Without Sour Sweet, what had begun as a maze of boxes quickly became a labyrinth of indecipherable chaos.
At first, following a bracing breakfast, Blueblood had attacked the matter gamely. After all, he’d been watching the fair lady excavate meaning from the piles of gibberish for days. Surely at least some of that would have rubbed off. And besides, he was a clever enough fellow. A bit of careful study and note-taking, and the patterns would shortly reveal themselves.
Several hours later, staring at his futile attempts at finding reason in the madness surrounding him, the prince forced himself to accept the simple truth that the matter was beyond his ken.
It wasn’t a comfortable moment, and it took some effort to make himself accept the facts. He just wasn’t accustomed to finding things he couldn’t figure out, at least passably, given a little time. Even magical theory, while certainly not his forte, he could at least puzzle out in essence.
But not this.
Oh, doubtless he could deduce at least the basics of whatever drove this particular system, given another week or so. He was certain of that. But with jury selection rendered moot by his invocation of magistrate law, the trial would be starting in just a few days. And Sour Sweet, the one pony who both would and could help him navigate this wilderness of paper and ink, was gone.
He should have been more supportive, he realized sadly. Instead, he’d sought to dispel the miscommunication between them, rather than trying to help the lady navigate her own particular storm. And while that had seemed right at the time, it had not only driven her away without helping her deal with her misery – though that was certainly bad enough – but it had also inevitably steered his investigation towards a shipwreck at least partly of his own making.
Damn me, he thought.
He gave a mirthless bark of laughter. That, at least, might well take care of itself at this rate.
Right, he chided himself, enough self-pity. It isn’t as though I’d really expected to find more leads than we already had. And it isn’t as if what I have now shouldn’t lead to something useful. After all, all I need is weapon and motive. And a confession, of course.
But still, the possibility that there might be something left, some crucial piece, something right in front of him, if he could only find it, was maddening.
There was only one option left to him, really.
Sighing, he settled into a particularly comfortable-looking chair, opened the nearest box, and resigned himself to the arduous task of systematically reading every paper, in every file, in every remaining box which had been considered relevant to the murder case in the time remaining to him.
“Blue.”
Drifting uncertainly towards consciousness, Blueblood felt something rattling in the back of his throat.
“Blue,” said a familiar, heavily-accented voice, “you are making ze snores.”
Blueblood managed to open one eye. “Mmph?” he managed.
“Zey are very loud, zese snores you make,” Hepzibah asserted primly. “Zey do not go, ‘snort, bleat,’ as ze average snoring might. Non. Zey are ze operatic snores, zem.”
“Right, thank you for waking me,” Blueblood managed, struggling to sit upright again.
“With ze aria, an’ ze full orchestra behind her,” she continued contentedly. “Zis opera, she is ze very loud snore.”
“Yes. Thank you,” he said, trying and failing to be cross with her. Noting his aunt’s multicoloured sunset streaming in through a window nearby, he reached out for a nearby folder.
“At first, we think, ‘Mince alors, ze dragon is attacking, him! For quick, pony ze stations of battle,’” she went on conversationally, straightening his smoking jacket as she did and pouring him coffee. “But non, ze only dragon here in Canterlots, he is Spike, who is très petite. There is no such rumbles an’ bumbles coming from him, non. An’ besides, he live now far away, in ze village below, which is both itty an’ bitty.”
“Ponyville is not a village,” Blueblood said, struggling not to grin as she stirred cream into his cup.
“In fact,” she considered, putting a hoof to her chin as she did, “Mayhaps zat is ze why of his moving there? Such a bitty fellow.
“Oh, but you must not say such sings to him aloud,” she added with sudden mock seriousness. “Large or small, he is still ze dragon, him. With great angair, he jumps up, an’ sets fire to all ze ankles! Foosh!”
There was a moment of eye contact between the two, and they both fell into laughter.
“Thank you, my dear,” Blueblood smiled once their mirth subsided.
She shrugged. “Non, no raizon for thanks. For you, mon ami, I am always willing to be ze tease.”
Grinning, the stallion let his forehead fall against his hoof. “That is not what that means.”
“Ah, but where is Miz Sour Sweet?” Hepzibah frowned as she scanned the area. “I see her nowhere else. So I sink, surely, she must be with you?”
Blueblood shook his head as he drank his coffee. Then, putting it down, he said, “Forgive me, I was so wrapped up in my own affairs, I neglected to tell everyone. Sour Sweet had to go.”
”What? Zut alors! What happened?” Hepzibah exclaimed, all attempts at humor vanishing.
“It was a personal matter that couldn’t wait. She headed out last night.”
“An’ zen you are here til now, doing all of ze searching alone? But you should ‘ave said somesing!” Then, she waggled a hoof at him, chiding, “You must learn for to ask for ‘elp when you need!”
Sighing, Blueblood offered her a form. “Dear heart, do you know what this means?”
Frowning, the ebon unicorn accepted the parchment, and, a few moments later, her shoulders slumped in defeat.
“Non,” she admitted.
“Exactly,” he said gently, placing the document back into its folder. “And most of what I’m dealing with is like that, to varying degrees. Some of it is self-evident, of course, but…”
He gestured to the stacks of boxes. “What is legible to a layman is evenly distributed, so far as I can tell, among the rest. Which makes me the most qualified pony in the household to search for this particular haystack’s needle. Not that that says much right now,” he admitted with a shrug. “Much of it I don’t understand, either.”
But the mare was nodding her black-and-white mane sagely.
“Zen, I am having ze good news,” she pronounced. “For a message has arrived from ze ladies Oct an’ Scratch. It seems zey ‘ave found a sing.”
“A thing?” he asked, eyebrows raising.
“It seems.”
“What sort of thing?”
She shrugged happily. “Am I ze musician, zat I would know of zair sing? But I know enough of ze maths to know zat a sing, he is better zan a no-sing, oui?”
Blueblood looked at her suspiciously. Like most pony accents, hers was a matter of preference and family tradition more than geography. But even so, there were times when he had the distinct impression that she was having him on.
For her part, Hepzibah gave him a comically innocent look. Then, she became somber again, looking back towards the window.
“Ah, but Miz Sour Sweet,” she fretted. “Whatever is to become of her?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I made sure she knew she was welcome, and that we loved her. I wasn’t thinking fast enough to do much more than that.”
“Zen zat will ‘ave to do, at least for now,” Hepzibah reluctantly agreed. “We will keep out ze eyes for her, until she is coming back. All ze eyes.”
“Yes.”
They exchanged a quick embrace, and Hepzibah said, “Oh, but you must hurry! Akane, she waits for to help you dress for ze journey. An’ ze carriage pegasi prepare ze carriage.”
He grinned. “Whatever would I do without you?”
“Oh, wizzair away an’ die, no doubt,” she winked. Then, gesturing grandly, she pronounced, “Now, off you go, mon ami! Scoot! Zy chariot awaits!”
The sound table of Vinyl Scratch had been well-renowned for several years. She’d been awarded an honorary Masters in Music by the EEA for it, and thus it had been described in some detail in a variety of magazine and newspaper articles in the months following.
Since then, Vinyl Scratch had continued to tinker with and improve its design, even as other disc jockeys had done likewise with their own, based upon her own innovations. This had inspired, in turn, an entire community of ponies and other speaking creatures corresponding across the known world, sharing ideas and experiments in music, recording, and performance. Most recently including, through her collaboration with Vinyl Scratch, Princess Twilight Sparkle.
And it all started with this, Blueblood mused. Amazing.
The sound table was currently the size of a rather large desk, featuring three turntables, several tape players, two microphones (at least for the moment), and a veritable cornucopia of switches, dials, meters, buttons, and sliding devices that he knew in his heart he would never, ever, truly understand.
Each turntable was padded with a gripping surface, and equipped with a needle on a semi-articulate, rotatable arm. The needles were capable of reading and writing to any variety of audio records, so long as they could be positioned against them properly.
The term ‘needles,’ of course, was something of a misnomer in modern day. Granted, the first sound recorders had used literal gold needles, both to record and release the sounds that magic had preserved within scrolls of mystic silver. But that had been many years ago. Around the time that recorders had started using beeswax (allowing for clearer recordings, the wax coming from a living, buzzing animal rather than a silent metal), needles had begun being made from hair, for similar reasons. Blue had read somewhere that Belle Tainter had been inspired by her brother’s smallest painting brushes when she’d made the change.
And thus, just as most orchestral musicians used their own manes (or sometimes that of a particularly beloved family member) for their bows, most modern record players used meticulously cut and shaped hairs from ponies’ coats to form their incredibly soft and sensitive ‘needles.’ Those needles, in turn, were especially enchanted to release the magically-recorded songs from the discs they caressed. Needles made from the coats or feathers of brilliant musicians were therefore especially prized, their sympathetic qualities yielding higher quality playback.
The needles on Vinyl’s sound table were, of course, a delicate grey colour. Blueblood had smiled a little when he’d seen them, realizing their source to almost certainly be the region over Miss Melody’s heart.
Now, the antique cylinder gleamed a dull gold as it rested on its end on one of the turntables. Next to it was a small disc of glass encasing a paper-thin circle of wax, resting in the center of its own turntable. Vinyl Scratch pressed a button, and the compact disc began to rotate. Then, the DJ gently turned the needle’s arm and placed the needle against the record’s surface, a kaleidoscope of rainbows dancing across its transparent surface as it played.
There were the inevitable rhythmic scratchy sounds from the original recording, high and fast, for several seconds. Then, there were pony voices, garbled and indistinct. These were immediately followed by a stallion’s voice. And while the voice’s owner was unclear, his surprise was unmistakable:
“What? What are you doing here? What is that?”
Then followed more undecipherable sounds, almost certainly pony voices that modern sound magic had not been able to fully recover.
Then, a mare’s voice, desperate:
“Because I love you!”
Another garbled cacophony of one or more voices followed. Blueblood frowned then, as a final rush of sound on the record reduced everything else to white noise.
Vinyl shook her head as she switched the recording off. “Sorry, Grace Dude, that’s all we could recover. Far as I can tell, somepony launched off a really major firework close to an open window or something. The sound blew out the mic, and that caused an energy surge into the wax. So, we got this and the previous recordings we used as templates; everything else is just static.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Really. That’s rather a lot of damage, isn’t it?”
“It was a big boom, man.”
For a time, the stallion said nothing, lost in thought.
“‘What is that,’” he mused aloud. “Curious.”
“Yeah. And like I said, we can’t identify anypony from it,” the DJ added regretfully.
“Mmm? Oh, that’s hardly a problem, my dear,” he said with a distracted wave of dismissal. “I know who the killer is.”
She blinked. “Uh, what?”
“Oh, yes. I’m never wrong about these things, you know.”
For several moments more, he considered the matter in silence. Finally, he said, “The building’s windows were all closed. That being the case, what kind of firework would it take, do you think?”
“Oh, in that case, one of the big ones, man, like the really big suckers,” Vinyl replied. “We’re talking, like, the massive display models. That, or maybe a quarter blasting stick, if it was close enough.”
“Yet, the psychometrists didn’t find any traces of alchemy around the building,” Blueblood mused. “Or any unusual magic at all, for that matter. And the only traces of magic found within were Miss Rarity’s.”
“Have to be a rocket then,” Vinyl nodded. “Probably went off right overhead.”
“Could it have been anything else you know of? Anything at all?”
The DJ shook her head. “No way, man. This was an explosion. Period. And if the cops didn’t find the vibes around the place itself…”
“…an overhead rocket would seem to be the only remaining possibility,” he finished, still frowning.
“Sure, man. You ever been under those things? Loud as fuck. Somepony probably launched it at an angle, over what they thought was an unused building. It went off too low, and that was it.”
“Mmm.”
Again, he said nothing for a time, still frowning. Vinyl also stayed silent, not wanting to interrupt anything that might save her friend.
“You… had a performance that night, did you not?” he asked at last.
She nodded. “Sure, up at the palace.”
“It sounds like you’ve arrived, as they say.”
Despite the stakes, she couldn’t suppress her grin. “Right? I mean it doesn’t get better than the royals. Plus, they’re some seriously righteous ladies. It was a sweet gig, man.”
Still thoughtful, Blueblood gave another nod. “Indeed they are. What time did you start?”
The DJ’s ears twitched, and she scoffed a little. “Tsh. On the SSC? Seriously? Dude, about nine-thirty. It was part of the fireworks show.”
Blueblood looked at her.
“Nine-thirty.” he repeated. “You’re certain.”
“Dude, it’s summer solstice! Nopony sets anything major off before then, not even the private shows. Otherwise you couldn’t see ‘em right, y’know?”
“Yes,” he said, slowly becoming animated once more. “Yes, actually that makes perfect sense. Thank you, Vinyl.”
“Hey, back atcha. So, um…” The mare’s careless demeanor faltered, her voice growing quieter as she asked, “Listen, Blue… you still think you can get Rarity out of this?”
Blueblood’s smile was genuine and kind.
“With your new information? My dear lady, I positively guarantee it.”