Twilight walked through her friends' dreams, looking for any signs of dream-poison and gently unraveling any nightmares she came across. It had been a couple of months since she'd brought Applebloom back from her imprisonment, and every night she patrolled her friends' dreams. Normally she'd find this more taxing, but they'd all agreed to it, and something about being invited into her friends' dreams made it easier for her to enter. Before, entering her friends' dreams had taken a moderate spell and some help from the whispers of the shadows, and she never slept well afterwards. Now she found that she felt stronger for having made the agreement, and she slept peacefully after, which made her a little worried.
Twilight had been compiling vast volumes of notes on her new abilities, but it seemed that every time she thought she'd found the end of her strange new powers, something new would pop up. For instance, she was now incapable of entering a home without an invitation, the only exceptions being either public places like hotels or the homes of the other Elements, which were always open to her for some reason. If she tried to break that geas, her magic would lash back at her, either bouncing her painfully away or making her bleed from the face again.
Twilight stepped stealthily through one of Applejack's more interesting dreams, dodging the bouncing pink apples with which she was dancing merrily and continued searching. She found the doorway to Rarity's dreams and nudged it open, only to find herself sucked into the middle of a nightmare.
Rarity was standing in the middle of a circle of impossibly huge piles of cloth and thread in the middle of a disturbingly proportioned version of Carousel Boutique. She was sewing endlessly, with large armed needles holding her at, well, needlepoint. They had strange accents and were constantly bullying her and degrading her designs.
“'Ere, you call this fashion? I call it fit fer wipin' me bum!” Said one needle in heavily accented Equestrian, nudging the frantic white unicorn with the other needle held in his metal claws like a sword. “You've clearly no sense of design, what d'you think, Clem?”
“Inferior stitching, shoddy fabric, hardly fit for the King of the Needles!” Clem, the other needle, said firmly, gesturing with his needle-sword dangerously. “Maybe we ought to teach her a lesson, eh Jimbo?”
“Aye, maybe we should!” The giant needles advanced on Rarity, who screamed helplessly. Twilight took that opportunity to lift up both of the needles with her magic and step into the weird lighting.
“I think not, gents,” Twilight said, then blinked, “What the, how the bloody hell do I have your accents? No, you know what? It doesn't bleedin' matter 'cos you're both up the creek now.” With that, Twilight summarily crushed the giant needles into a large silver ball and tossed it towards the window. She had expected a crashing noise and an impressive shattering of glass, not a soft curse and the sound of running hooves. Before Rarity could approach and thank her, Twilight dashed to the window, which was unaccountably open, and looked out.
In the distance, a blue pony jumped into a shrubbery, the only shrubbery in sight because, in accordance with dream-logic, it was the only shrubbery Rarity could see from that window in her shop. Twilight stared at the shrubbery, which wiggled a little, then looked around the shop. Everything seemed to be relatively normal for Rarity's dreamscape now, with everything returning to something approaching the real look of her shop. There was one thing though that seemed out of place in the dream-shop though: a hat and cape on one of the dummies that she'd last seen on a certain boastful blue unicorn.
Twilight turned back to the window with narrowed eyes, and incinerated the distant shrubbery. Nothing came out, but Twilight felt she should probably pay Rarity a visit in the flesh. The dream however couldn't take such drastic changes in the dreamscape and Twilight felt herself getting pushed out as Rarity started to wake up. She left for Pinkie Pie's dreams, but made a mental note to visit Rarity when she got the chance, in case somepony had slipped her some dream-poison somehow.
In Canterlot, a young unicorn couple staggered out of a bar together, laughing merrily. Diamond and Karat Ring, newly married, had been celebrating their honeymoon in the capitol for the past week, visiting all the best restaurants and seeing the sights. They even ran into Princess Luna once, who personally congratulated them on their union in her archaic manner.
Diamond, the stallion, was a beautiful, kind soul whose jewelry business had made him one of the richest unicorns in Manehattan. His rather rough-and-tumble white mane matched his coat perfectly, and his sharp blue eyes never missed a flaw in a gem or imperfection in a cut. His cutie mark of a diamond in the rough fit him perfectly, even if most ponies thought it was just a rock.
By contrast, Karat, the mare, was a perfectly groomed, silver-coated pony with a mane like spun gold and a cutie mark of a gold bar. Her parents ran gold mines across Equestria, and she'd met Diamond during a business meeting. The deal had gone south when Diamond had caught her parents adulterating the gold beyond the accepted levels, but Karat and he had hit it off. She had been disgusted by her parents' duplicity and managed to arrange a fairer deal for Diamond, going over her parents' heads to the mine owners directly. Soon after, her parents retired and she and Diamond got married once she was head of the Karat family business.
Many ponies felt that there must've been some underhoofed dealings for such a perfect business pairing, but in truth, they both loved each other deeply. They were going to try for a foal, once they got back from their honeymoon, but for right now the couple were enjoying themselves. They saw the palace, the great School for Gifted Unicorns, visited the royal gardens, ate at the finest restaurants and generally had a good time. Currently they were making their rounds of the drinking establishments
Diamond started singing a bawdy song as the couple staggered down the street, something about unicorn horns that made Karat blush and giggle, when they were called to by a strange voice in the alleyway. “Hey, you two.” Diamond and Karat turned around and saw, to their amazement, somepony very important, a unicorn, though the exact name of the pony eluded both of them. He was tall, bulky, but carried himself with a predatory grace that, had he not been such an important and obviously influential pony would have made the couple uneasy. His mane was grey while his coat was almost black, and his eyes were a sort of steel-grey, giving him a strangely monochromatic appearance that, while it would have been unsettling, simply looked refined on him.
The couple bowed unsteadily to the strange unicorn standing in the alleyway, “Why hello there, it's an honor to-” Diamond began, but he was cut off by a wave from the strange, important pony.
“Don't bother with that now, I need your help with something.” The unicorn's voice was like liquid silk, and the couple found themselves tripping over each other to ask what he needed. He smiled, beckoned them into the alleyway urgently, and led the drunken couple into the darkness. An hour later, a scream brought the Guards, who arrived in time to find Karat on the brink of death, bleeding from multiple stab wounds in an alleyway. Diamond however was not so lucky.