Twilight gets a pair of tickets and must make an assessment as to who deserves them.

Applejack's brother becomes injured right in time for him to miss the entire harvest season, so it's up to Applejack to make a complete fool of herself all around town and fundamentally do worse and worse work. Unless someone just intervenes and makes the problem a moot issue.

Gilda visits Dash for a few weeks of fun and catching up. The two got up to a lot of trouble back in the day, but apparently there's been a bit of growing up and growing apart since then. It's funny how nostalgia can color your perception of someone.

It can be a grand day when a performer comes to town! Unless said performer actually has no performance and plans to talk down to the town's residence. The glorious Trixie show takes no hostages, except perhaps for Trixie who feels awkwardly trapped on stage until things derail.

Twilight and her friends are given a mission to slay a dragon. They could walk all the way up a mountain, or they could use magic to find a lazier way and save a ton of time.

There's a storm set to roll in over Ponyville, and Twilight finds two of her friends cooped up in her house, presumably for the night. Between the three of them they don't have a single common interest or mutual hobby. They blasted a god with rainbows once and that's about it.

Nothing in Ponyville is more horrible then when a strange creature comes into town. And since they live next to a forest full of maticores and on top of the physical gateway to Hell itself, it's probably pretty reasonable to be afraid of anything you aren't used to.

The Yellow One makes an appearance bearing a horrible infestation of adorable parasites, but Twilight, being the enterprising horse that she is, comes up with a swift solution to the problem.

Spring time is rolling around, and that means the ponies need to endure back-breaking manual labor in order to make the season change! Twilight would prefer to use magic, but it's against the rules.

Growing up as a pony means having your destiny magically determined for you by a life-long image on your butt. Whatever that image comes to be, whether it's a thumb tack or an inexplicable desert island, will be the one thing you're truly good at above all else. For this reason it's both a rite of adulthood and a kind of hazing ritual to gain and celebrate the cutie mark. Most children are afflicted at a very young age, but continue going to school anyway in spite of being imbued with all knowledge related to their craft by sorcery.

Rainbow Dash stakes her personal worth on being able to win petty competitions, so there's not a lot of time before age sets in and she has to grapple with that. Applejack decides to muscle in for the sake of pride, and the result is an insecure Dash willing to go to any length to be the top of whatever the heck is going on.

Rarity runs a "boutique" in a tiny little town where virtually nothing goes on. Every once and a while there's a prom or homecoming dance, but those require some less than stellar dresses. So when the possibility of going to the Gala comes up, Rarity works for things aside from direct financial compensation. The real money comes from the frilly numbers she sells out of the back room, anyway.

Earth ponies don't get a lot of magic. They're supposed to be in touch with the earth, but unless they're farming or otherwise tending a garden, it doesn't seem like much of an advantage. Pinkie, however, has the psychiatrist powers.

Dash goes to Cloudsdale to participate in a young flyer's competition! Fluttershy is in tow, but between the two of them there's barely enough real confidence to go inside a super market.

Pinkie likes to throw parties. Every day. Every single day, and every single night, for every possible occasion. Somehow, other ponies seem to grow tired of this and start rejecting Pinkie's parties. This can only end in tears.

You can dress the ponies up, but you can't take them anywhere. The Gala ended in chaos and safety fines, and rightly so, but the heroes of their own stories don't have to feel happy about it.

Twilight decides it's about time to discuss how the ponies conducted themselves when she first them met them. Basically, they were awful, terrible animals who provoked the goddess of the night and barely had the wherewithal to grasp the severity of the situation.

Our ponies, knowing they have to do the right thing, are faced by Luna's many beguiling traps! For example, the one where she acts like she isn't Luna, and then offers to let you join another, much better sports team than the one you already like.

Twilight and friends are only called for when faced with the utmost friendship emergencies, but not if they involve something boring like real politics or diplomacy! Thus, when there actually is a job to do, it's generally some kind of strange, once in a lifetime issue that happens startlingly often for some reason, and this day the ponies are faced with a once in a lifetime foe.

Twilight realizes she'd like to defeat Beezen after all, and that means rounding up her friends and reminding them, with magic, why they should be helping!

Twilight has to invent some kind of conflict so that she can write a story to Princess Celestia and make it seem like she's doing something with her life. The only problem is that they can only think of really dumb, implausible ideas that Celestia would never believe could happen.