When all of his classmates had their cutie marks years in most cases, Gabe still didn’t, and he was getting depressed. He’d tried everything he could think of at that point, even dangerous, and he still had nothing. He was starting to think that he’d be a blank flank forever, it’s happened to ponies before, but he didn’t want to be that. Still, every attempt he made ended in failure.

One day, when playing outside in the back yard, he managed to get lost a good distance away from home, he ended up wandering into a desert. The heat was bad enough, but even worse was a glimpse of something in the corner of his eye coming right towards him. Before he even gets a chance to react, he feels a sharp pain on his rear, and he turns his head to get a look, it’s a cobra biting him, but even more shocking, the sides of his flanks were glowing, he was getting his cutie mark. But why now of all times? How? The cobra stops biting and slithers across his body before leaving just as quickly as it showed up. Confused, and with some lingering pain, he stared at his newfound cutie mark, a pair of snake fangs, and wondered just what it could possibly mean.

He made his way back home and told his family about what happened, and they were just as confused as him. Doctors didn’t detect any venom in his body, nor did they detect anything wrong with him, and he was happy to be able to how his classmates that he finally got his cutie mark, but he was still fearful inside that something was still wrong.

A few weeks later, he woke up to a pain in his jaw, and upon looking in the mirror, his canine teeth had somehow grown into pointy fangs. That was weird in and of itself, but it was only the beginning…