What a wonderful world

by a touch of sparkles

Chapter 36: language? paint? ouch (???)

Months went by without realisation which really attested to Sombra’s mood about school. He had finally gotten to the point however, where his ears had a school drama filter on constantly. He was so unbelievably thankful that this method of education was not a thing in umbrum culture.

He and Hope were in his neat and organised room, in which he had found the blocks him and his cousins used to play with. Since they had letters on, Hope wanted to practice Umbrull on them, in which Sombra hadn’t realised she had been taking his old schoolbooks. He often re wrote class notes in Umbrull, which sometimes proved a problem with words that don’t translate.

“I think I’m starting to understand how to write them better” Hope said as she copied the words she had built into a full sentence.

“Is that a D or an M?”

“…what”

“The D’s loop is longer than the M’s”

“why are they so similar?” Hope complained.

“I dunno” she still stumbled over letters that were similar shapes to each other. The other pairs being I and B, then G and S. Sombra realised that they didn’t have blocks for the numbers, so instead he had wrote them down for her.

Hhow good are you at speaking?” Sombra asked her.

“…er…ii…leiikaiee…er…cuuanai’dieelai’s”

“Yeah I figured” it wasn’t quite there, however he suspected it had something to do with the lack of rasp in a ponies voice.

“Do umbrum have an accent?” Hope asked.

“Not sure if it’s an accent or just…dry sounding”

“As in, need a drink dry?”

“I thin-ahk…(Hey Opal guess what brilliant comedic timing you just missed”)

(“Wot”) Opal replied from the back garden, most likely with a beak full of ants.

(“Voice cracked right as I was telling Hope about weird umbrum voices”)

“Do…do you need a drink?” Hope asked.

“No” it was a very small no if anything.

(“How do I get my voice back?”)

(“It should come”) Sombra stared forward just waiting.

(“If it helps, which it won’t, most umbrum bite the tip of their tongue off because of hissing”)
(“No, no that doesn’t help”) Now Sombra sat staring forward, very aware of the position of his tongue in his mouth. He was so focused on his vocal cords and tongue that he hadn’t noticed Hope also staring at him.

“Hey were your eyes always almost completely red?”

“…I think…that’s suppose- woah” his voice had dropped significantly in pitch and there was most definitely a heavy grating at the back of his throat, along with a hiss.

“I think you’re the first colt to have their voice break at school”

Year nine came around and Sombra sounded like the oldest in the school. His voice had stopped cracking in the last couple months of year eight and while he had the six weeks to get used to it, it was hard to when it didn’t match the body it was coming out of. Apart from his new blazing red eyes he was still leaning towards colt than stallion.

It was break and he no longer could fit onto the bench and had to sit on the ground. Him and Hope hadn’t switched tables since year seven. Sombra wasn’t the happiest, for his love for chemistry, was simply not displayed by his grades.

“You’re not bad at it, you probably just struggle with test conditions” Hope tried to comfort him.

“Hmph, just wish I was like you with biology. You love it and your good in tests, when was the last time you got a B?” Sombra kept his voice quite, he often felt his larger lungs would make his voice louder, more noticeable.

“I…I just wish I was better at chemistry to help you” Break ended, and art came around. it wasn’t the most chaotic of lessons, considering most found art, no matter how bad they were at it, more fun than maths. The desks in the art rooms were, needlessly tall, at least they were a comfortable standing hight for Sombra.

“Alright, you lot, I’m going to trust you to use slightly nicer water colour than the blocks, however, I will not hesitate to demote you back to them” the teacher told them, a mare who seemed to lose her will to go with what her cutie mark said every day.

“I want you all to try and paint a portrait from memory, it doesn’t have to be picture perfect, make it abstract if you want, just some form of a portrait of a friend or family member, you got that?”

“Yes miss” The class said in tandem.

“Good” She walked off to her desk.

“Right, looks like I’m in grayscale” Sombra dully joked to Hope. He stood and made his way over to the stash of tubes being raided by the other students, and he took four colours. Black, white, blue and red. It was all he needed, and he decided to ignore the offhand comment by a student about “all the ones in my dad’s basement looked the same”. Sombra stood back at his desk, to find Hope hadn’t moved.

“What…do your parents look like?” she asked, confusion on her face as she attempted to figure it out herself.

“Pretty much like me, we don’t vary much”

“Oh, right” she got up to go grab her own paints. Sombra stared at his canvas, he couldn’t choose between who to paint. He figured, to make life easier, to go with someone who didn’t have their hair loose, which put all the stallions of the board. That also included, from what he remembered, his grandam and aunt. Which left him with his dam and the twins, and they blended into one so he figured he would be going with his dam.

He could easily remember her face, one that had a horn and two eyes. He again, ignored the fact that that face was gone, and focused on the one before which he could remember clearer in day light than in the darkness of the cell. It was almost easy for him to transfer her face onto the canvas, at a slight angle and a smile. She was looking down, it was the only angle he remembered of her, the horn and hair proved a challenge at the angle, however. But there was in fact a recognisable face on his canvas, a nice change from the usual mess of “landscape” he produced. If they started doing portraits more perhaps he would find another subject he liked.

He started to add on the paint, he added blocks of colour with relative neatness. It was then that he added details, but he didn’t try to perfectly blend them, he left each bit added as a rough mark, but intentionally left. He went down the route of more stylised colouring and shading then realism, even if the anatomy suggested so. About halfway though the lesson, he had a very recognisable image of his dam.

“How have you done that?” Hope had been watching him for most of the time, and barely made much progress on her own painting of Miss Chestnut.

“Not sure”

“I am useless at this” she stated while poking the canvas with her brush.

“I figured you’d have more control of the brush with your magic”

“You’d think wouldn’t you”

“Woah” it was a voice he hadn’t heard spoken directly to him in a long time, being Fleur. Sombra wasn’t to sure what to say to her, considering he wasn’t quite sure how she seemed to switch from popular girl to the old Fleur, falling into a looser, less stuck up stance.

“How has your cutie mark not come through yet” she asked.

“Erm”

“Hey Fleur come look at this!” One of her friends called from the other side of the room. Her face twisted between devious bully and regret before she hesitantly trotted away.

“That was…weird” Hope said.

“It was a bit” they continued normally for the rest of the lesson. With sombra being the only one with a completed painting, which the class but them up on a drying rack. The interaction with Fleur through off Hope and Sombra for the rest of the day, it was just strange to see her be kind to some one for once.

“Still confused about Fleur, she hasn’t talked to us in years” Hope said as they walked home from school

“She was just giving a compliment”

“But still, she usually ignores our existence”

(“There is a chance its peer pressure and what not causing bad behaviour, I’ve seen that happen in schools throughout the years”)

(“Who off?”)

(“Those other girls most likely”)

They got home, in which it was now very obvious that Sombra did not fit in the house anymore. In both hight and width he did not fit through the front door without bashing something (he wasn’t exactly overweight, in fact he was very slightly underweight considering the limited source of meat, but umbrum just had much wider shoulders and ribs then ponies). Then the hatch to his bedroom was scratching down his spine, although it gave him a good excuse to practise shadowing, even if still he wasn’t that good.

He did have an option, however. He had a few months back went back to the factory again, which Big J told him if he needed to he could take up the giant bedroom in the top of the factory. The only downside is that it would be quite toasty. That wouldn’t stop Sombra, most of the time he would be out hunting anyway and by the time he got back the factory would be cooling off. What was stopping him, was simply asking Miss Chestnut. But frankly, his spine had splinters, his shoulder and hips were bruised, and he routinely bashed the horn on his head he forgot about.

(“Just ask her mate”) Opal told him.

(“She already proved she hates the place”)

(“She relies on the news, the news can slander a newly hatched chick”)

(“She’ll say no, I’d rather not cause another argument”)

(“Just ask, and maybe show her the mark you’ve left on the hatch from your back rubbing against it and all the splinters I’ve pulled out”)

(“You kept them?”) Momentary disbelief passed through him and his stomach threatened to turn.

(“No, but there’s a big enough dent in the framework to say so”)

(“I can try”) With little to no courage, he headed downstairs. Fortunately she was alone, as Cloud had gone to do some shopping.

“You alright?” Miss Chestnut asked as he met her on the sofa.

“I um”

“Is this about the fact that you don’t fit in the house anymore” her voice shifted from sweet to expected annoyance.

“Yes”

“I mean, their isn’t anywhere else for you to go, so you’re just going to have to be more careful when moving about”

“But I’m getting splinters all in my back”

“From where?” she asked slightly panicked.

“The hatch to my bedroom”

“Oh, well, I guess we could see if Hopes willing to swap rooms” He didn’t even want to think of moving her belongings around considering the mess they made.

“My hooves don’t fit on the stairs”

“I don’t want you sleeping downstairs though”

“It’s carpeted it wouldn’t be that bad”

“I’m not having you sleep on the floor of all places”

“I did it for seven hundred years on cold stone”

“What? No, no. If you do decide to just leave where would you go” she wasn’t exactly asking him, more angry that he would even suggest leaving.

“I um…I’ve been told if I wanted…I er…could stay at the factory-“

“WHAT NO. Absolutely not do you now how much crime exists in that place”

“I’ve been multiple times and I’m fine”

“You…what” he’d never been more scared of a pony almost throwing themselves of a sofa into a standing position, mixed with a scowl of a voice.

“You’ve been there, more than that ONE EXTRA TIME?! And you never told me. Do you even understand how many of them will see you and plan ways to get money to sell you off!? And with the state of that place who knows what you could end up inhaling-“

“Everyone theirs been pretty nice so far”

“So. Far. What do you know if their planning some way to get money out of you” she repeated, there was a deathly silence only filled by Miss Chestnuts breathing.

“How would you even get to school in the morning”

“Get up earlier?”

“Oh and walk around crime central at four in the morning?”

“Not sure if I’m even visible in the dark-“

“No.” Sombra didn’t feel like arguing, so he just turned and went back up the stairs, not wanting to deal with the fact she was starting to repeat herself and the conversation would go nowhere. He made his way back up the stairs his hooves where too big for, scraped his back on the hatch and collapsed on the bed he was also, too big for.

“What, just happened?” Hope popped her head up into his room.

“I’m not to sure, but at this rate I’m going to be totally stuck in this room if I don’t figure out how to shadow properly” He mumbled half into the pillow.

“You are a bit big for the house, where would you move to?”

“The factory boss said I could stay their if I needed to”

“In a…factory?”

“Err (I forgot she doesn’t know anything about umbrum, so the whole bedroom floor isn’t going to make sense”)

(“She’s what, fifteen now? She’ll be maturing mentally but…alright look I never planned how one would go about talking what happened to you but maybe if you…I don’t know sugar coat a little bit and drop it in slowly instead of info dumping her?”) Sombra figured Opals idea would work, he also figured it would be better on him, he didn’t particularly feel like talking about it for a long time.

“There’s like, a bedroom in the attic”

“Do some of the workers sleep their?”

“Sort of, or used to, but its still there so I’ve been told I can have it”

“Would you just have to get up earlier for school?”

“Most likely”

“I mean…when we went on that trip it seemed fine”

“It’s more the surrounding area she doesn’t like”

“That seemed fine to, Cloud would probably let you go”

“I don’t think he could win with her”

“Maybe like, try to purposely hurt yourself more than normal, just to make a point” he didn’t know how much he was going to go along with hopes plan, as he really didn’t feel like having more bruises.

“Oh she thought maybe we could swap rooms but-“

“Has she seen my room?”

“Don’t think so”

Author's Note:

i swear im getting worse at typing by the day. or maybe it's the wide variety of keyboards i have to use on a daily basis. sometimes i question if i ever learned to spell, or type. or anything English. and my brain's ability to function is going down every day, i think school might actually be rotting it.

Comments

[ARandomLonelyDude]

school is shitandpoopoo that hutrts brain

dont be sad, you're tyonig is great and youre cahpter is alos great👍

[a touch of sparkles]

11453754
thanks :) i'm trying

[Radical Gopher]

It may be you have an overly agressive spell check program. I've run into those myself from time to time, as well as being victimized by plump didgets. Just in case, the correct form for a couple of your words is as follows:
there = place/location/demonstrative pronoun (Now there is a good idea)
their = possessive form of ownership of something by multiple individuals (That house is theirs.}
they're = contraction of they are (nominitive pronoun showing action or condition) They're in so much trouble now! 😉

[Radical Gopher]

And if you want to confuse people you could always say: They're over there in their house.😁

[a touch of sparkles]

11454134
honestly i just get in arguments with words grama checks on a daily basis, i'll write essays for school and it doesn't pick up completely incorrect words, and given the fact i struggle to read in general it's rare for me to pick them up unless someone tells me, at least your polite about it.