//------------------------------// // 24- My first job! At long last! // Story: Still No Signal // by Axel Azabash //------------------------------// It’s about time I become a productive member of society. It is nice to be taken care of and all that, but after a while, you get that nagging sensation that you are overstaying your welcome and becoming a dead weight on someone else’s shoulders… or withers… because you know… horses… Anyway… The thing is that I observed a pony grabbing a piece of paper stuck to a board near the town hall when we went to do my paperwork. I am now an official member of pony society and therefore, I should be able to get an employment. And that’s where those pieces of paper come into the picture. I asked Purplesmart what was that pony doing and she told me that he was grabbing a ‘help request’ so she would go help someone… err… pony, and in exchange for the help, he would get coins. More or less, give or take a few words and still unintelligible sounds here and there, but the thing sounded awfully close to being hired to do something. At this point I had brought the idea a couple of times, and every time I even remotely suggested that I wanted to do something to earn money, I got rewarded with a few spare coins and some kind words. I am not a child requesting pocket money, dang it… So, there is that… I ended up ‘Hey-Purplesmart-I’m-going-out-for-a-walk’ my way into making them leaving me on my own for a moment and used said moment to go to the town hall looking for a ‘help request’. I brought my freshly made documentation with me just in case, but these ponies seemed pretty casual about it. I was about to browse the board looking for a fitting job that I could do using my crafty human abilities when I realized I was forgetting one teensy weensy, but ever so crucial little, tiny detail… I still can’t read pony. Or at least not out of the safety of a textbook. Books for teaching the language are carefully crafted and have pictures, the symbols are clear and carefully displayed, and the words are carefully selected to teach you and they are prepared to be easy to understand… This quickly and crudely scribbled notes… not as much. I could only make out a few words and I was missing some context to put the pieces together. Flower… garden… plants… roses and something about being lucky? Who is asking for help? What is supposed to be done? Where? I was about to turn back in defeat then I spotted a familiar yellow little filly with red hair and a bow. Wait, wasn’t she related to some of Purplesmart’s friends? And she was carrying a piece of paper in her mouth and was headed directly to the board… I waved at her and she waved back, and then something happened. She was about to stick the paper with a nail to the board when she suddenly gasped and presented the piece of paper to me. Uh oh? Was I going to take advantage of the situation, my connection to Purplesmart and her friends and let the utter innocence of this filly grant me my first job position? Well, I had to start somewhere, and the first job you ever get is always a shacky one at best. And the filly was doing the puppy face thing after asking me something far too quickly for me to understand, or maybe is the accent or something. “Okay, I will help.” I answered. The filly squealed in delight almost in the ultrasonic spectrum, pranced in place and ran a couple of laps around me before grabbing my trousers with her mouth and pulling. “Okay, okay… I’ll follow you.” *** Headache. That’s what I’m getting. The filly doesn’t seem to get it. She keeps firing question after question far too quickly for me to understand, far too quickly for me to even answer, and also far too quickly to even finish her own question properly before the next idea crosses her cute little head and she comes up with a new one with renewed excitement. Also, her intonation is a little bit off compared to the one I was learning. I do my best to keep it up, to at least provide a couple of words here and there, but the horse words are coming too fast, and by the look of it jumping from topic to topic, I can’t focus like in Cheery’s class, this is way too random, to high pitched, too fast… If I stay more than a couple of minutes ignoring her, she tries to grab my attention again and continues her almost one-sided conversation, I just… Thank goodness we got where we needed to be relatively quickly. This place is not very big, it doesn’t take long to go from place to place. It happened to be a quaint orchard, with rows upon rows of apple trees. A rustic looking red painted barn could be seen from the distance. The center piece of the place was a two-story house with a little tower, red painted walls and white beams with purple-grey painted roofs… quite colorful, could be an eyesore anywhere else, but in this land of technicolor equines it was right at home. There were other elements, like other small varied plantations and little animal pens with pigs and chickens. Wait… Why do they even have pigs!? My train of thought was interrupted when the orange pony came up to us and started to chat with her little sister or daughter. They went back and forth for a little while and the orange mare seemed frustrated. The little yellow one pointed at me and to the piece of paper. “Oh, yes… I help farm!” I waved the paper in front of her. “Uh… right. Apple Flower? *Unknown question*?” “He is going to help! Look at his… *Rapid succession of small horse sounds that I could not follow*.” After another little bit of back and forth, the orange mare looked at me with one of those awkward smiles. “Are you sure, *unknown*? The mare asked. “I need to start somewhere, I learn.” I shrugged. “Okay… we will give this *unknown noises*.” She motioned me to follow her. We passed in front of a semi covered porch and there, sat in a rocking chair, was an old looking green pony with white hair. She waved at us and I waved back. From time to time, a loud ‘whack’ could be heard, like something hitting something. After a couple of minutes walking through the rows of apple trees we met a red big stallion, his butt mark was a big green apple, so I guess he worked in here. “This is Big *unknown*, he is *unknown* apples. Can you help him?” The mare asked. “Of course! I will help him!” I exclaimed excitedly. I was taller and had dexterous fingers, I was going to ace this job, there was no way this equine creature could compete with me! “Okay, *Unknown*, I will go to do my part and you help him. In a few hours I will come back to see how are you doing.” “Hello, Big… uh…” I didn’t get the second part correctly. The big stallion nodded in acknowledgement to my greeting. “I see you later, guys!” And the mare started to walk away and took with herself the little yellow and red menace. “So, we pick apples…” I got near a tree and extended a hand, took the first apple and put it in an empty basked. “Eeeeyup.” “Okay!” And I continued to do that operation, but the stallion stood there, looking at me. “Huh… Impressed?” I asked. I could reach much higher than him, he should be astonished at my ability… “Eyyynope.” Big Apple shook his head. Wait wat? He was not impressed? How was he supposed to pick the apples anyways! With his mouth? He reared back and put himself in position in front of an apple tree. “What?” ‘WHACK!’ And all the apples fell from the tree perfectly into the few baskets that were randomly put on the ground, doing instantly the job that would take me an hour at least. “Wait… just… HOW!?” And he just shrugged and moved on to the next tree. Okay, roll with it, magic land of technicolor horses… Let’s do it! I imitated his movements, positioned myself in front of a tree and carefully kicked the trunk. Nothing happened. “Eyyynope.” He said and demonstrated again with another tree, again, the same result, a few more baskets full of apples. Okay, what am I doing wrong? Maybe is the colocation. He looks away from the tree and kicks with his rear legs, but I don’t have ‘rear legs’ just legs. Maybe it is about the positioning… I turned around and gave my back to the tree, measured the distance and kicked back with one leg, nothing happened. I did it again with the other leg and still nothing happened. The red big stallion repeated the process and another tree dropped its apples perfectly on the baskets. And that is KIND of how gravity works… but not at the same time… that’s cheating… I kicked again with all my might and the tree rattled a little bit, then a single apple fell and hit me right on the head and then bounced to the floor. Yeah… that’s how gravity is supposed to work… “Curse you, Newton! You have abandoned me!” I screamed to the world in general. I bet the bastard is having a laugh right now at my expense. The red stallion shook his head at my antics. “Okay, I carry apples then.” “Eeeeyup.” “Where do I need to take these and where are the empty baskets?” I grabbed a couple of baskets full of apples. He pointed with his muzzle towards the red barn. “Okay, be right back…” And so, I started to be the hauling mule for the ponies in this farm. *** It was hard and tiring, but in the end, it seemed that it paid off and the ponies were kind of happy with me. I got paid twenty coins for the few hours of hauling apples, and Big Red could concentrate in kicking trees and making apples rain on top of the baskets. This way, I kind of helped speed up the process, and they thanked me for it and I was told that I could come back other day. They also provided apple pie for lunch and it had that particular ‘pony’ style of unrefined, yet really delicious and natural taste to it. The little yellow and red filly was also there, but the orange mare kind of prevented her from drowning me in questions again, she was slightly disappointed in that, but I still lacked the language skills to follow her. Big Red and the orange mare with a cowboy hat didn’t seem really thrilled with me helping again, but the old mare, who they were calling Granny Something, seemed really excited to have me around and offered some kind words that I mostly understood by the intonation and the way she kindly smiled at me. She also stole a couple of glances to the orange mare and said something that made her look away and blush. Long story short, the farmers were just okay with me, but the old mare liked me being around and asked me to come back to help them the next day. I came back to the castle to a kind of worried looking Purplesmart, she asked where I had been and I mostly told her. She was not really happy with me disappearing, but I was a grown man and I was in need of finding a source of income. I kept it brief, as I was really tired and went straight to the shower and then crashed into the bed. There was still some daylight left, but I was exhausted from my day at the farm. I counted the number of bits I had collected so far. The few coins I got from time to time, and the few coins I got the couple of times I asked Purplesmart for advice about getting a job, adding the twenty I had earned today, I had a total of forty bits… That’s as much as four tens, and that’s terrible I had no idea how much every ‘bit’ was worth, but from what I learned with Cheery, I got the feeling I could comfortably buy groceries for a few days with this amount. I needed to work on it, I was still unable to know if something was expensive or not, but I could go watch these ponies haggle at the market the next day it was set up. I left my solar panel on the windowsill and it has managed to charge a little bit the power bank, but I was too tired to get up again, therefore I decided I would pass today’s daily ‘still no signal’ check.