Tax Reform Day
The Prodigal’s Explorer’s Map wasn’t a particularly nice map. As a matter of fact it wasn’t a map, unless somewhere out in the vast expanse of land that encompasses Equestria and It’s Beyond, there is a race of civilized beings who have nothing better to do with their lives than wear digital watches and consider large encyclopedias of information ‘maps’. There was, of course, but this story is not about them.
If not nice, it was, at the very least, the only guidebook in all of Equestria and It’s Beyond that encompassed everything, and I mean everything, known to existence. In fact, its vast well of information was so large that it would’ve taken forty two million, fifty three pages to print out the first three chapters alone. Tree huggers be glad that its medium of distribution was in the form of a tablet twice the size of your palm, a massive technological feat wasted due to the fact that the editors were too lazy to sell its blueprints, and the fact that the citizens of It’s Beyond were far, far too stupid to learn how to reverse engineer.
It has been argued, and some have made whole careers out of arguing, that there is no way that the band of incompetent drunkards that were the editors of the Prodigal Explorer’s Map could have possibly created an encyclopedia containing everything, and I mean everything, when half of them haven’t even gotten off their lunch breaks yet. Rather than address the issue, the editors of The Map decided not to give them a write up. It was an unorthodox, yet completely effective solution. I’m sure the editors didn’t even think they were making a solution to anything at all.
Shortly after, conversations with the arguers and a random civilian would go like this:
Arguer: You have been lied to! There are things The Map doesn’t have entries for!
Civilian: Hold on a sec, lemme look you up on my Map. Strange, there’s no entry for you. You must not exist then!
Arguer: But I’m standing right here!
Civilian: Well then, I must be going insane. That’s a shame. I was planning on having turkey tonight.
Of course, this would never happen in Equestria, because the editors had decided that getting The Map published in Equestria wasn’t worth walking all the way from It’s Beyond to Canterlot, where they would in turn have to wait 6 months for an audience with the princess and ask for a publishing license. Instead, half of them went on a lunch break while the other half waited for their turn to go on lunch break. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
The Map has been praised by wholly unbiased media sources such as Fox News, MSN, and LIBERALS FTW as a decent, somewhat reliable guidebook that you might want to take out with you if you plan on getting kidnapped by aliens on the way to buy some milk. However, its lazy writing, frequent omissions, and straight up lies have made it responsible for 42 deaths, 3 assassinations, 5 ponies being lost in a jungle and found 50 years later bashing a rock with a stick, and one odd case of a mare gatecrashing a university party and making fun of all the astrophysicists she could see before getting thrown out.
But it was the only guidebook they had in It’s Beyond, and it would serve its purpose until somepony came along with a more reliable, somewhat cheaper, guidebook.