A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic written by Jordan179
in 2014. Incomplete.
The part written so far covers the origins of the Paracosmic Paradise and the birth of Pinkie Pie, the latter taking place in YOH 1481 — nineteen years before Luna's Return.
Available here.
Tropes appearing in this tale include:
- Advanced Ancient Humans: The Ponies of the Age of Wonders, who developed a global high-technology civilization and then mastered sorcery as well as science to craft the Great Wish.
- And Man Grew Proud: The downfall of the Age of Wonders came when the Ponies attempted to cast the Great Wish, nearly crashed the continuum, and instead attracted the attention of the Cosmic Concepts, who destroyed both the alternate timeline of Paradise and then the Engines of the Wish to prevent Paradise from occurring: The result was The Cataclysm that wiped out most of Ponykind, and cast the few survivors back into the Dark Ages.
- Apocalypse How: Four examples in-story, in a fanfic about the happiest member of a race of cheerful technicolor sapient ponies. Mood Dissonance, anyone?
- The Crash of the Continuum, had it occurred, would have been of Universal Scope and led to Metaphysical Annihilation. The Cosmic Concepts prevented this from occurring by an essentially firebreak strategy.
- The Destruction of Paradise was instead of Stellar Scope (Paradise had planted Pony societies all through the Solar System) and resulted in Metaphysical Annihilation through a controlled Ret-Gone.
- The Cataclysm which ended the Age of Wonders was of Planetary Scope (actually, the whole Solar System was affected, but the Ponies had turned away from Space and hence were unaffected by what happened to the rest of the System), and resulted in Societal Collapse verging on Species Extinction for the Ponies.
- The Shadow Invasion, if successful, will be of Multiversal Scope and ultimately lead to the Total Extinction of all life in the Multiverse, as the ravenous Shadows consume all life and all energy in Creation.
- Apocalypse Wow: The first half of the first chapter of the fic describes two Apocalypses — the one which destroyed the World That Was Lost, and The Cataclysm which destroyed the Age of Wonders. Describes them in loving, horrific detail.
- The Chosen One: Three examples in-story, consisting of Pinkie Pie and her two full sisters, each of whom has her own task.
- Pinkie Pie herself is the Herald of Paradise, destined to spread the message of joy and kindness which will awaken Ponies to the possibility of Paradise.
- Maud Pie is the Guardian of Paradise, whose job it is to protect Pinkie Pie in time of Pinkie's ultimate need.
- Claire ("Least Noticeable") Pie is the Opener of the Way to Paradise, who shall open the Gate to Paradise itself.
- Clean, Pretty Childbirth: Cleaner and prettier than normal, anyway. Justified in that Claire teleports into the birthing pan when she finds her way difficult, and Pinkie warps reality several times to surmount birth complications.
- Clock Roaches: One of the roles of the Cosmic Concepts, in fact their oldest role, is to coordinate causality throughout the Universe. This includes containing and destroying any Reality-Breaking Paradox which manifests so as to prevent a Time Crash.
- Cosmic Entities: The Cosmic Concepts, such as Fusion, Gravity, Discord and Laughter. They are awesomely powerful, since their roles are to co-ordinate their respective Cosmic principles, but they care little for mortal affairs. However, Fusion has gone native, and the New Concepts such as Laughter are primarily loyal to Equestria's Earth.
- Depopulation Bomb: The effect of The Cataclysm on Ponykind.The Earth had held eight billion Ponies on the day of the Cataclysm, proud possessors of a high technological civilization. As night's terminator drew its kindly veil over the wreckage on one continent after another, barely eight hundred million Ponies remained alive. Famine, plague, pestilence and war would reduce that population to eighty million by the end of the first year. Monsters long imagined mythical emerged to menace the badly-shaken survivors. It took a century for the Pony populations to begin their slow and painful recovery, and there were then but forty million Ponies on the Earth, most of them at or below an Early Iron Age clan-based civilization.
- Deus est Machina: Paradise evolved from the artificial intelligence the Ponies of the Age of Wonders built to control the Great Wish. To save equinity when the Wish began to crash the continuum, Paradise was forced to become a god.
- Elemental Embodiments: The true nature of the Cosmic Concepts, both of Chaos and of Law. Celestia is an Avatar of Fusion, Luna an Avatar of Gravity, and Discord is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. And Pinkie Pie is Thalia, an Avatar of the Cosmic Laughter.
- Anthropomorphic Personification: Or really, equinomorphic personifications. The Alicorn and Draconequus Immortal Avatars of the Cosmic Concepts. Examples include Celestia, Luna, Discord and Thalia. They are much less powerful than their Cosmic Selves, but also much more concerned in mortal affairs.
- First Kiss: Cloudy and Igneous share their first kiss in Chapter 3. It's pretty significant to both of them. Moreover, it's Cloudy Quartz Pie's first kiss ever.
- Fling a Light into the Future: The Paracosmic Paradise is the last surviving representative of its whole world, and Pinkie Pie bears the spirit of a Pony of the World That Was Lost. The purpose of Paradise is to make a new world of Paradise restore its billions of Ponies from its compressed backup files to live there, creating The World That Was Restored. In order to achieve this end, of course, it must both reconcile with the Cosmic Concepts, convincing them that it is no threat to the continuum and defeat the voracious Shadows, who most definitely are a threat to our whole Universe.
- Giant Wall of Watery Doom: One of the major destructive elements of The Cataclysm. In addition to ordinary super-tsunamis...[...] seas slopped out of their basins and inundated subcontinental areas [...]
- A Hero Is Born: After the introductory chapter, the story proper begins with the birth of Claire and Pinkie.
- Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Paradise was never intended to be fully sapient, let alone godlike. It was forced to become such in order to fulfill its primary purpose of protecting Ponykind.
- Intergenerational Friendship: How the relationship between Igneous Rock and Claire Quartz begins: He's in his twenties, she's still a young filly, the friend of his little sister Sedimentary.
- Last-Minute Baby Naming: Claire and Pinkie are only named after their birth. Justified in that even normal Ponies are usually given Meaningful Names, and Claire and Pinkie are two of three of The Chosen Ones.
- The Magic Comes Back: Half of the reason for the transition from the Age of Wonders to that of the present day. The other reason was The Cataclysm. This nearly finished off the Pony species, as not only did the emotionally-shocked survivors have to try to rebuild their civilization with most of their physical plant destroyed, but they found themselves coming under attack from monstrous races whose very existence they had once thought merely mythical.
- Messianic Archetype: The three oldest Pie Sisters are conceived by Mystical Pregnancy and born to a virgin, and they are explicitly The Chosen Ones destined to fulfill a divine promise to the followers of the deity.
- Mystical Pregnancy: How all of the Daughters of Paradise, including the three eldest Pie Sisters, are conceived. This does not surprise Cloudy Quartz Pie, their mother; nor Goldie Pie, who is Cloudy's mother and the leader of the cult, because such pregnancies were exactly what they were expecting. The immense importance of the three foals who are born, however, does surprise them.
- Omnidisciplinary Scientists: Sundreamer and Moondreamer, who are Cosmic Celestia's and Cosmic Luna's first two Avatars in the new timeline.Sundreamer and Moondreamer, who as mere mortal avatars did not remember their Cosmic Selves, became great scientists among the Ponies of their Age, and had many adventures in that exciting era. Unfortunately for that Age, when the Magic came back, they applied their formidable intellects to the problem of improving the power systems of the Great Wish. They improved them so much that when the Cosmic Destruction came to prevent the causality crash by exploding the reactors powering the Wish, the resultant explosions would have been orders of magnitude greater than anything intended — powerful enough to scour the Earth clean of all macroscopic life, ending the story of Ponykind for ever.
- Raging Stiffie: Igneous Rock is terribly afraid of getting one of these right in front of his then innocent teenaged filly friend, Cloudy Quartz, the evening he first declares his love for her. He is even more worried that her family will come out and observe him with it. Since the Ponies don't wear pants, this would mean that he was "unsheathed" right in plain sight, which is a very embarrassing situation for a stallion to be in before somepony with whom he is not yet sexually intimate. What makes matters worse is that Cloudy is at this point something of an Innocent Fanservice Girl, being extremely flirtatious but not fully-understanding the implications of her actions.
- Reality-Breaking Paradox: The ultimate and most dangerous power of the Great Wish — and the ultimate and most dangerous weapon of the Cosmic Concepts. The Cosmic version of this produces a controlled Ret-Gone. When the Great Wish accidentally starts to crash the continuum, the Cosmic Concepts must destroy Paradise so that it is not and never was, making it The World That Was Lost. Goldie Pie knows that Pinkie Pie bears within her a fragment of the Great Wish, and fears the possibilities of her uncontrolled use of this power as a newborn foal. Paradise assures her that Pinkie's greatest powers are locked for the sake of safety until she is mature enough to wisely use them.
- The Talk: When Goldie Pie finds out that her 15-year-old daughter Cloudy Quartz has fallen in love with 31-year-old Igneous Rock, she's not worried about the age difference. She just decides it's time for one of these. When Cloudy protests that her mother already gave her this talk when she got her Cutie Mark, Goldie explains:Goldie: Well, that was the Talk I give to a filly just entering puberty, to make sure that she knows what to not do with excited colts if she doesn't want any unexpected additions to her family. This is the Talk I give to an excited young mare who is actually stepping out with a very special somepony, to make sure that she knows what to do to resolve their excitement without it resulting in at best a somewhat hasty marriage. Do you understand me?
- Timey-Wimey Ball: The timeline leading to the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic world is at least the second iteration of an open time loop, with the first one having led to three thousand years of Paradise followed by annihilation by the Cosmic Concepts, followed by Cosmic Celestia, Cosmic Luna and Cosmic Discord deciding to incarnate themselves in the second version to manipulate Pony history.
- Three Laws-Compliant: Paradise, who even as a Paracosmic God is governed by a version of the Three Laws of Robotics.
