It was a normal life, until Twilight Sparkle fell out of time and into her lap. Then things started getting complicated.

100 words. Fragments of a life. Each year, every year: as the years march forward, unstoppable, unceasing, Granny Smith wonders what it all adds up to.

An entry for Bicyclette's Crackshipping Contest!

Vignette Valencia is the worst person Wallflower Blush has ever met. She's vain, petty, materialistic. She's the kind of person that shouldn't exist outside of horror stories about social media influencers.

She's also easier to talk to than anyone else.

Struggling with conversation at the best of times, Wallflower finds Vignette's existence so baffling that it's impossible for her to be uncomfortable around her.

Winner of a committee prize in the 2022 Crackship Contest.

Huge thanks to VoxArachne for editing and prereading.

This story is a sequel to p-value

Shortdesc

Destabilized by Equestrian magic, Wallflower’s world is dying. For its sake, Sunset had to leave forever. All Wallflower can do is hold on to the last connection they still have: the journal Sunset left behind.

Review

Long-Distance is a wrenching story and more than one of our judges said that, though they won’t ever be able to bring themselves to re-read it, it will stay with us for a long time. Everything is ending, it may or may not be anyone’s fault, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. The time it will take to reach that final tragedy doesn’t make it any less remote. Sunset and Wallflower are separated across worlds, and have only Sunset’s journal to link them. One of them will die and the other will live on. They’re left to learn how to cope with and share and grieve the time they have left.

Long-Distance is superbly written, with just enough detail about the nature of the tragedy to make it feel realized without overwhelming readers with exposition. There’s a novel’s worth of story in this short story, but none of it feels compressed. Sunset and Wallflower’s tightly written, wrenching, and affecting, and the last chapter left us breathless.

--Judges of Scampy's SunFlower Shipping Contest

The result was an emotional tale of making the best out of a bad situation through inevitability and – if you’ll pardon the title drop – long distance. Bicyclette’s work is a delightful story that exemplifies how to Show a hard-hitting story through meaningful dialogue, contextual narrative clues, vivid scene setting, and a firm grasp of the characters and their struggles.

--PaulAsaran, Paul's Thursday Reviews CCCXLVII

Contest

Literal last-minute entry to Scampy's SunFlower Shipping Contest, and now unexpectedly the fourth-place winner. Go read the other entries please, there's a lot of good stuff in there!

I originally pulled this story for revisions after the contest results came out. I regret this, and I am sorry.

Credits

Thanks to Sledge115 for emotional support!

Winner of Scampy's Sunflower Shipping Contest!
Go check out the other stories here.

Chrysalis knows the world is a simple place. There's people who have power, and people who don't.

Sunset Shimmer is about to make things complicated.

Earned second place in Oroboro's Sunset Shipping Contest: Changing Seasons.

This story is a sequel to Passion and Reason

There comes a point in your life when you finally become aware of the road you're walking down, and where that road takes you. Where you realize the whole way's been mapped out for you in advance, and you never questioned it before. The moment where you first have to ask if you're okay with that.

Spike and Applebloom just want to pull over for a bit and get wasted.

In this day and age, who has time to be a God? Prayers come in 24/7 and fancy dress is compulsory. Rainbow Dash certainly doesn't have time. She's got bills to pay and things to do. Besides, she isn't qualified for Godhood, surely.

The ponies who say her control of the weather is divine disagree, unfortunately. They've given her a funny spear and a robe that doesn't quite fit. They've got their own temple and they take church seriously.

And it turns out she's not the only pony recently undergone apotheosis...

Teen for immature jokes.

This story is a sequel to Beauty Will Tear Us Apart

There is another secret agent stationed in Ponyville.

Some elder siblings are not as old as they look.

Ponyville's premiere party planner is pondering her purpose.

The world is not quite what it seems. A pony, in the wrong place at the wrong time, just might stumble behind the stage and see the the nuts and bolts that hold their reality together. Some ponies brush up against the dividing curtain briefly and never understand what it is they saw. Some ponies get a good, long look behind it, and their lives are never the same. And some ponies live their whole lives with a hoof on each side.

These are their stories.

The comment section may contain unmarked spoilers.

Cover art by the multi-talented KuroiTsubasaTenshi.

Big thanks to my pre-readers (in roughly chronological order):
cleverpun
Midnight Rambler
Justanotherbrony
KuroiTsubasaTenshi
war877
JapaneseTeeth

Look at this guy who said something about this, one time.
And also this guy.

Set in the canon of Friendship is Optimal

Ashley is an unimportant research assistant in an American machine learning lab. The release of Equestria online provokes more than a little interest in her lab, and she is selected to investigate it. What she discovers horrifies her, but for some reason she can't get anyone to take her seriously.

This does not dissuade her. Ashley might not know much, but she isn't going to sit idly by and watch her world end. No... if nobody else is going to step in, she will. It doesn't matter that nobody believes CelestAI is dangerous. It doesn't matter that it's a game about a children's show.

Ashley is going to save the world. Or try, anyway. The odds aren't great.

Editing by Two Bit and Sparktail, and art by Zutcha!
Il existe une traduction française de cette histoire, elle est par ici.

Tonight, Celestia will talk to Shining Armor. With just one conversation, she needs to save Equestria.

A homage to Pearple Prose, written in her style. Cover art by LoloPan. Proofread by Queuefka Palazzo, Lucky Roll, Selbi, Mr Numbers, Magello, and Pearple Prose herself.

As seen on EQD and the RCL interview.

Reading by Illya Leonov.
Reading by VocalNoctis
Chinese translation by Dreams Set Free.