Based of PISOT II over on Alternatehistory.com
Princess Celestia only wants to fulfil your values through friendship and Ponies. Never mind that you're a Pony who's only in this mess because you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time because of the wrong career, and it doesn't matter if the Equestria she created for you bears only superficial resemblance to your memories; it's been nearly ten years since you last set foot on Equestrian soil, and it was a sub-optimal version of Equestria anyway...
Chapters (2)
So, if I'm understanding this correctly, he probably was a human, but those memories are permanently gone, and he thinks he was always a pony? But other memories he has, and he still remembers Europe and stuff?
4572638 Oh boy...
This is based of a collaborative crossover timeline game called PISOT II over on AlternateHistory.com (ISOT stands for Island in the Sea of Time; it basically means a mass teleportation of a country through space and time in Alternate History Jingo. A member called Pieman is the founder of this timeline, so it's called PISOT). A while ago, I wrote a regular alternate history timeline called the Edelweiss Blooms, where the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph was assassinated in 1853 and succeeded by his liberal brother Archduke Maximilian (who in our timeline became Emperor of Mexico and was executed by the previous President Benito Juarez), who eventually leads turns Austria into a liberal federation. Afterwords, I brought over this timeline's version of Austria from 1870 (later retconned into 1871) into another collaberative game called LAISOT, started by a member called Lord Apocalipsis. To make a long story short, what happened was that Austria and Equestria became neighbours, with Equestria being in the location of Northern Italy, and became close allies after some time passed. When PISOT II began, I decided to bring LAISOT's AUstria into PISOT II 50 years after it initially started (and with plenty of time to catch up to the rest of the world), neighbouring Germany from Friendship is Optimal, but not Equestria any longer.
High Tide was an Equestrian diplomat who was in Austria at the time of the ISOT; this basically meant that he was stranded in Equestria at the time, and to make matters worse, he (and the hundreds of thousands of other Ponies who either lived or were visiting Austria) found out that their motherland was nothing more than a TV show, and a virtual version of it was assimilating the entire world at the time. However, any existential crisis was averted when the Eurasian Federation (near-future Russia; think Putin on [even more] steroids) invaded Austria, which distracted the everyone (okay, nearly everyone) from doing anything about Celest-AI's growing influence for nearly eight years. Of course, by then, everyone began uploading because their lives were ruined by the war, though the Austrians are working on it (though not enough to help poor High Tide, unfortunately)...
4572856
Too late. So, OK, yeah. I thought the story worked without any of that backstory in the way I described above. So, I think you wrote it well. But if you wanted me to get all that and read the PISOT stuff, you didn't hook me, sorry.
4572906 No, but someone asked me for the backstory, and I complied so people would know the context (and I thought it would be unfair to implicitly take credit for everyone else's work). This is merely a sidestory I wrote that I wanted to share on its own merits.
What an intriguing idea for a fanfiction! I love it! Though I elaborate on the details you have elaborated in the comments in the actual story. Besides that, this story is unique, mind-boggling, and extremely interesting.
What does PISOT II stand for? What is this a crossover of?
So the basic idea is that Equestria was around for a while, replacing Germany, then poofed back out of existence and was replaced by Skyrim?
4591285 Equestria was around for a while, replacing Italy, then poofed back out of existence and replaced by something else. What country replaced Equestria will be seen in the next chapter. I hinted that there was a Germany in that world, a version of Imperial Germany.