is a Star Trek/My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic crossover fanfiction written by Dewdrops on the Grass.Sunset Shimmer used to be the personal student of Princess Celestia, who taught her magic and groomed her to eventually become an alicorn and a princess. This ended when Sunset, in petulance at being denied ascension until she was more mature, fled through a magical mirror and into another world.
That story is familiar enough, but here it diverges. Sunset was not transformed by this mirror trip, and when she landed in the other world there was no matching portal to bring her back home. Instead, she found herself stranded in an alien civilization, with no way back to the world she knew. Six months later, the portal appeared again, staying open just long enough to spit out a second pony — a filly, transported there in the wake of a disastrous magical incident — before closing for good.
Sunset and her new companion, Twilight Sparkle, are quite definitely cut off from their old lives — but things aren't too bad, in the balance. 24th century Earth is a very nice place to live, their adoptive mothers love them very much, and they're pretty sure that if they can get themselves into Starfleet they have a decent shot of tracking down their old homeworld. They're bright and ambitious young sparks, so achieving this should be pretty easy as long as nothing really unexpected happens. Like their new home being invaded by a fanatical alien empire. Or old dangers from their original home finding their way into their new paths. But that definitely won't happen. Right?
The story was published on 5th Apr 2021, and went on indefinite hiatus on December of that year due to author burnout. A year later, it was announced the fic would return on December 31, 2022, and the story indeed resumed that day with season 2, episode 7.
This work contains examples of:
- Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In canon, Sunset and Twilight first meet as rivals and later become correspondents and long-distance friends, but play a fairly limited role in each other's lives outside of isolated incidents. In the story, they're adopted by the same family, consider themselves sisters, and share a very close emotional bond.
- Ancient Grome: A species of literal Space Romans visited in Season 2 uses primarily Roman-like clothing and architecture, while their artwork and pottery are decidedly Greek in style. This is noticed and discussed by the crew.
- Back from the Dead: This is a central part in the process of becoming an alicorn — ponies who ascend to this status do so when they perform immense magical feats that overwhelm them and destroy their bodies, and the actual process of ascension involves essentially willing themselves back to life and creating a new alicorn body in the process. This happened to Celestia in the distant past (raising the sun for their first time burned her body to ash; she returned as an alicorn a day later) and, in the story, to Sunset, who comes back to life as an alicorn after being vaporized while trying to contain a warp core collapse.
- Cat Folk: Preta R'el is a caitian, a species of feline humanoids. She often purrs when talking, and Twilight's first reaction to meeting her is to gush about how adorable she looks — much to her embarrassment, as that's usually how humans react to meeting her.
- The Charmer: Captain James Liang has something of an earned reputation as a ladykiller. He's courteous, polite and charming by default, and quite enjoys flirting with pretty women. When Sunset and Cadeneza meet him at his bar he casually greets them with poetic compliments; later, while he keeps his behavior strictly professional while on his ship, he has no trouble switching back to his charming old rogue act in more relaxed settings when talking to female company who has indicated that she's interested in that kind of conversation. When Sarah is besides herself with nervousness at the thought of dating again, it takes him maybe two sentences to ease himself past that and have her swooning.
- A Day in the Limelight: The second season features a number of mini-chapters, which focus on the lives and day-to-day vicissitudes of secondary and tertiary cast members.
- Doomed by Canon: In "Ensign Shimmer", Alma mentions that her brother Max moved to the colony of Ivor Prime. In Star Trek: First Contact, Ivor Prime is overrun and assimilated by the Borg. Sure enough, when the story gets to that point in the timeline, Ivor Prime falls and Max either dies or becomes assimilated.
- Dramatic Irony: In "You Can Lead a Horse to Water", when discussing Twilight's past in Equestria, Belle asks if she was planning to become Princess Celestia's personal student like Sunset was. Twilight dismisses this idea, as she doubts that Celestia would have ever taken her on as a pupil in this manner even if her entrance exam hadn't gone as badly as it did. In canon, however, this was precisely what happened.
- Ear Fins: In human form, the Sirens retain a number of fishlike traits such as rayed fins instead of ears.
- Early-Bird Cameo:
- Zhidar first appears in the story's first chapter as the antican security guard whose beard Sunset sets on fire during her initial panicked flight through San Francisco. He has a couple of non-speaking reappearances, but drops out of the story after the end of the chapter. He returns in the opening of Season 2 when he's recruited as the Phoenix's Chief Security Officer, a role he retains afterwards as a recurring member of the supporting cast.
- Dr. Selar makes a brief appearance in the first chapter as the doctor who examines Sunset after she returns to consciousness. She returns late in Season 2, having been assigned to the Phoenix's medical crew.
- Freudian Slip: Twilight does this twice in Season 1:
- The first time, in "Welcome to the Stars", after having spent six months together on Earth, she accidentally calls Sunset "BSBFF" — "big sister best friend forever", an adaptation of the term she'd used for her brother. This signals the beginning of their considering each other sisters.
- Two and a half in-universe years later, in "A Pebble in Time", Twilight accidentally calls Amina "mom". She's initially very upset about this, as she feels that accepting Amina and T'Lona as mother figures means that she's betraying and replacing her birth family.
- Furry Reminder: Sunset and Twilight are often mentioned as making equine noises, such as whinnying when scared.
- God Guise: The Dazzlings have taken to pretending to be goddesses in order to trick undeveloped civilizations into caring for and catering to them. This, however, ends up backfiring on them — it turns out that, when a monarch suddenly finds her authority strengthened and legitimized by playing host to divinities, she not going to be too eager to let them go.
- Happily Adopted: After becoming stranded on Earth, Twilight and Sunset are adopted by a human/vulcan couple with whom they develop a very strong and loving relationship.
- Heroic Sacrifice: At the end of "The Choices We Make", severe battle damage to the Enterprise causes its warp core to destabilize, and by the time the ship's crew is marshalled into the saucer and it's ready to detach there isn't enough time to get clear from the rest of the ship before the core explodes. As such, Sunset stays behind to use her magic to contain the explosion for as long as she can, buying the saucer just enough time to get clear before the explosion blows out of control and vaporizes the ship with her in it.
- Honorary Uncle: Inverted. Belle Hendricks, the psychiatrist assigned to care for Sunset and Twilight, is a close friend of their adopted mothers and, due to the significant amount of time she spent helping the two fillies adjust to their new lives, eventually came to see them as adoptive nieces.
- How Dare You Die on Me!: The root issue for the conflict between Twilight and Sunset in the second season stems from Sunset's close call with death and subsequent two-year disappearance. Twilight mourned deeply for those years and, just when she eventually managed to let go of her and move past her grief, Sunset simply returned well and unharmed. The resulting conflict of emotions messed Twilight up something awful, leading her to deeply resent Sunset for dying on her and especially, and irrationally, for not staying dead and sparing her the need to fear losing her all over again.
- Interspecies Romance: By virtue of Sunset and Twilight being the only ponies in Federation space and adopted sisters besides, every romantic relationship they pursue is one of these by default. Sunset, in particular, has a year-long fling with Alma, a human, and later becomes friends with benefits with Cadeneza, another human.
- Jerkass Has a Point: In "Confessions of an FTL Pony", Admiral Nechayev is aggressive, confrontational, and excessively abrasive in criticizing Sunset's testimony, but as Admiral Nakamura points out, her basic points are sound and the story that Sunset is telling them (which involves both a string of unlikely coincidences and some fully magical situations) does sound very hard to believe.
- Magitek: During Season 2, Sunset and Twilight begin to incorporate Equestrian magical engineering into the Phoenix's sensory arrays by creating a mechanism to transform energy from the ship's warp core into magic in order to power sensors meant to detect magic signatures.
- Mythology Gag: In "You Can Lead a Horse to Water", Belle mentions that when she was younger, Sunset became mildly obsessed with Danganronpa and considered writing a holonovel based on it. This is a reference to the other long-term story the author published before this one, Danganronpa: In Harmony's Wake, an Equestria Girls/Danganropa crossover featuring Sunset as the main character.
- Original Generation: The story tends to skirt around canon Star Trek events instead of directly following or replacing them, and Equestria is entirely absent from events after the opening chapter. Consequently, a large portion of its cast, including all of the Phoenix's crew outside of Sunset and Twilight, consists of original characters.
- Our Nudity Is Different: An early stumbling block when Sunset and Twilight are adapting to life on Earth is that the galaxy's humanoid societies are profoundly uncomfortable with nudity — Equestrian society has no such taboos, and it takes some effort to explain that their preferred way of going around in public would be considered indecent.
- Parental Favoritism: Discussed and deconstructed. One of the root issues for Twilight's conflict with Sunset in the second season is that Twilight believes that their adoptive mothers favored Sunset over her.
- Retired Badass Roundup: After James Liang accepts the captaincy of the Phoenix, he tracks down a number of his old shipmates, all of whom have since left Starfleet for other occupations or private life, to talk them out of retirement and into joining the fleet again.
- Robinsonade: After the destruction of the Enterprise, Sunset spends two years stranded on an uninhabited planet. She manages to create a basic shelter, food stores and tools, but is mostly reduced to hunting and foraging — her preference would have been to graze, but she found the local plant life toxic — until she finds the ruins of a recently-abandoned installation and scavenges enough parts to build a crude radio transmitter.
- Shout-Out:
- In "Space Race", Drake and Rodrigo quote a few lines from The Princess Bride.
- Later in the same chapter, Preta mentions having had a Professor Farnsworth at the Academy.
- Space Romans: An alien world visited during the second season is an almost literal example — the local species' culture is heavily reminiscent of the Roman Empire in architecture, clothing and warlike outlook, while using mostly Grecian artistic styles.
- Supporting Leader: James Liang is the captain of the Phoenix, the ultimate commanding voice in its mission and running, and the primary authority figure for the story's main cast. He is however a secondary character, as the narrative focuses on Sunset and Twilight instead, who are subordinate members of his crew.
- Trapped in Another World: The core premise of the story is that the magical mirror that, in canon, leads to the My Little Pony: Equestria Girls universe instead transports Sunset and later Twilight to the Earth of Star Trek. Unlike its canonical version, the mirror doesn't have a corresponding portal on the other end — it simply opens a hole in reality, tosses them out, and closes behind them, leaving them stranded in an alien world with no way to return home. Finding a way to track down their homeworld and return to Equestria is Sunset and Twilight's primary motivation in the story.
- Unstoppable Rage: When Yukarin gloats about his intention to crash the ship they're into the Earth and kill Sunset's family in the process, Sunset goes into a berserk rage, channeling every drop of magic in her body to slaughter the ship's Jem'Hadar guards, incinerate Yukarin himself, and tear the ship to pieces.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Despite a rather disastrous first meeting, Twilight and Maia develop a lasting friendship with each other — albeit one where their primary bonding activities are sarcastic sniping interspersed with sparring matches where they try to beat the tar out of each other.
- Wham Line: "Ghosts" ends with "They call themselves the Dazzlings", revealing the identity of a new set of characters and providing another complication in Sunset's quest to find Equestria.
