Chapter 1: Simone La Unicorn
Once upon a time, when Simone was an ordinary foal, she was being trained to run. Run, run, run. Every day, every night, and in between. Her trainers were awful. They beat her if she was bad and took away food if she fell down. She hated it there. She really wanted to escape. One day, she decided to try to jump over the fence. She tried three times, and on the fourth try she succeeded. It was dramatic irony because her trainers wanted her to be fast, but then she used that skill to escape.
Now Simone was alone in the world, and she was scared. She wandered for miles. After four days, she met a calf that was hurt. She nursed it back to health, and the calf said he would grant her one wish because it was a magical calf. She wished she could be a unicorn. When her transformation was complete, she had a golden horn and white wings.
She touched her horn on the ground, and a unicorn swept her away to a rainbow land. Then, she was adopted by another unicorn and treated with kindness.
Chapter Two: The Witch in the Woods
The day after she arrived, her adoptive stepmother said, “You must never go into the wicked woods — for a wicked witch lives there and will turn you into a cockroach.”
But Simone was curious. She went into the woods, even though her mother told her not to. After she went deep into the woods, she came across a beautiful house.
She saw stables and lots and lots of carrots. She saw these things and started toward them. She laid down in the soft hay and munched on the carrots. Then, an old lady came out from the house.
She saw Simone and said, “Well, well, well, a unicorn.” And she went back into the house. She came out again with a wand and magically locked the stable. Simone whined impatiently. She kicked the door to see if she could knock it down. She was trapped.
The room she was locked in was a small wooden stable with itchy hay and rotten carrots because the witch had magicked it to look lovely even though it wasn’t.
This must be the witch that my stepmom told me about, Simone thought, and she went to sleep. The next day, the witch came out of her house and woke Simone up. She had rotten oats and moldy bread. Simone didn’t touch her food. Then, she took a nap.
While she was sleeping, the witch snuck up on her with a pair of magical pliers, a sword, and other instruments for extraction. But what the witch didn’t know was that each tool in turn made a very, very loud noise. Simone had woken up from the loud noises that the tools had made. She started fighting. She kicked and stabbed with her horn.
Finally, the witch was trapped in a corner. “Why do you want my horn?” Simone asked.
“It was for a spell, to wipe out all unicorns!” said the witch.
“Why?” said Simone.
“Um well, um… I don’t know!” replied the witch.
“This is why my stepmom told me to avoid you. She was right. I should have never gone into the woods,” sighed Simone. “Set me free!”
The witch had no choice. She said, “Okay.” But as soon as Simone got a few feet from the stable, she was drawn back by a forcefield.
“Hey, you trapped me!” Simone hollered. The witch had snuck back into her house.
Chapter Three: Cockroaches and Fears
The witch had officially given up on trying to steal Simone’s horn, so she turned her into a cockroach.
“Bzz bzz bzz!” Simone cried as an Australian Wood cockroach. She tried to find a weakness in the witch’s forcefield, bumping her head until it throbbed. Unsuccessful, she decided to try something else. Then, she noticed she was hungry. She started eating a hole in the witch’s house. Five days passed, and finally the hole was complete! Then, she had to wait a day because she was very full. After that day, she crawled through the hole to see if the witch could turn her back into a unicorn.
When the witch saw the cockroach, she jumped up onto her dining room table and got her feet in ketchup.
“Aah! A cockroach! Mama! Save me!!” the witch cried.
“Bzz bzz bzz bzz bzz,” said Simone.
“Oh, it’s you,” said the witch. “And yes, I can understand cockroaches.”
“Bzz bzz bzz bzz bzz bzz.”
“Oh no you won’t,” the witch said.
“Bzz bzz bz bzz.”
The witch grabbed for her wand and started firing curses at Simone, and Simone started scuttling around, trying to avoid the curses.
“Bzz bzz bzzzzzzz bzzz bzz bzz bzz!!”
“No!” the witch yelled. “Please don’t bite me!”
“Bzz, bzz bzz bzz bzz!”
“Absolutely not!” said the witch, and magical gavels started banging around the room. Simone scuttled around again, trying to avoid the gavels.
After an hour, the witch had gotten tired and said, “You and I will propose a truce and have tea together.”
So, the witch made a tiny little cup for Simone and then made tiny little cakes which Simone ate all up. “Okay,” the witch said. “Now the truce is over.” And she started throwing chairs at Simone and overturning the tables and smashing all the tea cups. After she had destroyed all of her furniture, she went into her bed and went to sleep.
Well, Simone was also tired, so she crawled back into her hole, so she wouldn’t get smashed by anything and fell asleep there. The next morning, the witch found Simone in her bedroom again, eating her dresses.
“Stop eating my dresses!” the witch said and overturned her bed trying to get to Simone.
“Bzz bzz bzz bzz bzz!” said Simone.
“No they are not, and I should know because I accidentally turned myself into a cockroach and took a bite of my dresses. It tasted terrible,” said the witch.
“Bzz bzz bzz bzz bzz.”
Simone started dodging around, avoiding the witch’s hand. “Stop destroying my stuff!” the witch said.
“Bzz bzz bzz bzz bzz,” Simone said.
“Well, I’m tired,” the witch said. “I’m going to go back to sleep… ” And then the witch magicked the overturned bed back to its original position and laid her wand on the bedside table. Simone was hungry, and as an Australian Wood Cockroach, she wanted to eat wood. The witch’s wand was made of wood, so she climbed up her bedside table and started eating the wand. By the time the witch woke up, her wand was destroyed, and Simone was back to her original form as a Unicorn.
“Oh no!” the witch said. “You are now a unicorn.”
And then Simone ran as fast as she could, kicked the door down, and ran back home with her mother.
Chapter Four: The Mysterious Murderer
When Simone got back to her house, she laid down and rested for a million years. Then when she woke up, her mother was an old granny with five hundred kids with a walker and fake golden teeth.
Then, Simone met a handsome young male unicorn named Isaac, and she said, “Will you marry me?”
“No,” he said, very, very rudely. Then, Isaac immediately died. There was an arrow stuck in his throat with poison in it — it said Gunjabar on the side.
“I must find this mysterious murderer!” said Simone. “They have murdered my loved one.”
Then, she went home and consulted the library to find out what Gunjabar was. She found out it was the most deadly poison, and it would raise the dead after an hour. So, she put posters up quickly with her horn, and soon everyone in town knew that someone had died from Gunjabar, but nobody thought it could actually raise the dead. So after an hour, Isaac the male unicorn rose from the dead and terrified all the unicorns into their homes where they shut themselves in with 500 million bajillion locks.
Simone walked carefully and quietly to the library to see if there was a cure for Gunjabar. The librarycorn looked through a little peephole in the door, unlocked the 500 million bajillion locks, let Simone in, closed the door, and locked the 500 million bajillion locks. She read every single book about poisons, and she could not find a cure. But one book called What Happens in Poisons said there was another book that might help cure the effects of the poison before it was irreversible, but she had to do it by dawn of the fifth day. There was only one copy, and it had been lost for a century. She decided to look for it.
She flew across the Atlantic Ocean, in and out of clouds. She finally came to a small island about fifteen feet wide and two miles across. There were two palm trees at each side, and in the middle was a poem and five rocks, and the poem said, The one palm in the middle of the island and five rocks split evenly on the ends will sink the island like a boat until you figure out how the puzzle bends.
“This is… this is… it,” Simone said. “This is where the book is.”
Chapter Five: The Book
Simone dug up the whole island in search of the book. She had dug up a whole island, and it was now a big mound of dirt with two palm trees and five rocks, when she noticed that it was only ten feet across. It had sunk five feet. So, she had two more days. She decided that another unicorn had cast a spell, so it would appear when they solved the riddle. So, she picked up the piece of paper again, read it over, and decided it made no sense because she knew that there were two palm trees not one. And five was an odd number, so it could not be split evenly. Simone decided to try anyway.
She walked around the now seven feet across island and looked at the palm trees from every single angle there could be. Finally, the last angle made sense. She could only see the first palm tree, and there wasn’t another one. But she still didn’t know how to split the rocks evenly, and she only had five hours left. She got an extra rock from the ocean and put three on each side — that didn’t work. She tried to use herself as a rock — that didn’t work either. And Simone was getting tired because the rocks were very heavy. Then, after five more tries, she finally thought of splitting one in half. It still was five rocks, but it had one split in half and two and a half plus two and a half equals… five! Simone saw the book hovering above the island. She made a bag out of the tree leaves and made sure it didn’t blow away by putting rocks on it. She flew across the ocean, landed in her hometown, and locked herself in her house.
She read the book, and she discovered the cure: a corpse flower, a Madagascar hissing cockroach, and rare gems like pearls, amethyst, desert rose, and an especially one of a kind, toucorrall. The toucorrall was different blues, and it looked exactly like the ocean, which made it hard to find because it was found in the ocean. Simone quickly looked up where everything was, except the Madagascar hissing cockroach because of course that was in Madagascar. She flew over the Pacific Ocean and landed on another island, except it wasn’t as small as the first. She covered every inch of the island, even though she thought that the corpse flower would be easy to find because it was as tall as a five story building. She suddenly smelled a repulsive smell. She followed the smell, and she came to a clearing.
“P.U.!” Simone said. What is that?! Simone wondered.
Hello, welcome to … Dun da da duuuuun… What The Heck Is That Thing! The game show in Simone’s mind!
“Okay, Lazy, what do you have to say for yourself?” said the judge. He looked like a carrot, as in he was a carrot.
CHH-SHOO CHH-SHOO, Lazy snored. Lazy is one of the contestants. There’s Lazy, Magic, and Cute. Cute is always cute, Magic isn’t really there because she’s magic, and Lazy is always asleep. Those were all Simone’s personalities.
They had booths, and Mr. Carrot the judge asked, “Now, Magic, what do you have to say for yourself?” And Magic didn’t answer because Magic wasn’t really there.
“MAGIC!” Mr Carrot shouted. “Come here immediately, or you will be severely punished.”
And then Magic appeared and said, “I’m not sure what it is, but I can destroy it or make it live forever or… or… or… or… ”
“SHUT UP!” Mr. Carrot shouted. “Now, Cute, what do you have to say for yourself?”
And Cute said, “I don’t know what it is either, but it’s not cute, and it smells horrible, and it’s going to ruffle my fur.”
“That means only one thing… It is a corpse flower!” Simone said.
Simone took a petal from the corpse flower with some difficulty and used it as an umbrella because it was raining. She went home and added it to a big pot her adoptive stepmother usually used for soups or Simone’s favorite thing ever: hummus. So, she crossed the corpse flower off her list. The next thing on her list was the Madagascar hissing cockroach. She suddenly felt something scuttling up her leg. She used her horn to levitate it and found it was a Madagascar hissing cockroach. I didn’t know this was Madagascar, Simone thought. She put it in the pot and then put a lid on it so it wouldn’t escape and crossed the cockroach off her list. The next were the rare gems. She knew exactly where to find them because her mother sometimes used them for a spell, but they were pretty far. She memorized which gems she needed and decided that if she found any others, she would use them for a spell. She set out for all the rare gems except toucorrall.
She found the pearl first and put it in a little bag she wove from fresh leaves. Then, she flew across a lake and into an underwater cave in a stream a little while off. In the cave, she found an amethyst crystal. She cut the rock in half with her horn and carved out three amethyst crystals. They were purple, and they filled all around the inside of the rock. Simone came up for air and dragged herself out of the stream. Her next target was the desert rose. She flew to the desert. She scoured every inch of the desert and found some jade, some papery diamond, and some coyote skulls. Simone flew to the next desert and immediately spotted a whole pile, about seven stories high, of desert roses. But the moment she took one from the top, a huge — about ten stories high — coyote roared a really loud roar, and Simone smashed the desert rose into powder and sprinkled it over the cactus to make the thorns disappear. The coyote, who survived on his own saliva, leapt aside to lap up the cool cactus water. Simone stole five desert roses and flew to her house and put it in the big pot.
Only one gem left! Simone thought.
The toucorral was found only once in the Tasman Sea. So, Simone mashed up one of the extra desert roses again, looked in the pantry, and mixed it with exactly one gallon of water. She mixed them and produced a sandy colored liquid that would turn her into a mermaid-unicorn. She put it in a bottle, put it in the basket she wove from fresh leaves, and set off across the Tasman Sea to the exact spot where it was found last. She drank the whole bottle of potion and dove in. She swam past the Intertidal zone, the Subtidal zone, through the Bathyal zone, past the Abyssal zone, and all the way into the Hadal zone. She found the cave where the toucorral was found and searched every tunnel, every twist and turn. But she did not find any sign of toucorral. Simone searched five other caves, each bigger than the first, and only found terrifying fish. Then, she scoured every coral reef and lit her horn to see through fish, if they had eaten the toucorral accidentally. She was just giving up hope when she thought of Isaac and the unicorns at home. She decided she would never ever give up for Isaac. She kept her horn lit and dug and dug and dug and dug until her hole was fifteen million bajillion miles deep. She dove into it and was dazzled with what she saw. Toucorral was all around her, behind her and on her sides. The toucorral was exactly like the ocean except much more beautiful and with streaks of yellow, pink, and purple. She carefully inserted her horn and cut out two pieces of the toucorral. She flew back home at superspeed and dropped one part in the pot.
Simone took a wooden spoon and started stirring. It turned into a sun-yellow mixture. She magicked a dummy of herself and pushed it outside. Isaac the unicorn spotted it and galloped toward it. Just when he was about to take a bite of her stuffed ear, she stuffed a spoonful of the yellow liquid down his throat. Isaac turned back to normal!!! He went to all the unicorns and apologized for what he did when he was a zombie, giving Simone time to carve a special pendant out of the second toucorral piece. She gave the special pendant, which was shaped as a heart, to Isaac as their engagement necklace, and he agreed to marry her.
The End