Here is a list of notable creatures and monsters of Equus.
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Creatures and Monsters
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Prism Racers
"Wanna race? It lives for the thrill!"
Prism Racers (their entry here
) are giant flying lizards who get their name from the prismatic appearance of their wings and scales. They literally get off from the feelings of thrill and amazement, and feed by participating in racing competitions where they will be watched by adoring, excited crowds. Despite their diet, they are very friendly creatures and are generally welcomed among the skies, where the pegasi mostly live.Owing to their friendly disposition, they tend to lean on the "flight" side of the fight-or-flight response. They're known for their incredible speed, and their legless bodies are streamlined to endure the turbulence and high speeds they often reach. If threatened, they usually use their wings to emit flashes of rainbow-colored light, blinding their foes long enough for them to escape. They also have minor weather magic like the pegasi, which they use to enhance their performances or defend themselves.
- Emotion Eater: Prism Racers are emotivores, and specifically feed on the emotions of exhilaration and amazement. They're commonly found in race gatherings to feed on the ambient emotions, and may show off for the crowd or join in the race in order to deliberately amp up the audience's reaction.
- Gentle Giant: Implied; the entire race is described as being this trope in their profile, so they must be pretty large.
- Solid Clouds: Similarly to pegasi, prism races can stand on and interact with clouds as if they were solid objects.
- Super-Speed: They're described as the fastest creatures in Equus, capable of outrunning most airships and rivaling professional athletes.
Great Song Birds
"Hope you enjoy singing, you'll probably be doing it for awhile."
Great Song Birds (their entry here
) are giant white birds whose song causes those who hear it to involuntarily sing when they try to speak.- Least Rhymable Word: One way to break out of a song bird's musical effect is to end a line on a word that's difficult or impossible to rhyme. This will break the effect, but doing it too often risks angering the bird and having it start another song with a bad key or beat to vent its frustration.
- The Music Meister: Their song causes anyone who hears it to spontaneously burst into musical numbers.
Accusers
"It literally lives on your indignation and self-righteousness."
Accusers are normally invisible — reports of their true form vary between tentacles brains and fanged rings of flesh — that attach themselves to intelligent beings to feed on their indignation and self-righteousness.
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: If discovered and cornered, accusers usually resort to piteously begging for their lives in a self-effacing show of groveling, mewling, and crying.
- Emotion Eater: They feed off of emotions of indignation and self-righteousness, which they foster by influencing people to dwell on and obsess over past slights and minor fights. They will only reproduce, which usually happens by budding, when a lot of ambient rage is in the air.
- Screams Like a Little Girl: When an accuser realizes that it's been discovered, its typical reaction is a shriek of terror described as resembling "a high pitched little filly crossed with nails on a chalkboard".
Glory Hounds
"Pride comes before the fall."
Glory Hounds (their entry here) are canine emotivores that feed off of the emotion of pride.
- Big Friendly Dog: Domesticated Glory Hounds are much friendlier and more encouraging than their wild counterparts, and this temperament makes their true forms appear far less frightening. Domesticated Glory Hounds are also often used as medical dogs who help people alleviate their depression and/or low self-esteem by giving them words of encouragement and support.
- The Corrupter: Wild Glory Hounds feed by encouraging people to become increasingly arrogant by stroking their egos, driving their victims to do foolish things that they'll regret later out of pride and vanity. It's inverted with domesticated Glory Hounds, who encourage healthy pride in those who are suffering from ailments like depression by giving words of encouragement and support.
- Emotion Eater: They are classified as emotivores, and true to their name, they feed off of pride. To get their food, they use their Telepathy to encourage a host's inner pride by "whispering" things that causes their pride to swell to the point of arrogance. They'll flee once their host realizes their growing pride and becomes humble, cutting off the food source. Because of their nature, Glory Hounds flock to places with great amounts of pride, such as Canterlot due to its large numbers of arrogant nobility.
- Meaningful Name: A "glory hound" is a person who seeks popularity, fame, and glory. Glory Hounds are canine emotivores that specifically target and feed off of people who harbor great pride, or are encouraged to show an increasing amount of pride.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: A Glory Hound's true form is a black dog with lion-like eyes, eagle wings, and a peacock's tail.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: A Glory Hound will flee if their host realizes their pride has been inflated to harmful levels and rectifies it by humbling themselves. For a Glory Hound, this means that their food source is quickly cut off, leaving them with no reason to remain.
- Telepathy: Their entry notes that they have telepathic abilities, which allow them to sense pride in potential hosts and encourage them in order to feed.
Kite-Eating Trees
"AAUGH! Stupid Kite Eating Tree!"
— Starlight Glimmer, after losing a kite to one.
Kite-Eating Trees (their entry here) are sentient trees that eat kites.
- Animal Nemesis: They serve as one to Starlight, as she loves to fly kites and they keep eating hers.
Amaroks
"In the frozen north, never go out at night alone."
Amaroks (their entry here
) are gigantic, solitary wolves that roam the Frozen North.- I Work Alone: Unlike normal wolves, Amaroks generally hunt alone, though even then they're still rather dangerous if one encounters a lone Amarok unprepared. The sole exception to this are Amarok mothers and their cubs.
- Meaningful Name: Their scientific name, ''Canis dirus", translates to "fearful/omnious wolf", which is fitting given they're dangerous enough to make even grown Yaks pause. They're also named after the Amarok, a gigantic wolf that is prominently featured in Inuit mythology.
- The Nose Knows: Amaroks have a keen sense of smell, which allows them to locate prey in snowy environments. However, like all canines, they can be driven off by strong smells.
- Savage Wolves: Amaroks are deeply feared and dangerous predators. They grow to the size of a Yak, are strong and resilient enough to overpower a grown Yak in single combat, and use blizzards as cover to hunt anything smaller than themselves. It's because of this that even the normally Hot-Blooded Yaks refuse to hunt a single Amarok alone. To successfully take down an Amarok is considered to be a great achievement in Yak society, with seasoned hunters and warriors wearing Amarok pelts.
- Super-Hearing: Amaroks have a keen sense of hearing, which allows them to locate prey in snowy environments. However, like all canines, they can be driven off by loud noises.
- Super-Strength: Compared to normal wolves, Amaroks are immensely strong, enough to overcome a grown Yak in single combat if they're not careful. Due to this, even Yaks are wary of fighting them alone.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Fitting for a species that lives primarily in cold, snowy lands, Amaroks are deeply afraid of fire. Any fire source like torches or flame spells will quickly scare them off.
- Would Hurt a Child: They're very willing to prey on young Yaks and Ponies who get lost in blizzards.
Aniwyes
"Give it its distance. Preferably upwind."
Aniwyes (their entry here
) are giant skunks that are generally native to the Everfree Forest. Like their smaller cousins, Aniwyes can spray a foul-smelling liquid in self-defense. Due to the dangerous creatures that they share their home with, they are also very trigger-happy. A spotted variant of the Aniwyes also lives in the Badlands.- Adaptational Heroism: The Aniwye in Native American folklore is depicted as an evil, giant skunk that loves hunting people and kills its victims with a lethally poisonous odor. Here, the Aniwyes are a race of giant skunks that are very territorial, but will leave people alone if they heed their initial warnings. Instead, their more malicious actions were actually done by the Fae Skunks, who were created by Moufette using the Aniwyes as their racial template.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: in Native American folklore, the Aniwye is an evil skunk that kills people with its odor and eats its victims. Here, the Aniwyes, while very territorial and trigger-happy, generally act in self-defense and is content to be left alone.
- Gentle Giant: Downplayed; Aniwyes are a race of skunks larger than even Ponies, and are much more trigger-happy and territorial than their smaller cousins. However, their reactions are done in self-defense towards intruders and will leave people alone if they're given the same courtesy. The worst they'll do to someone is knock them out with their spray if they feel threatened.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: Justified. Aniwyes are far more trigger-happy and territorial compared to the average skunk, but it's generally due to living in very hostile environments populated by other dangerous creatures. Any actions they take are in self-defense; otherwise they're content to be left alone.
- Mama Bear: Mother Aniwyes are fiercely protective of their children. While Aniwyes normally give warnings before spraying, a mother Aniwye will skip the warning entirely and spray to protect their children.
- Meaningful Name: The Aniwyes are named after the Aniwye, a monstrous giant skunk portrayed in Native American folklore as an evil creature that is the primordial ancestor of all skunks.
- Sensory Overload: Like smaller skunks, their main defense is their horrid smelling musk. The odor is so awful it can knock ponies unconscious and drive off an adult dragon.
- Smelly Skunk: Justified; like all skunks, Aniwyes will produce a horrid-smelling musk as a warning to any creature that approaches them. If the warning isn't heeded, then the Aniwye will spray an even more potent odor foul enough to drive away Dragons. Unfortunately, thanks to Nittunak Moufette's former people, the Fae Skunks, Aniwyes were mistakenly believed in legends to have a lethal spray due to the Fae Skunks' racial template being based on them.
- Weaponized Stench: Like all skunks, Aniwyes will produce a horrid-smelling musk as a warning, then use their much more foul-smelling spray if that warning isn't heeded. Unfortunately, thanks to Nittunak Moufette's former people, the Fae Skunks, Aniwyes were mistakenly believed in legends to have a lethal spray due to the Fae Skunks' racial template being based on them.
Bogeymares
"They feast on your fears!"
Bogeymares (their entry here
are small, imp-like creatures that would be essentially harmless if not for their ability to recreate the greatest fears of those around them.- Emotion Eater: Bogeymares feed off of fear, and use their ability to generate illusions to recreate their victims' greatest fears. The more fear they consume, the stronger they become until they start warping reality.
- I Know What You Fear: Bogeymares have low-level telepathy that allows them to sense the fears of people around them, which they then replicate with their illusions in order to feed on the resulting terror.
- Master of Illusion: Bogeymares are capable of generating illusions to frighten their prey. If they ingest enough fear, they become strong enough to start doing minor Reality Warper stuff. They also use this power to hide themselves from concerned parents. The only ways to overcome a Bogeymare's illusions is to either stop taking their bait or [[Weakened by the Light turn on the lights, after which the Bogeymare will flee the area.
- Meaningful Name: Bogeymen are mythical creatures used by parents to frighten their children into good behavior. Bogeymares function the same as Bogeymen, but here they're very real and will become a credible threat if not properly taken care of.
- Non-Indicative Name: Despite their name, they don't resemble mares or any other kind of horse, being small gremlin-like imps instead.
- Not Afraid of You Anymore: The Bogeymares' biggest weakness is if their targets no longer fear them. When that happens, they're reduced to mere nuisances and become quick to flee.
- Punny Name: Their name is a take on the Bogeyman.
- Reality Warper: A Bogeymare can potentially consume so much fear that they can effectively warp reality, making them extremely dangerous. Fortunately, the chances of this happening are quite rare, and Bogeymares who do reach that level still have the same weaknesses as their mundane counterparts.
- Telepathy: Besides illusions, Bogeymares have telepathic powers that let them see their victims' fears in order to recreate them.
- Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: Bogeymares typically live in houses, usually in hidden and out-of-the-way areas such as under beds, in closets, and in basement or attics, from which they emerge at night to use their illusory powers to terrify impressionable and easily cowed people, primarily children, so as to feed on their fear. They're quick to hide away when adults come to investigate, and will usually leave entirely once their preferred target grows too old to easily intimidate or stands up and confronts them.
- Weakened by the Light: In addition to courage, a Bogeymare is extremely vulnerable to bright lights, which will cancel out their illusionary powers and make the Bogeymare vanish into thin air. As a result, they try to turn the lights off before going after their targets.
- Would Hurt a Child: Bogeymares primarily go after children because they're weaker and more impressionable than adults. This can backfire if a child learns to overcome the fears that Bogeymares feed off of.
Dreadmares
"Tremble with fear — the Dreadmare draws near..."
Dreadmares are a rare and powerful variant of the boogeymare, being much more powerful and capable of commanding their lesser kin. Dreadmares are not a distinct species in the strict sense of the word, but are instead the result of a very rare, dormant gene being expressed. As such, most Dreadmares are born to boogeymare parents, and whelp more boogeymares in turn.
- Monster Lord: Dreadmares can command and direct common boogeymares, and are usually the ones responsible for situations where the normally solitary creatures gather together. This leads to them often being referred to as "boogeymare kings" or "boogeymare queens".
Dread Storm
Rare, dangerous beings created when a Dreadmare and its boogeymare pack consume enough fear to fuse together into a huge serpent. Dread Storms are in many ways less so individual creatures than they are living natural disasters.
- Weather Manipulation: Dread Storms can create stormclouds, wind, and lightning, and are immune to their species' normal weakness to sunlight due to creating a permanent pall of dense clouds around themselves.
Dangler Trees
"Don't touch the stalks."
A species of tropical palm-like trees named after the long dangling stalks produced by colorful pods in their crowns, which serve as traps with which to capture unwary animals.
- Alluring Flowers: The pods of dangler trees are shaped and colored to resemble giant flowers, and produce a "pseudo-nectar" with psychoactive properties, whose scent induces the production of ghrelin, a hormone to stimulates hungers, and dopamine. Exposure to this drives animals into a frenzy of hunger and ecstasy, furiously rooting around the tree until it's snared on one of its sticky stalks and eaten. Each tree has a slightly unique cocktail of chemicals, which are thought to gradually tune themselves to attracting whatever animals are most common in the tree's vicinity.
- Man-Eating Plant: Dangler trees produce clusters of colorful pods in their canopies, from which hang long stalks that trail almost to the ground. These pods also produce a sweet, enticing scent, which draws animals and incautious people to investigate; when something touches the stalk, it's quickly snared, drawn into a pod, and eaten. The trees take prey from rabbits all the way up to lions and manticores.
Giant Crabs
"Snappy fellows, no matter the size!"
- Animal Nemesis: For some reason they keep fighting Rarity in reference to a certain meme. They have the same enmity with Nightmare Rarity. Apparently, something about their smell offends them enough to attack them both on sight.
Heart Fliers
"It knows what you did."
- Emotion Eater: They come in a variety of colors, each of which feeds on a different emotion. Touching them let's them trigger memories fostering the emotions they feed off of.
Kitsunes
"A good omen... if you can put up with their pranks."
- Playing with Fire: A kitsune will light its nine tail tips with blue flames to defend themselves.
- The Trickster: They are known for being mischievous creatures.
Laughing Lilies
"Tickle tickle."
- Emotion Eater: Feed off laughter and joy.
- Friendly Tickle Torture: Their entire thing: they tickle things with their vines to trigger the emotions they feed on.
Shisas
"The strength of a lion and the loyalty of a dog."
- Super Drowning Skills: They are basically incapable of swimming.
Borrower-Mutts
"I could have sworn I left that nail right here..."
Miniature relatives of Diamond Dogs that live in small bands that sustain themselves by raiding larger species' homes for scraps of food and small, easily-missed scraps and objects to repurpose for their own use.
- Lilliputians: Borrower-Mutts are tiny — most are just about able to lift a nail or strawberry unaided.
- Mouse World: Borrower-Mutts live in miniature communities hidden in the crannies of cities and towns, usually in junkyards, empty lots, or abandoned buildings, where their villages of scavenged materials can most easily be hidden, and provide for themselves by stealing small items from "giants" and foraging for seeds and insects.
- Scavenged Punk: Borrower-Mutt settlements and technology are built out of random junk and scraps taken from larger homes, such as aqueducts made from straws propped on slingshots, dirt-filled egg cartons for farmland, and crossbows made from rubber bands and watch springs that fire tacks and splinters.
Browbeaters
"There is no hope..."
Shapeshifting emotivores that feed on the despair of broken dreams.
- Emotion Eater: Browbeaters feed on the emotional turmoil and despair caused by a person's hopes and dreams being shattered. They feed by turning into someone that their victim considers to be a figure of authority — the browbeater does not directly control what this is — and then insults and berates their target, shattering their self-image in order to create a storm of emotional turmoil to feed on.
- I Know What You Fear: Browbeaters have an innate ability to detect the doubts and insecurities of others — they're believed to be telepathic in some form — and use this ability to dredge up every perceived fault, mistake, and shortcoming of their victims, ruthlessly berating them until they're left as shattered, crying messes in order to produce the despair and self-hatred that the creatures feed on.
Blaze Bats
"Like a bat out of hell!"
Batlike creatures made out of rock and lava, Blaze Bats live in the fiery depths of Equus' underground layers, but occasionally wander into deeper layers of regular caves, enter a mine when this breaches into their homes, or wriggle up to the surface world through the mouths of volcanoes.
- Bat Out of Hell: Literally, more or less. Blaze Bats are huge, rocky, fire-shrouded bats, capable of overpowering a minotaur in single combat, and are extremely aggressive predators.
- Defeat Equals Explosion: Due to normally living in the depths of the planet, the bodies of Blaze Bats are under extreme pressure. As such, when one is killed or sufficiently injured, its body has a tendency to violently explode.
- Kill It with Ice: Blaze Bats are very vulnerable to cold temperatures, which solidify the lava making up their bodies. At first, these stiffen them and render them slow and clumsy, but intense or prolonged cold will completely solidify and kill them.
- Kill It with Water: In addition to ice and cold air, water also harms Blaze Bats by cooling and freezing their semi-molten bodies. On those occasions where one reaches the surface of the world, rainstorms quickly drive them back underground.
- Rock Monster: An intermediate stage between this and Living Lava. Blaze Bats are made up of living rock, with lava running through it like blood. As a result, they are extremely strong and difficult to injure, but are often preyed upon by dragons.
- Wreathed in Flames: Blaze Bats are permanently covered in a coat of flames produced from the lava making up their bodies.
Gumiho
"These are NOT your friendly nine-tail foxes."
Nine-tailed foxes native to Carrea. Gumihos are alien and very dangerous beings.
- Asian Fox Spirit: The Evil Counterpart to the kitsune.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Gumihos are not truly evil as such, insofar as they are not consciously transgressing against an understood set of morals, but instead operate under their own alien, complicated, and very poorly understood systems of logic and morality, which often leads to violent and deadly confrontations with other species.
- Cold Iron: A gumiho's illusions can be dispelled by the presence of iron.
- Kill It with Fire: Gumihos are normally invulnerable to almost all damage, but fire is one of the few things that can truly harm or kill them, and as such one of the few things that they fear.
- Picky People Eater: Gumihos typically tear out and eat just the heart or liver of their victims. It's not entirely clear why they do this; some speculate that they think that this will let them experience equine emotions or become ponies, while others assume that their logic is just too alien to understand or that they're just psychotic.
- Sadist: They are known to love killing their victims in very violent ways.
- Super-Persistent Predator: Once a gumiho has set its sights on a victim, it will never give up the chase and will pursue them to the ends of the world and for as long as necessary until it can catch them; once this is done, it will often start on its victim's family as well. The only way to end the chase is to kill the gumiho. On the upside, if a victim manages to hide themselves behind barriers or wards that the gumiho cannot cross or perceive it through, the creature will be left stuck in an endless loop of fruitless searching that will effectively neutralize it, as it won't select a new target until a slip-up allows it to identify its original target.
Ōmukade
"And that, young dragons, is why some bugs can sting."
- The Dreaded: They're some of the most feared Yokai in Neighpon, and one of the few things that dragons fear. Dragons are known to raze entire areas to the ground just to kill a single infant Ōmukade. Dragons and Neighpon are perfectly willing to work together to kill one whenever they appear.
- Food Chain of Evil: They're one of the few creatures alive that can be considered a fully grown dragon's natural predator.
- Poisonous Person: One of the reasons they are so dangerous, is their poisonous fangs. Their poison is potent enough to kill a dragon.
- Kaiju: Fully grown, they're capable of encircling a mountain.
- Super-Toughness: Another reason they're so dangerous: much like smaller centipedes, they're absurdly hard to kill. Even if their armor wasn't fire proof and resistant to dragons' claws, it takes an absurd amount of punishment to kill one.
- Stronger with Age: The older they get, the larger and more dangerous they become.
Bête Noire
Irritation Imps
- Emotion Eater: They feed off feelings of frustration and irritation.
- Troll: They act like this in order to feed.
Dyvaos
- Kill on Sight: There's a nigh universal order of this variety on them because they're so dangerous that if allowed to propagate freely, they could destroy all life on Equus. They nearly did it once before.
- The Dreaded: Everyone is so afraid of them that they've got a nigh universal Kill on Sight order on them because they're just that dangerous.
Banezards, the Deathless Menaces
"'Stabbed it through the eye'. You know, I never really believed it. Banezards are so tough they survived getting half their skulls blown off, and some freaking come back from the dead. Blackpaw’s sabre has to be something really special for him to put a freaking Banezard Alpha down with only one brain kebab."
— Mane Allgood, Equestrian animal/monster expert/hunter, wife of Meridian/Equestrian animal/monster expert/hunter Snap Shutter and mother of the Cutie Mark Crusaders organization co-founder Scootaloo. She was later proven correct in her deduction.
- Captain Ersatz: In-Universe, Princess Stitching Time from the Church of the Stars compares them to the 'Horrasque' from 'Castles & Cavalier' tabletop games (An expy of the infamous Terrasque from D&D) she played back in the Second Age. Then she realizes to her horror that they're not dealing with one of these things, but an ENTIRE SPECIES of them.
- Extreme Omnivore: While technically predatory, in practice necessity means they would eat just about anything, from animals to plants to even minerals. Whole acres of rain-forests could be devoured down to bedrock by a pack/herd of Banezards when feeding.
- Healing Factor: Possesses one which allows them to recover from even the most damaging injuries, and part of the reason they are so hard to kill. They could regenerate whole lost limbs, and it's theorized that given broken body-parts had been observed to continue living and regenerating for quite some time, under the right circumstances an entire clone of the original Banezard could be recreated, which would explain some of the more inexplicable returns of old Banezards which Meridians had thought they had definitively put down.
- Rasputinian Death: This is the only guaranteed way of putting them down as they can take the likes of having half their heads blasted off, losing entire limbs, punctured like a porcupine by spears and lances, suffering fourth-degree burns over their bodies, losing most of their blood, having more than half of the skeleton broken, and survive long enough escape and fully recover.
- Their bodies also have multiple redundancies that allow them to lose entire organs without missing a beat. A pair of six-chambered hearts, a pair of independent windpipes with multiple layers of bio-filters, a pair of interlocked spines with a pair of spinal cord, a four-lobed brain, three stomachs (one for meat, vegetation and minerals each), among other things. Did we mention they could regenerate all this?
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: These things are reptilian monsters which simply do not know how to die, and are hyper-aggressive to boot.
- Super-Toughness: Even discounting their infamous regenerative abilities, Banezards are incredibly tough and hard to kill due to various evolutionary traits. Their scales, for example, are hardened with metallic elements from their Extreme Omnivore diet, including enough traces of heavy metals to make them radioactive. If you can get pass that, their skeleton is also hardened that way, making it difficult to break their bones.
- Walking Wasteland: All the Banezards can potentially become this, owing to their bodies containing large quantities of radioactive and thaumatic materials from their diets. The 'Radzard' species are notable for being able to externalize this field, making them truly Walking Wastelands among their kind.
Petsebek
- Breath Weapon: They are able to fire beams of light from their mouths.
- It Can Think: One of the thing that make them more difficult to deal with than regular alligators is that they are capable of thinking beyond their base reptilian instincts.
