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// Tape 1 - The Origin Story 
// Story: The Lunatic 
// by Supermuncher60 
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Let me ask you a question, have you ever wanted to visit the moon? 

If you were born any time since the 1950’s, and human of course, I would assume that the answer, at least for most, would be some form of yes. 

Well don’t. This place sucks. It’s a desolate wasteland with dust that’s worse for your lungs than asbestos and tends to stick to anything it can like cling wrap. Pair that with the total lack of water or any type of food along with a constant bath of solar and cosmic radiation and you have the perfect vacation destination. 

At least if the ‘vacation’ you have in mind is the vacation the people booted from ships onto Australia by the British had.  

When my ass got kicked up here, I spent the first year unable to do anything but continuously suffocate, unable to die. I eventually got used to that feeling, something I would never wish on my worst enemy along with the constant thirst and hunger. Now at this point I was still only Luna. Well there was a bit of Nightmare along for the ride as well, but after she had her ass royally kicked by my bitch of a sister after she had been acting even more insane than normal she went mostly dormant. 

Now after I got used to my shit accommodations and the constant feeling of dying, yet not being able to I devoted my time to attempting to escape. At the time I had no idea that the cursed spell the elements of harmony placed upon me had a time limit and I quite honestly believed I would be stuck on this godforsaken rock for the rest of time. Due to that after my initial escape attempts using magic failed, I began to attempt more and more drastic measures. 

Eventually it got so bad that I resorted to trying to use dream magic to escape. Nightmare even 'woke' up and helped in this endeavor, contributing her knowledge of mental manipulation magic.  She was always better at that aspect of mind magic as I usually refused to touch it with a 10ft pole after what Sombra did with it.

Due to this desperation, slight insanity from Nightmare, and the cursed elements of harmonies' spell something went drastically wrong with the Macgyvered dream and mind magic spell. What I had originally been intending to do was cast myself into the mind of one of my loyal thestrals to communicate with them so they could attempt to free me from their end. However, due to Nightmares insistence at escape she threw much more of ourselves, our soul, into the spell than we should have. The elements spell evidently saw this as an attempt to escape, but due to my mastery of the mind arts it was unable to prevent the spell from being cast. But it certainly tried and along with redirecting the spell it scrambled much of it as well.  

That was how I found myself being reborn on a quaint little planet called Dirt or rather Earth by its inhabitants many times over. Now at the time in each ‘life’ I had no notion of who I really was and instead lived out each life to the best of that version of me’s ability. Now I suppose that my spell impacted the planet on the North American continent as that’s where I was always born. It started with me being born into various native tribes and eventually into the families of the European settlers when they arrived. Additionally, I was reborn more often the more people there were around, so by the later dates I was on Earth there were hundreds or thousands of copies of myself floating around what was at that point the United States. 

Now I did everything from being a hunter and gather, a farmer, a slave, a soldier, a scientist, an engineer, and every other profession under the sun. As you could probably tell some of these lives sucked more than others. However especially as the years crept by and I was finding myself being born in the eras past the 1800’s I tended to find myself gravitating to more scholarly pursuits. I had always been the more studious of the two sisters and loved to learn and improve. Now before my banishment this was primarily in magic but as the humans had none in these new lives I found myself studying and applying the sciences. Now I won’t name specific people, but I was a hand in a fair share of scientific advances throughout history. Hell I even worked with myself unknowingly many times. Additionally,  for some reason I also found myself as a politician and leader more times than I would have suspected, perhaps I still gravitate towards leadership even though I have grown to despise it. 

Eventually my spell ran out of ‘juice’ and I found myself waking back up in my body. However, this time I woke up with thousands of lifetimes of memories and experiences. I was certainly no longer Luna, but I was also no longer any one of my past lives. Now one benefit of Alicornism is a perfect memory, most likely due to our long lives, so I remembered every single one of my human lives perfectly. Sometimes better than I remembered them while I was in the process of living them. I’ll admit that when I work up, I had a bit of a breakdown for a few months and really didn’t do anything but curl into a ball and lay in the moon dust. It certainly took time to sort myself out, but I eventually pulled myself together. 

I may have not been only Luna anymore, but I was certainly still myself. Just a bit older and more lived version. Being a big purple horse again was certainly a bit different though. 

One true benefit, other than the new experiences I gained from my botched spell was that I now knew for certain that escape was possible. For you see while I never watched the show myself regularly, I did happen to catch the airing of a certain show called My Little Pony once when doing a solid for a friend and watching his daughter. This happened to be the premier, a two-part episode that focused on little old me. 

Now looking back, I have to say that I am a bit offended by how I was presented, but I suppose I would have been pretty crazy after all that time on the moon. Hell by 200 years I was crazy enough to try sending a part of my soul to another body just to escape. 

Now some may ask, “Luna how do you know that the show is what is really going to happen?”. 

To be honest I don’t. Really the show will never happen as depicted now as after incorporating my new lives my split personality, Nightmare, has been completely subsumed by the rest of me. Yes, somehow, I am actually more mentally stable than I was before thousands of years of experiences were crammed into my brain. 

Now back on the topic of escape, I don’t know for sure that the show was accurate. But I can hope at least that it may be what was to occur if I had not cast that ill advised spell. Having hope that I would certainly be able to escape in 300 years was better than having no hope at all. And yes, I was on Earth for about 500 years, the math was a complete bitch to figure out when I came to my senses.

And since then, I have been a little busy. While I have hope that I can escape after a thousand years have passed with ease, it certainly didn’t stop me from trying to get off this rock earlier. While all my magical attempts had been blocked, with my new memories I had many new ideas of possible ways to get myself into orbit. 

I developed a whole new branch of transmutation magic with the help of human understanding of nuclear physics and chemistry, so I was eventually able to create elements from the moon dirt as well as chemical compounds. 

Now of course the first thing I did with this new skill was build a box and fill it with air so I could finally after another 25 years of continuously suffocating have a breath of fresh air. After that I continued to improve my standard of living, so that even if I was going to be stuck here it could at least be enjoyable. 

Now I admit that I may have gotten carried away with using my new skill. The very ‘James Bond villain’ esq moon base I built myself certainly lends weight to that theory. I think it started as a joke in my mind as I was building an abode for myself, as the moon themed villain needs a EVIL moon base of course. But as it came together and I refined my spell enabling me to build more complex technology it started becoming quite comfy. Now I probably spent more time than warranted on the ‘moon base’ but after it was completed no pony could ever claim that I didn’t have the coolest digs in the solar system. And I’ll be honest the place is nice, really nice. Even if I could escape at this point I wouldn’t even mind just living here full time. If anything, else it let me perfect my spell and get better at rebuilding much of the technology that I remember from Earth. 

After I finally had a place where I could breathe, drink, and eat I began working on my new escape attempts. 

But I think that that’s enough for today. I’ve spent enough time on this recording right now. I still have a lot of preparations to make for the launch of Project Pegasus tomorrow. Commander Luna of Moonraker Base signing off.