Having Flashbacks

This blog is meant for those who've read Flash Memory. If you haven't yet and want to avoid spoilers, you've been warned!

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Well this one came together in, well, a flash.

My main way of finding contests to enter has been searching blog posts. A quick search of the word "contest" every few days to check for any new announcements that I can leap upon, and work into my schedule. I had assumed, after Jinglemas and with everyone recovering from the holidays, there wouldn't really be much going on for contests until at least February.

Then I saw this.

"Well, damn," I told myself. "I should have joined the group so I'd see this sooner. I guess I'll have to miss this one. There's no way I can come up with an idea for Flash Sentry and execute it before the 29th."

Then I had an idea literally over dinner the same day.

Whether I did a good job executing it will be up to the judges to decide, but I had fun with it, and, as a bonus, it allowed me to establish a characterisation for (pony) Flash Sentry in my local canon.

It did end up bumping my plan for a fic about Discord until next month, but the Lord of Chaos has a... wobbly relationship with time to begin with, so hopefully he'll forgive the wait.

Setting

Cloudsdale

It's often the little things that leave me clicking on the "Alternate Universe" tag. Like a restaurant owned and staffed by hippogriffs.

It's something I try to work in when I can, that my take on the world is just a little more species-diverse than it looks in canon. The show does imply that griffons are a little more intergrated in Equestria than most nonponies, but when the show would reveal species to the characters at the same time as the viewer, with the implication that all of them have only ever been in this one place...

For changelings, shapeshifters whose entire deal is infiltration and going undetected, I'm less likely to call bullshit on their having been unknown, or considered mythical, before their reveal. Otherwise? People are people, no matter their shape, and people migrate.

So Cloudsdale has griffons and hippogriffs, who can walk on clouds so long as some pegasus magic is in those clouds. There are likely other flighted species there, too, making the sprawling cloud city home. That doesn't mean that they don't face driscrimination or other hardships, and just like the pegasi, some of them may choose to go to land-bound settlements eventually, but they're still there, living their lives day by day.

Characters

Flash Sentry

The spark of the story idea was this: Human Flash Sentry is a highschool guy with a band, while pony Flash Sentry is a member of the Royal Guard. So... what if pony Flash used to be a highschool colt with a band? And then reconciling that past with his present, via his getting to see his old band again, became the framework for this story.

To an extent, Flash is treading the same ground that Twilight Sparkle covered in Ammending Fences, the way that a sudden change in lifestyle can result in leaving friends behind, and the way it can be jarring to be faced with realizing you'd let bonds atrophy from neglect.

I think anyone who struggles with maintaining relationships can relate to how strangely jarring it is to step into a place you haven't been for a while and see familiar faces. That moment when he drooped, realizing that he'd forgotten entirely to write and let the time slip by, is something I'm sure others have felt.

He's also a pony who's on the edge of becoming too immersed in his mark, something that I think guards are especially prone to, since it's a job that requires a lot of work and dedication. It's easy to become, as Shining puts it, a walking suit of armour instead of a pony, and so he nudges Flash to get out and be a pony, when he's started to forget how.

It'll take work to keep from slipping back into old habits, but he knows what he's done, now, and he's dedicated to making it right.

Thunderhead and Deluge

When it comes background ponies, it's a rare one I can't find some information on. For the background humans, unless they're a counterpart of a pony, it's a rare one I can. So for the two guys in Flash's band, I was working pretty much from scratch. As soon as I decided that he was from Cloudsdale, them being pegasi was obvious, and from there I did my best to map their appearances onto the pony form, plus a few years of maturity.

Names are my own choices. Flash's bass player has apparently picked up the fan nickname "Ringo," but I wanted something that sounded more pegasus, and his black-and-white hair evoked thoughts of lightning through a stormcloud, so I went with Thunderhead. The drummer didn't even have that much that I could find, but a big guy who's all green and blue made me think of torrential rain, so Deluge it was. And once I had those names, them being workers at the weather factory seemed natural.

They're pretty much the embodiement of "those two guys," two characters joined at the hip who are always bouncing off one another. Them being so close, in both past and present, helps highlight both Genna and Flash as odd ones out, who both feel the splitting of the group much more keenly.

Genna

Sunset Shimmer, pre-breakup, slots in easily as having been Flash Drive's singer in the human world. But in a world where Sunset is in Canterlot during her teen years, then through the mirror, who would take on that role? I needed an original character, one who'd been the most hurt by Flash leaving to become a guard. Making her a griffon instead of a pegasus helped highlight her sense of alienation, since she doesn't have a mark to pull her away from music, and so would feel more lost when the rug was pulled out from under her.

There's a bit of Sunset in her, which she highlights with her setting-appropriate-leather jacket, but their relationship is obviously very different. The friendships were genuine, and there was never even the entertainment of a romantic relationship, since Genna is openly gay and disinterested in ponies. But she's still the "bad girl" of the group, even if she's kind of pidgeonholed herself into the role.

"Naaaaah, griffons don't do friendship. I just hang around you two so you'll keep the rain off me."

You know those people who subscribe to the mentality of "they can't say it to me if I say it first?" Yeah. Flash noted that Genna still had an accent while in school, one that's only now faded. She's an immigrant, one who immediately got slapped with the stereotype that griffons are greedy, selfish brutes. A stereotype that Genna, being a teenager, decided to lean into instead of fight in order to cope. And it's left a very-much-not-cutie mark on her.

And why a snowy owl and white tiger? When I settled on the name Genna, the translations of it that I could find pointed to the name meaning either "white wave" or "fair phantom." It felt like a fitting combo.

Other Notes

• "Flash Drive" really is the canonical name of Flash Sentry's band. The name is given in the novelization of Rainbow Rocks.
• The title comes directly from the point above. After all, why is a flash drive called a flash drive? Because it uses flash memory. It seemed like a slightly less obvious pun than the one I used for this blog's title.
• The school name of Magnus High is supposed to be an in-universe reference to Flash Magnus. Flash having gone to a school named after a historical figure that he shares a first name with felt like a fun bit of seredipity.
• I couldn't resist a tongue-in-cheek reference to the old "Brad" meme with Flash's full name. With Pinkamena Diane Pie as a canon full name, Flash Bradley Sentry doesn't seem too far out there.
• Yeah, I was taking some shots at human Flash Sentry in the "I bet there's a mare" conversation, I admit, but it was more meant to help give the two counterparts more parallels than the show gave us, since the show was content to make his pony self into an Easter Egg rather than explore him. Both Flash Sentries have a lot of wasted potential, really, and when I do decide to try my hand at an EqG fic, human Flash will get some much-needed spotlight too.
• In another story, I established that ponies have presstoff for a faux leather. However, presstoff isn't very good for things like jackets, because it's made of paper pulp and doesn't handle water well. While I operate under the assumption that Equestria has treatments to make it more durable than real life presstoff, actual animal hide would still have an edge for anything but small peices. With cowhide off the table for very obvious reasons, things like snake skin and alligator skin are more likely to be seen as the default instead of a "luxury" type of leather, and that's why I settled on alligator for Genna's jacket.
• This is the story where I am now officially establishing that, yes, my Equestria is one where musical numbers are diegetic. Or at least they can be. It's a form of magic that isn't well understood, but like in Rainbow Rocks, it does need to be invoked by the wielders actively trying to make music in the first place. And yes, the lyrical allusions in the narration were supposed to imply that they're playing the opening song from that movie. In a world that doesn't have the Rainbooms, that song needed to find an outlet somewhere.

In Other News...

• If you enjoy stories that put a spotlight on under-utilized canon characters, you may like my tale about a young Night Light in A Moonlit Storm, and if you're fond of slice of life tales with protagonists grappling with feeling out of place, you might enjoy Lesbian Sheep Syndrome, or Every Dog Has Her Day
• You still have time to vote in my poll for a new fic for me to launch in February.