First Contact. It was all over the news, how could it not be? A station could be heard, if one tuned into the right AM station. It played on repeat. It came from outside this world. Was it in peace? What did it mean?

Done entirely on whimsy, though I can blame the folks in #writing-chat on the Fimfic Discord.

Join the special community of folks who like my stories and/or get your own here at Patreon!

Don't want to do an ongoing thing? You could buy me a coffee

Join my discord to chat!

In Manehattan there is a strange ape-like creature that is being held in a lab. Its injuries bear the distinctive marks of illegal sport hunting by exotic game poachers.

What's strange is that there's an entire section in books on natural life about this creature designating its kind maned apes. What's even stranger is that there are accounts throughout Equestria's history about maned apes turning up.

The maned ape, given the moniker Big Red by the scientists holding it, is given over to the crown and transferred to Ponyville for safe keeping. The Mane 6 comb through Equestria's historical texts and oral account to try and find where the maned apes come from.

This is an HiE story that starts in Season 1 shortly after Apple Buck Season.

EDIT: 6-8-2022 Featured! Woo-hoo!
18-202023 Featured! Woo-hoo!

Rick, a very enthusiastic human, meets Twilight, a curious pony who wants to know his name.

Rick isn't having any of it.

A shitpost written in a hour. Will be updated semi-regularly to springboard me into writing actively. Criticism appreciated, except from Mike White, because he's above this story.

Edited and inspired by FamousLastWords.

Now with an audio reading by StraightToThePointStudio! (Currently CH1 & First part of CH2)

"And we are absolutely certain that's a settlement? That Rhysling already has Indigenous populations?"

"Yes, Commander. There is no doubt. An engineer can fix the probe, but he would not know how to talk to them."

"Alright. Forget the engineer, then. Get me the linguist."

Coverart by SagebrushPony (not on Fimfiction).

Preread by Sunnypack, Shinzakura, Ghuntz, and Admiral Biscuit.

French language support by Conflicting views and Sparktail. German language support by Purple Smart. Russian language support by Alkarasu.

This story follows show canon until the end of Season 1.

Featured on 30 June -- 4 July 2021.

The star system Omega Centauri was just another oddity on a map to scientists in the not too distant future. However when they found the star was orbiting an earth-sized, earth-like planet instead of a black hole as its motion had suggested, a mission was scrambled to investigate this most unusual of celestial behaviors.

Hamstrung by politics, and nearly crippled before it began, the 'Lone Ranger' mission was reduced to just one crew member and left to his own devices.

These are the logs of Arrow 18 and its lone commander. This information is classified TOP SECRET by the Global Space Agency.

Do NOT tell the princess.

Princess Twilight has seen some strange things in the past few years. She made the best friends a mare could have, she had some amazing adventures, became an alicorn princess, saved the world a few times, and got a palace to call her very own. Yet for all that, the strangest has yet to come.

There are new strangers in Ponyville. That's not too odd, but they're not ponies. They're human! But they're not like any human Twilight saw on the other side of the Mirror. Their magic isn't like anything she's ever seen, either. She'd love to learn more, but there's a problem. These humans could give Fluttershy lessons in keeping out of sight.

Dealing with snooping aliens was not exactly what Twilight had planned to put on top of her royal agenda.

I started writing this back before Season Five. It's not a new idea, not hardly, but no matter how many first contact stories I sifted through, always it was from the alien perspective. The pony perspective would come to the fore only rarely, and usually only with sizable external influences.

This story takes the idea of an alien observation team but is entirely from the locals' standpoint. What do you do when there's an alien science outpost next door?

Sam Winston is a small-town K-9 patrolman faced with some unexplained, and potentially lethal, events. Fortunately, he has backup... a very unusual kind of backup...

Reviewed by Admiral Biscuit in his Signal Boost blog series. Thanks, Admiral!

When well-respected naturalist Mane Allgood returns to Ponyville, all she wanted to do was leave her work behind, relax and enjoy some quality time with her foals before starting her new job at Twilight's Academy. Her plans are dashed however, when she hears of a new species of ape found brutalized by poachers. Infuriated by the news, Allgood finds a new purpose in helping this creature get back onto her feet, all the while writing a new paper of course.

This new creature, however, might provide Allgood with something even more substantial than just a new animal to write about and care for.

Thanks to Jinzou and TCC56 for editing this story!

Going up to the roof for some fresh air after pulling and all-nighter, our "hero" makes the mistake of closing his eyes for a bit.
When he opens them again, he is no longer on the rooftop in Copenhagen he was expecting to be on... no he's somewhere very different, and extremely unfamiliar.
How will he react? How will the ponies react? Nothing is certain, except for one thing...

He never asked for this.

This story takes place about 8'ish years after the second season of MLP:FiM, the language of Equestria does not match any earth languages (that the main character knows of at least), and the human in question knows nothing of these ponies or the world of Equestria.
He emerges into Equestria on the roof of a building in Manehattan, not the Everfree, not Ponyville and certainly not one of the princesses' bedrooms in Canterlot Castle.

Oh! Spoilers in the comments and all that jazz, not gonna go into a whole spiel about it.

There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and humanity is determined to explore every one. We send probes, probes with the blueprints to reproduce human explorers upon arrival. Uninhabited worlds the galaxy over can be colonized and populated, until after many years they too can join the vast throng of interstellar civilization. But if a probe is very, very lucky, it will land on a populated world instead. Equestria is one such world.

Even so, it's far from perfect for colonization, not with an environment lethal to human life. But each probe is resourceful and armed with the greatest machine intelligence mankind has devised. If placing a human mind into a newly manufactured human body won't work, it will just have to get a little more creative.

This book has a Hardcover! If you want to pick it up, you can grab it here: https://starscribe.net/

This story was written at the behest of Canary In The Coal Mine, who is sponsoring it on my Patreon. As usual, cover by Zutcha. Editing by Two Bit and Sparktail.

Fantastic prereading help from: Chyre, Danger Noodle, Doctor Disco, and Doggyshakespeare (who also did the Esperanto translation). Thank you all for helping to make this story more readable and more consistent for everyone.