It has been a peaceful few years under the reign of Princess Twilight Sparkle. Ponies are happy. Equestria is progressing. New technologies have appeared, including the first fixed-wing planes. The first intercontinental flights now soar across Equestria, allowing long-distance friends and family to meet up for the first time without an arduous journey or fancy magic.

Earth Ponies are not meant to fly. Rind Watermelon knows this—and it terrifies him—but he will go with his fiancée Smoldering Ember to meet her family in Kiria, realm of the Kirins. It is only a twenty-hour flight away. He just has to look out the window, and ignore that he is in a metal tube hurtling through the sky on flimsy wings.

And there is something on the wing.

Applejack gets an unwelcome visit from the Equestrian Revenue Service. Handed a large tax bill and limited time to pay, Applejack comes up with a creative use of the farm's biggest asset.

No, not the apple trees.

Why Big Macintosh of course.

Can Big Mac save Apple Bloom's college fund?

Read and find out.
Now with dramatic readings!
Reading 1
and
Reading 2

Featured on Equestria Daily 8-25-2012

Credit for the cover art goes to cassie-chan55

Beyond the limits of Equestria, creatures sleep and dream.

It's a chance in a thousand years to capture such a sight; a glimpse of another world. A vision that should never be forgotten.

Anypony will tell you that Princess Celestia is the most amazing pony in Equestria. She's graceful, she's beautiful, and she always knows just what to say. Her decisions are wise and her manners are impeccable. Some might go so far as to say she's completely perfect.

Celestia has a secret, however. As it turns out, she actually is completely perfect. She's utterly infallible in every aspect. And boy, is she sick of it.

Now she's determined to manage to make just one little thing go wrong.

It won't, of course. After all, she's perfect.

---------
Written for the Equestria Daily Pre-reader battle: April 2013- The prompt was "Celestia's terrible secret- Revealed!" Unfortunately it didn't work nearly as well as I'd hoped, but hopefully someone gets a cheap chuckle out of it.

Night and day. Fire and ice. Creation and destruction. Everything has an opposite, and Chaos is no exception. Princess Celestia tells Twilight the true history of Discord's rise, the Alicorns' fall, and the creation of the Elements of Harmony.

She tells her student the story of Order and Chaos.

Matthias Síðasta Von has always wished to visit the magical land of Equestria, see the wonderful colors, talk to the ponies that live there. Perhaps even, should he be so lucky, live there permanently. Help Fluttershy with the animals, listen to Twilight talk about her most recent lesson or experiment, lift baskets of apples with Applejack, tell Lyra about humans.

One day, a connection is made, an offer: step through the gate. It was warned that the cost might be hefty, that the journey might be hard, but anything was better than this drab, grey life. So he stepped through.

But, this is not the Equestria he knew. Buildings aged and decrepit, roads cracked and eroded, the Everfree slowly reclaiming the Apple's farm and the last barn finally given out under the strain with nopony to raise it anew. What happened? Where did they go?

The colors bleached, the ponies gone, the Harmony and love that once sustained the land dried up and blown away like so much dust.

Except...

As with every living creature, once every year, Princess Celestia has a day that commemorates the anniversary of her birth. Given that she is blessed with many wonderful friends and family members, she receives many gifts on her birthday. Some she likes more than others, while some are rather odd.

On this one thousand seven hundred and nineteenth birthday of hers, she receives a large stuffed squid plushie.

She is perplexed.

Everypony daydreams.

Some ponies daydream about becoming rich and famous. Other ponies daydream about meeting their one true love. Still others daydream about becoming great heroes.

Celestia's daydreams are nothing like that. Indeed, when her mind wanders, she imagines what her life would be like if she was an ordinary mare. No tiara, no wings, no castle. Just an ordinary mare living an ordinary life in an ordinary town.

What would those daydreams look like?

Note: Special thanks to Justin for proofreading and editing!

Note 2: Electric Boogaloo: FEATURE!!!

For thousands of years, the moon has waged endless war on innocent beaches. Every day the tides wash away countless sand castles, crushing the dreams of foals all across Equestria. Somepony needs to stop the moon's heinous crimes—and, at last, it looks like somepony will.

After her sand palace is washed away by the ocean, Dinky Hooves takes it upon herself to do something that should have been done centuries ago: destroy the moon.

Now with a reading by Teksune Studios!

Originally written for the Writeoff Association's February Contest, "Look, I Can Explain..."
Thanks to Foehn, Quill Scratch, Murmurpunk, Horizon, and Oroboro for helping out in various ways.
Dinky vector by ZuTheSkunk. Silhouetted Luna vector by NightFlyer22. Moon photo by NASA.

Tiberium. The infamous green crystal that destroys entire worlds in its wake of global proliferation. It has been a little over a century since the Tiberium threat was first wiped out on Earth, and with it, the primary vestiges of the Brotherhood of Nod. When the GDI advanced humanity to the stars, they found that Earth had not been the only target of the alien Scrin: dozens of other worlds had already been claimed by Tiberium, and the Scrin returned in full force, attacking human colonies across space, stopping human expansion. To fight back, the GDI undergoes a reformation to become the Interstellar Defense Intiative (ISDI) and enacts the Hallman Directive, designed to stop Tiberium spread wherever it may be; such a protocol brings the reincarnated ITC Methuselah to a planet being ravaged by the green crystal, and the forces under Commander Martin Alexandra deploy to stop the threat.

Crossover Material: Command and Conquer - Tiberian Series/MLP
Rated Teen for Graphic Violence and Language