Author's Note
Because I needed at least a 1000 words to publish this story, I gave my self an hour and topic of "1000" to come up with something to pad things out. And here it is. I'm not proud of this, but it appears to have worked.
Quills
“You need how many?!” Davenport asked.
“Three hundred and eighty-five,” Twilight Sparkle, Princess “open mouth, insert hoof” replied.
“I don’t even think I’ve got more than a hundred in stock, not counting your monthly standing order.”
“Well, can you order more?”
“Well, sure, but it’s gonna take a while for them to arrive. At least a month. Ands that’s assuming the quill-picking union teamsters don’t delay the process.”
Twilight Sparkle grimaced. She needed the quills to write just a very large number of thank you cards. Each quill would then being sent along with the card to the recipient. And she had no one to blame for this other than herself. It had been a recent meet-and-greet with a school class from Manehaten who had won the trip because their school had raised the most bits during a regional bake sale whose proceeds had gone to support the local Orphan Care and Street Sweepers Retirement Fund. (After the event, she made a note to track down the pony responsible for establishing the fund and have them either fired or forcibly placed in therapy. She was waiting to learn the reasons for the name before making her final decisions of which.)
It had been an off-hoof comment that one of the fillies made that while their school had raised the most, all the of the schools had participated. And while she wasn’t complaining about winning the contest or getting to visit Canterlot and Princess Twilight, the filly admitting feeling bad because some of her friends in other schools hadn’t gotten anything even though they had worked just as hard. Upon hearing this, Twilight decided the filly was right, the others did deserve something for their hard work. Then a small, mottled colt suggested possibly sending out personal thank-you cards from the Princess. Twilight thought about it, and decided that wasn’t a bad idea. Magically writing out thank you cards wasn’t that bad, it just took a little time, some blank cards, and a lot of quills and ink. She could then leave the logistics of getting the cards mailed to Spike. Seeing the happy looks on the little faces in front of her, she decided to up the ante said she’d even include the quill she used to write the cards. The response from the foals was ecstatic.
Then for some stupid reason (she’d later confess to Spike she was guilty of getting carried away with the whole thing) she promised the letters and quills would be delivered within a week. She hadn’t realized that there were over a thousand foals from Manehaten that had participated in the content. Nor had she realized that Canterlot Castle didn’t keep that many signatory quills in stock at any moment. Oh, sure, there were thousands of normal quills available, but wasn’t going to send some foal a dirty quill she found in the bottom of some secretary’s desk. No, she intended to use the good quills, the ones that she or Luna or Celestia used when signing important documents. The ones with the white feathers and the sharp nibs. Finding that many good quills turned out to be a bit of a problem.
Luckiily she had been able to find most of the quills she’d need in Canterlot. Then Canterlot had run dry, so she went back home to Davenport at Sofa and Quills in Ponyville. And here she now was, just about two hundred quills shy of what she actually needed.
Twilight sat in Davenport’s store and dropped her head into her hooves. “What am I going to do? Where am I going to find that many nice, white feathered quills on such short notice?”
“Um.. Twilight, didn’t Fluttershy say something about a family of swans visiting her cottage?”
Flanks For the Memories (Trotcon 2018)
Author's Note
The Trotcon 2018 prompts were: characters Rainbow Dash and Featherweight and the location of "The Moon".
Flanks For the Memories (Trotcon 2018)
“You want to do what?!” Rainbow Dash looked down at the small pegasus before her.
“I need a photo of Princess Luna’s cutie mark.”
“Kid, her cutie mark is all over Equestria. Everypony know what it looks like.”
“Yeah, but that’s just a replica, it’s not the real thing. I want a photo of her actual cutie mark.”
Rainbow cocked her head, puzzled. “Why?”
“Well,” he adjusted something on the camera rig around his neck, “Photoshot Magazine is running a contest that I want to win. I need to take an amazing picture of an exotic location. And I can’t think of any place more exotic than Princess Luna’s flank.”
Rainbow Dash just started at the foal. There wasn’t a hint he meant anything illicit with that statement. The kid either honestly too young to realize how twisted it was or was the world’s greatest poker player. Amused at the prospects, she decided to play along for the moment and see where this was going. “Any why would a photo of Princess Luna’s flank win you that competition?”
“Because it’s a photo of the moon!” RD blinked in confusion. Featherweight rolled his eyes. “Can you think of a more exotic locale? It’s perfectly reasonable!”
Rainbow couldn’t decide if this was foal was seriously out to lunch or had just been hanging around the Cutie Mark Crusaders too much if this was his idea of “perfectly reasonable.”
“Why not just ask Princess Luna to send you to the moon to get a real photo?”
“That seems a bit invasive, if you ask me.”
“And taking a picture of her flank isn’t?”
“She is the moon! She was trapped there for a thousand years! I can’t ask her to send me there. It wouldn’t be right. Besides, she’s got better things to do.”
Cocking an eyebrow, Rainbow Dash asked, “...and asking Princess Luna to pose so you can get a photo of her rear-end isn’t a waste of her time (or weird)?”
“Well, I didn’t want to do that either.”
“Well, what did you want to do and how do I fit into all of this?”
“Simple, you help get me close to her and I’ll get the photo without her even knowing I’m there.”
RD’s other eyebrow went up. “Where did you even get an idea for something like this?”
“From my hero, Midnight Star, I just read his auto-biography about his life as a photo-journalist for the Equestrian Inquirer.”
“A ‘photo-journalist’?” she said flatly. Rainbow new of who Featherweight talked about and “photo-journalist” was the last term she would use to describe that pony. She’d had her own run in with Midnight Star and he was hack at best, a pest at worst. In fact all of the Elements had had run-ins with him; enough run-ins that he had been kicked out of Ponyville with a strong encouragement to not come back outside of normal business hours.
“Yeah, the Equestrian Inquirer, the largest newspaper by volume in Equestria. He’s gotten them some of their biggest stories in the last few years. Like how Princess Celestia is a secret cake fiend or that Prince Blueblood secretly wears Rarity designed dresses.” There was a twinkle in the kid’s eye. The kind that said the kid was star-struck.
“...and what ideas did you get from this book?” She asked, wearily.
“Find the subject of your stories in their natural habitats, take pictures when they least expect for a more natural experience, never let them know you’re there. It lets you tell the truth as you see it!”
Rainbow Dash hung her head in hooves. How did a pony go about explaining to a foal that their hero was nothing more than a paparazzi for the biggest trash rag in Equestria?
