Merge - Yet Another Ponies on Earth Story

You can skip this if you want. There's no story here, only promises of things to come.

And explanations.

Magic-using humans

In “I’m Making a Note Here”, Doctor Andrew Parker’s newborn son Ray is stated to have alicorn finger bones. As the doctor notes, there are basically three states for alicorn; “unconnected, idle, or activated.” The question he wouldn’t be able to answer is if Ray’s finger bones are connected. That is, is there a way for his brain to reach the alicorn in much the same way his brain can reach the muscle tissue that holds it?

If they’re not connected, Ray can’t use magic. If they were, he still wouldn’t. This is because to cast magic doesn’t only need the brain to be connected to the alicorn, but to also send the correct signals. At best, Ray would be able to “put a charge on it”, so to speak, and make his hands glow in the magic aura we all know and love, in some personal color.

If the alicorn in Ray’s fingers were connected, and his brain was wired to send the correct signals, and he knew how to consciously control it, Ray would be able to cast magic as a human.

Mutant humans

Mutant humans would be any Homo sapiens with non-cultural pony traits. For example, Ray Parker again, whose alicorn is the direct result of Doctor Andrew Parker having his reproductive DNA manipulated by extended exposure to powered horns. There’ll be plenty more examples of mutations in humans in later chapters, but since Merge only covers about 200 years, there’s not enough time for proper pony-human hybrids to appear – think anthropomorphic half-pony half-human creatures. Instead, the worst that’s likely to happen in so little time is something like funky hair and eye colors, and possibly the beginning of a fur coating.

Changelings

In this story, changelings count as a subset of ponies just like earth ponies, pegasi, unicorns, and alicorns are. Any magic-using pony can shape-shift in a few seconds if they know the requisite spell and have the skill to pull it off, but changelings do it naturally and within a second or two.

Changelings start out neuter. When they grow up and find out what they self-identify as, their default forms adjust accordingly. Though they get no other bonuses from it, changelings are more comfortable disguising as ponies matching their own gender.

Default forms can be altered to a degree, allowing some changelings to have proper manes and such if they choose to. Their leg holes, which they cannot change, are supposedly unique to each individual and mostly serve to tell one from the other. This is a necessity born from the simple fact that they do not, in fact, have a hive mind, and all of them have the same pure green aura.

Changelings from different hives have subtly different default forms, such as their colors. Most if not all the changelings in Merge, however, are from the same hive and are therefore all the same color.

Spread

As implied in “Too Damn Late” and “Something completely different”, there are ponies in several countries besides the USA. But not all countries appreciate the Equestrians as much…