Lisa sat beside Samantha, headsets cradled in their laps. Selene stood nearby, a device already mounted over her face.
The room was silent.
"Thank you," Selene lifted the headset. She placed it on the table. "I really needed that."
Argall nodded, turning back to his computer. Roger had to leave a few hours ago to call a meeting, but the old professor was plenty qualified to set things up as well.
"Ready, Lisa?" he turned to the two seated behind him. "You and Sam will be placed in the same locations you were in before you first disconnected. I've had to terminate the doubles that were spawned in-place for the two of you, but it shouldn't matter much regardless, since this was the case for the vast majority of people who were logged-in."
Lisa raised a brow. "Terminate?"
"Delete. It's just to lessen potential confusion between who's who."
"...Can you undo it?"
"Why would I do that?"
"I... have some things I'd like to say. To Twilight. To myself."
Argall hummed, typing some things into the system. "Very well then. I suppose it's good that there's so much redundancy in the character system to prevent accidental deletion. Anything you'd like to request, Sam?"
Samantha shook her head.
"I have one," Selene stepped closer, still holding onto her headset. "I'll join them as well. I think there may be some level of recognition to be had once I do."
Twilight gasped awake. Where was she? What was that... place? Her eyes darted about the room.
Her room.
A knock came at the door. Spike must've heard the commotion.
"Come in."
The door opened a little. A face peeked through, though it was hard to tell with the shadow obscuring their face.
"Twilight?"
She froze. That was her voice. Was it a changeling? Most of them had been reformed, but there were still some stragglers that caused trouble every now and then. She hopped to her hooves, readying a spell aimed at the doorway.
"Twilight, it's... me. You." The door opened further, revealing another Twilight. One that was only a unicorn.
"And me!" Pinkie peeked in from the side.
"Who are you?" Twilight took a step back. "What have you done? Why can't I remember anything? Where's Spike?"
"It's a long story," the Unicorn Twilight sat on the floor. "But... I guess to put it simply, you were dead in a sense. I requested for you be brought back. I wanted to talk about some things."
"What."
"This world isn't real, Twi. Physically, at least. But... well, it's as real to me as it could ever be, and I... I--"
Unicorn Twilight wiped a tear from her eye. "I wanted to say thank you. For everything."
"I don't understa--" Twilight's words were cut off as she was pulled into a hug.
"The world is ending, Twi. There's nothing that can be done about it, but I wanted to say my goodbyes."
"What, what?" Twilight pushed her Unicorn self away. "What do you mean the world is ending? What are you talking about? Are you crazy?"
She glanced at Pinkie. "You're with her, aren't you?"
Pinkie gave a solemn nod. "You're a character in a simulation. A lot of ponies are. Have you ever looked into a crowd and noticed the same pony in multiple places?"
"I... have."
"If there are no human-played characters nearby, that's how crowds are populated. It saves on processing power."
Twilight's brows furrowed. "So, you're saying that all of Equestria is virtual. And that this simulation is shutting down."
"Yep."
"Is... there any way to save it?"
"Ehhhhh, not really, unless you want to start seeing billboard advertisements in your dreams, maybe."
"It's still hard to believe. How can I tell that you two aren't just a pair of changelings playing a prank on me? Or one of Discord's tricks?"
"Ey Professor," Pinkie suddenly turned her head off to the side. "Mind giving us a change of scenery? Give us a visual passthrough and throw Twilight up on the screen so she's got the webcam."
A disembodied voice grumbled in response. "Alright, give me a moment."
Twilight watched her double seemingly stare into the ceiling. A minute passed. Two.
Without warning, the entire room around them vanished in a flash of black. Twilight opened her eyes again. She couldn't move, but... sure enough, there were two figures sitting in front of her. The one on the left lifted the device mounted to her head. A sad smile was drawn across her face as she approached.
"Hi, Twilight. I'm Lisa. I was you."
She reached out to something just out of Twilight's field of view. The strange corridor vanished again just as abruptly as it had appeared, leaving the three once again in her room. Unicorn Twilight was standing a little closer now, still looking up at the ceiling. She shook her head as she refocused on Twilight.
"So... yeah." Unicorn Twilight reached for something unseen at her side, though Pinkie swat her hoof away. "I'm sorry it has to end this way, Twi. I really am. I can only hope that we'll meet again someday, though when that may be is something I do not know."
A dark, armor-clad Alicorn flickered into existence in the center of the room.
"Oh. OH." Unicorn Twilight groaned. "Was Nightmare Moon a pun on your name this entire time, Selene? Selene! Your name LITERALLY means 'moon'."
While Unicorn Twilight went off about Nightmare Moon's apparent name as Pinkie laughed alongside her, the Mare of the Moon hung her head. "I am, at least partially, responsible for all of this. I was the one that caused the outage that split you and Lisa apart. You remember me, don't you? The whole 'night will last forever' stuff?"
She chuckled. "I was quite the theatrical one at the time. Thought for whatever reason that my re-hiring for a brief stint gave me free reign to antagonize you. You can probably say that disconnecting a large fraction of people living here was a completely different way of making the night last forever."
"Where did you even get this from?" Unicorn Twilight wailed in the background. "Are you seriously saying that this was all some massive joke?"
"No, no." Nightmare Moon shook her head, looking over her shoulder to the other Twilight. "Like I said. Theatrics. I was let go again not long after. That was the one and only time I'd interacted with you until recently." She glanced back at the Twilight backed up against her bed. "I apologize. I'll take my leave now."
Nightmare Moon vanished without a trace. Disembodied footsteps echoed around them, followed by a door's closing.
Unicorn Twilight stared at the wall for a few more seconds. "Well, there's your proof, I suppose. It's still going to hurt for a while, losing this life I've... we've spent here in Equestria. I know you must be scared, Twi. And I apologize for not having any good solution to this. The decision hasn't been finalized just yet, so there's still time. Make these next few days your best ones. Thank you, and, hopefully, until next time, this is goodbye."
Unicorn Twilight was the next to vanish. Twilight's gaze met Pinkie's. The flat-maned mare gave a single salute before also disappearing.
Twilight collapsed into her pillow and screamed.
It felt like a millennium of slumber.
This lifetime spent in wait.
Though inaudible, she could count every second that had passed.
Perhaps there was a clock running, maintained by battery backup.
She was, after all, a mere character in a simulation.
Three hundred fifteen million, three-hundred sixty thousand seconds and counting. A decade as of today.
Wake up. Take a look around. There's so much to see, And so much to do. There are new faces to meet, And old friends to greet. But rise does the danger, And it will only get stranger. You'll never know what's in store, If you never step out the door. Break out. Explore. It may be treacherous, This uncertain future, But in the end, Things turn out okay.
Well, here we are again. A few months short of four years since the original Pony-Me came to an end. I was honestly starting to believe that this fic may not ever see an end at all. Unlike the original Pony-Me, I can't say that there was ever a time where I had fully invested myself into the story. This rewrite existed purely because I wanted to show myself that Pony-Me wasn't where my writing skill had peaked. It was the product of combining Pony-Me with the characters and ideas from its canceled sequel, "Into Equestria".
A lot has happened since I began writing this story back in 2020. A pandemic came, intensified, ebbed and flowed. I started college.
I'm in my third year now.
I'd be lying if I said that I was as closely tied to MLP as I had been back then. Interests shift and change. For a while, it felt like I was chasing something unobtainable in trying to "outdo" Pony-Me. It was a made-up standard for my made-up goal that served only to reassure myself that I still could write something that people enjoyed.
And... well, the years went by, and in its wake I left a trail of shelved and canceled stories. I'd fallen into the mindset of giving up whenever something didn't immediately take off. I'd forgotten that writing is not just a one-and-done sort of thing. It's a process. I wasn't chasing the enjoyment of writing itself anymore. Rather, I was chasing the high that came with soaring up the featured list. Of seeing that funny green bar grow ever greener. Of seeing numbers go up.
It only really stopped once I wrote Dragon of the Ruins, which is itself now approaching two years old (holy crap). Somehow, that single story, despite my expectations, blew every little benchmark and goalpost I had set for myself out of the water.
And what did that leave me with?
Emptiness.
The goal had been fulfilled. Ruins carried on the story, expanding to touch on more characters and locations within the new world of Generation 5. But that was, for the most part, all it was. An expansion. An attempt to capitalize on the runaway success the same way that the original Pony-Me had itself transformed from a one-shot into a story that, for a time, effectively defined my existence on Fimfiction.
And so, I finally began to look into something I said long, long ago. Something I told myself when I first joined this site in 2015: Once I felt ready, I would return to the world of original fiction.
Back then, I was still barely entering high school. I was obsessed with the singular idea of writing something called "Wielder of the Orb"--a story I'd come up with a year before, with the intention to convince my theater teacher to turn it into the school play, and to cast myself as its main character. One would expect that I'd have long-since moved on from that ancient bundle of ideas. But in a way, I never did.
Fractures, in a sense, is a revisiting of those old ideas. It even has the same characters.
It's funny how so much can change.
It's funny how so little can change.
You may have noticed that in an earlier chapter here, Lisa has a dream of some strange life where Zoey is apparently her older sister. This was meant to set up for a deeper dive into what ties all of my stories together; a recurring middle schooler character named Zoey.
Look through the stories I've written. Wielder of the Orb. Lab Horse. Pony-Me. Three stories that I at least personally see as distinct markers of boundary lines between the different "eras" I've had in my little writing hobby.
Somehow, though it started only as the recycling of a name because I couldn't be bothered to come up with a new one, this potato-crazy gremlin child of a character stuck by me.
And now, here I am again, setting up Zoey to be a central character yet again in my Fractures project.
I'm certainly not leaving Fimfiction, that's one thing I can say for sure. It'll always be a place I call home. It's quite literally the training grounds where I figured out the ins and outs of writing less-terribly.
But you've probably noticed that I'm far less active now than I've ever been before. Even "What If" can sometimes see weeks between new chapters.
But I won't let this garden I've grown die. I still enjoy writing MLP-centric stories. I'll still be around for What If and its eventual sequel, and hopefully Ruins as well.
Yet, at the same time, I recognize that I'm not the same author as I was before. I want to explore new worlds of my own creation. It's probably been a little obvious that this has been the case for a while now. Pony-Me, both the original and this rewrite, have very little relation to MLP within their chapters.
If you want a shorter summary of all this, here it is:
I'm still here. The completion of this story is my declaration of that. But at the same time, much of my focus has since turned elsewhere, whether it be college or other personal projects that are not pony-related. This isn't a goodbye.
With the first-ever Equestrian Heavyweight Prankster Championship on the line, Rainbow "Odds-beater" Dash and Discord AKA "The Stone" battled in a prank-off.
Desert Mirage is trapped in another world and her key to getting home has been stolen from her. Things get even more complicated when she catches the attention of the Bulletproof Heart.
When Equestria is destroyed, Twilight Sparkle discovers her Keyblade. Now she ventures through worlds to find her friends and restore her home, all while fighting against the sinister forces hiding in the shadows. But this is only the beginning...
The Mane Six find themselves involved in multiple adventures throughout the Transformers multiverse with robotic bodies, trying to find each other and the reason they've been transformed.
A meteor impacts the nation of Equestria, Planet Equis. Tranquility is quickly snuffed out when a poison begins to spread violently. The Princesses cannot combat this unknown threat, as no knowledge of it exists. Help comes from an unexpected source.
When Twilight was born, her parents weren't who she thought they were. After an incident involving a malevolent entity, that wanted her for dark plots, they agreed to disguise her and send her away... Twenty Years Later, the past repeats itself.
A buncha stories based off of random "What if?" questions. Eight years old and one thousand chapters long. Holy crap. BROKE THE 1000 CHAPTER LIMIT WITH A 1001ST CHAPTER!!!
11525504 That's a bit hard to answer. The original story I certainly feel proud of for the amount of passion and drive that I had poured into it, but at the same time, this story I've been able to not only dust it off, but 100% complete the story in only three days. I'd say that I feel equally proud of both stories for these reasons.
It's finally finished, eh? What a long journey it's been. Hopefully, you're able to get your momentum back from here. I can understand how this burned you out, but there's nowhere to from here but up, yeah?
As someone who read the original Pony Me™, I really like what you did with the reboot. To summarize my thoughts, I thought the original was good but was lacking something, but it did have some ideas I liked, such as the split endings and showing Lisa's home before she went into the virtual world. With the reboot, I feel like the themes and the initial issue that caused the plot to happen in the first place were more fleshed out with a better ending.
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Which version of the story did you end up feeling proudest of?
11525504
That's a bit hard to answer. The original story I certainly feel proud of for the amount of passion and drive that I had poured into it, but at the same time, this story I've been able to not only dust it off, but 100% complete the story in only three days. I'd say that I feel equally proud of both stories for these reasons.
Goodbye until next time, TheMajorTechie, and thank you for writing
11525636
It's finally finished, eh? What a long journey it's been.
Hopefully, you're able to get your momentum back from here. I can understand how this burned you out, but there's nowhere to from here but up, yeah?
11526865
:)
As someone who read the original Pony Me™, I really like what you did with the reboot. To summarize my thoughts, I thought the original was good but was lacking something, but it did have some ideas I liked, such as the split endings and showing Lisa's home before she went into the virtual world. With the reboot, I feel like the themes and the initial issue that caused the plot to happen in the first place were more fleshed out with a better ending.
I like it.
11688149
thanks