1/14: Neither Hear Nor There (Suited for Success)
The beings on either side of the counter both wore glasses. That, to Soundwave’s relief, was practically the only thing they had in common.
Soundwave’s red-tinted corrective lenses stayed in place, while the other pony’s glasses continually slid down his muzzle. Soundwave’s pony body possessed perfect dentition. The other pony’s teeth had become misaligned at some point, which explained the trusswork that peeked out each time he spoke like railroad tracks on an icy tundra. Finally, some kind of chemical or possibly biological agent had left multiple bulging red spots scattered across the other pony’s otherwise brown-furred face.
All in all, Soundwave faced a specimen vastly inferior to any Decepticon, which made it all the more galling that this creature, this pony, was the only one in all Ponyville who bought and sold what few electronics this primitive society actually possessed.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Soundwave,” High Fidelity squeaked. “Your order didn’t come in on today’s train. The next train from Manehattan is due two days from now.”
Had Soundwave been of a more choleric personality- like, for example, Rumble or Frenzy or Megatron or Skywarp or, to do the math, 89.7% of the whole Decepticon armada- he might have chosen to take it out on the store clerk. But Soundwave had been of a patient temperament even before he became a Decepticon, in the ancient days before the Great War. He knew how to keep his frustrations reined in. It made their resolution all the sweeter when the time came.
Even so, the frustration didn’t go away. Any self-respecting electronics shop, even on that pitiful filthy mudhole Earth, kept spare parts and kits for constructing devices from scratch in stock. Yet here in Hi-Fi’s Hideaway, Ponyville’s record and music shop, electronics barely took up one wall of shelves, and spare parts were barely an afterthought. Most of the wares, like the wind-up gramophones and the trombone and, Primus help us, the banjos, plural, most of these were strictly mechanical, without even an electric amplifier.
Oh, yes, there were a few electronic devices. They were split roughly evenly between toys and musical tools. A couple of electric amplifiers and some primitive electric microphones made up most of the latter. There were a couple of tools- a voltometer, a small electric soldering iron- but they were crowded out by the Battery Operated Yippy Doggy and the Electric Tugboat That Makes Nine Nautical Noises. (Soundwave hadn’t decided which of the two toys annoyed him more when some foal or filly began playing with the samples. Either way, he would have derived great satisfaction from releasing his frustrations on their creators.)
The only reason Soundwave had even given the shop a second visit was High Fidelity’s wholesale order catalog. His main supplier, a firm in Equestria’s largest city, carried a lot more than what appeared on his shelves- including vacuum tubes, circuit boards, capacitors, resistors, transceiver kits, scientific equipment, and a broad array of testing tools. According to High Fidelity, Soundwave was the third of three Ponyvillians to place an order. That had been over a month ago, and “allow four to six weeks for processing” appeared to be an accurate, if not conservative, estimate.
None of that was High Fidelity’s fault, of course, but Soundwave didn’t feel inclined to let him off the hook. Servitors of whatever species instinctively sought to placate unhappy masters or customers, and Soundwave never missed an opportunity to extract bonus value from a mission. “delays: not unavoidable,” he said, watching Hi-Fi flinch at the sound of his unnatural voice. “disappointment: increasing.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Soundwave,” High Fidelity squeaked again. “Maybe you’d like to hear the newest records out of Manehattan? We just got in the newest Sapphire Shores album.”
Soundwave frowned at this. He’d dabbled with the musical offerings of this culture and found them mostly wanting. Sapphire Shores in particular felt primitive and uninteresting- vastly inferior to, for example, Countess Coloratura, whose own work had innovative sound but lacked complexity. He shook his head, declining the offer, and turned to go-
-only for the bells above the door to chime as a white unicorn with a two-tone electric blue mane walked in, head bobbing, odd sunglasses reflecting oily rainbows of distorted light as she stepped in out of the late-morning sun. Each limb seemed to spring in and out in the most unusual gait Soundwave had yet witnessed on this peculiar planet… but, he noted, every snap of a joint, every plant of a hoof on the floor, came in perfect tempo with all of the others, presumably from the headphones that rested snugly over her ears.
“Oh, good morning, Vinyl,” High Fidelity said, smiling broadly enough to show off three-quarters of his bracework. “I’m sorry, but your order didn’t come in today, either. I was just telling Mr. Soundwave here about it.”
The white unicorn frowned at the news. She reared up slightly, urgently tapping her left fetlock with her right forehoof.
“I know you’ve got a show tonight,” Hi-Fi said. “But all they shipped me this time was this week’s music releases. Speaking of, I’ve got your pull list ready for you, if you’d like to take care of that.”
The white unicorn let out a loud but unvoiced puff of air through her lips, cocking her head just so as to convey the idea of her eyes rolling under her shades. This done, she nodded her head, not with any great enthusiasm.
“All right,” Hi-Fi said, pulling a stack of records over from the table behind the counter. “Sapphire Shores’ latest, Hay Bale and the Sand Tones’ double-album, that collection of synthesizer tracks from OG Moo, and the debut album from Bachmare Turner Cattledrive.” After a pause, he added, “Oh, and also this classical album from the Minotaur Islands- a collection of works by Pachabull. I suppose that’s for Octavia?”
The unicorn nodded. Soundwave felt the now-familiar sensation of a unicorn activating her magic, and a small plastic packet of cello strings floated over to the counter to rest on top of the stack of records.
“Oh, of course,” Hi-Fi said. “Also, I bought out a collection from a guy over in Trottingham last week. Did you want to go through it before I put them out on the shelves?”
Soundwave decided to take his leave. He wasn’t going to get his parts order today, and he had no other business in the shop. “in two days; I return,” he said, nodding to the store clerk and the other customer as he stepped backwards towards the door.
The unicorn’s head jerked up at the sudden sound. Her horn lit up again, and one side of the earphones lifted to free up an ear-
-and Soundwave heard a mixture of sounds, three or four overlapping songs playing at once, a pony singing overlaying unreleated drum beats overlaying two competing synthesized harmonic lines. Underneath them all rode a bass sound both overwhelming and invisible, so perfectly synchronized to the other sounds that he could hear the resonance as a sine wave, a sine wave as clean and perfect as the two intertwined on either one of his flanks.
It was the closest thing Soundwave had heard to Cybertronean music for an age- even better than the leading-edge experimental music the humans had been dabbling with back on Earth.
Then the earphone dropped back into place, and the blend of music ceased. Or, rather, not: now that Soundwave knew what it was, he could just barely detect its sound leaking around the edges of the earphones.
The silence stretched to the point that even Soundwave felt awkward. Nodding his head again to the other two, he backed out of the shop door and departed.
But his mental processes orbited that white unicorn with the blue hair and tinted glasses like a comet around a sun. As he tried to put together some plan for the rest of his day, he kept coming back to her, only to try to force himself back out again onto some more logical, more productive path.
Like him, she’d ordered from Hi-Fi’s catalog, making her another of the three. (He’d already spotted the third- the eccentric scientist who made his living repairing clocks. As much as Soundwave wondered how an earth pony could repair gears and springs with hooves, some subconscious logic process had warned Soundwave that closer investigation of Time Turner was a very bad idea.)
The music she listened to had complexities that just didn’t exist in the other music these pony creatures favored- possibly because the pony creatures didn’t try listening to two or three tracks at once to find the synergies in the sound. The tracks he’d so briefly heard from her earphones all came from obviously different sources, but somehow they meshed perfectly, like the teeth of a transformation cog at the heart of a Transformer’s mechanical body.
And she’d known how to communicate without speaking a single word. Soundwave was still working on that. His monotone voice, with its nerve-jarring harmonics, startled and repelled ponies even more than it did his fellow Cybertroneans, but he had yet to figure out how to make himself understood nonverbally.
The mare literally fascinated him.
And he needed- he wanted- more data.
Fortunately, he knew exactly where to get it.
“Oh, it’s the robot.”
“Hello, Mr. Robot!”
“Would you be interested in some nasturtiums today?”
The three sisters who ran the flower shop represented the paradox of pony culture to Soundwave, all wrapped up in three flighty packages. The first time they’d met, they’d been terrified beyond logical thought. Now they didn’t even bat an eye when he walked over to them. Most other intelligent creatures of Soundwave’s experience would have remained cautious and suspicious of him. These sisters, these ponies, had taken him from alien invader to perfectly normal in a matter of days, and now he was just another regular customer.
Of course, he was still the Robot Disguised as a Pony to them. Soundwave hadn’t bothered to argue. Nobody else believed them, and it happened to be true, to a certain extent.
And besides, it was worth it to get open access to Ponyville’s most encyclopedic source of town gossip and rumor. When not scared out of their minds by whatever minor irritant caused the panic of the day, the three of them babbled like unmoderated chat sessions. Even taking into account the usual number of misunderstandings, misapprehensions, and misinformation in general, the three had proven to be almost as reliable a source of information as Laserbeak’s spying around town.
That was why he’d come here, today. “i seek information,” he said. “white unicorn; blue mane; sunglasses; loves music.”
“Oh, you mean Vinyl Scratch?” Lily asked. “I’m surprised you haven’t met her before! She’s really big into robots and technology and all that stuff.”
“You know she doesn’t like that name,” Roseluck said. “She wants to go by her stage name- DJ P0N-3.”
“But it’s such a stupid name!” Lily answered back. “It’s like a robot name from one of those bad kiddy serials at the matinee!”
“Every pony’s entitled to be called by the name they choose!” Daisy said. “Anyway, DJ P0N-3’s, well, a DJ. She mixes music at events. Makes all her own equipment.”
“Doesn’t she have a show tonight?” Roseluck asked.
“Yeah,” Daisy said. “She’s providing the music for Rarity’s fashion show. You know, the one she’s holding for the dresses she made for the Grand Galloping Gala?”
All three of the flower ponies sighed in discordant unison at the thought of the Gala.
“But I heard from Ditzy Doo, who got it from Aqua Blossom, who got it from Octavia,” Lily said, “that Vinyl’s equipment broke down. She might not be able to do her show tonight. And Ditzy said Aqua said Octavia said she’s been impossible to live with ever since it broke.”
“How would anybody tell?” Daisy asked. “I mean, the mare never talks. I mean, never talks. It’s not like she throws a screaming fit or makes horrible sarcastic remarks or anything like that.”
“You don’t have to talk to be a bad roommate,” Roseluck said. “To say nothing of a bad marefriend. I mean, look at Timey, for example-“
“pardon me,” Soundwave interjected, sensing a conversation about to drift away from the information he wanted. “never speaks; explanation required.”
“Oh, Vinyl?” Lily asked. “Nobody knows. She used to talk when we were all fillies, but ever since she got into music, she just sort of clammed up.”
“I heard there was this tragic accident with a gramophone,” Roseluck said. “She swallowed the gears trying to learn how to sing like the pony on the record. Now she’s got no voice.”
“That’s not how I heard it,” Daisy said. “I heard she was working on this electric music machine, and she got herself electrocuted by the system. The Pale Horse let her come back to life, but she had to give up her voice forever as a price. And if she ever says a word again, she’ll die on the spot!”
“Oh, how tragic!” Roseluck said.
“And I thought that she got caught one year on Nightmare Night, but Nightmare Moon was mostly full and only had room in her tummy to gobble up her voice.”
The other two looked at Lily. “Um,” Roseluck said, “you do know Nightmare Moon actually came back? And is Princess Luna now? And never actually gobbled anybody?”
Lily flinched. “Oh. Yeah.” Her ears flopped down in shame. “I guess I should update my story, huh?” She looked at Soundwave. “You know, maybe she’s been replaced by a robot in disguise like you, Mr. Robot. That might explain why you’re interested in her.”
Soundwave had heard enough. The factual data had been extracted; now there was nothing left but idle fiction. If he wanted to learn the truth, he’d have to get it, literally, from the horse’s mouth. “subject location: unknown,” he said. “request direction.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Lily said. “Vinyl and Octavia live in a house on the edge of town. Looks like two entirely different houses split in half and glued together. Can’t mistake it for anything else.”
“Just take this street out three blocks,” Daisy said, pointing in the direction away from the town hall. “Turn right at the big street lamp, and follow the street up the hill. It’s in the curve just before the street leaves town and becomes the Smoky Mountain Road.”
“assistance helpful,” Soundwave replied. “status: very grateful.”
“Oh, think nothing of it, Mr. Robot,” Lily said. “Just remember to treat us well when you crush all of Equestria under your metal heel.”
Soundwave didn’t answer. He saw no point in making a promise he had no intention of keeping.
The house was exactly as the flower trio had described it. Even the front door was split into mismatched halves. Soundwave knocked cautiously, lest it split apart and fall at his hooves.
The sound of a cello playing its repetitive eight-note motif ceased. After about twenty seconds, the door opened to reveal a gray earth pony with dark brown hair, wearing a collar and a small purple bow tie. She looked Soundwave up and down with a single flick of her eyes. “Vinyl? It’s for you,” she shouted, turning her back and leaving the door ajar.
Soundwave stepped in through the door. The bifurcated interior matched the exterior: prim and proper on the side where the earth pony was returning to her cello practice, wild and avant-garde on the side where that white unicorn, this time without her earphones, poked and prodded a screwdriver with obvious frustration into the interior of a large sound system.
“warning,” Soundwave said. “electrical current active; electrocution possible; caution required.”
The screwdriver dropped onto the floor with a clatter. The white unicorn- DJ P0N-3- lunged up onto her hooves, turning to look at her visitor. She raised a hoof up to lift her sunglasses out of the way, revealing blood-red irises underneath. “Oh, hey!” she said. “You’re that pony from the music store with the bitchin’ voice! How’s it goin’?”
It was Soundwave’s turn to stumble. “my voice; not disturbing?”
DJ P0N-3 shook her head, smiling. “S’cool, man. Better than mine, for sure.”
Soundwave didn’t think so. Her voice was a little deeper than most female ponies, but it still fell well within the socially acceptable range of “normal,” and thus would not automatically trigger a negative response. But the fact that she spoke at all… “audio communication,” he said. “information gathered; vocalization impossible.”
“Sh’yeah, a lotta people say that,” DJ P0N-3 said. “Ain’t it weird how stories get started? But really, you don’t get far in life if you can’t talk, right?”
Soundwave shook his head. “if vocalization possible: why do you not?”
DJ P0N-3 shrugged. “Isn’t it more fun to listen?”
Behind his visor, Soundwave blinked. “affirmative,” he said. Leaning down to the equipment, he spotted a scorch mark on one of the larger vacuum tubes. “circuit overloaded,” he said. “damage repairable.”
DJ P0N-3 shrugged and spread her hooves at the empty floor next to her. Obviously she didn’t have the replacement tubes.
Of course, replacing the tube would only patch the problem temporarily. “replacement relay: not required,” he said. “bypass possible; i will demonstrate.”
Without speaking, DJ P0N-3 levitated the screwdriver over to Soundwave. He extended his magic to take it, and of a moment he felt the two magics overlapping one another.
The synchronization approached unity.
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Yo I'll ship it.
I got as far as "Battery Operated Yippy Doggy" and started wondering, "Is he in Radio Shack?"
Careful Soundwave, you might start getting attached. And I think she's taken.
Soundwave and Vinyl Scratch... two beings that will always mesh well with each other. Doesn’t matter what type of relationship it is, they will always mesh. I did see one fic (an EQG one) where Soundwave was Vinyl’s father, which is my basis for my statement.
That may be the smartest thing you've ever said.
Ehehehe...
I friendship it.
10777468 In the 1980s the answer was an unequivocal yes. I can't speak to earlier days, but I suspect that was true since about the week after the company decided to be more than just a parts shop.
Soundwave's got a girlfriend~
10777584
Do you remember which fic that was? I'd like to read it
And Soundwave has a best pony now too, I see. Also possibly something else but we'll see.
Ah, so the Perception Filter is working, I see.
I dunno, one of the kind-of hilarious things about the recent Transformers/MLP crossover comic was that it turns out that Soundwave fully appreciates the Magic of Friendship, as do all of his casettes. He's still loyal to the Decepticons, of course, but he was also perfectly willing to hang out with Fluttershy for a day.
That's a good line, I like that line.
Such music they make together.
The funny part is that I've made Soundwave Vinyl's father in some settings. Especially human Vinyl. (How else would she get a car that turns into a portable sound stage?) But this ship works quite well.
)
(And only after I posted this did I notice the other comment about it. Whoops.
And I do love Soundwave not making that promise. The Flower Trio's time will come, and no amount of useful data will change that.
I like this it's cute in a way?
from
"Bachmare Turner Cattledrive"
With their most popular hits.
Fragile Mare.
Let it Gallop.
Takin Care of Bushels.
Soundwave may have a voice that's difficult for others, but he's quite decent for a Deception. Intelligent, not really possessed of most of the slightly bent mental constructs line the one Starscream calls a brain.
Eye twitch. It’s purple eyes ugh. Why oriole do that ?
Oh, the music these two will create... I can only read on.
And then Soundwave and Vinyl fused!
SoundScratch went on to defeat Majin Buu!
Great chapter.
So two Deceptions have found potencial love?
Hm... Who would be Megatron possible mate?