Changelings, Sirens and Windigo's have been in a shadow war for the ability to feed on Equestria, a pony discovers one of their battlegrounds.
Inside a shadowy conference room, inside a menacing corporate skyscraper, which was itself inside a black arcane spire, which was itself built within the borders of an evil empire, nine figures sat.
“Ruining friendships is not enough,” Chrysalis said, pounding her hoof on the dramatically lit onyx table. “The ponies must adore us so that we may feast on their love!”
“Love? Don’t me laugh,” Adagio Dazzle, still in her human form, let out a dismissive breath, and flicked her fingers as though to brush Chrysalis away. “Love is unstable. Inconsistent. Rare. Chaos and disharmony on the other hand… sorry,” she chuckled, “the other hoof, are easy to come by and persistent. A far better source of power. We should turn the ponies against each other.”
“Yeah!” said Sonata Dusk. Adding, “Evil music is the worst, which means it’s the best.” The purple one was there too, whatever her name was. She didn’t say anything, but the shadowy room did make her look very sinister.
“This proposal is not aggressive enough for the windigos,” said Aanakamigishkaang, the Windigo Queen, one of three. “I say, we invade Canterlot and Manehatten. The changelings can suck out their love until only hate remains, and with that hate, we cast them into eternal frost!”
“And ruin three years of good public relations?” Thorax asked. “We’ve got the ponies tricked into thinking I’m a nice changeling. Did you know that in some of their polls, I’m voted Best Princess?”
“You’re a stallion,” Adagio said, with a long sigh. “How are you a princess?”
“That’s none of your business,” Thorax said, with an upturned muzzle.
“He takes it like a mare,” Chrysalis said, with a slow drawl.
“Mom!” Thorax blushed bright, his wings buzzing. Outraged, he snapped: “I told you to respect my lifestyle.”
“And I told you to get a job.”
“I have a job,” he shouted, as the changelings and windigos cooed and jeered. “It’s being your assistant, because without me you kept sending telegrams to Celestia warning her of our evil plans. Threats against Canterlot, remember that?”
“Hey, don’t be embarrassed,” Adagio Dazzle said, her voice a sultry purr. “If you take it like a mare, I’ll give it like a stallion.”
The two nearly came to blows then and there, until two massive fists hit the table, and the resulting thunderclap cowed them all into silence. They all turned to look at the ninth figure in the room, the one at the head of the table, the only one who had not yet spoken.
“Gentlebeings,” Tirek said, “this infighting is getting us nowhere. If we are to accomplish anything today, we must come up with one act of supreme villainy. One evil scheme to show the world that Equestria, the nation of friendship and magic, is nothing more than a nation of prey. A weak nation, with weak friendships. A nation that has lost the will to fight!”
Then he said, “Don’t you agree, random changeling drone who has been in the background the whole time?”
And the random drone, who had been there the whole time, pulled off her mask to reveal that she had been Princess Twilight Sparkle all along. “Nobody suspects the changeling of being a secret pony!” she shouted.
Then she kicked Tirek in the groin.
As the room stood frozen in shock, Twilight, the action hero, lept into heroic action! She flipped over the table and crushed Chrysalis under it, then punched Throax so hard he flew back into the Windigoes and scattered them like bowling pins. Hooves flying, punches and kicks going every which way, she knocked down the sirens, flipping the purple one right over her shoulder and into the wall.
“Don’t ever let me catch you playing hookey on high school again!” she said to the purple siren, whose name was still unclear. “An education is the most valuable gift a young creature can receive.”
Then, in through the door, burst Twilight’s nosey neighbors from Ponyville, who kept filing Homeowners Association complaints about her crystal palace. “I knew you were evil!” Twilight shouted, dropkicking the first mare right though…
Twilight awoke midway through snoring. Her head bobbed like a lure on a fishing line, and a sharp gurgle escaped her throat.
She was in her throne room, sitting on the chair itself, two royal guards on either side of her. She’d nodded off in the middle of the day, and, she noted, drooled on herself a little. She attempted to brush it off with a hoof before anyone noticed.
“I was meditating,” she told one of the royal guards, who had not asked. “So uh… anything happen while I was… reflecting on the secrets of the universe?”
“Just paperwork, Your Highness.”
“No villains or anything?”
“No,” the guard said. “Just more paperwork. And I believe you have some meetings scheduled.”
“Meetings about anything important?”
“I don’t think so, Your Highness. Would you like me to summon your secretary to be sure?”
“No,” Twilight said. “If it was important she would have woken me.” After a moment she added. “No news is good news I suppose.”
Silence hung in the throne room. The guards continued to stare straight ahead.
Once she was sure the guards weren’t looking her way, Twilight mock-punched the air and whispered under her breath: “And don’t let me catch any of you in Equestria again!”
Rarity discovers The Writer's Block, also known as The Writer's Cube. It is a large, metallic cube of mysterious origin.
“It’s terrible,” Rarity groaned. “Simply terrible. I’ve been trying to write my memoirs, to immortalize my story, my many adventures. But I have…” She held a hoof to her head, as though she might faint. “Writer's block!”
“Oh,” Fluttershy said, after a hesitant pause. “What… part are you getting stuck on?”
“Well,” Rarity demurred, “it’s not so much that I’m getting stuck on it as that the front face prevents me from reaching my typewriter. You see?”
She gestured to her desk, where an enormous metal cube -- at least eight feet on a side -- rested on top of the remains of her desk. The word remains bares emphasis, for of course neither her desk nor any of its contents were capable of supporting what must easily have been more than ten tons of metal.
Ink, the blood from her slain pens, ran in rivulets over the wooden splinters, the broken shards. A single, solidary typewriter key rested on the floor before the carnage, miraculously face up, and correctly oriented. It was “S.”
“Oh!” Fluttershy’s eyes and wings alike went wide. “Oh, uh. Oh, uh. Oh.”
“Uh,” Rarity supplied on Fluttershy’s behalf, her voice dry. “Indeed.”
“Have you, um…” Fluttershy stared at the crushed desk. “Uh. Actually. What… how did. Where did this come from?”
“Writers block? Nopony really knows.” Rarity shrugged, her tone so light it was almost whimsical. “It simply arrives when it wishes, and writing may not continue until it departs.”
“You can’t just… write somewhere else?”
“Well.” Rarity’s voice was soft, and she gave a helpless half-shrug. “Some writers do find that a change of venue spurs the creative process, but I regret that I am not one of them. No, my writers block follows me wherever I go.”
“Like…”
“Through the wall, dear.” Rarity mimicked a penetrating motion with two hooves. “Once, I attempted to write at the local coffee shop, and it took out two laundromats on its way to intercept me. Not to mention, when it actually landed in the coffee shop itself, it crushed a hipster who was in the seat across from me. But he was hogging all the electrical outlets, so nopony made a fuss over it.”
“Goodness,” Fluttershy said. “I had no idea being a creative pony was so difficult.”
“It is a great burden,” Rarity agreed. “To bring true creativity into this world is a tremendeous undertaking.”
“Is that why you write so much fanfiction instead?”
Rarity froze. She blinked. Then she rose from her seat, and pointed at the door. “Get out.”
“But I just-”
“You heard me!” Rarity snapped, again indicating the door. “Out. Out! It’s an art form, Fluttershy! It’s an artform and I won’t have it mocked in my store.”
“It’s making the cartoon character kiss,” Fluttershy muttered, stalking out of Rarity’s boutique. The door bell jangled behind her, and the door itself swung back and forth several times before finally coming to rest.
Rarity sat back down, with a sharp hiss of breath. “The absolute nerve.”
Unicorn Horns: Unicorns don't technically have horns. Like narwhals, they have a tooth that grows out of their heads.
Maybe unicorns can actually channel magic through all of their teeth, but don't because casting magic with your mouth wide open makes you look silly. Maybe unicorns go to the dentist for "horn" care, have to brush their horn, etc. Maybe this could be a sort of secret to non-unicorns, not because unicorns are trying to keep it a secret, but because unicorns assume it is common knowledge..
One day, Rarity slipped and fell down the stairs of her boutique, and landed on her horn. She stumbled outside, called for help, and her neighbors whisked her to the Ponyville Hospital, where she was diagnosed with a linear horn fracture.
When the news got out among her friends, panic set in. “What do you mean, Rarity’s horn is cracked?” Fluttershy asked, her hoof flying to cover her mouth. “Will she ever cast spells again? Is she crippled?” Applejack took off her hat when she got the news, her expression grave, saying only, “Tell it like it is, doc.” Rainbow and Pinkie Pie both cried, then later denied it.
Rarity, for her part, laughed. “Oh, you poor dears, I’m touched, but I don’t know where you got this notion that a unicorn cracking their horn was serious, or even life threatening. With modern medicine, it’s no more severe than a broken leg. I’ll have my horn in a cast for a few weeks and be right as rain.”
“But…” Pinkie Pie asked. “With your horn covered, how will you, you know. Open doors? Sew dresses? Pour tea into your overly fancy teacups?”
“You all seem to manage,” Rarity said, a light mirth to her words to disperse her friends' gloom. “Oh, don’t make a fuss. I’ll use my teeth, I’ll be fine.”
Despite her insistances, her friends did make a fuss, and insisted on one of them walking her home from the hospital. Rarity immediately selected Fluttershy as the party in question, and only a few hours after the news broke, the two were walking side by side, with Rarity’s horn in a large and vaguely cylindrical cast.
“Oh, but it really isn’t very flattering,” Rarity said, pointing at the frankly enormous thing on her forehead. “I suppose I shall simply have to live with it in the meanwhile.”
“It seems like it might get in the way,” Fluttershy replied, and when they reached the Boutique, she was quick to hold open the door for Rarity. “If you tried to use your teeth the earth pony way, I mean.”
“I suppose it would,” Rarity only reluctantly agreed. “So inelegant.”
The inside of the Boutique was chilly and damp, and undisturbed from the way Rarity left it when she rushed outside that morning. “Oof!” Fluttershy said. “The autumn air is really getting in. Would you like to start a fire?”
“That would be lovely,” Rarity said, moving towards the fireplace in the back of the shop.
Only when Fluttershy saw the logs stacked in the fireplace did it occur to her that Rarity, being a unicorn, might not have a mechanical lighter, or matches, or any other sort of firestarter that a pegasus could use. She would be used to having her horn, and so might have no way to warm her house. “Oh,” she said. “Do you want me to run to town for some matches, or-”
Rarity craned open her mouth like a snake, her teeth glowed, and with a deep rumbling sound, she belched a stream of red-hot fire directly onto the hearth, setting the logs ablaze.
Fluttershy blinked once, then again, and into the stillness that had come over the room, she asked: “What the f-”
The first time Big Mac brought Sugar Belle to the farmhouse.
Imagine an invisible line, draw along the ground.
On one side of that line are Big Mac and Sugar Belle, who have come to Sweet Apple Acres so that Sugar Belle can meet the Apple Clan, and come to know the family into which she will soon be wed. Both are nervous, yet both are smiling, pressed into each other's shoulders, their joy overflowing into the world around them.
One the other side of the line are Granny Smith, Applebloom, Applejack, and approximately 237 other earth ponies, all of whom are part of the extended apple family. All eyes are on Sugar Belle, hundreds of them boring in, the gazes of the young, the old, the wise and the foolish, the welcoming and the hostile. All of them watch.
“So,” Granny Smith said, “you pregnant? Because the wedding was kind of short notice.”
“Granny!” Big Mac shouted, his face flush. “How dare you?”
“We’re not sure,” Sugar Belle said, her tone bright and untroubled. “But I did throw up, so we figured, better safe than sorry.”
“Sugar Belle!” Big Mac turned, his mouth hanging open.
“That’s a good sensible mare you got there, Big Mac,” Granny said, with an approving nod. “You want an apple family apple fritter?”
“Only if you eat some of this pie I brought!” Sugar Belle produced the treat with a flourish. “I heard there was a baking contest, and I mean to hold my own.”
“She’s one of us!” A pony in the back shouted, and the whole apple clan applauded as one.
That night, as they lay in bed side by side, Sugar Belle said to Big Mac: “I think your family likes me.”
Rainbow Dash comes home from a long tour with the Wonderbolts.
They say war is hell.
I guess, technically, I’ve never been to war, but Wonderbolts get a military rank, and Spitfire told me they’re descended from the old Pegasopolis Air Guard, so that’s pretty close. And I’ve been to Tartarus, which is what stories about hell are based on, and let me tell you: air tour’s are just like Tartarus.
Long boring flights in and out, remote locations like the Tartarian Gates or Albuquerque, cages full of hideous beasts. Not literal cages, I’m talking about the stands. Shouting crowds. It’s like a metaphor.
You think the training prepares you, that you’re tough, hot stuff, ready to put on any show. But nothing prepares you for townies throwing popcorn out of the stands as you go past. I knew one young buck, name of Speed Run. Strong flyer, good kid. He tried to do a low pass over the foal’s section of the stands, and he…
He took a milkshake to the face. Spun in. There was nothing we could do. Sprained wing, doc made him keep off it for two weeks.
And you keep telling yourself, when it’s all over. The show, I mean, when the show’s all over. There’ll be a big party. You’ll be a hero! Drinking hard and flirting with mares asking you to sign body parts. But then you get to the afterparty and it’s just at some local bar that keeps trying to push their weird artisanal cider, and the mares mostly just want you to sign napkins or posters or things like that.
I don’t know what it was all for, Twilight. For the glory? For the adventure? For the generous pay and government pension? Just because I wanted to fly really really fast?
I don’t know. I just don’t know.
They got a name for it. PTSD -- Pony Tour Scowl Disorder. It’s where you start glaring at ponies real hard because you’re all cynical and bitter. Spitfire has it. She’s got it real bad.
I think I might have it, Twilight.
Twilight didn’t look up from her book.
After a long pause, Rainbow continued in her best gravelly, dramatic voice: “You think I need therapy?”
Preparations for the Rebuild Ponyville Charity Gala were well underway, that happy day every year when the ponies of Ponyville gathered to sing, play games, square dance, and raise money for all the citizens whose houses had been destroyed by monster attacks.
Applejack and Rarity had been active in the Charity Gala all their lives. As children, their enthusiasm pulled others into the games. As adolescents, they ran booths or volunteered for cleanup. As adults, they were organizers, and even celebrity guests after they acquired the Elements of Harmony. And on this particular year, they were also going to be performers, putting on a two-pony guitar rendition of Smells Like Horse Spirit.
As they each stood on stage, checking the microphones and tuning their guitars, Twilight approached them and said: “How’s it going?”
“Good,” AJ replied, and Rarity added something to much the same effect.
“I just realized,” Twilight continued. “Both of you have lived in Ponyville your whole lives, you’re both really close, and both of you play the guitar. Is there, like, a story there?”
“Yeah,” AJ said, “sure, when we were little—”
“We both went to band camp,” Rarity cut in, raising her voice ever so gently and adding a touch of dramatic breath. “I was in that awkward phase, too old to be a filly, too young to be a mare. I heard that Applejack liked the guitar, and I wanted to impress her. I don’t know what I thought, at the time. That she was cool or hip, that I’d somehow win a friend—”
“Woah, woah,” Applejack cut in, “that is not what—”
“Of course!” Rarity raised her voice higher, unable to keep a grin off her face. “I suspect on some level, I knew that music was the way to a mare’s heart. That I wanted her to look at me the way she—”
“Both our families,” AJ fumed, “sent us to the same music tutor when we were five!”
“Oh, I know.” Rarity let out a long sigh, and fanned herself with a hoof. “You always were the mare next door.”
“Oh, kay,” Twilight said, slowly. “I’m going to let you two work this out on your own. Let me know when you need the sound check.”
“Twilight,” AJ called, as Twilight walked away. “Twilight don’t leave me alone with this mare!”
Cloud Chaser asks Rainbow Dash out on a date, but must first battle her seven evil siblings, including her unicorn sister. Rainbow Dash secretly helps out because this is bullshit, but it would hurt her siblings' feelings if she was open about it.
The pegasi can be a very traditional tribe. Not because of any natural inclination, but rather, geographic isolation. Cloudsdale is almost literally a world apart from the rest of Equestria, and a pegasus could easily go their whole childhood, or even most of their lives, without ever meeting a member of either ground tribe face to face. It promotes a certain insularity, a sort of small-town incestuiousness.
That said, it is important not to exaggerate. For instance, some unicorn authors like to portray pegasus ritual as occurring in stark amphitheaters, with burning braziers and toga-clad crowds howling for blood. These stories are both anachronistic and, frankly, somewhat tribalist. Yes, many pegasus customs do require open spaces, but they aren’t primitive, just a little traditional. A ground pony might not be familiar with their customs, but they would appear quite modern.
Cloud Chaser was born of two earth ponies, and raised on the ground, so Rainbow Dash’s family endeavored to be understanding. They knew she would not necessarily be familiar with Cloudsdale’s customs, and wanted her to feel at ease.
So they had a little family gathering, with hayburgers and pie, where she could meet all the ponies who would be attempting to beat her senseless for her presumption, to bloody her for daring to touch their beautiful flower of a sister.
“This is Radar Assist,” Rainbow said, introducing her eldest brother first. His cutie mark was a radar dish and a zeppelin, and he fought with deadly energy beams he could project from his wings.
“Rope Burn,” she went down the line. Her older sister wore a stetson hat and carried a lasso, a provlicity she picked up in her youth from her earth pony boyfriend, who had since become her earth pony husband. “Be careful,” Rainbow said. “There’s a magic weight on the end of that rope that she can make heavy as an anvil. If she gets a lasso around any part of your body she can drop you right out of the sky.”
“Uh…” Cloud Chaser said, which she felt was fair, under the circumstances.
“Reverse Charge,” Rainbow pointed at the brother who was but a year older than her, who had a slight frame, and wore glasses and a pocket protector. “He’s an accountant at a credit card company.”
“Oh!” Cloud Chaser held a hoof to her chest and laughed. “So, there’s at least one easy one? Or uh,” she attempted a smile, “do you audit me to death?”
“No no,” Reverse Charge laughed. “I’m definitely going to be the easiest fight. I don’t even have a gimmick or a special move. I just use knives.”
“What?”
“Knives,” he said, picking up the plastic knife that rested on his hayburger plate, and sending it flying into the sky with a flick of his head.
Cloud Chaser stared at him. A moment later, a dead seagull fell past them, a little plastic knife having impaled it beak to feathers.
“Anyway,” Rainbow Dash sighed. “Finally, we have the little kid of the family. Cloud Chaser, meet Rise Early.”
Rise Early was a unicorn mare, perhaps fifteen years of age, still in that lanky phase where her limbs were too long for her body and her horn too short for her face. Her coat wasn’t blue, and her mane wasn’t colorful, and of course, she had to wear special magic horseshoes so she could sit on clouds with the rest of the family.
“Before you ask,” Rise Early said, “yes, I’m adopted. And no, it doesn’t matter. My family’s the best.”
“Darn right it is,” Reverse Charge said, ruffling Rise Early’s mane.
“Oh, well…” Cloud Chaser laughed. “She’s a kid. I can’t punch a child. Or, sorry, a teenager. But still.”
“I know. It’s okay,” Rise Early said. “I’m a necromancer. Get it, ‘rise’ early? You can fight my undead minions. I’ve got some skelletal pegasai, some zombies, and your mother’s ghost.”
“Oh. Well then, I’ve got some mare’s ghost who has unresolved issues with her daughter ‘Cloud Chaser.’ But I guess it’s a different Cloud Chaser. Just to check, your mother has a red coat?”
“Green coat.”
“Yeah, different Cloud Chaser then. Darn.”
“Uh…” Cloud Chaser stumbled several times as she tried to get to her hooves. Only on the third attempt did she manage it, and thereafter utter a shaky, “Rainbow, can I speak to you in private, for a second?”
The two flew away to a nearby cloud, and once there, Rainbow embraced her. “Sorry,” she said at once. “I know my family is way too intense about their traditions. But it means a lot to them. And I know it’s stupid—”
“It’s not stupid, Rainbow!” Cloud Chaser hissed. “It’s psychotic. They’re saying I can’t date you unless I kung-fu fight all of your siblings.”
“I know,” Rainbow sighed.
“It’s violent. It’s savage. But more than that,” she pointed at the cloud below them, “it’s controlling. It’s saying they have to approve anypony you go on a date with.”
“I know. I know. It—”
“Think about it,” Cloud Chaser pointed back at the family gathering. “If Rise Early met a nice colt and wanted to get lunch with him, should that colt have to fight you, one of the Elements of Harmony, before he could smile at her? That’s messed up!”
“That’s not fair,” Rainbow fumed. “I’d go easy on him. And they’re going to go easy on you.”
“Go easy?” Cloud Chaser frowned. “Like, it’s just a play fight?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Oh.” Her brow furrowed. “Sorry, I thought this was a real fight.”
“A real fight? No.” Rainbow laughed. “That would be crazy.”
Awkwardly, Cloud Chaser laughed. “So it’s like, ritualized? Like, if Rise Early brought home a colt, you’d just play-punch his shoulder.”
“I’d Flying Dragon Kick his shoulder.”
After a long pause, Cloud Chaser said, “Wouldn’t that… break his bones?”
“Only if he didn’t get out of the way,” Rainbow rolled her eyes. “Come on, the Flying Dragon Kick has like, a huge leadup time. It’s one of those wuxia martial arts moves that looks really cool, but isn’t practical in a fight. He’d have a full half-second to get out of the way. Any pegasus who can’t dodge a kick with a full half-second lead time doesn’t deserve to be dating my little sister.”
Cloud Chaser stared. Into the silence, Rainbow muttered. “Besides, I was really hoping she’d find a pony who knows the Iron Bones Technique? I mean, like an earth pony. She’s about Apple Bloom’s age.”
“Okay, you know what?” Cloud Chaser said. “I’m out. From this day forwards, I’m only dating earth ponies. At least their traditions make sense.”
“Didn’t your parents and the apple family once have a pie-eating contest to the death?”
Pony on Earth, pony discovers some life-changing piece of kitchen equipment. I was thinking a blender.
Far Shores sat on a little pillow in her friend’s dorm room, and sank deep into existential crisis.
Grasped in her hooves, in a cheap little plastic cup with a simile face on the side, was a hay-oat-and-kale smoothie. The first such smoothie she had drank in her entire life.
Oh, certainly, she’d consumed things that were called smoothies, back in Equestria. Things full of chunks, full of floating bits, where the shards of hay floated and clung together on the surface. Smoothies made by hoof, by grinding stone, by the labor of earth ponies and their broad hooves.
But how could they be smoothies, she thought, when they were not smooth? Not like the drink she had just sipped, the ambrosia that flowed like liquid gold, and whose flavored intermingled so entirely she could imagine that they had grown that way, that hay, oat, and kale were all but a single plant.
She could never drink an Equestrian “smoothie” again. Not without the pain of knowing what she had lost. She had beheld the true nature of the cosmos, at least as far as it pertained to ground vegetable drinks, and she could not go back to her state of ignorance.
And yet, how had it been made? With a blender, one of those gadgets with which humans festooned their nests like magpies with shiny junk. Never before had Far Shores truly desired one of the human’s technological devices, save as anything more than a toy or a momentary convenience. But she had to have a blender. She had to.
And yet, where would she plug it in?
To use her blender back in Ponyville, she would need a generator. To run her generator, she would need fuel. To get fuel, she would need a refinery, which would itself require specialist metal parts, specialist gauges, modern glassware, digital thermometers, crude oil. Of course, she had a job in Ponyville, and couldn’t spend all day refining crude oil to make gasoline for smoothies. To make things easier, she would probably want to hire ponies to do it for her. Establish an oil company. But she couldn’t possibly afford to pay multiple pony’s salaries. So she should invest in automation, computers or robots or…
That’s when the revelation came.
It was impossible to make a smoothie, a true smoothie, without first creating all human civilization.
“This is it,” she said to her human friend, staring at the drink, eyes wide and dark. “This is the special talent of the whole human race. This is why you exist.”
She took another sip.
“It’s really sweet though,” she went on after a moment. “Do humans have to put sugar in everything? Like, I went to the Starbucks in the physics building and they put syrup in my coffee.”
"It's simple, Twilight. Manehattan would like you solve a friendship problem it's having with Canterlot."
"I haven't gotten any kind of request from either the Mayor or the Lord Seneschal about civic conflict that requires mediation, Rarity..."
"No, dear. You wouldn't have. I didn't mention the government. Or anypony, really. Manehattan would like you to solve a friendship problem it's having with Canterlot."
"... you're going to have to walk me through this one slowly.".
Special Containment Procedures: Due to SCP-4757’s scale and area of influence, containment is impossible without causing significant disruption to Equestria society. As of writing, SCP-4757 has been determined to not present a sufficient threat to normal reality as to justify such extreme measures. Foundation Research Sites 344 and 822 have been established to monitor SCP-4747 and appraise the Foundation if there is any change in their properties or behavior which may indicate a need for more aggressive containment procedures.
Description: SCP-4757 is an ongoing friendship problem between two Equestrian cities: Canterlot (SCP-4757-A) and Manehatten (SCP-4757-B). Within the context of SCP-4757, both cities demonstrate sapience, emotion, and other properties required to experience both friendship and friendship problems, however, they have not demonstrated these properties, or other anomalous behaviors, in other contexts.
SCP-4757 first came to the Foundation’s attention when Foundation Agent ██████████ (Codename: “Apple Hat”) reported unusual behavior in Princess Twilight Sparkle’s Cutie Map (See SCP-9233). SCP-9233 displayed the Foundation seal, as well as Princess Sparkle’s own cutie mark, over the cities of Manehatten and Canterlot respectively. To protect Foundation security, Apple Hat applied Class 0 amnestics to Princess Sparkle, in the form of a blow to the back of the head.
Examination of the cities by MTF Neigh-14 (“Quarter Horses”) revealed nothing of interest, however, statistical and cryptographic analysis by researchers at Site 277 revealed unusual artifacts in routine activity occurring in both cities. Examples include:
The first letter from every section of Section 34 (Intercity Rail and Other Shared Infrastructure) of the 1024 Manehattan City Budget forms the sentence: “IT MUST BE NICE TO HAVE THE MONARCHY PAY FOR EVERYTHING”
A routine test of the Catenterlot Emergency Communications System, intended transmit random characters, instead transmitted the following messages, as though encoded by a 1938 model German Enigma machine: “AT LEAST THE PRINCESSES DO HONEST WORK NOT LIKE STOCKBROKERS YOURE THE PARASITE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD”
A list of names of Manehatten to Canterlot travelers, recorded by the ticket-sellers for the primary connecting railway, contains the sentence: “I HAVE MILLIONS OF HARDWORKING CITIZENS IN FIVE BOROUGHS”
In the middle of an otherwise unremarkable speech on urban redistricting, delivered from the palace at Canterlot, Princess Twilight Sparkle said: “And, while we’re on the subject, ‘five boroughs’ is a cute way to say ‘urban sprawl,’ fatass. Try losing some weight.” Nopony in the audience considered the remark unusual or worthy of note, and it only came to the foundation’s attention due to the presence of a mechanical recording device.
For a complete list of other examples, see Appendix A.
Requests by Foundation Researcher ██████████ to resolve the friendship problem through mediation or trust-fall exercises have been unanimously denied by the M6 Council. As SCP-4757 does not appear to constitute a threat to normal reality, it’s destruction falls outside the Foundation’s purpose. To quote M6 Council Member ██████████. “Foundation exist to contain artifacts, not smash! ██████████ smash!”
"Sunny Starscout and her friends have done it! In the years since they reunited the tribes and rekindled the light of Harmony, magic… Who's this "Star Power", and why does she look so much like Twilight Sparkle?
Or, in other words: the hypothesis that G4 is a TV show within G5's world is, for this world, true -- but they don't know that.
“You’re sure…” Sunny Starscout said, slowly, calmly, “that it was a TV show?”
“We’re sure,” said Whisk Brush, the reedy little pegasus archeologist standing before her, his tail and wings shaking alike. “We’ve found… artifacts. Collectable toys. Promotional material. Pieces of the sets.”
“Well,” Sunny said, after a pause. “That doesn’t prove anything. Maybe the ancient people’s made a television show about the historical life of the actual Twilight Sparkle. Just because the mare we revere as Twilight Sparkle was actually…” It hurt her to say the word. “Star Power, doesn’t mean there wasn’t a real Twilight Sparkle who did all those things.”
“Yes!” She raised her voice. “Yes, I get it. You’re saying that Harmony, the creed and the faith around which our new society is based, through which we reunited the tribes, is in fact based on… a children’s TV show, from some long-lost civilization.”
“I’m afraid so, ma’am,” Whisk said, holding his hoof to his chest. “I’m sorry.”
Sunny turned to look out the palace window, at the colorful banners hanging from every building. She could hear the music from Mandatory Singing Practice, as musical numbers were sacred, and smell the smoke from all the friendship letters ponies wrote and burned, as was described in the holiest of texts.
She could also hear the screaming from all the ponies she crucified, because they just insisted on being jerks for more than thirty minutes, and every pious pony knew that friendship problems got resolved within half an hour.
“You know,” she said, “that really puts the last two or three crusades in a different context. I’m not feeling as great about them as I was this morning.”
“Indeed,” Whisk agreed. “A real bummer.”
Then, Izzy Moonbow ran in. “Sunny! Sunny!” she shouted. “The tennis ball thing happened again. Look, it’s on my horn!”
“Izzy,” Sunny sighed, putting her face in her hooves. “Not now.”
