Side Effects Of Life

Side Effects Of Life

Chapter 1: Oh Rose, thou art sick

“I feeeel love! I feeeeel love!” Vinyl Scratch shouted, microphone in her hooves. “But it’s BACKWARDS! But it’s BACKWARDS!”

A pounding rhythm, along with guitar samples and acid synths, accompanied her vocal performance, driving the white pony into dancing. Vinyl dominated the stage, dancing on two legs, jumping, bobbing her head, always in a frenzy, her electric blue mane going up and down.

“LOVE ME FROM BEHIND! LOVE ME FROM BEHIND! LOVE ME IN REVERSE!” Vinyl shouted, then jumped and threw her head back.

Vinyl's shades landed on the floor, purple shatters glistening when the multicoloured lights of the club hit them. Lost in music, Vinyl stepped on the glasses, but showed no signs of feeling pain, never casting a glance down at her hoof, continuing to move frenetically, waving her forelegs, eyes shining with a feverish fervour not usually present in ponies.

The crowd was busy dancing or tripping on ecstasy, so it was Octavia only who noticed how high Vinyl was. The fact, however, wasn't surprising. And who was she to judge, especially with a pair of windowpanes burning through her bloodstream.

The gray mare followed Vinyl's intoxicated eyes that shone like rubies. Due to the illumination of the place, crepuscular despite the flashes of light, Vinyl's magenta eyes seemed crimson red and overflowing with vitality. For Octavia they were the colour of the sunset, when the golden disc of the sun met the horizon, and just as exploding with tremendous energy as the sky before the rule of the night. They were as beautiful as the first time she had met Vinyl.

The more Octavia thought about the past, the more the club transformed into the Canterlot garden where she had played a few months ago. The manes of the dancers flowed and transmuted into haircuts of aristocratic nature, and fancy clothes appeared from their fur. Carefully trimmed bushes and rare trees with thick branches and exotic flowers covered the walls. Grass, scintillating with the golden brilliance of the sun, started to grow from the floor.

Octavia locked her stare on Vinyl, who jumped like a mad pony from one place to another, barely aware of any crowd; but even the stage morphed into Canterlot, the dark space behind it showing the tall spires of the royal city and the blue sky above them. On the table where Vinyl's computer lay beverages and glasses spurted out like mushrooms. The mixing deck carried dishes made from exotic meats and spices, so numerous as to provide satisfaction to every kind of palate. Vinyl herself morphed, waving, stretching, shrinking, and growing like an amoeba, into Fancypants. The more Vinyl looked like him, the more difficult it was for Octavia to hold back laughter, for it was absolutely impossible to imagine Fancypants in a club like this, let alone dancing wildly to something he considered “plebeian” music.

“It’s so backwards! Bloody backwards,” Fancypantsy Vinyl continued shouting as the beat stopped, letting the synths and pads to linger for a while. “It’s all backwards.”

The white horse fell down to her knees, eyes closed, mouth open as she tried to catch her breath. Her fur glistened with sweat, every drop shining as bright as the purest diamond under the rays of the Sun.

The pause sent Octavia further back and faster to the Canterlot garden. No matter how much Octavia fought against it, the visions, or hallucinations, advanced, Vinyl being Fancypants and the club the labyrinthine garden of the city perched on the side of the tallest mountain in Equestria.

Octavia missed the time when she had been entering into the world of acid, for the only things that had bothered her back then had been the visuals and the undulating motions of the universe. As the consumption advanced in quantity, it seemed that geometric designs and vortexes that had obscured her vision field were substituted by more radical changes. Whatever place she found herself in could change its design in a matter of minutes. Sitting in a restaurant, Octavia could see how it became a jungle, a burlesque bar from the Wild South, the inside of her home, or even a place deep underwater, with everything and everypony morphing into something to suit the vision.

The most intense experience, both in the good and the bad sense, was walking through the streets. Every object in her sight was in a state of constant motion, the towers of Canterlot becoming arrowheads or owls, the trees transforming into octopi that got trapped in the ground and tried to get out into space by frenetically waving their tentacles, the roads revealing that they are actually serpents akin to the mythic ouroboros, always moving in circles with their own tail in their mouths.

She enjoyed seeing the buildings take a singular sensual quality, losing their solid form and achieving a touch of the intricate sexuality of Saddle Arabian masonry along with the vibrant expressions of energy that were characteristic for the ponies from the southern territories. As she walked from one cobbled street to another, the places she visited morphed from red light districts, with sexual energy as palpable as taffy energizing the air, to buoyant cities from lands south of Appleloosa, roses crippling across the streets, on the walls, and around lamp posts, their flowers red, open, and sensual, blood vibrant and shining dripping from the petals. Looking down at the cities in the valley from some balcony or vantage point transformed the whole landscape into a dark lake or river, the yellow lights of distant homes nothing more but candles floating in paper boats amidst the vastness of the black ocean.

And the ponies. The ponies all were intoxicated by the touch of overflowing sexuality, not rigid and well mannered like aristocracy must be, but vulgar, drunk, decadent, eyes ablaze from lust, lightning snapping at the end of their fur, ready to copulate with their mate in the middle of the street.

As the night passed by and her mind lost its grip on reality, hallucinations would totally flood Octavia's vision, transporting her into another realm till the spirit of LSD deemed necessary to let her go. Octavia didn't like this particular effect at all. One thing was looking around at the transmutation of the place she was in, but totally another one seeing how the fluid perceptions seemed to shape the world into something alien and dreamlike and being unable to return back to the usual world. The most disturbing event for Octavia was finding out that midway in the oneiric state she had closed her eyes without even noticing it.

Octavia wasn't afraid she would harm herself in some way - as she and Vinyl had discovered, extremely high doses of LSD were so overwhelming, especially with the advance of the separate reality, that it was impossible to move at all. She didn't want to look weird in front of other ponies. The thought that somepony else could catch her while she was tripping scared her; for unlike Vinyl, who didn't care about reputation at all, Octavia still wanted to be a part of the Canterlot orchestra. Bits weren't the issue - her gigs with Vinyl as well as album sales brought enough money to satisfy all their desires. Prestige was the thing that kept Octavia in Canterlot. She didn't want to lose it all and get into drama because of her lifestyle.

The dreaded substitution of reality seemed to occur right now, the club looking like a caricature of the the Canterlot tea parties.

“Riiise. Shiiine,” whispered words reverberated through the dance hall, echoing into eternity. Vinyl still looked like a female version of Fancypants, stoned and gazing at the ceiling as if seeing it for the first time. “The Sun is fading. It's time to play.”

As Octavia looked at Vinyl, she went further back, toward the day when she had met the white mare.

She had immediately noticed the white unicorn in the crowd; for there had been a touch of madness around Vinyl, of exuberant energy, that went out of the usual restricted and mechanic Canterlot manners. Octavia had been playing the contrabass in the Canterlot Royal Orchestra, whose work that day had been creating a high society ambience for another party thrown by Celestia. As it had been the kind of festivity where nopony paid particular attention to the sound, Octavia allowed herself to focus less on the play and more on the environment.

At that moment she had noticed amongst the languid crowd Vinyl Scratch. Octavia knew Vinyl, for she was famous amongst Equestria for her dubstep and electro, bringing powerful midrange basses processed heavily through low frequency oscillators. Furthermore, both of them had studied at Canterlot Conservatory, the place where all the ponies whose talent was related to music went to learn their craft. However, the gray mare didn't pay particular attention to her and her music. Vinyl's music seemed to her to be without melodies, just grating and headache inducing noise in the same vein as Merzmare but less intense and more manageable.

And Vinyl herself wasn't prone to revealing her self to strangers. In the conservatory she had been known as the music nerd, whose only interest lay in sound; and Octavia would never forget the sleepless nights when Vinyl, a wall away from her, had stayed up all night playing some part of her track over and over again, making sure every dubstep fart sounded as it was supposed to sound. Maybe such torture was the reason she hated dubstep so much, as hearing these screeches at a time when she wanted to sleep had been excruciatingly painful.

As she had looked at the white horse from the stage in the Canterlot garden, Octavia felt interest in her. Vinyl didn't do anything out of place and didn't look weird, out of place - in fact, she looked like somepony dragged out by a friend to an event she considered utterly boring - yet she stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the Equestrian elite. There was a sense of aliveness, of power unleashed, of uncoiled energies, around her, in her wide smile, and it the way she moved. It felt as if at any moment white sparks of electricity would appear around her body.

The most intense experience had happened when Vinyl's shades slid down to her nose, unleashing a pair of eyes with severely dilated pupils, pools of blackness with a rim of magenta. Although her eyes looked distant, there was a gleam of intense energy in them, and the Sun shining from a clear sky only accentuated the Dionysian presence by covering them with a layer of liquid gold. Vinyl's smile, wide and somehow sensual, added to the unhinged aura present around her.

When Vinyl cast her stare at the stage, Octavia was sure the high horse was looking right at her; and she was sure some spark, even a bolt of lightning, passed between them, for Vinyl's eyes seemed to shine brighter for a minute and her grin, so attractive, so suggestive of hedonistic activities, got bigger. Then someone called Vinyl, and placing the glasses back over her eyes, the white mare turned around and vanished into the sea of almost dead flesh that was Equestrian nobility.

Somepony bumped into Octavia from the right, and from the left, and from behind. The moment they touched into her, they penetrated through her skin, fusing with her flesh; and when the dancers moved away, they took with them a part of her, stretching her body left and right, creating taffy like strings where foreign bodies mixed and became an indivisible whole.

Octavia opened her eyes and tried to move away from the thick crowd. The loss of boundaries was the main thing she didn't like in drugs Vinyl used. Be it boundaries between real and unreal, her own body and everypony else, on acid, especially in the quantities she had been consuming, they fell down, creating an amorphous combination where dream and reality interacted so strongly with each other that breaking them apart was impossible, and where she couldn't understand at what place her hoof ended and another body began.

In club environments, with everypony rubbing each other, the sensations were the most intense. It felt like being a part of a big gelatinous mass where one ripple happening on the other side of the room reached the whole crowd, including her. At times Octavia was sure that another pony controlled her mind; by jumping and dancing, the stranger pulled the strings that made her twist and turn the same way as the master. At times it seemed that she controlled the whole crowd. She waved one hoof, and everypony else waved their hooves. She jumped, and everypony else followed. Looking into another pony's eyes, or even feeling a foreign body, was an act of incredible intimacy. By a single look into the intoxicated eyes of her dancing neighbour, Octavia was sure she knew all about the pony, from the mask he or she used while walking amongst others to the deepest, darkest fetishes.

After the bodies clashed, it was difficult becoming whole and free again. It felt as if she had accidentally bumped into molten chocolate, and removing herself from the intrusion took a lot of effort. To get rid of the other pony's pseudopodia, Octavia jumped as wildly as possible, only to bump into someone else and get stuck in another cloud of stickiness.

After she managed to get unstuck from the others, she went outside or to the bar, where the absence of ponies restored, to a certain degree, her boundaries. She didn't stay in one place for too long, because no sooner she relaxed properly than she felt like fusing with the chair or melting into the ground. With one pony only didn't Octavia mind melting totally.

As the gray mare moved away from the crowd, each contact with another sweaty body taking more and more away from her solid form, she felt like walking through honey, all sticky and gooey. Every step was a Sisyphean effort, for the strings connecting her to others pulled her back into the crowd, turned her into the ooze that was the dancing folk. Once she would be outside the formless mass, she would go to the backstage - no one would bump or disturb her there.

When the fear and loathing washed strongly over her, making her mind ruminate at incredible speed about the location of her barriers in order to reassure her that Octavia Melody was an independent entity, the musician looked at Vinyl. It helped every time.

“Why don't youuu enjoy your little ponyyy?” Vinyl, smiling, shouted. “Why don't youuu just fuck some ponyyy? Why don't you hoooold your life in somepony's hand?”

As Octavia looked at her partner, both in business and in life, who jumped happily on the stage, she saw how strings of brilliant white light emanated from her skin, then enveloped her body, and formed something between a flame and a star. Sometimes the white aura exploded and filled the stage with a scintillating white mist that looked like falling snow illuminated by the streetlights at night. It seemed that the white flame gave stamina to Vinyl Scratch and at the same time consumed her, for the more frenetic Vinyl became, the more she was obscured by the star’s radiance.

Another bump from the right, another pony entering her and devouring her body like an amoeba. She must get out of here as fast as possible, before every vestige of her most intimate and most personal belonging disappeared into the singular body consciousness of the dancefloor.

The ponies around, dancing, eyes either closed or open but observing invisible landscapes, brought to Octavia memories about the first time she had visited a party like this, which had happened in the evening after the event in the Canterlot garden and the exchange of glances with the enigmatic club musician.

The reason why she had decided to visit such kind of party in the first place had been her marefriend from the band, Harmonia Pentatonica, who talked about some new dance craze that spread through the underground music scene of Equestria and parts beyond.

According to hearsay, parties were usually held in sleazy parts of town and in the most hidden allies, and getting into one required not money but connections. Whoever organized the events, and whoever participated in them, wanted to remain as anonymous as possible, the party itself being as invisible and unnoticeable as gust of warm wind at midday of a hot summer day. Nopony knew why parties were held in the shadows of equine life; and many suggested the parties exhibited such forms of hedonism that if they were discovered, Celestia would ban them in a blink of an eye. As a result of the profound secrecy and the rumours surrounding the events, Harmonia, who had managed to get invited through the help of another friend, was afraid to go alone. Knowing about Octavia's restricted demeanour, she had asked the gray mare to accompany her, be her guard in case if something went wrong. For some reason unknown to her, Octavia obliged to her friend's plea.

As a consequence, Octavia had found herself in a tenebrous club in the less populated parts of Ponyville. She didn't like the place one bit, and was surprised why her friend, a pony born and raised in Canterlot, wanted to participate in this event. The club was filled with dancing ponies grinding against each other, hugging, passing hooves over each other bodies in a manner sensual. Octavia regretted coming here as she moved through the crowd that bumped into her from every direction imaginable. Then there were the throbbing lights of all the colours of the rainbow that pulsated in rhythm to the music, illuminating the crepuscular space in strange hues before sending it for a few seconds back into darkness.

And the music. One good thing about it was that it wasn't dubstep or a dubstep derivative. In fact, the music seemed to be the opposite of dubstep or electro dubstep. Gone were the happy melodies and the growling midrange basses; absent were climaxes present every two minutes; and abandoned was the ear splitting loudness. The sound was minimal - a mere kick drum with percussion elements, a bassline, and some squelchy melodies made with synths unknown to Octavia's ears - and the sound was dark, emotionless; but there was no denying that the combination somehow worked, making Octavia tap her hooves and move to the rhythm. Maybe it was the minimal percussion, or the bassline, or the synth sounds, or maybe it was everything. Or mainly the synth sounds, since the alien melodies made her want to move like a madmare, waving hooves left and right in an attempt to physically mimic the music.

Despite the coldness of the music, Octavia, as she grooved amongst the ground, had felt content. Never before had club music influenced her in such way. She considered it a “plebeian” form of merriment, Dionysian and low compared to the carefully constructed melodies of classical Equestrian sounds. There was more history, more emotion, in a group of strings, Octavia thought, than in some artificial kick drum and sine waves. This kind of sound, new and unheard, made her question her views on electronic music; for in the minimal structures she was listening to existed a certain harmony, a certain combination, that affected her on every level of her being. Everything - from the beat to the squelch - worked so well together that she unable not to dance. Even the lyrics, which sounded more like growls due to the pitch shift into the lower octaves, added to to the infectious groove.

“Pon-three will surviiive. Pon-three will stay aliiive,” cold voices said through the speakers, as if a robot glitched and got stuck into a loop. The monotony, though, drove ponies further into dancing frenzy. “Pon-three will surviiive. Pon-three will stay aliiive.”

Octavia had wanted to see the DJ in the hope that, as a musician to a musician, he or she could give recommendations about this type of music; but the crowd was too thick to go closer to the stage. Inch by inch did Octavia progress further, often stopping to analyze and enjoy the music rather than to wait till some dancing couple cleared the way. She noticed that the DJ must be skilled, for the tracks blended in such a way no pause existed between the beats - the last kick of the ending song was immediately followed by the first kick of another. With the type of music being played, such mix made wonders by accentuating the groovy and trancy aspects of the music. Octavia could get lost in the grooves and rhythms in a blink of an eye, dancing without stopping until the music ended or her body hit the exhaustion mark.

Once she had been approached by Harmonia, whom she had lost as she moved through the lines of ponies dancing with large smiles on the faces to the infinite beat. Judging by her eyes, Octavia concluded she must have gotten her hooves on some kind of mind altering substance. Octavia's suspicions were confirmed when Harmonia gave her a round white tablet.

“Join the party,” Harmonia said, smiling either like a retard or like a child. “You're missing half of the fun.”

Much to Harmonia's dismay, Octavia had to renounce this pleasure, for she remembered well the classes about club safety. Amongst them reigned one supreme rule: if you're planning to consume psychoactive substances, even alcohol, be sure to have somepony absolutely sober to watch out after the group.

“What is it?” Octavia asked out of curiousity.

“Ecstasy,” Harmonia said, grinning as if not a single bad thing existed under the Sun and the Moon. Then, she hugged Octavia, enveloping her hooves around Octavia's neck and stroking lightly her mane, playing with every lock of hair like for the first time in her life.

Octavia had never heard of something like that before. She knew that the dubstep parties were filled with stimulants like speed and cocaine, and she knew that certain classical musicians engaged in hashish, but she had never heard of “ecstasy.” It sounded like a slang name; maybe the exact chemical name would ring a bell. Whatever the nature of the drug and its effects, Octavia enjoyed her stay without it.

Harmonia, though, was annoying Octavia with her clinging, acting like a teenager stroking her lover for the first time while they both looked at the stars and the moon. Octavia had tried to move closer to the stage, which she could partially see after several hours of wandering through the thick crowd, but Harmonia, wrapped around her body, had been more of a nuisance than help. Octavia felt as if she were working on a rock farm with a boulder attached to her back.

“For somepony so firm you're so warm and smooth and soft,” Harmonia said. “Why are you so cold anyway?”

“I'm a frigid horse,” Octavia said, annoyed.

“You need to get out of yourself. Get some ecstasy. Get it?”

Octavia had looked at Harmonia, who still smiled like a first grader on recess, not a care in the world obscuring her wide and innocent eyes. She had wanted to say something in return when a shift occurred amidst the club goers. Some of the ponies started climbing onto the stage, writhing and twisting before a large crowd without giving a single flying fuck about how ridiculously they moved or looked. To Octavia's surprise, nopony tried to stop the folk; in fact, she realized at that moment that she hadn't seen anypony looking like a guard since she had entered the venue.

“I want to go there, too,” Harmonia said, released Octavia, and tried to gallop her way to the area that was in most cases reserved for artists only.

Octavia had wanted to go with her - after all, an intoxicated friend was a friend in need - but she stopped when she finally saw the DJ. It was more than simple coincidence, she thought as she looked at the so familiar, so energetic, so... attractive pony on the stage, dancing with others like if she were somepony from their group, not a musician hired for the occasion.

The blue maned mare looked as wild as back in the Canterlot garden, maybe even more, for the party didn't require a particular code of behaviour. Her body, fur glistening with beads of sweat, writhed and undulated like that of serpent reacting to the tones of a flute, moving in total harmony with the music. A joyful grin never left Vinyl's face as she danced with one pony and then another; and for a moment Octavia thought Vinyl looked like one of these creatures from the myths called satyrs, who were supposed to represent the eternal creative ecstasy of Nature.

What had stricken Octavia the most were her eyes, her magenta eyes that looked deep red underneath the peculiar illumination of the club, red as rubies. And they shone with such fervour that Octavia had rarely met, drunk with divine madness, giving a glance of that immense energy that existed behind material apparitions. Octavia suspected that the DJ horse was probable intoxicated, but neither Harmonia's eyes nor the eyes of the dancing folk around looked so brilliant, ecstatic, mad.

Vinyl had turned toward the dancefloor and, ready to descend from the stage, exchanged a glance with the gray mare. Once again Octavia felt the bottom of her stomach drop, for she never could have imagined that so much fire could be in somepony's eyes. She didn't remember seeing so much energy in the horse back in the conservatory; but to be honest, Octavia never really interacted with her, for she was a high brow musician making true art, not an entrepreneur with enough skills to make escapist music and suck out money out of the ignorant masses. Interacting with somepony lower was the same as rolling in polluted matter for Octavia. Maybe she was wrong.

Vinyl's smile had grown bigger, and the white horse had even winked, which Octavia had proceeded to disregard, shifting her eyes around in an effort to show confusion. Vinyl, however, didn't take that as an offense; instead, she jumped right into the crowd that was lost in the monotonic beat, oblivious to anything but the sounds coming from the speakers.

Octavia didn't know what to think. Anxiety and desire ripped her apart. One part of her being wanted to run as fast as possible from the club, return back to the safety of her apartment in Canterlot, and forget everything about what has transpired in this shanty place on the rim of Ponyville. Another part felt attraction - irrational attraction, for it was based upon intuition rather than the decisions of the mind, which stated that one must know somepony very well before developing feelings of such kind - and it requested Octavia to stay. But one thing was certain - she wanted to see those magenta-red eyes again, to drown in them, to lose herself in their magnetic power.

When she saw Vinyl coming, moving in tact with the beat, Octavia had felt the bottom of her stomach drop. Her heartbeat jumped up till she could feel the thumping of the heart in her ears, and a wave of cold perspiration covered her body. Stuck to her place, Octavia didn't know what to do. Should she smile? Dance? Walk toward her? Run away? Kiss her?

The sight of Vinyl, though, had calmed her down. Looking into those magenta-and-ruby eyes shining like diamonds took away Octavia's anxiety. It is said that the eyes are windows to the soul; and if the the saying was correct, then she was seeing in Vinyl's eyes the same thing she felt at the bottom of her heart, hidden beneath thick layers of denial and fear, enclosed by armoured and rigid musculature that didn't allow the emotions to come out.

When Vinyl had reached Octavia and placed her hooves on Octavia's shoulders, their heads merely inches apart, the gray mare realized there was absolutely nothing to fear.

“Take a sniff of me,” Scratch said, her breath caressing Octavia's cheeks and neck. “I'll make you feel fine.”

The next moment hot and moist lips had pressed against hers. Waves of shivers lifting every hair of her body and making her tingly all over, Octavia closed her eyes and responded back, pushing her head toward Vinyl. Some part in her mind still screamed about the absurdity of the situation, and tried to remind the gray mare that only easy sluts made out on the first date, that what she was doing was utterly wrong and immoral and decadent; but judging by her feelings, wrong was right, absolutely right.

The kiss broken, Octavia could only smile like a little filly. Maybe it was a contact high or maybe she had absorbed something from Vinyl's mouth; however, in the end, it didn't matter. The kiss, the smile, the tingly skin, even warmth in parts below the navel - everything was perfect.

For the next hour or so - time seemed to be nonexistent without the presence of something that showed its passage - Octavia had surrendered totally to the music, and danced as wildly as possible with Vinyl either in front of her or right next to her. The hypnotic beat, never disappearing apart from the breakdowns in the tracks, kept her going and going. She became a part of the dancing crowd that she had not liked at first; and it felt good. Without shame Octavia jumped, swirled, twisted, shook her flank, and waved her hooves, oblivious to the layers of perspiration covering her body. For some reason, being with Vinyl liberated something inside her, some powerful energy she had never suspected to exist within her being, energy that made her dance despite exhaustion setting in, energy that made her tingle and feel light, energy that made the colours more vibrant and deeper.

However, the best experience had been Vinyl, who emanated a tremendous cloud of raw power around her and to whom Octavia felt attracted against every cry of her rational mind. The gray mare lost count of how many times she fondled Vinyl's neck, inhaling her warm breath, looking into those magenta eyes that seemed to be crimson red, and wanting to do things done usually in private than amongst the dancefloor. The most intense moment was rubbing spine to spine with Vinyl and then turning around and passing her hooves down Vinyl's writhing body, feeling the heat of her skin, and the pulsation passing through it. If it weren't for the venue, Octavia would have kissed Vinyl on her lips, then would have fallen to her knees, tracing a line with her tongue from Vinyl's upper mouth to her lower one, drenching her face in the heat and juices of Vinyl's private parts, her tongue going maniacally up and down, catching every single drop of the liquids dripping from Vinyl's red and swollen petals of flesh.

When the frenetic dance had ended, Vinyl smiled, then leaped forward, closer to Octavia's right ear.

“If you want to know me better, meet at my place. Horse Tail Road. House twenty-three,” Vinyl had whispered, then planted a soft kiss on the right corner of Octavia's mouth.

Octavia had closed her eyes and felt her whole body tingle. Never before had a mare or a stallion given her such powerful sensations. If she weren't so well mannered, she would have jumped on Vinyl - so strong was her desire.

Vinyl looked one last time into Octavia's eyes, smiled again, then proceeded back to the stage.

Once Vinyl had disappeared in the moving crowds, Octavia sighed. All the joy was suddenly gone, replaced by a sadness and longing, as if she had lost her most precious belonging. It felt like Vinyl had taken her heart away as she returned behind the DJ deck, leaving in its place a hollow cavity that couldn't be filled by anything.

The crowd looked as boring as before Vinyl's visit, just sweaty bodies moving and colliding with each other. Octavia again noticed the absence of strong lights in the club, everything being submersed in dark hues and long shadows. Only the music seemed more or less the same, although without Vinyl's presence, it sounded rather hypnotic and dark than sensual, inviting for carnal activities.

As the gray mare had stood amidst the undulating crowd, she tried to recollect her mind. She reminded herself over and over again that feeling such strong emotions, let alone wanting to do things of sexual nature, for somepony she had known only for several hours was wrong, utterly wrong. Every other part of her being, outside the barrier of the mind, screamed that it was the best thing that had happened in her life.

If it hadn't been for Harmonia, who wanted to go home, exhausted from dancing, Octavia would have stayed right to the end until everypony would have been gone and she would have been alone with Vinyl. She would have sent her friend home and remained at the occult club; however, Harmonia was intoxicated on a drug unknown to her, and leaving her alone in the moonlit streets of Ponyville wasn't something a decent pony would do.

Unsatisfied and confused, Octavia had left the party.

“Let me feel crazy. Let me feel crazy. Let me feel crazy,” a heavily processed voice repeated over a rolling four note bassline, bringing Octavia back to the present. Vinyl's song choice seemed to fit her thoughts, Octavia reflected. Each song was related to a certain part of her past, to certain memories and experiences. Each song seemed to be like a time machine, chosen with extreme care by the white horse who now stood behind the DJ deck. Octavia, though, wasn't surprised - since their first meeting phenomena outside rational explanation followed them like the night follows the day.

As Vinyl let roll in another track, just as thumping and driving as the previous one, Octavia finally escaped the throngs of the amorphous crowd, and found herself near the bar stand, unoccupied save for a few couples engaged in dalliance. She felt torn, nothing but an empty shell whose essence has been absorbed by the tentacles of the shapeless dancers. Before going backstage, Octavia cast a glance at Vinyl, and the feeling of being glued to others and sucked out of her body disappeared step by step, as usual. Vinyl always brought her down to reality.

Lately, thanks to the acid diet, Octavia often lost herself. As she and Vinyl took LSD usage to new heights, the gray mare discovered that she was absent most of the time, not there. The strongest this effect manifested itself when she was doing something, no matter how small or insignificant the activity was. Whether she was walking, eating, making love with Vinyl, or working in her studio on the new joint album, Octavia perceived herself as the activity. No doer existed at that moment; only the doing, the process. In these moments she often felt not as Octavia Philarmonica, earth pony with the calling being classical music, but as something beyond categorization. She was empty, empty as the air, yet as encompassing and ever present. At other times she felt like a vortex of intense ecstatic energy that was the essence of the universe, or a little wave on this ocean of transcendental might, whose every single action contributed to the whole picture. When Octavia felt like energy, there was nothing but ecstasy and boundless power in her - in fact, she was nothing but ecstasy and boundless power - and her actions achieved a touch of madness and intensity she never thought could manifest through her. Especially it manifested in her music, which now had a strong ecstatic, Dionysian vibe that made the audience enraptured with her performance.

However, it only required Octavia to stop doing something and start thinking in order to discover that she couldn't find her self. She simply wasn't there. There was only emptiness; no matter where she looked, “Octavia” was absent. And in the end, what defined “Octavia”? What made “Octavia” different from, say, “Lyra” or “Spitfire”? If she wasn't Octavia, who was she? In whatever part of her consciousness she looked, she couldn't find her core, “Octavia”. She was greeted only by memories of what she liked and what not, what she found pleasurable and what painful, what she desired and what she avoided; however, no “Octavia” rested there. Along with memories existed clusters of rules, all based on what she should avoid doing, all different in regard to different settings, that told her how to talk with other ponies, how to respond to them, what attitude to take toward them, what to do and what not in their presence; but beneath them did not abide a pony called “Octavia”. A look deeper revealed some constellations of meaning related in some way to the clusters of behaviour; and they rotated around words. Apparently, she had been a “musician” at some point, a “filly” at some point, an “Equestrian citizen” at some point, a “gentlemare” at some point, and many, many other “things” at different points, sometimes being one "thing" in one space or house or time and another "thing" in another space or house or time. Sometimes, what she was depended on the pony she was speaking to. Alas, even there she couldn't find “Octavia”.

The more she looked inside, the stronger she panicked, for in no place she detected “Octavia”, only a mesh of learned behaviour and the words and symbols that triggered it, automatic reactions based on what felt good and what not, and attraction to some things and aversion to others based again on the feelings of pleasure and pain. Nowhere - absolutely nowhere - there was “Octavia”. It made her sweat, shake, and look around feverishly, mind going athwart in the frantic search of some core, something tangible. Existence is some thing, therefore she must be some thing. Only emptiness, void, is no thing. Did she exist? Was she nothing?

Looking at the environment surrounding her didn't help; it just made her slide deeper into the singular state. When Octavia looked at a tree, a rock, a house, or the sky, she couldn't really understand them as such. If a tree happened to stand in her vision, the mare needed to understand what a “tree” was. It would not seem to her like a “tree”. No, the object didn't dissipate into nothing, but at the same time it wasn't there, it wasn't a “tree”. The more Octavia got into this vortex, trying to understand what makes a tree a “tree,” the more she found out that a tree wasn't a “tree”. To solve the mystery, Octavia defined what a “tree” was, what made the tree a “tree”; however, she ended up in a mental morass where it was necessary to understand what the “leaves”, the “branches”, the “acorns”, and the “roots” were. A look upon them led further down the spiral of confusion, for Octavia had to grasp what formed the “roots”, the “branches”, the “acorns”, and the “leaves.” In the end, after the exhaustion of all her rational capabilities, there still was no answer to the question what a “tree” was and what made whatever was standing in front of her a “tree”.

The same thing happened with everything else. One glance from right to left, and Octavia was lost, for no thing seemed to exist, yet it all was there. For some reason unknown to the gray mare, the experience was profoundly disorientating as well as frightening.

Only Vinyl, that alabaster horse with eyes shining as the most precious gems made by Nature, managed to drag her out of that abyss. Just looking at Vinyl was enough for Octavia to remember that she wasn't no thing, a process of the universe, a vortex on the sea, but Octavia, a Canterlot born musician working in the Canterlot symphonic orchestra, living in apartment in the elite town in Equestria, and in mad love with a certain horse. A simple hug, a contact with Vinyl's warm skin and satin like fur, followed by a deep kiss of her lips with a tongue exploring her teeth and the space beyond, did incredible wonders to Octavia, as it reminded physically to her that she was Octavia and the other mare was Vinyl, which in turn restored the trees, the rocks, the houses, the sky back into the world.

“The way I feel I don’t expect to go to sleep for a year. I am on fucking fire,” a sample said, then the music exploded in a sonic firework of distorted acid melodies.

As Octavia observed Vinyl behind the deck, she could see an aura of white electricity around her, thin filaments of lightning coming out of her body and forming a fuzzy cloud around the white mare. When Vinyl lifted her head from the mixing equipment and shouted, the tip of her horn flashed, and then the stage was obscured with a white scintillating mist from which spectral white-golden spermatozoa flew out into the space above the dancing crowd, leaving behind long silvery trails. Just looking at the sight, only available to her, made Octavia gasp; for the gray mare felt like watching the explosion of a supernova happening right in front of her. However, it wasn't really a surprise for her that such phenomena happened. Since that fatuous first glance in the Canterlot Garden had Octavia been aware of the energy, ecstatic, sensual, and seemingly endless, seething from every pore of the white horse.

It had been the direct sensation of this immense energy that had brought Octavia to visit Vinyl's place the next day after the underground party in Ponyville.

Having arrived home from the event and put Harmonia to sleep - Octavia didn't want to leave her alone until she was absolutely sure that no trace of the mysterious drug remained in Harmonia’s consciousness - the gray mare took a shower and then tried to fall asleep. To her frustration, she couldn't turn off her mind because the vivid memories of that white mare, the dance they had, and of that peculiar contact between the two of them. When the impressions of the night faded into the background, however, other things emerged in her consciousness, things she wanted to do with that mare, things sensual, like kissing her from head to toe, fondling her body while bathed in the cloud of heat it emanated, so calming and comforting, caressing every crevice of her beautiful form, both above the navel and below, the ones available to public display as well as the occult ones which acted as keys to the secret joy of the white mare, placing her hoof between the white mare's legs and savouring the pulsating warmth and pleasant wetness present there, and then seeing the mare's transparent liquids slowly make their way down the pleasuring hoof, shining like diamonds, and then tasting them, feeling how they rolled on her palate, their taste dissolving as they reached her throat. Octavia of course tried to push them away, but the wishes were too strong, making her feel flushed and tingly all over, her lower belly longing for a release. Maybe if they had come home before dawn, the darkness of the night would have allowed her to crash into the land of dreams, but the penetrating rays of the rising Sun kept her awake, in the trap of the wishes and desires swelling up in the back of her mind.

For several hours had Octavia tried to fall asleep, but to no avail. She drifted like a pendulum between her thirst and an inability to accept and understand it. Love didn't work that way. You were supposed to go out for a few months with the pony you felt attracted to, not feel currents of passion the first moment you saw him or her. It felt wrong. It felt right. It scared her. It attracted her. The gray mare knew everything would change if she would visit Vinyl, but she was afraid to do it because, guessing by what had already happened, it would be furious, burning everything, incinerating her.

At noon Octavia had decided to take the risk, no matter what consequences awaited her. Maybe once her thirst would be clenched, she would manage to get back to her old life.

As Octavia reached the door knob, Harmonia walked into the hallway. Apparently, Octavia had been so involved in her thoughts she hadn't noticed that her friend had awakened.

“Where are you going? Don't you want to stay with me?” Harmonia asked, smiling.

It seemed the drug didn't wear off totally, for Harmonia's grin still had the touches of fillyhood innocence not common to adult mares and stallions.

“I need a breath of fresh air,” Octavia said.

“Is there something wrong?”

Octavia smirked. “No. Nothing at all.”

She went out of the apartment before Harmonia could respond.

Standing in the gloomy and chilly hallway, the gray mare sighed. “It's only me pursuing something I'm not sure of.”