Arrival
It was a pleasant, though chilly pre-dawn morning in Ponyville. WAS, being the operative word here. All of the sudden, a deep rumble and the sound of a single WUB from what must have been the world's most powerful bass amp woke up the neighborhood, followed shortly after by the sound of debris falling all over the place.
In the center of a crater that had just been her house, Vinyl Scratch stands, her electric blue hair standing straight up, her now shattered purple tinted glasses hanging off of her face, and her mouth agape. A moment passes before she grins and gives a shout of "THAT WAS BUCKING AWESOME!"
Another moment passes. It is then that the DJ looks around her and realizes her house had just become a hole. "Oh..OH...oh... damn." She says, her features losing the perkiness she'd had moments before as the reality of her situation sinks in.
Lights in the nearby houses start coming on one after another, tired, shocked, and angry stares (sometimes all at once!) quickly find the source of the disturbance.
It is in this moment, Vinyl Scratch finds herself feeling VERY small.
It was a very cold midnight in Austin, the temperature a far-too rare blessing for the Texas city. In the basement of a two-story building on the bad side of town, the home's sole resident is hard at work completing a diagram on the bare floor. The drawing itself is but only a single step in a very time-consuming ritual. Thankfully for him, Alan Ryves now has nothing but time.
First, a mixture of salt, sand, gold flakes, and alcohol (the last two easily obtained from the same bottles at a nearby liquor store) are to be spread around in a circle at the property to be affected.
Windows are to be shut and have a single broken link from a chain placed on the windowsil.
Near the center of the salty circle, at the lowest point, arranged at the points of a hexagon made of the same salt/sand/gold/alcohol mixture are placed the seed of a giant redwood, a sealed jar filled with tiny pieces of paper with jokes written on them, the hair of a dog, the feather of a parrot, the diamond from an old family heirloom, and lastly, a shard from a meteorite (which was easier to get than it seems at first. Meteorite hunters have been busy in Russia of late.) Dead center in the middle is a small pile of ash from the fireplace of a fallen building.
Having finished the arcane work, the young man responsible for this mess steps back, wiping the sweat from his brow while admiring his work. "There's no way this will work. My entire ass this book was written by Merlin." he says to the air, a slight edge of bitterness in his voice. "But I've got nothing left to lose."
The gas having been shut off the day before, the house was getting close to the outside temperatures of mid-October. Looking around the dim basement, the young man smiles sadly at the remnants of several generations of a family whittled away by age, bad decisions, and bad timing:
The black and white photographs of smiling people Alan has never met. Old sports equipment. Materials from unfinished home improvement projects. Unopened boxes of plastic model kits. A collection of worthless foreign money. A restored Harley-Davidson Model WLA. The accompanying sidecar for said motorcycle, still sporting some bullet holes and it's original paintjob. Still unboxed equipment from a DJ career that never got the chance to take off. A pile of welding equipment and half-finished projects. And even more things still in boxes awaiting shipment to a storage rental.
Sighing, Alan looks to the work ahead of him and shrugs his shoulders, as if shrugging off the last of his hesitation."Now, the last step," he says as he stands up slowly, a slight creaking noise coming from his right knee. He furrows his brow and takes a hobby knife from a nearby table, pausing with the blade hovering over his left index finger. Closing his eyes, he speaks as though addressing a large group of people.
"I, Alan Ryves, knock upon the door of eternity which leads to the land of Avalon. I come to you seeking refuge from a world that wishes to swallow me whole. I swear by all that is good, that I shall keep and uphold your laws. That my currency shall be kindness. That my body, when finally spent, shall be used to enrich your fields." He winces slightly as he draws a crimson line from his finger with the small blade. "And finally, that I show my devotion to this pact with an offering of my life blood."
Kneeling, Alan holds his bloodied finger over the pile of ash in the center of the hexagon. Sanguine tears mix with the pile, forming small balls of dark red mud. "I beg you to accept me as I am: weak, tired, and desperate."
There was absolute silence. No barking dogs, or singing night birds, or even the wail of a too-close police car's siren.
Silence.
Then, for the briefest of moments, a low rumble could be heard in the neighborhood. No-one awake witnessed the old two story house in east Austin, along with a dome of dirt from under the house, wink out of existence.
Vinyl Scratch was not having a good day.
Standing where her house/studio used to be located was now a deep crater of freshly-exposed earth, with a debris field of broken household nicknacks and audio equipment surrounding it. After a whole morning of apologizing to her neighbors for waking them up in the early morning and then collecting the small amount of her things which had survived her unsuccessful acoustics-enhancing spell, the ivory and electric blue colored mare was at a complete loss for what to do now.
Her entire life's work had been in the studio of her house, and all she had to show for it were a duct-taped headset, a mere hoof full of her records, some audio wires, and a single amp. Everything else had been too smashed up to use. Today was not a good day for DJ PON-3. Pinkie Pie had even stopped by to give the poor mare the biggest hug she could, but only succeeded in making Vinyl Scratch depressed AND blue in the face.
"I'm sorry, Pinks, but this isn't just going to go away for now. I promise I'll swing by that shindig you had planned for tonight, even if I don't exactly have the gear to spin tunes for you now."
"Pinkie promise?"
"Yup. Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye"
Satisfied with Vinyl's answer, Pinkie gives her one last short hug before beginning to trot off "Seeee youuu attheparty!" the strange pink mare says, the last part spoken at the speed of light as she zooms off to Celestia knows where.
Vinyl Scratch sighs, shivering slightly in the chill air as she looks over her cracked glasses in her hooves, her apple red eyes cast downward. Had she been looking up, she may have seen what happened next, for yet another rumble filled the air, shocking her out of her thoughts, and spooking the neighbors yet again. Vinyl looks on, mouth agape at the two-story house which now occupies the spot where her own humble home once stood.
Ponies from all around come outside to have a look at the source of the latest disturbance, many blinking and rubbing their eyes when they see the old dark red brick house that was definitely not there before, as if thinking it were some manner of illusion.
But it was real, and there was the very real sound of muffled cursing coming from the basement window.