The Pony-Me Universal Framework · 10:45pm May 21st, 2018
Alrighty, so for those of you who are interested in a document with all of the info on the world of Pony-Me collected in one place, or for those interested in working on the collab, here's a thing I've written.
The document below the break goes over everything from the setting, to the lore, to even the economic feasibility of Pony-Me based on current e-commerce and DLC practices.
The Pony-Me Universal Framework
-This covers everything up to the beginning of Pony-Me Part 2.
Basic idea: Equestria turns out to be a virtual reality simulation. A network outage has cut off the protagonists from their regular lives, and upon waking up as humans, they learn that Equestria_04 wasn’t the only simulation affected. Depending on how the writing goes, the story may be presented as canon or non-canon to the original.
Places:
-Simulation room. This is a small, single-room apartment/house with very little furniture, save for a medical cot that the protagonists wake up on, and a large machine that kept the protagonists alive during their time in the simulation. In order to escape this room, the protagonists must find the emergency call button on the underside of one of the medical cot’s railings. Upon pressing this button, after the passage of a couple hours, a heavy-coated technician arrives to disconnect them from the machine, leaving behind usually some sort of food that the character is familiar with so that their hunger is staved for the moment.
-The Sustenance Sector. This is a loosely-connected collection of cities dedicated entirely to sustaining the lives of those living in the simulations, hence the name. The two currently established cities are Snowbush and Mountain View, both of which being high-elevation cities surrounded by empty plots of farmland and occasional storehouses stocked with tools and seeds. The two cities are nearly identical to each other, but Mountain View quickly falls to anarchy as its inhabitants realize that their lives were nothing but fakes the entire time. Snowbush comes off much more lightly, with several people being law enforcement officials or authority figures in their simulations, in contrast to Mountain View’s mostly rural set of farming simulators. Other cities may be created as you wish.
-The City Hall. Being a central building in both of the established existing cities, this normally-empty building serves as a central point in authority early on in the story as Societal Management Officers pour in from outside of the cities in attempt to reconnect the simulations to the larger network. The building consists of a large, public meeting hall, multiple smaller conference rooms complete with a small collection of assorted books, bedrooms for visiting or volunteering officers, and a pseudo-cafeteria/mess hall room that also serves as a study room, even though it contains an electric stove.
People: These are the already-established characters in the story. These aren’t required to be used or included in any way in the collab or in spinoffs.
-Twilight Sparkle/Lisa Garnet. While Twilight is obviously going to be the usual bookhorse shenanigans, Lisa Garnet is a human girl in her mid-20s. Lisa, alongside her friend Samantha, co-created the Equestria_04 simulation, or Pony-Me as it was marketed. Due to how long she’d spent in Equestria, (Roughly a decade, give or take a few years,) she has a very dim, but slowly returning memory of her old life. She’s often plagued with nightmares of losing her identity as Twilight Sparkle, or of losing her friends. Volunteered as a Societal Management Officer.
-Pinkie Pie/Samantha Hayes. Once again, while Pinkie is quite well-established already, Samantha in contrast is a stern, occasionally rude girl roughly the same age as Lisa. Samantha clearly remembers her old life before Equestria, as rather than joining as her chosen/created character, she instead set it (Pinkie) off into Equestria as an AI. However, with the revelation of the sheer damage Pinkie could cause with her powers of randomness, Samantha reluctantly joined Pony-Me in attempt to at first deter, but later to contain Pinkie. After ultimately failing to control Pinkie’s powers in Equestria, Samantha merges herself with Pinkie’s AI in a last-ditch effort to control the rogue AI. As a result, she now is in a constant battle for control over her real-life body with Pinkie’s AI, but as of more recent chapters, is beginning to trend more towards accepting the fact that she’d likely be stuck with Pinkie forever. Volunteered as a Societal Management Officer.
-Spike/Timothy Carter. Spike’s pretty obvious. Timothy is a skinny guy in his mid-teens with almost no recollection of his life outside of the simulations due to having joined very early on in life. His persona outside of the simulations mirrors that of Spike in Equestria, being that he tries to help the best he can. Ultimately, he decides to part ways with Twilight and Pinkie to return to Equestria, where he’s far more comfortable and is able to fill in for Twilight until she returns.
-Melina Daalmans. Middle-aged. Head of the local Sustenance Sector. While strict and straight-to-the-point, she can at times take on a somewhat patronizing tone when speaking directly to others. She and the other officers of the Sustenance Sector carry special suitcases of varying content.
-The Heavy Coated Man. He has never been mentioned by name, and always wears a heavy jacket. He’s one of the lead technicians, and is often the one to respond when the emergency call button is pressed. His suitcase mostly contains medical tools, but he is also able to operate, enable, disable, and upgrade the machines that sustained the population in the simulations.
-Officer Jones/Andrew Smith. While not much has been given about him, Andrew is a side character who had grown accustomed enough to his metropolitan-style simulation that he at first continued to call himself Officer Jones, after his in-simulation persona as a police officer. He offered Twilight/Lisa a place to stay overnight once, and currently as of Part 2, has joined Lisa and Samantha, taking Timothy’s place in the pack.
-Yazhu Argall/Professor Argall. Retired professor and former mentor of Lisa and Samantha. He often makes wisecracks, but often brings up past events with a slightly nostalgic attitude. After finding Lisa and Samantha during a meeting, he’s opted to instead travel with the two rather than returning to retirement. He and his colleagues were collectively responsible for what would eventually become all of the simulations to exist, created through an extensive tutoring and mentorship program meant originally to teach about virtual reality and artificial intelligence. He’s uncomfortable with speaking in public, resulting in an awkward situation whenever he speaks to those of whom he doesn’t know personally. Lisa/Twilight jokingly based Starswirl’s looks on Argall wearing a Christmas suit. Except the suit was red, while Starswirl’s cloak was blue.\
Lore: This is the existing lore of the story up to Part 2.
A little over a decade ago from the story’s present, Professor Argall and his colleagues created a network of training campuses focused on teaching the upcoming generation how to program and create virtual reality and artificial intelligence programs. For a time, things appeared to take on a firmly education-only standpoint, with no real product of the teaching process outside of simply teaching the next generation of working adults. However, several video game and film-based virtual reality simulations begun to sprout from the students on the campuses, often with the purpose of adding an additional layer of realism to a particular work that certain students happened to like.
Soon, however, some students came to the realization of what benefit these crude simulations could present to the general population. More specifically, the simulations they created, together with the Artificial Intelligence programs, could offer an escape from reality to those that felt lost in the world, or had no sense of purpose. After an initial trial of entering people into the simulations, it was determined that the simulations could even become self-sufficient economically by tying the economies of simulations directly into the virtual, online economy created and run by e-commerce. Items sold by certain AIs would represent a real-life transaction between the user and the outside world, and profit was generated for users through service-based jobs such as research and development, which once again translated into real-world efforts.
However, while the economic system is indeed able to be self-sufficient in order to sustain its users and the shell organization running the collective simulations, it often requires additional sources of profit or investment, as hinted by the fact that some cities were surrounded by farmland. As such, while the organization remains profitable primarily through a service-based economy, it still requires additional sources of income from time to time through a much more traditional export of produce ranging from raw materials to agriculture.
Most simulations were coded to contain an emergency exit routine to enable users to disconnect, but a small handful of simulations, including Equestria_04 (AKA Pony-Me), were never written to contain any exit routine of any sort, and thus required a hard severing of the network connection to allow exiting the simulation. While the two cities currently known of as of the beginning of Part 2 contain almost entirely non-exitable simulations, it has been hinted at multiple times that there are other simulations that allow for users to connect and disconnect as they please. The primary reason why Snowbush and Mountain View are located so far from both each other and the rest of society is mainly due to the possibility of widespread chaos in the event of an incidental disconnect, and as shown by the short-lived anarchy of Mountain View, the idea of isolating the communities for safety was firmly cemented in place.
