Starship Ponyville: Mystic Acoustics

by Vylet Pony

I. Forewarning

The grand intuition becomes folly in times of great wickedness. How crippled a world’s essence becomes, blighted by selfishness and rage. Truly, all hope is lost when even a common threat fails to unite those who must fight together. Times have changed, and so have hearts. The world had become unstable; the land’s resources plundered and technologies being sought after to replace them. Magic remained likewise vain. Sorcery could not restore the natural state of things. Overpopulation hindered all food production immensely. From these things came the onslaught of tragedy that would consume the world.

As a result of Equestria’s ever more fleeting survival, the nation turned to science as a beacon of hope and advancement, so much so to the point of developing technologies that would allow earth ponies and pegasi to use magic. Small transmitters called Adaptive Magic Channeling Devices (AMCD’s) were designed and manufactured by PegaSystems for personal and industrial use in the 2030’s. With these devices, ponies could even have hands made of magic, resembling the humans of our neighboring reality. Yeah. The benefits were obvious, but yet, hands still looked uncanny before everypony got used to them.

Even with such progress, Equestria had eventually locked itself in a civil war between senseless terrorism and those who opposed it. Most ponies couldn’t even explain what started the fighting, but they sure as hell remembered the horrors of it. Few have the competence to tell you, out of blind loyalty for the princesses, that the fault truly lies with the Administration itself. Celestia realized before anypony else that Equestria could not sustain itself much longer; Twilight upheld this notion.

The princesses determined that the most effective plan for resolving this devastation was to push for space exploration and planetary colonization. Their objectives were to solve the overpopulation crisis and hopefully acquire more natural resources and land to cultivate. With Equestrian technologies advancing rapidly, one would think that such a feat was of no complication. However, the majority of Equestria had protested the concept of space travel for decades. This opposition can be attributed to the widely accepted conspiracies that dominated the minds of many Equestrians. These conspiracies asserted that outer space was the origin of powerful creatures and monsters. Conspirators would have you believe that traversing far enough would upset the balance of nature.

Despite the overwhelming objections, Twilight developed a plan known as “Project Banshee”, entailing the construction of a starship for the purpose of space exploration. This project was developed and carried out in secrecy for around 15 years. However in 2048, public suspicions began rising around rumors regarding the project’s existence. In response to this, Celestia created “The Black Hoof”, a pseudo-terrorist organization that would create enough destruction to keep Equestria distracted from revolting over the rumors. Unfortunately, while the Black Hoof staged conflicts internationally (carried out without the intent of causing actual injury or death), other ponies began fighting for “the cause”. They became zealots for some sort of perceived rebellion against the state of the world. This is how the Equestrian Civil War began: with those fighting with or against a senseless ideal, conceived by the nation’s own leaders.

Two years later, the fighting ceased following a confrontation between Feather Light, leader of the Neo Black Hoof, and Sylver, captain of the National Equestrian Task Force (NETF). The formal ‘peace ceremonies’ were held a few weeks subsequently, just after Hearth’s Warming Eve.

Soon after, the team was working furiously to finish the construction of the starship in an underground base outside Ponyville. Conveniently, the vessel became known as the “Starship Ponyville”. With all options spent and diversions exhausted, Twilight feared they didn’t have much time before nearly everypony in Equestria would pose questions regarding the administration’s proposed solutions to the crises. With the starship nearly complete, Equestria would face a more imminent danger, unlike the eventual chaos that would slowly ensue as a result of the already-evident problems.

A great evil would soon be upon the world.

Comments

[Hap]

Hmmm.

I've read "chapter 1" but it's not so much a chapter as a prologue. There's no story here, just kind of a list of events. Events I find implausible without enough story to justify Celestia creating a terrorist organization to distract the people from an unpopular space program. I mean, I get that it's in the future and all, but without a story (so far, at least) to justify actions that seem so different from the Celestia (and the Twilight!) that we know, it's just jarring.

I'm going to trust that the story justifies it in subsequent chapters, but I would have rather learned these things as the story progresses, so that I see the world in which Celestia made such a harsh decision, rather than just being told that she had.

I guess that I'm kind of treating this like the front jacket flap, rather than a first chapter.

[Logical Gavin]

terrorists win

[Seratina]

picture is broken unfortunately. "Upstream error"