A filly waits in a small white room. Waiting for her friends to visit. "Hi! I'm Silver Spoon and I'm the Perfect Patient! What medical symptoms would you like to treat today?"

Winner of the Magic Fades and Science Grows contest on Quills and Sofas.

TW for lots of gore and emotionally cruel treatment of a child. Read with care, and if emotional child abuse is something you've experienced perhaps steer clear of this one. I think my initial trigger warning wasn't extensive enough, so apologies if anyone was disturbed by the content. This is a grimdark look at sentience, souls, and the way people/ponies treat things they perceive to be inhuman.

Ebony Dew has a friend that nopony believes is real.

However, she knows in her heart that he exists.

After all, it's his heart in the first place.

An entry for the Science Fiction Contest run by Bicyclette.

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.)

Zenith would give anything to find her lost sister Nadir, who vanished in the depths of space long ago. And now, after decades of suspended animation, she has finally located Nadir on a strange planet haunted by alien ruins, far outside known space.

It's lonely out there, but Zenith has company – six personalities simulated by her ship's AI. And she'll need every ounce of help Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and the others can offer, for Lapis is a more mysterious, and dangerous, planet than she could ever have imagined.

Updated every-other day until Jan. 6.

An entry for Bicyclette's Science Fiction Contest.

You know what they say: you haven't really made it as a writer until you take advantage of your fleeting Internet fame to inflict a bunch of micro- and speed-fiction on your followers that wasn't long enough for you to feel clean posting them as individual stories.

If you're wondering who "they" is in this scenario: it's me. "They" is singular now. It's 2019 the entire year that encompassed March 2020 the 2020 decade 2021 [insert current year, time is a social construct], and we live in the future.

Posted in as close to chronological order as I can remember. Story ratings vary from E to T, mostly for bad words and heavy themes here and there.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose...

Your Familiar: She's your robotic best friend, made just for you. She will love you, care for you, and live every moment of her life devoted to you. But when all that she lives for is suddenly gone, one Familiar must find a reason to go on living anyway.

In a world where technology has freed everypony from toil and strife, the Eternal Carnival goes on. Posing as a normal organic pony, Turing Test is a freed Familiar who joins the Carnival to seek out new meaning in her life without a master.

Based on the "Familiar" universe created by GaPJaxie, who helped critique and edit this story. Also featuring characters from The Iron Horse series. No prior reading is required.

Cover art by Colby "Greenfinger" Green of Snailbunny Designs.