Officially, it's the 'temporary human settlement camp': land set aside for the most peaceful arrivals in Equestria -- those who cannot be sent home -- to live until a means arrives to return them to their birthplaces. Most of the ponies who supervise the place call it 'the zoo'. The residents use New Cynosure. And Ben, one of the earliest incursions, has been there for nearly three years -- the only one from his world to live in New Cynosure at all. As such, he's the one the ponies turn to when someone else showing all the signs of his home comes in.
Someone else from that home just arrived to be given the usual choice of prisons: the cells for those who won't live in peace, confinement under the outdoor shield for the humans who will --
-- or the one in their head.
(Follows up on Tales Of The Canterlot Deportation Agency: A Typical Day.)
Has a TVTropes page and character sheet. New edits welcome.
(Now with author Patreon and Ko-Fi pages.)
I love the idea of the CDA, and combining it with Paranoia of all things works much better than I expected it to. Very, very well done. Thank you for this story.
Ah, OUTDOORS Sector. Still rife with peril.
I'd never play Paranoia turned to the serious setting they put in, but it works well enough here.
I still think of the Deportment Agency as ponies who determine if that outfit you are wearing is really in fashion, or should be thrown out.
You, good sir, are the best. I love Paranoia.
Oh, crap. Now I want a glimpse at that parallel universe with Alfalfa Complex and precisely color-coded ponies reporting each other's treason to Friend Celestia...
Perhaps it wouldn't fly as a fic, but I bet it's worth a session as a My Little Paranoid: Friendship is Treason crossover game. Thanks, Estee. This is the best idea since the nuclear toothbrush.
3163694
There are potentially several million little horrors involved here, but I think the first one which needs pointing out is that you just established a certain unbreakable pecking order as follows, from lowest to highest:
That's right. You just put Rarity in charge.
"Dreadfully sorry, darling, but your cutie mark indicates a talent far in excess of your security clearance, and so I will simply have to shoot you now. No hard feelings, I trust?"
Tyrant Of The Underdome.
And Pinkie stands outside the system yet again.
3163115
Or in this case, you just save time by executing anyone whose taste is offensive to yours.
Really boosts your own sales.
Excellent side story to a depressing yet interesting universe. I especially enjoyed the fact that Ben was a clone (and in the same sense of the word as yours), something of which I have made one of the characters from a story of my own be.
Fantastic bit of world-building. Really well-executed, and it implies more than it states, which I love in a story like this.
I've never heard of "paranoia" before. The world Ben describes just felt like a mash up of all those 70s dystopias. I'm sure there's an insight or two I missed, not knowing the reference, but it was still easy to follow anyway. Good story overall, but a tad slow. So many fun things were hinted at in the start... really wanted to see transdimensional superhuman baseball! Then it went dark and mostly stayed there. It was solid though, and good character depth shown for Ben.
Wow, I wasn't expecting to see Paranoia here, but here it is. And written really well. I love this series a lot.
You know, file the ponies off this, replace them with a magi-tech human or near-human society, and this would would be a TV series I'd watch religiously.
Whoah. A clone from Alpha Complex inserted into Equestria? Excellent.
3189064
"I've never heard of "paranoia" before. The world Ben describes just felt like a mash up of all those 70s dystopias."
It kind of is! Paranoia is an '80s tabletop RPG set in an underground society of clones, all strictly ranked by color codes, who live under the "benevolent" tyranny of a paranoid crackpot AI, the Computer. Computer hates mutants and traitors; every player character is both a mutant and a traitor, who hasn't been found out. Yet. They work as troubleshooters (in a very literal sense) for the Computer and the upper echelons of the AC society, fighting rogue robots, mutants, traitors, Commies, other troubleshooters who've been given conflicting orders, etc. With a good gaming group, it's hell of a lot of fun if you enjoy black humor, backstabbing and mayhem. If you treat it even remotely seriously, it's just plain hellish.
Paranoia mixed with My Little Pony. Brilliant.
Ah, Paranoia. The game my friends all got into that I probably should have too. It's depiction here is very detailed, though I never would have guessed it was such without being more familiar with it. Well played!
Holy shazbat!
Okay, yesterday I left a note on your userpage saying that it seems we've read much of the same stuff. But until I got to this story, I had no idea!
Suffice to say that within a few paragraphs, I knew that Ben's full name would contain seven letters and a number, and I flinched when the color indigo was mentioned. And I also knew, from her introductory paragraph, what the people of Laurie's world call the neighborhood we know as the Bowery. And that's without having read either of the source materials for at least a decade! How it all comes back so easily...
I'm certain as gravity that there are other references here I'm not getting, but even so... if you're also savvy to the names Winnowill, Cirocco Jones, and Mike Callahan, I'm going to have to suspect that you are me, or some close dimensional parallel.
4949404
I had to look up Cirocco Jones. (Incidentally, there's a new novel for Laura's world coming out in November.) And just to test the reading list... the next CDA story will be titled Luna Vs. The Law Machine.
Poor Law Machine.
5045819
Holy crow.
Been awhile, hasn't it? I was kinda hoping that the big numbers on Game of Thrones might lead to some renewed interest in Wild Cards. There's mention of a movie on the wiki page; it'll be quite interesting to see where that goes...
You mean the ones that enforce laws in the Gallimaufry? Good golly gosh, now we're getting downright obscure.
(On the related-via-Foglio tip, it would be quite a thing to see Flim & Flam vs. a Deveel trader.)
Incidentally, I seem to have knocked out a couple of pages toward a CDA story, for some reason. It's not quite a robust concept yet, but if you're interested I could PM you the details.
Reading this makes me sorry I never got to play Paranoia. I'm really quite impressed how you manage to fit the completely different two worlds together.
...And it's much better than the Paranoia novel I read once. Although that could be considered faint praise as it really wasn't a very good novel...
5110860 I played a LARP of Paranoia at a con once; it was amazing. Of course, we died so fast, the GMs had to give some of us extra clones just to make it through a 3 hour session...
Very nice story. I also liked the subtle reference to the Wild Cards novels.
Paranoia's a terrifying world when it's looked at rationally.
It's a small mercy that outsiders who are newly arrived to Equestria get imbued with the local language.
For no real reason, I'm imagining Agatha Heterodyne getting caught in this Equestria and making her way back out within the hour using a heavily modified pizza oven.
no
3189064
Same here: Never heard of the Paranoia game until this fic. That's Estee's genius for you: when she wants to make background knowledge unneeded, she succeeds.
Mad props for the foreshadowing that clued me in instantly to Paranoia on this.
this made me think of that Sluggy Freelance story, "4U city". nearly everyone was daily dosed with LARGE doses of "happy juice", forcing them to smile all day, anyone who frowned was INSTANTLY zapped into a random dimension...like the REST OF THE ENTIRE WORLD...and later the main protagonist, "riff" is terrified that HIS dimension will end up like that!
FYI, "4U" stood for something like "universal ubiquitous utopia"...i forget the 4th U.
Excellent story :)
The moment Ben asked about the arrival's clothing colour things clicked for me... enjoying wearing white, expecting selfcontradictory orders that get you killed multiple times(?!), and then Indigo being problematic (compared to black) - I knew where Ben came from... Happiness is mandatory.
I may have been reading too much of your stuff lately because I was confused when this wasn’t an expletive.
…Or maybe not enough, since I didn’t notice the lack of capitals.