Twilight Sparkle wakes up one morning to a harsh dose of unreality. She is stranded, without her friends, on an island which matches no known locale on Equestria. Surrounded and harried on all sides by the alien and the dangerous, she will find her mettle sorely tested, and find perhaps that the best friends you will ever have in your life are the ones you make when your back is to the wall...

Thanks to CedricBale and noobie56xx for tracking down the name of the artist so I could give them credit.

There's a reason ponies don't practice un-magic much, mostly because it's a lot like regular magic except more dangerous and less predictable. But for some ponies, un-magic is worth the price.

Humble Pie is one of those ponies.

Too bad the price seems to be blowing up Twilight Sparkle's castle at the behest of a voice on a radio.

To re-iterate: there's a reason ponies don't practice un-magic much.

Though most view them as simply immortal powerful rulers, some ponies worship the Princesses as actual Goddesses. Some families with deep Earth Pony roots worship the old Nature Spirits of their ancestors.
But some ponies turn to darker forces. They worship monsters and demons, praying for plagues and misfortunes upon those they despise.

One day, Discord finds out that in his "extended absence", a cult formed with him as the Central Deity. Unfortunately, it's not exactly what he would want. These ponies will soon find out it's a bad idea to anger your god.

Edit 5/18/18: New cover art courtesy of the illustrious Mix-up. Check out the original here.

Time after time, through chaos and through wars, Princess Celestia prevailed.

Of all the terrible forces she could have fallen to, Flim Flam Industry was the last one anypony had expected.

With thanks to gardrek for editing (3-6) and PinkieDP, Ice Star, and Odd_Sarge for prereading help.

I'm in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of orifices I didn't know I had. Why am I there? Why is Rainbow Dash sitting in the corner?

Why is she crying?

This story is a sequel to Empress Rarity's 250th Birthday

“We are friends, are we not?”

The Empress’ two hundred and fifty-first birthday is just a few days away, yet there is little cause for celebration as Rarity’s Empire is crumbling before her eyes. Bad luck somehow meets her at every turn, and there’s a grim shadow looming over any hope for her nation and her crystal ponies. With a powerful darkness locked within her own mind, will the voices in her nightmares tear her apart? Or can she learn to rely on those she once called friends before it's too late?

Welcome to the sequel to Empress Rarity’s 250th Birthday.

This story was designed with new and old readers in mind. I have made sure to carefully place information to touch on the important facts to remind those that had read the first book of what happened, and to let new readers know what is going on in this one. Not everything is going to be explained from the last book at once, but it will be eventually covered.

So it is not necessarily a requirement to read Empress Rarity’s 250th Birthday, but it is highly recommended.

The group for the story: Birthdayverse.
Credit goes to Autumnschild for the editing.
Cover art is done by, and belongs to ifthemainecoon.

A human stays among ponies, mystifying them with his odd traditions and customs. It will be five years before Celestia and Twilight can send him back to his homeworld. Until then, Twilight wants to study him and have him experience pony culture. These are their stories.

Twenty years ago, a horrible infection -dubbed the Blight by those who saw it- swept over the world and decimated plant and wildlife. What land was not withered was cultivated and preserved by cloisters of civilization; Conclaves. The world outside the Conclaves is still ravaged by the Blight, threatening to always sweep in and kill what usable land remains.

In an effort to prevent the already limited food stocks from becoming strained further, people created machines to assist in the work force. Steam powered, Clockwork, coal burning; a multitude of different sorts of semi-intelligent machines. All of them built with Robot-Ethics built into them: The Three Laws of Robotics.

However, at a young age, one girl sought to grant the robots something greater. A freedom that they never knew they could have.

Humanized/Robotized characters.

Pinkie doesn't tell ponies about Pinkamena and Surprise. The doctors said that they were bad for her, that they were a disease, but she disagrees. Sure, Pinkamena's a bit of a grumpy-pants, but she's still a great friend! She's often the voice of reason to counter-act some of the other two's crazier ideas, after all. Surprise, on the other hand, is a great prank-player, and always up for some fun. She's more like Pinkie, only more hyper. Both are great fun to be around, and they get on well.

Thing is, she knows that if she told ponies about them, then they would be dragged back to the hospital. And then be 'treated' again. None of them want that. Because of this, not even her best not-in-head friends know about them. The three of them have, for years now, been careful enough to keep the existence of Pinkamena and Surprise secret.

This has, of course, gone out the window now that Twilight is hammering on the door after overhearing one third of a conversation, with no sign of anyone else talking.

Hints of F/F shipping inside. Nothing will actually come of it here, though. Maybe in a future story.

Cover art can be found here: http://killryde.deviantart.com/art/Smile-338206490