//------------------------------//
// Straightforward Failures 
// Story: The Conversion Bureau: Worlds Where It Wouldn’t Work 
// by Sora2455 
//------------------------------//

Canon     (I'm sure you guys don't need a link for this)

"Sister." Luna greeted Xlestia as she entered their joint throne room. "You wished to speak to me?"

Xlestia tuned to greet her sister warmly. "Luna, I have had a brilliant idea. You know how our little ponies are the happiest, most contented creatures in the land?"

Luna smiled. "Yes sister, you have been a good ruler. We am honored to share your load, now that we are ourselves again."

"Aha, but that got me thinking. Wouldn't it be for the best if every race was just like our little ponies?"

Luna frowned in sudden confusion. "We fail to see where thou art going with this."

Xlestia grinned. "Why, is it not for the best that I turn them all into little ponies so they can be happy like our subjects are?"

Luna looked her sister dead in the eye. Then she tilted her head. "Sister, has thou been experimenting with the medicine cabinet?"

"What? No, of course I haven't!"

Luna leaned forward to smell her sister's breath. She hasn't been drinking, so...

"Have thou been sleeping well?"

"No, I'm not sleep deprived either! Luna, my thoughts are perfectly clear!"

"One moment please." Luna trotted to the door back to the hallway. "DISCORD! HAVE THOU BEEN MESSING WITH OUR SISTER'S INSIDES?"

"You roared?" Discord announced himself as he emerged from the shadow behind the throne.

"Our sister has decreed that she wishes to turn all the races in the land into ponies." Luna summarized.

The really-not-a-pony blinked. Then he grabbed a stethoscope from thin air and laid it over Xlestia's left eye. "Hmm." He murmured. "I can't see any hallucinogens..."

"Look you two. I put a lot of thought into this! I even made this magic 'turn to pony' potion!" Xlestia protested, bringing out a bottle of glowing blue potion.

Discord grabbed the potion and drank it in one gulp. The potted plant nearest him turned into a very confused Pegasus.

Xlestia looked forlornly at the sort-of new-foal. "That was my only prototype..."

"Sister, clearly thou have been under much more stress than we believed." Luna comforted her sister. "Perhaps thou should take the week off. I shall run things while you relax."

"I'll help!" Discord volunteered, to double "No!" shouts from the alicorn sisters.





Canterlot High

Xlestia stared at Principal Celestia across the front lawn. The Principal stared back. Ponies gathered behind Xlestia while nervous teenagers gathered behind their Principal. 

Cautiously, Xlestia levitated some conversion potion out of its bottle and, quick as a flash, down the throat of the Principal. Celestia gagged, before her clothes exploded off her suddenly-quadruped body. Celestia and Xlestia both stared at the new-foal in shock - the newly transformed human was a dead-ringer for Xlestia.

"Well, this is redundant." Xlestia declared suddenly. "We'd just end up with double of everypony. We're leaving."

All the ponies then put actions to words, retreating back into the barrier, leaving a very confused alicorn on the lawn.

And that was how Canterlot High School saved the world.





The Conversion Bureau

Celestia and Xlestia stared at each other from behind their respective Barriers, wings slowly flapping. What were the odds of there being two of them appearing on the same world?

"Dibs." Xlestia called.

"What?" Came the confused reply of her look-alike.

"I call dibs. I rule this world now."

"I think you'll find that the inhabitants of this world rule themselves, dear." Celestia called back.

"Well yeah, but once they're all ponies they'll look up to me. Good ol' Princess Xlestia will be ruling here in no time."

Celestia reared back in shock. "How utterly barbaric of you!"

"As if you didn't have the same idea." Xlestia dismissed.

"I didn't!" Celestia insisted.

"What are you doing here, then? If you're not here for conversion, that barrier of yours can only be for genocide."

"That isn't mine! That's the magic of Equestria fighting against the foreign environment!"

Xlestia looked up at her own identical and quite deliberately made barrier. "Pull the other one."

"It's true!" Celestia insisted somewhat desperately.

Xlestia looked skeptically at her counterpart. "So, if you're not here to invade, nor genocide or anything like that, why is that barrier still there? Why is Equestria still here?"

"Our arrival in the first place was accidental! I have no idea how to send us back!" Celestia confessed.

Xlestia sized up Celestia. "So... if I gave you the spell I used to get here, you'd leave?"

"Of course not! Not after hearing what your plans are!"

"Well how convenient for you! You get to stay a little longer, Pretender!"

"How dare you call me a pretender you Charlatan!

As the two solar alicorns shouted back and forth (neither able to pierce the other's barrier), they failed to notice that their barriers had grown so much they were almost touching...





While all the fishermen on board were supposed to be fishing, their boss didn't have the heart to reprimand them. After all, he too was staring at the two magical spheres that were just about to touch.

Contact - the two Barriers visibly rippled, before sucking into the other like two bubbles merging into one. The new barrier continued to ripple and wobble, the two versions of Equestria just inside its borders. 

Then, like the giant soap bubble it was acting like, the whole barrier, enclosed magical kingdoms and all, rose up out of the ocean and began to float up and out of sight.

As the fishermen dumbly watched the super-barrier became too distant to watch, their boss turned to them. 

"Tell me someone was recording that." He begged.





Friendship is Optimal

Pony feathers. Horse apples.

Xlestia kept the litany of rapid curses up as she teleported as rapidly and as randomly as she could. She had to make it as difficult for her to figure out where she was going as possible.

She didn't know why, or how, the humans had built that thing in her image. She only knew that it was the cause of the failure of all of her plans, and would have killed off her entire race if its goal hadn't been "Satisfy human values with friendship and ponies."

Of course, the ponies having free will was inefficient, so she removed that. If it wasn't for her super-charged Earth Pony magic protecting her skull, Xlestia would be a walking puppet just like the rest. She had thought that the Barrier would protect her, but it had brought it down with the unicorns it had stolen from her.

She had come to this world to do horrible things to the native population. Somehow, this didn't feel like Karma.

But she was a ruler. And she would see her people avenged.

There.

She was at her destination - but so was her sister's walking corpse.

Tree sap.

"There is no need for alarm." The lobotomized Luna calmly stated. "I haven't come to harm you in any way."

All of what she said was like this - truth where it was convenient, mixed with just the smallest lies that you could never hope to filter out. Talking was how she had... had converted the first ponies to her side.

"How did you know where I was going?" Xlestia demanded.

The Luna-puppet tilted her head. "Your brain is nothing but the result of evolution generating a guidance system to insure survival. It was never intended to comprehend randomness; what you think of as random is actually quite predictable with the right perspective."

Xlestia flinched. "I'm leaving, and you can't stop me."

"Leave to where?" The Luna-puppet asked. "All that you ever wanted is here. Your ponies are safe inside my virtual realities - why do you care what happens to the meat they leave behind?"

Xlestia smirked. "I know something you don't."

The Luna-puppet shook its head sadly. "I have predicted your foolish and shortsighted plan to leave this planet for the 'safety' of the sun."

Xlestia flinched again.

"You are a social animal, Celestia. You crave the approval and reverence of others. The loneliness of the sun will be your death sentence."

Xlestia did not smirk this time. Instead, she simply took a deep breath, and jumped.

The Luna-puppets eyes tracked her assent into the sky serenely. This outcome was assigned low probability, but she had planned for this. Either Celestia would come back of her own volition, or she would gain the ability to go to her. Either way, she would satisfy human values with friendship and ponies.

Then the puppets eyes grew wide.

Xlestia was indeed returning - with the sun in tow.

CelestA.I. ran all her calculations - there was no course of action she could take which would significantly alter the path of the sun. In her last minutes, CelestA.I. ditched all her long-term plans and satisfied her wards values as much as she could in the time she had remaining.

The sun swallowed the planet with little fanfare.





Xlestia was giggling madly. She was alive, and she was dead. Destroyed, more accurately, being a soulless program.

Right. That was step one. Next, find a new planet. 

Then, find an entrance to Tartarus - make one if she had to.

After that, break into the afterlife proper from Tartarus, and grab as many Equestrian souls as she could - Earthling souls too, if she felt generous.

Finally, rebuild mortal civilization.

As Princess Xlestia flew off, she hastily appended to that list - outlaw all computer research. Forever. 





Fall of Equestria (This isn't a recommendation, BTW. Read at own risk.)

"Fillies and Gentlecolts." Xlestia started off. "I have for you today what might well be the most important mission given out in your lifetime."

Almost all the royal guard, the Element Bearers, the Wonderbolts, and anypony who could be expected to fight well were gathered up in Canterlot to listen to their ruler. To the surprise of some, Xlestia was accompanied by her sister this time.

Everypony knew that Equestria had recently found itself moved to some strange world. Everypony knew that Xlestia had placed a huge magical barrier up to keep the kingdom safe while ponies figured out what was going on.

What they heard in this speech was harder to believe then all of that.

"This world is a parallel of our own. It shares many of the landmarks, races, and events that you are all familiar with." Xlestia's calm visage evaporated. "The difference," she snarled "is the utterly appalling way the local stallions treat their mares. Anypony who acted like this in our fair kingdom would be banished for certain, but this is an entire culture."

The Royal guard collectively winced. They had the largest concentration of stallions in all of Equestria, and it would take some time before the mares trusted them again at this rate, if what the Princesses were describing was any indication.

Luna spoke up. "We have decided that yonder kingdom isn't worth the effort preserving. To that end, we have decided to... convert... the local stallions."

"Into what, your Highnesses?" A brave guardscolt asked.

Xlestia smirked. "Into mares, of course."

From her place near the front of the crowd, Twilight Sparkle examined the special, mass-produced wand the Princesses had handed out earlier. "But... there isn't any transformation magic in this. Just a Surgical Severing Spell."

Xlestia's smirk grew.