One crisp fall day, the Apple Family had completed all of their main tasks for the day. Applejack sat on Granny Smith’s rocking chair on the front porch of her house, idly kicking her hooves and listening to some old country song on the record player.
She looked out across the landscape, noting all the tiny details of the lazy evening as she relaxed.
A few lightning bugs were buzzing around and the crickets in the grass were making their steady, high pitched chirp. The sun had just started to set, painting the sky with a beautiful gradient of purple and orange. The wind gently passed through the trees, gently rustling the leaves of their now apple-less branches, reminding Applejack of her successful day of hard work.
She sighed in contentment and leaned back in her chair, reaching for her mason jar of iced tea with her head and taking a sip through the straw. She savored the sweet taste of her drink, keeping it in her mouth for a few seconds before swallowing.
She didn’t get to end work days like this often, sitting and relaxing the way she was. But since she still needed to wait for Pinkie Pie to arrive to pick up the Cakes’ order of apples, she could sit on the porch and enjoy the off time with her music to unwind after a long day of hard work.
Her ear pricked at the sound of wheels rolling down the road toward the farm, likely Pinkie still towing the Cakes’ delivery cart, and pried herself off the chair with a small groan to go greet her last customer for the day.
“Just this last thing and I can listen to my music again”, she quietly thought aloud to herself.
AJ stopped as she saw Pinkie clearly as she approached; Pinkie was wearing a checkerboard pattern button-up shirt with the buttons undone, a black tie and a pair of sunglasses on her forehead, and was clumsily riding a skateboard down the dirt road, bumping into every tiny pebble and falling off more than a few times.
AJ just stood there, one eyebrow raised and her jaw hanging slack as Pinkie continued failing to ride a skateboard down a dirt path. Eventually, Pinkie did manage to get close enough to AJ for a proper greeting.
“Hi Applejack!” Pinkie chirped with more energy than usual, somehow, knocking Applejack out of her daze. “I’ve got the bits if you’ve got the apples!”
AJ stopped staring at Pinkie as a whole and made eye contact. “Huh? Oh, yeah, I’ve got the apples right here, sugarcube,” AJ lightly kicked at the bag of apples at her side with a forehoof. “but I have just got to ask you somethin’ before you go.”
Pinkie tried to deftly step off her skateboard, but instead almost tripped again as it rolled out under her hooves. “Sure! What’s up?”
AJ lightly shook her head and stopped looking at the skateboard that was now rolling back down the road that Pinkie came from. “I learned a long time ago not to ask questions about what you get up to darlin’, but what in Celestia’s name are you wearin’?”
Pinkie looked down at her own torso as if she had forgotten what she was wearing, causing her sunglasses to fall down over her eyes. She smiled as she looked back up at AJ, looking 20% cooler. “Oh! These are my ska clothes!”
AJ blinked again. Pinkie made her do that a lot, she noticed. “‘Ska clothes’? Alright, one more question: what the heck is ‘ska’?”
Pinkie gasped incredulously, putting a hoof over her chest and leaning backward a little. “You seriously don’t know what ska is? It’s only the greatest musical movement in Equestrian history!” Her eyebrows slanted and she started pacing back and forth. “All my life I’ve never been able to find any music that’s 100% me, y’know? Octavia Melody’s classical music is way too slow and bland, and DJ PON3’s dubstep was way too fast-paced and intense and bassy for me! But then, then I found the perfect genre of music for me! I was in the record store because I wasn’t doing anything in particular and I heard something interesting inside and I went to take a look because it sounded cool and it was so cool so I bought some records and listened to them and got these clothes and a skateboard and now I’m here!” She hopped toward AJ a little as she ended her ramble.
AJ lightly pushed Pinkie back to a comfortable distance and put her hoof on her shoulder. “That’s all well and good sugarcube, and I’m glad you found music you can relate to, but you never told me what ska is.”
“Oh yeah! Sorry, AJ!” Pinkie giggled at her own incontinuity. “Ok, so ska is like, kinda mellow; it’s got trombones, trumpets and saxophones a lot of the time, it’s got like, an off-beat bassline, and a synth that kinda sounds like an organ but, like, not exactly.”
“Uh-” Applejack tried to interject, but Pinkie kept on rambling.
“But I don’t listen to regular ska, I listen to a subgenre called ska-punk!” Pinkie was now walking in circles around Applejack as she talked. “Ska-punk is more high-energy than regular ska; the tempo’s usually faster and the guitars are more prominent! Ska-punk is also where the cool clothes I’m wearing come from!” Pinkie gestured toward herself and smiled, then stopped in front of AJ and gasped as she had an idea. “You should totally get into ska with me, AJ! It’s such a cool genre!”
“Hm. Well, from the way you described it, I don’t think it’s exactly my kind of music, sugarcube.”
Pinkie put on her best puppy dog eyes. “Aw, c’mon, AJ, you can’t say it’s not your kind of music if you haven’t even heard it! Give it a try! Here,” She produced a ska vinyl record out of nowhere. “At least give it a try, and if you don’t like it, that’s fine!”
“Hm. Yeah, you’re right. I’ll listen to it, see if I like it. Either way I’ll give this record back to ya next time I see ya.” AJ took the record from Pinkie, setting it on the porch behind her.
“Yess!” Pinkie dropped her bag of bits on the porch and threw the bag of apples onto her back. “Be sure to tell me what you think of it!” Pinkie turned around to get back on her skateboard, only to see it halfway back into town. “Whoopsie daisy!” She shrugged and started bouncing back the way she came. “La la la!”
AJ set the bag of bits on the floor next to the rocking chair, then removed her country music record and put it back in its sleeve. She sighed softly and took Pinkie’s ska vinyl out of its sleeve. “Hm. Maybe I will end up enjoin’ this. Probably not, though.”
AJ sat down in the rocking chair, put the ska vinyl in the record player, and dropped the needle.
Twilight loudly groaned and dropped her head onto her desk; she was trying very hard to finish up a report on her findings relating to a magical experiment she had done recently, but she couldn’t focus on the account of there being a cacophony of scraping, rolling and clattering noises in no particular order coming from outside.
She put her hooves over her ears and stared intently at her almost-finished report. She lowered the quill suspended in her magic toward the paper, willing herself to be able to concentrate despite the noise. This report was the culmination of weeks of work, after all.
After a few minutes of her quill hovering over her parchment, Twilight groaned again, more loudly this time, dropped her quill and went to go see what all the racket was.
She grumbled as she pushed the library’s door open and looked around to find whoever was making so much noise. She had suspected that Pinkie Pie or Rainbow Dash was messing around with a skateboard or something, so she was surprised to find Applejack, repeatedly failing at skateboarding and dressed in the strangest outfit: a black tie, a checkerboard pattern hoofband, sunglasses that rested on her forehead, and the weirdest part (for Applejack), several piercings on her ears.
Twilight blinked. “Um, hi there, Applejack, what are you-”
AJ abruptly turned around, almost falling off of her skateboard. “Pick it up!”
Twilight deadpanned. “Uh, what? Pick what up?”
AJ slowly shook her head and tutted. “It’s just an expression, Twi. I’m tellin’ you to pick up the beat.”
“W-what beat? What the heck are you talking about?”
“I’m bein’ metaphorical, Twi! I’m tryin’ to get you into ska!”
Twilight cocked her head. “What is ska— Wait, no, I don’t have time for this. Applejack, I’m trying to finish up a report that I’ve been working on for weeks, and your skateboarding has been making it impossible to focus. Could you please do it somewhere else?”
AJ then noticed that her left two legs were starting to move backwards, so she kicked her skateboard toward Twilight, bumping lightly against her forelegs. “Shoot, sugar, I didn’t mean to distract you, I was just tryin’ to get you into this cool genre of music Pinkie showed me.”
“No offense to Pinkie, but I don’t think that any music she’d recommend would be up my alley.” Twilight turned back toward the library and opened the door.
“Aw, c’mon, Twi! At least give it a shot!” AJ held a ska vinyl Twilight’s way. “If you don’t like it, that’s fine, but you can’t say it’s not ‘up your alley’ if you haven’t even tried it!”
“Mmm, I guess you’re right.” Twilight grabbed the vinyl out of AJ’s hoof. “I probably won’t like it, but I’ll give it a shot.” She waved to AJ and walked inside, back up the stairs and plopped herself at her desk.
She sighed as she took the vinyl out of its sleeve and put it on her record player. She set the needle on the record and picked her quill back up.
“Hm.” Twilight said to the room while bobbing her head to the beat. “Y’know, this isn’t half bad.”