Twilight breaks her quill. She goes to Quills & Sofas to buy a new one.

Hyper-intelligent pandimensional beings beyond the feeble ken of conventional sentience may or may not also feature.

- Written for the SALT contest, with the prompt, "Twilight breaks her quill. She goes to Quills & Sofas to buy a new one."

Featured on EqD, rated Star-4.

Winner of the Storybook Vision Looks OK Award
[img]http://i.imgur.com/YYFTket.png[/img]

The future. The singularity has passed, and post-humanity is still here, and thriving. Artificial Intelligences rule the roost, but mankind in all its glorious forms has just begun to take its first steps into a wider, fuller, more dynamic and overall complicated reality.

When a hostage situation and resultant 'net blackout causes havoc at a cafe, a recently decanted ponified citizen is caught in the middle of some very strange goings on, between the real world and that digital paradise they call Equestria.

Time travel is a curious thing. Starlight Glimmer tried to alter the past, but Twilight Sparkle and Spike were able to stop her. Because they stopped her and the past wasn't altered, there's no record of Starlight's actions to be found in any historical archive. It's as if the whole thing didn't even happen.

But not all ponies look at time from a linear perspective of cause and effect. Take Minuette, for instance. She wasn't part of Twilight's epic quest, but because of her special talent, she saw it all. All of the timelines starting and stopping; all of the heartbreaking futures; everything. She even knows what would've happened had Twilight failed to stop Starlight in the end (spoiler alert: it's not pretty).

With all the trauma affecting her at once, Minuette is not her normal, cheery self. Thankfully, she has a close friend who knows a thing or two about freaking out over such things.

Twilight Sparkle conducts an experiment and succeeds in obtaining an unusual flower with some intriguing properties.

What it could teach her, however, might prove to be more than she bargained for. She finds herself having to face surprising—and maybe frightening—new possibilities about the universe. How does it work? What is 'real', exactly? And why are these suddenly such uncomfortable and challenging questions for her?

Pre-reading and editing for this story was done by Grand Moff Pony, The Dobermans, SIGAWESOME, Reese, Georg, LCranston, and Equestria Daily pre-readers 63.546 and Slorg. Many thanks to all of them for helping this get where it is!

Now with an audio reading by TheDizzyDan!

Star Swirl the Bearded, exiled by Princess Platinum and worried for his continued survival, sends a letter to Clover the Clever briefly detailing his views on ponykind's origins, the nature of the physical world, and the future of his species.

Much to her surprise, Pinkie Pie has discovered that the pen is a mighty tool, indeed. When she first tried her hoof at writing, she had no idea what the consequences might be. Now, more is at stake than she ever could have imagined.

Now on Equestria Daily!

Revised version of the third-place winner in /fic/ write-off #3 here and here.

"Author, author!" is often shouted by appreciative audiences at the premiere of a musical or play when the writer is known to be in attendance and they wish him to take a bow with the cast.

Twilight reads a book about literature and, analysing her world, decides that everything she does is planned by someone other than her.

She does not take it very well.

Rated Everyone for adult humour.

now with a reading

Obiter dicta -- things said in passing.

A collection of short stories, vignettes, and delete scenes, mostly based in the Civil Serviceverse and tending to be either slice of life or comedy. Also contains contest entries including FanOfMostEverything's Imposing Sovereigns.

Currently contains:

1. An Afternoon For Dotted Line [slice of life] [comedy]
2. The Game The Princesses Play [comedy]
3. On the Inaccuracy of Proverbs [slice of life] [comedy][sad]
4. The Nature of War [history]
5. On Forensic Accounting & Choral Singing [comedy]
6. Hoofprints [human][sad]
7. Dr. Spinning Top—Specimen Annotated Daily Schedule [slice of life]
8. Love and Other Acquired Tastes [comedy][sad]
9. Any Other Business? [comedy]
10. Songs Like Snow [romance]
11. Civics [comedy]
12. The Other Princess [slice of life] [comedy]

Before beginning the story proper, an explanation is called for.

I am one of those people who can't write except in a fit of inspiration. The story either writes itself or it doesn't get written at all. I'm afraid I've been very dry of this inspiration for a very long time now. But recently an idea has been invading my mind and refusing to let me rest. But unlike my usual practice, I have tried to resist it.

The reason for this is that this particular story simply doesn't fit any easy category. It is primarily a sequel to my previous story “Lauren Faust's 'IT!'” However, while that story was strictly for humor, this addendum is serious. I don't mean serious in any tragic way; I mean merely that this, though it continues the assumptions of the previous lark, is written as a serious fic.

This in itself is troublesome to me. The previous story (which of course you should read before reading this one) was written in opposition to “Cupcakes.” Since so many bronies were running with the idea that the happy, party-throwing, balloon-marked mare was concealing an unspeakable monster deep within herself, I made her the ultimate monster clown, Pennywise from Stephen King's 'IT!'” With one exception: that she's as sweet and good and kind as ever. Because I am adamantly opposed to evil Pinkie Pie, and if she were some sort of bizarre quasi-omnipotent entity of some sort, she would only use her powers for good. It was meant as a poke-in-the-eye to all the “evil Pinkie” stuff floating around on the web, because the “real” (canon) Pinkie Pie would never, ever, ever hurt anypony. She's the comic relief. Her powers are cartoon-character powers, and there's absolutely nothing sinister about her.

Now in this quasi-sequel OmniPinkie is still good and sweet, so my resistance to writing this was not out of any fear of harming her reputation any further in that regard. I have resisted for two reasons: 1)as a serious sequel to a parody fic, it defies classification. And 2)even as a good and benevolent character I don't want to start any “Omnipony” thing about Pinkie. It was to oppose that that I wrote the original story. But after so long being absent and with the idea refusing to leave me alone, I have determined to go ahead and try to write this down.

This is an unusual story, but I hope somewhere someone will enjoy it.

Thank you.

Mystery. Love. Magic. Murder. Truth. These are all important elements in the murder mystery Fluttershy has written, and is now asking Twilight to read. But the novel stars 'Twilight Sparkle', and she wrestles with the metafictional dissonance involved in reading a novel about herself and her friends. Twilight must do her best to solve the mystery, reconcile her own feelings about this ordeal, and figure out just what Fluttershy is trying to say by writing all of this in the first place as the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

This is a thematic crossover with the visual novel 'Umineko No Naku Koro Ni.' No prior knowledge of Umineko should be necessary.
Cover art commission done by SynCalio