A Chance of Grey - Chapter 2 - Daisy Rain - by RandomGreymane

As expected it was more than a little problematic.

Here is was, thrown into a completely different environment. It was so confusing because it was at once some of the same dung I’d experienced but also different.

It was the same group of ponies...jocks, nerds, ponies with their snoots in the air, and all of them still with more bits than I’d see. I think I made three friends in that whole time. One of which died in a cart crash.

I was pretty alone. And it didn’t help that no matter what I did, nothing seemed to help. My grades slipped again but were just barely tolerable. I failed the Equestrian Constitution Test once and had to take a class to do it again. In the end I went an extra year of upper grades before graduating. In some ways that worked out - I had a year of half day schedules - but in most it set me back.

Once school was done it was time for me to look into university schooling. I was still interested in the crystal clusters and their components but there was no way I could afford anything more than the local community site. So I enrolled there. I paid my tuition by working selling cart parts and took as many classes on weekends and nights that I could.

I did make a life-long friend there who I still talk to today. However overall the experience was mixed. I had some instructors I couldn’t stand, and others that I wanted to teach all my classes. In the end I was able to get a simple certification in the components of the crystal structures. That was enough to land me a simple job building and repairing the smaller ones.

It was a sweet job for a long time. I worked long hours, traveled to different businesses, and learned things I would have never learned any other way. And, for a time, I was paid what I was worth and for how hard I worked.

Like many things in my life, that didn’t last.

The owner of the business became involved with the Stellarite Cult and very soon he was pushing his rhetoric onto myself and the others working for him. He changed the pay system from hourly to a different one so that we were paid less. He required us to attend Stellarite instruction. In the end I started believing in the Stellarite Way of doing things.

During all this, I met and wed my long-time marefriend. We even had our child while in the cult. We didn’t stay in it long after that. They didn’t pay us for our work really, and we almost lost everything we owned and all we held dear. Somewhere in the process we moved back in with my mother and father. We ended up giving all we earned to help support that house as my parents divorced and neither was working.

We started new jobs at different places and washed our hands of the cult. The fresh start was painful, but we started moving up again rather than down. I started a good job doing matrix support for a small fastener company, and my mare got a job working at an advertising firm.

We also learned that our foal had issues of the mind. She didn’t talk at all until she was much older and showed problems learning. Among many other things. The doctor bills mounted of course as we tried to find some way to help her.

In the end, the center could not hold. My mother announced that she was selling the house to my sister and moving.

We had no place to go. Well...this isn’t strictly true. My mare and our daughter had someplace to go. My mother-in-law stated that it would be okay for my spouse and our daughter to move in with them but not myself.

While we were planning for this, a friend of mine’s father had to move out to Californeigha to keep his sales job. His house was paid for, and he didn’t want to sell it, so he offered to let us rent/house-sit it while he was gone. (My friend was moving out there as well to pursue his long-time marefriend.)

This was Celestia Sent! We didn’t have to split up our family and it was a wonderful, and inexpensive, house to live in! And for a few years we were happy. I had moved on to a full manager’s position at another company and it paid very well. She had moved to a position in Purchasing at a book warehouse. We had enough money and we worked and paid off most of our bills.

In time, my friend’s relationship fell through and he moved back to the area. I saw how lost he was, so I offered to let him move back into his old room until he could get back on his feet. (I didn’t realize how bad a mistake this was at the time.) So we moved our stuff out of that room and he moved back in.

And that’s where another round of trouble started. Nothing we did was good enough for his parent’s house. We did things “wrong” in every manner. We ended up becoming silently subservient to him. To the point where we let the house maintenance slip because we just couldn’t take being told we were wrong any more.

After a time, and at least once incident where his parents confronted us about the state of the house, they informed us that they would be moving back in.

Wait...I’m missing an important memory here...

Daisy. I’m missing Daisy.

Daisy Rain was my cousin on my mother’s side. I was extremely close to her and another cousin named Dive. We used to get together after family gatherings to have coffee and talk for hours. Daisy and I would talk via spell-cluster for long hours and trade scroll messages regularly. We talked of everything from philosophy to magick and even family history. We talked all the time.

Then, one day, the phrase ‘She’s made her decision. She’s made her choice.’ came to me. It was like someone plucked a string inside me and it vibrated the message. Stranger still, it appeared in phrases in the plays I watched, in the papers, even in messages I received from others. It felt...bad...dark...ominous.

Now please understand that our family contains many gifts. Gifts of magick. Gifts of prophecy. Gifts...somehow I knew this one was related to someone in trouble.

I spent two days contacting people by dragon-scroll trying to find out where the trouble was. Two. Days. Not once did I think to contact Daisy.

Two Days later...I got a scroll from my mother. Daisy...Daisy had obtained a combat-magick scroll...and...in the basement of her duplex...placed it on her head and activated it. All that was left was a mark on the wall and a blood-soaked couch.

It was only then that I understood the purpose of the message. The universe had given me a chance to help her.

The universe had given me a golden opportunity to save her.

And I failed. I failed miserably. That still haunts me to this day. Intellectually I know that I likely couldn’t have stopped her. She’d have tried later, or found another way. But I was given the golden chance that so many others weren’t. And I blew it.

Dive and I don’t speak any more.

Her death was a turning point of sorts in my life. I tried to do more with less. But I failed at that as well.

I don’t think I’ve ever truly gotten over her passing. The tears are still there to cry even though I let them out afterwords. They probably will always still be there until I too pass into the arms of the Guardian of Dreams.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll never be whole again. At least that’s what I tell myself when I reach out mentally and she’s not there. She taught me so much about how my life and our family gifts work. I’ll always miss her.

Moving on...

My friend’s father informed us that, thanks to those flank-heads in the Equestrian Council who caused the value of the bit to tank, he had been released from his position and would be moving back soon.

My mare and I were looking for our own place, and this only accelerated the process. We purchased a small red and black single-story house and promptly moved in. (A note to perhaps help somepony in the same position - don’t ever overpay for a house, and get RID of things BEFORE you move. Ask me how I know.)

And just like that, once again, we were happy for a time. The house gave us a place that was truly ours and we were able to get rid of a couple of bills with the money made in the deal. We moved in.

And then I became unemployed myself a year or so later.

Fortunately we were able to pull out money from our retirement and pay off our remaining debts that were not involved in the mortgage of the house. The unemployment funds we received via the Celestia Employment Agency kept us afloat. Fortunately, my spouse remained employed during all this.

When you have time to think, you learn. It’s unavoidable. I learned several things while I was unemployed.

I learned I could be artistically creative. I learned that I was something worthwhile to everypony but an employer looking for someone to hire. I learned more about how my mind worked. And...I learned that I had been abused earlier in life. Or at least learned that those fleeting moments of pain and terror that I’d been having since childhood weren’t “just me”.

It was the same sort of scandals that you read in the papers. Young colt becomes an acolyte of The Church Of The Sun Princess, young colt gets threatened with being sent to Tartarus, young colt is taken into a private room and...well...you know. Those memories, what was left of them, were very old. From when I was young and living in Nailville.

Doctor Whooves once said “You can always tell the shape of something that’s missing by the hole it left.”, and that’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with here. I can recall the abuse of friends. I can recall the warnings from them about the priests. I can even remember walking in on a colt crouched on the floor of a tiny room in the back of the church. Another of the colts hustled me out before I asked too many questions. There was even one very young colt who killed himself by setting fire to his home and locking his bedroom door.

The shape of the hole is quite clear. And so are the ripples of how it has affected me through the years. It’s the reason I hate cream sauces. The reason I can’t eat eggs that are rubbery when I had no problem with them as a child - they gag my throat and an image flashes in my mind in an instant. An obscene image, along with a particular smell. It’s the reason my reactions in the privacy of our bedroom are so strange, and always have been.

Yet another thing I’ll never be free of. I don’t have the insurance nor the bits to see someone about the memories.

In time, after some temporary jobs, I found a position with another company and worked my flank off the moment I set hoof through the door.

And I haven’t stopped since.

I work at least 50+ hours a week. For a while I was in the overnight rotation for emergency scroll alerts for the cluster networks.

Eventually I moved into assigning out those scrolls instead of handling. It’s not nearly the bits I was getting before I was originally laid off, but it’s enough if we spend it carefully. Sometimes we don’t. Heck, a lot of time we don’t.

The long hours at all my jobs, the bad eating, the lack of exercise, the time I was unemployed, they’ve all taken their toll. My body is now damaged enough that I can’t eat certain things, have to take medicine every day, and have pain in my hind legs every night when I try and fall asleep. Not to mention the failed operation that took away my ability to be intimate. *cough*

And....I’m going blind now. The failure in my body, has damaged by eyes so much that they bleed inside. It hasn’t caused a loss of vision - just blurriness for now - but it’s progressive. And there is no cure. Even the best spells only temporarily alleviate the situation.

I’ve come to terms with it. In a few years I’ll likely be blind. That means I’ll be unable to work and have to go on Lunar Disability.

So...in the meantime...I’m trying to get everything handed over to my loving mare before things get out of hoof. We still have a lot of debts, but we’re working to get rid of them. I don’t want her to have to deal with those as well as the current load.

And that’s where we stand now. I’m going blind. We are in debt. We never seem to have enough.

This doesn’t feel fair. But the universe isn’t fair. And others have it far worse than we do. I guess the best I can do it try and make sure I’m not a burden to those around me until the time comes for me to move on.

I often feel like I did something to deserve this. And perhaps, in another life, I have. But I can’t think of anything this time around that would fit the bill.

I'll have more later but thanks for listening and Luna Bless You.