Setting

 

Shadowbolt City. The city that never sleeps alone.

 

Once upon a time, it was an insignificant but sprawled-out suburban city. It had a modest port, a creek, and a northern shoreline that had all sorts of beautiful, sheer cliffs.

 

Then the Mane Six (Seven(Eight)) invaded.

 

It was not an armed invasion, really. In fact, it was not even an invasion in a traditional sense.

 

Some decades ago, a brilliant, kissless, handholdless virgin postgrad student named Twilight discovered cloning technology. She got really excited, cloned herself a bunch of times to help her write research papers, only to realize that the clones were barely conscious. She was distraught.

 

Then, a week later, Sunset and her got into a huge argument over the clones. It was unnatural, Sunset said. She shouldn't have done it. She was OUT OF HER MIND for doing this, those poor fleshbags. They have just enough wits about them to breathe through their mouths!

 

Out of her mind.

 

Out of her mind!

 

That's it!

 

That very night, Twilight transplanted her consciousness into one of the clones, and went on to get her doctorate (and a very lucrative patent) off of the process. Now, nobody had to see their loved ones, or sexual interests, pass away of old age. All they had to do was transplant their consciousness into a new body -- for a modest fee -- and live on forever!

 

Twilight named the process "sleeving" and the clones "sleeves." She insists to this day that it has nothing to do with Altered Carbon and went as far as have a ruling made in her favor with her newfound cloning wealth (see: Neetflix v Twilight, 420 Canterlot 6969 decision), permanently freeing her from royalties or copyright infringement suits from the company.

 

The kissless pervert she was, Twilight made sure that every sleeve ever made take the form of her sexual interests, namely the Mane Six (Seven(Eight)) and some masochistic bully-crush interests from Crystal Prep. Enough years have passed that a vast majority of population on Earthquestria are now some sleeve variants of that original catalog. In Shadowbolt City alone, the non-sleeved population is a small minority compared to the sexy, virile, young sleeve women casually working with their near-doppelgangers.

 

But don't worry, TwiCorp has enough variants of the sleeves (Big tiddy Dash? DFC Sluttershy? Midget Minuette? Check their 1000-page long brochure!) that things won't get too confusing. And of course, what could possibly go wrong with a world where every member is a freshly matured young woman in her peak reproductive desire...?

 

 

A massive tech giant that makes anything and everything electronic, which nowadays is literally everything. From location-tracking sneakers to vibro-pleasure panties, there's very little that this massive corporation doesn't touch.

 

Glim-Tec wasn't always so... Glim. Once its original founders died under mysterious circumstances, an aspiring political science student (and a part-time "equality activist") named Starlight Glimmer unexpectedly inherited the company. Now on her 8th Starlight sleeve, she continues to steer the company to ever-higher profit margins and is a driving force of inequity in Shadowbolt City.

 

Shadowbolt City is just one of many metropolitan and chic locations where they plopped down their massive ponut-shaped headquarters. They got a huge tax incentive to do it too, and it's not clear whether the benefits will ever pay off the reduced income for Shadowbolt City.

 

The resulting gentrification drove many to the slums, including Old Port and Low River District. If there's one thing Glim-Tec doesn't want to touch, it's the poor people. At the insistence of CEO Starlight, Shadowbolt City built a massive "public safety barrier" that keeps the "criminals and low-lives" away from the hardworking, handsomely paid denizens of this dystopian city.

 

Well, at least they're all suffering equally now.

 

Well, no. They weren't called that originally.

 

The thing about sleeving is that, over time, the original consciousness gets all blended up with the Mane Six (Seven(Eight)) personality. For example, someone sleeved into a Sugar Coat sleeve will eventually *become* just like the original Sugar Coat, all tsundere and shit. But they also retain some of their original skills and sometimes even get them enhanced by the EqG persona.

 

That's precisely what happened to some weeaboo girl who loved playing strategy games. She got sleeved into a Sunset sleeve, got all fiery and righteous-defender-of-the-weak, and got the strategic side of her brain cranked up to 11. She graduated from Breast Point (again, not its original name) with full honors and went on to become the Arch Admiral of Earthquestrian military.

 

She's a brilliant tactician and an unbeatable strategist without a doubt, but the weeb pervert in her remains strong. She has a harem full of Fluttershies ("they're so weak and cute! I wanna protec them") and renamed the entire military to "United Horsegirls Military" in a fit of power trip. One of her gigantic carriers, the SSS Firebrand, floats off the shores of Shadowbolt City and gets regular airstrike calls to quell Low River District uprisings or the occasional armed robbery. You, Rainbow Dash, was blown up in one while trying to rob Griffon Credit Union.

 

The original Sunset Shimmer was not a fan of Twilight's cloning experiment. After dozens of resleeving, she still holds that view. She insists that sleeving is morally and ethically wrong and went as far as start a quasi-religious group to spread this view.

 

As for Shimmer herself, she insists that she'll "gladly shed this mortal body and stop sleeving herself into new ones once the mission is done." No word on what that mission actually is.

 

Church of Shim performs many services for its flock, such as blessing those who were sleeved but have seen the error of their ways, participating in anti-sleeving demonstrations in front of the Legislation Megacomplex (LegMex), and generally being a nuisance.

 

There are rumors that Church of Shim is responsible for funding most of the anti-sleeving terrorism activities around the city, but proofs are notoriously hard to come by.

 

Nobody expected the Great and Powerful Trixie to amount to much besides performing stage trickery and sleeping with VIP pass holders for extra money.

 

To be frank, she did plenty of that before deciding that she needs to go back to school. Her autistic ramblings and grandiose third-person references to herself drove the professors crazy, but that cute little head contained a very capable, autistic brain.

 

After graduating and getting her Ph.D in physics in record time, she went on to start yet another spacefaring company, narcissistically named TriX. The investors steered clear from her, off-put by her autistic ramblings and third-person references.

 

It took a long time, but her company eventually beat out all the other space rocketry companies and held a de-facto monopoly on launching orbital payload.

 

Trixie herself now lives in an orbital station built by her company, narcissistically named OrbiTrix One. It is a technological marvel complete with artificial gravity and all sorts of gadgets developed in conjunction with Glim-Tec.

 

Rumor has it that she's found a way to forgo sleeving altogether and chose to upload her consciousness into a massive global computing cluster orbiting around Earthquestria. TwiCorp is quick to deny and downplay such rumors, insisting that only the terminally retarded would refuse to be sleeved into sexy EqG bodies.