The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of fanfiction disclaimers: Useless. If you don't want to be sued, then whoever hosts your work will cover you. Admitting the fact that you've stolen copyrighted characters and plot elements tends to take away from your case. Trying to use a fanfiction disclaimer to get out of being sued or having one's timelessly classic Mary Sue self-insert work utterly destroyed by a corporation is roughly equivalent to walking up behind an elderly woman, warning her you're going to steal her handbag, then proceeding to knock her over and steal her handbag, just before running away yelling "I told you so!"

A/N: Yes, I have read "So Long, and Thanks For All the Ponies" by Sir Ginger. I have stolen, er, borrowed one or two elements from him because I couldn't think of anything else, so I credit him 100% for those. Please don't be angry at me for taking, that is to say, borrowing them, Sir Ginger, or your fans for that matter. Consider my theft...borrowing of them a tribute. Please, enjoy the fic, don't forget your towel, and as always – Don't Panic.

The cottage stood in a hilly area just on the edge of the Everfree Forest, not far from the rural village of Ponyville. It stood alone and was surrounded by a broad spread of Equestrian wildlife. Most of the time, it was very peaceful and quiet, just as the tenant of the cottage liked it. And most of the time, the only sound that could be heard was the innocent chitter of a squirrel, or the chirp of a bird.

The cottage sat upon a small raised patch of ground, with a fully organic roof. There were birdhouses set inside it and hung from it. Outside, there were many untrimmed bushes, grass, reeds, flowers and trees, all because the tenant of the cottage didn't like to disturb her animal friends. Little rabbits would usually chew at the unmown grass and the birds would nestle in the birdhouses hung from the house or the sapling in the front garden. There was a bridge under which there lived a family of otters, among others.

Overall, it more or less succeeded in pleasing the eye. It was the kind of house someone would look at while poring through a catalogue at the estate agents', nodding and thinking, yes, I'd like to live there, before accepting the depressing fact they'd never be able to afford such a thing and buying instead a squattish, squarish, sixty-year-old house, made of brick, with four windows in the front of a size and proportion that more or less exactly fail to please the eye.

Around the back, there was yet more plant life and garden. There was also a chicken coop, or hen house, in which the tenant of the cottage got fresh eggs from her dearly-beloved, if mischievous, chickens. Wire fencing stopped the chickens escaping and going in to the Everfree Forest, where all kinds of poisonous creatures lived. Usually the garden would be filled with the sounds of animals all making their various noises in cacophonous harmony. The tenant of the cottage was an animal-lover, needless to say.

And, at present, the tenant of the cottage was cowering underneath the hen-house, trying desperately to protect the structure from being demolished. She was a light, pastel-yellow pegasus, and would at first glance seem to be a mutation of the common, recognisable breed of equine-descendant recognisable to a human being. She had a light pink mane, and stood about 120 centimetres tall on all fours. Her personality, that of extreme timidity and kindness, reflected her name: Fluttershy.

"Fluttershy, come on. You're going to have to accept it,"came a voice from somewhere outside the fence. Fluttershy didn't dare jerk her head up. She'd already bashed it several times today and the area of her cranium she kept hitting was beginning to pound and ache. "This road has got to be built, and is going to be built. There's nothing we can do."

Fluttershy fearfully turned around, her hooves making soft clopping noises against the hardened mud. She could see an arrangement of other hooves outside the fence. Orange, white, and purple, with purple standing at the front. There was an absence of blue hooves, and Fluttershy knew exactly why.

"Fluttershy, don't make me come down there," a boyish voice threatened.
"Rainbow!" scolded another, more regal-sounding voice, belonging to the white hooves. "Fluttershy, dear. We're just going to take down your hen-house here and move it to the front-garden so we can build a little extension to the main road going into Ponyville. Really, it won't even take a day. Right, Applejack?"

"Yup," assured a voice with an accent comparable to a Southern US accent, if the Southern US hadn't been blasted into atoms. "Ah got Apple Bloom and Big Macintosh all ready, they're gonna come over and fix 'er up, from top-to-bottom. We'll git 'er done!"
"You see? Nothing to worry about."

"Why are you so hung up over this?" came the boyish voice once again. It was flying overhead, as it was possessed by another pegasus. "We're just moving it a little bit."
Fluttershy poked her head out from under the hen-house. "But, Rainbow Dash, you don't understand...Elizabeth...she might get...homesick..."
"Homesick?!" the purple-hooved pony said. "Now you're just being illogical."
"But...if she got homesick...I'd never forgive myself..."

"Fluttershy, you've known for months this day was coming."
"Nobody told me until the mailmare brought round the mail last week – I didn't even know."
"They had the plans up on display in the town hall!"
"You know I don't like the town hall...there's too many...eep...ponies..."

The purple-hooved pony, known as Twilight Sparkle, rubbed the edge of her nose with her front hoof. She had a large object, made of some kind of chalky bone, protruding from her forehead. She was a unicorn, and had abilities beyond the grasp of most people, not that she used them to her advantage (preferring to walk rather than just teleport to places).
"Fluttershy, you know you're going to have to come out of there eventually. I won't pull you out. I'm not that kind of pony."
"But I am!" the pony with the boyish voice, known as Rainbow Dash, said, proudly. After being shot a glance hard enough to rip a diamond to shreds from Applejack, she quietened down, folding her front legs indignantly.

"Where's Pinkie Pie, anyway?" asked Twilight Sparkle, the fact only four of her friends were present suddenly clicking. If there was one thing Rainbow Dash didn't like to be stopped from doing, it was a chance to show off her "radicalness", as she said, and Twilight Sparkle's questions weren't helping. She turned back around for a moment.
"No idea," she snapped.

In fact, No idea was exactly how many ideas the five equine-descendant friends had that their other friend, Pinkie Pie, was in fact not descended from a four-legged ungulate creature at all, but was in fact not of this world in the slightest, and was not raised on a "rock farm", as she usually claimed in her tall tales of how she got her "cutie mark", a biological imprint on the flank that showed off natural talents.

This said, most of her friends had, jokingly, suspected this, often quietly thinking to themselves, "She must be from another planet".
Unbeknownst to them, they weren't right, but they weren't wrong, either. Pinkie Pie was quite possibly one of the oddest things in the Universe, and, by extension, the Whole Sort of General Mish-Mash of multi-verses and dimensions.

When Equestria came under threat from monstrous villains and villainous monsters, Pinkie Pie was the "Element of Laughter", part of the group known as the "Elements of Harmony", a group of closely-interlinked friends who, essentially, stood in for Princess Celestia due to the fact she had godded herself into a hole, by sending her sister to the moon, thereby breaking the powerful platonic link she had with her sister. Or something like that.

In the daytime, however, Pinkie Pie was merely the local eccentric, known for her seemingly boundless supplies of energy (not as illogical as one may think, for reasons that will be explained later), and her obsession with everything to do with having fun and laughing. At any one time, Pinkie Pie could be throwing a party, eating cakes, dancing, singing (she showed an amazing ability to write songs off the top of her head), hopping around, building flying contraptions that would make Leonardo Da Vinci's eyes water, or even doing completely outlandish things, like making films on no budget. In fact, one of Pinkie Pie's films, a horror film in which she and her friend Rainbow Dash starred, was so graphic, that hundreds were sent to hospital for various ailments including feeling faint, vomiting, and temporary insanity. The film was so horrifying because nobody had ever seen anything like it before and their brains were physically unready for the imagery – and this led to the Equestrian Board of Film Classification being set up, and all the copies being burned, to Pinkie Pie's chagrin.

Nobody really knew where Pinkie Pie had come from. She had seemingly rolled in to town one day and, after causing havoc after starting a party right the hell out of nowhere, had asked for a job at the local bakery, Sugarcube Corner, where she indulged in her passion, baking cakes. When asked, she often explained she had been raised on a "rock farm". It was only after she had seen her future friend Rainbow Dash shatter the light and sound barriers simultaneously in a phenomenon known as the "Sonic Rainboom" that she had discovered her special talent for creative insanity, she explained.

This, however, was all a lie.
Pinkie Pie had a peculiar habit – she would call parties for her five friends, but only ones that took place on star-lit nights, and she would then climb on to the roof and sit there all night, for no reason. Her friends often just ascribed this strange behaviour to Pinkie Pie's quirky personality. Little did they know that this was not the case at all. Once, when her friend Rarity asked her what she was doing on the roof, Pinkie Pie responded, "Looking for aliens," to which Rarity had simply blinked for a couple of seconds, laughed nervously, and then gone back inside.

But really, Pinkie Pie was looking up at the sky all the time because she knew how to flag alien spacecraft down and get lifts from them. She knew how to see the Marvels of the Universe for less than 1 ningi a day, (thankfully, as she didn't own any wallets that were 6,800 miles across). But she wanted her friends to be with her, too, when she could get a lift.

In fact, Pinkie Pie was a roving researcher for that wholly remarkable book, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Fluttershy still wouldn't crawl out from under the hen-house, even after all kinds of encouragement from her friends. It was all rather silly, really. Fluttershy really did like things to stay as they were. Right now, things refused to stay as they were, no matter how hard she tried, but by Celestia she was going to milk it until there were no more options, i.e. not being able to sit under the hen-house any more. Still, she'd prepared for such an eventuality, and could eat the chicken-feed she had stored if she needed to.

"Fluttershy, are you...eating chicken feed?" asked Twilight Sparkle.
"Um...yes...what else does one do when trying to prevent having a chicken-coop knocked down...?"
Twilight Sparkle sat back on to her rump, and rubbed her temples with her hooves.
"Fluttershy, you're more rational than this, usually," Twilight remarked.

Fluttershy remained silent, as if trying to think up some kind of response. At that same moment, a pink pony with a darker-pink mane that would make a hairdresser wake up at 3AM screaming hurdled the wire fence with a casual disregard for the fact the others were staring at her, and then bent down underneath the hen-house. She had a saddle-bag on her back, which looked rather lumpy.

"Um, Pinkie, what are you doing?" Rainbow Dash asked, curiously. Pinkie Pie turned.
"Oh, you! I didn't see you there. I was just coming to get Fluttershy and then you guys! Guess I don't have to now!"
"For what? Not a party, surely, we're in the middle of something," the white-hooved pony, Rarity, also a unicorn, said. "We simply cannot be having a party at this hour."
"A party? No, silly. It's really exciting! But serious. But really exciting!"
"Can it wait?"
"No, not really."

Pinkie punctuated her succinct answer with a grin. It was a rather unnerving grin.
"Well, are ya gonna tell us, or what?" Applejack asked.
"What? Oh, right, the thing! Of course, yeah. Um, but can we get Fluttershy out from under this hen-house first?"
Fluttershy squeaked and withdrew further under.

"Can't it wait?" the yellow-coloured pegasus groaned.
"No, not really," Pinkie Pie repeated.
"But my chickens – "
"Oh, you silly filly, you're not gonna be needing those much longer," Pinkie Pie said, tactlessly, although being as tact was a totally alien thing to her, this was to be expected. "Come on, get out from under there. We need to see Celestia, as quickly as possible." She started to trot away, preparing to hurdle the wire fence.

"The Princess?!" Twilight Sparkle exclaimed, "What in Equestria do you need to see her for?"
Pinkie Pie hurdled the fence, as Fluttershy tried to decide whether or not to crawl out from under the hen-house.

Pinkie Pie stopped. She sat down on her rump, something she wasn't seen doing often.
"All right. What would you say if I told you I wasn't really raised on a rock farm?" The others sort of stared, as if they wanted to say something, but couldn't. Rainbow Dash was the first to voice what was on everyone's minds. She started by guffawing loudly.
"Oh, Pinkie Pie, I don't think anyone sane could believe that story even if they tried!"

"Right, right. But you all sorta agree with my story, right?"
"Where's this goin'?" Applejack asked, with a bit of concern in her voice.
"What would you say if I told you I wasn't really raised on a rock farm but I am in fact made of this stuff called submarine particular wave stuff and strictly speaking I shouldn't even exist?"

"What does that even mean?" Rarity asked, trying to keep the curl in her elegantly-styled purple mane. "Is that something you're likely to say?"
Pinkie Pie sighed.
"Look, just take this," she said, handing Rarity an oblong object. "I'll explain on the way. Oh, we're gonna need Spike," she added, to Twilight.

Four of the six started to trot away, except Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash.
"Come on, you guys!" Pinkie Pie said. "No time!"
"But – but – " Fluttershy tried to argue.
"No buts! Come on!"
Fluttershy followed quickly behind, as she looked back.
"Rainbow, don't you dare do what I know you're about to do," Twilight said, as the eagerness in Rainbow Dash's eyes faded and she folded her front legs over each other.

"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Rarity said, aloud. As she turned it over in her hooves, she noticed it said on the back, in large, friendly letters, the words, "Don't Panic".
"How do I use this thing?" she asked Pinkie Pie.
"Oh, that? It's voice-controlled. Just say, 'Sub particular wave thingy'. It'll find it."

This is what The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has to say on the subject of sub-particulate wave-matter.

Sub-particulate wave-matter is quite possibly one of the oddest things in the universe, just behind the Babel fish. It goes above hyperspace, reality, probability and indeed, logic itself. Of course, for these reasons, it shouldn't, strictly speaking, exist. Essentially, sub-particulate wave-matter exists in all possible realities at any given time. Sub-particulate wave-matter can adapt to any laws of physics and reject them as it pleases, and exists across every single part of the Whole Sort of General Mish-Mash. This also means that any object made of sub-particulate wave-matter can absorb energy from the surrounding air at will, leading anything that is made of the substance to have a nearly boundless supply of energy.

Most leading physicists theorise that there is in fact only one photon of sub-particulate wave-matter in existence, it's just that it exists over so many time streams that it can come together to form material objects, the photons all being the same photon, all from different periods in its lifespan. Most leading philosophers, however, theorise that it is the leftovers of God after He vanished in a puff of logic. Most leading physicists, of course, denounce this airy-fairy notion as a load of dingo's kidneys, though this didn't stop Oolon Colluphid writing a book about it on the back of a napkin after the collapse of the Altairian dollar, entitled, "Bugger It, I'm Hungry, Read My Book, Will You."

One can easily tell that any living being is constituted of sub-particulate wave-matter by the fact that it shows abilities somewhat resembling the physics within Earth animation programmes, including, but not limited to, the ability to defy gravity until it is noticed, survival of extremely life-threatening injuries, completely mathematically-random brainwave patterns, and the ability to break the so-called "fourth wall", among others. There is, of course, a fourth wall between each reality and the next, but nobody ever notices it because that's just silly.

"So, you're...well, that?" Rarity said, putting the object back into its cover, in a tone that sounded very bizarrely unsurprised, as if it didn't matter at all to her that her good friend was from outside of reality entirely. She seemed to be taking it rather well, and so did the others. Then again, this was a world where one of her best friends could breach the sound and light barriers simultaneously, and her other friend could quite easily perform magic. The fact Pinkie Pie was not all that she seemed felt more like a mild inconvenience than an actual life-changing event.

"Oh yeah, totally," Pinkie Pie replied, stopping for a moment to point into space. "I mean, don't you see them?"
"See who?"
"The readers, of course!" Pinkie Pie smiled, waving into the space, mouthing, "Hi, readers!"

Twilight eyed Pinkie. "Pinkie, are you pranking us?"
"What? No!" Pinkie said, indignance in her eyes. "If I was going to prank you, I'd do this!" she opened up a can of fake peanuts she produced from nowhere, sending a snake flying into the air.
"Right..." said Twilight. "Okay, but if this does turn out to be a prank, then – "
Pinkie Pie's tail twitched.
"Snake incoming," she said, as it came back down and hit Twilight on the head.

The five stopped outside the Ponyville Library.
"Wait here," Twilight said, going inside to fetch her assistant, a young reptilian creature known as Spike, a fire-breathing dragon, with the ability to send letters directly to the Princess by both setting them on fire and by regurgitating them. In this fashion, he was essentially a living postbox. He was also a postbox with a bad habit of sleeping. Being as his skin was about an inch thick, it took more than a hard prod to wake him up.

Twilight found him sleeping peacefully in his bed. She gave him a gentle nudge. He was purple, with green spikes lining his back, owing to his name, green ears, and a soft green underbelly. Unfortunately, he was sleeping on his front, so Twilight couldn't wake him up by giving him a sharp prod in said underbelly.
"Right," she mumbled. She couldn't believe she was doing this. As much as Pinkie Pie was her friend, she was also not very reliable. The rock-farm story was an example of this, though the whole sub-particulate wave-matter thing seemed even more outlandish.

"Spike, wake up," she said. "Spike. Spike. Spike, wake up!"
Still no answer, apart from snoring, and the occasional nonsensical grumble along the lines of, "Jusfimominuteplease..."
Twilight shook her head. "Right," she said, again, using the telekinesis her horn granted her to pick up a bucket and fill it in the bathroom. She looked away, and then dumped it on him.

"Gah!" Spike shouted. "What was that for?"
"We need you to send a letter to Princess Celestia."
"Already...? It's, like, ten o' clock."
"Yeah, well, blame Pinkie."

Spike yawned. "Fine, let's get this over with."
He stalked down the stairs and out the front door, grabbing a quill on his way.
"Yes, Pinkie, what is it?"
"Spike!" she said, gleefully. "Can you take a letter?"

"Fire...away..." Spike said, yawning a small bit of green fire.
"Dear Princess Celestia, I need to see you because it's really important and I really need to talk to you so can you just please send over two large carriages that fit three ponies each to take us to you in Canterlot as fast as possible because it's really important and I need to talk to you right away!" Pinkie Pie paused. Spike was astonished by the total lack of commas in the entire letter. "Love, Pinkie Pie," the pink pony added, as a polite afterthought.

"Do you think you can trust Celestia to believe this wacky story?" Rainbow Dash asked.
"Me, I'd trust her to the end of the world," said Pinkie Pie.
"Oh, yes," said Twilight, exiting the library. "And how far's that?"
"About two hours away," Pinkie said.

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