Well, expanding on that didn’t take long. Turns out I couldn’t actually resist the call of the self-fanfic.

So if you might be interested in the occasionally-updated Friendship is Sufficiently Advanced:

A first-in scout from the Associated Worlds investigates the anomalous star system IGS 254672, expecting to find the home of a machine god. She finds herself making first contact with sophont ponies instead. A couple of them are weakly godlike ponies, but still…

…go read it on FIMFiction (now with footnotes and short second chapter).

(I’ll not be posting it here, in order to keep a proper separation between my self-fanfic and my “pure” original fiction. Thus, you may want to track it there. Likewise, its updates are unlikely to be posted to the Patreon unless there’s an overwhelming outcry from readers that they want them included.)