//------------------------------//
// Prologue 
// Story: The Toymaker and his Assistants 
// by abandoned2123 
//------------------------------//

No place was a good place for a donkey, Earnest had always said. No place at all. Tolerance was practiced, yet there was always that insecurity, that uneasy lingering feeling that had plagued the pony race.

“But what difference is there? Aside from the cutie marks and colorful coats there ain’t nothing else.” He would always mutter to himself upon blasting through their rickety cabin door, his beaten hooves slapping against the polished finish of the wood grain with a satisfying ‘click’. It was a ritual that seemed to have been practiced over and over, though Dorian had never fully grasped the concept of his father’s rants.

While the small colt would toddle about the floor and tinker with the makeshift playthings he had made, dear Millie would simply shake her head in exasperated disgust. There had always been a rift between the two burros, and even young Dorian was able to sense the tension that would inevitably sprout from the stressed cracks. 

Thus the arguing would begin with his father, coated in soot and ash from head to hoof from the long hours of mining and excavating. As far as Dorian could recall, there was a distinct smell that wafted from the donkey’s sweat-laden fur. It was musky, near putrid, and enough to make the child gag with fright and flee to his mother’s side.

Oh and dear Millie, her scent was more akin to the warm sensation of hazelnuts and milk. He could recall pressing the wide nostrils of his velvety snout into the backs of her knees, drinking in the smell as much as he could before he’d be inevitably pushed away. 

“What did they say to you this time, dear?” she would mutter to him, reciting the line as if from a repeating record. She would be humming over dinner, greedily eying the pots of mash and the freshly cooked bread in the oven. Dorian would look up at them both with fearful eyes, especially noting the inevitable scowl on his bitter father’s face.

“Nothing! Nothing at all!” he would cry, his rasping tone rising to a loud growl. “Dear Celestia, Millie, every day they act as if I don’t exist!” 

Such a conversation would often steer towards false sentiments and tired reassurances that ‘everything would turn for the better’ and that ‘the job market should improve with Hearth’s Warming Eve coming up’. However, no such words of comfort could ever please Earnest, and the stubborn beast would soon be pounding up the unstable staircase with a mantra of curses spewing from his muzzle. 

Dorian had, for the longest of times, never understood the animosity that his father seemed to cater for the ponies. At such a young age, he had always assumed that the entire equine race was a series of cookie-cutter shapes that seemed to blend with one another. He could remember the first time that he had asked his mother about the curious affair of cutie marks. 

It had been a relatively uneventful day of romping about in his parent’s neatly trimmed lawn. Of course, living in the outer sections of Canterlot pretty much guaranteed that there wasn’t much of a lawn to begin with. The suburbs were filled with primarily ponies with a few dashes of fellow donkeys here and there. Houses were squished mercilessly together, their sides snugly fitting side by side like a tight fitting glove. His house was a boringly painted white piece, its shutters an ivory yellow.  

He remembered playing with an empty toilet paper tube, his little hooves fishing though one of the openings only to pop out from the other side. It had always been an amusing game for him.

It was then that he noticed two little fillies down the trodden earthy road. Their coats were a matching pastel blue, their manes a mixture of various hues that seemed to meld about together. Dorian had paused in his play to stare up at them, his long ears pricking forward as to catch their far-off words.

“Can you believe that Motor Mouth finally got his cutie mark?” 

“I know! Who would have thought that he’d be so good at learning languages?”

The two fillies themselves were dainty little creatures, their own respective marks seeming to shine. Though Dorian could not make out what the little objects plastered to their flanks were, his own self seemed to well up in envy. In a small impulse, he looked down at his own shabby brown hide. There was nothing, not even the slightest hint of a colorful mark upon his flesh.

Troubled, the young foal had abandoned his empty toilet paper roll to totter back up to his shanty little house. He was barely six months, a toddler by any burro’s standards, and even he was wise enough to assume that his dear mother knew the cause for such an absence. His father would have been out mining in the overlaying mountains outside of Canterlot. 

He nosed open the door slowly, careful so as to not let its squeaky creak resound across the musty halls. Millie had never done a particularly good job with housewife duties, and that included raising her son. Of course she meant well, though her manners of upbringing would most certainly have been deemed questionable by our own standards.

“Mother?” Dorian murmured, his ears pricking at the sounds of clanking pots and kettles from the kitchen down the hall. The foal’s tiny voice was drowned in its cacophony upon being uttered, for he had always been a fairly quiet child. Sighing, he stumbled through the doorway and tumbled to the snug little kitchen, his thick hooves slapping hard against the ground.

He peeped his head through the open arch-way, though his mother had heard his arrival long before. She stood in front of the rusted sink with an expectant air, her long tail flicking to the side in greeting. Her coat was of a slightly darker shade than his own, and her muzzle was built in such a way that it looked narrower, more feminine. Her grey mane was parted to the side, unlike her son’s, which hung messily from all sides of his head.

“What is it, Dor?” she asked, with a touch of impatience. Her son’s timid nature had always perplexed her. Such an attitude was unusual for a donkey, though she figured that he would grow out of such childish behavior soon enough.

Upon being called, Dorian flinched back and walked forward, his long ears drooped down to the sides of his head in a solemn manner. “I saw the pretty ponies outside…” he began, earning himself a raised eyebrow from Mille. “They were talking about how some other pony got a… a…” he paused, seeming to forget the term, though his mother had already well enough understood.

“A cutie mark?”  Millie cocked her head to the side, only to sigh at her son’s eager nod of the head, his lax ears tumbling to and fro from his lanky shoulders. 

“Oh, yes! That was it!” Dorian trotted up to the mare, a wide, curious grin curled up his lips. 

For a long, long time his mother simply stared down at him, her frowning expression seeming to deepen as her brow creased with thought. She seemed to be contemplating something, as far as Dorian could guess. Her whip-like tail had begun to swing back and forth like a pendulum, a usual habit of hers when she reflected on questions and gathered the proper words for answers. 

After a few agonizingly long seconds, Millie nodded her head towards the door, gesturing her son to follow her. “Let’s go to the living room, and I’ll tell you all about them.” She murmured reluctantly, much to Dorian’s perplexity. What was so wrong with his questions? He had never been so nearly shot down with them before. Sensing his mother’s agitation, the little foal dogged her heels into the tiny room from across the kitchen doorway. 

Millie nudged the swinging door with her forehead, offering Dorian a wide berth to squeeze into. The living room was a dismal place, much like the rest of the house. However, such shabbiness was more due to Millie’s shameful neglect. Cobwebs and inch-thick layers of dust ran rampant among the bookshelves and window sills that clogged the small room. A lengthy couch stood in the left corner, wide enough to hold Dorian, his mother and his father all at once if they ever bothered to decide to sit there. For the most part the old thing had simply lain there, unused. The mare walked over to it now and clumsily moved to sit down, her bulky legs curling underneath her form. 

“Come sit by me.” She offered, nodding her head towards the open gap between her out-stretched legs and her belly.  
Dorian unthinkingly trotted up to leap up onto the gaudily textured upholstery, a wide smile crossing up his lips. How long had it been since his mother had been so close to him? Sighing in bliss, the foal nestled close to her stomach, his nose pressed against her wiry coat to take in her familiar scent. 

“Good.” Millie forced a smile and shifted her position a tad to give him some more space. “Now, your father and I have been mulling over how to talk to you about… things. Now, you know you’ll be going to school next month.” She ventured, noting Dorian’s curious expression from her suggestion.

“Are there ponies in school?” he asked, and the smile that had brightened his features was immediately shot down with swift shake of the head.

“No, ponies go to a different school than we do, Dor.” Millie awkwardly murmured. She hadn’t been prepared for such a delicate subject to arise as it had. Still, it was probably high time that she instruct her son on the basics of what life would be like before he was thrust into public education. No doubt if he went in ignorant and naïve he’d be mocked by his classmates. “You see, donkeys like us are… ah… different.” She fumbled, her ears swiveling about in tiny semi-circles. 

“Oh, I know they’re different.” Dorian nodded his head in a very ‘matter-of-fact’ manner, quite pleased that there was something that he already knew. “Ponies have pretty colored fur, and we got brown fur. They got little ears, and we got big ears.” He spoke confidently, his chest seeming to swell with pride.

Despite herself, Millie couldn’t help but hazard a chuckle. “Yes, that’s right…” she murmured gently, craning her neck round to view her son eye to eye. “There are different kinds of ponies too… Pegasus ponies… unicorn ponies… and then earth ponies, though they all go under the same name for one reason. They all gain what they call ‘cutie marks’ on their flanks.” 
By now Dorian was listening with the utmost of attention. His wide, grey eyes seemed to darken in thought as he absorbed every last tidbit of information that his mother generously threw him. 

“We don’t have cutie marks though… what do they do, anyway?” he asked, only to be hushed by a harsh whisper.

“Quiet, Dor. I’m getting to that.” Millie chided, her brow furrowed in annoyance. “I guess we should talk about what they are first…” she mused to herself. “You see, your father and I don’t know as much about them ourselves. We donkeys don’t often go into pony affairs. That’s why you’ll be going to a different, special school.” She frowned at her son’s resulting stressed frown. “Don’t you want to meet others your age?” she asked.

Dorian flinched slightly, and shook his head. “Nuh-uh… not really, anyway.” He murmured. “But what about cutie marks Mother? Tell me!” he lightly head-butted his mother’s side in annoyance, only to earn himself a swift box on his head from a whip of her ear.

Shooting him a quick glare, Millie went on. “As far as I and your father know, cutie marks are a type of symbol that ponies get when they learn what their special talent is. It’s like a tool for them to figure out a career pathway that they want to end up choosing.” She explained slowly, hoping that her son would at least partially understand. “Like, for example, if a filly finds out that she’s good at singing, she might get a mark that looks like a bell or a music note.” She added in after a short pause.

“But why don’t we get them, Mother?” Dorian asked, casting a glance to his mother’s own solidly colored flank. His light grey mane tumbled down over his eyes as he cast a glance, and he shook his head to rid himself of the stray locks, annoyed. “I got a special talent too, right?” he frowned at the thought of not being good at something, anything.

But at his question Millie merely laughed. “Of course you have a special talent, Dor.” She smiled, leaning forward to press the tip of her muzzle to her son’s scalp. “You just won’t get a prize for finding it.” She kissed the top of his head and pulled back to study his perplexed expression.

Dorian seemed to chew on her words for a while, preferring to nestle more closely into his mother’s short fur. The smell of hazelnuts and milk wafted into his nostrils. From his close position he could also smell the cabbage that she cooked and grew 24/7. It was a pleasant smell to him, a scent that reminded him much of his newborn babyhood that was so few months ago. 

“I wish I was a pony.” He finally mumbled, his tiny voice muffled underneath his mother’s soft coat. “It seems really hard to just find out and not know…” 

Millie simply looked to her son in a pitying fashion. “I know you like tinkering with things, though. Remember yesterday when you made me that paper plane? And with just your hooves nonetheless! I thought only unicorns could do things like that.” She marveled. The mare had often loved watching her son build things out of his toys and paint pictures with his hooves; it had been one of the few joys she had ever legitimately recognized as one of the perks of parenthood. 

“Yeah, but that was fun. Finding a job isn’t supposed to be fun…” Dorian muttered bitterly, his little body seemed to tense at the thought of doing something unpleasant for the rest of his days, though his fears were quickly doused by the next few words from his dear mother. 

“As much as I know you won’t believe it, I can tell you that your father likes mining. He thinks it’s fun, and he didn’t need some mark on his rump to figure that out.” Millie chuckled. “If you like making things, why not practice at it and get better? That could be your own special talent.” 

Dorian thought for a moment. His eyelids had grown heavy with all of the new information that was being stuffed into his head, though his mother’s words had most certainly pacified all of his remaining fears. For a few moments, he was actually proud to be a donkey. They seemed so much more mysterious than ponies now, and he had never even spoken to one of the colored beasts.

With that in mind, he yawned and snuggled closer to his mother, his mane plastering itself against her. His fears of school were, for once, forgotten. There are far greater things to chew on for the time being. There was that pipe cleaner sculpture that needed to be finished, and that stuffed cow that needed to be stitched up. 

With thoughts of the short-lived future, he drifted off into the plane between pure sleep and wakefulness, a weary contentment seeming to wash over him before his mother gently nosed him up. Yawning disdainfully, the foal was led into his own little room and lifted into bed.

Unable to find his voice to murmur any parting words to dear Millie, Dorian reached out his hooves for the raggedy stuffed sphere he had made as an experiment in stuffed animal making. It was his own crowning achievement, and his parents had praised him heavily for managing to handle a needle and thread with his bare teeth. 

Even after his mother’s explanation, he still thought of his hobby of making things as just that, a hobby. It was nothing more than some childish amusement akin to playing with friends or toys. But Dorian had never played with friends, as there were hardly any donkeys in the area that his parents liked. Unlike ponies, their long-eared cousins tended to stray away from others of their kind. Their behavior sprouted from their tendency to be horrendously stubborn.

Still, Dorian didn’t mind any. His own isolation allowed for him to work and wile away the hours. He may not have had many resources at the time, but he could still produce little things, shabby and makeshift as they were.

His final month before the impending arrival of his school years crept up like a looming shadow, though even now he could tell you that final month of babyhood was one of the more enriching experiences of his young life, for he was encouraged more than ever to do what he loved. 

It was only when his years of education rolled around that his peaceful existence had begun to turn awry, as short-lived as they were.