Chapter One: Disturber of the Peace
The town of Ponyville was quiet. The birds were just beginning to wake up as the sun lazily crested the horizon, spilling its golden light over the countryside as Princess Celestia brought forth yet another day in the land of Equestria. Here and there rabbits and squirrels ran along the lush, green grass and the countless leaves littering the ground, as they chased each other, looking for food and giving their morning greetings after a good nights sleep. However, not every creature, or more accurately everypony, had enjoyed a restful night. This became apparent when a loud blast of white noise issued out of one particular house, startling the birds roosting in the nearby trees into flight, and causing them to squawk in discontent and move from the source of the offending sound, the home of the pegasus pony, Audio Shock. The sound ceased as quickly as it had started, and was replaced by a cry of despair.
“Oh, COME ON, NOT AGAIN!” Audio complained from his seat on the floor in front of his low sitting desk. He looked at the blown out speakers to his right and left. It had taken him forever to earn the bits needed to get his hooves on them, and not something he particularly liked to make a habit of breaking. Despite his best efforts, though, he had already managed to blowout one pair earlier that year. He groaned again, slightly dazed, and ears still ringing from the sudden and unexpected blast of volume. When the thin wisps of light gray smoke began emerging from the now lifeless speakers, Audio dropped his forehead down onto the desk in front of him with a resounding *thump!* and muttered an inaudible complaint once again, the sound muffled by the desk.
Audio sat like that for a few minutes, holding the back of his head in his hooves. Finally, he lifted his head, and ran a hoof through his black and electric blue mane and sighed exasperatedly.
Audio stood up and went to the closet on the other side of the semi-lit room and pulled a box containing a spare set of the quad speakers. Even though the speakers themselves were fairly expensive, he always bought extras in case something unfortunate, such as this, happened. It looked like his habit of erring on the side of caution in cases like this had served him well yet again. He stood back for a second, admiring his studio. The room was semi-lit, the light being muted by the dark walls, giving the room an overall relaxing feel . The desk itself was built in such a manner that it had ‘arms’ extending at 120 degree angles from the sides that were the same width as the main section. A triple set of mixing tables, one on the main section of the desk leaving the other two flanking it on either side.
About eight inches of desk space was available for the hundreds of notes strewn about the work area. Mostly about little tricks he’d learned or developed by himself, others about random little quips that he’d noticed while working, all organized in a clusterbomb that only Audio really understood, and that would probably cause Twilight Sparkle to have a seizure. A pair of monitors hooked up to his computer sat directly behind the center mixing table. Audio’s computer was rather impressive, and quite expensive. The entire system had been custom built, and cost a small fortune to obtain, but after busting his flank for a few years, he had earned enough to pay for it in full, and has since nearly regained its worth by fulfilling various contracts, and doing a few shows himself. Audio was quickly becoming a big name on the music scene in Equestria and his editing software was some of the best in the world. Thanks to the custom computer, Audio was able to run several versions of his music editing software, his music library, his personal database of sampled music and sounds continuously without compromising the speed of the system.
While he didn’t often produce his own music, he occasionally traveled around showing off his own work, but his primary focus was doing studio work for other artists, mixing their tracks, and sharpening up the quality. Boosting highs, and lows for killer bass lines, and vicious leads. Recently he had been contracted by Vinyl Scratch, quite possibly the most famous DJ in Equestria, to use his equipment and expertise to step up her game that much more, not that it really needed a step up. The several shows that he had been to in the past had always had the same results, Vinyl effortlessly controlling the crowds and assaulting them with an endless barrage of bass and wubs for hours on end. He could only ever hope to be as good a DJ as she was. Audio could still barely believe that she had personally asked him to do work on her music, the day that she had shown up on his doorstep while he was in the studio, mixing a few of his own tracks after just finishing up a previous contract had been a day when his heart had quite nearly stopped beating.
The reverse side of such work, though, was a general lack of sleep, which was the culprit of the recent speaker blowout. Over the course of the last couple days Audio hadn’t been sleeping at all. In his state of unnoticed mental fatigue, he had accidentally put the volume to the max output instead of moving the balance all the way right.
“Guess that’ll teach me…” Audio mumbled, sleepily tossing a glance at the clock. It had been 3 days since he’d slept last, no wonder he was so tired. He often lost track of time while he was working, immersing himself completely in the constant flow of music, electronic and otherwise. In fact he was surprised sometimes, that his neighbors didn’t get worried and check on him from time to time, as occasionally he’d disappear for weeks on end inside that studio of his, coming out only to eat and relieve himself. Though now that he was aware of how little sleep he had gotten recently, he was on the verge of passing out standing up, his vision blurring and then coming back into focus on several occasions.
The pegasus finished unhooking and removing the broken speakers from their current spots, and moved them into the closet to work on later, thinking he could perhaps salvage them somehow. Audio left it at that and left the functioning spares in the box. He planned on setting them up later, but for now his thoughts were dominated by climbing into his warm bed, and passing out. Walking over to the computer, he locked the system. Audio dragged his tired flank to the door that led out of the studio, and into his living room. As he left the studio, he looked out the large picture window at the town as it began to wake up. Audio laughed quietly to himself, as he was heading to bed, the outside world was just waking up.
Audio wearily walked through his living room, too exhausted to pay much attention to the large collection of colorful band posters and various other memorabilia. Nothing, not even the autographed Wonderbolt uniform, which hung in a glass case along the far wall, and had been a gift from the team’s captain after his marefriend, Cloudtamer, had taken him to see them the day he retired from the Royal Guard, had elicited even a cursory glance from him, until he passed the hoof-signed Vinyl Scratch record in a little frame of its own. Audio stopped for a moment and looked at the record. Ever since that performance last month, when he'd been elevated from fan to business partner, the giddy fanboy joy never quite left. Also ignored as he resumed slowly making his way through the room, was the coffee table covered in neatly stacked piles of CDs, and another clusterbomb of notes. Most of the discs were of the electronic variety, but there were also a few piles of classical cases that he's picked up after last year's Gala.
Attending the event dressed up in his old guard uniform, decorated with the silver veteran V’s and the dull silver wings of the Darkwatch had been interesting enough, but being around all the posh nonsense and frills that night must have made him prone to picking up something that he used to think was stuffy and boring. Since he had really started listening to it, he found himself strangely captivated by the genre, especially when it came to piano and strings. Yet more CDs filled the cabinet in the corner, its glass doors offering a view of the hundreds of multicolored cases that lay therein, all ready to be slotted into the stereo on top.
Audio walked around the corner and down the hall to his room, casting his vision into the kitchen as he did so, noting the dirty dishes in the sink that he’d neglected to attend to. Putting it on his mental list of things to do, he continued down the hallway to his bedroom. Audio’s room, like the living room, was decorated with brightly colored memorabilia of several bands, and highly organized, save for a few select sections that he never really bothered cleaning up because he was constantly using them for his other areas of interest. He pulled off his military style outfit and neatly folded it and set it on the dresser on the far side of the room. Next to the dresser was clothes hamper halfway full of previously worn outfits and workout clothes. Even though his time in the Guard was over, he saw no reason to not maintain his excellent physical condition. On the opposite side of the dresser, there was an empty space the he planned on filling with a small set of shelves, and then a desk that had several open books covering a wide selection of subject matter were scattered about its surface.
Music had always been his talent, but it wasn’t the only thing that he was interested in or looked over in his spare time. Topics such as history and writing also found themselves subject to Audio’s scrutiny, although he was never quite as good at writing much of anything else besides music. Audio surveyed the room again, nodding in sleepy content, happy with the way the room looked at the moment. His bed had never before looked quite so comfortable as it did when he approached its inviting warmth. Audio clambered clumsily onto the soft mattress, nearly losing control of his motor skills as his body began shutting down before he was even under the blanket. The tired pegasus slipped between the comforter and sheets, curling up while covering himself completely, leaving no part of himself exposed to the outside world. Within a few moments of closing his eyes, Audio was passed out cold, his breathing settling into a rhythmic cycle indicating a lapse directly into a deep sleep. All hope was lost, at this point, for anyone wishing to visit the pegasus, for there was nothing short of a sonic rainboom that would draw the pegasus out of his deep sleep.