Chapter 1
Tonight was the night, Lyra would finally get to use the spell she spent so long working on and flaunt it about Ponyville on the night where everypony would look rather strange. She would have went about the town using it before now, but Bonbon was too concerned about making a scene. But now Bonbon couldn’t argue; it’d be seen as another costume however.....interesting it was.
“You and your obsessions.”, Bonbon said as she facehoofed and poured another batch of candies into a large bowls for incoming trick-or-treaters.
“It’s not an obsession if it’s a reality!” Lyra counter-argued as she looked herself up and down in the pony-sized mirror in their bedroom.
Lyra’s choice of costume this year was rather eye-catching, as it involved the use of a magical spell. The sea green unicorn even had to practice standing and walking like a biped; she could only use her hind hooves and she had to stand upright. the unusual posture she had to adapt to was necessary, as she could’nt use her front hooves. In fact, she did’nt have any front hooves to speak of.
Where her front hooves would have been, she had two mildly disproportionate muscular arms,complete with elbows, wrists, and ending in five digits. They weren’t fur coated like the rest of her body either; they had hair, however it was short and basically invisible to any eye that wasn’t making an effort to analyze it. To top off the surrealism, the bare skin even matched her sea green coat perfectly!
In contrast, Bonbon couldn’t see any way having such grotesque appendages could be enjoyable. Due to the multiple times Lyra had succeeded in startling Bonbon with her arms, she had learned that they were at a constantly warm temperature, which drilled into her head the fact that it was less of a spell and more of a plastic surgery horror. It was utterly impossible for her to even take the enthusiastic biped seriously; every time she even tried to look at her, she would lift her arm and flex the midsection of the upper arm, causing the earth pony to retract in semi-mock horror from the pulsating veins trailing throughout the limb.
“Are you done pouring candy yet? I wanna go show this off to Twilight first!” said Lyra as she took her attention from her arms and began to get some final practice on walking with her hind legs. The task wasn’t entirely on her--the spell had a minor influence in the shift of a pony’s center of balance, but it didn’t help very much.
“If you’re so eager to get started, why not put those to good use and help me?” Bonbon mumbled as she began opening a bag of caramel cubes to pour into another dish.
“...Actually that’s a great idea!” Lyra replied with enthusiasm as she quickly walked over to the table and snatched the bag from her lover’s jaw and began squeezing it determinedly.
“Careful with that! You don’t want to-” POOF. Bonbon retracted her head in shock as Lyra’s grip on the bag caused the bag to burst open and rain caramel cubes on the two of them, very few of them actually making their way into the bowl.
Once the candied downpour had ended. Bonbon shot an unimpressed look at Lyra, who was smiling sheepishly as she blushed, scratching the back of her head.
Lyra opened her mouth to offer an embarrassed apology, but the earth pony raised a hoof to shush her and deadpanned.
“Lets just go.”
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On the way from their own residence, Lyra made every attempt to attract attention, eccentrically waving to everypony within the viscinity, and earning a large number of strange looks as well as screams. Bonbon didn’t bother wearing a costume for tonight--she figured her companion would attract enough fright for the two of them. On top of that she felt like more of a foalsitter, personally volunteering to make sure Lyra didn’t try and run off and....use fillies as lifting weights or something.
Lyra made a point of visiting Twilight first tonight due to the amount of effort Twilight put into the 2-hour lecture on why her desired spell was simply a fantasy. As the green biped grinned, she anticipated the feeling of accomplishment that would come with bucking a hole in the wall that was the bookworm’s knowledge.
Twilight had decided to skip out on this year’s Nightmare Night, deciding that finding a few books on annual celebrations would be festive enough on her part. Once they reached the hollowed tree that was the Ponyville library, Lyra had knocked on the door with one of her hands, creating a low beat.
“Just a second!”, Twilight called out as she trotted toward the door, assuming it was an earth pony, since the door was almost always open, however anypony who couldn’t utilize magic would have difficulty with a doorknob.
As soon as she reached the door and prepared to open it, the knob had turned on its own slowly before being pushed open. All she saw was the cream colored earth pony Bonbon and....what was the torso and hind legs of....wait, Lyra?
“Hello Twilight!” Lyra exclaimed as she ducked under the door-frame to walk inside, nearly losing her balance before righting herself.
Twilight had to move backward and pause for a second to take in what was strange about the situation. Bonbon looked the same as ever, sadly not dressed for Nightmare Night, but Lyra was taller for one, but what happened to her front hooves?
“Remember when you told me that there wasn’t a spell for this? Hmm?” Lyra had gotten cocky and taken the offensive, since Twilight had apparently been too dazed to try and speak, and then once again flexed her arms.
“You....how...how did you do this?!” Twilight pried for answers as she walked toward her to examine her limbs. Bonbon took the opportunity to nonchalantly walk elsewhere in the library to look at random book spines.
Lyra walked to a bookshelf at the far side of the library and begun picking random books from the highest shelf, well above a pony’s typical height, and then placed them down on a table, only to taunt the lavender unicorn.
“You said there wasn’t a spell to do this, you said this was a silly idea, so HA! Look at me now Twilight!” She gloated once more before losing her balance and falling back on a couch.
“T-this is amazing! You’ve created a spell! Do you know how large that is?! You simply MUST teach me!” Twilight was giddy with excitement at the thought of presenting Princess Celestia with a new discovery, her excitement overriding the fact that she didn’t even create the spell herself.
“Naaah, what’s one spell the all-knowing librarian does’nt know? Wont hurt her! C’mon Bonnie, lets go to that concert I saw by the mayor’s office!”, Lyra shrugged off Twilight’s begging as she stood up and went out the door. Bonbon gave a bored look to Twilight before shrugging and following after her.
“Wait! Is there something I can do for you? A favor? Anything!” Twilight bargained frantically as she called out the door to the pair leaving the library. But it was too late, they were either out of distance from her voice or they simply weren’t listening.
‘A spell like that could revolutionize earth pony and pegasi efficiency, and she just creates out of of nowhere and doesn’t even share! How dare she just stroll in to taunt her just because I presented facts disproving her ambitions! ’ Twilight huffed as she stood at the doorway silently, trick-or-treaters passing by and some staring at her expectantly.How dare she just stroll in to taunt her just because she presented facts disproving her ambitions!
“I’ll just have to figure it out myself!”, she declared courageously as she charged back inside to begin a new study.
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“Was that seriously necessary?” Bonbon scolded Lyra as she struggled to suppress a grin at the past events. The sea green mare’s increased pride shown in the stride she walked with, her eyes set on her next destination, an outdoor stage occupied by none other than DJ PON-3. A large number of ponies below the stage were cheering and stamping their hooves to the beat, a fast paced remix of ‘This is Nightmare Night’, a song everypony recognized from the film ‘The Nightmare Moon before Christmas’.
“Oh no no no, you are not going up there to disturb an entire show! You’re letting this get to your head Lyra!” Bonbon defensively trotted in front of her before before turning around and stopping in front of her, blocking her path.
“Oh come on, nothing’s gonna go wrong, watch this.” Lyra rolled her eyes as she walked around the apprehensive earth pony and then circled the bulk of the crowd to find the stairs up to the stage.
The DJ, oblivious to Lyra’s approaching presence, was tapping her hooves on the stage to the beat whilst bobbing her head to either side. Rather than her blue and cyan streaked mane, it was dyed a festive black and orange in stripes, and she wore orange tinted shades, rather than the normal purple. She wasn’t costumed for the most part, however the left speaker of her headphones had a false knife handle on the outside of it, and the right speaker correspondingly had the tip of a fake bloody knife coming from it. Since her wild mane concealed the arch that held the speakers to her head, it made the illusion of a knife stabbed through her head horizontally.
Once Lyra had gotten close enough to the deck the turntables were perched upon, she tapped the leader-of-ceremonies on the shoulder to attract her attention. DJ PON-3 turned her head to look at the significantly taller mare waving at her and grinning, a toothy smile wide enough to rival her own.
“Well hello there Handy Mandy, what brings you up here? Awesome costume, by the way” She greeted eccentrically as she lifted an eyebrow and smirked at her. Lyra’s cocky attitude took over once more as soon as she felt she was welcome on stage.
“Bet I could mix something to rival yours in half a minute” Lyra taunted as she put her hand on her torso and smirked back at her.
At this challenge, Vinyl had to turn herself to face her properly before laughing at a volume that would be loud if it weren’t canceled out by the massive speakers at either end of the stage.
“You? Do this? With those grapplin’ hooks? Oh man I’d love to see you try. Know what, go right ahead!” Vinyl snickered as she used her magic to lift the headphones from her ears and onto Lyra’s neck, backing away from the turntables and standing off to the side, offering Lyra the position.
The cocky mare was well over her head in this situation, and she knew it. However, while DJ PON-3 may have had the know how to work the large device, as well as skill, Lyra had something a pony could never wish for with hooves: precision.
The DJ standing off to the side had already changed tracks to a song with more near-silent segments, which were open to a jockey’s own interference; sounds, effects, instruments, record scratching, as well as a number other tools that the improvising mare would probably pay no attention to. This worked in Lyra’s favor, since this eliminated the task of having to actually choose a song.
Lyra took the headphones in one hand and placed them upright against her ears, and as soon as she put them on proper, the noise-cancelling cushions helped to drown out the crowd and gather her attention on the music. The undisturbed music coming through the speakers pressed to her ears, coupled with the amplifiers on both sides of the stage made the atmosphere feel as if the air itself were pulsating with the beat.
The pattern of the current track was easy to grasp, and according to the display at the head of the synthesizer, the song was nearly over. Lyra waited for the next silent point in the tune to try her hand at it.
Once the rapid beats had suddenly halted and only a repetitive yet rapid high pitched drum begun, Lyra pressed four of her fingers to a record which had the needle applied and began jerking it forward and back, creating a fast scratching noise with no apparent rhythm, yet it stayed in time with the drum. She found that by applying or relieving pressure on the record, the pitch and some portion of the volume of the sound could easily fluxuate. She experimented with this by slowing her pace down to press harder on the record and push forward, then relieve pressure whilst moving backward. As soon as Lyra felt she had the hang of it, she began incorporating it into her wild patterns.
At this point, the entranced unicorn had lost herself in the music, grinning as she bobbed her head and continued to jerk and press the record to her own patterns. Sure, the song had ended ten seconds ago and counting whilst everypony in the crowd as well as DJ PON-3 stared at her, but she didn’t cease her turntable solo until she saw fit, giving the vinyl one last hard turn before pulling her arms back toward herself and crossed them in front of her chest, a smug smile on her face.
Five seconds worth of silence hung in the air before the crowd combusted into applause, stamping their hooves and cheering as Lyra relinquished the headphones with a content sigh and placed them on top of the synth. She gazed out over the crowd until the actual DJ tapped her on the leg to gain her attention.
“You’re teachin’ me how you got those handles next time I pop into town, right?”, the white unicorn asked as Lyra nodded in response. DJ PON-3 offered a hoof as a sign of sportsmareship, and Lyra met it with a fist as the crowd began to disperse.
“Now get the heck off the stage, cause I’m sure as hell not sharing my paycheck with ya!” Vinyl joked as the bipedal equine descended from the stage to meet with Bonbon.
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“I’m sure you’ve had enough fun for one night, Nightmare Night’s practically over by now.”, affirmed Bonbon as she yawned. The two of them walked toward their home, Lyra somehow expressing twice as much pride as before, sporting the DJ’s orange tinted shades in front of her eyes, a souvenir she was rewarded with for her performance.
“You do realise I’m not letting you do this again until next year’s Nightmare Night, right Lyra?” Bonbon revealed as she turned to look at Lyra, whose swagger didn’t fade a bit from the earth pony’s declaration.
“Yeh, I figured as much. Hey, can we go back to the marketplace real fast? There’s one last thing I have to do, one thing I simply have to do with arms!” Lyra pleaded urgently as they stopped in front of their house, Bonbon pushed the door open before turning around to reply.
“If it’ll be quick then sure I suppo-”, Bonbon wasn’t able to finish giving permission to Lyra before she sped off in a power walk back toward the center of Ponyville.
“Wait! Where are you going?!”
“I’ll be back in a sec Bonnie, I have to go squeeze ORANGE JUICE!”