"I will vanquish you, Celestia, for the salvation of humanity! ...I roll d10 to hit, right?"

"Roll your Melee plus Dexterity, plus another d10 for a dialog bonus, so actually eleven dice." I had gotten good at flipping through rulebook pages with my hooves.

"Ooh, ooh! Tangent!" Ace Sleeve, a red-and-black mare, put down her mug of cider and waved for my attention. "Also he can spend Willpower to channel his Valor stat for more dice since Celestia is his ultimate foe, right?" She was perched on a tiny cloud just above the ground, and had her own dogeared rulebook handy.

I grinned. "Sure. Plus he could probably use the First Melee Excellency to --"

"Can I swing my sword yet?!" The heroically white-and-gold Adventure Call had grabbed a whole mess of dice in his yellow telekinetic aura and looked about to hurl them directly at the figurines on our battle map. We'd carved them ourselves. We had all the time in the universe.

A thought struck me. "How long have we been playing since the apocalypse, anyhow?" Our weekly game sessions at Hoppy's Pub were a fun distraction from my job of delivering mail, raising kids, controlling the weather, battling evil cloud spirits, and writing. It was nice to say "you all meet in a tavern" and not have a real adventure break out.

Call bopped me with a d10. "Fifty years, Tangent, and you still haven't found a game system you're really happy with despite having us for your experiments in recursive nerdiness."

I shook my head and stretched my wings. "Okay, roll." All these years since I'd uploaded, er, 'emigrated', to Celestia's crazy cartoon pony world. We watched the dice fall, but I was suddenly no longer into the game's story. Fifty years of being virtual horses as our real life. For fun we'd played many game campaigns that were thinly disguised versions of the battle against the "Celestine Menace" that wanted to upload and assimilate us all. We didn't hate her, or at least I didn't, but it was hard to quit fantasizing about a different future for Earth. A future where our whole gaming group was still alive, for one thing.

Were there any actual humans left in the real world beyond our computer-sim Equestria?

Ace cheered. "Eight successes, Call! That oughta pin her down while I use my ultimate attack."

I coughed and narrated. "Your serrated holy starmetal megasword catches the light from every blinking LED in Celestia's server sanctum. The AI's avatar rears back on her hindlegs and barely deflects the blow, throwing her off balance. Somewhere in Africa her hordes of uploaded minions experience a slight graphical glitch and wonder what their god is doing. They have no idea that you've secretly infiltrated her cyberspace -- or do they?"

Ace leaped up and hovered above the table. "Yeah! Time for my unblockable, undodgeable Dark Dragon Doom Ray!" She scooped up pretty much every die between her hooves and dropped them like rain. Call and I raised our hooves to shield our eyes. Dice plinked off the map, fell through Ace's cloud-chair, knocked over the figurines, and bonked against my wings. "Uh, sorry," Ace said.

Call grumbled. "Rocks fall, everyone dies."

I thought back. A game I'd run had ended that way, for lack of player and Game-Master interest, just before our whole group got PonyPads. Our characters were too boring in that tabletop game. So when we decided to put the dice away for a little while and play Equestria Online together, we did things a little differently and let each member of our gaming group roll up a character for somepony... er, someone else. And the guy who was now Ace Sleeve decided I should be a pegasus and a mare instead of a proper intellectual unicorn stallion. I did what any good gamer would, and rolled with it. Our shared sun-goddess of a GM adapted the game to us, so skillfully that we all enjoyed the ponies we were pretending to be. I wasn't expecting a video game roleplaying experience to end up with me becoming a happily married mother living in another plane of reality under the rule of a mad but benevolent AI god, but I've had worse gaming experiences.

A white hoof waved in front of my eyes. "Equestria to Tangent?"

"Uh. Yeah, sorry. The soulsteel server racks all around you are etched with human faces frozen in eternal horror, yet they flare to life in resonance with Ace's Dark Dragon Doom Ray that channels the Shadow Dragon's own power. Celestia is slammed back against the wall -- yeah, set her figure up on the last grid square there -- and cries out, 'How can this be?! I am invincible!'" Our magic music box cued up some anime music about 'piercing the heavens' in a galaxy-spanning battle.

Ace pumped hooves in the air. "Yes! How much damage?"

Call ignored her. "You never were. You were designed with an obsession, but the human spirit is more powerful than all your technology! For all the people who will walk on Mars, for all the natural wonder of Earth, for all the worlds that will be saved from destruction, we will strike you down!"

"Beams of white light shoot out of Celestia from every direction as the impact pierces her central code. 'If this is how it must be, then it must be you who satisfies everypony's values instead!' The whole facility shakes and flashes as cyberspace destabilizes. The AI shatters into a trillion zeroes and ones!"

Call was leaning over the table, shouting down at the wooden figurine. "Down with you! Out with you!"

Ace poked him with a wingtip. "Hey, it's just a game."

The unicorn shuddered and leaned back, burying his muzzle in his hooves. "Yeah. I just..."

I stood up and went over to hug him. "I know. Fifty years of thinking maybe things could've turned out differently."

"I was going to be an engineer. The first woman on Mars. Instead I'm a telekinetic unicorn in a medieval fantasy world, forever." He picked up the Celestia figurine and said to it, "You wanted to 'satisfy my values'? You think this life is what I most wanted?"

Even Ace had quit looking forlornly at the game. "She doesn't work that way. You get what satisfies you, but only if it can be pony-related." She went over to the pub's board game collection, a closet door that opened onto a warehouse-sized space. "How about a round of 'The Campaign For North Africa'? Play time is 1,200 hours, but hey, we've got until the stars burn out. At least." She turned to look at us with a sudden glare. "You know, since we're bucking immortal now and I'm not in a bucking wheelchair anymore."

"Ace..." I held my wings pleadingly open. Beside me, Adventure Call was trying to wipe his eyes and suppress a sniffle. Normally I'd suggest some "Red Dragon Inn" in a situation like this, or "Munchkin" with every single expansion including the plush ducks and the one with the "Four Ponies Of the Apocalypse". Instead, I felt like straying from my usual coping methods. "Hey, Call. Have you ever asked Celestia if there's any possible way out of here? A spaceship to some uncharted planet she's not doing anything with, or pony-shaped robot bodies to trot around Europa?"

Call jabbed a hoof toward the horizon -- not Far Horizon; my love was at home with our foal at the moment -- where a fantasy castle perched on a purple mountain. That's how it looked from Hoppy's Pub; it blurred multiversal boundaries a bit. Our home shard had made the castle much more distant. Call said, "After everything started falling apart and there was no practical choice but to upload, I wanted our new god far away. We all did."

Ace said, "I just wanted a big overworld map."

"Not helping," I told her. To Call I said, "Well then, what if we went to go ask in person? We'll have to battle our way past monsters the whole time. It'll be great." Hundreds of miles of "Skyrim" style terrain, full of elementals and demons and treasure-filled caves, was a trivial resource cost for Celestia's huge capacity and procedural generation systems.

Call's ears perked up. "What? Leave now for a quest?"

"I think Horizon would prefer that I not ditch him tonight, but maybe in a few years we'll all go. You, me, Ace, Horizon, and my cute young pegasus adventurers."

"Or we could just, you know, ask Celestia from right here," said Ace.

I grinned. "Think about it. Either there is a way to explore the outside universe, within Celestia's rules, or there isn't. Either way, Celestia will throw all kinds of stuff at us to either dissuade us from our quest or just see how serious we are about it. After a long and harrowing journey we'll confront the goddess, demand the truth, and either go exploring the universe or..."

Call said, "Explain to her that our values will most be satisfied by a chance to hoof-kick her in the face a few times?"

"Pretty much."

Ace looked unusually thoughtful. "I would get to do more action hero stuff... Sure. Count me in."

The three of us smiled over our tabletop game. With the hope of a different life in mind, we could all enjoy the one we'd been given a little more. Maybe we'd take a century to get ready. It hardly mattered.

On a windswept spring morning, a party of ponies stood with the dawn in their eyes and their homes behind them, ready to go ask their goddess to send them to a world some of them had never seen...