No Sense In Beating A Dead Horse
“Stock?” Fluttershy called as she gently rapped on the door to Rainbow Dash’s office. “Stock Image, may I come in?”
“The door’s unlocked, and I can’t stop you from opening it,” the specter’s gurgling voice came from inside. “I can’t open it myself either.”
Figuring that was as much of an invitation as she was going to get, Fluttershy entered to see the specter curled up miserably on top of the desk, facing away from her.
“What did Grand Marshal Dash tell you?” she asked without turning around.
“Just your name. I cut her off after that because I want to hear your story straight from the horse’s mouth.”
That grabbed the specter’s attention enough to make her turn around. “You cut off a Grand Marshal?” Her phantom voice was tinged with an awe that made Fluttershy blush.
“Maybe she’s the big tough leader of the Wonderbolts to those of you around here, but to me she’s just Rainbow Dash, my friend.” Fluttershy tapped her lip thoughtfully. “My sometimes bullheaded friend,” she added.
“Yeah, I think I preferred Grand Marshal Spitfire over her,” the specter agreed. “Um, don’t tell Dash I said that.”
“I won’t,” Fluttershy assured. “So if you knew Spitfire, I’m guessing you’ve been haunting the Wonderbolt barracks for a long time?”
The specter swept a few tangled locks out of her face and nodded. “Not too long. Only about twelve moons. Died way before that though.”
“I’m sorry to hear.”
“Don’t be,” the specter assured, waving a phantom hoof dismissively. “It was my own stupid fault. My father, Grand Marshal Daedalus, shoulda put his hoof down and said no when his Earth Pony daughter begged to be taken to work with him.”
Fluttershy blinked uncomprehendingly.
“I fell. Through the clouds.”
“Oh my.”
“Yeah, go figure. Nopony ever found where I landed, me included. And you know what happens to an equine soul whose body doesn’t get a proper burial.” The specter gestured down at herself. “My guess is my bones are at the bottom of a swamp somewhere.” She held up two hooffuls of her ratty, water damaged mane as evidence.
Fluttershy didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. Fortunately, the specter kept going.
“Hung around the barracks afterwards, since I had nothing else going on. Father never knew what to do with me even when I was still alive, so he just kept me a secret til he himself passed on. Spitfire inherited this office afterwards, but she never figured out what to do with me either. Now I’m Dash’s problem.”
The specter glanced over at the portraits of former Marshals on the wall and addressed the third most recent one. “Still trying to figure out how to make you proud of me, Dad. I’m not crossing over to join you and Mom til I can do it with my head held high.” Fluttershy shifted awkwardly from one foot to another, but the specter seemed to have momentarily forgotten her. “Really hoped Dash was onto something with her idea to make me the Terror Of The Academy. I was gonna be this urban legend, an unseen banshee whose very name would make all the cadets stand up straighter at practice and fly more alertly while doing their rounds. I woulda finally been useful.” The ghost of Stock Image shook her head. “Today was supposed to be practice for scaring ponies, but all it did was show me how silly of an idea this was.”
“Where’d you get the name Stock Image?” Fluttershy asked, trying to steer the conversation into more shallow waters.
“From my mom. She was a postcard photographer, and my special talent is-“ the specter glanced at the billowing fog trail that had replaced her flank and cutie mark. “Erm, it was posing for her camera. Not to brag, but I was a pretty cute foal.”
The wheels were starting to turn in Fluttershy’s normally unadventurous head.
“You’re pretty good at hovering,” she complimented.
“Hm? Oh. I guess so.”
“And you didn’t dissolve away when I let sunlight in earlier.”
The ghost of Stock Image huffed with indignance. “Even in death, I’m still Celestia’s little pony. Her magic only hurts evil spirits.”
“You know, I used to watch Rainbow Dash play on the varsity buckball team when we were in school together. And I still come to the Wonderbolt air shows sometimes to show her the same support I did back then.”
“You sound like a very dedicated friend.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose so.” Fluttershy felt her long bangs cascade over her face as she bowed her head bashfully. “But what I was going to say is those old buckball games had something that I feel the Wonderbolts have been needing for awhile: a mascot.”
It took the specter a moment to get the hint.
“Me? Become a mascot for the academy? I dunno. Sure I want to be useful, but... if you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of a skittish crybaby.”
“The most skittish pony I know,” Fluttershy admitted before smiling warmly. “I was like that, once. But I got over it... with help from some friends.”
The ghost of Stock Image still looked unconvinced, so Fluttershy added: “You know, if you go out there and do well in the cheerleading role, you’d probably get to pose for the cameras again.”
Imaginings of both her father and mother’s posthumous praise filled the specter’s mind as her incorporeal eyes shined brighter than the glowstones Rainbow Dash was still scraping off the lobby floor.
“Y-you really think ponies won’t be put off by me?”
“Um… no offense, but I think we already established that you aren’t scary.”
For the first time in a long time, the ghost of Stock Image smiled. “Thank you for saying so, miss... um...”
“Fluttershy. My name is Fluttershy.”
Stock Image' s story continues in the Snippet Series Season One Finale!
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- Casketbase77 · 1.6k words · 82 0 · 1.2k views
- Casketbase77 · 6k words · 86 1 · 1.7k views
- Casketbase77 · 1.7k words · 92 1 · 1.1k views
- Casketbase77 · 4.7k words · 107 0 · 1.7k views
- Casketbase77 · 2.2k words · 132 0 · 2.9k views
- Str8aura · 1.5k words · 67 1 · 1.5k views
- Casketbase77 · 4.7k words · 215 5 · 2.5k views
- Casketbase77 · 1.4k words · 38 0 · 573 views
Stats
Page generated in 0.197 seconds
Total duration
1,118 users online
1,759,429 hits today, 1,996,409 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
This was adorable! That’s a definite upvote from me.
This was nice does it have a sequel because I want to know how the other things go for stock image
Well, that's one way to get a little school spirit.
10127150
Darn it all; that would’ve been a much cuter title for chapter 2 than the one I went with. Oh well.
10126981
Sorry to say this is just a oneshot at the moment, just like the other Snippets in the anthology. I have been toying with eventually acknowledging some continuity between them, though. Might contrive some cameos (or at the very least offhanded mentions) for Stock Image or Vitty in future installments.
Delightful stuff. And Dash is lucky Fluttershy didn't sic Discord on her for that stunt. Thank you for this.
The ghost needs to hire a proper bioexorcist…
media.philly.com/images/20141225-Beetlejuice.jpg
Actually, one of a hydra's heads was yawning at that very moment in that swamp...
1012731
derpicdn.net/img/2018/11/29/1893373/medium.jpeg
So this was cute.
Part of me almost wants to nudge for some kind of follow-up, no matter how brief, but I can't actually suggest anything that'd be enough for a storyplot at the moment. 
10127270
...or that Discord didn't sic himself on Dash, because, well...would you ever know if that guy was watching or not watching? And honestly, I wouldn't put it past him to discreetly do so, at least from time to time, for precisely this sort of reason.
10127319
Then it was probably for the better that nobody ever found the "remains" then. Saved everybody the unpleasantness.
I'm glad Fluttershy convinced Stock Image to do something with herself that's a bit more prosocial than giving ponies heart attacks. Although, it looks like the underwhelming result of Image's attempt to spook Fluttershy was more Rainbow Dash's fault than Image's.
Does she have a brother named Sample Text? I bet he plays a lot of Call of Duty.
The show has a weird relationship with the word "year", doesn't it? Several important things happened "a thousand years ago", but other than that, there seems to be a conscious attempt to avoid references to years. Maybe the preference for "moons" over "years" was supposed to be a way to avoid making the timeline concrete, because the length of Equestria's lunar cycle is never specified, but nor is that of the solar cycle, so what's the difference? Sometimes I feel like the world-building in this cartoon for little girls about magic horses isn't all that well thought-out.
Yay!
You did a great job portraying and older, wiser Fluttershy that is still just as kind of heart.
And Dash will always be Dash.
10127961
Since the show at times seemed to suggest that "moons" was something different from "years," I have often assumed "moons" was their version of "months" (seeing that the show seemed to make it a point to avoid using the term "months")...but there are, granted, plenty of instances where that couldn't always explain it either. Not unless Equestria has super long months.
10128287
Absolutely; I take that for granted. The question is just how long a moon is and how many moons there are in a year. At least in principle, a moon could be much longer or shorter than 30 days and there could be many more or fewer moons in a year than 12.
10128629
If we could just figure out how long the "many moons later" was for The Last Problem, we might at least get a rough idea...
It did surprise me that they said "moons" for that when it was quite clearly "years" later.
Have an updoot
That's actually an good idea for world building.
Good story!
I enjoyed reading it.
And here I was expecting her advice to be to haunt photos.
<Insert Steve Rogers/Captain America "I got that reference." meme here...>
As for the resolution: Seems like a post-marking CMC sort of situation. Guess they weren't needed, which says bad things about both Daedalus and Spitfire's problem-solving/leadership abilities...
This is toooo adorable. I love the little world building snippets too, like sunlight only hurting evil spirits, and the importance of burial rituals.
this fits into the show's lore perfectly
I read somewhere somewhat recently that the MLP staff said in an interview that Equestria runs on a completely different set of rules than we do in regards to the "moons" thing. Granted, that could be a fancy way of saying that they didn't want to bother especially since (cough) everyone knows that kids are dumb and won't care about world building or lore (end cough).
Spitfire was a bad officer, she had such potential in her debut, but from what I recall, they basically just decided to turn her into an unlikeable corporate supervisor/drill sergeant mix, like someone who got advanced too quickly so her metaphorical britches didn't have time to catch up.
The little bit we are told about Stock image her dad probably wasn't too keen on having an Earth pony as a daughter, or at least pretended as such because showing affection is a weak, female trait that stallions aren't allowed to have.
My mutterings and conjecture aside, I really enjoyed this story, and the bit with Fluttershy being the uplifter instead of the uplifted was a definite bonus, a very cute and warm fuzzy kind of story. Thank you for writing.