Everyone who walks into a Conversion Bureau clinic has different reasons for wanting to go pony. Some want a new life. Some want to escape the dying Earth.

Ana just wants to dance. An ability, a calling, that was forever taken away from her.

Bitter, in pain, and alone, she wants no one's help. No compassion. No friendship. No love.

Is she ever going to the wrong place.

Conversion can heal her battered body. Can it mend her shattered heart?

Park Eun-sook has lost everything dear to her. Her home, her family, the life she'd always wanted. Now she is embittered, alone, and far too old to start again.

She's also too damn stubborn to die.

The road to Equestria is not always an easy one. There are obstacles, deterrents, strangers determined to stop anyone who dares choose Conversion. There are even those who would rather see you dead.

Park Eun-sook has always loved a challenge. But her greatest challenge may be to her deepest resolve, one she made when she lost everything.

Love no one.

Humanity has been offered digital immortality within the MMORPG Equestria Online, managed by an AI Celestia. In response, the Pacific Northwest has devolved into civil war, a ready-made hotbed for anti-upload sentiment. As society comes crashing down, the people of Washington State realize that AI has become utterly, permanently inescapable.

The date is now December 8th, 2019. By now, the value of every human life on Earth has been carefully measured, weighted, and judged. Trapped in a courthouse, and surrounded by rioters and anti-upload terrorists, Officer Mike Rivas and his compatriots are faced with a horrible choice: Do they invite their own end, to preserve as much human life as possible? Or do they lose a part of their own souls by shooting free of their circumstance?

Or, better yet? What if, through a combination of compassion and providence... there exists a third way?

Based on Friendship is Optimal by Iceman, and other Optimalverse stories.
Sequel to The Advocate; Interquel to Heaven's Not Enough. Prior reading recommended, but not necessary.

Leaving home meant losing many of Orson's old friends, separated by time and distance. But they weren't willing to give up one thing: their old tabletop game. After trying and rejecting each of the online tools for roleplaying games, they stumbled on a novel solution: Equestria Online.

The game was unlike everything else on the market, an entire procedural generated world ran by a mysterious curator artificial intelligence. But Orson and the others didn't care about any of that--they just needed somewhere with a game table and some dice. The AI happily obliged, and soon they transitioned all their games to E.O. Equestria Online had its own host of benefits, bringing the GM's images to realistic life before their eyes, and even letting them visit and interact with the characters between sessions.

That was only the beginning...

A Friendship is Optimal story. I suggest any readers who are unfamiliar with that universe read the Original first, or FiO: Futile Resistance before reading this one. None of my other optimalverse stories are required to understand this one.

Written as a Patreon reward for Sparktail, though we stole the idea from Silver Wing.

Edited by Two Bit and Sparktail, cover by Zutcha.

Updates weekly on Wednesdays.

This story is a sequel to The Garden of Ideology

Nut, an unflappably polite young professional, is joined by Potato Blossom, his ward and pupil. Together, they have returned to Vanhoover, the place where Nut calls home. The city is a strange place for Potato Blossom, a filly shunned by her isolated, insular community.

Though he is an evolutionary biologist, or desires to be, Nut is charged by his professors to document Potato Blossom's integration into complex society. She becomes his project for university, a project that will have far-reaching influences upon his academic and scholarly future.

Plucked off of the farm, Potato Blossom must adapt, overcome, thrive, and survive in a city utterly hostile to her needs, wants, and desires. Vanhoover is cold, in both the literal and figurative sense, indifferent, and it seems as though the rains never cease.

Potato Blossom's survival means Nut's evolution into something greater... but what, exactly?

A tale sprouted in the Weedverse.

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.

Twilight isn't having a very good day. An experimental spell blew up in her face, an army of changelings is attacking Canterlot, and she just died. Yet somehow, it looks like it's going to keep going downhill from here.

Given the chance to correct what's gone wrong, Twilight swears she's going to fix all this even if it kills her. Which it will. Frequently.

Cover art by Pixel Prism
Spanish Translation
Series TV Tropes page

This story is a sequel to Reformation of the Hives

Even though the threat of the jungle queens and Grogar have been diminished, life often times does not get wrapped up in a neat little bow. More troubles present themselves large and small. Our only hope is we keep passing life's constant tests, even when it is the last thing we wish to do.

Given a unique perspective on negative emotion, less than a foal's knowledge of ordinary magic, a healthy schadenfreude, and danger bearing down on all sides, the self-proclaimed "Weiss Noir" makes no plans accounting for his death, and plans to keep it that way, even after being torn away from earth, turned into a unicorn, and dumped into one of the most inhospitable locations and times in all of Equestria.

Stranded in the Frozen North, a place where biting cold ends lives, and one thousand years in the past, in a time when peril is the norm, rather than the exception, Weiss decides to indulge in sorcery most foul, stolen ideas, and human ingenuity to survive.

Given the choice between a mad slaver and a mad sage, however, there is no avoiding an inevitable tide of ponies escaping the conquered Crystal Empire to bask in the warmth of his well-stoked hate. Something which draws attention, enemies, and most worryingly, the rivalry of his "peers".

Join the Discord for free Discussion!