The sun came up eventually, and the colt awoke when his temporary trashcan home began to heat up in the morning sunlight. For a moment as he sat amongst the white plastic bags, he actually felt good. Then he remembered where and more importantly who he was, and that feeling evaporated quickly.
Sunlight was not at all comfortable for him. Several elements of his biology made that abundantly clear. One was his mostly black coat. He was not a pleasant pastel like a normal pony, but instead a color that was both visually hideous and entirely impractical. His body got hot much faster than that of a normal pony, and even a moderately warm early summer day was sweltering. This was only compounded by his eyes: in bright light, they narrowed into very tight slits. The effect was that he became nearly blind and had a tendency to trip over things.
Far worse than both of those problems, though, was that in the light other ponies could see him. Even partially blind, he was able to feel them glaring at him. In some very rare cases, it was from outright surprise at seeing a pony like him, but most of the time he could tell that they looked upon him with blatant disgust. Ponies would invariably cross to the other side of the street when he passed, or duck into their houses, or even hide children that were older than he was as though he would attempt to eat them.
The colt did not eat children, of course. He ate grass, like every other pony. At one point, his hunger got so intense that he stopped to try to eat some. Doing so was a nearly impossible task, though: unlike a normal pony, he had a number of small and very sharp teeth that made herbivory almost impossible.
His attempt was futile, and ended abruptly when a landscaper pony chased him away from the grass with a broom. He ran quickly, screaming heartfelt apologies as he went.
Eventually, though, the colt knew that he had to start on his mission. As much as he wished it could, he understood that it would not accomplish itself. That was simply not the way the world worked.
To do this, he eventually settled on a house, mostly at random. Specifically, he chose one that seemed like children lived there. That in itself was a risk, but he hoped that they would be somewhat understanding.
He paused at the door and tapped on it with one of his black hooves. There was a momentary delay, and then the door opened. A smiling mare looked out the door, expecting to happily greet a guest. Then she looked down, and her expression fell.
“What do you want?” she said, coldly.
“I’m sorry to being bothering you,” said the colt. “But I was wondering if you have the directions to the Ponyville orphanage? I’m trying to get there to fill out application, but I am lost.”
“Oh. Hold on a second.”
She departed for a moment, and the colt momentarily felt helpful. It was clear that this mare did not like him, but she was at least going to be able to help him find his way to what he desperately hoped might become his new home.
Then he was suddenly covered in a deluge of mostly liquid garbage. The force of it was so powerful that he was knocked down off the front stoop and onto his back.
“Ack!” he cried. “It got in my mouth!”
He looked up to see the mare standing with a now empty trash pale with a little purplish filly standing at her side. “You get out of here!” she demanded. “Go! Leave! And if I EVER see you near my house again, I’ll throw the PAIL at you too! And then call the town guard!”
“Mommy, we don’t have a town guard,” said the filly.
“Well then I’ll call the Canterlot guard! Or mustard one!”
“Muster, you mean,” corrected the colt.
“Don’t you correct ME!” shrieked the mare, forgetting her promise and throwing the pail at him. It was metal and bounced off his forehead painfully. He tried to get up to make his escape, but doing so was not easy; he had landed on his wings, and they did not articulate well. Getting up from that position was really hard without help. Neither the mare nor the filly offered, of course, but the former did offer some choice insults before eventually stepping down the stairs and kicking the colt with enough force to right him.
By this time, a crowd had gathered around the house, drawn in by the commotion. As the colt walked away in shame, he dodged several pieces of rotten fruit- -and failed to dodge several more- -as the bigger ponies glared at him. He found himself wondering if ponies saved up their rotten fruit in advance of his visits to populated locales.
“Get out of here, Mary Sue!” jeered one member of the crowd.
“Yeah!” said another. “We don’t want your kind here!”
As the hail of decaying produce increased along with the barrage of angry words, the colt was struck in the head with an only partially rotten potato and forced to run away from the crowd, the whole w while desperately hoping that none of them had artichokes.
He retreated to the periphery of the town, where he felt slightly more secure. There were no ponies out at that distance, and even though the heat of the sun had made him both extremely sweaty and dehydrated, he was grateful that no one was around to see him.
As he walked along the dirt road, he paused to wonder where the orphanage might actually be. Ponyville was surprisingly large, especially to a little colt, and he was not even sure what kind of building he was looking for, although he imagined that it would be made of brick and perched on some kind of bleak hill.
Looking around was fruitless, though, except as the colt suddenly realized that the trees on the far side of the fence he was walking along were, in fact, laden with fruit. He looked up in utter astonishment at the multitudes of large, red apples hanging from the branches. Never before had he seen so much fruit in one place, and his stomach immediately rumbled as he remembered that he had not eaten in several days.
Unable to help himself and driven by his hunger, the colt approached the fence. At first he tried to squeeze through the slats, but even with his diminutive size he got stuck between them for nearly a half hour. After that point, he decided to climb over, a terrifying prospect considering how poor of a grip he had on the wood with his hooves and how large the fence was compared to his own height.
When he finally reached the top, he immediately slipped and fell off onto the far side, landing in a mud puddle. At least, he hoped it was mud. In his experience, wet things he landed in tended not to be.
After righting himself, the colt looked up the trees and contributed to the moisture below him by salivating heavily. Unfortunately, the apples were impossibly high and out of his reach. Despite having a pair of large, leathery wings, he was completely unable to fly.
The apples in the tree were of course out of reach, but after some searching, the colt managed to find a few rotten ones that had fallen down into the mud below. They were not the same quality as the complete ones in the trees, but he did not mind. He had come to think of the red apples more as an ideal than actual foodstuffs; after all, he did not anticipate that he would ever be allowed to have one.
So he reached down and bit into one of the rotten apples. It almost immediately squirted a fetid, fermenting liquid into his mouth, but he was at least able to chew it. The apple tasted bad, but still marginally better than the often inedible bits of trash he usually consumed.
Almost as soon as he bit the apple, though, a voice cried out behind him, starling him so much that he nearly jumped to within reach of the real apples.
“What’r yeh doing with that there apple?!”
The colt- -after landing- -turned around to find himself facing an earth-pony who looked as angry as she was old. And she indeed looked old, to the point where she very well might have witnessed the formation of the first dirt in these very fields.
“Eating…it?” said the colt, the apple falling out of his mouth.
The ancient green mare leaned forward, tilting her head as she glared at the colt. He shrunk away, not understanding what was happening.
“What the hay is wrong with yer eyes?”
The colt squeaked, suddenly realizing what she was referring to. Despite her obvious farsightedness, she had noticed his heterochromia. The colt immediately covered his red-irised eye, trying to hide it, but only before deciding that it was a better idea to hide his blue-irised eye, as that was the more jarring one. He switched between the two several times until he eventually settled on covering them both.
“Nothing!” he lied.
“Nothing? Do I look like I was born yesterday? Don’t answer that! You whippersnappers and yer fancy colors! Just look at yeh! Back in my day, we didn’t even had color! It hadn’t even been invented yet! Everything was in shades of gray, unless you were rich, then you might be able to afford a sepia tone! But we didn’t have no sepia tones ‘round here ‘cept on special occasions, and when we did we were DERN grateful!” She began to trail off, realizing that she had forgotten what she had been talking about and quite possible where she even was. “Er…what was I sayin’ again?”
“The yelling. You had the yelling.”
“Yer darn-tootin! I come out here trying’ a find that one apple-ent that done stole my false teef, and what do I find? An APPLE-THEIF! Theifin’ my apples right there in front of me! Hooligans I say! You’re hooligans!”
“But I’m so hungry- -”
“So what? Back in my day, we had to share a single apple seed among sixteen brothers and sisters, and that had to last us for a week! Because we were poor! Because everyone in old-timey stories is dirt poor! So poor we eat dirt! But not rocks. We weren’t THAT poor.”
“So…I can eat the dirt, then? It is looking so fertile- -”
“NO! It’s MY dirt and yeh can’t have none! And yeh can’t have no apples either, not without payin’ no money!”
“But I lack money!” the colt pointed at the apple he had managed to get at least one bite out of. “Can I at least have the worms?”
“No worms! Them is my worms! What are you, some sort of COMMUNIST?” The mare’s eyes widened with realization. “That’s it! You’re a RED, ain’t yeh?”
“What? No! It’s a color deformity! I don’t mean to be so ugly!”
“Well you know what we do to apple-thiefin commies round these parts?” She reached behind her and drew a flyswatter. The colt gasped in fright.
“No! Not that! Anything but that! Not the beatings!”
“Quite you’re gripin and take it like a stallion!” cried the mare through the flyswatter handle in her mouth. She then promptly began slapping the colt repeatedly with the tool. He squealed, not in pain so much as in fear. “Hold still! I’m a-gonna swat you so hard you’ll wish you were an apple! DERN you Mary-Soos, you’re worse than parasprites!”
“Noooo! No beatings!”
The colt ran away as best as he could before hopping the fence and promptly falling into a mud puddle on the far side. The mare seemed too decrepit to follow him, but rather poked the flyswatter through the slats, trying to reach him. Now crying and terrified, the colt ran away into the fields on the far side of the road.
“You get back here!” shouted the mare. “I’ll swat the OP right out of you!”
“Granny Smith, what are you doing?”
Granny Smith turned around to see Applejack and Applebloom standing behind her. Granny Smith pointed at the road. “The trees stoled my false teeth, but then a Mary-Soo done came and tried to steal mah worms and sepia tones! So I swatted him a good one before he could take any dirt!”
Applejack sighed. “Not again…” She put her hoof around Granny Smith. “Come on, Granny Smith. Let’s get you back on your rocking chair.”
“Yeah,” said Applebloom. “Because you’re clearly off it.”
The colt ran until he eventually collapsed in a hilly meadow far away from the orchards. He was out of breath and extremely tired, and his flank hurt from the brutal swatting he had received. Fortunately, due to his overall black color, the bruises would not show well when they finally developed.
He sat in the tall grass for a long while, hiding and trying to be still. The old mare likely could not catch him, but there was a chance that she might summon an entire platoon of hillbillies to hunt him down and take turns beating him with mostly harmless household implements. As ridiculous as it sounded, that had happened to him before. Twice. In his opinion, the flyswatter was the worst to get hit with, second only to the type of toothed spoon used to scoop spaghetti.
As he sat, though, he suddenly realized that he was not alone. His eyes scanned the grass and suddenly met a pair of eyes staring back at him. At first, he only saw the pupils and nearly panicked when he saw that they, like his, were vertical slits. He quickly realized, though, that the irises that surrounded them were not blue and red but instead yellow.
“Kitty!” he cried, rushing forward.
The large brown cat seemed to immediately accept that it had been found out, and just sat there and allowed the colt to hug it. It was a comparatively large cat, and it was almost the same size as the colt.
“So soft!” he said, squeezing it and giggling. His day, it seemed, had not turned out entirely bad. “Huggies make everything better!”
This joyous state did not last long, as the air was suddenly rent by a hideous shriek. The colt released the cat, at first wondering if he had squeezed to hard. The cat seemed fine, though, and had not minded his embrace at all. It was at that point that the repeated hoofblows came down, knocking the colt over.
“You stay away from that adorable kitty, you hideous beast!” cried an oddly soft voice that seemed more terrified than angry. “Go away! GO AWAY!”
The colt, now equally terrified as the owner of the voice, tried to look up to see who was stomping on him. He could not get a good look, though, aside from a flashes of pastel yellow and pink and the sight of flustered wings.
“No! Stop! Please!”
“I won’t allow you to hurt any animals!”
The relentless stomping continued. It did not actually hurt, of course; whoever was administering the beating was not physically very strong, and the repeated blows of her front hooves was roughly the equivalent of being caressed with fresh marshmallows. It was quite starling, though.
“No, I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it! I just wanted to hug the kitty!”
“You don’t DESERVE to hug a kitty! Demon! MONSTER!”
Now hurt both physically and emotionally, the colt burst into tears and once again found himself fleeing yet another instance of blatant abuse. As he fled, though, he understood why he deserved it. He was, after all, a Mary Sue.