There was only one place Vinyl could see to hide. She leapt for the single other door in the room and fell through, pushing it shut behind her. It closed with nary a click. It was cold in the new room. Dark, too. The only light in the place was a faint, dusty trickle of pale light that streamed through a peephole. Vinyl pressed her eye to it and saw the same pony from earlier stumble into the room. He looked flushed, like he’d just been out for a jog. For once, he actually removed his duster coat and hung it on a hook. For the first time, Vinyl saw that the stallion’s flanks were blank -- he had no cutie mark.
Or, wait, that wasn’t quite true. There was a discolored splotch of something back there, but what it might have once been, Vinyl couldn’t tell. She watched him as he rushed around the room, carefully selecting a new set of books to examine before he settled back at his desk with quill and parchment. Vinyl couldn’t see what he was working on, but he seemed pretty intent. Seeing that he was distracted, she lit her horn to get a better view of the room -- just a little faint light, not enough for the elderly stallion to notice.
The room was not large. Vinyl could stand with her tail pressed to one wall and reach across to touch the other. It was perhaps three times that distance from the door to the back wall. The confines were made tighter yet by the shelves that lined the place, each one holding rows and rows of metronomes. She would guess that they filled around two-thirds of the available space. She took a step forward and nearly stumbled over something on the floor. She turned to inspect it, and was surprised to see a sheet of parchment lying atop a sheet of metal. Something was inscribed on it, but it was badly faded, and she couldn’t read it in the dim light.
She extinguished her horn, making a mental note to take the thing with her when she left. Then, she returned her attention to Minor Key in the room beyond.
Minor Key felt dizzy. He had sat and watched the Krikkits play through three whole songs, and though he’d never heard them before, he felt certain that he could sing them all, note-perfect.
When the band had stopped at last, to laugh and joke with one another, Key had finally worked up the wherewithal to rise from where he sat outside the door and stumble back toward his chambers. The power of their music had been intoxicating in a way that nothing else had been for as long as he could remember.
He needed it. He needed to own it, to use it, his own goals finally possessing a power source.
Minor flew into his study, closing the door behind him. He threw aside his coat and started picking up tomes of relevant lore. His gaze fell upon his violin, and for a second he longed to pick it up, to play it now, to siphon all that excess energy away…
No. He shut the case tight and returned it to its place on the shelf. It was no good to play without purpose, not now that he had made this incredible discovery. He needed to plan. He took out book after book, turning to familiar passages and digging deeper with what he had seen burning fresh in his mind.
Yes. Yes! At long last, he had found the power supply he had needed for his ritual. Finally, his great work would be complete, and his revenge would begin. And he would start with Rita’s precious little opening act…
Minor Key began to chuckle, deep and low in his throat, a low and gurgling laugh that seemed to fade in and out of auditory range. His eyes flashed with a strange light --
The door banged open. “Ahoy, Minor!”
Minor practically jumped out of his skin, scattering his papers on the floor. “Miss Philharmonica,” he said, once his heart had slowed once more to andante pace. “What an… unexpected pleasure.”
Octavia smirked at him, trotting brashly across the floorboards. “That’s what she said, eh?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know. To what do I owe this unexpected visit?”
“Oh, you know,” Octavia said, trotting around the room, eyeing the various hanging sheets of music that hung from the ceiling. “Me and the gang realized we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of you all morning. We figured, you’ve been cooped up in your study here all morning and thought, now there’s a cry for help if ever we’ve seen one. You must be bored out of your mind hanging out in this dank little cupola all day. It’s not even the cool kind of dank! It’s just…” She scrunched her muzzle. “Musty. Probably a health hazard.”
Minor scowled at her cavalier invasion and insult upon his personal space. “I appreciate your concern for my health, but --”
Octavia clapped her hooves. “That’s the spirit, Minor! Come on out and have a cuppa with us in the kitchen, get out of this moldering ol’ room for awhile.”
He took in a deep breath, realizing as he did so that this interloper wasn’t entirely wrong about the state of the air in this room. “Miss Philharmonica, I am really rather busy --”
“And you’ve been busy all yesterday, too!” She shook her head. “You have to learn to take breaks, mate. It’ll stifle your creativity just working on one thing all the time. You’d be amazed at the ideas that come to you when you’re not thinking about it. Look at me, I hardly ever think about anything before I do it, and… well, not to toot my own horn, because really that’s Beauty’s thing, but I would say that I’m a pretty successful musician.”
“Again, Miss Philharmonica, I must really refuse. My muse is here, you see.”
Octavia tilted her head and glanced around the room, clearly perplexed. “Your… muse? Where?” She eyed the bone trinkets with disfavor. “Er. Is your muse… quite well?”
Minor inclined his head. “Look out the window.”
“Oh?” Octavia did so, peering out to the horizon over the edge of the cliff, the narrow coastline that gave way to the vast expanse of ocean beyond. “Oh! The sea is your inspiration?”
Well, of course. She couldn’t see what he saw. She never would have come here if she could. “That is… one way of putting it, yes.”
Octavia turned from the window and nodded firmly at him. “Well then, you’ve definitely got to get out of this room!”
Minor’s mouth fell open.“...Beg pardon?” he asked, barely constraining his mounting irritation. Had the fool simply not been listening?
“Well, perhaps you can see the sea from here, but you can’t hear it, can you?” Octavia asked patiently. “Can’t feel it, smell it, taste it, can’t get the spray in your eyes and the salt in your coat… a seaside holiday is exactly what you need, Minor, and the Krikkits are just the band for the job!”
“I -- you --” He sputtered his indignation. To his great horror, he found that she had quite a good point. Had he ever gotten up close and personal with his divine inspiration? “At least let me grab my papers!” he finally managed to say.
Octavia frowned, looking him over. “Oh… alright, then,” she conceded. “One pen and one sheet of paper for notes, if you really insist. Then, grab your towel and trunks, we’re going to take a jolly dip!”
Vinyl peered through the peephole of the secret door, breathing as little as possible. The thick wooden paneling muted most of the sound, but she could still see Minor Key clearly enough through the peephole. He was, to all intents and purposes that Vinyl could see, dead to the world. He sat hunched over his desk, scrawling notes on a sheet of paper, occasionally picking up one book or another, scrutinizing it carefully before shaking his head and throwing himself back at the page.
Suddenly Minor jolted to attention, fumbling his papers to the floor as the door to the room burst open. A voice rang through, loud enough for Vinyl to hear, though it was so muted and muffled she couldn’t tell who was speaking, let alone what was being said. Judging from Minor’s sudden look of exhaustion, though, she could make an educated guess.
Sure enough, when he finally hauled himself up from his chair and threw open the door, Vinyl saw the familiar bright face that she’d been married to for the last twelve years.
Octavia and Minor chatted at the door for a few moments, with a strong imbalance of enthusiasm. Vinyl could almost hear them, but their words were muddled and indistinct, as though they were standing much, much farther away than the room would allow. It was dreamlike, almost dissociative to watch.
Then Octavia pushed past him into the room, and Vinyl’s heart almost stopped. She wanted to leap out from her hiding place and pull Tavi away, keep her out of this weird old stallion’s sanctum. Nothing about this place looked at all healthy.
Octavia trotted around the room, studying the hanging sheet music as she chattered away. Minor was growing visibly frustrated, though he tried to hide it behind his wearied expression. He showed Octavia something out the window, and she instantly lit up. Vinyl didn’t catch most of what she said, but she caught the word ‘beach’. She also saw Minor tighten up even more, shaking his head violently, but Vinyl knew that it would take far more than that to dissuade her wife.
Minor held out for barely a minute more before Octavia was all but pushing him out the door and down the hallway, barely pausing to let the stallion grab some things off his desk. Vinyl waited a minute more before finally letting out her breath, slow and shaky.
She froze, hearing nothing. She clapped her hooves and heard nothing, only feeling a vague tremor.
“*” she said, as loudly as she could. She turned to look around the closet she had thrown herself into, at the metronomes that lined the shelves. Hesitantly, she tried to start one. Instead, the pendulum bar merely lolled over, barely hanging on the pivot.
Vinyl felt herself suddenly seized by foreboding. There was nothing in here with her, but a nothingness that was given shape and form. A nothingness that wanted her to be nothing, too.
She hastily pushed open the secret door and stumbled out into the room beyond. At the last moment, even in her panic, she remembered to grab the sheet of metal from off the floor, dragging it from the terrible closet. She kicked the door shut behind her. It made only the most muffled of thumps as it slammed into the jamb, and Vinyl fell to the floor, trembling and gasping for air. The sound of her own lungs working was perhaps the most beautiful she’d ever heard.
After several moments, she pulled herself to her hooves. She desperately wanted to run, run as fast and as far as she could to escape from that terrible silent nothing which was held at bay only by a single door. But, she had a job to do. So, she shut her eyes tight and pictured Octavia’s cocky, grinning face until the terror had ebbed and her heart had slowed to its normal tempo.
She opened her eyes again, and regarded the room with a sharp, steely gaze before moving to tear open Minor’s desk drawers.
Minor Key was not a stallion accustomed to the beach. In all honesty, he wasn’t all that accustomed to other ponies. In short, he reacted to Octavia and Fred pushing him along the road down to the shoreline by going limp and unresisting as they ferried him down the cliff, chattering endlessly about something or other. At one point, he managed to shake himself from his fugue long enough to ask, “Where are your bandmates? The last time I counted, there were four of you. To lose one would be careless enough, but two -- unthinkable.”
Fred laughed and bumped Minor’s shoulder lightly. “Oh, you are a card. Isn’t he just, Octavia?”
“Beauty an’ Harpo went back to that hotel to fetch Tapper,” Octavia explained. “This can be a right little day out for us all! Gorgeous weather for it, too.”
Fred hummed his agreement. “Still ocean, no clouds… I don’t even see any gulls.”
Octavia gave a mock pout. “Somepony’s gone and chased them off already, then?”
Minor chuckled softly.
“Mm?” Octavia asked, looking at him.
“Oh, nothing, nothing. Just remembering, that’s all.” Minor’s gaze drifted to a long-abandoned nest that had fallen amid the brush, and he grinned all the way down to the beach.
It was breathtaking. The coarse, dry sand spread out like a wasteland to the left and right. Ahead lay the vast and uncaring ocean. Above, the uncaring, unchanging infinite void. Any direction you could walk in, it seemed, would end in lingering, isolated death.
“It’s wonderful,” Minor breathed.
He nearly fell on his face as Octavia gave him a hearty slap on the back. “See? I knew you’d love it!” she said jubilantly. “Doesn’t it feel nice to be out of that old wreckage?”
Frederick cleared his throat sharply. “Er,” Octavia said hastily. “I mean. Out in the sunshine, hey? The sun, the sand, and the surf.”
“...Yes, indeed,” Minor said darkly, glowering at Octavia sidelong. He had nearly forgotten his company.
“Come on, then,” Fred said. “Let’s get set up.”
He pulled a pack off his back and began to unroll towels onto the sand. Octavia popped open an umbrella and planted it firmly into the ground.
Minor elected to walk to the shoreline. The waves lapped hungrily at his hooves. He looked out over the sea, peering at the horizon to better see his muse. He saw no sign of them, though that meant little; they were elusive things.
He shut his eyes instead, letting his other senses do the work. He smelled the desiccating sand and salt so strongly they tinged his tongue, and the uncaring heat of the sun and chill of the ocean washed over his coat. It was familiar. He had been to a beach before, he knew. He could not recall where or under what circumstances, but he remembered that he had at one time been to the ocean before.
The roar of the ocean was hypnotic, as the music of the Krikkits had been. It filled the empty hollows of Minor Key in the same way, save for that it was heavier. Steadying. Cold. He felt his heartbeat and breathing slow and the thought swam through his head that this must be what it would be like to be in the presence of a god.
No. Not a god. Such things would have appealed to him once, but those encounters were practically common in this world. This presence was something… deeper. Bigger, as the Krikkits were.
The warmth of the sun faded, and the water turned icier and icier, each time taking a little longer to recede. Minor knew that it was only toying with him, that it would take him and consume him well before its final freeze, that his body would be crushed in the terrible embrace of the sea before becoming entombed there in ice until eternity itself came to an end.
How long he stood like that, lost in its implacable beauty, Minor could not have said, but when he came back to himself, it was to a worried-looking Octavia shaking him to alertness. “You still with us, Minor?”
He blinked and glanced back to the horizon. “...So it would seem,” he said dully.
Octavia kicked at the sand, not really knowing how to respond. “The others are almost here,” she said at last. “I saw them coming down the road.”
She paused. “They seem to have company.”
Minor blinked. “...Come again?” he asked.
Octavia pointed up to the cliffs. A throng of some several dozen ponies were descending. All of them were smiling. Leading the pack, laughing and beaming, Harpo and Beauty made their way down the cliff face.
“Oh,” said Minor, his face turning a very peculiar shade. “I see.”
Vinyl searched through the contents of the desk carefully and methodically, skimming every book, flipping through every file, and making sure to check for hidden drawers. She found nothing.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. She found a great many things in those drawers, and it seemed incriminating. It was merely that she had no idea what any of it actually was. What use was a book on windigos in all this? Why did Minor have a whole book about some creature called ‘Entropy’ -- and who was that, anyway?
The only thing that Vinyl even remotely recognized was a slim, hoof-bound tome, little more than a teenager’s homemade zine, one that Starlight Glimmer herself had once made -- and later spent several years under Twilight’s tutelage trying to round up and destroy every known copy.
Vinyl flipped through it, carefully looking for anything that might have contributed to whatever might have disturbed Romana’s time senses. Again, nothing stood out to her -- not even Starlight’s actual spell for removing cutie marks was in here, only notes on the theory of it. Of course, it made sense -- why would a wannabe dictator write down the truth of their secret weapon where anypony could get their hooves on it?
Vinyl piled the pamphlet onto the stack of books she wanted to try and smuggle out of the house. Romana could probably make some sense of them, after all, and even if she couldn’t… well, it might delay Minor Key’s plans for a little while. She picked up the book stack in her magic and turned to leave.
There was somepony standing in the doorway. Vinyl froze, drinking the figure in. Her face was covered by a white mask of bone, rimmed at the edges with short, sharp spikes. She wore a deep grey skirt that hid her cutie mark. The only part of her that Vinyl could really see was her mane, which was a flaxen blonde. “Well, well,” the mare mused. “You certainly aren’t Minor Key.”
“...I’ll take that as a compliment,” Vinyl said, setting the books on the desk.
There was a flash of a grin beneath the bone, but it was gone just as quick. “Now. How did you come to be in my… associate’s… chambers, hm? Did you come in through the bathroom window? Walk up the cliffs overlooking the Sea of Green? Perhaps you took a long and winding road…”
Vinyl blinked. “Uh. It was the kitchen window, actually.”
The masked mare smirked. “Sorry. Inside jokes.”
“Uh… huh,” Vinyl said, watching the mare carefully.
“Now,” said the mare. “You’re in an interesting position, friend. I can’t actually cross this threshold, you see, so I can’t actually get in to kill you. By the same token, you can’t actually leave that room. A stalemate, if you like.”
“You’re going to kill me?” Vinyl repeated, her voice going up a few registers.
“Oh, certainly. It’s a cliche, I’m afraid, but you just know too much about what’s happening here.”
Vinyl snorted. “Lady, you got it all wrong. I don’t have a damn clue what any of this means. Actually, we’ve got time, why don’t you just explain it to me?”
The mare’s lip curled in contempt. “Please. I’m not that much of a two-bit villain.”
“You don’t actually know what’s going on, do you,” Vinyl said, starting to smile. “Minor’s warded this room against you -- he clearly doesn’t trust you, and all his books and shit are in here, not to mention…” she waved a hoof at the closet door. “That.”
“What?” the mare asked before she could stop herself. She quickly pursed her lips tight, but Vinyl had broken into a broad grin.
“You really don’t know what’s going on!” she said. “I bet that drives you nuts -- you seem like the kinda person who wants to be in charge all the time.”
“Does this have a point beyond riling me further?” the mare asked.
“Surprisingly,” Vinyl said, “yes. I’ll make you a deal, um…”
“Call me Rita, if you must.”
“Rita. I doubt I’m the thing in this room you want the most. I’ll give you all the information you want, and you let me leave in peace.”
Rita chewed that over. “I would be… amenable to that, yes.”
Vinyl breathed a sigh of relief. “Great. What do you want?”
Glancing around the room, Rita’s gaze eventually fell on the metal sheet Vinyl had rescued from the closet. “That,” she said, pointing. “Bring it here.”
“Alright,” Vinyl said, lifting the plate from the ground. “Keep your hooves where I can see ‘em.”
Rita sat neatly down and raised her hooves in the air. Vinyl looked her up and down, but saw no weapons. She made her way toward the door, never looking away from Rita. The mare’s eyes were shrouded in shadow behind the mask, but as Vinyl approached, she could see how her eyes kept flicking toward the threshold. The DJ slid the sheet of metal out, watching the floor as she did -- then quickly yanked her hoof back as a dark shape darted across the floor. There was a twanging sound, and Vinyl saw, to her horror, that there was a hole gouged deep in the wallpaper by the door. Slowly, the shadows shifted, and the shape of a hoof holding a knife twisted away from the wall. A shadow mare stepped out of the dark shadows of the hall itself, twirling its weapon with silent menace.
“You cheat,” Vinyl said, unable to keep the fear from her voice.
“As I said,” Rita said, picking up the sheet metal and pulling it away from the door. “You know too much to leave here alive. But I thank you for the lovely gift!”
Vinyl stepped back from the door and turned away, gathering up the books and papers she had been planning to leave with.
Rita arched an eyebrow. “You can’t still be thinking of getting away, can you? There is no other way out from this room, heavily warded as it is. That little trinket on your hoof will do nothing in here, nor can you simply teleport out. At least I will only kill you. You don’t want for Minor to put you back in that closet, do you?”
Vinyl shuddered. “I thought you didn’t know what was in there.”
“I don’t. But I doubt it’s pleasant, whatever it may be. Come here, it will be quick.”
Vinyl took in a deep breath, hefted the books, and bolted toward the exit -- though perhaps not the one that Rita had been expecting. In an instant, Vinyl was up and through the window and onto the roof beyond. The last thing Rita heard was the quickly fading cry of “Parkour!” before Vinyl was gone. She scowled at the window for a long minute, then shook her head. There would be other opportunities, she had no doubt. For now… she hefted the steel plate and parchment, thoughtful. For now, she had a recalcitrant agent to find.