//------------------------------// // Prologue: A Game And A Prank, A Prank And A Game // Story: The Rohan Chronicles: The Brand New Day // by Bucking Nonsense //------------------------------// The world as we all knew it ended not with fire, nor with ice, nor with a bang or a whimper. It ended not with water, nor with rocks falling, nor even with radioactive fire consuming the great cities of the world. No whisper, and no roar, marked what we would come to call The Brand New Day. Instead, the end of the world as we knew it, and the beginning of the world as we know it now, involved pranks, ponies, friendship, magic, MMORPG's, and a series of well-intentioned mistakes. As cataclysms go, ours was fairly unique, all things considered. It all started with the game, Limitless Saga. Released in 2018, it was an MMORPG that quickly became a smash hit. In the first year alone, it managed to outsell World Of Warcraft completely. By the end of three years, it was the single biggest game on the planet, and replaced Starcraft as the unofficial national sport of South Korea. It possessed a number of features, including a fully realized crafting system that allowed any item in the game, regardless of rarity or uniqueness, to be created, as well as a customization option that allowed one to make the gear that they wanted. In addition, the 'class' system was completely done away with, allowing one to create the character build that they wanted. Warrior? Mage? Thief? Healer? Those archaic restrictions were long gone: You could be a magic user in heavy armor, a healer who could dual wield hatchets, anything you could conceive of, you could create. The only limit was a player's imagination, and respec was relatively easy to arrange. Today's bare-fisted monk could be tomorrow's swordsman or sorcerer. And the most incredible aspect was that it all managed to balance out perfectly, so that no one build could be called 'unbeatable'... Bah, one could go on for days on end about the merits of the game, but that is only a small part of the whole picture. I've gone on enough, let's move to more important things. In Limitless Saga, there was a guild, The Riders Of Rohan. They were the largest and most well-known in the game, so much so that its membership included players from countries across the globe. It's founder and guildmaster, a player using the 'Golden Hero' build named Shadowfax (Yes, he was indeed a fan of The Lord Of The Rings), led the guild in many a great campaign. Countless raid bosses were brought low under his guidance, and he was much loved by his fellow guild members. They were a guild dedicated to guiding new players, and in helping out their fellow gamers wherever they could. They embodied everything that made MMORPGs great... I should stop there, before I sound vain or conceited. It was my guild, after all. But for every choir of angels, there is a horde of demons. For every light, there is a shadow. For every hero, a villain. There was another guild, which called itself the Crimson Viper Army, led by a player using the 'Maneater' build, named EatsYourFace (Yes, seriously. Do you think I'd make up something like that?). In addition to being a PVP guild, they were also 'n00b-spankers', essentially a group of jerks who spent their time abusing new players for no other reason than because they were new. They abused loopholes in the rules, in order to get away with making the lives of many inexperienced players miserable. As you can imagine, this made them the enemies of the Riders of Rohan. Many terrible battles were fought between the two guilds, often with no clear winner, and eventually the Riders had to establish a permanent base in the beginners area, in order to keep the Crimson Vipers from scaring away new players. The admins eventually became involved, and forced the two guilds to declare a sort of truce, and placed a level limitation on PVP, preventing higher level players from being able to attack players with significantly lower levels in order to finally put an end to the Vipers' predatory behavior. Still, even with the truce in effect, it was always a tense situation when Rider met Viper... There were many other guilds, of course. The Defenders Of The Rising Sun, The Wolf Guard, The Joker Kings, just to name a few, and some were almost as famous as the Riders. However, at the end of the day, it was all just a game... ...Until the day things got real. The Brand New Day began on April 1st, 2021. Limitless Saga's administrators had announced their plans to make a major update that day, several weeks prior, as they had done on the same day each year. Of course, the first day of the update, there would be some sort of prank played upon the entire community. Last year, everyone's armor had been turned into pink tutus and their weapons into candy canes. The year before, all of the NPC's and monsters had switched character models, resulting in monsters giving quests to slaughter townsfolk. The year before that, the towns had been retextured into gingerbread houses, and the dragons edited into giant winged bunnies. Everyone knew that this year's prank would be the biggest and most ambitious yet, and the forums and general chat were abuzz with speculation. But no one expected it to be ponies... and the ponies certainly weren't expecting us. ----------------------------------- Meanwhile, in Equestria... "...So, tell me more about this... Trickster Day?" Twilight Sparkle looked over at Discord with a deeply worried expression, as she worked on organizing the books in her personal library. Yes, the embodiment of chaos was reformed, and yes, his assistance did, in the end, unlock the Rainbow Power and defeat Lord Tirek. However, he was also one of the oldest, most powerful, and most unpredictable entities in the cosmos, and the only things keeping him from giving reality a wedgie and stealing its lunch money (Metaphorically... she hoped) was his enduring and unbelievably strong friendship with Fluttershy, and his less solid, but still standing, friendship with Twilight Sparkle, the princess of friendship... It was a little unnerving to realize that you're one of only two ponies who are responsible for keeping the universe as you know it from suddenly doing a headstand. She really needed to introduce Discord to some new ponies soon, and make him a few more friends. The more friends he had to keep him in line, the less likely it would be for Discord to turn all of existence into cake on a whim... Returning to the question at hand, Twilight Sparkle gulped, then said, "It's a holiday dedicated to playing jokes and pranks on others." The expression that crossed Discord's face was like that of a colt or filly having been handed the keys to every candy store in Equestria and told to go nuts. Twilight immediately added, before the master of random occurrences could zip off, "Of course, you can't do anything illegal, or anything that might hurt anypony, and ponies are just as likely to play a prank on you, and you have to take anything done in stride and not hold a grudge and please oh please oh please oh please don't do something terrible that breaks reality..." She was silenced by Discord placing a single finger on her lips. "Oh, don't worry, your highness, I wouldn't dream of doing anything like that. I promise, anything I do, I'll undo by the end of the day..."