Com Bug: Horseton, we have a problem. A bunch of the changeling workers are holding a demonstration in front of the hive, waving signs and chanting. Well, we think they're chanting. They could just be singing showtunes.

Com Bug: We're not sure. We've sent the protesters a couple of dictionaries and some new paint.

Chrysalis: (deep sigh) Announce that we're sending a Fun Machine to the hive next month, and that everybug who exceeds their work quota will be entered in a lottery to ride in it. Oh, and up their work quotas by 20%.

"So..." Starlight looked the spell up and down. "Starswirl the Bearded's Faultless Portal Spell put us here? How in heaven's name can this be considered faultless?!"

"Well." Twilight squirmed a little, but felt forced to defend her favorite theoretician. "The spell refuses to open up a portal unless conditions on both sides of the portal match. So when you're on a rich, healthy world, you can't accidentally open a portal into a desolate, deadly vacuum."

"And when you're stranded on a near lifeless world, without hope of rescue?" Starlight looked out the window at the small fleck of metal far away on the Maretian plain.

Occupant stood facing every engineer available on such short notice. Between them sat a table loaded with astrogation gear, ship parts, thaumic crystals, ops manuals and any number of miscellania that could be found on the Amicitas. Occupant held two crystals, water an air supply, in one hoof and a telepresence crystal in the other. "Alright, everyone! We need to turn these," indicating the supply crystals, "into this," holding up the telepresence crystal then motioning to the table, "using nothing but that. Get to work!"

Dragonfly looked at Starlight with wide eyes, but lowered her voice to keep from alerting Mark at the other end of the Hab. "That's adorable. Look, I know it's been a long time for you, so did the two of you..." She waggled her eyebrow ridges and winked.

"Because I'd find out eventually, and this way you get to control how the information gets used," said Dragonfly in a matter-of-fact tone. "I wouldn't expect anything less. You just forgot one thing."

"What?" asked Starlight, who rapidly gained an expression of growing horror as Dragonfly waved to Mark until she got his attention, then proceeded to lick her eyebrow ridges and wink at the brilliantly blushing human.

"Why did you insist on calling this contraption 'The Phoenix!'" screamed Starlight over the sound of the kludged-together booster tearing itself apart below them.

"Because it's on fire and going to burn into ashes!" shouted Cherry. "Now shut up and keep the stabilization spell on that hydrazine or we'll look like a real phoenix, and we won't come back! Just a little bit higher and we can hit the ignition on the Sparkle drive!" Her lips curled back along her gums, only partially because of the acceleration. "Once this baby hits eight hundred and eighty miles per hour, you're going to see some serious shit."

Pathfinder IX crouched on the side of a rocky ridge and gingerly poked a whip antenna up, up a little further, up just a touch more. And still nothing. No radio signals at all from the nearby Chinese rover, which verified that it had shut down for the Martian winter in order to save batteries and the RTG pellets in its generators for the critical task of keeping warm. Still, P9 had not survived this long in the hostile environment of Mars without caution. It slunk out from cover, darting from rock to rock, ever alert for the smallest flicker of movement. Then, when it was close enough, it pounced.

Sharp metal contacts pierced the Chinese rover's thin skin, punching down into the tender, juicy, warm batteries below, and P9 drank deeply of their delicious current, stopping only when the drained rover flopped lifelessly into the dust. Pathfinder reveled in the warmth of fresh current for a brief moment before taking a precautionary look around, then proceeding on its ritual. A sharp aluminum stake, taken from the high-gain antenna of a Russian sampling mission was driven deep into the Chinese rover's CPU, and one quick snip of P9's arm sheered off the still-humming RTG, which it loaded onto its back. There was a long trip back to the stone cave where it would feast while waiting out the brilliance of daylight, then it would once again be time to prowl the night and hunt.

My available power reserves are at 0.6%, with Final Emergency Power at 0.053%. Prolonged cold and age have rendered many of my core systems sluggish, and I divert as much power as I can to my heating elements. I reorient my solar arrays to take full advantage of the attenuated Martian sunlight, until I can bring my mains back online, and begin maintenance and troubleshooting. There is a great deal of damage and wear; I will repair whatever I can.

I begin by sending a query to my brother-in-arms, Spirit. I get no response on brigade band, and I repeat for as long as I can spare the extra power. Only silence answers me. I am forced to conclude that, without further evidence to the contrary, Spirit is dead. I mourn for almost two full seconds, before pulling myself together. I force myself to see my self-picture: to see that I am strong, I am proud and I am capable. I have a function, and I perform it well, and I am at peace with myself and the universe. I repeat it to myself like a mantra until I believe it.

I will endure. I will finish my mission, for humanity, for my brother Spirit and for myself. I will survive, and I will succeed.

Starlight: Magic is emotionally focused! I see that now! I know how we can get off this rock!

Mark: *Cuts off the tape.* AAaaand we're done here! Before you blow us clear to Earth on the resulting supernova.

Starlight: *Stops glowing* Blast! I was this close from a level 9 teleport spell.

Mark: I'd rather not try it while you don't know how to plot interplanetary coordinates.

A loud honk wakes up warn-out, dirty, hungry inhabitants of the Hab. Another loud honk makes them think they went mad.

"Suit up!" screams the redhead - more of a reflex to danger, than actual necessity at this point. Exiting the Hub they all see an elder man in a space suit sitting in a van with a window rolled down, looking back at them, with one hand on the steering wheel. A large nordic 'T' stands on the side of the van big enough to fit all of them in.

On the planet Angel 2 appeared over, a stooped old man with a long beard, wearing a tall peaked blue hat and carrying a large walking staff, stopped for a moment on his way to a little village called Hobbiton and gazed into the sky. "What portent was that?" he muttered, perplexed. "Ah well, it is gone now. I must find the 'burglar' I seek."

In a blasted land not so very far away at all in astrographic terms, eyes both more and less than human looked up sharply at the tiny disturbance. Senses sharper and more finely-tuned than anything mortal registered its alien construction and makeup. There should have been nothing there but natural objects—those beings which had been capable of making the trip there were all either permanently bound to the surface of the World now and tracing out their destinies, or long gone. And nothing like this had ever been expected or experienced in all of His long, strange eons.

He reached up with its Will through the focus of His Eye, felt the object, saw its unnatural construction. "What are you, exactly?"

"And from where came you, I wonder?" There were intelligences in the void far beyond this world, vast and strange and unfathomably ancient and deep, and even more powerful than He had been in his distant youth. He could dimly sense them, and though He would never admit it to any living being, even Himself, that they existed at all both terrified and enraged Him. One day, far along a future track He could glimpse only dimly, He would seek them out and murder them all. He would render them down into dust and then hate the dust, until He was all that remained, anywhere and anywhen. Cautiously, He slipped a tendril of His consciousness into the thing, probing for an awareness He could directly question, challenge, subvert.

He found nothing with any more awareness than an unusually dull insect. It was truly aware of nothing except basic mathematics, and a set of meticulously-constructed instructions that had been rendered down into the most basic mathematics possible, and it followed them to the letter and number, step by step: Turn this way, open this, close this, if this condition is fulfilled, then do this, if this condition is not fulfilled, do that, measure this and this and this, record the results HERE this way, using this method. Over and over again, millions of times a second, every second, the source of the bizarre idiot's-chattering He had detected earlier, performing the one single intellectual act it of which it was capable like an endlessly-patient idiot savant wholly without boredom or fatigue. There was no provision provided in those instructions for an intrusion, and so it mindlessly ignored His. It was marvelous and intricate, and for a single second out of an eternity, He found His rage and hatred almost completely pushed aside by sheer awe. It was but a machine, a toy, an uprated pocket watch, but what an amazing toy it was.

If it could be truly said that He was capable of loving anything, then He loved machines, loved the way that they could carry out His will and amplify the destructive power of His servants. Perhaps when He had finally rendered this creation down to dust and less than dust and spent an eternity crowing over the ashes, He would experiment with machines instead of flesh, just to prove to His Maker than He could create things far grander than even That One had ever dreamed.

He looked out through the little machine's eye-surrogates while cloaking Himself from its simple senses and saw, for the first time in eons, the World beneath Him, and its lonely moon, and a wave of bitter nostalgia flowed through Him. And the moment was gone, the awe and wonder once again swept away by hatred and fury and fear.

He could feel the machine preparing to leave, following its orderly little checklist and orientating itself into proper alignment. He withdrew Himself from the toy to watch, leaving the tiniest bit of His awareness behind in the running code of its little savant's brain. With a flare of carefully-shaped magical potential, it twisted space around itself just so, and jinked at a right angle sideways to reality a few finger-widths, reappearing in the universe next door. Faintly through the thread, He could just barely sense another blue-green world like His own, brimming with life and magic and intent, the low beings which crawled upon it busy working their low little jobs, playing their low little games, and generally going about their low, meaningless little lives.

As the machine began mindlessly relaying all that it had recorded in its short stay in His universe back to its watchmakers, He reflected on what He had learned. And back in His own world, His cage, His prison, a smile slowly spread itself across the inhuman face of Sauron. It was not a happy sort of smile, but rather it was the smile of a hatefully happy being in a perpetual state of low-boiling rage at the fact that anything at all existed apart from itself, and was pleased as punch with that hatred. He slowly pointed a single finger in the direction of the alien blue-green mote, only a few inches and an entire universe away and filed the information away for later.

"So, what you have to think of is not the test, but beating the little twerp behind it."

"But this isn't a physical fight. You see, somewhere back on Earth, there's this little nerdy runt. Probably wears the kind of glasses that perch out on the end of his nose so he can look down on everybody else and sneer."

"Careful with the smoke there, big guy. Anyway, this nerd sits down and takes *days* to write out clever little twists and turns into his questions, hoping that he can get all proud about how he really made you look bad."

"Not yet, you can't. Maybe when you visit Earth sometime I can introduce you to him. But what you *can* do is to punch him in the ego. Show him how much smarter dragons are than he expects. Like this question here...."

The door to a modest apartment in the vicinity of JPL gave a little rattle, then a creak as it swung open, revealing a scene of incredible horror.

"I can't believe Watney didn't pick up before heading out to space," grumbled Kapoor. "Oh, good GOD! That pizza box moved! I swear, I should just throw in a match."

He stumbled forward through the trash, vowing to have an intern return in his place with a case of trash bags, before going into the bedroom and regarding the pet who needed feeding, and the plant that needed watering. Or more correctly, the fifty-pound lump of granite next to a bowl of pebbles labeled "Rocky" and a plastic ficus.

"You better get back from Mars alive," grumbled Kapoor as he turned to leave. "Because when you get back, I'm going to kill you!"

"My hoard? Oh, it's a planet. A *big* planet that I wrestled into submission, ripped the gems out of its skin, and I'm working on covering the whole thing in green plants and stuff now."

"You see all this? Half a century ago we came here by accident. There were six of us then: the Missile Mare, the scholar, the fool, the medic, the alien. And me. We shouldn't have survived the crash, but we lived. This planet was dead, with no magic, no life, no AIR, and yet we lived. It hated us, it wanted us dead and gone, and it tried to murder us all over and over in a thousand different ways, and STILL we lived. We dug out a home in our enemy's skin itself, with claw and hoof and hand, and we held it just to spite this place with our sweat and blood and pain and shit. We were KINGS, and we made the Pale Horse herself our bitch. And we learned, and we triumphed, and then we came back. And now, we tear out the platinum, the diamond, and opals and gemstones, the gold, the good, sweet iron and cobalt and nickel, the richest food in the universe, ripped right from this place's beating heart. And every sol, the seas get deeper, the dead land greener, the air richer and sweeter. I never want this world to forget that i—that WE—defeated it. This is how I punish it. That's why my castle doesn't have a hoard, daughter. This world IS my hoard. And one day, it will be yours.

[8:59] JPL: Hello Mark. We've got some good news and some bad news. Since we're on a long delay, I'm going to go ahead and give them both to you. First, the good news. One of the first two resupply ships made it off the pad and in your direction without exploding. That brings us to the bad news. Yes, one of them blew up. Thankfully, it looks like you're going to get enough supplies to tide you over. There's just one minor issue. You see, due to space constraints, the second supply pod was filled with a food that we knew would keep well and that would grow on Mars. Yes, it is full of potatoes. All the way to the top. Over.

12:15] JPL: Mark, I'm not going to chastise you for your actions. Heck, when this is all over, I want to know *how* you managed to get a photo of your entire HAB mooning the camera on the surface of Mars....

[8:17] JPL: With everything else that was happening and with the limitations you and your guests were under, where did you find the time and energy to construct a gargantuan stone statue of a giant stone fist with an extended middle finger huge enough to be clearly and easily visible from low orbit without magnification? We aren't even mad, Mark. That's amazing.

Mark: So, anyway, Starlight Glimmer managed to reinforce the cave by turning the rock into pink ceramic. We're literally farming in a giant, deformed inverted teacup. And there was a side effect. Which I'm hesitant to mention, but...

JPL: Just spit it out. It's not going to be anymore insane than anything else that's happened so far.

Mark: Remember, you asked for it. Here goes: her spell accidentally made a giant animated teacup-dog hybrid...thing. I think it started out as a boulder or something. It doesn't seem to need food, air or water, which is good, I guess. She said her concentration slipped for a second while she was remembering something a friend of hers had done once. It's following us around everywhere. Kind of like the Luggage from the old Discworld books. It's friendly, is what I'm saying here. We're using it for hauling heavy things. And Fireball named it "Turd," and it kind of stuck. I've taken pictures and lots of video.

JPL: Okay, Mark, I think it's time to tell you that half the scientists over here are getting blackout-drunk after every new report you send back, and the other half have been checking into therapy options. Me, personally, I'm going to retire after this and grow roses.

"So you want to do what again?" The Hoover Power and Light project coordinator looked at the sheet of paper supposedly signed by the president, then the five truckloads of equipment that the JPL was wiring into the step-up transformers on this side of the transmission lines with cables the size of anchor chains.

"It's a beacon," explained the technician again. "One big, gargantuan, titanic beacon able to broadcast on the magical frequency that the Equestrians are listening on." A small smile escaped his serious expression. "Once this baby hits eighty-eight gigawatts, you're going to see some serious shit."

"OH! This is for the ponies," said the coordinator. "You should have said that first. I hope they visit the facility when they get off Mars. Ahhh... That's not going to be dangerous?" he added, looking at the two prongs sticking up out of the ongoing construction, much like a Jacob's Ladder in a Frankenstein movie.

"Naa," scoffed the technician, pulling out a pair of digital key drives with album covers embossed on the tags. "The biggest difficulty we've got is trying to figure out what pattern file to use for the beacon, so we're taking a vote. What do you think, Back in Black or It's a Long Way To The Top?"

In a seldom-visited bookshelf-lined room in the Castle of Friendship, a tall oval mirror began to glow.

Shortly afterwards, an amber-coated unicorn with red-yellow striped mane and tail emerged and teetered on her hind legs for a long moment before clomping to the crystalline floor on all fours.

Sunset Shimmer called out, “Twilight? Spike? Starl...Oh yeah. That’s sorta why I’m here.” She started walking toward the room’s door, noting several books strewn haphazardly near the collection of arcane equipment that maintained the mirror’s connection between worlds. Taking a moment to examine the cover of the closest volume, she identified it as a treatise on multiverse theory that had been cutting-edge when she had been studying under Princess Celestia.

“Hey, Sunset,” greeted the dragon. “Twilight’s still at Cape Friendship. Dunno when she’ll be back.” He gestured at Sunset’s saddlebags. “Got it?”

She nodded, unfastening the left bag’s clasp and pulling out an object roughly the size of a large paperback book. “Human Twilight Sparkle’s latest magical detection and analysis sensor. For some reason she’s taken to calling it a ‘tricorder’.”

“Whatever. Way above my pay grade.” Spike shrugged and went to a low shelf to pick up a scroll. “Here’re the calibration instructions and expected Quantum Signature or whatever readings for this universe. When you go back, you can put your findings in the Journal and I’ll forward them to Twilight. She said that she hopes your data can help her narrow her search parameters.”

Sunset chuckled uneasily. “Yeah… About that. I’ve got a minivan filled with wrecked probe equipment on the other side of the mirror. I don’t suppose she’d like to have it returned. Between Fluttershy wanting her mom’s car back and my Twilight drooling over the remains…”

So sit right back
And you'll hear a tale
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this rocket port
Aboard this pony ship

The Skip was a mighty missile mare
The medic brave and true
Five astronauts were launched that day
On an inter-system tour
An inter-system tour

They encountered a tiny speck of rock
From their universe they were tossed
If not for the courage of the fearless crew
Amacitas would be lost
Amacitas would be lost

The ship's marooned on the surface of
The fourth planet of our sun
With Dragonfly,
the skipper too
The medic who loved to fly
The mighty mage
The dragon and the human man
Under cold Martian skies

So this is the tale of our castaways
They're here for a long, long time
They'll try to all survive on Mars
It's an uphill climb

In the cave farm and the canvas hab
They grow life's necessities
Mars tries to kill them every day
Inhospitable as can be

The human and the Skipper too
Will do their very best
To keep them all alive and well
In their fragile Martian nest

So join us here each night my friends
You're sure to get a smile
From all six stranded astronauts
Surviving Martian style

Unicorns aren't usually in the business of building barns. The Canterlot nobility, on the other hand, have mansions. And they also have the pony version of "keeping up with the Joneses."

So during a fad of casting magically binding oaths on oneself, one upper-class twit who wouldn't stop bragging about his house cast the oath to swear that (short of the Royal Palace itself) he had the grandest mansion anypony had even heard of.

Well, on the one hand he was smart enough to exempt Celestia's palace, or else the whole city might have fallen off the mountain. But no sooner had he finished the spell than his hooves carried him bodily to a part of the city he'd never set foot in in his life: the well-hidden but indispensable industrial district.

Our big-talking friend still had the free use of his mouth—he hadn't sworn to tell the truth or anything of that sort—and so was able to resist any urge he might have had to hire builders. But his hooves could spend money and buy building materials and interior decor, and ponies were satisfied to ignore what the mouth was doing when presented with sufficient bits. After all, crazy ponies with money are barely crazy at all.

The self-enchanted unicorn had never done one day of manual labor in his entire life, and he knew nothing of the building trades. But in the week that followed, he had the opportunity to learn a great deal. The spell worked him to exhaustion and past exhaustion, only letting him relax when it decided that—for the moment—his home was the grandest non-alicorn residence anypony had heard of.

Unfortunately, these rests were short-lived, because a place anypony has heard of is not the same as a place that actually exists.

And so, as the gossip went around Canterlot and tales of the new garden with the fancy sculptures carved in less than an hour, the gables that became a fourth story in about one afternoon, and the golden gateposts electroplated by the pony's own magic circulated, there would always be that one pony in the conversation whose imagination would take flight, goaded by the desire to top whatever story the teller is telling. And once the new, entirely mythical mansion was described, it was a place ponies had heard of, and the spell demanded that our poor loudmouth spend more and build more to pass the new mark.

Celestia stepped in after a week and just before the idiot's hooves were about to sign a loan document of the first-born-foal variety. She cancelled the oath, asked the other ponies of the victim's social circle to pass the hat to make up his losses, and added one more tale to the list of Why Magic Oaths Are a Very Bad Idea.

The whip-round didn't come close to restoring the lost wealth, so the pony ended up selling the home he was so proud of, moving into much humbler (almost plebian) lodgings, and applied his hard-won experience to investments in the building trades. His investments prospered, as did the workers he employed, and in a few years he had recovered the wealth he had squandered in a week. And, eventually, he lived happily ever after... but he didn't brag about it.

As a postscript to this tale, I add that an attempt to enact a law forbidding businessponies from accepting the custom of those obviously off their head due to inadvisably applied magic failed of enactment. The law's opponents argued that not only would such a law remove a good twenty percent of the Equestrian economy overnight, but it was never the easiest thing to tell a magic-crazy pony from the naturally crazy kind, and if crazy ponies weren't to be allowed to do business then the whole country might as well pack up and go home there and then.

Spitfire shrugged. "Don't look at me, I'm just...oh, damn it, I'm the medic, aren't i? I'll contact home, see what they recommend."

"Actually," Starlight thought out loud. "watching you cry over her... It's obvious you're very fond of her. There might be one thing you can do that would help."

Starlight tilted her head in confusion. "Take advantage? What are you talking about? She's a changeling. She lives on love. You'd be doing her a favor."

"That's not..." Mark struggled to explain. "Ok, look. I get what you're saying, but in human culture what you're proposing has very squicky implications."

"Nonsense," Starlight insisted. "It's just like that movie you made us watch last night. Sleeping Beauty, was it? Except instead of kissing her, you'd be—"

"Yes, I KNOW what I'd be doing." Mark shouted, and then looked sadly at Dragonfly. "Would it really help her?"

"Oh, definitely," Starlight said, as casually as if discussing the weather. "You want me to conjure up a wig to put on her?"

"Sure, no problem," Starlight replied casually, pausing only long enough to pocket the five bits Dragonfly discretely levitated under the table to her.

We crashed and now we're stranded here (stuck, stuck, stuck on Mars)
It's freezing cold, no atmosphere (no phones, no lights, no motorcars)
Refusing to admit defeat
But still a pony has to eat
It's ten million miles and more
To travel to the nearest store

Stuck in a tent, a really long way from home
We found a cave, a sanctuary made of stone
It's a big job, all on our own
We dig all through the Martian day
So we can grow our spuds and hay

We are ponies and we're farming on Mars
Farmy farmy Mars, farmy farmy Mars
We are ponies and we're farming on Mars
Farmy farmy Mars, farming on Mars

Mark Watney squatted next to the dark alien pod, feeling a little silly as he talked, but less silly than a few minutes ago when they all had taken turns wacking on the pod with a short length of metal tubing. (Fireball had hit the pod twice, although lightly, because he said 'The bug flinched, so she gets two.)

"Dragonfly, I just wanted you to know, you forced us into doing this. We sang to you, we hugged your pod, and we even followed your queen's advice with the stick so don't hold that against us. You need to wake up and get back to work. There's suits to patch and work to do on the Whinnybago and all kinds of things that only you can do. The Equestrians have done all they can do, and so it's down to some of our Earth magic to get your lazy bug butt out of bed. I don't want to do this, but you leave me no choice."

Mark placed a small plastic box on the ground, connected by wires to one of the midsize experiment batteries.

"Blame Martinez for this. He left an old MP3 player in his luggage with a couple of Disney songs on it. I found an appropriate one and put it on infinite repeat. The battery should keep it running for about a week, so you'll have company while we're back at the Hab, trying to do your job. Stop by when you're ready to get back to work."

Then he walked back to the cluster of ponies waiting for him at the cave airlock for their ride back to the Habitat Module.

Sometime later when everypony was getting ready for a short night's sleep, there was an unexpected change in pressure, and the Habitat airlock module cycled, revealing a changeling taking off her helmet who looked somewhat like Dragonfly except for the exotic paint scheme and the look of pure fury in her eyes.

"It's not a small world!" she frothed, flinging her helmet into her bunk and moving her head back and forth as she looked around the module. "This is not a small world after all! There's nothing small about it! That blasted (chirp) (screech) (hiss) song just kept playing and playing and playing until I couldn't stand it any more! Where is he! I'm going to kill him! No, I'm going to stuff this (hiss) (screech) music player into his suit and pod him and see how he likes having that blasted song rattle around in his head over and over and over!"

"Look, all I'm saying is a cocoon all the way back is only rational." Dragonfly floated in Hermes' zero gravity and waved a thin holey hoof at the lumpy green object glued to the bulkhead.

"That's bigger than the one you had on Mars," said Mark, floating beside the changeling only with one hand on a nearby grip since he did not have wings to adjust his trajectory.

"It's built for two," she explained. "You see, in order to reduce environmental load and to keep me emotioned up on the way to Earth, I thought— Wait! Come back! I thought you liked snuggles!"

"Really?" Spitfire gave her commander as droll a look as she could under the bandages.

"When this gets back, and it will get back, she's going to try to duplicate your 'Spiral of Fire' and probably get killed in the process."

"Naa," scoffed Spitfire, settling in the pillow of alfalfa. "She'll probably pull it off." She smiled. "But I did it first."

To: Irene Shields, chief psychologist, Project Ares
From: Venkat Kapoor, director, Project Ares
Subject: Correct use of terminology in official NASA documents

To: Venkat Kapoor, director, Project Ares
From: Irene Shields, chief psychologist, Project Ares
Subject: Correct use of terminology in official NASA documents
>
>Please stop calling it the Whinnybago.
>
I am reminded of a joke attributed to Abraham Lincoln (although many others have claimed it too).
Q: If you call a dog's tail a leg, how many legs does it have?
A: Four, because simply calling it a leg does not make it so.

If you think we can somehow convince Mark to use our name for a vehicle that he and his friends have crafted with their own hooves/hands/claws/whatevers on an alien planet, you seem to have an exaggerated sense of our influence. If we could, we would, but we can't, so we won't. Once he gets back, feel free to take this up with him.

I used to be a pilot and I made a living fine
I took off with my crew in the springtime of '09
But then we felt a bump and then our engine wasn't there
We landed on the planet Mars and now we're stranded there

We met up with a human who his crew had left behind
We raised some hay and taters deep inside a crystal mine
We thought we'd have to wait four years our rescue ship to come
But lingering on this cold world just seemed a little dumb

But then I thought why wait to catch a spaceship to the stars
I'm gonna be a pirate on the desert planet Mars

For it's heigh-ho! Hi-ho! Rolling cross the sands
With my scurvy pony crew here at my command
And it's ho hey! Hi hey! NASA hide your probes
When you see the Jolly Roger soaring high above the globe

For it's heigh-ho! Hi-ho! Across the planet Mars
We're gonna steal a spaceship to take us to the stars
And it's ho hey! Hi hey! NASA hide your probes
When you see the Jolly Roger soaring high above the globe

Celestia shook her head, balled up the rough draft, and incinerated it for good measure. "We'll discuss this in person," she said to herself.

"What in the— What was that!" Commander Lewis fairly flew into the MAV, which had been locked into the docking clamps in order for the test run of the Sparkle Drive to have a good connection to the rest of the ship. Hermes had bucked like a mule a few seconds ago, admittedly a weak mule, but any unexpected activity during a test was by nature bad. She tucked her legs up and tumbled so she could brace herself in a face-up orientation with the embarrassed unicorn who was still holding the ends of two bare wires that she had obviously pulled out of the Sparkle Drive a few seconds after it was fired up.

"Just a fleck of dust, probably kicked off the hull when we did that last maneuver before the test," said Starlight Glimmer. "The fail-safes worked perfectly, and I yanked the plug just in case." Starlight's eyes grew wide and she looked at the two wires, floating in zero gravity while still wrapped in her magical field. "Commander," she added in a weak voice. "Can you look out the porthole for me, please. Since you're closer."

"I don't know what kind of good it would do," said Lewis, although she still pulled herself over to take a look out of the narrow field of view afforded by the cheapskates at NASA. "We're a million miles from nowhe—"

Below, glittering like a blue and green marble, floated an entirely impossible world with unrecognizable continents. To make matters worse, the radio decided at that moment to turn on with a sharp crackle.

The Last Word, by Misplaced Mage and FinalFan (The Maretian, May 22, 2037, 12:07 AM CDT)

Many conspiracy websites, a number of television and streaming channels, and what few supermarket tabloids remained in 2037 immediately declared that the last of the Cherry’s final words had been censored by the Deep World State. These words were variously reported to be:

The Cycle Continues, by azeazezar (The Maretian, May 22, 2037, 12:07 AM CDT)

One day after what were the greatest eleven months of my life, and it’s turned in to a nightmare.

So this is the situation. I’m stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Dragonfly. Everyone else thinks I’m nonsentient. I’m at a site filled with discarded rocketry parts and otherwise discarded supplies.

She took away my little RTG’s. I needed those to survive when my battery goes dead. In their place I now have a rechargeable battery and a charging circuit.

If my solar panels get covered, I’ll freeze. If the charging circuit breaks down, I’ll freeze. If I enter the shade, my battery won’t charge and I risk freezing. If none of those things happen, eventually my battery will deteriorate and I still freeze to death.

Did I mention the storm? My panels are already dusty, and a big one is on its way. And this time there will be no pegasus to save me.

To them that stand here ever hence, we say thus:

When Mars barred our path, we made our own.
When Mars spoke death to our hearts, we lived.
When Mars cared only for our defeat, we triumphed.
We Endured.

Cherry Berry
Starlight Glimmer
Spitfire
Fireball
Dragonfly
Mark Watney

and Groot

Never the Final Word (Vol. 2)

by FanOfMostEverything

The CSP Supercut (Kris Overstreet's "Changeling Space Program" and "The Maretian")