It is a tale well known to all: Twilight Sparkle, immortal alicorn, forced to face the world without her friends. Time having separated them, never to meet again, leaving only one Princess all alone, the last to remember those happy times. Alone in her castle, mourning all she has lost.

...too bad certain ponies have no sense of the dramatic and are too inconsiderate to actually be dead.

~~~You asked, you receive. Bonus chapter up~~~

Twilight has successfully created fake government jobs to help her terminally broke friends be less, uh, terminally broke. All they have to do is pass a simple little background check, just an easy little formality really. Should be no problem for these national heroes, right?

Right?

Well....

I guess the constituent parts of the cover art might be property of the federal gubbermint, but, honestly, I feel like I've spent enough on ATF tax stamps to make me stealing their crisp PNGs an equal exchange.

(The human tag is just a technicality)
There was a sloth. He was a simple sloth. And then one day he was whisked away to Equestria. What will happen to him when he is slow to react to the imminent change? And what will the ponies who care for him make of this new, strange and oddly compelling creature?

We heard that someone gave sloths a bad reputation 'round here, so we got together and tried to remedy the situation.
The results are...mixed. Please don't hate us.

Directed and produced by 'I'm not drunk' Quicksear in collaboration with 'Yes you are' Listener and 'You both need to go home' Selkowitz
Edited by 'I'm not with them' Candle_Jack

Starlight Glimmer has gone back in time. Each time Twilight tries to stop Starlight, she fails and is flung back through the portal and into a broken, twisted Equestria, ravaged by wars or monsters, each version worse than the one before, barreling toward the destruction of the world. Until she lands in a version of Equestria that ... isn't worse. It seems unchanged, happy, normal. The only real difference she can find on the cutie map is that her castle isn't there ...

... but the library still is.

Editing by Formerly Committed and JetstreamGW.

This story is a sequel to Changeling Space Program

Twilight Sparkle's experimental interplanetary drive has malfunctioned, stranding Starlight Glimmer, Spitfire, Cherry Berry, a changeling and a dragon on a hostile planet in another universe. With limited food supplies, very little magic, no communications with home, and no way to leave the planet, they must survive until somepony rescues them.

Fortunately they crashed right next door to another creature with the exact same problem- a creature named Mark Watney.

They're going to science the buck out of everything- and do whatever it takes to survive Mars and get everybody home.

TVTropes page here! Thanks to GymQuirk for making it!

Commissioned art and fan works from the readers! Thanks, everybody!

This experiment in an updates-daily story was made possible by a generous grant from Canary in the Coal Mine and viewers like you.

(Sex tag for crude talk about sex, but no actual sex in the story.)