Story Cancelled
I will be re-posting this story as
MLP 40k: Trial by Fire

Many apologies to anypony who was following this story, but the work in its current state cannot be salvaged. Instead of editing what exists, I have decided to start over and rewrite it.

I will be leaving this up just in case anypony wants to see how poor my old work was and how / where some of my ideas changed over the course of time.

Thank you to everypony who read the original and is still willing to look at the revamped version