A few years into her reign, Twilight Sparkle has what can only be described as a party emergency. The good news is that she has a Minister of Laughter for these kinds of situations. The bad news is that she’s relying on Pinkie Pie to defuse an intertribal incident before it happens. This is going to be one heck of a Hearth’s Warming…

Written for Zaid ValRoa for Jinglemas 2024.

Rainbow Dash's birthday is tomorrow, and her friends are all scouring Canterlot Mall.

Make no mistake, most of them already have gifts lined up, but they want to show their appreciation for everything Dash has done over the past year. Including the pranks, the pointing and laughing, that time she made all their magic spiral out of control...

It'll definitely take something special to say everything they want to. It's just a matter of finding it.

Rated Teen for jokes saucier than what S&P would permit for Equestria Girls. Credit for original concept goes to Tipper by way of Estee's Discord server.

After Izzy's imagined water park vanishes as quickly as it went up, Sunny and her friends happily make their way back to the Boardtrot. But one of them gets interrupted by a friend they haven’t thought about for a while… assuming they’d ever met him to begin with.

It’s far from the worst paradox Izzy has to worry about. That's kind of the problem.

(Note: No, this isn't FoME's last story on the site.)

Rainbow Dash is mare enough to admit when she's wrong about something's coolness, awesomeness, and/or radicalness. She'd barely even heard of Ogres & Oubliettes before Discord turned Namepending Castle into a LARP, and while the version without chaos magic isn't for her, it's opened up a whole new world of fun that her friends and fellow Wonderbolts are eager to help her explore.

The good news is that Dash will approach it with the same passion she has for anything that captures her interest.

That's also the bad news.

Originally intended as an entry in the Quills & Sofas Wonderbolts contest. Whoops. Instead entered into the Splash Contests Dumb as Doornails contest. Story does not contain magical pony dogfights, though the cover is relevant for other reasons.

After the success of the initial wave of friendship ambassadors—so much so that it unearthed multiple other Trees of Harmony—Twilight has happily pushed Equestria's global goodwill tour to every corner of the globe, no matter how remote or obscure.

This includes pushing west of Mustangia, to the country of Mustelia and the creatures that inhabit it. Sure, they're largely carnivorous, but so are the Diamond Dogs and Abyssinians. Yes, many of the previous missions went briefly but horribly awry due to monster attacks, bad-faith actors, or ancient beings from the depths of history, but that's why Twilight picked two of the Friendship Corps' best for the job.

Yes, this is definitely, definitely going to work out in the end.

Pay no attention to Discord laughing himself sick.

A polished version of the second place entry in Everfree Northwest 2024's Iron Author contest. Prompt: Significantly include "smile," "weasel," and "gubernatorial" in the story. (The prompts were chosen by Pinkie Pie this year. )

The Pie sisters all love each other. They even like each other, which is more than some siblings can say.

They do not, however, understand one another. And that applies to Pinkie trying to make sense of the others as much as them trying to wrap their heads around her.

But they're still there for one another, because that's what family's for. Even when family comes home lovestruck and bleeding in equal measure.

A regrettably ineligible entry in Spring Fling 2: Rainbow Rocks Boogaloo. Remember, folks, always read all of the rules. Rated Teen for the couple being unbound from the constraints of TV-Y7.

People have had a lot of crazy ideas about unicorns over the years. Given the sheer quantity, it shouldn't be surprising when some of them turn out to be true.

It still is, but it shouldn't be.

An entry in Thousand Words Contest III, in the Slice of Life and Comedy categories, earning Bronze in the former. Rated Teen for teenage discussions of M-rated topics. All characters are 18, just to be safe.

Shortly before extracting the Pillars of Equestria and the Pony of Shadows from Limbo, the Bearers of Harmony faced off against a stallion trying to erase all records of an ancient evil, lest that knowledge fall into the wrong hooves.

Nopony ever considered that the two incidents might have been related. Not until Stygian's first novel hit store shelves.

An entry in the 2024 May Pairings Contest for the Original Pairings group. Last minute best minute.
Rated Teen for implied concepts a bit more grim than what the show could get away with.

Cover from the Friendship is Magic mainline comics, Issue #53

Sunset just wanted to give her friends an Equestrian experience without any magical mishaps, threats to life and limb, or tears in reality.

In hindsight, she really should have known better.

An exquisite corpse from many of the same folks who brought you Cheerilee's Normal Day, with each author only seeing the two chapters prior to theirs. Featuring the work of Jarvy Jared, PseudoBob Delightus, Dashie04, Silver Needle, EileenSaysHi, AltruistArtist, The Red Parade, Fillyfoolish, Bicyclette, The Sleepless Beholder, Rego, and yours truly.

Rated Teen for a precision F-bomb. (Hey, if it works for PG-13 movies...) Cover by PseudoBob.

Fifty-odd years after Twilight Sparkle took the throne, Equestria is in a golden age of technomagical innovation, with concepts from the human world competing with entirely original innovations in an upward spiral of ingenuity that promises to last forever.

… Sorry, make that promised to last forever.

On an entirely unrelated note, two elderly twin unicorns just teleported to an uncharted tropical island.

A double entry in the Dialogue-Only contest (where it got second place) and the Tropical Post-Apocalyptic contest (likewise.) Rated Teen for references to alcohol and almost certain death.