The first scene of the story sold me with how Discord was cosigning the future of his "contestants" to a simple roulette spin.

However, there are a couple of things I've always been unclear about; though might not even have hard answers at all:

Was Discord just being Flippant in referring to our protagonist as a big winner (after the spin not before) or was he alluding to something specific (eg. the unique book Tune received)?

What is the weighting of each outcome on Discord's wheel and does it vary depending on the name drawn? I ask the second part because of the earth ponies in the camp that happened to have been farmers before. I'm wondering if this was just a lucky break or if their occupation biased the wheel towards that outcome.

I post this here because I think it's an essential detail for any spinoff fics that may come.

My guess would be that 'Big Winner' was him laughing at Tune getting the gender swap as well on his first transformee.
Could also be that Discord, while an equal opportunity prankster, believes unicorns to be superior ponies (Not quite as superior as himself of course).
As for the wheel, I can imagine it being random for some, but then there were probably a few that he decided to change in specific ways, that the 'joke' would be just to perfect to pass up. He may have also switched things up with his randomizer, switching to a dart board, or a bingo ball roller, maybe even slots.

That seems like a solid line of reasoning. It would leave open the possibility of Discord having some fun with identical twins and making other exceptions. It would be in character to cheat at his own games.

Do we know for sure if there are stallions that are former women? There are none named in canon, and it seems like some of the hints can be read both ways. While double-checking things, am I right in my assumption that no children were changed?

Sorry for all the questions. I just want to iron out some of the rules of the 'verse.

I actually asked LAP a couple of these and I'm actually trying to put together a Timeline and TF Rules bit to put up for people that want to contribute. So until I finish or some one beats me to it here's some things as I understand them.

If LAP says otherwise though, he's right and you MUST ignore me.

*They have to be at least 18.
*There is no upper age limit.
*Nobody incarcerated or otherwise incapable of escape.
*Someone in a coma could change but they would have to be able to escape (see above).
*Some women were changed to stallions. The opposite was just more common.
*No pregnant women. (I thought that might be interesting, but no, breaks rule one)

Keep the questions coming! It helps to iron things out.

I saw an empty forum and wanted to help make a useful reference, so I'll oblige:

How are the Cakes' foals explained in this canon? Twilight implied an Earth Pony foal was a new possibility for post-alicorn Alexia and Conrad.

Similarly, are Earth Ponies most common due to genetics or by a quirk of demographics that Discord mimicked?

What are the rules for the gifted books?

Can humans (eg. the Mion researchers) learn Equish this way?

Can infected humans be picked? Would Menville have been considered dead to Discord's raffle after he jumped to a new body?

Did Discord discriminately target high-ranking government staff? Any other groups?

Does the regeneration of a removed tail imply regeneration elsewhere? Can an arm be regrown if lost while changing? What if lost before? Can this be exploited to soak up damage (eg. take a bullet for someone else, knowing you'll be fine if death isn't immediate)?

Are ear and tail growth close enough together in time to keep the audience or subject in the dark about the outcome? Seems like a useful device as long as you don't stretch belief with the non-sleeping character not noticing which came first.

Was the book Tune received a prize for being the first unicorn? It seems like similar boons could make the first members of the other tribes decent spinoff protagonists.

I do understand Word of God decides in these matters... unless you are Ray Bradbury. In which case, your book is about censorship no matter what you say.

I will offer my thinking to this, or at least as much as I'm comfortable with, I am just an editor after all.
As before LAP's say on it is Word of God.

*Anypony can have any tribe of offspring (excluding Alicorns), just HEAVILY in favor of the parents own tribe. The cakes beat the odds big time.
*The tribe split is even, any imbalance would be due to location and not over all pony population.
*The books are random(ish), one may be a textbook, another a novel, and another a cookbook. Also not everybody got a book.
*Both Humans and Mions can learn Equish, but not from the spells in the books, they gotta learn the hard way. The spells are powered by the pony's own innate magic. (but if I were to try to get around that I would have a pony hold the book as a human read.) Word of God Needed (WoGN)
*I actually never though of that, that would be a cool idea! I can't think of anything in the story that would be a solid no or yes to this. WoGN
*Discord transformed people from all across the board. The high ranking people just stand out more.
*The transformation gave everyone a healthy pony body. I would assume regeneration would heal things up to a point, remember, the magic still needed mass to work with. Also it's a narrow time frame, more so the more ponies are around. I would think gunshots would be heal-able as long as they weren't fatal, it's small holes compared to missing parts after all. But how would anybody know that they had such a... resilience?
*I think the growth of the tail and ears could be close enough, if say the changes began right as they went to sleep. Being a long sleeper may help, but some people might change faster than others after all.
*Tune getting her tome as the first unicorn seems reasonable, and so does the rest of your logic. But remember, we're dealing with Discord, what he thinks would be useful may not match our expectations.
*I thought it was about how TV was devouring our lives turning us into content, mesmerized slugs, and the censorship thing was secondary.

Boldish42 of the Council of Editors has spoken!!

...I think this may be the beginning of me getting fired...

*Anypony can have any tribe of offspring (excluding Alicorns), just HEAVILY in favor of the parents own tribe. The cakes beat the odds big time.

Well, here's your cheap source of relationship drama.

*The tribe split is even, any imbalance would be due to location and not over all pony population.

The one answer I'm skeptical of (keeping your disclaimers in mind): the stated dearth of unicorns at the camp doesn't seem to agree with this.

*The books are random(ish), one may be a textbook, another a novel, and another a cookbook. Also not everybody got a book.

And now I'm snickering at the newly-minted mare that ended up with The Stallion's Guide to Everything Mare for the extra slap in the face.

*Both Humans and Mions can learn Equish, but not from the spells in the books, they gotta learn the hard way.

Rosetta Stone: now available in Equish. Be sure to ask for our mad scientist discount!

*I actually never though of that, that would be a cool idea! I can't think of anything in the story that would be a solid no or yes to this. WoGN

I also have to wonder if Discord would go through with transforming vital mion staff even if he drew them, for fear of making things too easy.

*Discord transformed people from all across the board. The high ranking people just stand out more.

Drawing even one person like Julie seems like a miracle, but this is the sort of thing that can be handwaved for how it enhances the story.

*The transformation gave everyone a healthy pony body. I would assume regeneration would heal things up to a point, remember, the magic still needed mass to work with. Also it's a narrow time frame, more so the more ponies are around. I would think gunshots would be heal-able as long as they weren't fatal, it's small holes compared to missing parts after all. But how would anybody know that they had such a... resilience?

Thanks for humoring this ridiculous question. These sorts of exploitable details are how story arcs get decided in the source work of my avatar. You are right that in-character knowledge will be a challenge given how poorly-circulated information is in-story.

*I thought it was about how TV was devouring our lives turning us into content, mesmerized slugs, and the censorship thing was secondary.

Bradbury once walked out on a seminar because his audience kept telling him his interpretation of his own book was wrong. Perhaps they are right and can invoke death of the author in matters of thematic interpretation.

If you get fired, you can drag me down with you for trying to dissect tropes that don't even exist yet.

I think I'll rename the thread if this develops more. I invite anyone else to jump in with additional questions/nitpicking.

The only other thing I can think to ask at the moment is if Discord replaces the ponies that pass away before he reaches 2 million?

Is it a steady progression to 2 million ponies, or do the transformations peak at a certain point on the timeline?

I think it was 4 million total, 2 million were transformed at 4 months.

The one answer I'm skeptical of (keeping your disclaimers in mind): the stated dearth of unicorns at the camp doesn't seem to agree with this.
Remember, there were 5 camps in the US alone. I asked LAP about it once and he had locations for 4. Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska (The Ranch), and Wyoming (which was shut down and merged with Nebraska). It's possible there were more unicorns elsewhere.

*I thought it was about how TV was devouring our lives turning us into content, mesmerized slugs, and the censorship thing was secondary.
Bradbury once walked out on a seminar because his audience kept telling him his interpretation of his own book was wrong. Perhaps they are right and can invoke death of the author in matters of thematic interpretation.
I read about that too

3771991
3771750

Anypony can have any tribe of offspring (excluding Alicorns), just HEAVILY in favor of the parents own tribe. The cakes beat the odds big time.

actually, a foal's tribe is based on the parent's genetics. While we have no idea what the Cakes' genealogy is, we DO know that any Earth ponies only possess the DNA of the tribe they turned into. alicorns on the other hand can produce any one of the 3 tribes, and can only produce another alicorn if both parents are alicorns. In addition, the tribe of which the alicorn was before awakening (unicorn for Alexia and Violet, pegasus with Aurora, has a greater chance of showing dominance. AKA for Alexia it would be 40% unicorn, 30% for pegasus and EP. The father would tip the scales in one direction. Or in later generations, in multiple directions.)

Are ear and tail growth close enough together in time to keep the audience or subject in the dark about the outcome? Seems like a useful device as long as you don't stretch belief with the non-sleeping character not noticing which came first.

no, it took hours for Tune's ears to appear. Sleep is the only logical way to give some question as to which came first.

Is it a steady progression to 2 million ponies, or do the transformations peak at a certain point on the timeline?

it peaks out and then slowly winds down over the course of two years, and no he does not replace dead transformees.

More concerning the genealogy thing. The first Gen can only have children from the tribes of the parents. P+E=P or E
However, subsequent generations do have the chance to have offspring of tribes from their ancestors. E+E=P is possible.
The first generation are all 'pure' Unicorns, Pegasi, and Earth (boy there are some possibly negative implications there).
LAP and I hammered this out, so unless I failed to express myself properly, this is confirmed by Word of God.

It seems that the only foals that can be written into a fic set around the time of Alyarin's are the ones conceived shortly after Alexia's. Considering the camps had been open for a few months at this point, I have to ask who is having these foals? Almost no one has accepted his or her new form before Alexia's debut, so how are these earliest foals getting conceived? Rather than the obvious deadpan answer and ignorance of birth control, I'm fishing for demographic details.

Am I right to assume that they belong mostly to the non-gender dysphoric half of the population?

On a related note, were herding behaviors popping up before Alexia said anything? I'd be interested in knowing a bit more about the groups that wanted to be married immediately after the announcement. It seems to suggest that they had already been having non-monogamist thoughts.

3775045 The following sentence is not aimed at you or anyone in particular.
Something I have to constantly remind myself of is people's ability to to be morons. And I mean that in the nicest way really. It is possible that there were some that thought the change was temporary, maybe they were curious, maybe some people just can't let such little things as major life changes get in the way of sex. Sadly on the flip side, rape is also possible.

Curiosity seems the most likely culprit here. Honestly, I would be intrigued, but I still wouldn't just go find some guy to bang.
As for who's having these kids, well just remember there's always someone...

Maybe they were instinctively forming groups, maybe they were dealing with guilt or were confused from the lack thereof. I could see both happening at the same time to different people.

That is the most logical explanation. I guess I projected the crippling depression of those in the Russian safehouse to the camps pre-Alexia, forgetting that their living conditions were also hell.

I had dismissed rape because the odds of two ponies even meeting outside of a camp are so slim. But in light of your previous statement, it's possible someone would suicidally brave sexual assault in a military installation.

When the entire population is in their physical and sexual prime, stupidity becomes even more believable; look no further than to the Olympic Village.

Such accidents can work to dispel the illusion of temporary change by hammering home that any children will also be like them--as will their children's children.

Or maybe I'm just trying to convince myself that such details fuel anything other than clop.

One more thing: does Discord exempt the married from the raffle? Would he even recognize its cultural relevance?

3780280 I actually plan to explore the whole marriage thing in my story... If I ever get to it.
Sex is a fact of life just like food, sleep, The toilet(where available) and death. To ignore it would be very limiting. That said, we also limit ourselves if we focus on it too much(in both story and readership).
I'm not going to write clop, but I'm not going to stop anyone from it... Not that I could.
Also I don't think discord would particularly care about marriage.

3780344

I've thought about invoking the fact that with a population less than 2 million (quite likely after the devastation of the Earth), the ponies pretty much need foals from almost everyone considering the generational bottleneck. It's the type of sociological problem that would take sophisticated modeling to begin to properly grasp at the implications.

Yet even framed like this, bringing it up still feels like I'm invoking perverse Strangelovian, "for the survival of the species" rhetoric by implying the 3:1 gender divide be exploited fully.

One thing I'm convinced will happen regardless is government subsidies for unicorn foals/herds with the objective of leveraging a newfound resource.

3780420 I am not a biologist or geneticist... I really typed that didn't I? Anyway.. Herding would certainly help, but the population isn't all in one spot. If it were, I would assume the pony pop would be enough to be fine without forcefully guiding their 'development'.
Of course Discord may have done something to make it a non issue, at least for a while.
I think we're gonna need WoG on this one.
BTW I love Dr. Strangelove, it's frickin' hilarious.

Forcefully guiding the development is what I was afraid I was implying actually.

The risk would be more irrelevance than extinction. When you're <0.1% of the population, you run the risk of being overlooked in policy. Alexia and others would fight hard to avoid this, but then you get a convincing counterargument that she's fighting for privilege of a vocal minority. This doesn't even have to relate to civil rights: the ponies will have to essentially demand the modern world be redesigned to accommodate them--from chairs to buildings.

It's really just another feather to put in Alexia's cap: she indirectly convinces her "subjects" that the species is worth continuing.

I just thought about invoking some of these ideas; I feel like they could reinforce the biological side of the whole new species deal. I'm wondering if my half-formed idea for a fic would benefit from such thought experiments or if they would make it resemble a dissertation.

3781371 Remember, the human race is about to take a serious hit in the the population. We never are told the exact damages, but they had to be significant right? Between food shortages, mion attacks and people turning to ponies, I figure some people are going to panic, starve, commit crimes etc.
I could be wrong though and it may have been infrastructure that took the biggest hit. However that would allow the opportunity for humans to accommodate ponies into the reconstruction.
Personally I imagine that eastern style trough toilets would find popularity among ponies. If that seems really random a thought sorry. It is the little things that would change though, the things of everyday life.
I'd kinda imagine how things would be for a very large dog and go from there.
The ideas could be good and help with world building, it really would be in how you present them. Is it something the characters notice about their new situation? Or are you telling it straight to the reader? Etc etc.

3781490

Considering LOTR has been half-jestingly referred to as Tolkien's excuse to develop his elven languages, I think we can have confidence in this model of developing stories. The idea of fan fiction with those kind of in-depth appendices greatly amuses me. It seems like you've done enough work to make an index by now.

I'd answer your possibly rhetorical questions, but I don't think I should show my hand. Is there a better way to have such a dialogue? I'm fairly new to groups and how they handle it.

3781687 could just PM me

Some news I got from LAP in conversation about things and this came up. Casualties.

The current population is about 7.125 billion, let's assume they had about the same.
3/4 of the population is dead at the end.
That's roughly 5.344 billion. 35 million of which were turned to mions.
4 million ponies, 1 million dead due to various reasons.
1.781 billion human survivors.

My reaction was Holy Shit... Ughhh.. I'm sad now, and this is fiction!

3785337

I had imagined both human and pony populations at 50%, but those numbers actually make a lot of sense now that I think about it. Modern civilization is strong for its independence, and precision targeting of certain industries would cause a chain reaction quickly.

On the other hand, the ponies were largely forced off the grid, and they can graze whereas most of us don't grow our own food.

I've got two questions. Both related to the unexpected growth of a tree of harmony.

1) Is this a sign that earth's ecosphere is shifting more towards that of Equestria's? We've already seen the effects of Earth Pony magic on the land and produce and pegasi on weather manipulation. Twilight's comments before activating the mirror portal seems to be hinting that the tree produces and radiates mana as well. Would that in turn increase earth's overall ambient mana levels? I know it's a big jump for one tree to do, but combined with Tina's comments about the mana levels in Trinity and knowing that there are a couple million ponies on earth...

2) This tree was seeded when Alexis and her herd calmed her down from her Nightmare. Does that mean that there was another alicorn before the Celestia and Luna in this canon? I would propose that the Fires of Friendship from the Hearth Warming story might have seeded the Tree of Harmony under the castle, but the descriptions don't match, even if it might possibly fit in the timeline.

3789205 The tree has been forming since the day the royal herd was formed. It is pumping out mana, but it's localized for now. Magic is spreading out, filling the Earth and it's going to take quite awhile, eventually the Earth will become like Equuis once it reaches a heavy enough saturation(not a complete copy though) There isn't going to be a sudden influx of sentient animals (just yet anyway) but eventually pretty much everything will be infused with magic. Including Humans.

Sadly it will take a while. The people of Trinity may see their grandchildren or great-grandchildren develop carbuncles and sling spells though. The soonest humans will be gaining magic would be 60 or so years, and if I understand LAP correctly they'll be born with them, people aren't just going to spontaneously get magic. Magic's got to work into the genetics first.

The Tree of Harmony in Equestria is an unknown however. It could have been formed by just regular ponies, but that probably won't come up in the canon story.

On more question on the mana levels on earth! I can infer that the ponies are naturally inching the mana levels up, again based on Tina's comment on Trinity, did all that mass to mana conversion that was first noted during Crimson's transformation add to it as well?
Okay... kind of an obvious question, I suppose...

A less obvious one; We've heard a few comments about how some of the world has been faring, Europe, Africa, other parts of the US. How did Canada fare during all this?

I ask because I'm considering doing a side story and might be considering running a pen and paper RP based on this world, and also because I'm Canadian and always want to know how Canada fares in everything. Discussions with friends have us going back and forth over whether or not American and Canadian administration would work together (it doesn't help that two of us are Stargate fans were the US and Canadian military does work together on the issues, far more so than any other nation). Then I've been considering all of Canada's open land and whether it would be viable for pony start up settlements and how the Brown Clouds would work there considering how scattered the population is...

Yeah, I'm a Canadian Busy-body theorist.

3790785
"Sentient animals"
*Twitch*
Boldish, please! *Dies*
Sapient = Like humans, Sentient = Like animals
~this was a message from your local grammar PAP~

3828991

You probably already recall a line somewhere about how Canada quickly followed the U.S. in pony policy affairs, although that could have been in Alyarin's fic now that I think about it.

It seems equally possible that Canada's wide-open land would be easily overrun with mions, much like the rural south. It sounds like even more of a logistical nightmare to clear it out.

3841322 How well do Mions take the cold?

3841357

As long as they are not Shyamalan's aliens they should be able to handle a little frozen water. If I were designing an alien parasite I'd certainly make it adaptable to various environments. If not, I'm sure someone like Tzadavek could manage the logistics of cold weather survival for large numbers of pseudo-zombies.

If they built a secret lab in a desert, I think they can figure something out with the vacant parts of Canada.

Of course, like Boldish, I'm hardly Word of God. I'm not even word of Dante until I get my own fic up.

3841466 Suffer Mions! Suffer in the bitter bite of Canadian Winters! Hopefully the wild ones clear out for self preservation reasons...

Actually, considering the Desert Base, it's likely regular Mions don't handle the bitter bite of the cold any better than we do and they would need to engineer a special strain for it outside of typical bundling up. Which is good news for the future of Canada. The cold might chase the wild ones away!

Why yes, I'm very protective of my Canada, even if we don't have many people up here.