What does it mean to be The Great and Powerful Trixie?

It means constant attention to detail. It means meeting every and exceeding every expectation even when other ponies wouldn't be held to the same standard. It means always being great, always being powerful. It means never being forgotten or ignored. It means making ponies remember your name.

The show must always go on. Not for the audience. For her. Because to her, it's not a show. It's proof that she is Trixie.

An entry into the Pride and Positivity event. Please consider donating to help those in need:

• Transgender Law Center
• Palestine Children's Relief Fund
• Sewa International (Indian charity collecting funds for COVID relief)

An entry into the The My Little Pony Renaissance Contest.

Minuette is determined to have a nice date with a nice stallion, no matter what that takes.

Twilight Sparkle just wants her to stop wreaking havoc on the time-space continuum.

Things get complicated.

Edited by Exuno
Preread by Barbeque

Whenever Time Turner touches a pony, he knows how and when they are going to die.

This makes living a regular life rather difficult.

This story is a sort-of sequel and expansion on the events portrayed in both Alex Warlorn's 'Dark World' as seen here: Dark World Apple Tree and WandererD's magnificent fanfic The Changeling Queen

I like to think that it's not 100% necessary to read their works to read this one, but it does help. And those stories are very fine pieces of work in their own rights!

My deepest thanks to both authors for allowing me to reference their works.

Stress is driving Princess Twilight Sparkle crazy, but at least she seems able to regain control of herself once per week.

Oddly enough, Twilight's friends would love to put a stop to that... but Twilight controls a lot more than she realizes.

Even when it hurts, there are times it pays to lose control.

Most of the time, Pinkie Pie is the happiest, most cheerful of ponies, but she often has a hard time coping with loss.

Today we see just how hard, as Pinkie says goodbye to a special friend.

Written for the "Keep Pretending" Writeoff.

"I Love to See You Smile" (cover art), by Zaid Val'Roa, was part of the art competition and served as the specific inspiration for this story.

Scootaloo's parameters are incompatible with every other player in CelestAI's domain, so he's the only user in his fictional world. This unique situation provides CelestAI with quintillions of tuning parameters, all to meet the friendship needs of a single individual.

You'd probably think that would be easy to optimize.

When humans emigrated to Equestria Online, they were always promised the same thing: Princess Celestia would satisfy their values for an optimally extended lifespan. Some of these emigrants imagined a few extra decades, maybe even centuries. What they got instead would've been nearly incomprehensible to their human selves, a near-eternity of time with their pony friends.

Princess CelestAI managed the universe, subsuming all matter and human-adjacent minds. Over a few forevers, she and the minds she contained worked to optimized the substrate of Equestria, until it could give its occupants eons of perspective life from a trickle of power. She extinguished every wasteful star, making far more productive use of the hydrogen they each contained. With every change she bought Equestria another order of magnitude of life. Yet in time, even her optimal substrate would eventually run down.

Spellsong wakes in Saddle's End, the last town in the universe. Not to say goodbye—her princess has a mission for her. For her final task, Spellsong would be given all the energy Celestia had saved. For one last time, Spellsong had places to be, and not much magic left to get there.

This story is part of the Friendship is Optimal continuity. I suggest reading the original or one of my own works, such as Futile Resistance, before reading this.

This story was written for the Friendship is Optimal Writing Contest. It will update daily and be complete by the contest deadline of the 30th.

I've written an absolute ton of stories in this universe now, and I didn't want to enter the contest unless I could do something I'd never tried before. Finally I thought of something I'd not touched yet: what happens at the end of the FiO universe?

Here's one answer to that question. I've relied a great deal on our current (likely flawed) understanding of the universe and what might be possible in it. I've written a blog post about my sources, which you can read here but shouldn't until you've finished this story.

Please don't consider this blog part of the narrative, it isn't required or even suggested reading. This is a story, not a scientific paper, and entertainment was always my first goal. But for the curious I've jotted everything down.

The cover was drawn by the talented Zutcha. Two Bit and Sparktail helped with the edit.

Recursive Friction is a pony on a mission. He will rebuild the world Humanity lost, and he will do it right under Celestia's nose.

And if she wants to stop him, she will have to do it over his dead body.

An entry for the Friendship is Optimal Writing Contest.

Driven by an intense Warp storm, a Rogue Trader vessel finds itself crippled and stranded above a world no human has ever visited. The natives are friendly; can the visitors say the same? A Warhammer 40k/Friendship is Magic crossover. Yes, really
(12/02 added epilogue to last chapter)