The Best of Octavia and Vinyl

"Welcome back. Did you bring the pizza?"

"Pizza? I thought you wanted take-out!" Vinyl held up a small bag for Octavia to examine.

"Vinyl, I gave you a note. How can you confuse '1 four-cheese pizza' with, let's see... '2 egg rolls, 2 cups of broccoli, 2 buckets of rice and a 4-bit donut on the side?'" Octavia lifted her eyes to meet Vinyl's.

"...Bad hoofwriting?"

"You can't be serious."

"You know me too well. Here you go, Tavi." Vinyl's horn glowed and a small boxed pizza floated into Octavia's hooves.

"Thank you. Ah, It smells wonderful." Octavia closed the door and walked with Vinyl to the kitchen counter before opening her box and grinning at the pie.

"Know what else smells wonderful?"

"What?"

"Teen spirit." Octavia groaned.

"For the hundredth time, no."

"Tavi, it would sound amazing! We'll record it in the studio and make enough bits to pay next month's pizza bill." Vinyl chewed into her egg rolls.

"Hmph. I don't think playing that particular song will pay for the extra cheese, so I guess I'll just have to cut back a bit. Owmph."

"The way you consume pizza, don't you mean a lot?"

"No, I mean a bit," Octavia replied after swallowing a particularly large piece of cheese. "Exactly 1 bit to be precise. Just enough to stop you from tripling our expenses with your take-out alone."

"Aww, Tavi. I'm hurting on the inside."

"You always are after eating the egg rolls."

"Oh, speaking of bits and ways to make sure we have enough to pay for food, I thought up this great idea while I was waiting for the pizza!"

"Hmm?"

"Well, I know how you love cheese."

"Of course. I was raised to enjoy the finer things in life, including cheese."

"Yea, yea. Anyways, I also know you really like to play music."

"Where are you going with this?"

"You know how we've been looking for ways of making some extra money? Well this is the jackpot: String. Cheese."

"..."

"What do you think? You can advertise with your cello!"

"Go die."

"Oh, come on, Tavi!"

"Vinyl, you have no idea how badly I want to throttle you right now."

"It would be beyond cool, and you know it."

"No, it wouldn't be 'beyond cool'! I have no intention of stringing my cello with cheese."

"Just think! It's concert night, and you just finished playing an exhausting piece, but you didn't bring any snacks. Don't worry, because you can just eat the strings right off your cello! It could go over really well!"

"About as well as edible electricity, I'm sure."

"Already been done."

"Really?"

"What do you think Bon Bon does with all the extra sour after cooking her candies?"

"That's not actual electricity..."

"You wouldn't say that after you woke up with your face in drool and a slew of pictures of you spasming all over the floor."

"Have you experienced this?"

"Not talking about my escapades, Tavi. We're talking about yours. String cheese. You can make it happen. If it makes you happy, we'll only replace one string. Maybe the big middle one, so you can skip around it if you really don't want to use it when you play."

"I am NOT letting you replace my G-string with mozzarella."

"I was thinking more along the lines of cheddar. It's both cheaper and more popular."

"The answer is NO, Vinyl!"

"But Taviiiiii..."

"Don't you 'but Tavi' me! If you get anywhere near my cello with the stuff, I'll do unspeakable things to you with a pineapple."

"Fine... I still think it would be awesome..."

"Trust me, it isn't 'awesome'."

"And how would you know, huh!? Have you ever tried equipping your cello with string cheese!?"

"..."

"By Celestia's beard, you have..."

"I'd rather not talk about it."

"You actually tried this? I was just pulling your chain, but to think you, the great Octavia Philharmonica-"

"It was a long time ago, okay? I was just a filly, and I thought it was a good idea at the time."

"All the details. Now."

"Absolutely not! I would like to keep some semblance of dignity."

"You can have all the dignity you want. Just do it in private, where I don't have to see it."

"Ugh... It was my second concert. I was tuning my cello when one of the strings snapped, I forget which one. Unfortunately I had recently restrung my instrument, and I hadn't replaced the spares yet."

"Why didn't you just go on with three strings?"

"Vinyl, did you just suggest blasphemy?"

"Uh... Maybe?"

"One does not simply begin a concert without the proper number of strings. If a string breaks during the performance, then it can be seen as passion, but to start with anything less than 100% readiness is... is..."

"Better than using string cheese?"

"As I said, I was young and foalish. I had no way of knowing cheese was never intended for such activity."

"What happened?"

"Well, I only had three strings, and I thought I was going to miss the concert because of it. That's when I remembered I had some string cheese left over from lunch. It was nice and warm and easy to mold in my hooves, so I stretched it out and tuned it as best as I could before walking onto the stage."

"Did it work?"

"Put mildly, the sound quality was... off."

"And if you put it bluntly?"

"You really want me to explain the timbre of a line of cheese?"

"All. The. Details. How well did it work?"

"If by 'work' you mean 'allow me to play the correct pitch' then it was passable, but like I said earlier, the quality was off. Instead of being somber and mysterious, like the composition called for, it sounded more like a career-ending bowel movement."

"Like what those pizzas do to you after you finish them?"

"Something similar, only with less grace and more pitch control."

"So if I hypothetically replaced all of your strings with mozzarella cheese just before a concert, and you hypothetically couldn't replace them, would you willingly play Beethoofen's 5th in raunchy fart? Hypothetically speaking, of course."

"Hypothetically speaking, yes. I have never missed a concert, and even if it ended my career, I wouldn't miss that one. However, should this completely hypothetical event actually take place, then for the following month, you will find your power supply limited to Bon Bon's sours, your knobs replaced by cheese wheels and your buttons by cubed cheddar, and your entire music library swapped with a mozzarella cello's rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."

"It will be worth it."