Stone of Heart A couple of ponies ask Twilight for help when the Choosing Stone begins pairing them up with ponies they’ve never met or who they have bad relationships with. They came to Twilight mostly because they thought she’d be able to get Cadance, who they think they actually need, to look into it. She rolls her eyes, but Twilight, Cadance and Shining Armor investigate (after leaving Flurry Heart with Starlight and Sunburst). When they get to where the Choosing Stone is, it seems to have gone insane, matching ponies with trees, distant stars and abstract ideas. Cadance senses that the love-magic that powers the Stone is all out of whack and while she’s able to restore it, something doesn’t feel quite right. But the Stone starts to make Twilight a match and she hurries them all back to the train before it can. Pan over to a nearby rock that turns out to have been queen Chrysalis. She does some kind of magical interaction with the Stone, grins all evil-like and declares the whole thing ‘very educational’.
Holiday Anthology I: Nightmare Night As pony influence spreads throughout the land, so too do their traditions. These are the scary stories told in cultures recently exposed to the most horrifying of holidays.
-Gilda tells the griffons about when, for one night a year, any griffon who stepped or flapped outside of Griffonstone was hunted down and captured by Aramaspi, never to be seen again. And about the only one who ever got away.
-Ember tells a tale about a beast that even dragons fear: the Chimera Queen.
-A changeling elder tells what could have happened if Chrysalis had succeeded in taking Canterlot and how it all could have gone horribly for every living thing on the planet. Including her, after the queen goes mad from power, isolation and eventually hunger.
-Rutherford starts to tell a story, but is stopped by the credits. Because levity!
Song for Moolah Sapphire Shores is the biggest pop act in Equestria this week, her career going strong on the massive success of a love song that speaks to the souls and hearts and whatever of the listeners. Even Gilda, who overhears it while visiting Rainbow, gets the emotional sniffles from it. After a show in Ponyville, Sapphire confides in Fluttershy and Spike, who won backstage passes in a contest, that she wrote the song purely because love songs tend to do well. She goes on to reveal that everything in the song was just a guess, since she’s never actually been in love. Fluttershy and Spike think that sounds awfully close to lying, but Sapphire says musicians write about experiences they’ve never had all the time and insists it’s fine. Word gets out, and ponies don’t agree with its fineness. The only one who doesn’t mind is Twilight, who compares it to a novel. “It’s not important that your entertainment be totally truthful,” she says. “What matters is that it reaches you.” Sapphire performs the song live and the ponies who can let go of it not being based on true events find themselves reacting just as strongly as when they assumed it was. The ones who can’t, make excuses to not enjoy the song and stay feeling ‘betrayed’.
The Greatest Debate! Earth ponies start looking down on unicorns for using their magic to hold books, insisting that the only way to really experience them is to hold them in their hooves. By doing otherwise, unicorns are proving themselves to be pathetic, uneducated plebeians. It’s like when people argue regular books vs. audiobooks. You know, pretentious and pointless.