"Are you sure this won't show up this week's drug test?" Rainbow Dash asked.
"Trust me," Soarin said. He was already placing two of the tiny paper squares on his tongue. He held his tongue out to show off the colourful pieces of the whole sheet, which, when put together, displayed a psychedelic picture of Princess Celestia wearing sunglasses and smoking an enormous joint, with an equally chilled out sunglass-wearing sun behind her.
"This'd be the first time I did that," Dash quipped back. She jabbed Soarin's shoulder with her hoof, and jostled his hanging leather jacket, which he'd only half put on.
"Come on," he said. He held up the three squares in his hoof that he'd saved aside for Dash. "I've been clean on every test for months, and I did these at least three times." He rolled his eyes. "You're not a flightless poultry, are you?"
"Gimme those," Dash said. She snatched the tabs out of Soarin's hoof and studied them like tiny pieces of panned gold. They seemed to glow in her hoof, fragments of the colourful illustration standing out underneath the dim fluorescent lights.
"Make sure you just take one to start," Soarin' said. He put the other side of his jacket on and checked for his keys in his pocket. "Wait about twenty minutes, and then—"
Dash smirked at him with her tongue out, all three tabs sitting vibrantly on the end.
She swallowed them before Soarin' had collected his jaw.
"What?" she said, rolling her eyes. "They're just pieces of paper.
"What's the worst that could happen?"
Dash was feeling it by the time they got to the concert. She had no idea what 'it' was, only that 'it' was large, distant, and creeping up on her from every direction at once, including inside, if that was possible. It felt like she was holding the end of a very large spool of thread that was being wheeled in at a rate of one second per... moment? That didn't make any sense.
Maybe there were special things you could do with a piece of paper these days.
"What kind of concert did you say this was anyway?" Rainbow Dash asked. The two had taken a cab, though Soarin' had lamented the fare, complaining they could have easily used the bus and gotten there at almost the same time, if they'd left at least thirty minutes earlier. They could find a way to charge it to the team account somehow anyway, so Dash didn't see what the big fuss was.
"I think you'll like it," was all Soarin' said as he got out of the cab. His pupils were almost as wide as his eyes, and he looked a bit like a bat-pony in the dim illumination of the streetlights outside the concert venue.
"Okay, but just tell me what kind of—"
"This way," Soarin' said. He grabbed Dash's hoof and led her towards the venue entrance, a wide set of double doors not being guarded by anypony from the outside. Inside was a ticket vendor, collecting fare at a dingy, home-made looking sort of booth, complete with a double set of metal tins for housing change and tickets.
Soarin's hoof felt strange... like Dash was holding him first, or there was an order to their hooves that hadn't been there when it started... it was difficult to express what she was thinking, and that was true at the best of times anyway. She wondered if having Twilight's many dictionaries crammed into her head would somehow help.
The two of them had tickets in advance, so Soarin' needed only flash them to let himself and Dash into the concert proper. There was a small crowd of ponies already gathered in front of the stage, but most were milling about and talking amongst themselves in groups, sometimes as small as two or three, but one giant throng looked about fifteen or twenty strong, and it was moving around the standing room space like a giant amoeba, absorbing ponies as it moved and spitting others out like fragments of a bloated, life-sized mitosis. Dash found herself watching the ponies that left as they blended back into their original groups or disappeared in straight lines to the bathroom.
"I'm gonna go get a good spot," Soarin' said. When Dash heard the 'Okay' in her head and decided she wanted to say it, she turned to Soarin' only to find he was gone.
"Okay," she said to herself anyway.
She wasn't sure what to do.
Being at a concert was an easily negotiable experience, usually: you stood there, listened to music, danced or moved or sang along if the music was good enough to warrant it, drank lots of water, peed when you need to pee, and generally had a good time until the ponies on stage stopped making noise and the lights turned back on and it was time to go home. That usually covered anywhere from two to four hours, depending on the size of the stage-list and whether or not Dash felt like staying for the entire thing.
Was the planet moving underneath her hooves? If she was stuck to it, was she moving too?
Standing up felt like a tall order in the first place. Dash's hooves suddenly seemed inexpert in the task of negotiating gravity. She wobbled from side to side, her legs stuttering, before she finally found a nearby wall and braced herself against it. She felt sea-sick, then sea-calm, then sea-nothing, as she remembered she was distinctly land-bound at the moment. The moment. Which moment was that though?
Was there somepony else in there, knocking on the walls?
The band, if they were the band, came on with an absolute lack of fanfare. Nopony seemed to even notice them crawl out from the side of the stage and move to their instruments, which consisted of a beat-up looking drum-kit with only one cymbal, and a bass guitar plastered in so many stickers and pieces of duct-tape that it was impossible to see the original finish underneath—except for one corner, where it was clearly bright, cherry red. And rusted, from the look of it. How did you rust wood?
The two ponies seemed to do their sound check in silence to, and how that was even possible would have mystified Rainbow Dash if she'd been watching, or knew anything about sound-checks, or even been operating in a frame of reference where she remembered she was at a concert, which was a task quickly beginning to lose its relevance as the minutes ebbed on. Once the ponies were satisfied—they looked rather alike, two earth ponies with sandy, light-brown coats, but distinctly different manes, one long and bristly and tinged with red, the other's cut so short it was barely there, just a tiny shield of brown around the crown of its skull.
The pony with the short cut of brown mane ducked its head out of sight for a moment. Wherever it remained for that moment was inaccessible. When it returned, its face was hidden by a helmet, painted to look like a wide-mouthed, many-toothed, horrifying demon.
Rainbow Dash looked up at the stage at that moment. It was a perpetual stairway, she took the first step always at this second in time. Just as the rainboom had happened potentially forever in every direction... what was she talking about? Thinking about?
Why had three seemed like such a good idea?
"C̶̨͓̼̭͐̂͘h̶͎͌̑e̷͈̤͊̑̇̈́ͅc̶̙̻̰̅͋͝k̶̳̯͋͜,̶͓̀̏͑͛ ̵̭̉c̸͕̓̐͘̕h̵̻̤̆̽͘e̸͔̖͗́ͅc̵̣͗̕k̷̯̗̐̂̈,̵͈̂́͜ ̸͇͊̾̎̕͜ū̵̞͋̚h̴̟̫̜͛̍́ḩ̵̱͍͆ͅḣ̷͙͓ͅh̵̥́̒̕.̵͖̤̻͉̽͒̒̉.̴͎̱̓̋̏̀.̴͙͍̈́̓.̸̖̾ͅ ̴͈͜͠͝h̵̲̎̄e̴͕̬͉̤͝l̷̨͖̝͇̒̈́͐̏l̸͓̬̹̃̋o̶̲͉̮͋,̴̣͎͙̈́ ̶̲̑͗̏̂ȟ̶̜̓ẽ̶̮̼̚ͅl̸̨̝̹̤̄l̵̼͘o̶̡̢̱͛͜,̵̞̹͌̓ ̴̨̋͑͊͝ͅh̷̡̛e̴͖̻͂̏l̴̛͇̖l̴̝̝̘̭͌́́o̴̯̍̒͆.̴̙͈̤̎̾̑.̶̗͓͚̋͋.̴̩̥̦̮̈́͘̚" the pony wearing the helmet droned into a microphone hidden somewhere in the casing of its demonic visage. The sound blared out over the crowd, lighting up the house speakers with their first dose of noise for the evening. It was quite a noise, hissing and warbling between droves of static and squealing into unnameable pitches... how could somepony make their voice sound like that? How could anything sound like that?
After a few seconds of silence, the pony in the helmet turned to the other pony, who was holding up his bass guitar. The two shared a look through the demon's eyes, the pony with the long red mane wearing a pensive, almost emotionless expression.
Underneath the speakers, somehow muffled from the microphone, the pony with the demon's face yelled out:
"O̶̼̗̦̺̮̙͍̜̺̲̟͖̳̗͚͝ͅņ̷̨̡̨͈͔̯͇̬͙̎̈̓̒́̚͝ͅͅé̶͈̹̫̘̰̌́ ̵͔̰́̊͒̒̀̈́͆̂̓͑̐͘̕̕̕̕ͅẗ̴̜̘̳͎͈͙́̔̉ͅw̸̡̩̗̳͍͔̥͉̼̝̉̿͊͛ǫ̴͕̠͓͎̙̟͇̫͚̙̠̺̭͔̈̆͛͌̃̄͜ ̷͙̀̉̔̎̈́̃̏͌̐̑͂̐̑͑̚̚t̸̡̡̛̗̖́͑̃͒͋̇̿̊̄͛͐͑ͅh̸̡̹̩̫̏̒̀r̷͉̪̠̅̀̏̀̌͆̀̔͊̄̄̎͘e̶̢̲̠̥̲̪̙̜͖̖̹̜̺͚̎̿͜ͅë̸̱̱̤̹͕͋ ̸̡̛͇̰̙͊͌̄͜f̵̡͇̫̖̥̥̈́̀́̑͊̐̔͗̓́̕͝͝͠ͅo̶̢̢̢͎̳̫̮̜̳͍̭̝͙̰̝͌͑̈̀̓͘͝ų̴̮̩̞̙̝̹̯͕̹͖̿̚͜ŗ̵̛̣̞̰͉̤͈͍̱̥̈́̾͂͆̍̊̏̊̇͐̐͜͜͝!̶̡̰̭̥̦̈́̀̓̎̋͌̚͜͜"
Rainbow Dash's moment exploded.
It was silly to say 'exploded'. It was hard to imagine what an explosion felt like from any direction. You weren't close to them often, and you were certainly probably never going to be in one and live to tell about it... unless you were Rainbow Dash, of course.
What had the Sonic Rainboom felt like?
An accident of destiny.
Who said that?
Rainbow Dash's ears were full up with the rest of her head. She looked at the other ponies around her, who had surged in a single, throbbing mass towards the stage and begun pulsating and undulating in place, bits and pieces of the Queen Amoeba breaking off and then rejoining the throng when they were ready. All the little bits were moving at the same time, but in entirely different directions. How did she know if she was listening with the left side of her body or her right? How could she tell which direction to turn her head?
The floor fell out under the torrent of the static wave. Dash let go of her hold on the wall and fell face-first downwards, holding her hooves out in a lame attempt to catch herself on... nothing.
Somepony else caught her instead. They were wearing sunglasses.
"Woah there," they said. Somehow, it was possible to hear them through the static. "Easy now. Make sure not to move too much if you're feeling shaky. Had a lot tonight?" The pony wearing sunglasses also had on a cool—that was the word Dash wanted to use for it, cool—a cool dark grey hoodie, pulled up over her spiky blue mane... and she was a unicorn, from the look of her horn, poking up just underneath the hood.
Good ol' Vinyl Scratch, Dash might have said if her head had been anywhere present.
"Help," she said instead.
Scratch raised an eyebrow underneath her sunglasses.
"You okay? I'm here to help if you need anything. Not my first trip around the solar system, if you catch my drift." Vinyl Scratch moved a little closer to Dash, offering her body as support and receiving almost a full pegasus' worth of weight as a reward. Scratch grunted as she shouldered Dash's body and lowered her center of gravity to avoid hitting the floor herself. "Holy white label... you're barely standing. Listen, sport. What's got you tied up tonight? I'm not a narc, you can tell me and I won't tell a soul. Trip-sitter's honour."
"Paper," Dash said lamely, sticking out her tongue, which by now had turned the three pieces to mush and slipped them down her throat at some point during a sip of water. "I mean... shiny paper. With... with colours on them."
"Is this your first time?" Scratch said, her tone businesslike but reassuring.
Dash nodded and left her head hanging on the down-swing, staring at the floor of the venue and making half-word noises with her mouth and tongue. Talking to herself in a language she didn't speak yet, maybe.
"Fuck me," Scratch said to herself. "Who does that to somepony? Alright, let's get her somewhere a bit more chill..."
Vinyl Scratch stuck a hoof into her mouth and whistled, which is weird if you think about how a pony might do that anyway, but maybe is normalized in Equestria, who knows. She did it, and even though it wasn't loud enough to compete with the overall volume of the still ongoing cacophony caused by just two ponies on stage, the crowd that was nearest by caught it, and Vinyl Scratch was a face and a set of sunglasses to notice when she needed your attention on a night out.
"First timer!" Scratch yelled to the crowd, forcing her voice to peak just audibly against the howl of the drums and bass, distorted together in a blender and garnished with a banshee's screams in overdrive, from the sound of it. "Bad trip, move please!"
Once again, it was loud enough for the nearby crowd, and they parted like an ocean split in half, making way for Scratch, and Dash, presuming she could find the strength to let herself be carried. Dash found her hooves after a few steps, but still leaned on Vinyl Scratch most of the way until they reached a hallway tucked off to the side of the main venue area—from the look of it, a kitchen during the day-time that had been tidied and closed off for the concert. Vinyl wondered if anypony else had snuck in here to look for snacks at some point. Right now it was dark, but there was a comfy looking bench just outside the room, and Vinyl dragged it in and turned on the lights as well, which caused Dash to squint rapidly in no particular direction. Her pupils were the size of cabbages. Yes, cabbages. That'd still be really big for a pony's eyes, considering the general size of their heads. Eh?
"Did you really just yell and move everypony like that," Dash said, rather than asked, holding her hoof in front of her face and waving it hazily back and forth.
Scratch nodded and lifted her sunglasses off, revealing her eyes, a bright, almost blood-red.
"It either happened or it didn't," she said with a shrug. "Chances are if you yell something like that, somepony's either gonna know what you mean or not. Fifty-fifty chance." She put her sunglasses back on her head but propped them up on her horn above her eyes. "Same chance as if you're dreaming now or not. How many hooves am I holding up?"
"One," Dash said, her eyes shifting involuntarily to Scratch's hoof from her own. "But, wait... how do I know what 'one' is?"
"Oh dear," Scratch said. She pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat on it, then rubbed her forehead roughly with one hoof. "She's down the rabbit hole already."
"I feel like something was supposed to happen that I forgot," Dash said. Her voice alternated in pitches, like she was half-certain at the beginning of a sentence, then forgetting her place the second half. "I feel like I was supposed to do something that I reminded myself about before it happened." She blinked and stared at Vinyl Scratch. "Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?"
Scratch sighed and shook her head.
"Oh," Dash said glumly. She looked around the room for a few seconds, then back at Scratch when she'd concluded there was nopony else present.
"Have you seen Rainbow Dash?" she said, leaning over conspiratorially and whispering just slightly.
"As a matter of fact, I was just talking to her," Vinyl Scratch said. Her voice was a bit morose as well, but her face looked calm, ready, maybe even a little happy if you looked in the right light. It wasn't anything Dash felt capable of reading at the moment. She wasn't sure how to use eyes she didn't feel belonged to her.
"You were?" Dash said. It felt awkward to use her name in a sentence when she wasn't sure who she was. But it was easier than making up a new name for her non-self. Or maybe that was all it was in the first place. Un-Dash. She was that whenever she wasn't herself. Or when she was herself, she took the Un-Dash and threw it away. Whatever that meant. Words felt heavier than usual. "What did she say?"
"She said she regretted taking too much of an unfamiliar substance at once," Scratch said, taking on a slightly motherly tone. "But she also said not to spend too much time worrying about the past, because if you did the future would run you over like a train moving faster than a Sonic Rainboom. Oh, and live in the moment."
"Did she say which moment, exactly?"
"This one."
Rainbow Dash kissed Vinyl Scratch on the mouth.
It felt like a kiss.
What, you want more?
Oh, alright.
First, we have to address whether or not Dash, in her inebriated, or arguably out-of-body state, is capable of giving informed consent. Then, we need to—
Just kidding.
Dash and Vinyl Scratch did the sexy drugged up make-outs. It was totally hot.
No, come on. Do it for real.
Vinyl Scratch and Rainbow Dash made out like two high-school fillies in heat for the first time, grinding against each other and getting all wet and hot and horny.
That's better. How many more can you do?
I think like three. That's far beyond quota. This was a thousand words at best.
Edit this part out.
No.
Wheee!
Rainbow Dash was looking at herself from a cloud. She felt like she was responsible for the weather in her own brain. She could see little threads pulling from her head down below up to the clouds again, and they were coloured and maybe even coded by those colours, though nopony had left a manual or explained to her at any point what any of them did. She had a vague memory of opening her own mouth as wide as a python's and pouring bucket after bucket of fresh vegetables down her throat, until she was bloated and lumpy and looked kind of like a giant blue bag of marbles. And then she remembered digesting all the vegetables and floating away. Maybe that was just a dream she had once. Whatever.
Hi, Rainbow Dash.
Oh, hi.
You're down there on drugs, you know. You asked us to look after you.
"I don't remember asking anyone," Rainbow Dash said.
I don't remember asking anyone, Rainbow Dash said.
Everypony asks. That's how they get here in the first place.
Do you wanna know a secret?
What?
When we asked you for your name... you kicked us in the face.
With both hooves!
No I did not... really?
Ask your parents. They were there.
Mostly.
'Is this the right thing to do?'
Everypony has that question. The very sad, very unhealthy ones, ask it far too frequently. You can count the amount of times per day, and that number will determine your need for assistance. Someone will calibrate this into a system eventually. Eleven.
"Did you know that the number four is blue?" Rainbow Dash asked. "I'm not just saying that. I looked. And it's impossible to be random. I looked at that too."
"Easy, girl," Vinyl Scratch said. "You're going through it right now. Remember waves. Can you do that for me? 'Waves'?"
"Who's 'we'."
"I said 'me', hun."
"I know. I want to know who we are together. Who's 'we'. Me plus you equals we. Right?"
"Right. Okay, I get you." Vinyl Scratch nodded and put one hoof on each of Dash's shoulders. "We're you and a pony you met at a party. You've met me before, but we've never talked or hung out." Vinyl Scratch rolled her eyes. "It's actually a pretty remarkable coincidence, when you think about it."
"What do you know about Rainbow Dash?" the other one asked. "We've been trying to find her for a while. And I thought we agreed on no weird speaking conventions."
"I thought you agreed to it," Rainbow Dash said, scoffing and turning her head.
"Hey, hey, come back buddy, I need ya," Vinyl Scratch said. She straightened Dash's head in her direction and stared deep into her eyes, which were alternating between scared-cat-in-the-dark and pools of absolute white.
"Hey," Dash said, suddenly corporeal. "I'm here. Hey. What do you need?"
"I need you to stay and tell me a good story," Vinyl Scratch said. She patted Dash on the head and ran a hoof through her multicolour mane. "Tell me a good story about why you're here."
"I'm here because nopony else wanted to be here," Dash said. She dragged Vinyl down to the ground with both hooves, lounged backwards and then sprawled onto Vinyl's lap. Vinyl took the motion in stride, nodding sympathetically as Dash continued her answer. "No, wait... I'm here because everypony has to be here. Because I agreed to be here... Because... we're stuck?"
"That's all subjective," Scratch said, patting Dash's mane. "It's all a big scrambled egg, if you catch my drift."
"Boy howdy," Dash said, in a voice oddly like Applejack's.
"Exactly."
The two of them lay on the floor of the kitchen, feeling the vibrations bleed through from the concert room like a giant murmuring machine, chewing the world in its unbreakable teeth.
"Were we supposed to have sex?"
"Let's just say we did and leave it for now. I'd love to when you're feeling more yourself."
"Feeling... myself?"
"Not like that, hun. Hoof back up here."
Scratch and Dash stayed like that for a while. When enough time had passed, Scratch helped Dash to stand up again, and the two of them caught a cab back to Scratch's apartment, where Dash passed out on the bed as soon as she walked into the room, flopping forward like she'd suddenly become dead weight meant only for a comfy landing.
Soarin' woke up in a public park covered in vomit, with no wallet, no jacket, and a pigeon sleeping on his forehead.
Woo.