//------------------------------// // 2. Vinyl Scratch // Story: A Kingdom Divided // by Samey90 //------------------------------// There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Joseph Heller, Catch 22 A chair hit the wall, splintering into pieces of wood that scattered onto the floor among other bits of garbage. For a moment Vinyl stared at the gash it left on the dull white surface, making some quick calculations. She then took another sip from the bottle in front of her, and levitated another chair sending it flying into the wall. This one seemed a bit more solid: only one leg snapped, while the rest of it fell to the ground intact. Vinyl smirked and tried to lift the table, but her levitation spell failed. She shrugged, drank the rest of vodka from her bottle, and threw it out the window (the pane was already smashed by the TV, which had left the room in much the same way two or three days ago). “Aaargh! I’m gonna stick this bottle up your ass so deep that ponies will start to ask why your eyes are so glassy, you fuck!” shouted somepony outside. “Good luck with that one, loser!” she shouted back. She knew she was safe. The bat-like guards didn’t let anypony into the Manehattan hotel. Too bad they also didn’t let anypony outside. At least they weren’t checking what the imprisoned guests were doing in their rooms. This had its good and bad sides. The good side was that they left Vinyl the impressive collection of alcohols she acquired after her Nightmare Night show, just a few hours before the civil war was officially declared. They didn’t disturb her when she threw the TV outside the window, or when she tried to light her bed on fire (fortunately, it was nonflammable because the first thing she’d done after being put in house arrest was disable the fire alarm). She had also smashed all the chairs against the wall, and carved the big, inch-deep graffiti on the opposite wall, saying “I’M THE BEST PRINCESS, AND THE REST CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES”. She was quite proud of it; it took her a whole day of work. Several smaller scribbles, about making love instead of war, or making love to war, surrounded it. The bad side was that the pony living near her, a young, sensible poet who couldn’t stand being locked in his room for the whole day, threw a hairdryer (which he had borrowed from Vinyl) into the bathtub while taking a bath. It broke the electricity in the hotel for two days and spoiled Vinyl’s mood for one day which she later spent drinking and contemplating the fragility of a pony’s life, instead of just drinking. She was just thinking about some things, which were important in her current state; who’d win the war, when they’d release her from the hotel, which wall would be the best to paint a picture of Octavia on it, and if it was safe to use a chair’s leg to pleasure herself, when the door opened and two black unicorns in Moon Army uniforms came in, wincing at the makeover she’d made. “Sweet Luna…” said one of them, “What’s that smell?” “No need to call me sweet,” she said. “Well, the food in the fridge rotted when that poet decided to go south and the power went out. Also, this stuff the mattress is made of smells terrible when burned, and, if I were you, I wouldn’t touch this bottle in the corner. I had an emergency and one of your fellow buckers didn’t want to let me go to the little filly’s room in the middle of the night.” The guard groaned with disgust, while his companion was carefully observing the scribbles on the wall, probably looking for any sign of offence against Princess Luna. “I guess it’s just your way of coping with imprisonment, Ms. Scratch,” he deadpanned. “We came here to announce to you that our intelligence said that, definitely, you’re too dumb to be an agent in Princess Celestia’s secret service, and you’re now allowed to leave this place.” “Great. I was running out of vodka and started to have quite explicit dreams about my marefriend. Where can I catch a train to Canterlot?” Both soldiers smirked. “There are no trains to Canterlot. There’s a front line between Manehattan and the capital,” explained the one with a better sense of smell. “Crap. I knew there was a catch.” “We wish you good luck, Ms. Scratch. We hope that you’ll enjoy your stay in Manehattan,” the other soldier said and they both left. Vinyl sighed and decided to clean the room a bit before leaving. She simply threw all the empty and not-so-empty bottles scattered around through the window. She had no idea what happened to the trash bin. It was somehow connected to the moment when she was told that she couldn’t leave the hotel, and a fit of creative anger that ensued later. She shoved the remnants of the chairs under her bed, and covered the burnt part of the mattress with a dirty blanket. For a moment she thought about the chair’s leg, but then she noticed some nasty-looking splinters and tossed it aside. Leaving the room, she tried to lock the door, only to find that the lock was literally torn out of it. She shrugged and left the hotel, leaving the key to another team of soldiers who were pretending to be receptionists. They didn’t even thank her, too busy shooting nervous glances around, acting as if they were expecting Princess Celestia coming to punish them at any moment. Most of the shops were closed, their show windows boarded, and the whole street was a bit dark, courtesy of Princesses playing with celestial bodies. She had no watch, so it was difficult for her to tell the hour. After about twenty minutes of wandering around the shady neighbourhood, she eventually found the shop she was looking for. She bought a bottle of beer - she knew that a hangover after four days of binge drinking would hit her sooner or later, but she wanted to delay it for at least few hours - and some cigarettes from a scared salespony, reluctant to let her in unless she showed him that she was unarmed. She then lit a cigarette and headed to the pub where her last gig had taken place. The pub was also closed, so she raised her hoof and banged against the door. Nopony replied. She banged louder, causing the metal door to ring, but again without results. She sighed, drank her beer in one go, smashed a bottle against a nearby wall, and began focusing the bits of magical energy scattered around her body. The spell fired loudly, obliterating the door. Several soldiers ran down the streets shouting something about attack. Lighting another cigarette with her magic, Vinyl entered the pub. “Bootleg? Where the hell are you?” she called, tripping over the pieces of furniture invisible in the darkness. “Here,” she heard a weak, raspy voice from behind the counter. “Bootleg? What have they done to you?” she asked, rushing to him. “They threatened to commandeer all my alcohol, so I decided to hide it…” he hiccuped. “In your own system, you friggin’ drunk?” She shook him brutally. “Where’s my equipment?” “What equipment?” “Turntables, speakers… I left them here after the show, four days ago if you don’t remember!” “Aah, those. Stolen.” “Stolen? Bootleg, you impossible plonker, you have… had a metal door here three inches thick! How the actual fuck did you let somepony steal my equipment?” “I don’t know… It’s all blurry here…” he explained. “Blurry? Your arse will be blurry after I’m finished with you…” Vinyl shouted. “I spent four days locked in some friggin’ dirty hotel, without my turntables, cigarettes, books, TV, unfucked beyond belief, and you’re telling me that you let somepony steal my equipment?” “Ask the Moon Army. They’re in charge of enforcing law in the town now,” he explained. “Enforcing, my flank…” she muttered, and began pouring a torrent of abuse and accusations on poor Bootleg, not even noticing that the pub’s owner fell asleep halfway through. When she eventually ran out of profanities, she lit yet another cigarette and quickly searched through the shelves behind the bar, taking a small bottle of applejack “in case of an emergency”. She then left the pub, deciding to go to the Moon Army headquarters. To be precise, there was no such thing as a headquarters in Manehattan. Instead, the officers were working on the fourth floor of the grim-looking, concrete city hall. Vinyl had to use the stairs, as the lift wasn’t working (shortage of electricity, caused by Celestia’s forces attacking the power plant, as the janitor explained to Vinyl). There was only one office open, and she promptly came in. “Good morning, sir,” she said to the bald, pale yellow pony in a dark blue uniform sitting behind the desk. Behind him, a large map of Equestria was hanging on the wall with blue and yellow pins tacked to it. A large, red pin was placed on Cloudsdale. “Well, good evening, actually, Ms…” “Scratch. Vinyl Scratch,” she said, noticing the uninterested look of the pony in front of her. “I won’t take much of your time. I just want to leave this town and not disturb you while you’re fighting a war, and I wanted to ask one thing: would you be so kind as to give me a lift?” “A lift?” he looked at her carefully. Vinyl suddenly realized, that her toothbrush had gone missing during the “artistic” period of her stay in the hotel room, and that her breath now smelled of combination of old cheese and vodka. “Ya know… You have all those airships and stuff, and ya fly to bomb Canterlot all the time, so why don’t you, like, give me a ride, and parachute me over south Canterlot...” A yellow pony, whose name was Road Ahead, was a major in Equestrian Army before his compassion to the working class ponies caused him to switch sides, and twenty years of military life had imprinted itself in his brain permanently. All he heard from Vinyl’s speech was “airships” and “bomb Canterlot”. “So, you want to enlist, right?” he asked. “Enlist? By Discord’s beard, no!” “It’s the only way to fly the airships,” Major Road Ahead explained. Suddenly, a great idea came to Vinyl’s mind. “Ok, I want to enlist,” she said, “but only if you let me–” “Great!” He interrupted her. “Good to see such an example of patriotism!” “Yeah, I’m amazed myself,” she deadpanned. Like many ponies who had spent their whole childhood on the streets in those parts of Canterlot (which are not usually depicted on postcards), she considered the law as a tall pole: she couldn’t jump above it, but she could easily trot around it. “What do I have to do to enroll?” she asked. Major Ahead took a form from the drawer of his desk. “What’s your full name and birthdate?” he asked. “Vinyl Agatha Scratch,” she said. “Born November 2nd, 980 years after Luna’s banishment.” When she said that she noticed that the second day of her involuntary stay in the hotel was her 25th birthday. “Occupation?” “Musician. Hey, maybe you’ll make me a part of the orchestra?” “Any previous military experience?” “No, unless you count the fact that I used to wear a griffon uniform when I was a teenage punk.” From the look of his face she could clearly see that Major Ahead failed to notice any of her remarks that were beyond his form and military training he had received. “Ok… so, Private. Or aircraftsmare, as they call it in Air Force. What’s your blood type?” “Alco… err… no idea.” “Don’t worry, there’s a doctor next door, you’ll have it checked, Private.” She nodded. The Major gave her some more papers, which she read carefully before signing them. Then she went to a doctor’s office. The doctor was an old, gray-maned unicorn with moustache. “Did you have any infectious diseases?” he asked. “Many, when I was a kid. Living in a cardboard box for six months isn’t well for one’s health.” He wrote in the form something that looked like “good physical condition”, and took three small bottles and a strange-looking plastic device from the cupboard. He poured some fluid from each of the bottles to the separate wells on a plastic plate and asked her to lift her forehoof. He then levitated a device to it. “Hey, doc? You do realize that I’m scared of… ouch!” she hissed when he used his magic to push the button on one end of the device. The needle protruded from the other side, puncturing her skin. The doctor collected some drops of her blood and poured them into the wells of a plate. In the first one nothing happened, but in the other two the blood clotted almost immediately. “B Rh+ then,” he said casually. Vinyl then trotted to the barber (“Touch my mane and surgeons will teach their students about you!”). Then she visited some shady old pony with glasses who, using a machine, which looked like an offspring of a typewriter and a steam engine, made a dog tag for her. She looked at it, reading her name and blood type. “Keep it,” the pony said. “When they find it near your body they’ll know what to write on a tombstone.” “Umm… thanks?” she replied. After accomplishing all the formalities, Vinyl was finally transported to the military base near the Manehattan airport. There were several hangars with airships there, as well as smaller buildings for the crewmen. The whole place was surrounded by a metal fence with barbed wire on top. She was welcomed by a tall pegasus in his thirties, who introduced himself simply as Sergeant. “What’s yer name, Private?” he asked, shouting loudly. “Vinyl Scratch… sir.” “What’s your attachment, Private Scratch?” “I don’t know… I wanted to play some music to entertain soldiers, but my equipment was stolen…” “Don’t worry, Private, we’ll find ya some equipment, and ya’ll play for those solar scumbags, so they’ll remember it even in Tartarus!” He led her to the armory and gave her a pair of large, dark blue saddlebags. “We call it ‘the starter kit’, Private,” he explained. “There are two uniforms, coat, helmet, spoon, fork, knife, bowl, revolver, toothbrush, and goggles in there.” “Hmm, that’s not exactly the equipment I thought about…” she said. “Don’t worry, the heavy machine gun is mounted on a turret in the airship, Private Scratch. You wouldn’t believe how few ponies want to be gunners…” “I still don’t follow, sir…” “You said yourself that you want to ‘play some music’! That’s what the gunners do!” “Oh… ok. May I ask you a question, sir?” “Sure, Private!” “If somepony… hypothetically… tried to leave the airport or abandon the flying airship… Would there be any consequences?” “Of course!” Sergeant grinned widely. “Going AWOL is punishable by death! But I know that such a patriotic pony like you wouldn’t do such a thing…” “Yeah, exactly.” She nodded quickly, taking the equipment and going to her room. As there were very few female soldiers, she didn’t have to share it with anypony. Two beds, a table and two chairs were all the furniture inside. The dull white walls reminded her of the hotel room she’d left only few hours ago. She unpacked all the stuff, carefully taking the bullets out of the revolver and, to increase safety, put the gun and ammo in separate corners of the room. She laid on a bed, staring at the ceiling while thinking about Octavia. The cellist was probably worrying herself to death in Canterlot, but she hoped that she’d meet her soon. Then she thought about the Sergeant who, while showing her the base, mentioned something about the battle drill that would start tomorrow at 6 AM. According to him “they had no time for a full training”. She’d only get some shooting lessons, one or two test flights, before being sent on her first mission in a few days. Searching through her belongings she found the small bottle of applejack she’d taken from the pub and put it in the pocket of her uniform. She thought this time tomorrow she’d probably be three miles above the ground in a wooden gondola attached to a balloon filled with hydrogen, learning how to become cannon fodder for armed-to-the-teeth pegasi. “Oh shit…” she whispered upon that realization.