"Most things out here are ambivalent. The animals, the forest, they don't care about you. But the river? The river is trying to kill you."

"I have found that in our darkest days, we judge ourselves not in terms of what we can do, but in what we fail to do."

CW: death by drowning in the background, implied suicide attempt

Entry for the Twilight Files contest. This story is a media fic best read on the site. If any piece of media is not working (and Red is still active on FimFic) please let him know.

Ponyville Retirement Village is being evacuated to a newly constructed shelter underneath Town Hall. It only makes sense; with this new villain 'Tirek' on the rampage, it's only a matter of time before he's drawn to Ponyville, just like every other monster, natural disaster, or hapless club of cutie-mark seeking agents of chaos.

What could possibly go wrong during the evacuation?

(Alternate Universe tag because of minor deviations from the show's canon)

This story was written for a Quills and Sofas speedwriting contest. Check us out here, and come join in the fun!
Prereaders include AuroraDawn, Holtinater, Exodd, and AFanaticRabbit. They're all amazing authors, so please go give them some love, hm?

Life in the streets is a constant struggle, even in a beautiful city like Canterlot. Hunger, danger, and persecution can easily lead to death or worse. Trixie and Sunset consider themselves lucky to have each other when facing the hardships of life.

They know that as long as they're together, they'll be able to survive anything the world throws at them.

Inspired by this music: Until We Die - Ending Song

Originally written for the Sunset Shimmer x Trixie Lulamoon contest over at the Sunset Shimmer x EG/MLP Villains Shippers’s Group & Competitions!

Now part of the May Pairings Contest

I had so many problems with the production of this thing I swear it's cursed.

Special thanks to Dewdrops on the Grass, mushroompone, and Shrink Laureate for pre reading and helping me keep my sanity.

Extra thanks to daOtterGuy for the cover art.

Loquaciously prolix Autumn Blaze hires terse Bulk Biceps as a parsimonious expert who can efficiently orient the isolated kirin on Equestria's history.

It was forbidden.^{(From the contest rules related to word count: "...please don't write an entire encyclopedia on the comprehensive history of Equestria, featuring Autumn Blaze and Bulk Biceps.")} Yet, it must be told.

Era: Season 8. (See an index of my stories, sorted by My Little Pony Season).

- Attained the Feature Box (#1 position at highest) on 25/5/2021 and 26/5/2021. Thank you!
- Equestria Daily on Kirin Day 2022/April/17, listed it as a top Kirin-featuring fic. Thank you!

Entry in the May 2021 Pairing Contest. (Contest Folder Link). Not a romance (though seeds of a romance may be planted for the future), just featuring two characters rarely seen working together.

Cover Image from here, with rights to the cover image discussed on that page.

Ingredients for authentic Japanese-style ramen:

• 8oz handmade wheat noodles
• 1 cup napa cabbage
• 3oz shiitake mushrooms, sliced
• 1 Little Dashie--WAIT WHAT....!?!?!

(This is a shitpost. Expect shitpost content. Typos are intentional and for comedic effect. No graphic violence occurs in this story.)

(This is an UNOFFICIAL parody of My Little Dashie. Support the official release.)

(Now with a VTuber reading by TheMajorTechie!)

Fluttershy and friends gain access to this website, but quickly find themselves trapped within a paradoxical situation.

Check out the comic where the cover art comes from!

Posted with approval from the staff.

Update 3/19/2021: _{A couple days after publishing this story, and after Fluttershy injected a hacking payload into the mainframe utilizing a quantum subspace frequency modulation algorithm, we were able to access hidden meta-data for this data endpoint and successfully remove ourselves from the causality loop. I am writing this message to preserve our efforts before we sever the connection, in the off chance that something like this ever happens again. With Love and Friendship, Twilight Sparkle.}

Rarity is a successful fashion designer slowly growing to hate what she's doing.

Gertie the Dinosaur is one of the first cartoon characters ever animated.

Winsor McCay is her creator, a pioneer of early animation.

...At night, the three of them dream together.

Click here to see Gertie the Dinosaur! (watch it, it's fun!)

A crossover with Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur, considered by some wikipedia editors to be the first proper “character” brought to life by animation. McCay, a newspaper cartoonist, pioneered for the film several techniques that remain essential to animation today – including keyframes, registration marks, and animation loops. McCay's animations were variously successful, but as time went on he became increasingly disillusioned with the burgeoning industry, and in 1921 was forced by his editor to give up animation almost entirely. In 1934, he woke to discover his drawing hand completely paralysed, and was pronounced dead later that afternoon.

Winner (!) of Estee's Who Crossed Over My Little Pony? contest. Check out the other entries here!

In the sky, a sable feather floating. In the air, the sound of engines. On, the wind, a lisping voice: "Buy war bonds." The duck approaches. Discord is terrified.

Theorizing that one could travel to parallel tooniverses where one's own species was sapient, Dr. Horace Horsecollar stepped into the Quantum Schlep accelerator...and vanished.

He woke to find himself trapped in one cartoon realm after another, facing equine mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change the overall cosmos for the better. His only guide on this journey is Mickey, an observer from his own tooniverse, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Horace can see and hear.

And so Dr. Horsecollar finds himself schleping from life to life, striving to put right what could go wrong, and hoping each time that his next schlep will be the schlep home.

This one isn't, though. This one has him schlepping into Big Mac's body just before "Applebuck Season."

And while this is definitely an entry in Estee's "Who Crossed Over My Little Pony?" contest in which it gained an Honorable Mention, it also might have something to do with this little TV series from the early 1990s called Quantum Leap...

Tirek is a juggernaut. A nonstop bullet train on the fast track to becoming the sole source of magic in Equestria (and it's de facto ruler).

But what happens when this unstoppable force meets an immovable will?

A will that's more than eager to resort to cheap tricks and humiliation tactics to balance the karmic scales?

At that point... it's open season.

Tirek Season.

An entry for the Who Crossed Over My Little Pony? contest.

Cover art by the impeccably talented Mutter_Butter.

Special thanks to mushroompone for prereading and feedback.