//------------------------------// // Chapter 1: Tempo Rubato // Story: Accelerando // by McPoodle //------------------------------// Accelerando Chapter 1: Tempo Rubato It started as an ordinary day. Clear weather as far as the eye could see. Birds and pegasi enjoying the clean spring air. Fillies and colts laughing and singing. But for Vinyl Scratch, this would be a day like no other. A day in which she would be tested...in more ways than one. ~ ~ ~ The white unicorn slowly opened her eyes from her mid-afternoon nap, focusing gradually on puffs of white which were drifting before her. She blinked rapidly several times, and then rubbed her eyes with the backs of her wrists. “I’m never going to get used to this,” she muttered to herself in a flat tone. Suddenly she sat up in shock. “Hello? Hello?! Great, I’ve traded my blindness for deafness.” Oh, that’s right—she’s so good at faking being able to see, that I forget sometimes. I suppose I should fix that...but then I’d have to keep track of everything she can’t see, and describe everything she picks up with her freaky super senses and...You know what? This time, Vinyl can see. A good story beats an accurate story every time, after all. Now where was I...? Oh yeah! A pony with a clipboard held in her wrist stepped into Vinyl’s sight just then, and waved at her. “Yes?” she said. The other pony tried to tell her something. “I’m sorry,” she replied, “but I can’t hear you, and I can’t read lips.” That’s odd, she thought to herself. Usually when the dream changes me, I get all the necessary skills to go along with it. The stagehoof mimed removing something from the top of her head with a look of annoyance. Reaching up, Vinyl was surprised to discover something indeed was on top of her head, so she removed it. The object turned out to be a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Immediately, the top of her head stopped feeling like it was being squeezed in a vice. “Oh,” she said sheepishly. “I suppose I should have noticed that.” “You’re on, Number Four!” the pegasus with the clipboard tucked under one wing repeated for the fourth time. “I’m...on?” Vinyl asked, looking around herself. She was standing on a plywood platform, in what she recognized as a dressing room of a concert hall. Since dressing rooms in most theaters were on the basement level, they tended to lack windows. This dressing room, on the other hoof, had a window. Looking outside, Vinyl saw a cloudy landscape. In fact, clouds were all she could see. Vinyl Scratch, a unicorn, was in Cloudsdale. With no trace of a cloud-walking spell in sight. Now I know this looks like a loser move on my part, but trust me: this is going to be awesome. She made a quick check just to be sure. Yup, still a unicorn, she concluded. And her cutie mark was apparently the one she expected to have as well. She saw no sheet music in her vicinity, but that didn’t really bother her. She’d been improvising before large crowds for years. If this was the worst she’d have to put up with, she didn’t think she’d have much of a problem. On her walk to the stage, Vinyl Scratch passed a sign: Best Young Musician Competition, 7015. Or the “BYMC”, as all of my musician friends used to call it. Oh wait, how old is she? Well I’m going to say that she’s young enough to qualify now. She can go ahead and thank me for the “Trough of Youth” treatment later. The unicorn smirked, probably in response. I thought I felt a little younger than usual, she realized. The first time I entered the BYMC, I was too intimidated to relax, and Octy blew my Maretoven out of the water. And then when I came back the next year with my own stuff, I was booed out of the theater for being too “modern”. I wonder what... Vinyl’s thoughts—whatever they were—were interrupted as she walked out onto the stage. As with everywhere she had been walking so far, she was supported by wooden platforms that had been hastily set up. Otherwise, she would have plummeted to her death, because this building—like most in this pegasus city—usually had clouds for floors. In front of her was a set of portable stadium seats, brought in because the usual ones for this building were made out of cloudstuff. The stand was built to support a couple dozen ponies, but was currently being used by at least a hundred, their every motion causing the thin plywood floor to bend and buckle. Twilight, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, Fluttershy and Applejack were there— —But not Rainbow Dash, realized Vinyl— —as well as Octavia, Vinyl’s uncle, her parents, and the rest of her humongous family, who all looked nearly identical to her. The BYMC was never held in Cloudsdale, for obvious safety reasons, thought Vinyl to herself. But this is Rainbow Dash’s dream, so she can break any rule she wants to. Speaking of which, I bet all of those clones are supposed to be the members of my family she never met. “I’m ashamed of you for a really stupid reason!” one of them exclaimed. “You’ll never be as good as your sisters!” the patriarch of the clones added. Yup, she concluded, definitely my family. Wait, since when did I have siblings? Dominating the stage before her was a piano. Vinyl smiled in triumph at seeing her instrument of choice, confident that she would ace this competition. Those hopes plunged through the floor and fell a couple thousand pony-heights to the surface of Equestria, however, on reading the sign hung above the piano: SIGHT-READING ROUND That meant, for those ponies lucky enough never to have endured this unique form of torture, that Vinyl would not be free to play whatever she wanted, but instead had to perform whatever sheet music the judges had selected. Music she was expected never to have heard or played before in her entire life. This explained why she had been forced to wear headphones earlier, so she couldn’t find out early the piece every participant of the competition would be required to play. From the look developing on her face, I’m thinking she hates sight-reading rounds the same as every other musical pony. Well, being blind she was probably exempt from them, but she had to have been there to witness the epic meltdowns that always resulted. I mean, I’ve seen ponies that were geniuses at improv and learning a song by ear turning into nervous wrecks because some sadistic pony had put up “Chopsticks” with one note transposed up a third on the repeat. The music academy was full of stories of broken students who had been expelled for attacking the judges during sight-reading, or else attempting to turn the piano into matchsticks. Yeah, I know a little more about music than I like to let on. You’ve got a problem with that? Trust me, I’ve got my reasons for playing dumb. Being formerly blind, Vinyl had one more reason to be terrified at that moment. RD, please remember to give me sight-reading ability! she pleaded silently. “Woo! Go, Vinyl!” Pinkie exclaimed, waving a foam eighth note in the air. Vinyl Scratch approached the piano. Sitting atop the music stand was this monstrosity, the Revolutionary Etude by Chopping the Dragon: Vinyl stared at the page, the color draining out of her face. The good news was that Vinyl could read sheet music. As for the bad news, her newfound ability made her absolutely certain that... This music was unplayable. There was even a notation at the top: Ala draco. That meant “in the dragon style”. As in “requires fingers for playing”. The tempo of the piece was absurd, there was that huge “NO MAGIC” stamp at the top of every single page to block her only work-around, and it was littered with chords. Chords, in case you didn’t know, are the arch-enemy of every pony piano player. With only two hooves to work with, chords of up to four notes at a time are played in sustained arpeggio. This meant first positioning a couple of special sliders on the piano to indicate what part of the keyboard the chord was—all pony pianos came with these. Next, the performer would press the sustain pedal down. And finally, the player would rapidly alternate back and forth, between playing a chord note, then a melody note, then another chord note, then the next melody note, then back to a chord note, and so on and so on. Holding that sustain pedal down would cause every note played within the slider range to blend together, creating the chord. The obvious downside of this technique is that a pony is forced to play three to six times more notes than a dragon performer on the same piano, and as a result, a pony’s maximum speed is reduced to just a third to a sixth of their speed on a string or wind instrument. Vinyl glared out at the pony judges sitting at the front of the audience. She could almost see their fangs when they smiled, the bloody carnivores. Slowly, she sat down at the bench. She looked down in defeat at her two hooves, and with a sigh raised them above the keys. “Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick!” beat an insistent metronome at the judge’s desk. That was the cherry on the insult sundae. “Excuse me,” she addressed her tormenters with a fierce tone. “Chopping’s etudes are meant to be played rubato.” By which she meant to say that the player was supposed to vary the speed of the piece as they played to emphasize the emotional content. The ticking instrument of torture was silenced. “Thank you.” With what looked like a quick prayer to her muse, she began to play. By Celestia, this is awful! Vinyl thought, as she plodded through the opening measures. The poor dragon composer of this piece was probably rolling in his grave. Although, considering everypony who had preceded her through this monstrosity, he was probably turning so fast that he was boring a hole straight to the center of the planet by now. After a couple minutes of this, Vinyl Scratch noticed something odd. This wasn’t tiring her. The rapid hops from high notes back down to low, maintaining the chords and the runs, managing the pedals and the sustain sliders, she should have been sweating under the hot lights, but this was all absurdly easy to her. Maybe she could dare to go faster. And so she did. Her forelegs accelerated into blurs, and still she didn’t feel fatigued, although she did notice that her vision had gained a faint red tint. “Yyaaaayyy, Vviiiiiinnyyyyllll!” shouted Pinkie. Vinyl turned her head in confusion (although still managing to keep up the unbelievable speed). The ponies watching her performance were going nuts cheering for her, bouncing up and down in their seats, but they were doing it in slow motion. Even the judges, staring at her in slack-jawed amazement, were blinking about once per second, to her perception. Vinyl looked back at her hooves in amazement. How am I doing this? she almost certainly asked herself. Then, if she’s anything like me (heh), she decided to let Twilight figure that out, and sped herself up even more, finally matching the blistering tempo set by the composer. As she did so, her vision became even more red-tinted than before. A thick blurry ring of darkness began to form around the piano... Just then there was a long sickening crack, as the raucous audience caused the temporary floor beneath them to snap to pieces. With a drawn-out scream, the audience of earth and unicorn ponies began to fall, but thanks to whatever Vinyl was doing, it was happening in slow motion. The pegasi hovering in the air looked down in horror, with everything happening too fast—from their point of view—for them to react in time. Vinyl turned to get up, hoping to use this strange slowing phenomenon to help her save these ponies. But the moment she stopped playing, the red tint and black ring disappeared, and the world snapped back to normal speed. She jumped back in her seat, and resumed playing, even faster than Chopping intended. As the platform collapsed, Pinkie Pie instantly knew what to do. “I do?” she asked the ceiling. “Does this mean I get to be a main character? Or maybe I can be the sidekick! I love being the sidekick!” Um...on second thought, let me try that again. As the platform collapsed, Fluttershy instantly knew what to do. (“Aawwwwwwww,” said Pinkie with a slow-motion pout.) “Vinyl!” the hovering Fluttershy shouted. “Play faster! Play faster!” Vinyl’s vision was getting so red that it was getting hard to read the music. The sounds of other ponies had slowed to the point where they sounded like they were speaking a different language, and their screams from falling were ten times more tortuous to hear having them stretched out like this. But Fluttershy’s words sounded completely normal to Vinyl. Well, normal in speed. They were far too authoritative to belong to the pony she knew. Concentrating part of her mind on her playing, Vinyl snuck a glance over at Fluttershy. She was surprised to see that the pegasus was moving at a normal rate, and was free of the red glow that covered everything else. On the more disturbing side, her cutie mark was three bumblebees instead of three butterflies, and her eyes were blood red. Those eyes seemed to pull the unicorn in towards them, like they were independent living things with lives and...appetites totally foreign to the gentle pony. Vinyl quickly looked away from those eyes, and did as she was told. Faster, and faster still she pushed the speed of her playing. From what she could hear, it sounded like Fluttershy was doing what she couldn’t, taking advantage of the slowing of the world to save as many ponies as possible. But they were falling too fast, and she seemed even weaker than normal. “There’s...there’s too much momentum!” she exclaimed. “I can’t move them!” “Faster...” Vinyl said under her breath, pushing the song to its utter limit. She had reached the end of the song and looped back to the beginning five or six times by now. She pushed just a little bit more... ...And Time stopped entirely. She looked around herself in wonder, still playing. Despite the red glow, the playhouse gained an ethereal beauty, as dust motes and individual tufts of light sparkled around her. Their texture resembled that of Celestia’s mane. (Something the last dream had made her very familiar with.) “How about now?” she shouted to Fluttershy. She heard a few frustrated sounds from the space beneath the busted floor, followed by a sob. “It’s no use!” Fluttershy exclaimed. “The momentum is just too great.” Vinyl grinned as an impossible idea came to her. “Well what if I go even faster?” she asked. “What?” Fluttershy asked in a panic. “Wait, don’t do it!” But it was too late. Vinyl accelerated her playing to another level of speed, and the notes started coming out sounding like an audio experiment run amok. The dust motes began to float upwards, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The red tint changed to blue, becoming deeper in color the faster she worked into the past. From the corner of her eye, she saw ponies beginning to float back into view. The stand rebuilt itself, followed by the flawed flooring. The judge ponies were frowning—from their point of view, she was playing the notes in the wrong order. Among the ponies affected by the reversal was Fluttershy, her motions comically accelerated compared to everypony else. With everything restored to normal, Vinyl slowed back down to “stop speed”. “What did you do?!” Fluttershy asked insistently. “I think I just reversed time,” Vinyl replied. “NEVER DO THAT!” the pegasus screamed. “It was either that or watch all of our friends die!” the unicorn insisted. Fluttershy sighed. Her red eyes were really beginning to creep Vinyl out. “Alright, I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “Keep playing.” “Aye aye, Captain,” Vinyl joked. Fluttershy flew around the platform, inspecting it carefully. Shaking her head sadly, she said, “No good. I’ll have to rig something to catch them. Do you think you can keep this up for a few minutes?” The fatigue of doing the absolute impossible for nearly a half hour of subjective time was finally beginning to wear on the performing pony. “Yeah,” she said between pants, “but make it snappy!” Fluttershy flew out of the back of the concert hall. A seeming eternity passed, and then she returned. “Okay, let ‘er rip!” “Finally!” Vinyl exclaimed. She started the piece over from the beginning, at the tempo that she calculated would sound just perfect to the slowed pony audience. For some reason (heh again), this calculation came naturally to her, like she had done it many times before. The black ring from earlier reformed and grew darker and darker, eventually resolving itself into a jostling band of living musical notes. In the audience, Fluttershy had surrendered herself to the flow of time, and her eyes were their normal color once again. Played at this speed, Vinyl found the piece to be almost too easy. She was playing four chord notes now for every one of the sixteenth notes that anypony else could hear. Moments before the song was to end, the floor beneath the audience broke, and they fell out of sight, screaming in terror. But then Vinyl heard that screaming turn to gasps of surprise, as they landed in the large net that Fluttershy had set up earlier. Vinyl finished the song, and raised her hooves into the air. This was a sort of signal to the ring of notes around her, which suddenly whooshed out, expanding at a phenomenal rate. The ring passed through the walls of the hall, causing them to shake like a lightning bolt had struck, and accompanied by a deep booming sound. “You did it!” exclaimed the voice of an uncharacteristically excited Octavia from the hole in the floor. “A Visual Music-boom!” “That’s...that’s not supposed to exist!” exclaimed the voice of one of the judges. He was flat on his back in the net, and unable to deny the evidence of his senses. “...Too much rubato,” clucked the voice of a second judge, desperate to find any reason not to give Vinyl a perfect score. Whoa, I just realized! “Rubato” means “stolen time” in...whatever language it is that they write those music terms in. That absolutely perfect! From now on, Vinyl’s alter ego in this story is going to be “Rubato” instead of that dumb name I was gonna use. Wait, “Rubato”? Or “Rubata”? “Definitely the first one,” said Pinkie Pie. “‘Rubata’ sounds too much like ‘Rutabaga’.” OK, that makes sense. Vinyl meanwhile was coming to a similar revelation about “rubato” and its Bitalian meaning. That’s what I just did, she realized. That’s what I am: a time thief! “What happened?” Vinyl heard Twilight Sparkle’s voice asking in awe. “I know, right?” asked the voice of a prone Pinkie Pie. “I had no idea that she had such a freakish knowledge of music! To think, I could have had her helping me on my musical numbers all this time!” Um...she was talking about Vinyl, right? Anyway, Vinyl’s friends all recognized that boom as being identical to the strange event that had changed all their lives ten years earlier. None of whose lives had changed more than Fluttershy’s.