The Prompt: I don't think your cutie mark means what you think it means.
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When Mariposa May slipped in through True Blue Spark’s bedroom window, she found him curled up on his bed, one leg covering his face. The remains of his latest project were scattered around the messy room. Oh, boy, she thought with a sigh.
“So... how’s it going?” she asked.
“Enh,” was the only response.
“...Got all your homework done?”
Spark nodded without looking up.
Mariposa sighed again, then went for the elephant in the room. “And... how did your latest blueprint turn out?”
“I’m giving up,” Spark announced suddenly.
“Wha—giving up on what?”
“Everything. The inventing thing. I quit. I’m done.” The unicorn, blue in the figurative as well as literal sense, rolled over and kicked a stray crescent wrench off the edge of his bed.
Mariposa frowned. “Oh, come on, you can’t just quit! Remember how excited you were about inventing some great gadget back when we first met?”
“Yeah, well, a few years of nothing but failure later...”
She looked at that ‘latest blueprint’, which was tacked to the wall next to a dozen others. This one was supposed to be an automatic sugar cube shaper. “Maybe you just need to start a little smaller?”
“If I go any smaller I’ll be working with nanotech!” Spark sat up and glared at Mariposa—or tried to; he was really terrible at anger, so he just looked kind of pathetic. “They just don’t work. Nothing does. No matter how hard I try, I can’t make anything that lives up to my imagination. The gears just won’t fit together!”
Mariposa May fluttered her wings awkwardly. Spark was usually a lot more upbeat than this, and it felt wrong to see him so pessimistic, as if a law of the universe were being violated. “There’s got to be something you can do...”
“Yeah, give up.” True Blue Spark flopped backward on his bed again. “So much for my stupid cutie mark. Guess my destiny is to fail.”
At the mention of his cutie mark, Mariposa’s eyes strayed to it. A large gear and a smaller one, with a spark flying out from where they met. “How did you get it again? You made a TV remote control and showed it off to your middle school class, right? They were all laughing like crazy?”
Spark groaned. “It was a fake remote. We were supposed to make up an invention, so I recorded asilly entertaining video ahead of time and memorized the timing.” He slapped his forehead. “That’s it! My destiny is to make up fake inventions that would never work! At least that’s clear now.”
“Geez, you get really sarcastic when you’re in a bad mood,” Mariposa mumbled. She cast her gaze around the room—and it alighted on a stack of papers on his desk. They didn’t look like the blueprints he usually made... “What are these?”
“Huh? Oh, those.” Spark waved a hoof. “Staring at designs was driving me crazy. I had a dumb idea for a comic strip, so I scribbled it down. My art’s pretty pathetic, but I don’t think the writing’s that bad.”
Well, it’s bound to be better than your automatic back-scratcher, Mariposa was kind enough not to say aloud. She picked up the sheets of paper and glanced at the one on top.
When she next looked away, she discovered almost a half-hour had passed.
“Spark... This is fantastic!”
True Blue Spark furrowed his brow, staring across the room at her. “Uh, what is?”
“This comic of yours!” Mariposa gushed. “I love it! The art’s not the best, but it’s a great adventure story!”
“O-Oh, really?” He reddened, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. “Wow, thanks. It’s just a little something I did for fun...”
“Well, it works really well! I like the six demons and the weird elements you picked for them. And working the last one in with the main character’s missing wings! Did you plan that from the start?”
“Actually, no!” Spark grinned and leaned forward, starting to gesture enthusiastically as he spoke. “I knew from the start the hero would be born wingless, and since he had to unite the feather-winged and the leather-winged tribes, he’d have to get one of each eventually. But I didn’t know how until I decided the demon would have to steal wings to disguise himself. It all just kinda came to me one creative spark at a time!” He laughed. “And it ended up fitting together just like...”
Spark stopped, eyes going wide, and it took him a few seconds to pick up the sentence again. “Like a couple of gears... meshing just right.”
As one, the two ponies turned to look at Spark’s cutie mark again.