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// Prelude:  The Past Seven Years 
// Story: Election in Ponyville 3:  Destiny at Stake 
// by StormLuna 
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Amethyst Star was entering the final year of her second term and decided to run for a third.  When she was first elected, Ponyville was an earth pony community full of old traditions, homes with straw roofs and a mountain of debt.  When Amethyst first ran, eradicating the debt was her primary concern.  Eradicating that debt however required that she do things to alter the town in a way that would have horrified the town founders and would anger the traditionalists. 

When Amethyst won, she immediately got to work.  She scrapped publicly funded festivals, she instituted a sales tax, she lowered business taxes, done away with the property tax and did something that just a few years prior that nopony would ever even dare dream of, she replaced depending on Cloudsdale for the weather and hired unicorn mages to keep the weather tourist friendly year round and to help the earth pony farmers generate an extra harvest every year. 

The things she did worked beyond her wildest dreams.  By the time she was up for re-election, Ponyville had changed significantly.  The community had at least doubled in size, the demographics had changed significantly with the town becoming more diverse and what made Amethyst the happiest was that many new businesses came into town.  Some of the businesses were owned by non-pony businesscreatures and a good amount of them were owned by unicorns, unicorns who brought in their own employees because of Ponyville's very low unemployment rate. 

Because of the huge spike in tourism, a new hotel had opened and in the most recent mayoral election, a referendum for small stakes gambling was approved and that not only caused the hotel to have to be bigger but also brought in even more employees.  Throughout her second term, Amethyst continued to have things go her way as a referendum for full scale casino gambling passed in 2022, bringing in other casinos, casinos that were ran by unicorns. 

It wasn't just hotels and casinos that moved to Ponyville, the headquarters of larger companies also moved there because of the lower business taxes.  Because of this, a twelve story office building was built, which along with the Sky Needle, the modern clock tower and the arch gave Ponyville a distinct skyline, one that was noticeable from a fair distance. 

Now here it is, time for Amethyst to begin her campaign for the 2024 campaign and she can sense that her ultimate goal may come to pass.  While she has repeatedly denied the accusation, her goal of seeing to it that Ponyville will never again embrace old, costly and out-dated traditions is so close.  The traditionalists have a feeling that is her desire and realize that to stop her, that they have only one option.   Because of the altered demographics of the town, they must find a unicorn who supports not only bringing back the old traditions but to even attempt to bring back the Ponyville of old.  The most extreme traditionalists want all the progress of the past seven years gone and surprisingly, there is one unicorn who realizes that her past support for Amethyst was a mistake and wants to do what she can to bring back what some of her friends love so much.