Finding something to occupy my time isn’t too hard. After taking some time to walk around and see what the town has to offer, I settle on relaxing in the park. I settle in on a park bench, ending up in something akin to a loafing position, with my legs tucked under me comfortably.

I take a deep breath and work on pulling myself together. While the tranquil environment and pleasant weather are certainly helping to soothe my anxious soul, the uncomfortable revelation I had uncovered within myself while speaking to Cheerilee is having more of an effect on me than I would like. I won’t act like it isn’t to be expected that I would come undone a bit at the thought of being forever severed from the attachments of my previous life. I’m trembling a bit again just thinking about the existential dread the concept drags up and out of me.

But it just isn’t practical for me to indulge in that sort of self-pity right now. I can’t afford to be anything but at the top of my game here. I need to stay strong, at least until I can get through the rest of today. Once I have done everything I can do to make this situation better…then and only then can I allow myself to break down for a while and try to process these feelings.

As I mull this over, I hear a feminine voice call out to me from the corner of my awareness. “Why the long face there? What’s got you down, huh?”

I look towards the source of the voice and find myself face-to-face with a unicorn mare a few feet away from the bench. Even from my sitting position, she had to tilt her head back a bit to meet my eyes.

Her bright aquamarine eyes shine with a bit of…excitement? Excitement as she looks up at me with a slightly concerned-looking smile. Her coat is a soft lavender, with a wavy, flowing mane and tail sporting a streak of lighter purple through a pastel cotton candy pink, a horn like mine adorns her head, and on her flank is a Cutie mark depicting a shooting star surrounded by a few smaller stationary ones.

“Oh, uh…nothing too important, I guess. Just worrying about some stuff.” I mumble as I avert my gaze. I avert my gaze and say softly, my ears flattening on top of my head, showcasing the shame that is every bit as evident in my voice and body language. “I’m new in town and I’m having some, uh…trouble getting settled in. I wasn’t planning on moving, you see. I don’t have anything set up, so I’m floundering a little.”

“Oh! Well yeah, that does sound like it would be a bummer. My name is Stardust. Is this seat taken?” She asks as she gestures with her head towards the empty spot on the bench beside me. “You sound like you could use someone to talk to.” She says as she moves a bit closer, her smile getting slightly wider.

I swallow softly as she asks and offers, my head lowering slightly more than before until I am nearly at eye level with her. “I mean…I wouldn’t want to impose on a stranger,” I mutter softly, head shying back from her just a smidge as she comes in closer. She seems nice enough, at a glance. But there is…something about her that is giving me a weird feeling.

“Horsefeathers! What kind of mare would just leave a sad-looking stallion all on his lonesome,” she declares firmly as she trots over to the other side of the bench and makes herself comfortable, a little closer to me than I would have liked. “I don’t think I got your name, big guy.”

I don’t have room to scoot away, so I tolerate it for now and offer her my best attempt at a thankful smile. “O-oh yeah uh…sorry. I’m Rose, Rose Tint.” I say as I tilt my head slightly and appraise the mare further. What exactly is her game…

“Rose? That’s a very nice name, it suits you.” She says as she places a hoof between me and herself on the bench. She looks down towards my saddlebags and frowns for a moment before turning her gaze back to mine. “So, you said you are from out of town, exactly where are you from then?”

“Well, I’m from the Colonies, Louwhinnyana specifically,” I say as I watch her hoof slowly slide closer to me from the corner of my eye. Is she trying to steal something from me? There isn’t anything in my saddlebag, so I won’t bother with calling her out for now. Honestly, having company is helping me take my mind off of things either way.

“Oh! A Colonist? That’s interesting. I hear that the Disparity out there isn’t quite as bad. The culture is a bit more…progressive as well. I mean, I think it’s really great.” She says quickly after pausing as if to correct herself.

I give a small smirk and a shrug. “I wouldn’t know. There weren't many other ponies in my area while I was growing up. I was kind of uh, adopted.” I say, delicately spooning out just a dab of the truth to keep the conversation going.

“Adopted, huh? By non-ponies? I can’t imagine what that would be like,” she says, tilting her head a bit, seeming genuinely curious, her cheerful demeanor seeming to become more bright as she sees my smirk. “Ah, there’s a smile. You really should smile more. You look handsome when you smile.”

I blink a few times as I process what she had said, not sure how to take it. I end up deciding to just take the compliment. “Oh, well thanks. I guess I just don’t have a lot to be smiling about right now is all, sorry-EEP!”

I feel her hoof slide over my flank, squeezing it before she lets go and slips it into my saddlebag, pulling it back out. My heart pounds in my chest as a renewed sense of discomfort and anxiety sets in. “H-hey, what are you-”

She interrupts me with a small chuckle, throwing her mane over with a flick of her neck. “Well, maybe what I just left in your little saddlebag there can fix that. If that farmhoof isn’t doing it for you, feel free to come and see me sometime, I know how to make sure a stallion has his needs met.” She says with a small wink before slipping herself off of the bench and trotting away with a satisfied, almost smug look on her face.

“W-what did she mean by that…” I say with a small almost-whimper as I reach into my saddlebag to see what she had left inside. I pull out a small folded piece of paper and about twenty golden coins emblazoned with a picture of two winged unicorns on one side and some symbols I did not understand on the other.

Unfolding the letter reveals further writing I find myself unable to decipher, though the exes and os that follow whatever the message is make the intent obvious enough.

I feel my face turn a bright red with shame as I quickly tuck the paper and coins away again, hoping no one had seen them. I think…I think someone just tried to pick me up. Normally, I would feel immensely flattered, but there was something about the way she did it that left me feeling...dirty.

I do my best to shake it off, giving a small shudder and mentally making a note to perhaps try to avoid that mare in the future. I don’t have much time to dwell on it right now, It looks to be about time for me to get a move on to the library. The sun is falling slowly closer to the horizon, so I probably only have a few hours until I need to be back at the farm for dinner.

The library is just as easy to find as Cheerilee had led me to believe. Just head for the gigantic tree in the middle of town. Really, it would have been more impressive if I had somehow fucked it up. I approach the door of the library and give three firm knocks, following it up by announcing myself. “Cheerilee? Are you in there? It’s Rose, Rose Tint. I’m here for our lessons.”

The sound of a lock clicking open is quickly followed by the door swinging open, revealing Cheerilee, flashing me a warm smile as she steps to one side and gestures for me to enter with her hoof. “Oh! Rose, there you are. I was beginning to worry you might have gotten lost. Well, come on in. I think we should have enough time to cover most of the bare basics this evening. How was your afternoon? A little better than the morning, I hope.” she says as I walk inside, closing the door behind me.

As I enter, I give her a small nod and manage to muster a sincere, if small smile for the kindly mare. “Oh, it was alright. I mostly sat at the park and tried to relax a bit. It’s just been such a hectic day, I was hoping that a bit of time to myself might help me pull myself together. Some weird mare grabbed my a-uh…my flank and left money in my saddlebag, which was really weird but other than that It wasn’t too bad.

As I mention what happened to me, I see Cheerilee stiffen up, a concerned expression set on her features as she walks over to me and tries to play it off with a smile as she asks in a lightly strained tone. “Wasn’t that bad? Do you mean this mare touched you without you wanting her to?”

I blink a bit and nod, not sure where she was going with this. “I mean, I guess so. I think she was trying to pick me up, she left this note in my saddlebags.” I say as I pull the note out and present it to her with a mild vexation written across my mug. “I can’t read it, but I think I know what she was trying to get across.”

Cheerilee takes the note from me gingerly and opens it, and as she reads it, her frown quickly deepens and with a small sigh she crumples it up, tossing it into a wastebin nearby. “It’s nothing that I think you would want to hear about, Rose. You’re…taking this awfully well.”

“Well, yeah. Where I’m from the stallion is generally expected to be the one initiating that sort of er…contact. I mean, granted if I did what she did back home to a mare I would be slapped,m but all of the guys I know would say I’m lucky that she-”

“Rose.” She says simply, cutting me off with a firm, quiet utterance of my name. “I don’t know how things work where you are from, but I do know that if somepony is touching you or talking to you in a way that makes you uncomfortable, that isn’t okay. If somepony does that to you again, you are completely within your rights and expected to tell them you aren’t comfortable with it.“ she says as her glare softens into a sympathetic, almost pitying expression. “Okay?”

“Oh uh…yeah, I guess that makes sense.” Reversed gender roles or not, creeping on someone the way she did was pretty shitty, actually. Then again, I did always have a bit of a hard time sticking up for myself. “Sorry, I didn’t know…”

“You don’t need to apologize, you didn't do anything wrong,” she reassures me, shaking her head and giving a small sigh. “Come on, let’s get settled in, I have a few books already pulled for you, you can take them home after we-...o-oh sorry, I-”

“Heh, now it’s my turn to tell you not to apologize. It’s not your fault.” I say back to her. The reminder of my situation did sting a bit, but I know she didn’t mean anything by it. “Getting settled in sounds good, let’s do some learning.”

Once we had worked past the initial awkwardness of the meeting, the actual teaching went fairly well! We started simple, With Cheerilee bringing out the books she had mentioned selecting for me earlier. “Now, before we begin, I just want to make sure I understand your current level of competency correctly, can you read or write at all?”

I think about how to answer this for a moment, rubbing at my chin as I lean back in the chair I had been provided. “Well, I can read and write, pretty well actually! Just not in whatever sort of script you use here. I won’t be starting from zero, since I speak the language fluently as well. I just need to learn the basics of how to read the written language you all use here.”

A weight seems to slump off of her shoulders at this and she gives a small sigh. “Alright, I was hoping something like that might be the case. That’s going to make this entire experience a lot less stressful for the both of us.” she says with a very notable tone of relief in her voice as she opens one of the books. “Let’s start with trying to memorize the alphabet, then we can move on to the different sounds the combinations of letters can make.”

As it turns out, the Equuish alphabet is almost a bar-for-bar translation of what I’m already familiar with. It will take a bit of getting used to the differences.

All of the consonants have a unique and individual line stroke, annotated with additional strokes to indicate things like changes in how c or g are pronounced, for example. All of the vowels have symbols that work in much the same way, and syllables are rendered as combinations of the line strokes and symbols in different combinations that are then strung together to form full words phonetically.

As Cheerilee does her best to explain this to me, I studiously take notes in English. Within about 45 minutes, I have a handy dandy cheat sheet which should, in theory, allow me to (albeit a bit slower than I would like) read most Equuish script without too much difficulty, penmanship of the writer notwithstanding.

As I am wrapping up my notes, Cheerilee seems to take a glance, then another at them, her interest seeming to be piqued. “Huh, that’s an interesting script. It kind of reminds me of Old High Germane script.”

“Does it? I wouldn't know much about that sort of thing.” Lies, dirty lies. I was a bit of a nerd back home. Wait, why am I lying about that? Just a gut feeling I guess. I feel a bit paranoid about the observation for whatever reason.

“I suppose that you wouldn’t,” She says with a small shrug as she pulls over a small stack of additional books. “But hopefully I can fix that! In the meantime, I have some books for you to take with you to read.”

“Oh! Well thank you, I’ll try to take good care of them,” I say as I fight back a small exasperated chuckle at the feeling of being actively glad to have a homework assignment. I take a look down at the provided books and try to parse the titles.

A Brief History Of Equestria
A Pony Guide to Growing Up: A Reference for Developing Teens and their Bodies.
Fantastic Beasts of Equestria
Your Horn and You: A Magic Student’s Primer
Simple Spellcasting: A Practical Guide to Beginner Level Arcane Spells
Notable Places and Famous Faces, 998th Edition
Equestrian Mythology, Vol. 1

I click my tongue as I peruse the titles before turning back to Cheerilee. “A lot of these make sense, but uh…not that I am complaining, but why the teen book and the magic stuff?”

She chuckles softly at the question and gives me a knowing look. “Well, I thought A Pony Guide to Growing Up would be useful for a pony who hasn't grown up around other ponies. There might be a few things in there you don’t know about yourself. For instance, a healthy unicorn in his prime like you should be using magic a bit more often if he wants to avoid developing long-term complications from the buildup of arcane energy damaging his horn and thaumic system. And considering I have never met a unicorn who would willingly try to use their mouth or hoof for writing over their horn, I made the assumption that you might not know how to use it, which is why I included Your Horn and You and Simple Spellcasting. Honestly, if that is how you go about your day-to-day, it’s a miracle you haven’t developed Shimmerhorn Disorder yet.” she says as her look shifts to a sterner one as she lectures me in that tone one would expect from a schoolmarm scolding a lax or deficient student.

“You were uh…correct in your assumptions, thank you for looking after me,” I say with a small, admonished voice as I collect the books and place them in my saddlebags, my ears laying flat on my head again at her firm tone.

As she sees this her expression softens again and she gives a little sigh. “Oh come on, now. No need to wither under me like that, I’m not mad. And you’re very welcome. Speaking of looking after you…” She looks one way, then another before leaning in to speak in a more quiet tone. “I went to speak with Mayor Mare before our lesson, and you have an appointment to go and talk to her about your…housing situation in the morning. In the meantime, I *can’t* help you. I will have to ask you not to use the key underneath the doormat at the front door to come into the library during the evening, and I really have to make sure you know that you shouldn't make your way up those stairs to the guest bedroom nook overlooking the library proper on the second floor and sleep there tonight if you cannot find anywhere else to sleep. Can I count on you to remember not to do that, Rose?”

It admittedly takes me a few moments to catch on to what she is trying to tell me, but with how thick she is laying it on it is only a matter of time before it clicks and I give her a thankful, conspiratorial little smile. Oh what the hell, I get a bit swept up in my gratitude and scoop the mare up into a big bear hug, pulling her in close with a small sniffle. “Thank you Cheerilee, thank you very much, thank you…”I mutter repeatedly into her ear as I feel the fur on my face and her shoulder start to get a bit wet.

She seems to tolerate it and hugs her back, gently patting me on the back until I willingly let her go. I reach into my saddlebags and offer her the coins I had been given earlier. “H-here, I can't just accept this without doing something for you. I know it probably isn’t-”

“No,” she says firmly, and flatly, pushing my hoof full of coins away from her with a stern expression once more. “This isn’t just charity, Rose. It’s an investment in protecting my newest student. You seem to be articulate, and bright, if a bit slow in terms of…social interaction. I think if you are given the opportunity to succeed, you will. All I want you to do for me is your best, okay, Rose?”

Oh wow. Never have I needed to hear something so badly and not known until I heard it. I choke up a bit, so instead of responding verbally, I nod.

“Good. I’m going to get out of your mane for now, then. Please be mindful not to make a mess, and feel free to read whatever catches your interest here, not just what I picked out for you, okay?”

I give another little nod, and she smiles softly at me before making herself scarce. “There’s food in the fridge, but it’s all for me, so feel free to help yourself, goodnight, Rose,” she says before closing the door behind her.

After she leaves, I sit there silently for about ten minutes to make sure she’s gone before I put my head in my hooves and let myself come undone a bit, sniffling as I allow myself to feel. I can’t dice it any other way with myself, I have gotten insanely lucky today. There was no guarantee that any of that was going to happen. But it did happen, and honestly I’m incredibly grateful for it.

Even so, I feel particularly pathetic. Look at me, thinking I could just waltz into an entirely new world half-cocked and just slot myself into place amongst all of these strangers like I was meant to be there. I was only kept from being homeless tonight by a combination of dumb luck, societal expectations, and immense pity from the ponies around me.

Which makes it all the more important that I do not squander the opportunity I have been given.

I give one more sniffle and start sucking it up, putting it back in the bottle for the time being. I’ve indulged in it enough for right now, there is still more I can do to make my situation better. Time to lock in and do some studying for the hour or so I still have before I need to go and have dinner at the farm. I think I want to start with the magic, that was the thing I was excited about the most after all.

I wipe my eyes with the fur of my foreleg one final time and pull the book back out of my saddlebag, pull out my cheat sheet, and start reading.

And there we go! Look at me successfully stringing together a sequence of events where I am completing introduced plot points before adding new ones to the mix. Let's hope I can keep that going for the rest of the rewrite and beyond. Hope you guys are enjoying this btw, I am really doing my best to make sure that this is an upgrade from my first attempt, and I hope that shows ^^.