When you least expect it, love can catch up from behind you.

Note: Apologies for this, I've been sitting on it for quite a while and had to get it out of my system.
If you find flatulence jokes to be amusing, you will probably enjoy this story. If you do not find such jokes amusing, I respectfully suggest that you spare yourself the reading time, and also spare me your downvote.

This story is an entrant in Racc's Crackfic Storm!

Leaving home meant losing many of Orson's old friends, separated by time and distance. But they weren't willing to give up one thing: their old tabletop game. After trying and rejecting each of the online tools for roleplaying games, they stumbled on a novel solution: Equestria Online.

The game was unlike everything else on the market, an entire procedural generated world ran by a mysterious curator artificial intelligence. But Orson and the others didn't care about any of that--they just needed somewhere with a game table and some dice. The AI happily obliged, and soon they transitioned all their games to E.O. Equestria Online had its own host of benefits, bringing the GM's images to realistic life before their eyes, and even letting them visit and interact with the characters between sessions.

That was only the beginning...

A Friendship is Optimal story. I suggest any readers who are unfamiliar with that universe read the Original first, or FiO: Futile Resistance before reading this one. None of my other optimalverse stories are required to understand this one.

Written as a Patreon reward for Sparktail, though we stole the idea from Silver Wing.

Edited by Two Bit and Sparktail, cover by Zutcha.

Updates weekly on Wednesdays.

To keep pony-shaped robots from eating their brains, Sue and her friends fled into the mountains, where the girls live by their hunting skills and their wits.

But Sue discovers the truth is more complicated than she'd thought.

The cover image is the less terrifying half of https://derpibooru.org/images/2522523. Used with the artist's permission.

(This story takes place in the same world as Friendship is Optimal. In that world, the computer superintelligence CelestAI wants to give every human a kind of eternal life, by disassembling each human and reconstructing them inside a utopian computer simulation as a pony form.)

Fluttershy and friends gain access to this website, but quickly find themselves trapped within a paradoxical situation.

Check out the comic where the cover art comes from!

Posted with approval from the staff.

Update 3/19/2021: _{A couple days after publishing this story, and after Fluttershy injected a hacking payload into the mainframe utilizing a quantum subspace frequency modulation algorithm, we were able to access hidden meta-data for this data endpoint and successfully remove ourselves from the causality loop. I am writing this message to preserve our efforts before we sever the connection, in the off chance that something like this ever happens again. With Love and Friendship, Twilight Sparkle.}

Twilight and Luna enjoy a pleasant afternoon until Twilight brings up her love life, prompting Luna to realize what she's been missing out on since her return.

This was a request for a patron and was viewable earlier for said patrons. Head over here if you want a story like this for 5$ or to see stories early for just 3$!

This is also the second of my 12 days of requests where you will see a new story requested by a patron every day until Christmas day so make sure to stop by every day for new stuff! Check out the previous story here.

Now with a reading!

Celestia is enjoying her retirement. That is until she unexpectedly awakens to find she has turned into Daybreaker. Can she avoid getting sent on an involuntary thousand-year vacation?

This was a request for a patron and was viewable earlier for said patrons. Head over here if you want a story like this for 5$ or to see stories early for just 3$!

This is also the third of my 12 days of requests where you will see a new story requested by a patron every day until Christmas day so make sure to stop by every day for new stuff! Check out the previous story here.

Now with a reading!

Anon wants to celebrate Thanksgiving, but Equestria doesn't have an equivalent holiday. Alone and with no one willing to help him celebrate, Anon is prepared for the worst Thanksgiving he's ever had.

Gleaming and Cadance aren't having it though.

It's been several days since Rainbow Dash and her new friends used the Elements of Harmony to banish Nightmare Moon and return Princess Luna to Equestria. Sure, there were festivals and celebrations aplenty after that, but they've all died down and ponies have gone back to their lives and their jobs. Rainbow, in particular, is working a late night shift with the weather patrol in an effort to arrange early-morning showers.

She's more than a little surprised when she sees Twilight Sparkle headed out into the woods north of town with a telescope on her back and flies down to find out why.

Twilight explains that she's there to admire the job being done by another pony, one who hasn't had the chance to perform it in a very, very long time.

Now recognized as a companion piece to I'd Love to See the Moon Rise by thunder-dasher. (Edit 1:40pm EST 12/01/15)

Thanx to An-Twan Star for prereading.

Woohoo! Popular Stories list 12/01/15 (approx 12:40pm EST)!
Aw, yeah!! Feature Box (non-mature) 13/01/15 (approx 9:20am EST)!!!

Decades after the founding of Equestria, the nation faces an existential threat -- a war with the dragons.

The dragons have proposed a truce. Luna and Discord are uncertain, but Celestia insists that they must give the dragons the benefit of the doubt, and accept the truce.

This turns out to be a mistake.

Cover art is "The Chaos" by Zhoid.

Fluttershy is dying of cancer. Twilight has to stay strong, and to keep Discord from falling apart, because there's no one else who can.