Dark Horse — A Five Score Tale from the Dresden Files is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Five Score, Divided by Four and The Dresden Files crossover fanfic by Lord of Dorkness
that started with a simple premise.
What if Harry Dresden, among many others, one day turned into a pony?
Well, for starters, she was not very pleased with this.
Still currently in progress, and may be found on FIMfiction.net.
Takes place post-Skin Games for The Dresden Files and the Friendship Is Magic season five hiatus. Heavy Late-Arrival Spoiler warning for both series.
Tropes:
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- The built in biological foci of ponies (horns, hooves, and wings) are this in Dresden's opinion. They're potent and always at hand, but also a supernatural 'kick me here until the glow stops' sign for anybody used to fighting magic users. Also, as Harry notes herself, half a ton of pony soaring through the air is indeed quite the feat of magic worthy of respect, but if you miscast a complex spell hard enough with a staff you lose a bit of work when it explodes. If you do the same thing with one of your limbs, you maim yourself.
- Turning into a wolf. A neat trick and first step towards turning human again, but Dresden's new pony form has many of the same advantages and less of the disadvantages.
- Bad Powers, Good People: Both this and Good Powers, Bad People ultimately averted. A large part of the conflict could have been avoided if not for some rather extreme culture clash about this between Dresden's magic/methods and the Equestrians far gentler if misinformed approach.
- Clap Your Hands If You Believe: A rather terrifying version of this discussed by Harry and Nemo. Nemo starts to ask Harry if it was possible to will into existence copies of Excalibur, as an example, by getting a whole lot of people to believe that the sword some joe schmoe crafted is the real thing. Harry tells him it's astronomically difficult but the theory is sound. Nemo then tells Harry that there are hundreds of millions of pony fans out there, so what if they all started to believe in the Elements of Harmony?
- Crack Fic: Actually played mostly straight, but the basic concept of the story is still that Harry Dresden is turned into Fluttershy.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: All four Princesses of Equestria challenge Harry while she's on Demonreach. The only reason the 'fight' lasts more then ten seconds is that Dresden tries making them surrender before things go nasty.
- Insistent Terminology: Harry has experience with actual horses, and uses that instead of more common MLP fan-terms. 'Arms' instead of 'forelegs,' or 'rump' instead 'plot' for example.
- Also, 'butt emblems' instead of 'cutie marks' since Dresden finds the later so ludicrously silly sounding.
- Killer Rabbit: Dresden is highly and constantly annoyed with how her new adorable appearance means nobody takes her seriously as a wizard after having turned into Fluttershy.
- Lethal Harmless Powers: Unicorn style telekinesis. Luna is quite clearly horrified by even the thought of somebody being 'barbaric' enough to weaponize it.
- Meaningful Name: Nemo Schwartz. "No-man Darkened." Quite a fitting name for somepony that's rather embittered by her friends only showing just as she's about to wrestle her new life back under control again. She even outright tells Harry that she was Named after Little Nemo in their first meting. One, if not the most famous character with the power of lucid dreaming.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Harry Dresden. As the story goes on it becomes clearer and clearer that Dresden is taking her involuntary jump of both the species and gender barrier not even nearly as well as she tries to pretend, even without magical complications in the mix.
- Simple, yet Awesome: Nemo has no formal training and basically only has one real trick as far as magic goes, a cobbled together booster spell that only works on herself. Her introduction involves her using it to safely jump atop a three story building in a single leap. Even Dresden is temporarily dumbfounded on seeing it happen.
- The Unmasqued World: The transformation of hundred of millions of mortals into magical creatures has basically chopped the masquerade in two, burned the corpse and salted the ashes. Dresden is almost more worried about how quiet the fallout from that has been than how she's grown hooves.
- Unequal Rites: Harry and Nemo thinks that the reason for how 'pony' magic being so potent and how it breaks all the rules of 'normal' magic is this. That some brilliant but horse obsessed person has invented a totally new and thus hard to counter magic system. How they were turned into ponies but still stayed sane even months later being one of this new system's advantages over traditional wizard magic.
