//------------------------------// // Paint It Cyan // Story: Foaling With Reality // by Zubric //------------------------------// Applejack, having nothing else to do at the time, suckled on the pacifier in her now tiny mouth. From her shady vantage point she could see the sycamore guarding the path passing by along with Big Mac moving hind legs. The ride would have been almost relaxing if not for the subtle squeaking of one of the wheels on the carriage didn’t keep to disturb Applejack.  The wheels annoyed her more than the usual because her attention span decreased drastically since she found herself in the flesh of a small foal. Also, besides the wheels, another thought annoyed her, specifically, the idea of begin the offspring of Cheerilee and her brother disturbed and confused her, both because it went against Applejack’s idea of a Cheerilee married to the job, and because it broke the usual ladder of power in the Apples’ house in a way that annoyed her (since she wasn’t in position of power anymore.) Soon the school bell tower came into view as Big Mac approached the playground. “Ready to see mommy?” Big Machintosh asked, looking back into the cart as he unbuckled from the harness. Applejack stared at his brother’s soft eyes and sighed, nodding her head, continuing to suckle on the pacifier. Her words were incoherent babbles to the rest of the world anyway , so, even if she wanted to say “No, Cheerilee ain’t my mother,” Applejack would be merely be spinning her wheels, going nowhere. “Hehe I’ll take that as yes.” Big Mac said lifting AJ out, cradling her in a forehoof before placing her on his back and walked inside the schoolhouse. Cheerilee was tidying up the empty but messy classroom as the two ponies entered. By what she getting out of the wooden cupboards near the blackboard contains some grammatical analysis, she pulled out four transparent bottles of paint and a large can full of brushes of varying size and several dishes made of red plastic for keep the paint. Hearing the noise by her husband’s hooves, Cheerilee turned around, and, as she dropped the last three brushes on the teacher’s desk, she smiled wide seeing her foal on Big Macs back, “Hi, Jacky, did you miss your mommy?” she cooed. Applejack, ignoring her surrogate mother’s attentions, scanning the room, thinking back to PInkie’s advice from earlier in the day. Art Class would provide just what she needed for prove that she was an adult. She just hoped her mouth writing hadn’t gone away in her foalish body… or, if mouth writing was impossible for whatever reason, hoof writing. Big Mac gave Cheerilee a kiss before setting Applejack down on the red ceramic floor near the teacher’s desk. Since the bell had yet to be rang, Cheerilee used the spare time to make the last touches to the class’ organization, while Applejack did a survey of what lied ahead. So far, she could tell that, judging from the number of brushes, if all the schoolfillies and colts were present that day, the class would have been occupied by twenty-six ponies; that said ponies were going to sit on desks put in a square formation made by thirteen files and thirteen desk wide. Useless information that still kept the mind of the farmpony-turned-foal occupied until the ring of the bell, sound that startled her, making Applejack turn her head in all directions, trying to find the source of the sound. She stopped mid glance, shaking the foalish behavior away Cheerilee, however, interpreting it as a situation that was going to lead to cry, rushed away from a desk covered in vulgar doodles in a corner towards Applejack. Once there, she scooped her daughter up and held her close to her chest, hushing in the process. Surprised by the reaction, Applejack flailed for a brief moment, before calming down and letting her surrogate mother cradle her. Cheerilee was so focused on “calming down” Applejack, that she failed to hear the sound of hooves coming from outside the room. “Aww,” said a familiar voice from outside “Cheerilee, I didn’t know that you  brought AJ to school!” Applejack, hearing that she had been called, turned her head and saw Sweetie Belle standing at the entrance of the class, wearing a big smile on her white face. Applejack, unable to say a verbal greeting, resorted to a simple hoof wave. Sweetie Belle waved back and entered the classroom. After Cheerilee slowly put Applejack on the teacher’s desk, she proceeded to ruffle up the little amount of mane she had. Applejack waved her hooves up a bit annoyed by the sudden contact. Seeing she did not like it too much, Sweetie Belle stopped the ruffling, smiled at Applejack, and took her seat in the class. Half a minute later, Applebloom arrived, immediately followed by a panting Scootaloo. Noticing that her little-big sister was in the class, the yellow filly wasted not time into trotting towards the regressed farmpony, and hugged her tightly. “Oh, hi Applejack,” Applebloom said. “Eeep, too tight sis.” Applejack squeaks squirming in her sister’s bear hug, feeling more like a plush animal than a foal.  “Careful, Applebloom, don’t want to crush me.” Applejack sarcastically said, as she felt something partially coming out of her “Or force her to have an accident at the worst possible moment.” “Oh.” Applebloom said, as she let Applejack go “Hehe sorry.” Applejack stood there for a moment in confusion, before sitting on her padded backside. Unfortunately for her, what Applebloom squeezed out of her was enough to make the diaper do an audible squishing sound. “Eww” Applejack said to herself, “Applebloom made me do it again.” Cheerilee pulled out a stack of blank paper, finishing up her prep work, only for then notice the smell coming from Applejack. Wrinkling her nose, Cheerilee chirped “Oh my, does Jacky need a change?” “Yes, just do it already!” Applejack whined blushing at the sudden stare of the (thankfully few) onlooking students. Cheerilee rapidly took her daughter in her arms, put the saddlebag on her flank, and ran into the bathroom, so to give herself and Applejack some privacy during the change. Once the bathroom, Cheerilee put Applejack briefly on the muddy but overall clean gray ceramic floor of the bathroom outside the stalls, took out the mat from the saddlebag  along with the pack of diapers, and set Applejack down on it “Let’s get you changed, stinky butt!” “Oh. don’t say that outloud.” she blushed red, as the diaper was untaped from her and tossed away. “Don’t worry, mommy will be quick!” Cheerilee said, getting her baby cleaned up, before taking out an orange diaper from the bag, and staring at it. Applejack rolled her eyes, seeing of course tiny green apples printed on it. “Pete’s sake, now she is deciding which diaper put on me? It’s a diaper, damnit!  I’m gonna use it anyways, so why bother?” Her complaining was yet again ignored, being only babble to Cheerilee, who was still deciding between the aforementioned orange diaper and a white one with a pattern of trees and barns. Applejack soon became bored of staring up the cracks in the wooden and hay ceiling. “Gah. Hurry up already!” Finally, Cheerilee did her choice, and took the orange diaper. After taking the foal powder, she poured it on Applejack’s nether regions, and then slid the diaper quickly under Applejack, not even letting her shiver in peace for a second. Cheerilee hastily put the diapers in the saddlebag along with the rest of the supplies, then she did a small stunt, by pulling the change mat quickly from Applejack’s back, making her fly in the air for few centimeters, for then pick her up mid-air without any damage. Applejack let her foalish instincts win her this time, and clapped her hooves in appreciation and giggled. Cheerilee, after picking Applejack back yet again, soon got back into the classroom. She looks towards her class, which was idly chatting away.  She faked a loud cough, getting their attention, and explained assignment for the class. “Very well, class, today you assignment will be,” she explained, putting Applejack back on the desk “paint, with the three primary colours, a subject of your choosing. Make couples, and start work up.” The students, after forming their respective groups, took their brushes, a plastic dish containing the colours magenta, cyan and yellow, and sheets of paper. Cheerilee, as a way to keep her daughter entertained in class, placed Applejack with the group formed by her sister Applebloom and Sweetie Belle. Applejack, while groaning for the mane ruffling and the cooing she was receiving, tried to think how to use the instruments available to her to make it perfectly clear to Cheerilee she was not a foal. She thought about using the brushes as a pen, she went towards the can of brushes and toppled it, thus allowing her to take one of them. Sweetie Belle and Applebloom, paying no real attention to Applejack’s behaviour, just took the brushes without saying anything to Applejack. Taking advantage of the fact that she was being ignored, Applejack, at first, tried to grab the brush with her hooves. However, thanks to her small body and, consequentially, reduced strength, the brush slipped from her hooves and hit the top of the desk with a slight thump. “Drat” she huffed to herself. Annoyed by the idea of doing that, Applejack reluctantly grabbed it from the bristles with her mouth. However, as soon as the bristles of the brush went in her mouth, the foalish impulse to suckle kicked in.   “Stop it,” she thought to herself concentrating, but to no avail, because her instincts kept telling her to suckle the bristles like there was no tomorrow. It was, supposedly, relaxing, but for Applejack, it was just an annoying reminder of her current state. That is, until Applejack slapped herself with all her might, and let the brush go once again. “This is harder than I thought.” she grumbled staring, at her sister as she fluently used her own brush moving it about with her tongue and lips. As an attempt to get her mind recognize the movements, Applejack looked carefully at Applebloom’s motions, and tried to memorize each step. Naturally, this behaviour went still undetected, because the two fillies were busy into painting, and Applejack had yet to do anything of note. So she decided to try to take a piece of blank paper, dip her right hoof in the paint, and write something along the lines “I am no foal.”  She thought for a moment about it. If she wrote that it seem odd but it was direct.  However, Cheerilee could possibly see it as the typical ‘I want to be a big pony’ thing and she would go nowhere near to escape. Until a realization hit Applejack’s mind: she was a babbling foal. She could not possibly have learned the alphabet before being able to talk.  That alone would raise some red flags about her true state, bringing her closer to her objective. Sure, writing with her hoof was kind of awkward for Applejack, but, since it was her only option, she took it. Applejack looked around her, and soon spotted the few blank sheets of paper next to Sweetie Belle, whom was occupied into doing some circular motions with her brush. She walked towards the stack, took a sheet in her mouth, and walked away. Dipping her right hoof into the cyan-colored paint, she experimented to see how well she could make letters in the first place. So she started to create circles on the sheet, and each one of them was decent enough to be passed as “o.” Then she tried the various combinations of letters, and saw that she could perfectly write … as long she wrote in capital letters and not in block letters, since they looked like scrawls. Apparently, Applejack’s quest for writing wasn’t very obvious to Sweetie Belle, since, after seeing Applejack scrawl on a blank sheet, cooed a “Applejack is a little artist!” Once Applejack was sure about how write her message, and once she got over the annoyance of hearing Sweetie Belle giving forced compliments to her, she went towards the stack of sheets, and picked one up in her teeth, going back to her original sitting spot. Seeing Cheerilee start to circle the room, she began to write her message. She carefully wrote her original idea of the simple “I’m not a real foal” just barely making it fit on the one sheet of paper, and then waited for the results.  Her mother soon came around to their table, Applejack grinning with hope, and waving her hooves to get her attention. “Oh, did Jacky make an art for mommy?”  Cheerilee babied as she went around the table to look at what Applejack had created. As soon as Cheerilee saw what Applejack had done, her eyes widened and backed away slightly, her face full of a mix of surprise and curiosity. POV of Cheerilee. Cheerilee looked at the “drawing” that her daughter Applejack did for her, and tried to make sense of it, because the immediate option… was too surreal to be considered seriously. Faking a chuckle, Cheerilee turned towards Applebloom, and said. “Good joke, Applebloom!” Applebloom looked up from her work, “What joke? I didn’t do anything!” The teacher kept assuming that Applebloom was trying to keep up the façade. “You wrote on a sheet of paper ‘I am not a foal’ and gave it to Jackie.” Applebloom blinked a few times and looked over at the said piece of paper, “What? I didn’t do that.” Cheerilee was unamused, since she was assuming that she was denying it out of fear of a punishment, so she asked, this time slightly more sternly.  “Then who did it?” Sweetie Belle looked up at Cheerilee, equally surprised as her yellow friend “That wasn’t me either!” Since something told her that it was unlikely that another member of the class had tried to put the written piece of paper near Applejack, Cheerilee was left with no other option. Also, her daughter was still flailing around and pointing at the drawing, going “Goo, goo!” and furiously pointing at the sheet of paper, like if she was trying to show off an hidden masterpiece that nobody but her was able to see. “Sorry,” said Cheerilee to the two fillies “it’s nothing.” Naturally, it wasn’t surely nothing, but it was nothing of their buisness, so she had better to gently shoo them away. The two fillies went back to work without questions, allowing Cheerlie to leave the desk and a seemingly-upset AJ behind. As she circled around the class, scanning the work of her students, and making herself sure that nobody was vandalizing the desks, Cheerilee was thinking about the strange happening of Applejack and the writing “Maybe Applejack is more clever than I thought? A genius even?” An image of Applejack getting an unnamed science prize came into her mind, before fading away pretty quickly, at a realization. “Hold on… but how she has managed to learn to write before talking? Even if she was really a genius, she would not be able to do that, she doesn’t know the language. And yet she did write something, in a correct manner, and she had her hoof covered in paint, so the only one that could have done that is her.” Cheerilee kept going around, glaring at Snip drawing a penis on the desk, and helping none into choosing the subject matter. When she had done the circle for the sixth time, the bell  rang again, signaling the end of Art class. Cheerilee quickly clapped her hooves. “Whoever is covered in paint must go to the bathroom first!” Shouted Cheerilee, so to be sure that everypony in the class understood the order, and, in the meanwhile, she tidied the class once again. While doing so, Cheerilee made her decision about her daughter’s strange doing.. “I’m gonna ask Twilight. Maybe she has the answer to this.”