Chapter 1:
The Soloist
Vinyl shivered. The basement was drafty, but she liked it. It was an old house, and so the foundation was made of stone walls set into the ground. It was on the main hill of Canterlot, although not in a particularly expensive neighborhood. But it was her house, and she was content with it. It did feel a bit lonely sometimes, though.
She stood up from her computer and flipped her mane over her shoulder. The basement had always been her special place, even when she had still lived here with her mother. It was the place she could be alone, the place where she could work on her music. Of course, it had changed since then. While the old Yamahoof Semi-Grand still sat against the far wall, it was covered in a layer of dust. She hadn't played it since her father left. Now the once barren walls were covered in a guitar and a few basses hanging from a rack, several midi cables, the table where her computer sat, and a large set of shelves filled with her old collection of LP's. The room was bathed in a ghostly light, courtesy of the lava lamp on the table, as though it were trying to crawl its way back to the carefree past it had once enjoyed. The studio was a bit cramped, but it was where she worked during the day, and for the most part, where she lived.
Vinyl looked back over at the piano. It was beautiful, in a poised sort of way; it almost reminded her of the Classical sculptures of olden ponies, regal and devoid of emotion. Tall and square bodied, its wood held a luster that was barely dulled by the dust. She remembered the feel of the ivory keys dancing under her hooves, the way that it had made her fall in love with music. And she remembered her father, hooves gliding over the keys, captivating her, showing her the beauty that the instrument could produce. He was the one who had inspired her to start playing, and it was he who had given her an introduction to the instrument. From then on, Vinyl had become inseparable from that piano.
As she had begun school, music teachers had seemed impressed by her talent. They had continually bumped her between different music programs, where she always concentrated her focus on jazz. There was something about jazz, smooth at some times, jarring the next; it was always so elegant, so perfect, that it had captivated her. So Vinyl made it her passion, and she was viewed by many as the next filly prodigy of piano.
Her father had left when she was in her first year of middle school. “I'll come back,” he had told her. She remembered their last embrace; she had been crying, and he had pulled her into a quick hug. “I promise,” he'd whispered in her ear. “Your mother and I... just need some time apart.”
He had never come back. Days came and went, and Vinyl grew more and more distant from her father; more and more distant from her beloved instrument. Her motivation dropped, and her energy sagged. Despite her continually bright and cheerful demeanor, she began to slowly sink out of friendships. Her mother cried more and more each night. Not soon after she had passed. Not soon after, she had passed; the doctors had whispered comforting words, muttering something about rheumatic fever. They told her that her Mother was too young to have passed, and spouted false words of regret for the family. Throughout the process Vinyl didn't shed a tear; she only allowed her emotion to escape her whenever she returned to her bed at the end of another day of dealing with constant reminders. Every night she cried herself softly to sleep.
She was still allowed to live in her parents' house, but under watch from a social worker until she was eighteen. A blithering old earth pony, he could barely recall her name the few times they had met over the years. She had assured him that she was getting along fine, and with that, she was mostly left alone.
It was ninth grade when Vinyl had finally quit piano, about the same time that she had finally admit to herself that her father was never going to come back. She still had a few friends, but she never allowed any of them to get particularly close to her. Vinyl developed a slight reputation for being cold, even haughty, from some of the upper class ponies. She had begun to hang around with other ponies who came from “bad neighborhoods.” Ponies who didn't ask questions, and whose ulterior motives were at least obvious. It was harder for her to navigate the social scene of fake-blonde manes who would lie straight to her face with a smile than to navigate ponies whose priorities lay exclusively in the categories of sex, drugs, or rock and roll.
She had gotten into Canterlot University on a musical scholarship, but she had ended up dropping out. Everything had become so insincere. There wasn't any integrity in music for her anymore. It was just another way to make money, not something that she could do for enjoyment. So she dropped out, and began to sell her talents with some of the new bands playing what they called "rock music." She had attained some amount of success, but she hadn't enjoyed that particularly either. There was only so much she could do with a guitar and a distortion pedal. So she began to experiment with her own styles.
To say she had a hoof in creating Dubstep would be an understatement. To say she singlehoofedly invented the genre would come closer to the truth. Ponies raved about her. She began taking on jobs as a DJ in a few nightclubs around, always going out in her large, round sunglasses, and her stage name, DJ-PON3. The glasses and the alias hid her from the world. From the musician she felt she could have been.
The truth was Vinyl had never really liked rock, and she liked dubstep even less. She still fondly listened to her old jazz LP's, and attended classical concerts regularly. But she could never bring herself to go back into the genre which her father- the stallion who had left her and never wrote her again- had introduced her to.
Coming out of her thoughts, Vinyl trotted over to the piano, overtaken with a sudden urge to look at the keys again. She reached out, towards the mahogany sheen across the curved key-guard. She remembered it fondly, from the days she had revered it, spending hours practicing in the dusty, mostly empty basement. But now it seemed strangely foreign to her, a childhood memory, or a dream even, which she could never attain, or even become enthused with the same zeal that had first moved her to play.
Her hoof was only inches from the latch on the key guard when her doorbell rang. Vinyl straightened up, grabbing her sunglasses off of the computer table. She could use a distraction right now, she decided. Like a nice, cold drink.
With that thought, she turned away from the lonely studio leaving her ruminations with it tucked neatly behind the piano.
- - -
Zephyrs of the warm summer breeze flew whimsically among the trees, shaking their leaves into shimmering tapestries of green, before darting off to buffet the tall towers of Canterlot Castle. Vinyl felt her spirits lift as she walked through the streets to the royal gardens, the low-hanging sun projecting its heat and dull, evening light across the city. Cloud had been right: she really did need to get out more.
It was this Stallion- Darnell Cloud- who had knocked on her door. He was an old friend from University, before she had dropped out, and one of the few that she still kept in touch with. These interactions, however, were mostly out of necessity; Cloud was the owner and manager of the largest record label in Canterlot, Raincloud Sounds, and he was constantly asking to Vinyl to promote new musicians he had signed by giving them airtime at the local clubs. Additionally, she had signed with Raincloud for the few dubstep tracks she had released.
That afternoon, Cloud had come to inquire whether Vinyl, having just released a new single, might celebrate with him. He told her that he had preemptively booked tickets for a concert: Octavia, the new cellist prodigy at Canterlot University, was giving a brief show on the lawns of the Canterlot gardens. Since she had been planning to see the concert anyway, Vinyl had agreed to join Cloud for the evening, and thus she was following Cloud over to the royal gardens.
Cloud was a tall pegasus, with a light brown coat. He constantly brushed his hoof through his mane when he was talking, so it always stuck out slightly over his forehead. Vinyl knew that many of her peers had found him quite attractive at university, but she had never really been able to see anything particularly extraordinary about Cloud aside from the rapid rate at which he went through marefriends. She supposed that was one reason that he still maintained contact with her: she was one of the few mares who didn’t fall head over hooves for him.
Trotting along beside Cloud was a dark red unicorn, whose eyes continually flicked back towards Vinyl with distrust. As Cloud’s marefriend of the week, she would be joining them for Octavia’s exposition. Vinyl, despite her best attempts to keep an open mind, had taken an immediate dislike to the mare; something about the smug expression permanently smeared onto the unicorn’s face rubbed her the wrong way.
As the trio approached the gardens, the crowds of ponies around them began to thicken. The exposition was, of course, free to the public; Cloud had reserved seats so that they would be close enough to the cellist to appreciate her concert. Indeed, as the three ponies walked underneath the arbor that marked the garden entrance, a patchwork quilt of grass and picnic blankets unfolded before them, stretching on up to the walls of the castle, next to which the cellist was tuning.
Squeezing between ponies, Vinyl took a moment to observe the cellist. She was grey, although Vinyl thought she could observe a faint brown tinge to her coat, and her black mane cascaded around her shoulders with the simple elegance of effortless beauty. Her shoulders were narrow, but still strong; Vinyl could see the muscles working as the cellist tuned, sending ripples down her coat. Vinyl stood watching the cellist, transfixed, for another moment, before another pony walked through her field of vision. Shaking her head, she followed Cloud and his marefriend to their seats.
The cellist straightened up, instantly hushing the dull roar of the crowd. She paused, as if savoring the warm summer silence, broken only by the rustle of the trees and occasional cricket chirping. Glancing briefly over her audience, Octavia brought the bow up to the strings, letting it rest there for a fraction of a second. And she began to play.
The piece started with a few long, somber tones, drawn out until they faded away into the heavy evening air. Slowly dying, each faded into the next, resonating through the cello’s body out over the silent crowd. The notes slowly began to climb, in pitch and in tempo, reaching a more moderate pace. The notes ran through smooth, legato winters in the minor, scaling up to a major scale for a staccato spring. The piece exuded a quality of life, superseding the moment and reaching forth into times yet to come, that was of a higher order than Vinyl had ever experienced. It sped up, continuing in a frenzied ascension along the highest string of the cello, which, upon reaching its zenith, dropped down to a low, powerful series of runs.
Listening to the performance, Vinyl felt captivated. The passion, the pure ecstasy obvious in the playing, was unlike anything she had heard since she had listened to her father play. It was the quality that music had lost for her. She remembered a time when she had felt that way playing, before University and its focus on the financial benefits and disadvantages of a musical career, or, in her teenage years, before her love for music had slowly ebbed away. She remembered, after her father left, her hours of practice to block out the tears, and also the sense that mundane life was slowly lapping at the defense and carrying its power away in the tide. Vinyl was seeing the dream, that dream which she’d once had, alive and well in a younger pony: not younger in years, but lacking the same age-inducing turmoil of Vinyl’s youth. The DJ felt connected to the cellist; she wanted the mare to succeed where she had failed herself.
Octavia dropped down into a low chord, sustaining it until it floated away on the wind before lifting the bow from the strings. The garden was quiet, each pony reflecting in their own thoughts, reveling in the beauteous music, and realizing that it had come to an end. Slowly at first, and then in a rush, the crowd erupted into applause, hooves pounding on the grass with thousands of dull thuds, creating a low, thunderous roar that resounded across the gardens. The cellist bowed quickly to the crowd before turning and beginning to unbuckle her case.
Glancing over, she saw Cloud disappearing between two ponies, heading towards the makeshift stage. His marefriend was nowhere in sight, since she had disappeared halfway through the concert with some mumbled excuse about needing to use the mare’s room; Vinyl slid off of her lawn chair and began to slip through the crowd after Cloud.
Slipping between two giggling schoolfillies, she caught sight of Cloud talking in a low voice with Octavia, still packing up her cello. She slipped closer, and Cloud turned to face her.
“The mare of the hour!” he exclaimed. “I was just telling Octavia about your newest success. That single is breaking Dubstep records for most copies sold. And the B-Side isn’t half bad either!”
Vinyl looked at the cellist, with her no nonsense mane and attire; she doubted that the earth pony even knew what dubstep was. She graciously accepted the compliment, but her heart wasn’t in it. She had just seen a pony following her own naïve dream from years ago, and succeeding at it; a pony who hadn’t sold out, who was still in the music industry for… well, the music part, not the industry. She could barely look the cellist in the eye.
“Yes,” the cellist granted Cloud. “I suppose this, erm... Dubtrot or whatever must be popular with less civilized audiences; however, I have a number of groups with somewhat higher distinctions of what defines music. I expected you to have showcased somepony with more experience in the field of classical, if not a similar genre.”
Vinyl gritted her teeth slightly at the earth pony’s derogatory remarks, but she kept her composure. It wouldn’t do to blow an opportunity this lucrative for Cloud.
“Well, Ms. Philarmonica, it might interest you to know that Ms. Scratch is somewhat more accomplished than simple beats. In fact, a few years ago, she was considered one of the most well renowned jazz pianists of the century.”
Cloud was, at heart, a salespony, and it was easily apparent in his collected manner. Vinyl had watched him calmly adapt to countless curveballs that potential customers had thrown at him with astounding ease and simplicity. He truly did live up to his recently acquired reputation as an ingenious business pony; Raincloud Sounds was one of the most profitable startups that Equestria had seen in recent history, breaking into a heavily locked market and becoming a respected name in only a few years. Vinyl did wish that he and Octavia would stop ignoring her though.
Octavia raised an eyebrow. Vinyl wondered whether the gesture was meant to indicate that Octavia accepted her as a legitimate musician, or if it was intended to question whether she could in fact play piano. She had never really cared about what other ponies thought of her, and as a result she was unpracticed at reading body language. She decided that she didn’t really care about Octavia’s opinion anyway, so it was a moot point.
“Well,” the cellist broke into the silence, “I don’t suppose that you could refer me to a pony that has signed with you, so I might discuss the merits of your label at a greater length?”
Cloud considered the question for a moment, a bemused smile playing around his lips. “Actually, I believe I already introduced you. Octavia, this is Vinyl; she’s had a good amount of experience with me, and won’t hesitate to tell you everything that I’ve ever done wrong. I doubt you could find a more suitable candidate anywhere.”
Octavia’s eyes raked back over him, as though she was looking for flaws in his argument. She lowered her gaze and fished something out of her pocket.
“Here.” She thrust the card at Vinyl; arching over the card, in spindly gold writing, read Octavia Philarmonica, Cellist. Underneath it contained an address- to a university dorm, the unicorn noticed- and a telephone number.
“If you would feel so inclined to discuss the label with me,” she said, throwing a condescending glance towards Vinyl, “you can call the number tomorrow in order to set up a more formal meeting.” Octavia snapped the final snap into place on her cello case and picked it up, sauntering back out the university entrance to the gardens.
Cloud chuckled. “It’s on your head now, Vinyl,” he laughed, leading her out of the garden. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”
Vinyl rolled her eyes at the pegasus, already two steps ahead of her towards the garden’s main exit. She could tell he had some sort of plan for getting Octavia to sign, but she couldn’t figure it out yet. Sighing, she turned to head back to the nightclub, as it was almost late enough. Sometimes other ponies just didn’t make sense.