Vinyl Scratch meets the perfect mare, but it seems the Royal Orchestra and its War of the Wubs Contest has something to say about that.
Vinyl Scratch (aka: DJ PON-3) thought she was disk-jockeying a perfectly normal gig in Canterlot, but when she shows up, she finds the Royal Night Orchestra has taken over the club and her clients have disappeared. Attending the Orchestra's party only deepens the mystery, as it seems somepony is trying to conquer all the musicians of Equestria using the musical talents of the bowed beauty Octavia. If Vinyl wants to have any hope of winning Octavia's hoof and getting to the bottom of why her show was cancelled, she'll have to pour all her Bass Power into winning the Royal CanterlotWar of the Wubs music contest to attain a Royal Rank as a musician herself!
As if that would stop her. The power of Harmony (Remixes) will prevail!
Based on the series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic… among other things
Place: Canterlot
Time: Contemporaneous
Vinyl Scratch, stage name DJ PON-3, had known this was going to be a miserable bucking gig when she got off the train in Canterlot and found herself caught in an unscheduled rainstorm. Her evening had only gotten worse since then, as she dodged puddles and trotted up-and-down half the BUYSOMEAPPLES alleyways in the city looking for the actual BUYSOMEAPPLES club.
"Everything had looked absolutely fine from Ponyville!" she groaned as the cold, pissing rain drenched her blue-and-white streaked mane against her neck. The wet leather of her saddlebag was nicking and cutting into her withers, too.
Despite Canterlot being a geographically small city, focused on culture and administration in the traditional mode of a capital, it had one thing you could get lost in that no other city did: the third dimension. Canterlot didn't just have boulevards, avenues, streets, and alleys in the mode of a normal city. No no, excuse me, Princess Celestia, Canterlot was special. It had spires, spirals, caves, and switchbacks to deal with, too.
As a result of which, Vinyl now found herself almost, but not quite, late for a show. She had actually never been late for a show before. Everypony thought DJ's had no sense of professionalism, but as a matter of fact, Vinyl Scratch prided herself on damn well getting the party started on time. She stood in a tiny alley built into Mt. Solstice's side, at the corner where it led down into an even tinier alley in what seemed to be total Lower City cave territory. In Manehattan you'd wonder if there were changeling gangs around in a place like that, and Vinyl knew a musician was always a valuable catch for them: art had such a power to create love.
However, tonight's clients were not ponies she could stand to fail! She'd been called to play in Canterlot by a tiny underground cell calling themselves Dudist Beach, the only dubstep lovers in the entirety of Canterlot, hounded so by the citizens that they had to meet in... A cave in a tiny alley in the under-the-rock levels of the city.
The One Nation Under Rock Club.
Vinyl Scratch brushed a lick of her soaking mane out of her eyes and dove under the stone roof of the cave neighborhood, galloping as quick as she could to her gig.
Place: Canterlot Cave Alleyways
Time: Almost late
Vinyl had expected that she might have to apologize for not getting to the One Nation Under Rock in time to help hook up the stereos and check the bass levels herself. She had expected to find a bunch of very impatient ponies. She had expected to perhaps even have to explain to the bouncer who the hay she was.
She had not expected to find herself confronting a butler who was quite expertly, if way too politely, blocking her own entrance to her own gig.
"BUT I'M THE DJ! I AM THE BUCKING DISK JOCKEY TONIGHT!" she yelled, whinnying. He was just some square-faced stallion jumped up in a suit and made to think he was fancy for guarding a door, that was what he was!
"And I am afraid to tell you, madam - " said the Earth Pony stallion, his black-and-white coat blending neatly into his suit, " - that the Royal Canterlot Night Orchestra has required this space for the evening, in order to unveil the premier performance of their latest instrumentalists. Lady Heartstrings explicitly instructed that entry only be allowed for ponies in formal or professional dress."
"FORMAL OR PROFESSIONAL DRESS!?" she fumed. "SO I'M A DJ WHO CAN'T BE LET IN TO HER OWN GIG BECAUSE SHE AIN'T DRESSED AS NO DJ!?"
The butler-bouncer huffed, stuck out his chest, and tossed his platinum-blond mane. "MADAM!" he shouted, "Your insolence towards Lady Heartstrings WILL! NOT! BE! TOLERATED! I, Prince Platinum Blueblood the Junior, will countenance not the slightest use of such offensive language! Not only have you failed to arrive in the uniform of your profession, you have failed to bring any kind of instrument with you! To an ORCHESTRA RECITAL, THAT IS NOT YOUR PERFORMANCE!"
"Offensive language?" Vinyl asked, deflating.
"You AIN'T getting in this way," replied Prince Platinum Blueblood the Junior, straight-faced. Vinyl Scratch stared into his eyes, but he didn't budge an inch.
And so, after a fair amount of uphill walking, Vinyl Scratch found herself once again at the alleyway entrance in an alley, with her mane soaked. This time she was late, too, though she could scarcely see how it mattered since some BUYSOMEPEACHES pony called Heartstrings had crashed her club and replaced her performance. With classical music.
Only the gods knew what the Royal Canterlot Night Orchestra must have done with Dudist Beach. She had to get inside that performance and find out what was up, and that meant she had to get some proper DJ'ing duds and an instrument to play.
A few minutes later, the door to the thrift shop jerked open to shed the flickering torchlight of Canterlot's middle-class ground-level streets on the racks of clothing and assorted household wares within. The light from outside wreathed the confident DJ PON-3 who had just kicked the door open lightly and now trotted into the shop humming to herself.
I'm gonna pop some tags, only got twenty more bits in my pocket!
Even at thrift-shop prices she wouldn't be able to afford Canterlot fashions, and they wouldn't wear back in Ponyville anyway. What could she even hope to find here? She pushed through racks of suits, dresses, fur coats, woollen sweater-vests...
I'm, I'm, I'm huntin', lookin' for a come-up.
The flannel shirt she tried on would have looked great on a stallion, and totes said DJ, but she just didn't have the chest and shoulders to pull it off. Truth be told, it was probably kinda hipster.
Then she saw it. It was simple, it was beautiful, it said DJ, it was a scarf of chemically refined awesomeness. Well, ok, actually it was a Saddle Arabian keffiyah in her colors. She pulled it off the pile of assorted winter garments with her unicorn magic and held it before her, eyes going wide. The blue-and-white checked pattern matched her mane exactly, as if the simple square kerchief of cloth had been made for her by the great glorious deities of music and fashion themselves, and, just to give that one last little touch of punk, it had black spiketies on its edges instead of tassles. Spiketies!
Anypony who had peeked in the fitting room at that moment would have noticed the distinct squee sound as Vinyl Scratch dashingly tied her new scarf around her crest and tucked it down to keep it away from her throat. It would also have been the last thing they ever noticed, as Vinyl furtively peeked around making sure she wouldn’t have to murder anypony for hearing her squee.
This is bucking awesome.
Then she saw a pair of blue shades to match, sitting just over with the foals' toys. The combination could only possibly be described by that greatest of words in the entire fashion vocabulary, the one to which Rarity Belle wished she could aspire: SWAG. No, hold on, pointing the glasses' narrow ends down didn't work. That just made her look sad. Pointing them up, on the other hand, that looked swag.
Now all she needed was an actual instrument, and she'd be ready. The problem was that she couldn't take just anything into what was shaping up to be an all-out cool contest. She needed some serious gear for this job. She needed something with Bass Power.
They had a broken keyboard, I bought a broken keyboard,
I bought a ski blanket, then I bought a kneeboard.
Naw, a broken keyboard wasn't gonna do it. Vinyl needed something for a DJ, not just some ordinary rocker. What she needed was...
And there it was, sitting in the middle of a thrift shop, on sale for a few bits. Somepony had thrown it in the bargain bin with old plastic toys and a kitchen mixer for making cakes. It was as though they had absolutely no idea what they'd taken their hooves off. It was a tiny red-and-black plastic-with-wood-finish box, just large enough to hold in one hoof, with a little half-circle handle at the top where you could tie it into your mane and a crystal wheel on the front for control by hoof or by unicorn telekinesis.
It was one of the most trusty weapons a pony could have in the eternal war against lameness, party-slowing, sobriety, and the other Forces of Evil that confronted a DJ on a bad night. Many ponies swore that friendship was magic. Vinyl Scratch knew that when you had a genuine original-model Get Rec'd digital music tuner, switcher, player, mixer, and recorder... music damn well was magic.
Could it even possibly still work? If it did, why had anypony ever thrown it away? Vinyl reached into her saddlebag with her magic and and slowly settled her trusty red-and-black headphones into place. She reverently plugged them into the Get Rec'd and sparked it into life with magic. The answering hum of the built-in Awedacity operating system told her that the best find she'd ever gotten in a thrift shop was indeed still functioning.
The DJ walked over to the cash registers and paid out a lucky 18 of her last 20 bits, then reverently walked out of the thrift shop. As she passed through the shop's mystic portal, she softly high-fived the doorpost, and then knelt down outside, her horn directed to the object of her blessing.
"Thank you, bass god," she said in reverence to the Great and Powerful Trigger, who watched over awesomeness.
Lightning slashed through the mountain night as Vinyl Scratch put her headphones on and set the mixer's tune to Universe. It crackled through her mane, across her horn, and blazed forth from her eyes, lighting the ill-boding darkness in a totally ill way.
She had spiketies. She had swag. She was armed. It was time to perform.
"All right, everypony, take a seat, because I, DJ PON-3, have totally got this!"
Place: Canterlot Cave Alleyways (again)
Time: To get busy
An orderly queue of ponies stood outside the Royal Orchestra's performance in the One Nation Under Rock, waiting to present their tickets and get into the recital. Each time Prince Blueblood Jr. checked another ticket, he would inspect the newcomers for appearance and silently allow them to pass, with only a look conveying his quiet judgements.
There was a soft but deep rumbling from somewhere up the street, and the sound of a pony galloping.
The whole thing was ticking over nicely, the Prince considered, and Lady Heartstrings was going to be pleased with the whole night, if he was any judge. Everything had gone just fine ever since that strange white mare had buggered off, the conquest of all musical outlets in Canterlot would be decidedly complete tonight, and advances into the rest of Equestria would begin soon. The Classical Music Reinaissance Plan would prevail.
The line was somewhat disrupted when the soft rumbling sound turned out to a wave of vibration running through the ground, which parted the crowd perfectly into two heaps of aching ponies. Aaaaahhhhh...
"Well, well, DJ Ain't!" laughed the Prince, cocking an eyebrow at the new-old-comer, "I see you weren't lying about your profession after all!"
"The stage name is DJ PON-3, and I'm here to see if your Royal Orchestra can floor ponies the way my Bass Waves can!"
"WELL ENOUGH THEN!" bellowed Platinum Jr with a smirk. "RIGHT THIS WAY, MADEMOISELLE!"
Vinyl trotted through the arching stone entrance-way with a smile, her nose in the air like a proper fancy lady... and then found herself standing at the head of an astoundingly large stairway for a mere nightclub. Actually, she could scarcely even call it a nightclub: it was a stadium! The stairs led down through tiers of ringed dance floors and bars around a single central mosh pit, with three elevated pillars directly opposite the entrance for the band and their speaker system. Everything was made of stone, no, of rock, except the safety railings made of metal. All of it worked to reemphasize the singular purpose behind the entire construction and architecture of this nightclub: to rock the buck out.
Vinyl Scratch took her sunglasses off.
The lighting helped an awful lot, too, since there was so little of it. Upper-class ponies milled about awkwardly in their fancy suits, speckled with dots and flecks of light where the black-lights in the ceiling, modelled as the stars in Luna's night sky, had lit up their white shirts or any bits of dust resting on their clothes and bodies. A disco ball orbited through the air across the ceiling, kept aloft by a magic spell, cycling through the phases of the moon to provide an ever-changing stream of silvery moonlight.
Before the majesty of the One Nation Under Rock club, before the effort and love Dudist Beach had clearly poured into it, and before the horrific, evil crime of its being taken over by the Royal Night Orchestra, Vinyl Scratch stared in awe and could form only one coherent thought. That thought was, "I need a drink."
Other ponies started to jostle her, since she was still standing just past the entrance archway, and she figured she might as well go get that drink. Carefully, she ambled down the stadium steps a couple of flights to the first level with a bar, and stepped into the ring of dance floor to go get some booze. Was that...?
"Berry Punch, my friend!" Vinyl cried as she sauntered up to the bar where Berry was working, "How is it going? I had no idea you were tending bar in this place! What brought you all the way from Ponyville?!"
"Viiinyl!" Berry Punch answered blearily, slowly focusing her eyes onto her friend from back home. "It's bucking terrible out here, maaaare! They told us we can't serve anything but tea!"
"Tea? I have to swag my way past that doorstallion and all I can get is tea!?" Vinyl's eyes were almost popping out. "But then how are you still drunk?" It was just a stroke of luck none of the Orchestra staff were checking up on the bars, thought Vinyl Scratch as she looked around. Most of the bartenders looked to be from One Nation Under Rock itself, judging by how sauced they'd gotten at the prospect of serving nothing but tea to a bunch of rich bucks all night.
"I am not drunk!" Berry Punch yelled, dragging Vinyl eye-to-eye with her. "Noooow, what ahm allowed to serve is we got black tea, green tea, iced tea, sweet tea, herbal tea, anythin' above made from herbal tea, milk tea with lotsa flavors, milk tea with authentic tapioca pearls made by the Grand Caterer herself, and Yuanma Iced Tea... which is kinda like milk tea but different spices and coconut milk in. Oh, and Manehattan Iced Tea, which is muh personal favorite."
"Manehattan Iced Tea?" breathed Vinyl Scratch. "Ain't that a bit... you know... How are they letting you make that?"
"Oh, they gots ta let me make Manehaaattan Iced Tea," slurred Berry Punch. "It's unofficial, so they gotta let me make it."
Vinyl Scratch raised an eyebrow at her friend, whose logic did usually actually make sense, if viewed from the bottom of a glass.
“Ok, so it's unofficial. Can I get an unofficial Manehattan Iced Tea, then?"
“Sure thing!" Berry Punch smiled, and quickly set to work constructing one of the most dangerous drinks known to ponykind. Berry Punch slid a high, round glass across the bar, almost tipping it over until Vinyl caught it in her magic, and then haphazardly stabbed a straw into it. The musical unicorn took a sip and felt the cool, refreshing sweet tea and gin go down smooth, with that dash of raspberry flavor Punch liked to add to everything even remotely fruity. Sure, it was one of the hardest, get-her-drunkiest filly drinks there was, but Vinyl was gonna need it for snooping around this place tonight.
"Mmmmm... Berry Punch, you are a lifesaver!" Vinyl said.
"No am not," objected Berry, "I'm not a donut-shaped minty sweet at all. Though I can drop one in yer drink if ya like."
"It's cool, Berry. You're cool." Vinyl told her friend. She sucked down another gulp of wonderful, divine alcohol through her straw and hummed to herself. "I gotta find out who killed my giiiig." A tiny little smile graced her face at last.
Then she heard it. The cello. Someone was starting to play up on the main stage, just one pony, on a cello. A magic cello. She could tell it was magic, because when she looked down at the upper stage, there was only one pony playing a cello, but from that cello came the sound of an entire group of instruments, all conducted according to a single unified song.
The cello had cut into violin all on its own! And snare drums to provide a percussion background!
And what a pony! What a mare! Dat coat, a pale golden grey like the last rays of winter before spring. Dat mane, jet-black like the smoke of a thousand romantic campfires. Dat suit, white shining blue in the ultraviolet, capped off with dat turquoise bow-tie and dem epaulettes on her shoulders! Dat treble-clef cutie mark! Dem half-lidded eyes! Dat elegance with which she effortlessly coaxed a complicated piece from a single instrument, even a magic one!
Vinyl Scratch's eyes went straight from normal-eye-sized to the size of dinner plates. She was as smitten as she'd ever been with anypony in her life. On a scale of one to "ALL PRAISE PRINCESS CADANCE" it wasn't quite up to eleven yet, but it certainly measured at least the "LET ME TAKE YOU HOME AND SMOTHER YOU IN THE WUBS OF WUV" level of smitten. All in all, daaayuuuuum.
"Who. Is. That. Mare?" stuttered Vinyl Scratch in sheer awe.
"Oh," said Berry Punch as she unevenly cleaned a glass. "That's Octavia. She's a cellist."
"Just a cellist? Not the most super-elegant wonder-cellist ever to happen? You're absolutely sure about this, Berry Punch?" Vinyl's had raised her eyebrow so far it looked like it might float away from her head.
"I'm pretty BUYSOMEAPPLES sure she's just a cellist, Vinyl," slurred Berry Punch. "And I dinnot know you swing that way."
Vinyl Scratch didn't reply because she had dumped her straw on the ground and was chugging down her Manehattan Iced 'Tea' like it was nothing. She slammed the glass back down on the bar and sighed happily.
"Wish me luck," she said, before turning and running from the bar. She moved as swiftly as she could through her current floor of the club, which admittedly was not very swiftly. For a fancy-schmancy Royal Orchestra show they'd sure dragged out a lot of ponies! Vinyl had to weave through crowds of mundane dancers (surprisingly unexotic, for the nobility) and dodge through the circles of polite conversation that, somehow or other, had nothing to do with the wonders of the currently-performing cellist.
The stairways, luckily, were not nearly as crowded, and Vinyl was able to walk down as fast as... Woah. Actually, she needed to slow down a couple of steps. That "tea" was starting to hit her. Thankfully, the song Octavia was playing had cut back into its leitmotif, this time with an electric bucking guitar behind it, so Vinyl chose to interpret her slowing down as the dramatic, ominous descent of one awesome mare towards her destined counterpart rather than as just being a lightweight.
This interpretation worked surprisingly well, as Vinyl reached the bottom of the smooth, grey stone stairs just as the song whisked through its finishing flourishes, pulled a few more riffs from the guitar component, and swung to a close. Now she would have been able to move quickly, if it weren't for the crowd of simperingly applauding, utterly overdressed Canterlot socialites who'd taken over the arena level and mosh pit as a place to make nice picnics and discuss BUYSOMEAPPLES fashion. As it was, she had to slowly duck and weave past ponies to reach the stairs at the side of the stage, and she just made it in time to see her new favorite cellist (in fact, her only favorite cellist ever) start to descend.
Here she came! She'd left her cello and its bow on-stage, but here she actually came! Three... two... one... Eye contact!
Vinyl Scratch looked deep into the eyes of her crush and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. "That was so utterly awesome it almost made it worth having my club stolen out from under me for the night!"
Octavia just nodded slightly, apparently not one to let her composure as a trained performer be perturbed even slightly by a drunk, fashionable stalker.
"Ummm... thanks, I guess."
Vinyl broke eye-contact to let her gaze roam to other places on Octavia's body than the face, and decided she should persist. "You should get a drink with me. Now."
"Well, I sometimes do enjoy a glass of Riesling to calm the nerves after performing, but it rather looks to me like you've had one already."
"Yeah, I have. That's step one of the plan, because I'm a musician too, so I know how tough it is being up there in front of everypony. Step two is for you to have one, too."
"Well," Octavia warmed slightly and stepped down to stop holding herself above the other pony, "I really could do with some relaxation after a performance like that... Those magically enhanced instruments really do take it out of a pony. What did you say your name was?"
"Meh name's Vinyl Scratch." Vinyl knew her smile right now was pretty dorky because she'd been told before how she looked when she had a crush, but if she was surviving the other mare's trained confidence, she knew she was doing fine. Never mind that her cheeks were probably beet-red and that made an awful contrast with the blue-and-white scarf.
Except Octavia was smiling back at her! If somewhat shyly... And she was loosening her bow-tie! If just to get a breath...
"I, of course, am Octavia Melody, and I must say I've never met a stalker with such a cute blush before. Tell me, Vinyl Scratch, does your plan have some kind of step three?"
"Oh," shrugged Vinyl, "Well step three is to make sweet love in the darkness before dawn when nopony else is around."
"Oh my." Now it was Octavia who was blushing. "That is... well... rather evocative imagery." Suddenly she jerked her head to her left, staring wide-eyed past Vinyl Scratch. "BUYSOMEORANGES, here comes Lady Heartstrings! She's my boss, behave yourself!"
"What happened to your fine manners!?" Vinyl exclaimed and spun around to see...
If Octavia was grey like the last pale rays of winter, the newcomer Lady Heartstrings was more the fresh minty green of buds in spring. She was wearing jewels around her neck, and an elaborate gown of jade and white that was almost immodest in its sheer modesty, covering not only her rear legs but cloaking her forelegs as well. The same white as her gown tore through her neat, short-cut cyan mane in a vivid streak, though it looked as though she'd still managed to tie it around a conductor's baton at the back.
It was the eyes, though, that capped off Vinyl's impression of vast power: one shade of yellow away from sunflowers, with an edge to them that looked like it simply did not belong. Here was a mare who was used to getting things done.
"And what has my expert cellist brought us, this night? Who might this be, Octavia?" She was meandering around Vinyl, checking her over, examining her every inch, as if looking for some place to stick a knife. Vinyl shivered.
For all she'd been formal before, Octavia had now gone completely rigid, steeling every muscle to express absolutely nothing. "My Lady Heartstrings, this pony is Vinyl Scratch, with whom I had been engaged in a friendly conversation. She plays the... what is it you play, Miss Scratch?"
All those words! Vinyl may have been drunk and not that book-smart, but street-smart, that she was. She could tell pretty damn well when a pony was speaking a lot to say only a little. She puffed up her chest a bit, again glad she had a scarf swaggy enough to help her stand up to a total BUYSOMEPEACHES like she thought this so-called pony might be.
"As a matter of fact, I'm the disc jockey who was supposed to play here at One Nation Under Rock tonight."
"Really?” said the Lady, “Well, I am the illustrious composer and harpist of the Royal Night Orchestra, the Lady Lyra Heartstrings, and I’m glad you were able to enlighten your soul with the elegance of our classical orchestration rather than the beastly mish-mash your clientele had requested. Octavia, you were actually engaged in conversation with somepony who goes around pretending to play music when she hasn't even one instrument to her name?"
Vinyl’s jaw dropped straight to the floor, and she actually had to use her magic to close it back to its right size.
“No instrument to my name!? Beastly mish-mash!? Pretending to play music!? What the hay, BUYSOMEPEACHES?”
“Octavia,” stage-whispered Lady Heartstrings, “You really ought to be getting along to your dressage training, should you not?”
“Errr… yes, Lady Heartstrings. I’ll commence directly.” Octavia immediately spun and trotted away, looking outright afraid of her own conductor. But Vinyl saw the other mare look back at her, just for a second. They’d had something! There had really been something between them, and this Heartstrings pony had just shut her down.
“Hey, Heartstrings!” Vinyl Scratch raged. “Where do you get off bullying your own musicians that way, let alone a guest in a club whose booking you outright stole!?”
The Lady Heartstrings just sneered. “Where do you ‘get off’ calling yourself a musician when you’ve never even achieved a Royal Music Rank, Scratch?” She stepped quickly to Vinyl’s left and hissed at her, eyes narrowed, horn nearly sparking sickly green like Changeling magic. “You listen to me, Scratch. I have an orchestra full of ponies who not only play their own music but play whole songs on single instruments, by the power of my magic. All you have is recordings of other ponies’ music, a few bad editing tools, and that noise you’re named for.”
Vinyl’s eyes were popping out of her head as she fumed, random magic sparking from the end of her horn and grounding itself in the rock around her. “YOU WANNA GO, HEARTSTRINGS!?”
“Oh I do, dear Scratch. I always want the very best musical talent in all Equestria, and the Royal Canterlot Annual Music Contest is where I find them. Were you planning to be in attendance?”
“What Royal Canterlot Annual Music Contest?”
“The one held each year to determine who controls the Musical Talents of the Day and Night, at stake among all ponies and every other race from all across the world. Indeed, it was only one contest ago that I myself won the right to command the Night Orchestra, and with it began my renaissance of true music, of classical music. And indeed, it is the contest in which this year we of the Orchestra will win control over all music in Equestria, and bring a permanent end to the impurity of your kind! Octavia is my faithful racehorse, and I was a victor. Do you think you can best us?”
“Wait, you mean I can get to Octavia and beat the musical crap out of your smug mug by competing?” Vinyl flicked her earphones and Get Rec’d from behind her mane and twirled them through the air, spinning them in perfect synchrony with the effortlessness of her special talent until she brought the headphone cable into its slot with a perfect click. Her ears flicked to the sides and up as the headphones wrapped comfortably into position around her neck. “You mean the War of the Wubs? I accept your stakes!”
“Then it’s settled!” crowed Heartstrings. “In you we will crush rock, hip-hop, and electronica, and show everypony that there can be no resistance to the triumph of classical music over all others! In your terms, ‘come at us’!”
“And in you I’ll shove a damn large horshoe to save music and win Octavia’s hoof!” Vinyl Scratch boasted through gritted teeth.
At last, Heartstrings broke eye-contact and damped her magic, turning to leave with a silken flick of her dress.
“We’ll see you at the contest, then.”
“Dear freaking Celestia on a stick, you are on!” Vinyl Scratch stomped a hoof and sent a wave through the stone beneath her. “Octavia, wherever you’ve gone, make no mistake! I’m gonna out-music your scary boss and we’re getting that drink together!”
Based on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the collected works of Imaishi Hiroyuki-sama, and one other thing I hope you’ll figure out soon
Place: Canterlot Castle Time: Almost Dawn
The Lady Lyra Heartstrings trotted across the drawbridge and into Canterlot Castle, glancing and gazing around her to see if anypony else was around at this hour. The enchanted flower clock painted above the bridge at the entrance to the castle had its daisy open, with the roses and violets closed, telling Lyra the hour had long gone past midnight and the Changeling’s Hour after it, and was reaching towards dawn.. Soon, soon Princess Luna would lower the moon, and Princess Celestia would raise the sun.
But first came Lyra’s time, to rejoice in everything she and the Kamui had done, and in everything they were yet to do. She could hear her dress whispering to her, always whispering in her ears now, whenever she wore it. The poor thing, all it ever wanted in life was her, and yet she kept it dormant almost all of the time. The whispering filled her mind again...
You ask me if I'll go with you,
You whisper to me in my ear,
You ask me if I take your hoof,
I have no reason to reject you...
Lyra broke into a canter as she made her way across the entrance courtyard, throwing a look at the leafless, lifeless olive tree in the Maredeterranean garden on the left. Once she would have stopped to play her harp a bit for the birds in that tree, but tonight, she wanted nothing to see her. Tonight was for her and It alone.
You ask me if I'll go with you,
You whisper to me in my ear,
You ask me if I take your hoof,
You whisper to me.
Fire tickled her veins and electricity ran across her skin. She felt power caressing her through the folds of her dress, and unleashed the tiniest bit of it to leap two flights of stairs. She kept running through the Artists’ Wing as fast as she could, letting the power ground itself through her.
“Soon, my love!” she whispered, panting. How had she once been one of the stupid and simple ponies who trampled blindly through their lives, stepping wherever a song told them to step? Who had worn whatever looked pretty? Clothing was power, though lesser among ponies than it had once been among humans, but ponies had their compensations: music was a great and powerful magic indeed with which to mold the lives of ponies. Now Lyra was a conductress, a wearer of divine garments, and enhanced her musicians’ instruments with Life Fibers as well.
How had she once lived in Ponyville and not even noticed the sheer negligence of the Princesses in letting chaos roll through the land in constant waves? How had nopony else ever seen the ruin to which Equestria would come without strength at the helm and discipline in the ranks?
Down another spiral of stairs and she arrived to the Observation Chamber, where she held her office as the head of the Royal Night Orchestra.
The floor was of marble tiles in a white-and-lilly pattern, and there were no true walls. Instead, ponies could look out into the deep ravines surrounding Canterlot Castle, peering through the stone columns into the pools of darkness that would soon fill with light as the sun came up. There, facing the east where the moon and sun rose, was the Tapestry, waiting for Lyra as always.
To most ponies’ eyes it showed nothing more than the cycle of day and night brought about by the Princesses, and it was completely ordinary that the Lady Heartstrings had installed it when she took office as Conductress of the Royal Night Orchestra. Only to Lyra’s own eyes did it reveal its true colors and its ancient secrets.
To Lyra’s eyes, it showed the ancient history of the world, before ponies, before minotaurs, before magic of any kind. The ancient race it depicted had stood on two legs, with fleshy “hands” and “feet” that resembled a dragon’s claws; they had stood many whole lengths high. Ages before ponies or magic, the Tapestry had taught Lyra in secret, the human race had bestrode Equis.
And even those titans had been made! There had been a time when Equis was inhabited only by brute animals and thought had not yet walked in the world. There had been a time without tunes or melodies or rhythms, without beauty or harmony. Then the Life Fibers had arrived to make apes into humans, and eventually, yes, horses into ponies.
Since her foalhood she had known they must have existed, she had known another world had come before her own, and now, she would be the agent of its rebirth! The Tapestry had chosen her and given her a dress of purest Life Fiber to restore her own race’s progenitors and humanity’s as well, alongside the humans.
There was a time when Lyra hadn’t noticed the problem. She had lived in Ponyville and played her lyre (for which she might as well have been named) like any other musician. She hung out with Bon-Bon, who made sweets. She wasn’t very ambitious, but a Ponyville mare didn’t need to be. The problem was… well, the problem was that Ponyville was stark, raving mad, and once she’d noticed it, she could never un-notice it.
Nightmare Moon. Trixie Lulamoon. Discord. Discord again. And, of course, finally, Tirek. When it came right down to it, ponies in general but Ponyville most specifically spent most of their time blithely ignoring threats that could easily drive them all extinct, and when the threats could no longer be ignored, ponies waited for the power of Harmony to save them all on its very own. Did it come through? Of course: after major damage was already done but before it reached genocidal proportions.
And for being in the right place at the right time with the right friends for Harmony to manifest itself, Twilight Sparkle got crowned a princess. Not for her cleverness, her original findings in magic, her hard work on behalf of other ponies, or her skill in organizing other ponies. In fact, whether she saw it or not, her original attempt to proactively handle the whole “Nightmare Moon problem” was exactly what had gotten her exiled from Canterlot.
Princess Celestia let nopony raise an active hoof against Destiny, no matter the damage or cruelty wrought by Destiny. After all, had it not been Destiny that had unleashed Discord and Tirek upon the land? Certainly it was: nothing else could have.
Human-kind had never behaved with such passivity, and Lyra had resolved that neither would she. Because when one started noticing the hoof of Destiny at work in Equestrian history, one noticed another thing: there were the ponies chosen by Destiny, who could actually do something with their lives, and there were background ponies, who were furniture.
Lyra would not be a background pony, and if that meant she had to destroy Destiny itself, so be it. Her first weapon to turn back the tide of decadence and change the destiny of equinity was music. Given the right song, ponies would march through the streets singing and dancing in tightly coordinated choreography. Nopony knew precisely why they did this; it was hypothesized to be an ancient herding instinct coming to the fore. Everypony just put it down to music being a kind of magic. Which, of course, made music a form of power, power over ponies.
Her dress’s song wound its way into her ears, giving her its power.
This world is cruel,
It is sad but true,
This world is strange,
It is questionable but true,
Is the flower garden real or fake?
This was the essence of her Classical Music Reinaissance Plan: her orchestra was but her vanguard corps, and empowered by the Life Fibers in their instruments, they would play a grand symphony to make all Equestria their army. Oh, they would start with those exiled to the Griffon Empire, of course, those who had fled Equestria’s decadence to a kingdom which allowed them their ambitions. They made such excellent recruits and had such high Life Fiber tolerances, after all.
Then, by the strength of the pony races under the sway of her music, Lyra would relegate the Princesses to their long-since well-earned obsolescence. She would restore the humans and the Life Fibers to life. She would build a newer, greater harmony of Equestria under the active orchestration of the master races.
Her dress whispered still, asking her to give herself to its orchestrations.
I want to get stronger,
because our world is very cruel,
It's advisable to remove withered flowers.
Lyra could stand no more anticipation. She used her magic to twist the conductress’ baton out of her hair and across her skin, scratching out blood. The blood soaked in and her beloved, her dream, her dress sprang to life.
And it sang to her.
Yes, I'm far stronger than I've ever thought,
Soar higher!
Run much faster!
Don't forget the truth!
Yes, I'm far stronger than I've ever thought,
I remove withered flowers,
Why do you look so sad?
The final moonlight streaked Lyra’s chamber in pale silver as the creamy greens and whites of her Kamui’s true form settled into being upon her, her beloved’s piercing green eyes opening where they covered her cutie mark on both sides.
Lyra tried not to scream.
“Life Fiber Override!” she whispered in rapture. “Kamui: Ts’an Nu!”
Place: Unknown Time: To wake up and smell the coffee
Vinyl Scratch smelled the coffee and woke up, finding herself on a camping mattress with somepony holding out to her, yes, a cup of coffee. Unfortunately, it didn’t smell like very good coffee. It smelled like someone had dropped several spoonfuls of godsawfully acidic instant coffee powder in a cup of boiling water and then attempted to cover their evil deed with cream, sugar, and hazelnut extract. There probably wasn’t even any vodka or liqueur in it.
Vinyl grabbed it, grunting her thanks, guzzled every last abominable drop, and dropped back to her knees as she waited for the gods-blessed caffeine to order the sawtoothed buzzing in her brain. In place of thinking, she stared at the pony in front of her and tried to place him/her/whargarrbl.
He was a turqoise earth-pony stallion, and in a very definite way. That is, he was very definitely both a stallion and an earth pony: he stood pretty well above average at almost 17 hands high, and instead of being built for manual labor like most earth ponies, he had the kind of lithe, sleek, thin body that got one job offers to be a coverpony on the Athletics Photographed Seapony Edition. His cutie mark was a yellow, four-pointed star (even Celestia probably didn’t know what that meant), and his aqua-blue mane was parted to fall mostly on the right, reaching down over the lens of his huge aviator shades so he probably had to blow it away occasionally. He was wearing a smirk that Vinyl hated seeing on anypony else’s face.
The buzzing in Vinyl’s head started to resolve into the normal kind of thought, though she had the awful feeling a headache was coming with it.
“In case you’re wondering,” said the stallion standing over Vinyl Scratch, “No, we didn’t.” He was kneeling down towards her in a way that, Vinyl could not help but notice, really made the muscles in his chest and barrel stand out. “You’re wearing some BUYSOMEORANGES fine shades, but at least for now, you’re also kinda a mare.”
Well, that was a load off her. Vinyl was an open partysexual, but waking up in a strange place with a strange pony in front of her always gave her that “Walk of Shame” feeling. Trying to remember the name was always really awkward.
“Right then,” Vinyl replied. She slammed the empty coffee cup down on the floor next to the ratty, striped camping mattress she figured she must have slept on, even if she had no memory of how she arrived. The fibers in the damn thing were really scratching at her flank. Speaking of fibers… where was her scarf? She raised a hoof and found it around her neck where she had it before. Ok, where was her Get Rec’d? Not around her neck where she had left it before. BUYSOMEORANGES.
“Who are you, where are we, and what have you done with my mixer?” Vinyl grumbled.
Vinyl looked out the window to try and figure out where they’d taken her. They were in an apartment - no, correction, a really nice-sized apartment - whose primary face was taken up with a single large set of windows onto a somewhat dull-looking park. They were pretty high up, and in an urban environment. It was cloudy.
Oh, and they were in the living room, which actually had similar camping mattresses strewn everywhere, and numerous strange mutant adornments hung on the walls, half rugs and half towels, depicting flowery patterns and seaside scenes. It had probably all once been some real finery, but now it mostly just looked lived-in. A lot of ponies had been through here.
Place: Canterbrigia (Outer Borough of Manehattan) (Probably)
Vinyl now had some reasonable idea of where she was, which tackled one of her three vital questions. That stallion was striking a pose in front of her, so he was maybe about to answer the second.
“You can think of me as… a wells-wisher,” he said.
Vinyl unceremoniously shoved her glasses off with magic, shoved her hair out of her eyes, and narrowed them at him.
“No I can’t,” she deadpanned, “Besides, the term is ‘well-wisher’, only one ‘well’.” He wasn’t even trying to give a straight answer, let alone to give her back her mixer.
The stallion slid onto his sides, posing with his entire ground-side midsection exposed to Vinyl. This was not a party and she was not feeling up for it. No, just no.
“I meant,” he said silkily, “That my name is Wells Wisher. Though I must admit, I had planned to put you through a series of tests at the War of the Wubs before revealing that to you. As to how you got here, Miss Scratch, you were invited to come see us, as I recall it. There was but a slight delay in our meeting due to the Lady Heartstrings having stolen our venue.”
Vinyl’s memory tried to jog and found itself just about able to walk...
At last, Heartstrings broke eye-contact and damped her magic, turning to leave with a silken flick of her dress.
“We’ll see you at the contest, then.”
“Dear freaking Celestia on a stick, you are on!” Vinyl Scratch stomped a hoof and sent a wave through the stone beneath her. “Octavia, wherever you’ve gone, make no mistake! I’m gonna out-music your scary boss and we’re getting that drink together!”
Of course, there wasn’t the slightest hope of enjoying the show after that, not with everypony from the Canterlot upper class staring at her. What to do, what to do…
“Oh yes, one more thing!” boomed the Lady Heartstrings, her head turned back as she stood halfway up the stairs to wherever the buck she’d come from. “Guards! Destroy the DJ and bring her remnants to me!”
Vinyl Scratch couldn’t help but notice that the usual burly and inconspicuous guard-stallions found in nightclubs were drawing closer to her (in their very best Stallion in Black suits for Lady Heartstrings, of bucking course)... and that tonight they were not on her side. Escape routes, escape routes… any decent nightclub had a bunch of the things built-in, just in case an ordinary brawl erupted into a full-blown stampede.
Where were they? Why was her vision all blurry? Oh BUYSOMEAPPLES, the booze was really hitting her.
Ouch. Vinyl somersaulted head over hooves on the cold, smooth stone, feeling her horn scrape in just the way that was gonna ache for days. BUYSOMEORANGES, how hadn’t she noticed that guy behind her? She needed a trick to get out of here, and fast. What worked on upper-class ponies?
She kept her head down and used a spell to take control of the disco ball that was still rotating the image of the moon across the ceiling. She couldn’t afford to let anypony else notice she was the one doing it, so she tried to use little enough strength that her horn wouldn’t glow. She held her head down in any case, trying to hide the aura. Then she stood.
The big scary security ponies were still standing there.
“Meep.”
Vinyl turned, screamed, and ran for her bucking life as she felt the characteristic “catch” in her horn telling her that her spell had worked. The disco ball now cast an eldritch pall of Nightmare throughout.
For her, the preexisting levels of Freak Out wouldn’t have been enough, but these snooty-flank ponies had never spent a single day or night in their whole lives partying. If you had told them the roof was on fiyah, they would in fact have believed the roof was totally really on fire. So for them, it only took a tiny… little… push…
“NIGHTMARE MOON IS BACK! EVERYPONY RUUUUUN!”
Most of the ponies were too busy stampeding to notice a bescarfed, beglassed DJ running through the aisles with them. Or at least, Vinyl had thought so until she felt something sharp plunge itself into her withers.
While Vinyl had been letting her memory jog, a bunch of other ponies had trotted into the living room and lined up behind her now-even-more irritatingly mysterious “benefactor” Wells Wisher. They all appeared to be variously mares and stallions of uniformly white coats and black manes. Everypony’s cutie mark was an electric guitar. Vinyl tried not to show how hard she was now breathing: somepony had the connections to buy a mass glamour from changelings.
“So,” Vinyl cocked an eyebrow, “You drugged me and kidnapped me after I tried to escape from Heartstring’s securiponies. And you took my Get Rec’d from me.”
Wells Wisher uncocked his eyebrows and glared back at her.
“I saved you after you nearly got beaten up by security guards after you bucked up what had unexpectedly turned into an extremely clandestine operation against the Royal Night Orchestra in our own club. To which you, Vinyl Scratch, were late.”
The various mares and stallions lurking around listlessly behind Wells Wisher finally fell into position and began singing… an acapella background. One of them busied himself tidying up the camping mattresses, exposing the polished tan wood of the floor.
The acapella ponies started miming passing a ball from one pony to the next until it exploded in their faces. And for Vinyl Scratch, that… was… it.
She had taken just about enough of this guy’s horseapples. She whinnied up and threw her forehooves in the air in exasperation. She would have liked to say that she threw them in the air like she just didn’t care, but in fact, she did care. Because DJ-PON3 had one thing she just did not do, and that was arriving late to her gigs. Vinyl whinnied up and threw her forehooves in the air. She would have liked to say that she just didn’t care, but alas, she did.
“They wouldn’t let me in without being dressed as a ‘proper’ DJ! I had to go hunt down a thrift shop open in the evenings in downtown bucking Canterlot and buy an extra scarf just to get in there! If not for that, I would NOT have been LATE!”
Wells Wisher scratched at the stubble on his chin for a moment, contemplating.
“I suppose so, yes. The Royal Night Orchestra does have a rather irritating tendency to require that one be properly dressed in order to enter. I’ve kept wondering if this is some kind of fetish by Heartstrings.”
Now that the truth is just a rule that you can bend,
You crack the whip,
Shape-shift and trick,
The past again.
The acapella ponies mimed getting dressed, or rather, mimed some of them forcing the others to get dressed. It really didn’t help that in perfect synchrony, Wells Wisher was miming stripping off.
“Wait, you mean that aside from stealing our shows out from under us, they go around forcing ponies to wear clothes? I mean, I’m usually happy to throw something on for a special night out, but clothes all the time? And then, to think she’s getting off on it, too. That’s just…”
I'll send you my love on a wire,
Light you up every time,
Everyone, ooh,
Pulls away, ooh,
From you.
The chorus ponies were pinning themselves to the available walls and showing exactly what they thought of ponies who got “lit up” by wearing clothes. Vinyl didn’t think it was very pretty, since it seemed to involve writing as if struck by electricity while also trying to vomit.
“Kinda freaky, yeah,” Wells Wisher nodded. “And I do suppose that your arrival would not really have prevented our club’s takeover by the Orchestra, since that happened many hours earlier.”
“How did they steal our show out from under us?”
“We are not quite sure, but we do know that the royally-authorized contract was delivered in the early hours of the morning, just after the sun was raised. There may have been quite heavy cajolery involved.”
Vinyl Scratch gaped at him, jaw hanging limp. Some things were just not supposed to ever be real, and this was one of them.
“Musicians can’t get up early in the morning,” she recited dully.
Got balls of steel,
Got an automobile for a minimum wage,
Got real estate, I'm buying it all up in outer space.
“Exactly!” thundered Wells Wisher, stabbing a hoof at Vinyl. The entire chorus stabbed with him; a mob of hooves united in accusation of lameness. “Alarm clocks! Bureaucracy! Tidiness!” Together Wells Wisher and the mob struck one of the most verifiably expert air-guitar poses Vinyl had ever seen. “A true rocker needs not such things! Thus, the pony who stole our gig was not a true rocker, but an abomination most eldritch unto - !”
“Hey!” Vinyl chirped for participation’s sake, “Abomination Most Eldritch sounds like a great name for a metal band!” She shifted from hoof to hoof, still wondering what was going to happen.
“ - all music! An abomination who left behind naught but a signed contract and a shell-shocked staff!”
“A pony would have to have a lot of pull to tell a private Canterlot establishment what to do on her own. Just how political has this whole thing gotten, so far?”
“The Royal Night Orchestra’s importance as a game-piece on the nobles’ political chessboard has grown and grown ever since the Lady Heartstrings assumed their helm. We of Dudist Beach believe the Orchestra has a sinister agenda lurking behind their Classical Music Reinassance Plan.”
Now that the truth is just a rule that you can bend,
You crack the whip,
Shape-shift and trick,
The past again.
Vinyl had expected that a few of the chorus ponies would start whipping each-other around this point in the song, but actually, they were just splitting into “nobles” and “commoners”, with the latter mime-cutting the heads off the former. That was actually pretty impressively radical, though the resonances with old anti-unicorn canards were pretty worrying.
“Implying that eliminating all cool music is not a sinister enough agenda…” grumbled Vinyl halfheartedly. That finally got Wells Wisher to drop the bucking Suave Stallion act and cut to the point.
“Even sinisterer than that! Did you not listen to the song? ‘Our common goal is waiting for the world to end!’”
“Sooo…” Vinyl Scratch interjected, “The end of the world is nigh.”
I'll send you my love on a wire
Lift you up every time
Everyone, ooh
Pulls away, ooh
“Well, not necessarily,” Wells Wisher shook his head, “We have been trying to investigate what exactly they’re up to, but since they know we’re spying on them we’ve only ever gotten knowledge they don’t mind us having.” The chorus ponies also “backpedaled”, opening floor space in the crabbed and cramped living room.
“That… being…?” asked Vinyl. She held up a hoof. “Wait a minute… What would I leak if I was a psychotic evil maniac? Huuuhhhhh…”
“All we’ve been able to get is that her musicians play magic instruments. There’s some emphasis on the finery of the stringed instruments. But that’s it.”
“She’s bragging,” Vinyl blurted out. She was really wishing she had a headphone wire to twist around with her magic: it almost helped her concentrate as much as bobbing her head to a beat. “She knows she’s being watched so she’s just showing off.”
“Of course, we have only been able to find out so much without confronting her directly. Which is where you come in, Vinyl Scratch. You barged into our infiltration mission, asked out one of the Royal Night Orchestra’s musicians, and provoked the Lady Heartstrings into challenging you directly. You will soon be facing her underlings and her competitors in the War of the Wubs.” With each you Wells Wisher took a step closer to Vinyl Scratch, making her uncomfortable again. “And that is why you are going to find out what she’s up to for us.”
“So... hero stuff. And I’m gonna find all this out… how?”
“With your trusty Get Rec’d, of course,” said Wells Wisher, motioning for the chorus mare who had just come in from another room to bring the mixer over to Vinyl Scratch. Vinyl just hopped up and past Wells Wisher entirely, not even bothering to wait. Gods above, she had needed this thing back!
Her new trusty mixer and headphones, travel DJ gear for any occasion! Vinyl spun them around and around and around her neck until the headphones settled into place, then tossed the mixer straight into the air and clicked the audio cord right in with her magic, before catching and clipping the thing into her mane.
“Finally! Now we can talk. Hero stuff, sounds awesome enough. What’s your rank structure like for new ponies just joining the group?”
“Well then!” pronounced Wells Wisher, clasping his hoof around Vinyl’s neck. “Nopony pulls rank among us, and each is identified solely by tribe! The only commanders are on the buddy system! We are… an egalitarian organization! We are… the sole guerilla force dedicated to fight for all that is awesome! We are… the most up-to-date and underground musicians in all Equestria! We are… Dudist Beach, and we now present you to our membership! Extend your right forehoof and state your name, title, and tribe!”
It's a mechanical bull at number one,
You'll take a ride from anyone,
Everyone wants a ride,
Pulls away, ooh,
From you.
The chorus ponies lined up facing Wells Wisher and Vinyl again and kneeled, extending a single hoof each. Vinyl did as she had been told and extended her own right forehoof back to them all, the symbolic brohoof of total brohood, though admittedly in a bit more of a total bro-den than usual.
“To Dudist Beach I present myself: the Hip Indie Unicorn, DJ-PON3, Vinyl Scratch!”
Wells Wisher pulled Vinyl through a pirouette, high-fiving everypony as they spun.
Now if only they could get her back her saddlebag, too.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. So is ROCKING THE BUCK OUT.
Written because book_burner wanted to archive YouTube links to awesome songs
Place: The Crystal Empire Time: Three weeks after induction into Dudist Beach
One would think that the Royal Canterlot Annual Music Contest (known to the cool ponies as the “War of the Wubs”) would actually take place in Canterlot, but, on this occasion, one would be wrong. Really wrong. In fact, pretty much completely wrong. The ongoing efforts to reintegrate the Crystal Empire with the rest of Equestria had been a rousing success during the Equestria Games, and so apparently the Music Contest had been scheduled here too.
Vinyl Scratch was leaning against a tree in a patch of green grass, considering this matter and watching the sun go down -- her last sunset as a pony not in for the ride of her life. All told, holding the Contest here was a BUYSOMEORANGES cool decision. After all, the Crystal Palace was, not to put too fine a point on it, a giant towering spire of crystal that giantly towered over all the landscape. This was known, in everyday DJ-ing life, as “pretty metal”, or maybe a bit “the Future”.
The sun was quickly slipping down towards the horizon as a glowing gold-orange ember, and day-job would soon give way to night-life all across Equestria. Vinyl considered how Luna was gonna pull off the opening ceremony of the her Music Contest from that palace. That, after all, would really decide whether the tower was metal or futuristic. This was extremely important.
She jerked her shades down onto her face and fastened her blue-and-white-and-black-spiketied checkered scarf around her neck. Dudist Beach had been nice enough to give her an Earth-Pony-fashioned hammerspace spell, so she was actually holding her headphones, audio connection wires, and Get Rec’d in her mane, along with the card stating her to be a Hip Indie Unicorn. DJ-PON3 stood and trotted toward the crowd, tossing her mane to loosen up a bit.
Actually, she didn’t even manage to trot that far, because the street was so packed she had to gear down into a walk. Despite the Crystal Capital having miles upon miles of boulevards spider-webbing out from the central Capitol itself, each one with a Crystal Pavement in the middle wide enough to hold a whole street from Ponyville, and each one having half a Ponyville street’s worth of duller blue crystal as sidewalk… only one of these had actually been reserved for the ceremony. Several others, supposedly, were gearing up for their own street fairs, which really drove home just how much Crystal Empire there actually was.
The crowd itself held pretty much every kind of pony, but was primarily split into a few “factions” of a fair bunch of ponies each.
There were the blatantly obvious members of the Royal Canterlot Night Orchestra in their severe uniforms, standing around trying to look stuffy for their high-and-mighty Lady Heartstrings. They filled an entire little plaza on the left that held, of course, of all BUYSOMEAPPLES things, a tea shop.
(Somewhere in that faceless mob of ponies, Vinyl knew, was the beautiful and glorious Octavia Melody waiting for Vinyl to liberate her from the cruel oppression of working for Lyra Heartstrings. And also playing cello, though on second thought, she’d coaxed some pretty awesome tunes from that cello and probably didn’t need liberating from it.)
In the next plaza up, across on the right side of the street, the Royal Canterlot Day Choir, the Crunching Pop-Rocks, were strutting their stuff -- literally. They were pretty big on strutting, and it certainly helped that somepony had fitted their jeans and shirts just to their bodies, and then Princess Celestia had granted them a Shining Sun glamor. The result had absolutely no effect on Vinyl whatsoever and had certainly never driven her to swoon and pass out at a concert during her teen years when the lead stallion Kick Swagger actually noticed her. NEVER EVER AT ALL.
After the group of no swooningsignificance at all to Vinyl Scratch came the Assorted Ponies, which included herself, bunched up in the crystalline main thoroughfare of the road, suspended between the Royal Sun and the Royal Moon. The symbolism was lost on nopony, and as the official Unaligned Mere Mortals in the contest, everypony had come to the contest looking just a little bit different from each-other. Now that Vinyl looked closely, in fact, some of them were distinctly wearing the exact kind of huge cloaks somepony would use to disguise themselves. Were those Dudist Beach operatives, or just dorks trying to look evil, or had somepony actually evil showed up? With Tirek having stormed through Equestria just a year and a half ago, hooded cloaks had become the big new thing among ponies desperate to come across as cool, evil, or evilly cool. They didn’t really seem to get that you couldn’t totally change what sort of pony you are just by putting on a new outfit.
The sun dipped below the horizon at last, and the moon rose in the east. A bright blue star twinkled into being atop the spire of the Crystal Capitol. Go time.
“WE ASK YOU, OUR LITTLE PONIES,” roared Princess Luna, “WHAT IS MUSIC!?”
“Music is sin!” chanted the entire Royal Night Orchestra together, “Equinity’s original sin!” For just a moment, the entire might of that star focused solely and exclusively on them, and they… scuffed at the ground? Had that not been part of the ceremony?
Apparently not, since the Princess looked away from them and was getting on with her speech.
“Since the earliest Hearth’s Warming, ponies have striven to kindle and rekindle the fires of friendship that drove off the Windigos: all our arts have ever turned towards that end. It is since our return from the moon that we have restored the ancient custom of this Royal Canterlot Music Contest. Why is that?”
Everypony stamped their hooves and cheered, though the crystalline city neither shook nor cracked. Vinyl banged her head up and down as she stomped her hoof with everypony else: Luna knew how to put on a show.
“It is in order to search for ever more musicians whose ears and voices are attuned to the song of Harmony. So it is that we, the Diarchs Celestia and Luna, established our own Royal Day Choir and Royal Night Orchestra, that Equestria might know music as fine as the light of the sun and moon themselves, and this Contest with them!
“The rules are simple! Each musician will receive from our retainers a Golden Record bearing either our crest or that of Princess Celestia. Each musician has the right to play with or against any others as he pleases, as long as each band in competition bets an equal number of their own such Records! Duets, collaborations, syncopations -- all is permitted! Thine goal is simple: reach Canterlot Castle in fourteen days with a full album of Records, for the final Princesses’ Performance!
“All competitions are to be judged by an appointed member of the Equestrian Parliament from either the House of Lords or the House of Commons! The former consist in the official membership of the Royal Night Orchestra and Day Choir. The latter consist in... the winners of the K-COLT Grand Giveaway with Jay and the Loon in the morning!”
A crowd of ponies perched atop the buildings on both sides of the street cheered.
“So with the rules and format of the Contest laid out, our ponies, we once again put the question to you: WHAT IS MUSIC!?” Princess Luna stamped her own hoof this time, and the city quaked. High atop her spire, Vinyl could see that Luna’s muzzle had split into an ear-to-ear grin. Vinyl grinned too. Showmareship was magic. “Music… is FUN! And so we say unto you: LET THE FUN BE DOUBLED!”
Everypony stormed the Crystal Tower to fetch their Records and get down to business.
And it was definitely “the Future” rather than metal.
Time: Like a whole BUYSOMEORANGES hour later Place: Still in line, almost under the awning of the Crystal Tower
“This line is taking FOREVER!” complained Vinyl to the heavens, the earth, and anypony who gave a buck. She threw a hoof in the air and waved it like she just didn’t care how many other ponies around her were also waiting in line. “What’s a girl gotta do to get her Golden Record, eh!?”
Ok, so what she actually had to do was obvious. She had to wait in line until such time as the members of the Music Parliament handed out Golden Records to all the ponies in front of her. This was the only fair way to do things, since they couldn’t just let the entire field of competitors stampede through grabbing Records freely for themselves. But couldn’t they have, like, set up a vending machine or something? Or couldn’t Princess Luna have cast a spell on everypony to just make a Golden Record follow them around until they grabbed it with their own two jaws?
No, apparently they simply could not have done that. It would probably spoil the whole Royal Ceremony of the thing, and all the Very Important Ponies wouldn’t get to feel like they were doing everypony else a favor just by standing there and handing out disks of shiny metal that couldn’t even actually be played in a record player. The longer she spent around them, the more she was coming to see that Dudist Beach - for all its bizarre concepts about “democracy” and “ordinary ponies making decisions” instead of magically-gifted, long-lived, and highly-educated alicorn princesses - kinda had a point about basic respect between the nobility and the common ponies.
And so, Vinyl Scratch, DJ-PON3, had to wait. In line. For as long as it took. With other ponies giving her the stink-eye for complaining and gesticulating, as if there was nothing innately horrible about waiting in lines.
It.Took. A. Looooooong. Time.
Eventually, though, she reached the head of the line and walked into the lobby of the Crystal Tower. Being the very center of the city and of the entire Crystal Empire, it was of course circular, and the Music Parliament had lined the entire circumference with a ring of tall benches made of, yes, clouded amethyst. On each one stood a Member of the Music Parliament giving out Golden Records to whoever walked up to them. Crystal Empire, so Crystal… Bleachers? Really?
“Oooooh, you want a Golden Record? You want a golden twinkle in your eye?” One of the MMPs off to the left was singing to her. On the one hoof, she did want to get her Golden Record and get on with the actual music contest. On the other hoof, showtunes.
Said Parliament member was wearing a hooded cloak with a penumbra field, so she couldn’t see his face. But he was singing. He would be, of course. It was just like the kind of pony who’d volunteer for Parliament to enjoy working with ponies who’d been waiting in a line.
Fine then. She pulled off her shades and trotted up to his place in the stands.
“I guess I do, then,” she said.
He threw down his hood, piercing the penumbra field and showing him to be one of those real grinny-ponies who just can’t help but grin. He had a gray pelt, a shaggy blond mane, and was utterly wall-eyed. The poor colt. He was probably, now that Vinyl looked at him properly, a pegasus underneath that cloak.
“You never had any open doors? Never a happy song to sing. But suddenly half the world is yours! What an amazing thing!”
Ooooh dear.
“Uuuuuh, look,” Vinyl Scratch gibbered, scuffing the ground with a hoof, “I know I haven’t been too cheery about waiting in line, but I just really can’t stand it when I should be moving around, talking, playing, dancing. You know, music stuff. I mean, this contest is a mission for me. Could you please stop the showtunes?”
The gray pegasus chirped right back at her. “As one of K-COLT’s sweepstakes winners, this contest is a mission for me, too!” He scrambled down behind the stands he was... standing on, and when he returned he indeed had a big, old-fashioned LP record apparently made of solid gold and gems in his mouth. Vinyl grabbed it as quick as she could and stuck it in her hammerspace.
“Oh,” said Vinyl. “Then where did you come from, and when will you go? And can I call you Cotton-Eyed Joe?”
“In fact...” he said, and jumped down off the stands, making Vinyl’s ears jolt up. He leaned over and whispered waaaay too conspiratorially. “I’m not just here as a K-COLT winner! I’m Joyous Showtunes Pegasus Herpy Hooves.”
OOOOOOH, Vinyl realized. Of course Dudist Beach had connections in the music industry. Of course they could get a pony into the Music Parliament. Wow, that was actually a bit creepy for an egalitarian organization.
Herpy Hooves motioned to come with him and made to trot out back towards the rest of the city. “We should get moving. It’s ever so muggy in here, we have an important contact to see. So, let’s! Get down! To business!”
“OH SWEET GODS SHOWTUNES MY HORN HURTS,” Vinyl deadpanned, and trotted out after him towards the main body of the city. “But seriously, where are we actually going?”
“Where else does a pony meet secret contacts? To the zoo, of course.”
Time: Soon after Place: Who even planned this city!?
“No, seriously, who even planned this city?” Vinyl whined. It wasn’t even that they’d been walking for too long or too far. It was the way the streets pretended to have a Manehattan-style grid layout when they actually didn’t, at all, and the way everything was made of uniform crystal. And that the directions were Hubward, Rimward, Turnwise, and Widdershins, a system used by nopony outside the Crystal Empire in the entirety of ever.
THUMP.
“Remember,” chirped Herpy Hooves, “the Crystal Empire originally formed around the needs of ponies making pilgrimage to the site of the Crystal Heart: everypony converging on one point from all around. So yes, it’s radial, and not actually any kind of ‘coordinate’ system. But you should be used to streets that don’t have a neat layout: you’re from Ponyville! Your streets are cow paths!”
“Ok, yeah, but it still shouldn’t be this hard to find the zoo,” Vinyl kept on, tossing her head back. “I mean, it’s a zoo! It’s where you keep all the exotic Northern animals, so of course it’s gotta be loud and smelly. And yet here we are, wandering through the entire Cultural Quarter because the maps aren’t clear and the street names repeat, so you never know where you are!”
THUMP.
A pony would think that in a city like this she could always just look back towards the central tower where she came from, but in fact, everything was made of crystal. The soft moonlight and harsher mage-light of the tower spackled and scattered through every building in the city. The effect was rather like looking up at the daylight world through a pool of water: a blanket of swaying, shimmering silver waves covered everything. It was like trying to find your way through a dream, which was probably just what Princess Luna wanted.
They would start down one way, and eventually come to the next street corner and realize they’d turned around in the opposite direction. Then it would turn out they had just walked the length of Horseshoe Street.
“Well the Crystal Zoo was supposed to be right in the Spiral Park in the Cultural Quarter, and we were going to meet our informant there.”
“Actually,” Vinyl raised an eyebrow, “why would we meet a secret contact at the Crystal Zoo? It’s pretty public there.”
THUMP.
“Well yeah,” answered Herpy Hooves. “In a public place it’s much harder to tail after you, you can lose yourself more easily in the crowd, and it’s harder to spy on anypony in the noise. This, I emphasize, is totally unlike the traditional secret meeting place, the park, where you can take a quiet walk together, feed ducks, and have every single spy in Equestria try to work out if you’re a couple or sharing confidential information after looking up your identities.”
“Wow,” gawped Vinyl Scratch. “I hadn’t realized you were so savvy at this spy stuff.”
“The zoo is helped by the fact that our informant needs a classy, high-cultural sort of place to slip out to, what with being in the Royal Night Orchestra herself. She can’t be seen anywhere that’s not sufficient to please the tastes of -” Herpy rolled his eyes “- the Laaaaady Heartstrings.”
THUMP. THUMP.
“Hey, what’s that thumping?” asked Vinyl Scratch.
THUMP. THUMP. CLANG!
“Ooh, they’re adding in some steel drums! I think it’s coming from the next alley over!” Herpy Hooves looked Vinyl straight in the eyes and mouthed: “Trouble. Two streets opposite the next alley. Walk, don’t trot.”
The two ponies crept forward as slowly as they could up the road… trying not to make any noise, working their way toward the side-street on the left. Gradually, they peaked around the corner, and found themselves espying (ahaha) the unpleasant scene of a gray mare in a fine blue waistcoat, lined in musical scores, beating up a hooded-and-cloaked stallion with a cello’s bow. She was standing on her hind legs, and held the bow in front of her as if it was a sword. The blood-red glint in its string betrayed that perhaps, just right now, in light of the reputation the Royal Night Orchestra had for magical instruments, the bow considered it wise to go along with her act. Who knew what might happen if she tried to actually cut with it?
“Well look at that,” whispered Herpy. “It’s our informant. Looks like she hadn’t got out of her present engagement to come see us yet.”
“Ironically?!” bellowed Octavia Heartstrings, bow in hoof, “You came to this wine-tasting ironically? You were only ever seeing me ironically? Tell me, is my bow smashing into your horn ironic, YOU PIG IN EQUINE CLOTHING!?”
The hooded-and-cloaked stallion backed against a wall looked unusually bulky for a unicorn, but indeed, his hood did betray the telltale spike of a unicorn’s horn, a massive one. Vinyl could almost swear she recognized him from somewhere.
“All you had to do was act as my plus-one for a single showing of stained-glass landscapes and a wine-tasting!” huffed Octavia. “That was all. Strictly speaking, there was no need whatsoever for you to bring up my, how did you say it to everypony else at the showing, oh, yes, right, ‘evil phase’ in conservatory when we actually had some association with each-other. Did you possess the wisdom to stop there? No, of course not, not in the slightest. You continued: steady on! You started complaining about the government of the only recently reappeared and reintegrated Crystal Empire. And all this, every spark of decent equine contact I have ever granted you, every slightest minute we have ever spent together, you call it ironic the instant you realize your insults towards me have fallen flat? You. Complete. And utter. Hipster!” She leapt through the air and roundly thumped the unicorn on his horn again with a downward stroke, using the change in momentum to land a perfect forward flip.
Wow, Vinyl thought. The gods knew Octavia was a fine one, but where did she learn moves like that? She pulled her shades on furtively: it may have been nighttime in the far North, but hay if anypony was gonna see how wide her eyes had gone.
“Ah, ehhh, excuse us?” said Herpy Hooves. Octavia froze and spun around to face Herpy and Vinyl on all fours, blushing madly as her eyes flitted from face to face.
“Oh! Oh my. Well, if it isn’t my most engaging acquaintance DJ-PON3, and the ever-endearing Herpy Hooves, both of Ponyville. Most pleasant to run into you both on this fine evening of the Royal Music Contest. I had been engaged in a slight matter of removing this unsightly former associate of mine from the premises.”
Vinyl Scratch raised an eyebrow and prepared to bring out her Get Rec’d.
“You want some help with that? Also, would he happen to have a Golden Record? And just how former an associate did you say he was, again?”
Octavia smiled tightly.
“You know, I think he does, in fact, possess a contest token, and in fact, I do believe that, myself being a member of the Royal Night Orchestra, I can act as referee. To address your second question, he’s so very former, my dear, that we could flirt quite unironically while you take his Golden Record.”
Vinyl smirked right back at the beautiful cellist and thanked her lucky stars for this opportunity.
“Hey bro!” she called over to the stallion who’d just got wailed on. “I challenge you to a duel of the bands! Do you accept, or are… you… chiiiiickeeeeeeen!?”
Red eyes flashed from beneath the hood.
“I WILL DESTROY YOU!” the stallion snarled, “AND TAKE BACK MY EX-MAREFRIEND!” His horn pulsed like an enflamed purple bruise, and his hood flew back; he whisked a keyboard from his cloak and it erupted into drumset beats.
The force of his metal scream smashed Vinyl against the wall of the alley, stabbing her tailbone into her spine. Struggling to move, she managed to peer leftward at Herpy against the flow of vibration through the air: he had suffered a similar fate. Hopefully, she thought, his lighter pegasus bones would give him a bit less pain.
Octavia, on the other hand, had stood her ground.
“Holy buck!” Vinyl screamed over the noise, “Octavia, you used to date King Sombra!?” Well, she had obliquely admitted to having an ‘evil phase’ in conservatory. Her waistcoat waved in the air as the waves and waves of dark metal washed over her, but even with Octavia looking steeled for anything, she wasn’t actually managing to strike back at Sombra.
The lyrics started to fly, fast and hard as the life of a beaten-down rock farmer.
When I'm in this state of mind
I'm wishing I was blind. Sometimes life is
more than pain, to me.
So Vinyl was spread-eagled on the wall, and so was Herpy. Sombra was actually playing a keyboard, so even if Vinyl managed to move along the wall, let alone struggle towards him, he could just keep shooting these endless waves of dark metal at her.
Sombra’s got me pinned, she thought. The only thing he’s not shooting right now is... the… ground.
The ground. That was it! If she could channel a Bass Wave through the wall and into the ground, she could knock Sombra off his hooves and get an opening to play something back!
Vinyl struggled to raise a shaking hoof towards Sombra. The G-forces from his song were actually keeping her pinned well off the ground, but she could still just barely do it.
Sombra smirked and kept singing. The BUYSOMEPEACHES didn’t even need to use his actual hooves to play the keyboard, just his magic. Truly, he was an evil sorcerer.
I feel the power of my grief. Death would be
such a relief. All the secrets that I hide
would die, with me.
(Oh please, as if King Sombra had any secrets.)
If she could just hum something… and spark a tiny bit of magic… the built-up sound would combine with the magic and let her channel a way larger Bass Wave than she’d ever manage on her own without an instrument. She gritted her teeth and hummed.
Hm-hm-hm hmmmm hmmm!
She sparked magic into her hoof, let Sombra’s dark metal slam it back against the wall, and let all the force flow into directing the wave.
Depression is my only friend. Will this----
The Bass Wave’s impact knocked Sombra out of his proper, four-legged musical stance and sent his metal waves flying off
The first thing the Bass Wave did was propel Vinyl down the wall to the ground, where she dropped right back onto her hooves.
torture never end? Let me carry o----
The second thing it did was reach King Sombra and make him stumble for a note. Just one note, but that was enough: Vinyl had already launched herself at him with a hoof raised to punch.
But he blocked her with his keyboard with barely even an impact. BUYSOMEORANGES if connecting her hoof with that thing didn’t hurt like hay. Was it made of lead? This was a musical duel: she needed to play something, and quickly!
I keep crying in my dreams.
Can you hear my endless screams?
When I fade away I fade, away.
But now, at least, she had gotten out of the blast range of that keyboard, and could at least try to play something. She needed to do it quickly, too, because Sombra was already turning back to shoot her again. Vinyl flipped out her Get Rec’d and her headphones...
Casted the best amplification spell she knew on the headphones… Positioned them around her crest, and flicked the switch that folded them together, the slightly larger left headphone now standing in front of the right one on her right shoulder to amplify the sound… Now she just had to charge it up for a few seconds with some vibration. Any vibration would do.
Gosh, and lucky golly gee, here was Sombra waving his BUYSOMEORANGES keyboard at her again. She was ready this time, though: it was a simple ultrasonic spell to direct the full blast of sound into her own headphones.
His song honestly sounded a bit tinny this way.
Life is like a masquerade. In debt to myself,
but I can't pay.
Aaaaand… charged. Before he could realize what she’d done, she leaped sideways to her left, rolled as she hit the ground to overcharge a last bit of vibration, and spun on her right forehoof as she came up to position herself...
Right next to his bucking face. Vinyl grinned. She loved this part.
“Oh look,” said Vinyl with her best jerk-face on, “You’re so malevolent and Crystal Heartless!” She clicked the ‘Play’ button on her headphones’ cord and let loose the wubs of raw.
BUYSOMEAPPLES that felt good.
When the wubs ran down and she got another look at Sombra, she saw that his clothes were torn to bits and he was lying unconscious on his back. A bit overdone, but aw well: you couldn’t always leave your audience as raw as an undercooked hayburger.
Oh, and Octavia had her forehooves over her ears.
“You know, Vinyl,” said Herpy Hooves as he dusted himself off (more for show than anything else: the Crystal Empire was clean), “You could have come to help me rather than going straight for Sombra.” It was amazing how unashamed he looked about rifling through Sombra’s cloak for his Golden Record, but hey, such were the privileges of the Music Parliament.
“With his having a broad-range keyboard blasting dark metal everywhere at everypony!?” Vinyl waved a hoof in the traditional gesture for referring to the terminally cuckoo. “He was so awful! So insufferable! So… emo-kid! ‘Look at me, I’m King SOMBERa and I wear black and red and have a name of PURE DARKNESS and play metal just so ponies will think I’m badass! But actually I can’t feel ok about myself unless I treat other ponies as property! I guess I’ll go enslave the Crystal Empire and treat my date as a piece of jewelry now!’ Did you even hear how he talked about Octavia!? Ponies like that just set my teeth on edge, you know?”
“Vinyl, I never knew - ” stuttered Octavia.
“That I really care?” said Vinyl, sidling up cheek-to-cheek with Octavia, “Well it’s a bit early for that, don’t you think, Tavi? Can I call you Tavi?”
“ - that you suddenly acquire such a large vocabulary when you feel strongly about something, actually,” Octavia blushed. “And it is a little too early for you to call me Tavi.
“Now,” she straightened up and smoothed out her uniform, “I do believe Mr. Hooves here had arranged to meet me at the Crystal Zoo in the Cultural Quarter so that I might give him a brief interview about my experiences in the Royal Night Orchestra. What say we keep that appointment?”
“We really ought to,” said Herpy, tossing Vinyl the Golden Record she’d earned. “We especially really ought to now that we’ve made enough noise to alert the other Night Orchestra members to our presence here.”
“BUYSOMEAPPLES,” spat Octavia. “We cannot afford to be seen by anypony else in the Night Orchestra. It would be… impolitic.” She gripped her cello’s bow in her jaw and shoved it well into a pocket on her uniform (which had, of course, appeared far too shallow to hold it). “Zoos, to our great luck, contain far too many strange noises and smells for the refinement suitable to the Orchestra. The Crystal Zoo is also a normal, public attraction, where we will not be the only ponies seeing the sights and holding conversation.” She whipped herself around and set out trotting towards the Crystal Zoo. “Do you understand, Vinyl Scratch?”
“Nnnnooooo. Not really. Not really very much at all,” Vinyl answered, screwing up her muzzle in thought as she set out after Octavia.
“It’s fine, Vinyl, you’re a DJ,” said Herpy Hooves, “You’re supposed to make a lot of noise for a lot of ponies. If we asked you how to achieve secrecy, you’d probably say something like ‘hide in plain sight’.”
“Well yeah!” Vinyl said, “It works at parties.”
“That’s because everypony is distracted at parties. Outside the Scene, hiding in plain sight gets you seen: just because someone didn’t expect to see you doesn’t mean they actually won’t notice you. So instead of hiding where someone might see you, you have to hide where your pursuers won’t want to look.”
“Besides,” said Octavia, actually winking for the sheer irony of it, “Since Lady Heartstrings won’t come around and interrupt us, the zoo will make for a great first date. Now come on, before someone finds us out!”
The three broke into a canter through the alleys and back streets of the Crystal Empire, not quite spooked but not quite speaking. It took a short while before they found their way back to the main boulevards of the Cultural Quarter, but their luck stood: Octavia knew the way from there.
Of course, this being the opening night of the Royal Canterlot Music Contest, the Crystal Zoo had stayed open late to pick up the extra tourist business. They slipped inside with the crowds --
“Elephants!” cried Herpy happily as he lifted off the ground from next to the Reptile House.
Fortunately, Vinyl and Octavia had fast enough reflexes to bite down on his tail and keep him with them.
“There’s a reason we’re here, you know!” growled Vinyl.
“Oh, fine,” said Herpy. “I suppose there was technically a purpose to our coming here.” He set himself back down onto the ground, jerked his tail from his comrades’ jaws, and sighed. “We were coming to obtain intelligence from you, Octavia Melody, about the plans and preparations of the Royal Night Orchestra under the Lady Lyra Heartstrings.”
“Correct,” nodded Octavia. “On behalf of?”
“The rebel organization Dudist Beach,” finished Vinyl Scratch.
“Correct,” Octavia nodded again. She pondered a minute, and shuddered. “I have always been a good citizen and a proper pony. I payed dutiful attention in school and practiced hard in conservatory. My life’s goal has always been to become First Chair Cellist in the Royal Canterlot Symphony. I was honored to play the Grand Galloping Gala and be accepted into the Royal Night Orchestra. Do you understand?” She had frozen her face into a mask again.
“Octavia,” Herpy said, “I can absolutely reassure you that your identity does not leave this zoo. But we have toknow what Heartstrings is up to.”
“Fine, fine.” Octavia gathered herself, and took a deep breath. “I am talking to you, a clandestine organization in rebellion against the Crown, because the Lady Lyra Heartstrings has turned the Royal Night Orchestra into a cult. She leads us in chants and rallies. She regales us in speeches on sin, virtue, and the coming of a new world. She calls us the vanguard who will build that new world. She is taking us further than any else have gone in weaponizing music as a tool of both manipulation and combat. She incites us against the Diarchy, the Minor Houses, and the Parliaments. She has even retained a trainer in dressage.”
Vinyl Scratch raised an eyebrow. “Dressage? Isn’t that where you canter between cones, jump over fences, and dance around a bit in a fancy dress?”
“Vinyl… I will forgive your prejudice against the art thanks to our fast-growing friendship, but please do not voice such obvious misconceptions again. Dressage is no mere dance, and you should be wary of encountering a more trained practitioner than myself! It is the fine art of hoof-to-hoof equine combat, by which Earth Ponies have defended ourselves against wing and horn, against claw and scale, against flame-breath and mighty spell, for all the ages of our race.” Octavia’s smile looked just a little too satisfied with that fact. “And Lyra Heartstrings is teaching it to each and every pony in the Royal Night Orchestra, including the unicorns and pegasi. You really should be quite afraid of what we will be when we finish that training: a trained dressage pony could turn any song you play against you, dance around any tune, counterpoint any theme.”
“That’s… legitimately creepy,” said Vinyl with her jaw dropping slightly. “Why hasn’t anypony tried to get word to the Princesses?”
“A trumpeter did. Princess Luna dismissed his concerns outright and even went so far as to silence him by means of a geas. Most of the Orchestra now suspect that Lady Heartstrings is conspiring with Princess Luna rather than acting against her authority.” Octavia started chattering, no longer holding in what begged to be said. “Lady Heartstrings speaks of a grand ‘old race’, greater in its might and wisdom than equinity, and of all history since their reign being naught but decline and decay. She tells us that if we can but weave a fine enough song, we will eventually herald in the return of that Old Race.”
“Some of us are frightened, and too many are enthusiastic.”
“Ok,” said Vinyl Scratch. “That’s really, incredibly metal. I see why we’re wailing on Heartstrings now: you just don’t try to act out metal songs in real life. It never works well.”
Octavia giggled. “Oh well, I was trying to be serious.”
“Not sure how well you’ll succeed in that at the moment,” chuckled Herpy Hooves nervously. “Though this actually corroborates a fair bit we suspected, and does indicate we have to stay away from Princess Luna for the moment.”
“Why, do you think, I can’t succeed in being serious?”
“Because we’re in the Crystal Zoo on the opening night of the Royal Canterlot Music Contest. Because there’s elephants.” Before anypony could stop him, Herpy leaped into the air and pulled a pose, pretending to have a microphone to his mouth. “Because the night belongs to us!”
Vinyl Scratch dragged him physically back down with her magic.
“The singing, we'll just have to learn to put up with. The telling us to enjoy ourselves... he's kinda right. Come on Octavia: we're in a zoo on our first date. Let’s go see some animals.”
Place: Made Sun Square Time: Two days after beating the pulp out of King Sombra
A dull smog hung over the city of Manehattan, swathing it in gray. The eye - which one could imagine being held up by a helpful turtle upon a cloud, except that clouds didn’t move without pegasi - swooped around the city and its five boroughs, as if seeking for something or someone. It dove down towards the Made Sun Square Garden, where an immense crowd of ponies had arranged itself into a sort of line, and came to a stop a short distance from a tail.
This was the tail of a mare who had yet to realize her destiny. It was medium-length, in a single swooping wave, and ended in spikes. It had the kind of striped blue-and-teal coloration otherwise normally associated with the more awesome varieties of toothpaste. It belonged to one Vinyl Scratch, of Ponyville, who was standing in line to get tickets to the upcoming Sapphire Shores concert so she could take one Octavia Melody, also originally of Ponyville, on a first real date.
The tail proceeded to swat the watchful eye away, its owner having decided she didn't like having a Breezy staring at her plot. It was still the tail of a mare who had yet to realize her destiny.
The line for tickets advanced by one pony, and Vinyl Scratch stepped forward to wait for another while to pay for tickets to a pop concert… of destiny.
BATTLE STATION BASS CANNON
Or: Vinyl Scratch vs the World of Popular Music Nopony has Remixed Yet
Because friendship is pretty great, and for some reason that involves pastel magic talking equines around 1.25 meters tall.
A narrated list of song links, for great justice.
Place: Vinyl’s Time: Morning, early (very)
The sun had barely come up when Vinyl Scratch crept quietly back through the door into her walk-up in central Ponyville, smiling quietly to herself. It was always surprising how many ponies didn’t realize how quiet Vinyl could be, for a DJ, but when it was a matter of sneaking concert tickets back up to show Octavia without waking anyone, she could do it. Besides, getting up early meant she could sneak back into bed.
She crept from the equipment room, through the standing kitchen, and into the bedroom, and then tucked herself back into bed as noiselessly as she could. Then, and this was the tricky part, she tried to silently levitate the tickets into the drawer in her nightstand-amp -- which was actually tough, since magic usually made some sound. Then she wrapped her forelegs around Tavi’s gray barrel and nuzzled her neck.
Octavia yawned, opened her eyes, and…
“Kbeg?” She shook her head a bit. “Bed? Whyuhmy in somepony’s bed?” She started squirming, but there was no escape from the cuddle. Bwahahaha.
(Vinyl never felt at all sure whether this kind of thing made her Chaotic Neutral or what. “No escape” was an Evil line, but “cuddle” was definitely Good. And you couldn’t really be in Dudist Beach without eventually catching on to the Chaotic alignment.)
“Because you were really stressed-out last night after practice,” said Vinyl Scratch, “And your Cutie Anxiety started playing up.”
“And then?” Octavia asked blearily.
“You were so wacked out about your destiny that I told you, hey, if you really get so panicky about playing cello for the Orchestra, you can always just go find that Starlight Glimmer chick the Six Girls were talking about and have her take your cutie mark away. Bam, no more grand destiny to worry about.”
Octavia jolted to her hooves, her light purple eyes springing wide open. Even blearily, it was a frightening proposition.
“I didn’t actually do it, did I!?”
“No, your anxiety just got even worse.”
“Good, because that would have been the single worst story ever of how I ended up sleeping with somepony. But Vinyl, how could you never think about your place in the world?!”
Tavi had relaxed, but it was a depressed-relaxed, not a calm-relaxed. Vinyl Scratch just kinda shrugged.
“I guess… I mean, I know my place. Everypony does. You’ve got your town you come from, your friends, your cutie mark, what you do in life. That’s your place.”
Octavia gave her that look, the you’re-being-so-dreadfully-Ponyville look. She blanched a slightly lighter grey.
“I had more meant about our place in the universe, broadly, as ponies. Lady Heartstrings…”
“Oh no. But I thought you hated all that stuff she spouts!” Everypony knew that stars were Princess Luna’s way of decorating the night, plain and simple. Saying otherwise was like claiming that Princess Celestia didn’t pick what the sky looked like during the day. The world just wouldn’t make sense that way. Hay, why hadn’t Princess Luna just outright told the head of the Royal Night Orchestra to stop telling tales? “You don’t think any of it’s actually true, is it? Everypony knows the sky belongs to the alicorns, right?”
“Think about it, though!” Octavia was still stiff. “If the sky belongs to the alicorns, who moved the sun, moon, and stars before the alicorns?”
“The unicorn nobility all-together, of course. It’s right in the Hearth’s-Warming Eve pageants every year.”
“But then, who raised the sun and moon before the unicorn nobility?”
“That’s like asking, where did ponies come from? We just don’t know. Is Lyra really getting to you that much?”
“It’s just that she really seems to know these things. She says the skies are a whole vast cosmos outside our world, that existed for long ages before there was ever such a thing as a pony. She says the stars are other suns, with their own worlds spinning around them. She says the Elder Race spread among them ages ago, that they were predators who dominated an infinity of worlds by claws, cunning, and woven plots.” Octavia shivered.
Vinyl Scratch pulled Tavi close to stop her from hyperventilating. It definitely wasn’t to stop herself from hyperventilating. Oh no. She’d been a brave girl ever since that one time in Unicorn Camp.
“You grow up thinking that a full-sized dragon is terrifying enough, and then a mare in a dress tells you the sky is full of dragons!” Vinyl gulped. “But hey, I’m - I’m sure Lyra’s just making this all up. You know she’s just another Ponyville musician deep down. She’s making it all up to seem deep for Canterlot ponies? Right? Right?”
But Tavi was still shaking.
“She keeps saying that we’re the only ponies anywhere, because only a weak, soft world like Equestria would ever give rise to creatures like us. She says she’s making us in the Night Orchestra her ‘gods of a new world order’ by something she calls ‘harmony through hierarchy’.”
“The only ponies… i-in all the universe? Weak and soft?” asked Vinyl Scratch. Her face scrunched up into a grimace. “That’s nothing! Weak and soft is nothing, ponies have always been weak and soft, but we were weak and soft together, and that made us tough!” She realized she was screaming and that her eyes had teared up. “But Lyra is saying… that we’re all alone.”
“And that is how ponies die,” they intoned together, the words of the Draconomicon echoing in both their minds. “For we are prey, who alone can only run.”
“Do you think we can pass this on to those Six Girls?” asked Vinyl Scratch nervously. “Heroism against cosmic-scale stuff is kinda their thing.”
“Ummm… my dear… would this actually end well if we passed it on to them? They’re the Elements of Harmony: the living avatars of Destiny in the world.”
“So you’re saying if we hoof it off to them…” started Vinyl Scratch.
“It’ll become - “
“A total disaster,” they finished together.
“Yeah, sure, friends for the friend gods, jewels for the jewel tree!” Vinyl Scratch rolled her eyes, “But they blew up half of Ponyville! It’s gotten to the point where even Pinkie Pie isn’t throwing Sorry We Blew Up The Town Again Parties. It’s like she doesn’t even notice anymore what her destiny does to other ponies around her!”
“Don’t forget that time Ms. Pie violently intruded upon my performance at the Grand Galloping Gala in Canterlot. This would all get political,” Octavia groaned. “The Royal Night Orchestra operates under the imprint and authority of Princess Luna. Twilight Sparkle may be a princess herself, but it would be downright rude for her to step into Luna’s own domain and put her hoof down. Even if the Lady Heartstrings does originally come from Ponyville.”
“Then I guess we’re dead and cosmically inferior and all that,” Vinyl sighed. “Oh well.” She brought up what she’d collected yesterday in her telekinesis. “So we won’t be able to enjoy these?”
Tavi looked at the tickets being levitated in front of her face. Then she broke into a fit of squirming and giggling.
Vinyl was lucky she’d practiced dancing while also working a turntable before: some unicorns would have had trouble levitating the tickets in place while also holding onto a struggling pony.
“You got tickets to the Sapphire Shores concert! You got tickets! To the Sapphire Shores concert!”
“Yeah, I did.” Well at least that was working to cheer her up!
“You got tickets to the Sapphire Shores concert in Manehattan!”
Was she really that surprised?
“Yeah!”
“You actually got me tickets to the Sapphire Shores concert in Manehattan this coming weekend!”
Ok, now it was time to just let go.
“Yeeeeeeeaaaah!” her voice rang out, pouring in just a tinge of electric guitar. “And it’s two tickets, so we can go together!”
“Oh my sweet and lovely Muses, that’s WONDERFUL! Vinyl Scratch, how did you know I’m secretly in love with pop music!?”
Oh. Oh. Ooooooh. Well that did explain the Dig a Pony record Tavi had shoved into her saddlebag the other day. And what was wrong with that, other than the fact that few other ponies liked that particular song? Well, ok, ponies ignored that song because John Lemon had called it a piece of garbage, and too many ponies had no taste to get over what the artist told them and like what they like.
Also, it probably hadn’t helped that the same band had held the famous Pinkie Pie of Ponyville for a short while, before creative differences tore them apart.
“Well, actually,” Vinyl Scratch admitted, “I didn’t know. I always like to go to pop concerts so I can hear new things to sample, but I would have thought you’d be too classy, what with wanting to play in the Royal Canterlot Symphony.”
“I guess I could say pop is a guilty pleasure of mine, but really I oughtn’t feel guilty about it. Sometimes a pop song can just wash away the complexities of one’s station and remind one of the simple joy that is life.”
“Wow, big words.”
“Oh just come here, you utter, utter DJ.”
But it was decided that they were going to the concert, and it was also their first kiss.
Which made it kinda a pity that Vinyl had kept her Get Rec’d on Record the whole time she’d been with Octavia. Spying wasn’t very romantic if you weren’t into Close Bond 007 movies…
Place: Canterbrigia Time: Meanwhile
It was a relatively ordinary dead-early morning in the Sexy Sax Pony, and Wells Wisher was thus the only actual sexy sax pony needed to run the entertainment. The problem was, the Sexy Sax Pony had never seen as roaring a business as had sprung up with the advent of the War of the Wubs Music Contest: everypony in all of Manehattan with any musical aspiration at all, let alone a musical cutie-mark, had started using it as a place to relax and grab a half-decent cider without getting into a contest. He was proud of that, even if it meant he worked tiring hours: Dudist Beach agents had spread word throughout the city’s Scene that their bar could be treated as a safe zone.
Of course, the citizens of Manehatten didn’t provide nearly as much information about the nobility as those of Canterlot had spilled in the One Nation Under Rock before it got taken-over. Sweat, cider, and sweet, sweet intel had basically been what covered the floor there.
He just kept up his act, watching the clock slowly tick towards 08:00, sweet Celestia’s morning, when even the most vigilant of Dudist Beach’s officers could go the buck home. He slid onto his side across the stage, raised a single back leg, panned a hoof over his face, and struck up his most recent composition on his saxophone.
Sisters, two stars that fell apart, As they tumbled from the skyyyyyy, Sun- and Moon-light, stirred jealousy and pride, as they both began to shiiiiine,
And the ripple of all their struggles shook even their hearts,
LUNA! NIGHT-MARE MOON! PRINCESS OF NIGHT!
The one exceptional thing about today’s dead-early morning was the number of well-dressed ponies still throwing back ciders at a time like this. Maybe it was because of the Contest that they’d all dressed up nicely? Or maybe some of them were just the normal banking clientele coming in to get thoroughly drunk before putting up with their jobs again all day -- Manehattan was like that. Manehattan was also the shipping and shopping center for all of eastern Equestria, so it wasn’t like he could complain too much.
With the guidance of the sun,
The elder sister earned her place in the spotlight!
While the younger’s ambition,
To be loved hardened her tiiiiimes,
‘Till she refused to end the night.
LUNA! LUNA! LUNA! LUNA! LUNA!
Wait. Was that a green unicorn over at that table in the back? The one with the omelette? They didn’t have a kitchen: how did she have an omelette? And what the buck was she wearing?
Time for morning is approaching and the air is cold and sets hearts to fear!
Wells Wisher wasn’t exactly a fashion buff, but he had spent time spying on the citizens of Canterlot and their affairs, which ended up being at least part of an education in fashion. Mares normally wore dresses to accentuate the natural pastel colors of their coat and to draw the eye towards (or, in one known case, away from) whatever curves they had (or, in some cases, didn’t). If they didn’t want to wear a particular look, they trusted in their coat to keep them warm, as the gods intended.
They didn’t normally wear dresses designed to look like a manticore had a foal with a suit of armor and it ate them, especially not with those snarling, constricted eyes hiding their cutie marks.
He had to keep playing and hope she didn’t notice he’d noticed her.
Feel the power flowing up into your hooves,
And the courage coursing proudly through your veins!
A saying he’d started to hear recently came to mind: to hide one’s cutie-mark is the way of the Life Fibers. Was that what he was looking at?
It's written in your stars, and etched into your soul!
Bound by fate and harmony,
LUUUUUUUUUUUUUNA!
THWIP-THUNK
Still alive. He looked over his crest. Horseapples. The knife had just missed his face and lodged itself in the wood behind him. He turned back to start fighting off the well-dressed ponies now trying to set fire to his bar.
And found a hoof on his chest, with four grass-green eyes narrowed at him.
“Good morning, Heartstrings,” he sneered.
“Good morning, rebel,” she replied. “What was that mongrel stuff you were playing just now about our Princess of the Night?”
From the outside, an observer would have seen what looked like her casually shoving him a bit, except that he flew backwards, hit the wall, and mercifully lost consciousness as the rubble of his own bar collapsed in on him.
“Find the scarf!” was the last thing he heard.
Place: Made Sun Square Garden Time: THE CONCERT! (actually early afternoon)
Of course, nopony had ever said Vinyl Scratch was any good at standing in queues when it wasn’t for something really important, like tickets or her girlfriend. This was why, in the back of her closet at home, she kept a stash of STAFF caps from every major concert hall in the land. If she was headed somewhere, she just had to take the appropriate cap and make for the quick way in.
She and Tavi were now engaged in walking very casually, exactly like they had a right to be there, to the staff entrance to Made Sun Square Garden. This required an effort to look casual and act natural, since everypony in Made Sun Square could totally see you walking through to the Garden. Luckily, if you had the right STAFF clothing, nopony looked twice.
They held their heads exactly low enough to look tired-out without looking depressed. The ball caps were covered in carefully cultivated layers of closet dust, straight from Vinyl’s closet. Tavi, surprisingly, had contributed the old band T-shirts.
(And actually, hers was from a punk band and really suited her. It had to be something about the tired-out look that went with her normal elegance to form the image of a consummate professional. Oh hey, “consummate”, that was one of her words. Vinyl had used to believe it was to do with food.)
In short, they were the spitting image of grizzled, experienced concert-hall staff who’d played every show since the beginning of time and definitely, totally belonged inside through the service entrance, preferably raising a pair of free staff ciders to the Old Days and Where They’d Gone.
If anything was going to get them caught, it was the constant giggling and nuzzling and little kisses on the cheek. Real staff members at concerts didn’t emit a sixth-level Sparkle Field out to ten hoofsteps’ distance in all directions, even after sneaking awkwardly out of an equipment closet where they’d been… buying some apples.
“You know, I’d actually expected that somepony would be on guard here during a music contest, maybe waiting to challenge Sapphire Shores for her Golden Record,” said Octavia as they approached the side door. Well, it was a side door in so far as you could have side doors on a massive potted plant built in the middle of a city that was all grids and right angles.
(Truth be told, it had been Princess Celestia’s gift to the Manehattan commoners lacking the gemstones and gilt of Canterlot or the country charm of the rural regions.)
She pulled the door open with a hoof, softly and inconspicuously. There was nopony at the staff door.
Vinyl Scratch pulled her cap down over her eyes and slipped inside. Tavi did likewise.
It only took a minute inside Made Sun Square Garden before they understood why everypony had gone inside so quickly. Tonight, the pegasus and unicorn staff had prepared the place with some absolutely BUYSOMESTRAWBERRIES amazing acoustics.
Sure, they’d both been there before. Made Sun Square Garden was pretty literally a garden, being actually made of extrusions from the heavy Manehatten bedrock to form a terraced arena, with soil then used to smooth out the slopes, and a layer of grass and flowers planted on top of all of it (Readers from foreign planets or dimensions should be advised that when Equestrian ponies speak of “landscape architecture”, they mean it literally.). The whole Garden was fed from above by a system of rotating micro-local weather managed by the Garden’s Weather Team.
The result was a sports and performance arena where you were always comfortable, you could come with anything from a tent to just a blanket, and if you wanted something to eat, you just reached out and munched on stray flowers and clovers instead of trooping around to a snack bar.
And today, just for Sapphire Shores, a team of unicorns had added a floating layer of acoustically reflective gemstone and stained glass, floating above and below the light clouding scheduled for Manehattan today. Portraits of famous ponies, pastel logos, and (of course) rainbows danced across the grassy hills of Made Sun Square Garden, turning the entire concert hall into its own spectacle of softly colored afternoon sunlight. Occasionally a cloud would interrupt the light while the gems and glass plates transitioned into a new pattern.
“Bucking. Amazing.” Vinyl Scratch’s jaw had dropped open.
“Seconded. A work of true beauty,” added Octavia, hastily rolling up her own jaw from the floor.
“So this is the kind of show you can put on when you’re Sapphire bucking Shores.”
“As I have oft heard it said, ‘Ayyup’.”
“We need to get to our seats,” said Vinyl Scratch, still staring upward.
Luckily, Octavia had actually looked for them, and had promptly marched behind Vinyl Scratch to shove her dead-staring flank over leftward and up through the tiered fields of the arena.
Place: Their actual seats Time: Literally two minutes later
The opening act had started playing while they walked up the marble steps between tiers of lawn and reached their seats. Unfortunately, the opening act was driving Octavia to pondering as she reached behind her mane; if she but had a glass it would be driving her to drink. Ah, yes, there was her and Vinyl’s blanket for the grass at their ticketed spot. And ah, yes, the opening act was indeed a punkish singalong called “‘Ere We Go!”, indeed by a Trottingham band called Da Dropkick Orkies.
(It was utterly intolerable, because the band members were basically just shouting constantly into their microphones. How did these ponies get to open for Sapphire Shores!?)
Octavia turned her marefriend’s face from the ceiling towards the stage and watched steadily for a moment, waiting for active consciousness to resume.
“Vinyl, my dear,” she said, when Vinyl’s eyes started moving on their own again, “You understand ‘punk rock’.” She helpfully made little quotes with her hooves to emphasize. “Can you explain the point of this band to me?”
Scratchy (nopony could ever know she was thinking of her as “Scratchy”) looked at her and tilted her head sideways with an eyebrow raised. She looked delightfully like a bemused puppy.
“Da point? Dey Da Orkies. Dey all green, dey all from Trottingham, and dey all yell WAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! What else is dere to gets?”
Octavia shook her head and rolled over, burying her face under both hooves and wishing she had wings to add. For one thing, all the performers indeed had green coats.
“Forget I asked.”
At times like these, a pony could almost understand why the Lady Heartstrings hated nonclassical music so much. Except jazz. Jazz was a living wonder.
“Actually,” Scratchy was standing over her and winking, “It’s a dramatization of some ancient myths about Diamond Dogs. Very cultural.”
Oh well. Their song was finishing anyway, and they shuffled off the stage to the sound of one last WAAAAAAAAGH from the audience. Octavia could hear her own thoughts again.
Octavia breathed more easily as Da Orkies’ janitorial staff, appropriately titled the Adept Custodians, shlepped their stuff off stage.
“Oh, right,” Vinyl Scratch remembered out loud, “We need to get these disguises off before somepony tries to enlist us in cleaning up!” Vinyl rolled over and lifted the T-shirt and cap off herself with magic, then helped Octavia do the same. The experience explained a lot for Octavia, namely why unicorns were so fond of clothes. They had a perfectly easy time putting the things on and taking them off.
When she’d slipped her T-shirt up over her muzzle, she noticed Vinyl Scratch had put on her characteristic checked scarf. Figured: she had to be ready to party, even at a pop concert.
And then Sapphire Shores trotted on, and she was the most beautiful thing in the arena. They hadn’t expected that she would be. In fact, they had mostly just expected somepony to walk onto the stage and announce that the show would start soon.
Yet, there she was, in her characteristically magnificent ruffled dress, which she had even improved from her usual. It had three black crosses across its front, and the purple-on-violet hems had been exchanged for red-on-black, with the red threads glowing and shifting hypnotically. Her emerald-on-red-and-black horseshoes clip-clopped across the stage, the only noise in all of Made Sun Square Garden.
This was what everyone had come to see.
“Hello, everypony!” crooned Sapphire Shores. “How are you liking the show so far?”
The crowd roared as a single force of nature.
“WE LOVE YOU SAPPHIRE SHORES!”
Her smile was as broad as the day was long. Considering that it was spring (these things always happened in Spring), this meant her smile had a ways to grow.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaah!” she sang in a do note, and turned her head this way and that to hear the echoes. “What a magnificent occasion it is to be back in Manehattan’s own Made Sun Square Garden! La la la la laaaaaa!”
It was magic.
Sapphire Shores sang Serves Her Right, and it was as sassy as a filly who’d just inherited a million bits and had the world at her hooves. For a magical few minutes, Manehattan outclassed Canterlot as everypony in Made Sun Square Garden knew what it was to be truly regal. And hold it over those snooty aristocrats, of course.
Nopony wanted to ever look away. Everypony stared with eyes wide open.
She sang Get Your Pony On, and it was like galloping through open meadows, wild and free. She let the left side of the stadium sing along with her through the chorus, while the right side stomped their hooves to the beat. The song lifted them all back into the primal steppes and plains of their ancient past, to the fresh flavor of wild grasses in spring, the pounding of the heart from successfully outrunning an enemy, and the original discovery of friendship when the herds learned their hooves could be weapons against the predator.
And then she paused.
“Before I begin my next song,” she crooned, “I just want to thank my generous donor Lyra Heartstrings for the gift of this lovely dress!”
Everypony could see it, and watched as its bright, shifting red threads spun and wove themselves through the air until, when they settled, it was as if Sapphire Shores had changed shape. Where a tall, lanky Earth Pony had stood, there was now a lithe, sleek Earth Pony covered in fabric, with adorable little bones running up and down her costume and a cutely enormous pair of pairs of heart-shaped speakers strapped to her sides.
The red and black threads were now pulsing ever so glamorously in bold, sexy crosses across Sapphire’s chest and barrel.
“Here we go, everypony! The Symphony Regalia and I will be playing our first grand hit! Let’s make this… the best debut ever!”
“Aaaaaaah! At the gala!” Sapphire Shores’ voice rang out.
“At the gala!” everypony sang back together.
At the gala! rang all of Made Sun Square Garden.
“At the gala, in the garden, I’m going to see them all! All the creatures, I’ll befriend them at the galaaa!” sang Sapphire Shores.
At the gala! echoed everypony together.
There was a mare bobbing her head next to Vinyl Scratch, with a dark gray mane on a lighter gray coat. She seemed nice, but wasn’t anywhere near as important or pretty as Sapphire Shores. Even if she did have a pink bow-tie on. What was her name, again, anyway?
“All the birdies, and the critters,” Sapphire Shores trilled on, “They will love me big and small! We’ll become good friends forever, right here at the galaaaa!”
At the gala! everypony repeated.
Why was Vinyl’s neck on fire? Sapphire Shores was singing, so Vinyl Scratch’s neck definitely shouldn’t be on fire. Was her neck on fire? It was definitely on fire. Would it be ok to look away from Sapphire to check on her neck? She’d have to.
She looked away from the most beautiful sights and sounds in the world… and the scarf around her neck was pulsing with the same red lines as in Sapphire Shore’s dress. Except that around her neck, they didn’t look bold and sexy, nor beautiful, nor pretty. They just looked… clear. Sobering. Like coffee with just the right amount of vodka in it.
She felt like a lovely dream had fled. If she looked away from her scarf, would it come back? Lovely dream of what? Sapphire Shores was the most glamorous, most sonorous, all-around best pony, and she was right there.
"All our dreams / will come true / right here at the gala!”
At the gala!
Wait. That would imply Octavia wasn’t the all-around best pony.
That was the dream. Glamor magic in Sapphire Shores’ singing, making her think that Sapphire was the best pony instead of Octavia being the best pony.
Vinyl concentrated on her scarf burning at her throat, tried not to listen and looked over at Octavia. But there was no Octavia: there was just a gray mare staring and cheering and singing along in helpless adoration.
“At the gala! I will sell them: all my appletastic treats!” she crowed.
Gods above! There were stories about Sirens that could do this to ponies, but Vinyl had never thought they were real. Or, for that matter, that Sapphire Shores was one of them.
“TAVI!” she screamed in her marefriend’s face, waving her hoof. “IT’S SIREN MAGIC! SAPPHIRE SHORES IS A SIREN!”
“Hungry ponies, they will buy them! Caramel apples, apple sweets!” Octavia was bobbing her head to the beat.
“Give us sa - she can just - mples! We will buy them - eat me up! Gimme some - then!” sang Octavia stiltedly. Her face was twitching and spasming with the effort of speaking independently of the song, and even then it was only glamor-influence.
“And I’ll earn a lot of money, for the Apple familyyyyyy!” rang the voice of Sapphire Shores.
Buck that and buck it hard. It was still taking effort to move, but the more she concentrated on the burning threads at her neck, the more clearly she could think. And the more she concentrated on the image burned into her memory of Octavia’s face spasming, the louder her hoofsteps thudded as she walked down towards the center stage.
She readied her Get Rec’d, swung the headphones in blaster-mode over her crest and shoulder, and max’d the volume. Tavi had said Shores had a Golden Record. Beating the BUYSOMEPEACHES out of her would be totally legal. Contest rules.
If Sapphire Shores could play music that tapped into the primal experiences of history, two could play at that game.
All our dreams and our hopes
From now, until hereafter.
All that we've been wishing for
Will happen at the Galaaaaa.
At the Gala!
Vinyl flared her into action as she marched down the stands towards the open field. Sapphire Shores hadn’t taken notice yet: she’d hopefully be able to get in a solid hit before she did.
Snare drums snared, and she resonated her hoofsteps with them -- it hurt a little, but she could take it. The trumpets trumpeted, and she hummed along. A few ponies around her started to awaken from their trance, and feeling her beat instead of Sapphire’s, they came in as the choir.
The tune swelled and built. The chorus lilted. This was her challenge to Sapphire Shores, for the sake of Made Sun Square Garden and Manehattan beyond.
… and threw her shoulders into the blast to push through the recoil. A canonball of blue-white bass energy arced down towards the stage. Vinyl raced to get away before Shores could see where the shot had come from. Until she could get in close this would be a shoot-and-run fight.
At the Gala, all the royals,
They will meet fair Rarity!
They will see I'm just as regal at the Galaaaaaa!
And Sapphire Shores’ high note casually dissolved that canonball. Vinyl could see the BUYSOMEAPPLES smug smile on her face as she casually dashed to the other side of the stage and continued her song.
DAKKA!
Pain lanced through her left wither as tissues that weren’t supposed to separate, did. She fell and rolled through on her side (a sharp coldness pressed further into her bleeding flesh), which at least meant the next shot missed her. Problem was, it hit some poor red Earth Pony stallion. She noticed that up on a sheet of stained glass, floating across the ceiling, there was a flash of green and grey. What had hit her? She pulled it out telekinetically. It was a finely carved emerald, tiny and shaped almost like a fat bottle without a cap.
“Bullets?” she whispered. But firearms were illegal! And who was shooting at her? Bystanders to a song-duel were BUYSOMEPEACHES illegal to use in the War of the Wubs.
Vinyl Scratch winked a basic shield spell into existence around her and used a basic healing spell to weave her wither back together. Every unicorn could do that, which was why she hadn’t expected to get shot with actual bullets. Everypony knew you didn’t bring guns to a spell-fight, let alone a Royal Music Contest song-duel.
She just had to keep singing.
“They came with the first light of dawn, setting their sights on Dundee,” she warbled weakly. “Led by the sorcerer Zargothrax, slaying all ponies he seeeeees!” This time she had her ears turned to the sides and heard the bullets coming, dodging onto her front hoof before flipping over some ponies. She was almost in the frontmost section now.
“They ride to war, once noble beasts, corrupted by wizard spell. The unicorns used to be good. Now they are forced to serve Heeeeeell!” Her voice was clearer now, stronger.
I will find him, my prince charming,
And how gallant he will be!
He will treat me like a lady
To-night at the Galaaaaaaaa!
“That isn’t enough, Sapphire!” thought Vinyl Scratch, as she fired the bass cannon at the stage again. The more she could keep Shores and her apparent sniper moving, the further down Vinyl could reach. Her scarf was still burning, which meant Sapphire had dodged the blast and was still singing.
“Down from the mountains, and across the river Tay, an army of undead unicorns are riding into the fraaaay!” Vinyl bellowed, and leaped over the fence keeping the audience out of the stage pit.
“Fireballs and lightning are raining from the sky!” she bellowed across Made Sun Square Garden. A Bass Wave shook the stage as she nailed her landing.
“Chaos and bloodshed while all the ponies die!” She had to sing louder! Ponies were starting to wake up!
“In this epic battle begins the final war!” Vinyl Scratch dodged to the left again and circled the stage, trying to reach the stairs.
A rain of bullets bounced off her shield, shoving her away from the stairs. BUYSOMEAPPLES. But she could turn this to her advantage.
She dove under the stage and readied her bass cannon for the last line of the chorus.
“Tragedy will strike this day! Prepare thee for!” she cried, and braced herself. Ready… aim…
“THE UNICORN INVASION OF DUNDEE!”
Vinyl Scratch jumped up onto the stage, where Sapphire Shores was actually out of breath. Her scarf was no longer burning, and the other ponies were waking up. She wasn’t even getting splinters in her mane from where she blew a hole in the stage.
Tzing -- her performing shades landed cleanly on her face after being launched into the air when she’d jumped. Vinyl smirked in that one way she knew everypony else found infuriatingly smug. Now then.
“The townsponies had little ho -”
This is what we've been waiting for,
To have the best night ever.
“ - pe. They were not ready for war. Fireballs make everypony die -” she stomped a hoof and felt the stage shake underneath her, “ - and buildings collapse to the floor!”
Each of us will live our dreams,
Tonight at the Gala.
Sapphire Shores hadn’t even stopped singing for a second. She was just doing it at Vinyl now.
“The beautiful princess was raped, and taken to prison with cry!”
At the Gala!
“Angus McFife swears a mighty oath: I WILL MAKE ZARGOTHRAX DIIIIIIEE!"
Bullets bounced off her shield as wubs, riffs, and chorus-song echoed through Made Sun Square. She couldn’t keep this up forever, but she could make it to the end of the song. Probably. If Shores didn’t knock her out first.
The wall of sound hit her again.
I’ve been dreamin', I've been waitin'
To fly with those great ponies--
Sapphire Shores slipped right to the side of Vinyl’s desperate punch.
The Wonderbolts, their daring tricks:
Spinning 'round and having kicks.
Perform for crowds of thousands,
They'll shower us with diamonds!
More wubs! She needed more wubs!
“The forces of darkness, are invading proud Dundee! There must find a hero, to save its destiny!”
She punched and bucked at Sapphire, but nothing ever connected. All she managed to do was waste Bass Wave energy on blows that just hit the stage.
Then she saw Sapphire Shores trip over one. It wasn’t a large trip. She righted herself immediately. But it was a trip.
-- Wonderbolts will see me right here at --
Vinyl channeled all the vibration of an army of undead unicorns into her Bass Waves.
Glory!
She reared up to strike the stage with her front hooves.
Would prevail!
This day!
She struck, and the stage collapsed under Sapphire Shores. The crowds of ponies all around Made Sun Square Garden blinked in the afternoon sunlight, freed from the siren spell.
“Fireballs and lightning are raining from the sky! Chaos and bloodshed while all the ponies die! In this epic battle begins the final war! Tragedy will strike this day, prepare thee for --”
She jumped into the hole where Sapphire was just rising to her hooves again, right foreleg pulled back and charged with Bass.
“THE UNICORN INVASION OF DUNDEE!”
Sapphire’s head made a horrible crunching sound.
“Flower metal? Really?” she whispered, with blood running from her mouth.
Then her dress tore, its red glow faded, and something… left her.
Vinyl didn’t feel any burning around her neck anymore. She’d won. But everything had gone straight to Tartarus.
The world spun around her, her limbs turned to jelly, and flowed thoughts her notright eyesclosed rest.
Safetavi? About Safetavi what!? Nowrest.
In front of thousands of ponies, Vinyl Scratch thumped to the uncovered earth.
Place: Canterlot Castle, basement Time: Sunset
“So… then,” whispered the Lady Lyra Heartstrings through clenched teeth, clip-clip-clipping a hoof to the floor.
“So then,” said some pointlessly professional Canterlot mook in a suit. He couldn’t keep still on his rump, constantly looking this way and that. It was as if he thought she really was just going to feed him to her Ts’an Nu.
Of course not. He’d have to fail her twice more to warrant that. Or carry a secret she couldn’t allow to get out. Or have made some attempt at incentivizing her like the nobility occasionally tried. She was a reasonable Lady, after all, even if of new title.
“The scarf had not been found by Dudist Beach after all,” she continued. The sunset was beautiful tonight, even if it drove the cream in her dress to orange.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Instead, it somehow slipped between our hooves.” Clip-clip-clip.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And ended up in a thrift shop in Canterlot, of all places. Canterlot, the Royal City within whose fabulous boundaries Destiny itself forbids poverty, and in which there should be no such things as thrift shops.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Clip-clip-clip.
“Whence it was found by that most obnoxious of all Royal Music Contestants, Vinyl ‘DJ PON-3’ Scratch. Who then proceeded to, worst of all, wear it during Sapphire Shores’ concert.”
“Correct.”
“Who not only survived against, but in fact defeated, Sapphire Shores and her Siren Shift?”
“Again, correct.” Clip-clip-clop.
The Lady Heartstrings sighed audibly and lowered her eyes to the floor. It actually would have been a kind of relief to just feed him to Ts’an Nu and be done with it, but she could only hire so many muscleponies cheaply before the flow of bits from her coffers into those of the mob would show up in the Diarchy’s famously well-checked financial ledgers.
At least she still had Sapphire. The mare had been strong, strong enough that she was almost uninjured beyond what the Shift had soaked up before dying. That was all right. There would be another Life Fiber dress. She would see to it.
“Go find out if that thrift shop is still there, would you?”
The mook of a stallion cantered out as fast as his legs could carry him from a sitting start.
At the very least, no common pony on the streets knows of us yet, whispered Ts’an Nu in her mind, as sweet and reasonable as ever.
Yet, my love, she replied. Yet.
Place: OUCH Time: OUCH
Vinyl Scratch woke up in a great deal of pain for the second time in… what had it been, a week and a half now? Argh. And these bandages were scratchy all over. And slings! Why was she in slings!?
Oh, bandages. And a bed under her.
Place: Hospital Time: Oh gods why
“You’re awake,” said a voice to her left. Who was that again?
“It’s me, Wells Wisher,” said Wells Wisher.
“And how the buck did we get here, eh?” asked Vinyl, still unable to shift her body so the bandages wouldn’t itch and bite.
“You halfway killed yourself fighting Sapphire Shores to a standstill. I got attacked by Lady Heartstrings.” She couldn’t even turn to look at Wells Wisher, so she just nodded a little.
“Where is here, eh?”
“Beth Alicorn Hospital. It’s not like they moved us halfway across Equestria or something while we were near-critical.”
Place: Beth Alicorn Hospital, Manehattan Time: To get even
“We’re gonna bucking get Heartstrings for this, aren’t we?”
“Yeah.”
“She BUYSOMEPEACHES ruined my date,” deadpanned Vinyl Scratch, remembering everything.
“She BUYSOMEBERRIES ruined my sexy sax bar,” deadpanned Wells Wisher, shuddering as he remembered the last bits.
