“Look, Li! They’re doin’ the bit!” Vitty thumped her cloven hooves excitedly on the bleachers while she gaped at the performers on the field. “They’re doin’ it!”
“Uh huh.”
Lightning Dust was indeed looking, but it was away from the halftime show and into the depths of her popcorn bag for something still edible. All that seemed to be left were unpopped kernels.
She felt it. The reflexive anger boiling up at being slighted again, this time by a worthless concession stand worker who’d sold her a subpar snack. It was wrong. She’d had enough counseling to know that by now. She had also learned to get her mind off her own ego by giving an earnest compliment to whoever she was with.
“Thanks for inviting me to come to the Wonderbolt show with you, Vitty. You remembered me mentioning I almost flew with them once, which means you’re a good friend who-”
“There they go!”
Lightning Dust’s attention snapped to the cheerleaders performing the halftime show just in time to see the captain vault into the air. Lightning almost laughed at the absurdity of a cheer squad doing aerial stunts at a Wonderbolt show. It was comparable to an amatuer singer opening a Vinyl Scratch concert, wasn't it?
Apparently it wasn't, because the cheer captain tucked into a ball and arced at the stands with alarming speed. Vitty and several others cheered for some reason at the imminent impact, and just as Lightning Dust was flaring her wings to jet out of the way, the cheer captain phased noiselessly through the crowd in a muddy green blur that didn’t leave so much as a tailwind. Applause erupted all around as the captain rose up from the ground back near her support squad’s formation to strike a bashful pose in profile. Only then did Lightning Dust notice the 'pony' had a translucent fog trail where a pair of hind legs should’ve been.
“She’s a ghost?” Lightning Dust had heard rumors of the Barracks Banshee of course. Every past and present cadet had, and promptly laughed them off. “Where’d a Pegasus cheer squad recruit an undead Earth Pony?”
“Stranger things’ve happened in this corner of Equestria,” Vitty reported. “I even heard tell that the local Zebra found a lost Umbrum half-breed wanderin’ the woods not far from ‘ere.”
“Wasn’t that Umbrum you, though?”
“Was makin’ a craic, Li. A joke. Guess it didn’t land.”
“Oh.”
Vitty stood up to let another showgoer pass by on the way to the aisle, and Lightning Dust followed suit. With the cheer squad’s routine concluded and the Wonderbolts themselves not due to come back for another ten minutes, the bleachers were emptying of ponies who wanted to stretch their legs or take bathroom breaks. Lightning Dust spied the cheer squad idling on field sidelines with their intangible leader, laughing at an inaudible joke one of them had told.
“I’m keen to go say hi,” Vitty announced. “Wanna come with?”
Truthfully, Lightning Dust was still miffed about that fakeout divebomb and didn’t want to give the smug specter any satisfaction. But Vitty’s big crimson eyes were shining bright with excitement. Only a stupid pony would say no to that.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
“Go Bragh!” Vitty exalted. “Let’s pick up another sack o’ popcorn on our way, yeah? Noticed our last one is a bit lackin’ in edible bits on its low end. There’s some shameful shortchangin’, if ya ask me.”
Lightning Dust allowed herself a vindicated nod before descending the bleacher stairs after her friend.