“Ew, no! Why’d I help you?” The taller unicorn sneered at Dawn, much to the amusement of her small group of friends, “Go take a weather class like a proper pegasus.” She laughed harshly at Dawn’s shocked and upset face before walking off with her pack of horned buddies.
“Such help you are, featherbrain.” Dawn grumbled in the direction of the mean unicorn, doing her best not to jump on her and pull her ears off. Growling under her breath, Dawn turned away from the third peer of herself that had refused to help her.
It had been two hours at least since she had last spoken to Legacy, this needed to be rectified quickly before she stomped on the next unicorn that looked at her funny. Dialing her bestie’s number, Dawn listened to the dial tone go off a couple times before hearing Legacy’s squeaky voice, “Hey there pegasister, wassup?” Dawn balked at the petname.
“Eh, it’s been better.” Dawn groaned, sliding into a seat in the café she was by. “Trying to get some help on the bit of class I… Slept through today.”
Legacy giggled and tutted, “Naughty naughty Dawny, sleeping in class isn’t very astute now is it?”
“Way to make me feel better Legacy, thanks.” Dawn said sarcastically.
“Hey, I don’t know your exact mental state right now, I can’t tell from your voice alone now, can I?” Legacy said defensibly. “Hey maybe I can give you a helping hoof?”
“With mecha-archanum structures and the shapes required to form them?” Dawn asked tentatively.
There was a brief pause from her excitable friend. “Um… Maybe you better go and find someone that knows that you needed shapes in the first place?” Legacy sounded almost embarrassed.
“Apparently not then.” Dawn sighed and rubbed her temple with an outstretched wing. “You wouldn’t happen to know any not racist unicorns taking my class?”
“Well, yes, of course I do… I know a couple that might like pegasi.” Legacy answered tentatively. “I’m not so sure you’d like who I am thinking of though.” She warned.
Dawn sighed, already knowing one of the names that Legacy was about to list. “Hit me, come on Legacy.”
“Ok, Ok! Jeez. Well there’s Lumen… she’s odd though. Walker’s nice, but I don’t know much about him. And there’s the one I’m not sure you’d be so fond of, Cobalt Dust.”
That name was the one Dawn had been afraid of. “Just send me his details, may as well put the poor stallion out of his misery.” Legacy giggled at Dawn’s snarky remark.
“Will do, Pegasister!” Legacy chirped happily, “I’ll do that as soon as you hang up. Is there anything else you wanna chat about or have I served my purpose?”
“No, there’s nothing else, your purpose is complete, minion.” Dawn giggled, waving her hoof regally. Legacy giggled back before wishing her friend a goodbye and hanging up the phone. About a minute later, Dawn received every contact detail she could have thought about and more from Legacy. Dawn tapped the phone number into her contacts and set a reminder to tell her to “Call Cobalt Dust before going to bed.”
Dawn didn’t have a pictochat account and wasn’t planning on getting one so she ignored that one, on the other hoof, she did have a facehoof page where she posted about science and books, so she gave ‘C.Dust’ a follow.

After a while of drinking hot chocolate and reading about magical circles, Dawn decided the best course of action would be to just make her way home. It was nearing five PM after all. She packed up her troubles and started out of the grounds to the college, making her swift way home. That paper wasn’t going to write itself.

--==========================--

Quizzy wasn’t home when Dawn arrived, Ratchet was nowhere to be seen either, but the occasional metallic bang and curse word from her father's workshop told Dawn all she needed to know.

Dawn poked her head into the workshop and greeted her father who waved at her with a wing from underneath some sort of automobile and mumbled a greeting around a wrench. With that out of the way, Dawn made her way to the kitchen where she purloined an apple and a bag of something too sugary to be good for you and heading upstairs to start on her paper.

“Okay, this is gonna be my first proper assignment for college, better make it the best I can. I want to prove to those pesky unicorns that I’m not ’lost’.” Dawn said to herself, psyching herself up and stretching her hooves above her head before sitting down at her desk and hitting the spacebar on her keyboard to wake up her computer. It eventually gave a whir of its fans and lit up. She tapped in her password and waited for the computer to let her in. Eventually, it played a happy little jingle and the desktop popped onto screen.

Dawn opened her word processor and started to work, furiously tapping on the keys. Eventually, after a good two hours of working, Dawn had a piece that had surpassed the minimum word count after the first half an hour. She read it through a couple times and corrected her admittedly bad grammar on a couple occasions. Then hit print and lay back in her chair while her printer coughed and spat out her paper.

Dawn now had nothing to do, she had finished her book earlier and didn’t really feel like starting another one just yet. Instead she just capsized on her bed and played with her phone a while. She eventually got around to changing her old, crap ringtone to a newer jazzier one. After about half an hour of this, Dawn got bored and tossed her mobile onto her desk and hugged a pillow, pretending it was a handsome, strong stallion that was squeezing little Dawny tight, protecting her from all the monsters while she slept, and she nearly did fall asleep in this little fantasy before a little chirp sounded from her desk and a synthetic voice read out, “You have a reminder for eight pm. Call Cobalt Dust before going to bed.”

“Ugh, alright then.” Dawn moaned, just wanting this to be over with. She dragged herself away from her warm, comfy bed and plonked herself down at her cold, uninviting desk, her phone seeming to stare at her like a tiger.

Before she could talk herself out of calling the wierd stallion, Dawn just did it, putting the device on speaker and listening to the dial tone go off once, twice, three times. Then it was picked up, “Hello? Cobalt Dust speaking, who is this?” The voice on the other end of the line asked.

“U-Um… It’s Dawn, you know, that Pegasus from class.” Dawn answered him tenatively.

“Oh! Um… I’m really really sorry about how I acted yesterday… I really put you in an awkward position.” He apologised, sounding genuinely sorry.

“Listen C-Cobalt, I don’t want to talk about that. I’d rather we just forgot that ever happened and just got on with each other.” Dawn told him, getting out her notebook and pen. “Just forget about it, alright?”

Cobalt hesitated, then perked up, “Ok, water under the bridge. And if you aren't calling me to complain about me, why are you calling me, and a better question, how do you know my number?”

“Legacy gave your number to me… and I-I need some help with some of the work today.” Dawn whimpered quietly, “I… wasn’t really paying too much attention during class today and I’m pretty sure I missed something I might need. Nopony else seems nice enough to help a pegasus out, soooo…” Dawn sighed, then wrote the date on the top of the page, “I thought I’d turn to the one pony I knew would probably help me out.”

“Um, alright then. Well you didn’t really miss much that wasn’t covered before college, there weren’t any new glyphs, just a couple new orientations.” Cobalt started, Dawn could hear him fiddling with pieces of paper through the phone. “Aha! Ok, there’s a couple new orientations, as I said. Ok, well the Hyre glyph can be vertical or at thirty degrees, Nocht can be at fourty or fifty two, but only if you are trying to make a cloudwalking circle with the baast glyph in the fifth position.” Cobalt continued rambling about glyphs and shapes and certain orientations of the specific shapes while Dawn took speedy notes on them.

After a while of discussing their college work, Dawn and Cobalt began chatting about their classes, then their lives at home. And admittedly, Dawn began to take a little bit of interest in this admittedly rather nice stallion she had met.

“So, want to chat again some time?” Cobalt asked.

Dawn hesitated, “Um… sure, m-maybe some other time.” She said slowly after a couple moments. “Um, Bye.” Dawn said probably a little too quickly and hung up the phone.

“Dear Celestia” Dawn breathed, her heart rate slowly returning to normal, “That was probably the most stressful thing I have ever done.”

Dawn plugged her phone in and left it to charge before crawling back under the covers and cuddling her pillow again. “Why can’t I seem to talk to ponies?” She murmured into the bedding and pressed herself against it harder.

An hour later and Dawn was sound asleep, trotting happily round in her luscious dreamscape, her head held high. She felt confident, like the Queen of dreams. Dawn walked through the calm forest, feeling the perfect breeze ruffle her feathers gently and ripple across her soft coat. Dawn was happy here, not having to constantly worry about what everyone felt of her and what she looked like, here she wore her true colours happily, letting the whole forest in to see her deep orchid coat. At home her coat was different, both her parents wore dark grey coats, but here it was Dawn’s badge of honour.

Dawn kept skipping happily, jumping over fallen trees and small patches of braken on her little forested path. She didn’t have anywhere to go so she was just out to have a walk, she breathed in the damp, mellow scent of the forest and smiled. She closed her eyes and slowed down to a calm pacing to listen to the different sounds of the forest, she could hear birds chattering in the trees, leaves rustling and the occasional creak of an old branch in the gentle breeze. Mice and other critters flitted around the forest floor, rummaging for food and playing in the sunbeams.

Opening her eyes, Dawn continued on her way, leaping gracefully over a small stream in her path, fluttering her wings to keep her airborne a moment longer. She landed safely on the other side like a cat and kept on her peaceful stroll a while longer.

Before long, Dawn came out of the forest and into the sunshine, stretching far in front of her was a grassy plane where you could just be free. She stepped out from under the cover of the canopy and felt the sun hit her back with a wondrous warmth, the light reflecting off her shiny coat and making her feathers feel amazing. Dawn closed her eyes and raised her head, trying to get as much sunshine as possible, spreading her wings out and shaking her feathers to catch as many of the warming rays as she possibly could.

After spending an eternity standing there, still as a statue, Dawn opened her eyes and grinned. She folded in her wings and started walking forward, quickly her walk broke off into a free trot, then a small canter as she crested a hill. On the way down she started picking up speed, dipping her head down till she felt like she was running faster than the wind. Dawn was galloping freely among the hills, pounding her hooves against the perfect grass and sprinting for all she was worth, here she could do anything she wanted to, because here nopony could watch her.\

After what felt like forever of free running round the sunny plain, Dawn lay down like an exhausted puppy, sweat pouring off her hide in a great deluge. She was happy, having not run like that in years, Dawn didn’t dream that often, preferring to jump into somepony else’s dream instead of staying in her own.

Suddenly a brilliant light filled her vision and willed her back to the waking worldher eyes and groaned, light was flooding through her window and bathing her face in a pale morning glow. Her mobile was buzzing on the table like an irritated bee, Dawn stretched her body out and hit snooze on her alarm with a lazy hoof. After about ten minutes of drowsiness and not wanting to get out of bed, Dawn managed to crawl from under her blanket and onto her hooves where she stretched again and spread her wings.

“Uuuugh why?” Dawn groaned when she looked in the mirror and noticed her chest was purple, her natural colour. Quickly, she began dabbing more of the oily dye onto her soft coat, rubbing the grey paste into her fur. She checked it covered the purple patch before going and stepping into the shower, washing the excess dye off her chest then rubbing herself all over.

She stepped out of the shower and tossed a towel over her back, rubbing her chest furiously with the rapidly staining towel. Today was a day she had all to herself, no work that she could be bothered to do right now and no lessons she had to attend. Dawn would just have to find something else to waste the day, maybe a mushy romance novel.

Author's Note

A massive thank you to my co-writer and editor Ratchet for stopping me from releasing this chapter until it was ready, just like the others. I am an impatient... person... who will have published this before it was properly done. The title was hard to come up with in this chapter and it was given to me by Ratchet too... about three minutes before this was published! Happy reading!