@Background Pony #63E0
Oh hey, I can help yeah, I made this character and such.

So they were part of a what was called a ‘CYOA’ on /mlp/ back in the day. Choose your own adventure things where usually people would reply with what they wanted to do and the QM (Quest Master) would synthesis and then make a reply. They were like Quests from /tg/ more or less.

There used to be a big online archive for them but unfortunately the website died and has never been brought back up, there’s some offline archive but you have to it and it’s rather cumbersome.

However there are links to the CYOAs still on desuarchive if you want to read them, they are all rather old though and unfortunately none of them ever got a conclusion. After the death of the archive it kind of became a bigger ask to bring a Quest back since context would be lost and now the entire CYOA culture on the board is basically dead so I moved on.

Unique Quest: First and oldest one that started in 2015. Never finished but the quests take place after with the ending I thought the players would be heading:
https://desuarchive.org/mlp/search/subject/Unique%20Quest/

Crystal Dreams: Next one focusing on Lovesick where this scene took place:
https://desuarchive.org/mlp/search/subject/Crystal%20Dreams/

A Carcassian Paracop: Last One I ran focusing on a new character who I don’t think their art has been ed to Derpi ever:
https://desuarchive.org/mlp/search/subject/Carcassian%20Paracop/

As for ‘White Waking’ it was an in-progress Fanfic I had that unfortunately I never released other than showing a few snippets to friends and getting some of the scenes commissioned. It would’ve been a prequel focusing on Lovesick before Unique Quest.

As for the general premise: you’re right it basically was a sort of ‘Infection AU’ I guess although a lot more Lovecraftian and such. The city itself was called ‘The Carcasse’ which is a pretty on the nose reference. Bioshock also was a reference especially in the first Quest which was much more survival horror. The other were more ‘investigation’ focused but with some horror elements still. Although you could control your mutation and use them like more purposeful abilities but it was an active struggle to maintain. The general lore was that there was a substance called ‘Ambrosia’ that if you consumed would make you a mutant but it’d rot inside you slowly, becoming Ichor, making your mutations go out of control. If it progressed past a certain point you’d turn into a constantly roiling, mutating, form called a Hoarder. To maintain your sanity and control, you need to drain the Ichor out of your body and then replace it with freshly purified Ambrosia. Ambrosia can only be refined by the blood sacrifice of unmutated sentient creatures though so this created a conundrum that The Carcasse tried to solve in various ways.

The lore developed and refined as time went on so some thing probably aren’t consistent between Quests but that’s the gist of it.

As for what happened to the setting and story now: I’m still working on it in the background and retrofitting and refining a lot of the old lore and timeline to be better. I will say I feel like the setting has gone so far past Pony at this point that I’ve been tempted to just divorce it entirely: The Carcasse is basically in it’s own pocket dimension separate from all universes and they pull people in from innumerable multi-verses to be either citizens or sacrifices. There basically is in-universe multi-versal fatigue where Carcassians basically don’t see people born outside of The Vulgar Valley (Carcasse) as even conscious beings because there’s 200+ versions of them: they’re disposable. But if you’re born in The Carcasse there is only one of you because there is only One Carcasse. Prejudice by Extreme Solipsism.

>“HUARRGG”
what the hell they doing puking up there