Sunset Shimmer was livid.
She had just been dismissed for the tutelage of Princess Celestia because she had been unlucky enough to be caught in the restricted archives researching so called forbidden magic.
Now she was being escorted from the palace by a pair of guards after Princess Celestia had ordered her removed from the palace.
Sunset tightened her hands around the straps of her backpack in anger.
'She showed me all these things, all those possibilities and she just throws me away when I try to attain the potential she saw in me. She knows I should be a princess damn it!"' Sunset thought to herself with a growl.
The path from her quarters, where Sunset was able to gather her meager personal possessions, took them past a certain room.
Sunset noticed this and quickly made a plan and enacted it.
As they approached the door, she quickly charged her horn and fired off a pair of force blasts that sent the pair of guards flying into the walls.
Sunset heard their groans as she shoved the door open and ran towards the mirror that Celestia had told her was a portal created by Starswirl the Bearded.
She touched the surface of the mirror, causing ripples to form where her fingertips touched the silvery surface. She smirked, nebulous plans forming to get her revenge and show the Princess just how worthy she was.
"Sunset Shimmer! Don't!" Shouted Princess Celestia as she entered the room, panic written on her face.
"You can't stop me! Not anymore!" Sunset yelled back as she jumped through the portal.
The strange thing about magic and magical items, especially those that rely on certain celestial events to function, is that another celestial event can cause it to behave in a way that was never expected or indeed, even theorized by their creators due to a lack of understanding.
In the case of the mirror portal, Starswirl the Bearded, while a very intelligent and learned wizard, he didn't understand things like solar maximums and minimums or coronal mass ejections.
In fact, just minutes before Sunset leapt through the portal, what would be classified as a 'X3' class coronal mass ejection by a society that had a deeper understanding of the bodies in their star system.
However, the world that the nation of Equestria was a part of did not have this understanding, even as the sciences began to learn more about the world around them. There was no way to observe the local star with more than a telescope with a filter but, even if such a technology existed, due to the reverence for Princess Celestia, many who would be best suited to study the behavior on the star refused to entertain even the idea of looking upon the star with a critical eye due to an unspoken dogma.
This meant, that the studious and usually cautious unicorn that Sunset Shimmer was, she had no idea that a massive wave of high energy particles were about to slam into the upper atmosphere of Terra.
As she made her leap, the wave struck the upper atmosphere, interacting with the magnetic fields that protected the planet from the stellar radiation put out by their star, generating auroras over the city of Canterlot, bringing the busy streets to a standstill at the unexpected site so far south.
The mirror, merely completed its task of transporting the user to a different dimension, however due to the interference of the radiation, missed its target.
Sunset stepped out of the other side of the mirror with a victorious smile on her face, until she slipped off the ledge that the other end of the portal was located on.
She fell to the hard metal surface of the floor. Rolling onto her back, she looked up to see the swirling portal flicker and then collapse in on itself with a loud pop.
It was at this moment a hatch across the room slid open.
"I think I found the source of the radiation." A male voice said. "It looks like it is in storage room E561. What the hell?"
Sunset turned to look at the man who was startled by her presence in the room.
"Who the hell are you and what are you doing in here?" He asked gruffly. "These decks are restricted to authorized personnel." He said as he moved towards Sunset.
Sunset, not wanting to get captured so soon after escaping from the Royal Guards, she quickly got to her feet and rushed past the man, ducking under his grasping arms.
She moved out of the hatch as she heard the man yell for security, but she paid him no mind as she charged down the corridor.
She found another hatch that was open and charged through it, finding herself in a warehouse area with large machines and hundreds of people moving crates of various sizes around the area.
She made her way around the edge of the room until she reached the opposite side, duckingf through a hatch that had been opened by a worker entering the massive room.
She continued moving through the corridors, hiding from any of the strange, furless creatures that came her way.
Soon enough she found herself in what appeared to be a more civilian area of whatever structure she had found herself in.
As she walked she walked past a window, but didn't immediately take note of it as she tried to figure out where to go next.
A flash outside the window drew her attention, making her look towards it, causing her to gasp in shock at the sight of deep space and the numerous craft of all sizes moving around in all directions outside the window.
"There she is!" A voice called out, causing her to turn.
Her eyes widened at the sight of a half dozen armored figures with strange weapons pointed at her.
She took off running again, but only got a couple of steps before her muscles locked up and she fell onto her face.
Sunset found herself cuffed to a table in an interrogation room. When she was captured, they had taken a sample of her blood, pictures of her face, scanned her fingers and hands, and shined a light in her eye to 'scan her retina' as she was told.
Soon, a middle aged female entered the room, holding a tablet.
"You have been the cause of a great many headaches for my staff and I today young lady." The woman said. "My name is Administrator Mela Tines of the Federation station Cook Gateway. And you, young lady, don't show up in any database, be it Federal, Imperial, or Alliance." She said glaring at Sunset. "As far as we can tell from security footage, you just appeared in that storage room in a burst of Chernkov radiation. The medical scans show no ill effects on you, which is odd, but of little importance to me other than the fact you are not a health risk to be around. What is of importance is that I now have another mouth to feed on a station with a population of nearly a million and I have no idea whether or not you will be an asset or a liability. To that end, I am turning you over to the Federal orphanage in the Duamta system. Your transport will be leaving shortly. Good day to you and I hope the next time you are on my station, you are doing something productive."
Sunset sat in awe as the couple of times she had tried to speak through the woman's tirade were quickly overridden by a tired and stressed beaurocrat. She was quickly taken from the room by a pair of security personnel who had her fitted with something called a Remlock suit, a tight form fitting garment that they said would protect her if she was exposed to vacuum.
Not quite understanding what that meant she followed as her escorts took her to a hangar bay. The commander of the vessel she was to board, a ship named the Celestial Wayfarer, lead her to the small cabin she would be in for the duration of the trip with strict orders not to leave the cabin during the voyage.
The trip didn't last long, only a few hours that were punctuated by the many sounds of the ship as it traversed the stars. Thankfully her cabin had a screen that she was able to work out that showed the outside of the ship, though most of the time was in some strange dark dimension that seemed to whisper to her through the speakers in the cabin. Soon enough they had reached their destination. The commander handed her over to the representative of the orphanage and Sunset Shimmer, after a short argument about her name, was a registered citizen of the Federation.
Sunset entered the small room she had been given in the orphanage. It was approximately three meters by eight meters with a small twin sized bed, a desk, and a small set of shelves for trinkets. Other than that, it was completely barren and emotionless.
Sunset dropped her backpack that she had managed to keep and the duffle bag of clothing and toiletries she had been issued onto the desk and sat down on the bed.
After a moment, the stress of the day caught up with her and tears began to make their way down her cheeks.
With what little she had seen, any of the nebulous plans that she had for getting her revenge on Celestia had evaporated. She was trapped in this strange new dimension and, as far as she could tell, had no way of getting home. She had lost access to her magic, one of the most important things about her.
Now, she was adrift, almost literally, as she found herself in a galaxy where the fates of trillions of people were decided by the few. And it wasn't the beaurocrats or the politicians. It was the members of the Pilot's Federation that decided the fates of the galaxy at large. They could make or break alliances and either save or doom a star system. Though she knew none of this, Sunset's fate now rested in the hands of the Elite.