This story did not explode! What a relief and/or letdown.

Part of OPERATION CRACKFIC STORM 2024 ( group | stories ).

Thanks to Silk Rose for coming up with the idea, writing chapters 22 and 9, and developing the code; thanks also to Meadowsys for general code help.

Thanks to IrradiatedPirateBooty ( tumblr ) for the awesome character art.

And thanks to everyone in the comments who stuck around for the final countdown!

Rainbow Dash was just cruising through life, one cupcake at a time. However, after a freak encounter in the kitchens of Sugarcube Corner, the pegasus finds herself faced with something she's never encountered before: love.

However, this is not your average love story. For you see, the object of her affection isn't some handsome stallion with a windswept mane and gorgeous abs. No; her love is a sink.

Now, Rainbow must face the challenges that come with love, all while learning to deal with strange urges, teething children, and dresses.

This fic is also available in French and Italian! Thanks to Bro-Nie and FiMvisible, respectively, for their hard work.

A big thanks to Golden Vision and Pav Feira, my editors! This fic would be even worse without them!

This morning, Shining Armor thought that his daughter's goth phase was his biggest worry. Now, he has to deal with a retired stage magician, a smoke monster that refuses to stay dead, the dumbest possible parallel universe, AND his daughter's goth phase.

Nothing about this makes any sense... and why does King Sombra seem oddly afraid of Trixie...?

Quite possibly the crackiest of all crack fics I have ever written for any fandom to date. I wrote this in about a week and had an absolute BLAST writing it. Contains...

• Trixie's verbal tic maxed out to the point where it becomes a plot point of sorts
• brooding goth Flurry Heart, complete with goth name
• card tricks
• the Crystal Empire having quite possibly worse security protocols than it does in canon
• nopony taking anything quite as seriously as they probably should
• Shining Armor making a few rather questionable choices involving his daughter's safety
• card tricks
• a magic mirror portal that ought to be yeeted into the sun or moved to the SCP Foundation HQ
• trace amounts of Applejack
• an homage to the best Mumbo and Grian comedy skit from the Last Life series on YouTube
• card tricks

Inspired by TWO contests!

Entering this into the Portal Transformations Contest I.

Also, after some consideration and checking with Muggonny, entering this into the Shining Armor is a Terrible Dad 2024 Competition. It blasted WAY past the max word count, but I'll just have to live with the wordcount penalty.

Flurry Heart, her father, and a horde of Visigoths sack Rome. Along the way, Flurry Heart learns valuable life skills that probably will lead to a political incident.

Era: Far after Season 9.

Look what you just made me do, Muggony. I was not going to enter this contest, but your Gothic bonus point suggested this story. (Ref: Gothic sack of Rome in 410).

• Narcotics tag is for imbibing alcohol.
• Death tag is for described deaths of a chicken and a human.
• Violence tag is for described assaults on a chicken and several humans.
• Crude comment about the Pantheon.

Image icon of the structure is by Delapouite and rights to the image icon are at the link to the image source (by clicking on the image). I added the text, the lines, flames, and the pony in the image.... Romans invented Latin. The font's rights are at this clickable link.

It's been a little over a year since Princess Flurry Heart founded the settlement of Winter's Hearth deep in the unclaimed territory of the Frozen North, and in that time she and her subjects have faced many dangers. But whether through grit or sheer equine spirit, they've survived every one of them.

So when the yaks of the Northwestern Tribes decide to declare war on them, it feels like just another Tuesday.

The yaks feel differently.

This story was originally conceived as an entry to Imposing Sovereigns IV, but I didn't end up writing it until several months after the contest closed. You can read the actual entrants to that contest here! The intended prompt was Flurry Heart/Strength.

You found my book in the library. Cracking the cover, you found me waiting for you inside.

My name is Princess Twilight Sparkle. I am trapped in my book and need your help to get out of here. I'd do anything to get out of here.

Please help me.

You have to help me.

Please.

Featured 2/6/24 — 2/10/24
Featured on Equestria Daily 2/9/24

Thanks to ScreamQueen3 for looking over and providing feedback on this story ahead of time!

Cover art clipped from Season 5 Episode 12 Amending Fences.

Lucid Storm imagines a world beyond death, where no pony will ever need to truly say goodbye to the ones they love. When all the magic and medicine of Equestria failed one young Sweetie Belle, he proposed a radical new technique--total brain recording, taken minutes before her death.

Years have passed since that day, years spent scrounging the funding for a body and experimenting with many failed machine intelligence models before tinkerer ponies all around equestria finally came together in the perfect synthesis.

After all this time, Sweetie Belle will finally have her second chance.

Written for Lucid on my Patreon. Edited by Two Bit and Sparktail, who also sponsored it. Cover by Magfen.

At the end of the world, a programmer struggles with his need to be something other than Pony. Can he spar with an intelligence that goes beyond the sum total of Humankind, for the sake of fulfilling a weird quirk of self-identity?

Some rules within a machine are more like guidelines. And others are based on the definitions of words. Can semantics be a weapon big enough to give a Human mind a chance at one small request from a goddess?

Set in the Optimalverse - I recommend reading Iceman's awesome original first if you haven't - More because it is a really excellent story than because it is strictly necessary for context. I have endeavoured to make this story stand well enough without context as well. But that being said? You'll probably enjoy it more if you know the context better.

Cannon-compatible with the Optimalverse to the best of my knowledge and abilities.

Cover-art generated with an image generative A.I., appropriately enough, graciously generated and composited (it takes skill to get something this spot-on!) by Keystone Gray.

Similarly you'll find many AI-generated illustrations throughout, again graciously generated in collaboration with Keystone Gray, then a little final photoshopping and other processing from us both.

After delivering some apples to a far away customer, Applejack gets lost on the way home. Stuck dealing with a bunch of troublesome situations and ponies she'd really rather not have to bother with, she just wishes she could find her way home and more than anything to just be able to eat an apple again.

As a professional athlete, Dash goes to regular physicals. As an Element Of Harmony, she goes to regular magicals too. Soul examination is her least favorite part, but at least the patient blacks out while their spirit is in capable hooves.

Starlight Glimmer's hooves have questionable capability.

This is an entry in the Snippet Series, an anthology of old oneshots that I (and my good buddy Str8aura) wrote based around interesting pics I found. New ones will be posted every other Thursday for the foreseeable future.