in my cringe era

GRACE

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Stellar Grace is a unicorn from San Filly who went through Celestia's School of Magic and started on a lucrative career in the sciences, but ended up quitting over his first major paper's controversial subject, and the scientific world's response to it. He ended up getting his cutie mark for teaching, and actually really liked his job, so he never really regretted leaving microbiology behind.

After it was discovered that the Princesses had all disappeared without a trace, and that the sun/moon were frozen in place indefinitely, Grace was found by the emergency science team and recruited to help find a solution. The solution was to send a team of three ponies with enough food to get them past Klugetown, and hope they could find one of the Pillar's ancient artifacts which used to be used for the day/night before Alicorns were in Equestria. Grand estimate that none of those ponies will come back unscathed, or even survive after returning to Canterlot with the solution, but it's the only option if ponies all over Equestria don't want to freeze or cook.

Just like in canon, some sort of accident involving the unicorn (and backup unicorn) for the mission ended up killing them both, and Grace was the only unicorn with enough knowledge of the mission who was expendable enough to send instead. Poor Grace.

ROCKY

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Rocky is literally the exact same except that he and the Eridians are from a really hot, humid place past the Dragonlands. Nothing has changed but the ammonia breathing, he's still like 400 degrees and everything else.

SIMON

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Crimson Smog is a Pegasus from outside of Equestria, originating from an underground collective called Eden that believed Equestria had been doomed centuries ago, and that the Princesses were false idols of the 'real' ones. Eden is a cult, all of the ponies are raised in a collective and trained together to scavenge and raid other cave/underground dwelling species. Most Eden-ites don't end up with cutie marks, as they never even try to find a special talent (if you believed the world had ended and you were the only ponies left, would you really care about that either?) and those that do have it 'overwritten' by a brand from the Father. Crimson was part of a scavenging run that was ambushed by the COI (Diamond Dogs), and he was the only pony to survive, taken hostage by the group that killed his Brothers and brought back to their settlement.

The SM-13 is an amulet, and one that Crimson was saddled with indefinitely because it'd killed multiple COI researchers through testing. It has an ancient siren trapped in the gem, and she's pissed. It's just Ellie, and she's also exactly the same so she's just trying to lure Crimson to his death (so it frees her from her cage). Everything from the blood ocean, to the drinking rubbing alcohol, to the broken speaker, all of it is a hallucination created by the amulet. The 'spell' is only broken once the amulet is removed and the gem is destroyed, but Crimson ends up lost in the wastes before that happens, and he just accepts his death because Eden, nor the COI, would want to find him.