more often than not, and if she is aware of this fact, she chooses to purposely ignore it, having long since dismissed the possibility of befriending others as nonexistent for this reason. Nonetheless, the younger kaiju who know her seem to believe that she might be capable of genuine goodness more than she herself thinks, and that there is a non-zero chance of her mellowing out and becoming the leader of a new herd on Echidna Island. All she needs to do is open up her heart a little.
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In celebration of the release of the second volume of his fantastic e-novel series The Atomic Time of Monsters, @TyrantisTerror is hosting a third create-a-kaiju contest! I linked it at the start of this artist's description, so go check out the rules post if you want to join! As for this entry, well... It's #kaijune, right? And I've also wanted to contribute to #junicorn, right? Weeeeeeeell, what if I drew... a unicorn kaiju? Yessssss, it's genius I say, absolute genius! Mwahaha! >:3
So basically, in the notes for the last create-a-kaiju contest entry I made, I said that my original entry was going to be a giant unicorn with rhino- and knight-like traits, which I rejected due to being too similar to Mastemuth, who is a member of the related "behemoth" clade which are basically very big weird thick-skinned prehistoric mammals... which was what that idea was too, actually. This time around, though, I decided to revisit the concept while leaning into precisely that similarity. I didn't have any other ideas that resonated with me quite as well, and experimenting with a similar overall concept behind one of the "canon" designs, but taken in a completely different direction, was something I think a few other entries for the previous create-a-kaiju contests also did, so trying something similar with a less represented clade and design turned out to be worth exploring after all. So that's exactly what I did here, though I did try to distinguish Lilacorn from Mastemuth to the best of my ability. Whether or not I succeeded of course is up for debate. ^^;
Compared to the previous entries I've made for these create-a-kaiju contests, I actually had a good idea of how Lilacorn would look from the get-go and managed to get the lineart done without too much trouble and almost no post-production revisions at all! It's pretty funny to me because I actually did try to come up with a unicorn kaiju years ago only to scrap it because it looked too similar to someone from a certain popular new-tens cartoon, and instead came up with a design inspired by giraffes and deer rather than horses. For this design, though, I decided to start with Pliny's account of the unicorn as having a deer's head, horse's body, elephant's feet, and boar's tail, and then build from there until I had something more prehistoric-looking to better fit A.T.O.M.'s 50's sci-fi aesthetic - though I did also give her a short trunk to distinguish her face from Mastemuth's, like older depictions of Macrauchenia as well as saiga antelope and tapirs. Other contributing influences include indricotheres, Elasmotherium, wildebeest, a bit of bison, medieval unicorn tapestries, Amalthea from The Last Unicorn, the Galarian Ponyta line, a touch of Shadowfax, and of course a wee smidge of the aforementioned popular new-tens cartoon. I did have to revise the color scheme somewhat because originally she had a rainbow-colored mane a la Starlite from Rainbow Brite but I figured that'd be too ridiculous and implausible, so I ended up giving her a palette more akin to a lightened, desaturated reference to Twilight Sparkle (sans cutie mark of course lol) while also homaging how Amalthea is introduced in her novel of origin living in a "lilac forest", which is incidentally the source of both her name and the, well, lilac forest she was found in. (The date of her discovery, btw, alludes to when the author of The Last Unicorn novel, Peter S. Beagle, was inspired to write it.)
As for her personality... yep, she's basically a "bad girl" archetype =P. I was thinking of Harley Quinn's depiction in the Birds of Prey movie specifically with respect to that but her character can be taken as a nod to any example of the trope. I'm not sure if a brutal badass female thug who starts off as a villain but has a hidden heart of gold has been represented yet as a kaiju personality in A.T.O.M. proper (though one could argue that Tyranta fits that mold, she was never an antagonist to begin with), but the old accounts of unicorns as being such wild, violent creatures coupled with how they were
only pacified by virgins (albeit with accounts of that varying from allegorical to downright skeevy) meant that it was only fitting to characterize her as a fierce, harsh-natured bully who eventually softens up and learns goodness but never loses her prideful ferocity. If I had a penny for every time I've submitted an entry for the create-a-kaiju contests for which the personality was that of a villain (at first) but with sympathetic aspects, I'd have two pennies - not a lot, but it's funny that I've done that twice now. :XD:
Regardless, best of luck to all entrants! And if you want to check out The Atomic Time of Monsters, both volumes are available for purchase on Amazon and Kindle (the latter of which was what I went with to save money). Go check them both out - these are truly stellar pieces of work!
The Atomic Time of Monsters and all related concepts (c) William Cope a.k.a. TyrantisTerror
