//------------------------------// // Epilogue // Story: Amplitude Adjustment // by kudzuhaiku //------------------------------// The ice cream parlour was almost empty; it was just far too cold a day for ice cream. Yet, there were ponies here, a hardy few, and their boisterous voices provided a pleasant background noise. Feeling generous and maybe a bit self-destructive, Vinyl had ordered the Celestial Juggernaut; not one, for her and her apprentice to share, but two, one for each of them. It was the sort of thing that no responsible adult would ever do. “I should have brought my umbrella,” Sumac remarked. “Umbrella?” Confused, Vinyl shot her apprentice a curious glance. “We came to an ice cream parlour… there’s a chance of sprinkles—” “Oh, boo!” Shaking her head, Vinyl’s hidden eyes rolled behind her glasses. “Hey, Vinyl!” There was a reckless grin on Sumac’s face that was disconcerting. Hesitant, Vinyl invited disaster. “What?” “What do you get if you divide the circumference of a dish of ice cream by its diameter?” Right about now, Vinyl wished that she hadn’t invited disaster and she said nothing. “Pi à la Mode!” The sensation permeating through Vinyl’s grey matter was worse than brain freeze and after many moments of painful cringing, she facehoofed, which knocked her glasses askew. Her apprentice showed distressing signs of pure evil. Not maniacal mustache twirling afternoon matinée evil, but world-dominating-crushing-others-underhoof-evil. In short, the worst kind of evil, because how did one fight back against a barrage of bad jokes and puns? Ugh! “Did we do okay, Vinyl?” The sudden change of tone from her apprentice caused Vinyl some worry and she gave the colt a good looking over. He seemed okay at first glance, but closer inspection revealed a few introvert warning signs; her apprentice was having an internal freak out and his bad jokes were his way of blowing off some steam. What he needed was reassurance, so she nodded. “We did fine, Sumac. Fine enough that things turned out well.” A powerful sense of emotion welled up within Vinyl Scratch and she shuddered when the sting of tears burned the corners of her eyes. She had to play it cool though, because it was a real drag if you cried into your bowl of ice cream. It was now a struggle to hold everything together and she had no idea what was wrong or why she felt like crying. “You don’t look fine.” Looking away but at nothing in particular, Vinyl shrugged and wished that her ribs would stop hitching, because it was annoying. What had come over her all of a sudden? Behind the counter, a dull purple unicorn prepared two Celestial Juggernauts and poured tropical fruit in heavy syrup into two massive, comically-oversized troughs. Thinking of Octavia, Vinyl knew. Vinyl knew and it was her undoing. The floodgates opened and the first few tears began to fall, a trickle at first, then a deluge, and finally, a torrent. Like spring showers, it lasted for but a short time, and Vinyl began pulling paper napkins out of the chrome dispenser so she could clean herself up. She just wasn’t the crying sort, but it did happen, always explosive and brief. She blew her nose with a dainty honk—which caused a few heads to turn—and Sumac, though small, was an aggressive, protective sort when it came to mares and fillies weeping in public. “What’re you lookin’ at?” The colt leveled a hard stare that swept through the room that turned heads away. “That’s what I thought.” Sitting up a little taller in his padded bench seat, Sumac turned to face his master. “Are you alright?” It took Vinyl a moment, but yes, she was alright. Emotional maybe, but she was fine. Even though a few tears still trickled down, she found her smile and kept wiping at her face with wads of paper napkins—paper napkins which did nothing to clean sticky ice cream messes off of fuzzy faces and weren’t so good for snot, either. When she spoke, her voice came out distorted and weird, because the magic powering it lacked focus. “I’m successful, Sumac. I can finally say I’m somepony.” “What?” Bewildered, Sumac shrank down in his seat. “You’re already an amazing pony, Vinyl. How are you not successful? You’re already somepony.” Already, Vinyl’s mind was sorting out the various details as she worked through her emotional reset and a multitude of things became clearer. She was surprised by her own complexity and it occurred to her that some part of her had been aware of this problem all along, she just hadn’t acknowledged it. Being mute, she had always been the quiet one, so why would she speak up about it or give voice to the problem? Problems without solutions were ignored and energy was redirected elsewhere. “Sumac… it’s complicated.” Vinyl blew her nose again and then vanished her snotty, mascara-stained napkins into the sewer where they belonged. “I can’t talk about most of what I do. My adventuring? I can’t tell most ponies about that. My work as a sound engineer? It is so hard for ponies to understand what I do. It’s impossible to explain in a party conversation that I make Octavia’s music sound amazing. It’s like everything I do is in support of somepony else and it takes explaining to have it make sense or seem important.” Understanding spread over Sumac’s face like a slow sunrise. “But I can say that I am the head of the Equestrian Radio Ministry and ponies will understand that. I’ve finally done something with my life… I’ve accomplished some great and wonderful thing… I’ve finally done what Octavia always said I’d do—” “You finally did something important that can be shared without complication.” At this, Vinyl went silent and she was shocked by how succinct Sumac could be. “Self-explanatory greatness.” Vinyl’s silence endured. “Everypony that knows you best already knows that you’re a great pony, and you do all the hard work that makes our lives better. You’re like Lemon, in that everything that you do is in support of others, and just like Lemon, you probably don’t feel that you get enough recognition. She struggles with it too. Trixie has her greatness, Twinkleshine has her, uh… reputation, but Lemon gets nothing and she’s too nice to try and explain why she’s important. Without Lemon Hearts, there would be no Trixie or Twinkleshine. They’d fall apart.” Something deep inside of Vinyl melted and she felt a quivery shudder whilst she looked at her apprentice. A few more tears fell and she was thankful for the introverts in her life, because they understood. They saw stuff. Not much slipped by them unnoticed, not the important details anyway, and they were always there with a save when it mattered. “I’ll be right back,” Vinyl said. “I’ve got to go to the little filly’s room. Be watchful, Sumac.” “Right.” How Sumac had eaten so much ice cream in so short a time was a mystery; how he did so without brain freeze, a greater one. Vinyl had hardly made a dent in hers while Sumac assailed his Celestial Juggernaut with the sort of savage voracity that only a colt his age could muster. With success came understanding. Vinyl had some new insights into the lives of those closest to her. Tarnish had some great successes in his life, as a ranger, as an adventurer, as the Heliophant, but when he had become a recognised professor—something the common pony understood—Tarnish had bawled like a foal. Octavia too, had a whole list of successes, but when she became the first pony to have ever sold over one million records, the shock of that success had floored her. Of course, Vinyl’s hard work made the record sales possible, but trying to explain how and why was enough to put a pony to sleep. Vinyl Scratch held the patent for stereophonic multi-channeled sound distribution through multiple amplified ambience devices, a process that used multiple records playing in sync and filled the room with directional sounds which surrounded the listener, which had of course revolutionised how ponies heard the sound in movies, but she couldn’t talk about it without causing heads to explode. It was an accomplishment that was impossible to bring up in casual conversation. Sumac had his own similar problem, and it was all Vinyl’s fault; at the tender age of seven, he held not one, but two patents under his name. It was a most impressive feat, and Vinyl held immense pride because she had made it happen, but trying to discuss those things, to boast about them, it was almost impossible. Of course, with every success, there had also been spectacular failures, many of which also were hard to discuss or explain. The bass projector was supposed to work on a quantum level, with powerful vibrations dispersed through the local environment through spooky action. It was now being weaponised and Vinyl had no idea how she was supposed to feel about it. “Your job title should be Conductor,” Sumac said around a mouthful of ice cream, syrups, and tropical fruit. Smiling, Vinyl’s spoon paused mid-stab into her frozen treat. A laugh worked its way out and she peered around the mountain of ice cream in front of her. “Sumac, that’s a fine idea, but I don’t think it will work. It needs to be something recognisable and easily understood. It might cause confusion otherwise.” “Aw… nuts.” Somehow, Sumac crammed an entire scoop of chocolate ice cream into his maw and his head didn’t explode or implode—whatever fatality that brain freeze inflicted. Vinyl dug out a chunk of pineapple, a bit of papaya, some chocolate syrup, and some crazy-pink ice cream that she couldn’t be certain of which flavour it was. Looking down at it, she held it in her spoon for a moment, silent, thankful, a return to being mute. It all came back to being mute. If she couldn’t talk, then she would make sound. But sound wasn’t enough, she had to make sounds beautiful. If she couldn’t tell somepony how she was feeling, she would make them feel what she was feeling, and she would do it with sound, with noise. She wondered sometimes if creating her own voice with magic had robbed her in some way of her potential greatness. The need, the urge to fill the world with sound, with noise, had been somewhat diminished since she and Sumac had found her voice. Now, Vinyl was a phonograph of sorts, a sound projector, and she could make almost anything come out of her mouth, from a simple hello to a thumping, pulsating bass riff. The whole of the world was about to be filled with sound through radio and Vinyl took a moment to enjoy the silence.