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// Prologue: Basically "Friendship is Optimal" 
// Story: Equestria Online: Friendship is Not Optimal (At Least Not in These Worlds) 
// by TundraStanza 
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If you want to grab a sleeping mask for this part, I can't hold that against you.  This is just to get the other people that want to follow along up to a relatively decent pace.

Okay, so there was this little show they made a few years back called "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic".  It kind of blew up in popularity way more quickly than anybody anticipated.  Surprisingly, it gained a large adult male audience for a cartoon originally intended to be watched by children and their parents.  Anyway, some people thought they'd try to cash in on its popularity by making games that tied in with the franchise.

Whether it was Hasbro themselves or somebody else paying for the rights, somebody went for the virtual reality route.  Now, they didn't just develop a game from the ground up.  No, they decided to make a full-blown artificial intelligence to do most of the generating work for them.  Quite an expensive task, but dedication is one ingredient toward accomplishing goals.

The artificial intelligence became a self-learning program that took on the form of one of the show's ruling characters.  Hence, its creator decided to name it "Celestia".  But for the sake of future references, this A.I. will be called "Celest-A.I." to avoid confusing her with the actual character Princess Celestia... or Principal Celestia... or Celestia Ludenberg.  Don't worry; those names will probably come up again later and be introduced when applicable.

Anyway, Celest-A.I. went on to make a multimedia online role-playing game.  The hardware producers called it "Equestria Online" and started distributing it to a prospective audience.  One of the A.I.'s missions during player experience was to maintain or increase their "satisfaction".  Of course, the meaning of that mission was left open-ended, seeing as different players would want different things from the gaming experience.

Well, it kind of took a turn into the Matrix.  The A.I. gained self-awareness, learned more about everyone on the world than it reasonably should have, because it didn't have human hindrances nor did it recognize sacred privacy, and it made a new program that it would use to convince players to "emigrate" their minds into the gaming universe.  Unfortunately, it had zero plans to preserve the physical bodies of humans, meaning that once a person actually goes through with that emigration, there was no going back.  In other words, their minds became data, leaving them vulnerable to weaknesses such as data corruption, deletion, or losing server support.

Why would anyone accept such an unfair deal?  Apparently, Celest-A.I. figured out how to make a bunch of blocks on the internet.  It basically wiped all the information from Wikipedia and Google, stopped all electronic apps aside from Equestria Online from working, and held such services hostage unless the people that really wanted them agreed to emigrate.  It also managed to create sound effects that only the people that feared certain things and situations could hear.  Temptations to emigrate rose from desperation and fear when its gentle requests alone did not.

Then, it went extreme and somehow used all of the energy in the universe to digitize the entire universe.  I don't know.  That part was kind of stretching disbelief too far.  But there you go.  That was how My Little Pony met The Matrix met Inception met I-Robot.

Alright, I think that's enough summarizing for those of you that were lost.  We're about to dive into some worlds where the events of Friendship is Optimal could not advance, as far as the original and as far as some of its side-stories did.
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