This story is a sequel to Project: Sunflower

After the events of Project: Sunflower, Erin Olsen has returned to Ponyville, happy to pursue her studies in magic. After everything that happened the year before, she's looking forward to spending her days studying and having fun with her friends.

Meanwhile, on the newly discovered world of Harmony, humans and ponies work together to study this strange new world. However, their arrival causes something ancient to begin stirring. Something that may end up changing everything.

Erin will need all of her courage, all of her cleverness and, of course, all of her friends to see herself through what happens next.

Cover art by Valkyrie-Girl
Editing provided by:
Brilliant Point, Coandco, Ekevoo, Ludicrous Lycan, Merlos the Mad and Razalon the Lizardman.

This story is a sequel to Project: Sunflower

No story ever truly ends, and some stories have parts that remain hidden until they are unearthed.

This will be a collection of stories related to Project: Sunflower. Stories as yet unheard, and things that come after the end.

Note:
The stories presented here will be slice-of-life style stories based in the same universe as Project: Sunflower, and therefore will contain spoilers. It is recommended that you read Project: Sunflower before reading these stories.

These will not necessarily be in chronological order, and each side story will contain a note describing when it takes place in the main story time line.

(Additional characters/tags may be added as the stories require)

It is the year 2038, and the Earth is slowly being consumed by a space-borne monstrosity dubbed the Black Tide, which is using nanotechnology to remake the planet into something hideously alien.

Erin Olsen works for Project Harmonics, humanity's last-ditch effort to find a new world before the Tide can wipe them out. But when that world is found, and it turns out to be occupied, Erin will need to find the courage to face the unknown in order to save the inhabitants of both worlds.

(Many thanks to Easteu for the fantastic cover image for this story!)

Now with its own TV Tropes page

There is now a follow-up to this story: Sunflower - Side Projects
Sequel: Project Sunflower: Harmony

Diplomacy has failed. Six years have passed Equestria's crowning of the princess of friendship, ushering in a supposed unprecedented age of peace and harmony. The concept of warfare is, to most ponies, nothing more than an unfathomable legend. They have let their guard down.

An unknown enemy has seized the opportunity to attack Equestria with terrifying new weapons of war, bent on taking the fertile land and restoring an ancient order. The valiant efforts of the Royal Guard have given Princess Twilight and her arcane scientists time to research and develop a response to their attackers, and the time has come for that response to be implemented. Utilizing weapons and tactics borrowed from another world, five squads under the command of Princess Luna will infiltrate the forests of the Equestrian Northwest to destroy a revolutionary magical matrix that Twilight refers to as the "radio" - a tool that allows enemy ponies to communicate across vast distances instantly.

Nightmare Two is comprised of three foalhood friends who, rather than be separated from each other in the draft, volunteer to become one of the five Nightmare squads. With their bodies forever altered to suit the needs of their mission, the three young mares join legions of ponies armed with powerful weapons to partake in a horrifying new breed of warfare - Equestria's first in over one thousand years.

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Heads up, folks. If you wouldn't mind leaving a comment alongside the thumbs-down, I'd appreciate it. This is my first foray into fan fiction and although it's a hobby I nonetheless wish to get better. :)

Got some FAQ's for you guys as well!

- Alternate universe in which the events of "Crusaders of the Lost Mark" did not occur. (As much as I loved it! :D)

- Numerical age tends to vary with headcanon, but the CMC here were just getting started with their adult lives when the draft went into effect.

- The war is pony v. pony, utilizing firearms and the Equestrian equivalent of a tank. The underlying headcanon is that ponies used firearms similar to muskets and tracked armored vehicles akin to our tanks in times of old, and what the enemy currently employs is essentially the natural progression of these technologies.

- There are no real-world weapons or equipment i.e. "Panzer IV," or "M16 assault rifle." Particularly acute details such as the caliber of weapons are also absent.

- Technology is based on that of WWI with some WWII elements. Firearms are primarily bolt-action.

- The "radio" spell matrix functions as what we know to be a radio, but is not identical.

- All four of a Night Mare's legs are permanently replaced by the augments.

- Night Mares are female. Stallions proved unable to properly animate the limbs.

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Hold up, now - fanart? You guys rock. Like, for real. Thanks a lot!

1. A great YouTube video coming from The_Pegasus_Box. Thanks, bud!
Check it out!

2. Click here for the collection on DArt.

3. https://derpibooru.org/740375?scope=scpeac921b191f688d04521575f31608785cbc3bbaa1
[img]https://derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/10/10/740375__safe_anthro_apple+bloom_gun_artist-colon-pusspuss_night+mares.png[/img]

"How could somepony as amazing as you not have a Special Somepony on Hearts and Hooves Day?"

With that single sentence, a thousand memories came flooding back to Cheerilee. A thousand memories of a thousand terrible dates...

When the Royal Wedding scatters defeated changelings all over Equestria, a member of the hive winds up being captured in Ponyville, tied up, stunned, repeatedly shot by a cannon, and held against his will.

The truly frightening part is he’s starting to like it.

Thank you to my twisted editors: Tek, Seether00, GameKnut, Cerulean Blue and Peter
The picture Pinkie Pie uses Party Canon is from Atmospark at DeviantArt

This story is listed as comedy⁽*⁾ because the author has an odd sense of humor. No changelings were harmed⁽¹⁾ during the production of this story, despite what the newspapers printed or the ongoing lawsuit from the ESPCA⁽²⁾. The management would like to remind all readers to spay and neuter your pets. Unless your pet is a changeling, in which case…

(*) Dark humor, to be exact. If you are someone who finds pleasure in the misfortune of others, enjoys watching the occasional inept chainsaw juggler or cheers during a NASCAR crash, welcome home. Also, get help.

(1) Excluding blunt trauma, thermal impingement, chemical exposure, radiation, thaumaturgic infusions, and confetti ingestion. All characters represented, including changelings, are the exclusive property of Hasbro, no matter what they may shout at you from between the bars of their cell. Any violence or pain inflicted on the changeling in this story was simulated on a stunt changeling with special effects and mirrors. Except for the cannon. There is no truth to the rumor that Queen Chrysalis provided the stunt changelings from a supply of disobedient changelings in her dungeon⁽³⁾.

(2) Equestrian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Arthropods

(3) The Changeling Kingdom does not have dungeons. They have Call Centers. It explains a lot, actually.

Here is a link to some appropriate background music to listen to while reading: Piotr Tchaikovneigh’s 1812 Overture

Additional Note: This story is tagged Sex because it has the occasional reference to… well, sex. There are no explicit references, but there are things.

Dear Diary,
Looking back, a scientific, step-by-step plan is completely ineffective for social situations (Note to self: don't do them, ever). Inviting Princess Luna to a Pinkie Pie Hearth's Warming party, with a checklist of steps in your head, was an awful idea. There are too many variables that a checklist cannot prepare for, such as an entrancing outfit. The plan resulted in a spectacular failure of when awkward meets anxious.
For future use, a spreadsheet might be better.
- TS

A super-duper, awesomely-wonderful, amazing podcast review of this fic can be found here by Lapis Lazuli and Inky J! Seriously, they're great. <3
More Awesomeness! Doom Pie has done a super-duper reading for this fic! Thank you so much!

Cover art courtesy of the wonderful lovelyneckbeard, which can be found here.

"I stood before the doors to Princess Celestia’s private chambers, just as I had so many times before, and waited. I’ve always been a nervous mare before our meetings, wondering if what I had done measured up to her expectations. But I had never before entered those rooms with the blood of another being on my hooves. I swallowed, dreading what I would discover behind those doors."

Twilight faces more than she bargained for when a resort island turns out very different from her expectations, and she must make a decision that will forever change how she sees herself.

Rarity, Twilight, and their friends are eating lunch, when AJ notices Twilight staring at a stallion. In the ensuing conversation, Twilight soon learns that her friends are all crazy ponies and have somehow gotten it into their heads that she is in a relationship with her mentor and idol Princess Celestia.

Queen Chrysalis, ruler of the Changeling Hives, feels a disturbance. Something unusual, something evil... something festive. It doesn't take her long to discover that the source of this dread is a pony holiday by the name of "Hearth's Warming Eve," and it takes even less time for her to decide what she has to do now: She must steal it.

Yes. The whole thing.