Played on Strings

by Sixes_And_Sevens

Fixing a Hole

Early the next morning, Romana and Vinyl made their way up Anderschwelle Road, pulling a cart stacked high with luggage behind them. “Alright,” Romana said, munching on a danish she’d snagged from the continental breakfast in the lobby. “Here’s the plan. I’m going to deliver these suitcases at the front of the house, while you slip in through the back and investigate the house.”

Vinyl waited for a moment. “That’s it?” she asked. “That’s your whole plan? Are you gonna, like, also come in and help me look around?”

“Unfortunately not,” Romana said, looking genuinely apologetic. “I need to get back to the TARDIS and try to make some sense of the readings.”

“...What readings are those?” Vinyl asked.

Romana grinned. “The ones I’m going to take as I drop off the luggage, of course.”

Catching sight of Vinyl’s discomforted look, Romana hastily added, “Of course, I wouldn’t send you in without an escape plan.” From her mane, she produced a thin brass watch. “This is a one-time-use vortex manipulator,” she explained. “I’ve already programmed in the TARDIS as the destination. Just pull that little knob on the side, and you’ll be back to safety before you can say ‘Rassilon was a dickhead’.”

“Oh. Alright,” Vinyl said, strapping the watch around her forehoof. “Cool, I guess. It still seems risky for me to go in alone.”

“I’d be lying if I said this won’t be a dangerous situation,” Romana said. “But I have confidence in you.”

When Vinyl made no reply, Romana playfully bumped her side. “C’mon. If nothing else, do it for Octavia, hey?”

“Listen,” Vinyl said, stopping in the middle of the street.

Romana paused as well, tilting her head. “I… don’t hear anything?”

“Exactly,” Vinyl whispered. “We’re in the middle of the street, just about the time when ponies should be going off to work or school or whatever, and we haven’t seen or heard any other creature on this road that I can remember.”

Romana paused. “That is… odd,” she agreed. She glanced around, then hurried up the path to one of the houses. She rung the doorbell. At least, she tried. It seemed to have broken, so she knocked instead. There was no reply.

Romana hastened across the yard to the next house and repeated the process. She tried again and again at five different houses, without a single response. All of their doorbells had been silenced. “Curiouser and curiouser,” Romana mused, pulling out her sonic pick and scanning the doorbell.

“Hey,” Vinyl said. “Look at this.”

Romana turned to see the other unicorn studying an anthill. Vinyl lit her horn and poked at the hill, gently at first, but with increasing force. No reply came from within. Finally, she just smashed the thing open, spilling dirt and thousands of little dead insects across the lawn.

Romana realized her mouth was hanging open. “I see,” she said quietly. “This bears… consideration.”

“Yeah,” Vinyl said. She hesitated. “Hey. Those houses. Do you think…”

“Whatever happened here, I suspect it occurred quite some time ago,” Romana said, looking at the peeling paint of the street. She peered in one of the windows. “Quite some time indeed,” she said, taking in the layers of dust that covered the room within.

She turned to see Vinyl looking at her with undisguised concern. “Vinyl, please. There really isn’t any other way.”

Vinyl took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, alright. Let’s get going.”

---

They parted ways a few houses before their destination, Vinyl skirting through abandoned backyards to help conceal her from watching eyes. Romana, meanwhile, made for the front porch of the old house. She made her way up the steps, leaving the luggage on the sidewalk for the moment. She tried the bell first, but like every other one on this street, it seemed to have broken. Instead, she rapped hard on the door, though even that sounded oddly muted. There was a long pause before she heard the faint sound of hooves coming toward her.

Please don’t be Octavia, she thought. Anypony but Octavia, and I’m fine.

The door creaked open, and Romana found herself face to face with an old, pale-coated stallion. He regarded her with suspicion. “May I help you?” he asked.

Romana arched an eyebrow at him. “You’d be Minor Key, I presume.”

“...I am. Who wants to know?”

Romana thought quickly. “...Minty. Minty Fresh. I was sent from the hotel to drop off these bags for your houseguests.”

Minor looked at the cart behind her and made a faint noise of recognition. “Very good. I will take the luggage to them.”

“I’m going to need to take the cart back,” Romana pointed out. “I can help you unload them into the house…?”

Key looked rather displeased at that, but reluctantly trotted back from the door as Romana started to levitate the luggage in. As she did so, she also quietly activated her sonic pick to start scanning for various types of energy and technology.

“You aren’t from around here, are you?” he asked after a moment.

Romana hummed. “What gave it away?”

“It was either that or you drew the short straw to come here,” Key said. “Most in the town prefer to leave this street alone.”

“But not you?” Romana asked.

“No,” Key said. “I have lived in this house for as long as I can remember. Part of… You could say that part of my soul is invested in it.” He attempted to smile, but it merely looked like he was baring his teeth.

Romana nodded slowly. “I see,” she said, switching off her sonic with her magic. She lifted the last of the bags into the foyer. “Well, I suppose that’s all. Good day, Mr. Key.”

She turned to go.

“Wait,” said Key, and Romana froze. Did he suspect her of something?

She turned, and found him holding a small stack of bits. “Your tip,” he said. “For coming out all this way.”

“Ah. Yes. Thank you.” Romana took the money and nodded to him politely before starting to push the cart away once more, speeding up as the stallion closed the door.

She was halfway down the road when she realized that she was sprinting and she had no earthly idea why. Some muffled, chilly terror had lodged in her heart, and she didn’t know how or why. Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to slow to a canter. She was a Time Lady, after all. She refused to let herself be cowed by a terror that she couldn’t even sense. She would get back to the hotel and the TARDIS at her own pace, no matter what that gnawing sense of dread said to the contrary.

---

Vinyl was feeling more than a tad rattled herself. The distant roar of waves crashing against the shore far below the cliffs would normally have been calming, but here and now they felt wrong in a way that she couldn’t quite put her hoof on. She didn’t feel like diverting the precious mental energy away from this weird heist scenario toward figuring it out, either. She felt vaguely nauseous about the whole thing.

She pushed those feelings down deep as she approached the backside of the house. Licking her lips, Vinyl looked at the first window she came across. It had been years since the last time she’d tried to break in anywhere, since the time in high school she’d tried to scope out an abandoned warehouse for a rave. That particular adventure had ended with seven stitches on her barrel, plus a tetanus shot and getting grounded for three weeks.

Still, breaking and entering was like pulling a cart, right? Once you learned how to do it, you never forgot. Vinyl tugged at the window. It was latched from the inside, but that wasn’t much of a deterrent against unicorns. It was the work of a moment to telekinetically unlatch and raise the pane.

She hauled herself through the window and found herself standing on a kitchen counter. It looked, at first glance, to be nearly as abandoned as the rest of the street, with outdated furnishings and all manner of disarray lying on the floor. But no. There was no dust in this room, certainly not to the degree that she had seen through the neighbors’ windows. Somepony had been here recently.

Closing and re-latching the window behind her, Vinyl leapt to the floor, wincing instinctively at the clatter she knew her hooves would make on the tile floor. But the sound was once again muted and uncomfortable in her ears.

However unnerving the strange way sound carried in this place, it did at least have its uses in sneaking around. On the other hoof, Vinyl also figured she wouldn’t be able to hear any creature coming up behind her until it was too late. She nibbled her lower lip for a moment, thinking. Then she brightened and started rifling through the cabinets until she found the aluminum foil and some clear tape.

Removing her sunglasses, she carefully ripped a couple of small piece of foil off the roll. Being careful not to wrinkle them, she taped them to the inside of her shades, shiny-side out. She lifted them back onto her face, adjusting them carefully on her muzzle until she was satisfied with her jerry-rigged rear-view mirrors.

Somewhat reassured by this precaution, Vinyl warily made her way out into the hallway and deeper into the house.

---

Octavia woke up the next morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. That was the first clue that something was wrong. She had just been out drinking late last night, hadn’t she? She fancied herself quite good at not letting alcohol affect her, but she felt certain that she should be feeling less like a daisy and more like pushing them up.

She cast her mind back to last night. What had happened? She and the others had gone out to a bar -- perhaps neither the friendliest nor the most salubrious of establishments, but a bar nonetheless -- and then they had come home.

And in between, they’d --

They’d…

Octavia was still, the memory of strange music running through her head, dissociated from any other stimuli. There had been… a party? A dance? Something more?

Of course, it was now that the headache kicked in, and with a vengeance. She let out a long groan of pain, clutching at her temples.

“Good mornin’ to you, too,” said a voice from the door. Octavia looked up to see Beauty Brass looking back at her. The mare’s complexion was fresh and rosy, but her expression was decidedly haunted.

“Beauty,” Octavia muttered. “What the Tartarus hap--”

“C’mon,” Beauty said shortly. “The lads are out getting breakfast -- the kitchen looked like a bomb went off or something. Once that’s done, we’re rehearsing.”

“Does my input enter into this at any point?” Octavia asked, pushing herself up. “How are we going to rehearse, anyway? All our instruments are still at the hotel.”

Beauty shook her head once. “They arrived just this morning, with the rest of our kit. C’mon, then.”

Just like that, she was gone. Octavia merely sat in her bed for a long moment. Apparently, they weren’t talking about last night, then. Well. That was…

Her head pulsed again and she winced. Fine. That was fine.

She rose on unsteady hooves and poked her head into the hallway. Sure enough, her cello and luggage lay on the floor outside her room. She hastily unzipped one pouch of the largest suitcase and pulled out her bottle of aspirin, popping a couple into her mouth in hopes of reducing the severity of the headache. Deep down, though, she suspected it was pointless. The pounding in her skull was nothing that medicine could touch.

---

Breakfast was a sullen affair. Harpo and Fred had brought back scrambled eggs and hotcakes from Jenny’s -- the restaurant of choice for the morning after a night you’d rather forget. Although, ‘choice’ was probably the wrong word for it. It was just where you ended up, alongside the haggard and weary former partygoers and recently de-transformed hengstwolves and all-nighter grad students, all in a silent truce to not acknowledge any of the others.

It had, Fred said in the few sentences he’d spoken since returning, been rather more crowded than usual. The others had glared at him dourly, and he spoke no further.

The meal was bland and unpleasant. Octavia ate mechanically, letting the marionette of her body act out its scene. They sat at the table for nearly an hour, staring with glazed eyes at their empty plates before Harpo spoke.

“Rehearsal,” he said, his voice unfamiliar on his thick tongue. “We should…”

The chairs scraped back across the linoleum and the four musicians staggered from the room, heading to gather up their instruments.

---

Vinyl hurried through the house, trying to go as fast as she could without making too much noise. The strange muting effect helped with the latter aspect, of course, but even with her rear-view shades, Vinyl couldn’t help but feel a mounting sense of paranoia as she went through one room after the next looking for… looking for…

Well, fuck, what was she supposed to be looking for? Some big golden magic lute? A room full of weird technology, like the TARDIS control room? She just hoped it wasn’t a grimoire, because Minor Key had way too many of those to go through.

Vinyl shook her head. No, she decided. If there was some weird power in this house that could control her friends and silence the world, it wouldn’t be hidden on a shelf with a billion other books. Minor would probably need to access it a lot, right? It would need to be somewhere special, somewhere he could get at it easily.

She finished with the ground floor far sooner than she would have expected. For all the house’s apparent size, it didn’t have that many rooms. The whole place felt weirdly claustrophobic.

There was only one staircase that she could find that led to the next floor, and it stood in the foyer of the house. It was a grand old thing, with two bisecting flights of stairs leading up from the ground floor to connect on the second, before turning into a wider staircase that led from the second floor to the third. The whole thing was, unfortunately, totally visible from all three floors. Vinyl skulked in the shadows of the foyer for several minutes before she finally decided to risk it. She bolted up the stairs, all pretense at creeping gone. It didn’t matter. The musty old carpet, which was once probably red, swallowed the thud of her hooves, until they sounded like nothing more than a distant knocking, inaudible unless you were really listening for them.

She reached the top of the stairwell and slid into the shadows of a nearby hallway on the righthoof side of the stairwell. She felt her heart thudding against her chest, but even the rushing of her own blood sounded distant to her ears. “Fuck this place,” she said with feeling, though her voice sounded like it was coming through wads of cotton.

And then she heard a noise from further down the hall. That alone was so shocking that she nearly choked on her own spit. It was a clear tone, the sharpest and clearest thing she’d heard since setting hoof on this street. And, she realized as it went on, more noises joining it, it was familiar. It was the warm, rich tone of a cello. Then, a harp. Then, a piano. Then, a horn.

It was the same music that she’d heard dozens of times before, one of the Krikkits’ favorite warmup melodies. She blinked in the sudden light and realized that without meaning to, she’d started wandering down the hall toward the source of the music.

She stifled a yelp and all but dove into the nearest darkened room, her heart pounding once again. What had she been thinking? Romana had said that their presence here was meant to be secret, and she had just been stumbling through the house without a thought in her head!

Taking a deep breath in, Vinyl tried to regain her bearings. Well, at least she knew where the band was. She’d save this floor for later.

Vinyl peered back out into the gloomy corridor once more. It looked clear, and she quickly hurried back the way she had come. She peered around the corner again, only to see a figure descending the staircase.

Turning tail, she pelted back to the room she had just been hiding in and hid behind the door, laying flat on the ground. She pulled off her sunglasses so that she could see more clearly, and peered out under the gap at the bottom of the door.

After several harrowing moments, she saw a set of hooves pass her by, pale in the dim, sickly light of the house. She waited several seconds more before daring to rise and peer out into the hall directly. The stallion, an elderly and pale pony that she could only suppose to be Key himself, continued down the hall, apparently totally unaware of her presence. For a moment, the rather hysterical thought flashed through her head that he looked very clean for some kind of evil time mage. She watched him as he stopped in front of a door and stared at it for several seconds. Then, haltingly, he lowered his head and peered through its keyhole, transfixed.

“Creepy way to watch a gig for free, but alright,” Vinyl muttered. Then, the thought struck her. If he had come down from the third floor to listen to the music, then he might have been interrupted in the middle of whatever he was working on. And if he was going to be occupied down here for the next several minutes…

Vinyl looked hard at Minor to ensure that he was really that fascinated by the performance, and then she snuck back down the hall toward the staircase, keeping close to the wall and its shadows.

---

Vinyl had been quite correct in her train of reasoning. Only a short few minutes ago, Minor Key had been in his study, poring over grimoires and diagrams and sheet music. Occasionally, he would stop and paw at his coat, peering at the skin beneath as though to confirm that it was still there, before scrawling ever more details onto a complex diagram. After several minutes of this, he sat back in his chair and studied what he had drawn.

It looked like some strange form of deconstructed sheet music, with staves contorted into weird circles and twisted shapes, and notes that dotted the piece in patterns that seemed to be incomprehensible at first glance. As one looked further, however, it became slowly more readable.

Minor caught himself humming along quietly and bit his tongue sharply enough to draw blood. He breathed out softly and returned to studying the diagram. Eventually, he nodded, seemingly satisfied, and reached for the quill once more. With a deft hoof, he scrawled one last sigil into the center of the complex musical mandala.

Setting aside the quill and inkwell, Minor Key produced some tape and a square of steel plating from a drawer and affixed the paper to the metal. With one last brief, satisfied look to ensure that the sides were all flush, he rose from his desk and opened the closet on the other side of the room, quickly thrust the diagram in, and slammed the door shut. He watched it intently for several long seconds before he finally relaxed.

“That should be done by morning, I think,” he mused to himself. “Which means, I suppose, that I have all the rest of today to rehearse.”

With a sigh of contentment, he pulled down a case from the top of a bookcase. He flipped all three latches, one after the next making a harsh click as they snapped open.

Minor smiled as he opened the lid. Inside lay a delicate violin and bow, both pure white aside from the dark red strings and horsehair black as night.

He lifted the instrument to his chin with practiced ease. For a moment, he considered the effect that his music could have on his unwanted guests, then remembered that he really didn’t care. As long as they were alive, Rita could scarcely say anything.

Minor Keys lifted the bow and reverently laid it on the strings. He inhaled.

Then he froze, as a set of strings that decidedly were not his own came echoing through the house. Then more instruments joined in, harmonizing and rebounding off one another. For several moments, Minor just stood there, shaking. Snapping out of it, he replaced the instrument and bow in their case and hurried from the room, not waiting even to close anything behind him. He rushed down the stairs. The music felt familiar, painful and glorious and comparable only to one thing. He approached, the music becoming clearer and brighter with every step closer he came, swirling around his ribcage like a swarm of bees. The power was as terrifying as it was alluring, and Minor pressed on until he was at the final door.

It took all of his will not to throw open the door and drink it all in. But no. That would be… indiscreet. Instead, he crouched at the keyhole and stared through, mesmerized. The Krikkits were glowing.

Spectral golden forms swathed them, lighting their faces as they played, illuminating the slowly-growing smiles that they shared with one another. It was awesome to see. It was agony to be excluded. But for now, it was enough to be the audience.

The bees were stinging him from the inside, painful and unfamiliar emotions welling within him. Minor wept, unable and unwilling to leave. Not yet. Not now that he had found the replacement for his stolen soul.

---

Vinyl hastened up the stairs and glanced around. There was one hallway leading further back into the manor, and a few doors along the landing. One of those latter doors was hanging open. Vinyl peered around the corner. “Oh,” she said aloud, straightening up. “Yeah, this place looks haunted as shit.”

By her count, there were around seven weird old books lying open, with more on the shelves that lined the room, bumping shoulders with still more esoteric bric-a-brac and trinkets. Weirder still, sheets of parchment hung from the ceiling on strings, twisting and spinning slowly by some invisible force.

Rather more subtle, Vinyl glanced down at the threshold and saw that the floor was inscribed with some kind of runes. Warding magic had never been a specialty of hers, but she could recognize it when she saw it. Carefully, she lifted one hoof over the line, readying herself to use her emergency escape button at the first sign of danger.

She set her hoof down. Nothing happened, which she felt was a little anticlimactic.

“Alright,” she muttered, stepping back. “I can’t hear anyone coming, and I won’t be able to see them, either. Time to get creative.”

She trotted back to the stairwell and lit her horn, swiping it in a straight line -- a trick she’d picked up from her good friend Neon Lights, justly famous in the game for his gratuitous use of special effects.

The barest hint of magenta fizzled in the air, a spiderweb strand of magic at chest-height for an average pony. The instant anypony broke the tripwire, Vinyl would know about it.

Satisfied with her precautions, she hurried back into the study. “Alright, fucker,” she said. “Let’s see what you’ve been looking at.”

Unfortunately, she couldn’t find much -- at least, not much that she could realistically put together into a coherent narrative. Three of the books were on the properties of crystal, one on the history of the Crystal Empire, two on something called ‘psychic vampires’ of which changelings seemed to be a subspecies, and one that was just a very dry old book of musical theory. Key’s interest in crystal seemed to extend further -- many of the weird talismans and trinkets around the room were made of the stuff, all of them colorless and transparent. The ones not made of crystal, however, were made of another unusual material.

“Bone,” Vinyl muttered, running a hoof over a strange, spiralling horn. “Crystal and bone. I don’t get it. What kind of pony is so obsessed with this stuff that he makes a violin out of it?”

None of it made sense. The research, the sheet music, the bones, none of it seemed to add up to any kind of coherent evil plan. Maybe Minor was just a serial killer with a couple of weirdly specific hobbies?

Then, something clicked in Vinyl’s head. Specifically, the tripwire she’d laid in the hallway. “Oh, shit,” she muttered. “Alright, goodbye forever, creep.”

She pulled the knob on her watch, readying herself for the sudden gut-punch feeling of teleportation. It didn’t come. “Oh, what the fuck?” Vinyl whispered. “Romana, I swear --”

She could hear muffled hoofsteps now. She had seconds at most before she would be discovered.