Chapter 6: Strength (or the Lack Thereof) and Health

Dye had planned on eating as soon as he got back, but things don’t always go as planned. Especially if you’re a Vein clan Thestricorn.

Right after Dye had prepared two sandwiches for himself, another headache struck, killing his appetite, and Dye grumbled as he got his tank and mask out again.

He turned the tank on, pulled out his headache journal and looked at his watch before writing, “Wednesday, 7:20 PM”.

At least I’ll only have one attack each Tuesday and Wednesday during this cycle, Dye thought to himself as the pain stopped increasing. It’d be really nice if I get at least one headache-free day per week, though.

The pain started to decrease, and Dye could feel his appetite start to come back.

By the time the pain was completely gone and the tank was shut off and put away, he was even hungrier than before, so he prepared another pair of sandwiches before starting to chow down.

The four sandwiches were washed down with some milk, and Dye sighed. He had planned on getting the second floor at least halfway done before going to bed, but it was too late in the day for that, now. He considered pulling an all-nighter and sleeping after sunrise, but he shook his head. Even though Dye was physically part Thestral, he was diurnal out of habit, like most of the Vein clan. Switching to nocturnal, even for just one day, would feel very odd, indeed.

Dye busied himself with transferring his belongings from the shack to the finished portions of the house for the next hour. By nine o’clock, he’d managed to get all the food stored in a makeshift pantry in the otherwise empty kitchen, and he’d also managed to craft a somewhat comfortable bed out of cloud for his room. The bed was only temporary, but it’d have to do until he could buy a proper one.

Dye was getting sleepy at this point, so he climbed into his new bed, pulled his blanket over himself and fell asleep.

Thankfully, Dye slept through the whole night without getting a headache. He woke up at six in the morning, ate another breakfast of two muffins, two apples and milk, and renewed the stay-fresh spell on his stored food before getting to work on the house again.

By ten in the morning, he had three second floor rooms complete. He suddenly remembered that he still hadn’t put up a mailbox yet, so he promptly took a piece of cloud and started reshaping it into a suitable mailbox. Before he could finish it, though, another headache struck, and he had to put the mailbox on hold so he could get rid of the pain with his oxygen.

Dye grumbled as he turned on the tank and the pure O2 flowed into his nostrils through the mask. He wrote, “Thursday, 10:05 AM” in his headache journal and waited for the pain to go away again.

As he waited, he heard a voice from the front of his property.

“Hey, Dye!” he heard Rainbow Dash say, “you busy?”

“Whatever you wanted to talk about can wait, Dash,” Dye groaned loudly. “I’m not in the best condition for a conversation right now.”

Rainbow flew over to the unfinished room Dye was sitting in and saw the half-finished cloud mailbox at his hooves.

“Why’s it…” she trailed off when she saw the Thestricorn with an oxygen mask on his face taking long breaths in through his nose and short breaths out through his mouth.

“Oh,” Dash said, looking away. “Bad timing?”

Dye grunted in reply as the pain started to slowly fade.

Dash waited until Dye took off the mask and shut off the tank before asking, “why weren’t you screaming that time?”

Dye turned to look at her, his left eye still a little bloodshot.

“I only scream when it gets really bad,” Dye told her as he picked the mailbox back up with his magic and continued reshaping the cloud into a working mailbox. “If I get on my O2 right away, it usually doesn’t get bad enough for that.”

“Hey, why do you need such a big house, anyway?” the Pegasus asked, changing the subject.

“Well, the Thestricorns in our clan have a tendency to have larger families than the ordinary Thestrals,” Dye said.

“Why’s that?” Dash asked.

“Um… Well…” Dye’s cheeks turned as red as a brick. “A good way to deal with a Cluster is to get the blood pumping, which relieves some of the pressure on the nerve caused by blood pooling in the vein next to it. And a really effective way to get the blood pumping is… Um…” The burning in Dye’s face had extended to include his ears by this point, and he couldn’t finish his statement out of sheer embarrassment.

“Foal making?” Rainbow snickered.

“Yes, that,” Dye said, trying to look very interested in completing the mailbox. “It kills pretty much any Cluster, guaranteed. Mom and Dad soundproofed their bedroom for more than just Dad’s screams, you know.”

“So, you’re planning ahead, huh?” Rainbow chuckled.

“I guess you could say that,” Dye said as he finished the mailbox. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to set this up.”

In a blur of red, blue and silver, Dye zoomed over to his front yard and started trying to get the mailbox upright. His first few attempts resulted in it leaning in random directions.

Dash flew over to him.

“Hey, d’ya want some help with that?” she offered.

“No, I’m fine,” Dye said without looking at her, trying to hide his still-crimson face.

Unfortunately, his ears were still red, so Dash wasn’t fooled.

“Aw, c’mon,” she said. “It’s not that embarrassing, is it?”

Dye knocked the mailbox over in surprise.

“Um… You see…” He took a deep breath and faced the mare before speaking. “My family are sticklers for morals, and it rubbed off on me. A lot. Any mention of the subject causes me to turn as red as a colt who just went into the little fillies’ room by mistake. The reproduction unit in my high school Health class was absolute torture for me.”

Rainbow burst into laughter, and Dye returned to trying to set up the mailbox. After finally getting it to stand up straight, Dye grinned sheepishly and added, “and that was after Mom and Dad gave me ‘the talk’. When Dad revealed how effective… it is on Clusters, my face got so hot that Mom almost mistook it for heatstroke.”

Dash was rolling on the ground laughing by that point, and Dye took a few deep breaths to calm himself down. The burning in his ears was now gone, and his cheeks were cooling off a little, too.

“Okay, I get it,” Dye said, rolling his eyes. “I’m an incredibly awkward stallion when it comes to… that, and you think it’s funny. Now could you cut it out?”

Dash got to her hooves, still snickering.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “Still, it’s funny that a fully-grown stallion like you can’t talk about that without going red in the face!”

“Sure it is,” Dye said flatly. By this point, his face had returned to its normal royal blue color. “Anyway, I’m sure that wasn’t what you wanted to talk to me about.”

“Oh yeah!” Dash said, breaking into a friendly grin. “I was gonna ask you if you wanted to join our hoofball game this afternoon! You’ve gotta be pretty tough, right? I mean, you’re an Alicorn stallion! Every Alicorn I’ve met before you is a mare.”

“I’m a Thestricorn,” Dye corrected, “not an Alicorn. Still, you’re right, to an extent. I have above-average abilities from all three races. However,” Dye sighed, “I’ve never been much for physical exertion, so my physical strength is actually a bit lower than that of your average Earth Pony stallion.”

“C’mon, that’s still pretty good, right?” Dash said. “That still sounds as if you’re about as strong as AJ, right?”

“Let me put it this way,” Dye replied. “If I tried to hoofwrestle Big Mac, not only would my foreleg get pinned immediately, he’d probably break it, too!”

“Wow,” Dash whistled. “You’re really that weak? You don’t look like a wimp to me.”

Dye sighed and constructed a block out of cloud and set it in front of him. It was about the same height as an average table.

“I’ll prove it to you,” Dye told her. “Hoofwrestle me right now. I bet you’ll win without breaking a sweat.”

“Stop putting yourself down like that!” Dash told him. But she did as he said and sat down on the opposite side of the block.

Dye rested his right foreleg on the table and waited. They quickly locked hooves, and Dye said, “on three. One. Two. Three!”

Dye pushed back with all his strength, but just as he predicted, Dash pinned his foreleg in three seconds. Dye was sweating, but Dash hadn’t broken a sweat at all.

“Wow, you weren’t kidding,” she said.

“No, I wasn’t,” Dye panted. “I’ve got about as much strength as one would expect from a painter. I don’t physically exert myself very much.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be a weakling,” Dash told him. “You should work out or something.”

“Eh, I’m as strong as I need to be,” Dye replied. “If I need to get tougher at some point, I’ll consider it, but painting is my life, and that comes first.”

“Suit yourself,” Rainbow said. “Still, if you ever change your mind about toughening up, talk to me. I could really help you with that.”

“We’ll see,” Dye said. “Well, I’ll see you around, Dash.”

“See ya,” Dash replied before taking to the air and flying away.

Dye shook his head. Everypony expected his family to be tough for one reason or another, and only his own kin understood that bat wings don’t automatically mean a pony is tough. Not every single Thestral in the world was in Princess Luna’s Night Guard, after all. Being a Thestricorn stallion just made things even more difficult, though. Ponies often assumed that he should be similar to the Princesses, but physically tougher. All he wanted to do was be an artist and paint wonderful pictures! Where in that job description did it ever mention that he had to have the strength of a professional linebacker? Nowhere! But when ponies looked at him, most of them just saw what they thought was a souped-up version of a Night Guard. He was sick of it.

He got back to working on the house, only stopping for lunch before resuming construction. As he worked, he got to thinking. Maybe toughening up just a little wasn’t a bad idea.

Dye made a mental note to give the idea some serious thought later and continued to work on the second floor. Another headache struck around four in the afternoon, so he added “Thursday, 4:10 PM” to the entry after getting rid of the headache. Now each Thursday was going to have two attacks in one day. Dye was not happy about that at all.

By sundown, Dye had completed another floor, and his house was now two stories tall, complete with ceilings for the second floor. All that was left was the third floor and a roof, and his home would be complete. Unfortunately, he’d almost run out of cloud, so he’d have to gather more the next day.

Dye ate dinner and went to bed, hoping Friday would be headache-free.

It wasn’t. The horrible pain woke him up at four in the morning, and Dye groaned as he wrote “Friday, 4:00 AM” in the headache journal and waited for the oxygen to do the trick. At this rate, he’d be out of O2 again in a week. That thought was far from comforting.

Dye managed to get back to sleep once the headache was gone, waking up again at seven-thirty.

Dye pulled himself out of bed, renewed the stay-fresh spell, ate breakfast (he consumed the final two muffins, and the apples were half-gone now, too), and got to work on the third floor.

By ten, Dye had gathered more cloud, finished two rooms and was working on a third when a scroll appeared in front of him in a burst of green flame. He caught the scroll in his magic, opened it, and read it.

It was a reminder for his appointment at eleven.

Dye stopped what he was doing and got ready to leave for his appointment. He groomed his mane and tail to be presentable in public, put everything he’d need in his saddlebags, and packed a snack, just in case.

It was ten-thirty by the time he was done preparing, so he headed off to the hospital for his appointment.

After he arrived, Nurse Redheart had him sign in, and he sat down to wait for his name to be called.

While he waited, he picked up a copy of the Canterlot Chronicle and started to read the newspaper from the city he grew up in.

Almost nothing caught his interest. Almost all of the boring articles were about pointless things such as the private lives of celebrities or some politician kissing up to the public with empty promises.

However, one article took him by surprise. It was about his family. One of his cousins, Cosmo Vein, had simply vanished the day before, and nopony knew what had happened to him.

Cosmo was a magical researcher who had been researching the arcane, and had gained acclaim with his journal article on using magic to revive recently deceased ponies who died of unnatural causes. The magical theories hadn’t been tested yet, but they were so groundbreaking that Cosmo had been awarded the “Order of Starswirl” by Princess Celestia herself!

But now, Cosmo had simply vanished into thin air, leaving his family and his fiancé in a confused panic. There was no ransom note, no indication that he had been thinking of running off… Nopony knew if he had been ponynapped or if he had simply ran away.

As Dye read the article with interest, he heard the nurse call his name, so he put down the paper and trotted over to the desk.

“Dr. Stable will see you now,” she told him. Dye nodded and followed another nurse to a room where said doctor was waiting for him.

“Ah, Mr. Vein,” Dr. Stable said, shaking Dye’s hoof. “Please, have a seat.”

Dye sat down on the observation table while the doctor levitated a clipboard and quill over to himself. “Please, tell me about your condition,” he requested.

Dye complied. He explained everything he could that wouldn’t raise suspicions about his grandfather’s origins. It took half an hour, and by the time he was finished with his explanation, Dr. Stable looked thoughtful.

“That’s a strange condition, indeed,” the doctor mused. “According to the medical definition of a headache, it’s not really a headache, but it is head pain, so there’s little reason to call it anything else.”

“And you say that the only members of your family who have it are Thestricorns?” the doctor said.

Dye nodded in confirmation.

“That is strange,” Dr. Stable remarked, putting a hoof to his chin in thought. “Do you have any idea why?”

“I can make an educated guess,” Dye replied. “However, it’s based on information that has been classified by the order of the Princesses, so you’d have to request the information from them directly.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to consider doing that,” the doctor said as he set down the clipboard he had been writing on. He then levitated another clipboard over to Dye and said, “Please read this carefully before signing it, Mr. Vein.”

Dye read everything on the sheet before taking the quill the doctor offered him and scrawling his name on the indicated line. He’d just granted Dr. Stable permission to request duplicates of his medical records from Canterlot.

“Thank you, Mr. Vein,” Dr. Stable said after Dye returned the clipboard. “I’ll send you another letter once I have your medical records, unless my request is denied. In that case, I’ll let you know that I’ll be attempting an appeal.”

Dye nodded in understanding, shook hooves with the doctor again, bid farewell, and left.

As he left, he passed by a chestnut Earth Pony stallion with an hourglass Cutie Mark and a green tie.

“Good day,” the other stallion said.

Dye just nodded and started to spread his wings, but the stallion spoke again.

“You’re Mister Dye Vein, right?”

“That’s right,” Dye replied. “I’m actually quite busy, seeing as I have a house to finish.”

“Ah,” the stallion said. “My apologies. Here, have a Jelly Baby as my way of saying sorry.”

Dye turned around to see the odd stallion was offering him a strangely shaped orange piece of candy. Dye eyed it for a few seconds, and the stallion said, “oh. You don’t like orange? That’s my favorite flavor, but I guess that’s just me.”

The stallion started to rummage through a bag, but Dye stopped him by saying, “Actually, I like orange candy. I’ve just never seen anything like that candy before.”

Dye took the piece of orange candy in his magic and put it in his saddlebag for later.

“Well, Jelly Babies are foreign,” the stallion admitted. “Very foreign, actually.”

Dye nodded, bid farewell to the odd stallion and flew back to his property.

He ate the snack he’d packed, and then got back to work on the house. As the sun started to set, Dye wiped his brow and smiled to himself. It was finished. Every single floor, wall, ceiling and door had been installed. Most of the rooms were completely empty, but Dye didn’t care. He considered the house complete, so complete it was.

Suddenly remembering the odd stallion’s candy gift, Dye levitated the “Jelly Baby” out of his saddlebag to take a look at it before eating it.

Now that he was able to get a closer look, the shape of the candy took Dye by complete surprise. It was shaped like a human infant!

Where in the world did he get this? Dye thought to himself. The only way the shape could be this accurate is if it was made by somepony who’s seen human beings firsthoof! How is this even possible?

Dye popped the candy into his mouth and continued to think as he chewed. He’d forgotten to get the stallion’s name, so he didn’t know where to look for him. He could ask around the next morning, at least.

Dye decided that that plan was better than no plan and made himself dinner. Having fangs meant that he could eat meat, but he usually didn’t, since most ponies thought the concept barbaric. This time, however, he’d managed to acquire a single strip of jerky from a griffon who had been asking for directions. The griffon hadn’t expected a pony to ask for something like meat, but he gladly gave Dye a strip to show his gratitude. Dye had no idea what kind of jerky it was, but the griffon had assured him that it was meat from some kind of ‘dumb animal’, so Dye accepted the strip immediately and stowed it away for later.

Dye had decided that later was now, so he munched on the delicious piece of dried meat, savoring every bite. Meat had already been a rare dish even when visiting Grandpa, but while living among regular ponies, meat was nearly impossible to come by.

Of course, all that mattered to Dye at that moment was that he was eating a piece now, so he stopped thinking about how lucky he had gotten and just focused on enjoying the rare treat.

Once he’d finished off the jerky, Dye went to his studio to do what he’d wanted to do ever since he’d gotten everything set up: paint.

Instead of painting a scene he knew, Dye began painting something he saw in his mind’s eye. A highly detailed painting of a human family warming themselves in front of a fireplace took shape on the canvas. Once it was finished, it was a beautiful work of art. Every little detail was visible: the hairs on each human’s head, the wrinkles and folds in the clothes they wore, the expressions of how happy they were to be together in spite of their shivering… Every single detail was perfect, and he knew exactly whom he wanted to sell it to.

Dye rolled up and bound the new painting before storing it in a bag with the painting of an aerial view of Ponyville. He’d try selling the painting of humans tomorrow. The aerial view of Ponyville would be displayed as an example of his work.

With that, Dye went to bed, hoping for some profit the next day.

Author's Note

Special thanks to darksonickiller for helping me get this chapter up in spite of the technical difficulties. If it weren't for you, this chapter would still be stuck on my computer!