Side Effects Of Life

by Amethyst Deceiver

Rating: mature
Tags: Sex, DJ P0N-3, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Romance, Octavia
Length: 20121

By coincidence, or perhaps not, Octavia meets Vinyl Scratch, who shows her the many side effects of life, love being the main one.

Octavia's life is boring. Despite living in Canterlot and having a luxurious life, Octavia simply walks from one day to another in a gray cloud of monotony and dullness. When she meets Vinyl, however, she discovers that life has certain side effects which can change the whole destiny of a course in a blink of an eye, which can steal one's peace of mind and routine and contaminate one's existence with things that are impossible to remove from one's soul. Love is the main of these effects.

Published 2014-07-23 18:40:04 UTC
Last updated 2014-07-23 18:40:04 UTC

Oh Rose, thou art sick

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.”

The Honey Sucks

Chapter 2: The Honey Sucks

A final cymbal crashed, and the beat went away, leaving the crowd in an aether of formless sounds. Vinyl, grinning, glanced at the crowd, then proceeded to her laptop, golden spermatozoa floating around her like anacondas in the tropical marsh. At any minute the beat would start again, and the ponies, sweaty, high, but happy, awaited this moment impatiently, judging by the whistling and clopping they made.

As a powerful four note bassline rolled, the dancers lifted the forelegs into the air, and a loud yeah rolled through the space. Octavia, however, didn't feel cheerful. She wanted peace and quiet, a silent haven where she could recollect her mind from the acidic onslaught that was too overwhelming for her.

Octavia turned her head away from Vinyl and noticed that she was a few steps away from the bar, almost deserted save for a few couples who wanted to enjoy each other sensually and intimately. It looked like an ideal place to rest and recover after having restored her identity; although it still felt rather shaky, for the gray mare perceived herself as if her whole individuality was the same thing as Frankenstein - a jumbled mess composed from parts alien to her but which, by working together, seemed to be her. If these extensions and ideas were to fall at the seams, she would find only emptiness, nothingness, a featureless distance between the bar stand and the raving masses. The prospect of turning into void scared Octavia, and she put all the will she could muster in her state into the act of pulling back together the foreign yet so familiar and cozy parts of her being.

Illuminated by dark red and blue lights, the bar looked like a cave, the bottles on the shelves glistening like rivulets of water running down the cavern's ancient and twilit walls. As the bar shaped further into a cave, the more everything else disappeared into the background. Octavia was sure that the blasting four-on-the-floor rhythms decorated by acid melodies didn't happen behind her, but a few blocks away. The dulled out ecstatic celebration reminded her of dub-techno made by Fog, for she liked to drift away in those long tracks where every sound seemed muffled, as if a party were happening a few storeys up or below her.

Calm, mind quiet, Octavia sat on one of barstools that seemed for her to be giant amanita muscaria mushrooms due to their bright red tops.

“Can I have a glass of water, please?” she asked politely.

In no time was the glass in front of her, water shining red with occasional tinges of yellow. Almost the same way had the waters looked when she took acid for the first time, getting on a ride truly set for locales outside the dominion of common day existence.

Only a few days had passed after Octavia's appearance at Vinyl's doorstep, but for the gray mare these few days had seemed as intense as to other ponies five or ten years of dating and marriage. Many times she had thought about why she had kissed Vinyl when the white horse appeared from behind the door of her house; many times she had thought about their reverie that had begun in the hallway and ended up on the coach; many times she had thought about how her mind faded into the background the moment she saw Vinyl's magenta eyes, how her heart skipped a beat when Vinyl smiled with the smugness of a know-it-all teenager, and how her whole belly below the navel tingled when Vinyl kissed her as gently as a summer breeze on the lips and on the neck; but she couldn't find a satisfactory answer, nor she wanted to stop doing what they were doing, for it felt so right. Nothing ever had felt so right as her mad attraction to the white mare.

When Vinyl had presented her to the molecule of LSD, however, the whole universe became perfect, a crystal gem of beauty so intense that mind failed to comprehend it and languages to describe it.

“Have you ever wanted to touch the sky?” Vinyl had asked Octavia one day as they laid on the carpet, reposing in each other arms after a long love session, the late afternoon sun falling from the large window opening to the plains and hills of Equestria.

“Who doesn't,” Octavia said, then placed a soft kiss on Vinyl's nose.

The white mare stood up, annoying Octavia.

“There's acid in the house. Wait here,” Vinyl said, then proceeded into the bedroom.

Octavia lay on the floor and let the post orgasmic serenity and occasional yet pleasant shudders reign over her mind and body. She liked to satisfy herself in the privacy of her home, but never had the end result been so intense, shattering her on every level of her being. Although she had not had any kind of sexual contact with stallions - they seemed unsophisticated to her, just trying to shove their thing and ejaculate instead of making an aesthetic performance out of it - Octavia had heard about how it felt from her friends; and comparing what her friends had said about the sexual experience involving stallions with her adventures involving Vinyl, she was grateful not to have had a stallion inside her. Vinyl was the only one she needed. End of story.

“Get up your lazy flank. Let's go for a walk,” Vinyl said, returning back into the living room.

“I don't want to,” Octavia said slowly, rolling onto her stomach. “It's cozy here. Calm.”

“Believe me, it's gonna be a walk you'll never forget.”

“If you say so,” Octavia said, then stood up languidly.

Vinyl stretched to Octavia's face her right hoof, on which a blue gelatin square lay.

“What is this?” Octavia asked, her brows furrowed.

“This is acid,” Vinyl said. An impish smile suggesting things forbidden by common standards adorned her face. “I'm giving you acid.”

“Isn't this a...drug?”

Vinyl lifted her left eyebrow. “So what? I use it all the time.”

Octavia had looked warily at Vinyl. She remembered how ecstatic and somewhat unhinged most of the time Vinyl looked, but it was exactly this what had attracted her to the DJ horse in the first place. A glance into Vinyl's drug fueled eyes had been enough to send her down the path which led to underground parties, undiluted sensuality and mad, utterly mad, love. Why not to take the next step, then?

Without further delay, Octavia took the little tab and put it in her mouth. To her surprise, it tasted the same way as pure gelatin.

Vinyl's smile grew wider. “That's more like it. Come on now.”

“Will you be on acid also?” Octavia asked, her voice weak.

“I've already dropped in the bedroom,” Vinyl said. Then, as if reading Octavia's mind, she stroked her cheek against Octavia's neck. “Don't worry. Everything will be fine.”

As Vinyl looked into her eyes, Octavia felt the knots of anxiety ease up on her stomach. She had seen Vinyl doing impossible feats while intoxicated, such as performing live and DJing, therefore she should calm down. If Vinyl said that everything would be all right, then everything would be all right.

Being her first time on “real” drugs - a few glasses of wine didn't count on Octavia's mind as serious inebriants - Octavia paid all her attention to her body, expecting any second some clear changes in her body or thinking. Every tremor, every shiver, every movement in her bowels she interpreted as a sign that the tab was working. Because of her anxiety, she didn't notice when the changes really started.

As the gray mare walked down cobbled paths shadowed by long and tall trees and twisting across miniature ponds, she had noticed that the Canterlot garden looked somewhat different. Although she had strolled many times throughout these twilit paths, she couldn't remember the green leaves, the scintillating water, the bulbous tree trunks, the flowers of all the colours of the spectrum, and the manifold little insects flying from one bush to another looking so enchanted, so there. Maybe the reason for such an effect lay in the light, which seemed brighter yet more ineffable than usual, making everything shine, giving every object, no matter how small or big, beautiful vibrancy. And the way it fell through the foliage: sharp as the blade made from the best steel, but as ethereal, as angelic, as fragile as the first rays of dawn. Everything illuminated by or moving through the luminous might speckled like if it were covered by a layer of diamond dust. The most intense thing was the golden haze created by the descending Sun as its rays, falling onto the shady streets from between thick leaves, mingled with each other. The whole air inside the effulgence looked alive and glistening with golden powder, almost liquid thanks to currents of solar power moving through its emptiness. Why hadn't she noticed this beauty before? Was it because strolling through the same area for countless times had dulled her perception of the place, or because she usually didn't pay much attention to the environment surrounding her, lost in endless loops of thought? Why was she seeing it at the current moment?

A turn left followed by a turn right, and many old but new wonders opened to her eyes. The trees, the grass, the bushes, the flowers - all looked beautiful beyond words, infused by the brilliance of the descending Sun which made every object look shining and golden. Apart from overwhelming ebullience emanated all objects, whether organic or not, a profound sense of power, of might, of ecstatic energy, of the pulse of nature itself. No matter where Octavia cast her stare, she saw this intense might, manifesting through the fierceness of light and buoyancy of vibrant colours. Sometimes, she saw sparks of Nature's delight on the borders of leaves, in the cracks between the cobbles of the paths, on the ends of Vinyl's deep blue and flowing mane, even in the air itself; and she couldn't help but smile and giggle like a teenage filly that had caught the infectious laughter bug from her friends without even knowing why everypony else was laughing in the first place. Her body tingling from the force of the ecstatic flows of energy, Octavia convulsed in joyful laughter, feeling light, wanting to jump through the streets in the same way as a little foal chasing butterflies.

Energy. Energy everywhere. Energy had impressed Octavia the most as the acid advanced through her body, yet she had not been aware of the chemical source of her reaction, blaming everything on the frivolous love mood and the presence of her lover by her side, shining white, every hair of hers bristling with sparks, her eyes as bright and deep as cerise coloured diamonds. Only when Octavia closed her eyes and was greeted by golden ever shifting blobs did she realize what had happened. The awareness of the drug affecting her brain, however, didn't make her feel scared, nor did it diminish the impact of the experience she was having. Without thinking much about the drug proceeded Octavia to enjoy the amoebas floating behind her closed eyelids. For her the amorphous shapes of gold, red, and orange seemed to be a visual representation of the energy that she saw and felt streaming through every inch of space, her body included.

In fact, energy had been the essence of her first trip. Everything, Octavia felt, was related to the drunken interplay of power moving life and nature. No matter where she looked and what she experienced, everything was alive, infused with tremendous might. The breathing bridges on top of ponds and small canals; the rippling white pavilions hidden amidst emerald foliage moving on its own accord and looking as liquid and shimmery as the ocean on a bright sunny day; the flashes of white light in her vision that were followed by shapeless blotches of colour; the geometric patterns moving rapidly on the cobbled paths and watery surfaces; the eyes of pigeons that looked like black suns, bright and alien and fierce, layers of radiance emanating from the black shiny core - everything was a part of a never ending dance of joy.

Every single cell of her being charged with astral fire, Octavia jumped down the walking paths, smiling and laughing, stopping and looking around with eyes full of wonder and joy. Thankfully they were deep in the Canterlot gardens, with nopony for a mile in sight, so Octavia didn't feel anxious about appearing wild in front of a group of revelers.

When she stopped to take a breath and examined the place the two of them found themselves in, Octavia didn't look at one area for too long; for the patterns, both geometric and formless, which rested in the periphery of her vision came to the fore and in a matter of minutes completely obscured the real world, entrancing the gray mare with singular hues, perpetually morphing shapes, and shimmering energy. Sometimes she got so enthralled by the patterns that Vinyl had to pat her on the back and remind her with a kiss where she truly was. Looking at Vinyl, though, wasn't really helping. The fact that Vinyl's face kept morphing, one moment looking like her old self, the other like a Dali painting, some parts of her jaw dripping onto the ground, only added to the fast advance of rapidly moving figures. Nevertheless, Octavia was grateful for her presence, which acted like an anchor she truly needed.

The most beautiful moment of her first trip had been watching the sunset, which went from blinding yellow to deep red. When the sun finally kissed the horizon over the mountains in the west, the whole sky lit up in an explosion of red and orange. For Octavia the event seemed either like a giant squid spreading luminous tentacles throughout the dark blue sky, or like a cyclopean eye opening and obliterating everything in ecstatic and orgasmic fury. And the clouds. The clouds! Catching the yellow, purple, and red colours of the blazing sky, changing shapes like blobs of magic or the bubbles in a lava lamp, the clouds looked like eldritch creatures, fluffy yet utterly foreign to the equine world.

For many eons, or what felt like eons, had Octavia watched the furious glory of passion as the Earth and the Sun mingled with each other. Only when Vinyl interfered with her trance did Octavia look at her, and her heart skipped a beat; for in Vinyl's magenta eyes, looking red due to the vanishing light, she saw the same thing that happened across the endless fields and over the mountains in the west. The same fierce emotions emanated from Vinyl's eyes; and Octavia imbibed this flamboyancy of energy, her stare never wandering from the white mare.

As a response, Vinyl lunged forward and kissed Octavia. The kiss was light, not as lustful as usual, but Octavia felt as if the same explosion that was happening at the horizon occurred in her mind. Waves of the most electric crimson, orange, and yellow obscured every single crevice of the usual darkness behind closed eyelids, wiping in their wake the last remnants of her thoughts. Octavia's mind ceased to exist; there was only sensation, pure sensation.

For how long the kiss lasted Octavia had not known, nor had she cared to know. The moment had been absolutely perfect, from Vinyl's warm wet lips brushing against her dry ones to the kaleidoscopic and liquid madness that had been her only sight.

“Baby, do you have a light?” somepony asked Octavia.

Octavia opened her eyes, not wanting to return into the present from crimson red ecstatic and sensual memories. She looked left and saw a young mare sitting on the barstool right next to hers. By the look of her messed up mane and glazed eyes, Octavia concluded that her neighbour was either on something or drunk or both.

“I...don't smoke,” Octavia said. She tried to sound as coherent as possible despite her mind barely working. “Sorry.”

She looked at her reflection at the bottom of the empty glass - a star trapped within glass, a material that looked solid yet was in fact fragile and illusory, not knowing how easy it is to get out - then stood up, and placed one bit, golden and shining, onto the table. As the bartender took the money, the gray mare passed by the drunk or intoxicated mare, her destination set on a brown door nearby.

“I'm sorry. I got a little wasted...carried away,” the mare said in a slurred voice, rather speaking to herself than the horse who had left her. “I feel a little bad, you know? It's like...well...you know what it's like.”

Octavia knew what it was like. Knew it very well.

The gray mare found herself in a dimly lit hallway. Some ponies walked hither and thither, mainly performers getting ready for their gigs or technicians, but none of them paid attention to Octavia - just about everypony in the underground music scene knew she was Vinyl's partner in crime, who at times added a touch of classical ambiance to Vinyl's set, and even actively participated in the act by twisting knobs.

Octavia knew that she needed to walk ahead and then pass through a set of gray doors. Behind the doors a set of stairs awaited her; and as she would ascend them, she would find herself right behind the stage, right behind Vinyl.

As Octavia walked through the hallway, memories triggered by the drunk pony assaulted her, seeping into the present environment. The air of the corridor became electrified, almost palpable from the waves of unhinged, unrestricted passion flowing through it. Wherever Octavia looked, sensuality was present, not the delicate, refined sensuality of Canterlot, but the Dionysian, transgressive, rambunctious sensuality of red light districts and hormonal youth. A look at a picture of a lake near Ponyville; and Octavia remembered rolling with Vinyl on the sand and under the rays of the descending sun, then Vinyl going down on her, and then beads of her pussy juice flying through the air and shining like liquid diamonds as Vinyl reached her orgasm and arched her head back, eyes closed, mouth open and lips glistening with her secret secretions. A glance at the poster of Manehatten, and Octavia remembered convulsing madly in the hotel room, lost in the waves of pleasure, again and again, and then at the end of the performance falling into Vinyl's hooves, utterly exhausted on the mental and physical level, but revived by Vinyl's masterful licks of her neck and the space behind her ears.

Once the barrier had been broken, there was no coming back. Musical duties done, Octavia spent all her time with Vinyl, either in clubs or at parties - not well known clubs like Shroom or Hoofcienda or events like Manezora or Bam, but occult ones, where the latest and cutting edge stuff was played before it reached the mainstream and got butchered - or alone with her, working in her studio, walking around the hamlets of Equestria, and enjoying each other bodies if the opportunity presented itself.

Although Octavia came to view the club scene in a more positive light than before, she still preferred solitude and intimacy. The only exception happened when she was rolling on E, for the drug seemed to be made for getting in close physical, albeit not sexual, contact with other ponies. The gray mare couldn't describe that almost religious feeling which happened when the whole crowd danced together and rubbed together while at the same respecting each other personal space. It felt like a communion, a collective understanding and feeling, where you could look at strangers and feel no sense of danger coming from them as you stared into their eyes, and where you could allow them to touch you, knowing that the touch wasn't sexual but utterly innocent, like that of a child caressing her mother's hoof. It was more an acknowledgment that you exist and I'm awed by your existence and I respect that. While dancing on E, Octavia felt as if the whole “please don't touch me or I'll file a rape report” thing suddenly were peeled away, and everypony returned to interacting on a kindergarten level: totally open, without fear. Thanks to ecstasy, Octavia realized another dimension of these underground parties and the music played at them; for the environment and the sound facilitated this sense of total understanding.

While not rolling or on another kind of psychoactive substance, however, Octavia appreciated the parties less, unless she was with Vinyl. She couldn't get enough space to dance or move freely; the warm air between the shifting bodies didn't bring relief and satisfaction; and, if drugs were present in her system, she was afraid to stay in crowded places for too long, since it felt as the large masses would crush her both physically or mentally. Although she liked getting lost in the endless beat, Octavia couldn't achieve fully the desired state on the dancefloor, always being alert lest someone do something improper to her.

With Vinyl, everything was in reverse. The alabaster mare present, Octavia could let go of the last vestiges of her control. She couldn't really say why she acted like that with Vinyl only - maybe it was Vinyl's Dionysian presence, or maybe it was the feeling of total trust brought by the pony whom she had no doubt in – and in the end, it didn't really matter. Once Vinyl was on her side, everything ceased to matter.

Many parties had Octavia spent utterly lost in the music, jumping and twisting with her marefriend, kissing her on the lips, then neck, then shoulders, moving her hooves down her white body till parts not touched in public, smelling her skin that gave off a tinge of sweat mixed with muskier and more inebriating fragrances. Octavia's favourite moment was dancing with her forelegs resting on Vinyl's shoulders and looking into Vinyl's magenta-red eyes, which brimmed with fire every time the lights flashed, then moving closer to her, warm breaths mingling, chests and bellies touching, and then kissing each other as passionately as possible.

Vinyl pushed her right over the edge on the dancefloor. Wild and unrestricted, Vinyl allowed herself much, much more than Octavia; but this wasn't a problem for the gray mare. Vinyl's hooves, soft, moving in perfect rhythm to the beat up and down her body, sent shivers all over her skin, and sometimes Octavia caught her breath as Vinyl's hooves slipped beneath the navel and between her hindlegs. The same story happened with Vinyl's lips, which knew exactly where to plant their gift to drive her out of control. A kiss on the base of her neck, one beneath her left ear, and one on her right shoulder, and Octavia’s pussy was wet and her body felt warm and covered by a field of dense but invisible electricity. Sometimes the tension and drive was so intense that Vinyl dropped on her knees and kissed furiously Octavia's chest and belly, her hooves doing their work in total sync with the music on Octavia's hindlegs, in the beatless breakdowns only allowing themselves to play with the space right beneath Octavia's tail, lifting the tail up and massaging with utmost skill the space where hair and skin came together. Much to Octavia's dismay, though, the white mare didn't dare to plant her lips on the place that deserved their treatment the most, at least not amidst the crowd; but Vinyl’s warm breath brushing against her groin was enough for Octavia to feel weak in the knees and shivering from waves of sexual ecstasy going through her body.

It took all Octavia's willpower not to moan or embrace Vinyl tightly as a way to demand more stimulation. Dancing aroused was utterly ecstatic and utterly demanding at the same time. Her every move bristled with waves of sexuality wanting to find a release, beating against the slowly crumbling shores of her mind that was usually debilitated by acid. With every beat and every touch and caress of her marefriend, Octavia lost herself more and more to the red haze of lust. As a result, every act of restraint, of pushing back, brought pain and only fortified the electrical tingling covering her skin and the throbbing, pulsating, humid heaviness between her legs.

When Octavia was ready to snap did Vinyl finally wink and nod with her head toward the exit.

There was no point using the stalls, since everypony else was there and the whole environment wasn't aesthetically pleasant, especially with the overall condition and nauseous smells. The chillout rooms, despite the pleasant and twilit space obscured by transparent swirls of marijuana smoke, were usually crowded, and the combination of music and drugs was more suitable for delicate fondling rather than something intense and passionate. Of all the opportunities Vinyl and Octavia decided to use dark corners outside the club.

Once out of the club, their passions didn't abate. On the contrary, Nature itself seemed to pour oil into the fires of their lust. Every breath made Octavia feel dizzy after the poor ventilated rooms of esoteric clubs, and every brush of the quiet nocturnal wind against her raging nethers was a whole orgasm of its own, driving her to rise up her tail and bend down, presenting her swollen, shining, and drippy marehood to Vinyl's hot breath.

Reaching a suitable isolated area, Octavia, aroused by the smells coming from her partner and by the masterful play of nature, assaulted Vinyl, wrapping her forelegs around Vinyl's white warm body, kissing her furiously on the lips, not caring about strands of saliva left on Vinyl’s face, grinding her wet pussy against Vinyl's thigh, moving her loins up and down against Vinyl's soft and silky fur that stimulated every single piece of her sensitive folds at the same time, hugging Vinyl tighter and tighter, bringing as much contact as possible between their skins, as if in a furious effort to melt with her, her forehooves either holding Vinyl's head or moving up and down her body, playing with the base of her electric blue tail and the space beneath, making the white mare grind against herself in return.

Bored with Vinyl's mouth, Octavia proceeded up toward Vinyl's horn, pressing her heavy pussy tighter against Vinyl's body, her body tensing every time her clitoris rubbed against the warm leg of her perfect lover, every hair on her body standing because of the currents of pleasure running along her skin. A lick at the base of the horn, and Vinyl gasped, shuddering and holding Octavia as close as possible. As the gray mare worked with her tongue over the coils of alicorn, and circled her tongue around the sharp point, Vinyl barely moved her hooves. Her only action was grinding against Octavia and letting a muffled moan into Octavia's shoulder. Vinyl's motions only stimulated further Octavia's nethers; the gray mare herself could barely hold moans or squeals of pleasure as her pussy ground against Vinyl, sliding easily up and down Vinyl’s thigh that was usually soaked in her own voluminous secretions.

Passion reigning supreme, barely aware of her surroundings or feeling the elements, Octavia would detach from Vinyl and look at the face of her marefriend, always smiling, eyes ablaze with pure lust, pure energy, a satyr in a pony's body. Then in a flash Octavia would be on her knees, looking at Vinyl's belly as it moved in and out in erratic rhythms, or at the wet glistening spot on one of her thighs, right near the place where her leg turned into her body, some transparent streaks running down on both sides and forming drops on thin filaments ready to drop onto the ground. Hungry, Octavia would start kissing Vinyl's sweaty and warm belly, her kisses short but intense, moving from one area to the next, always going down, her left hoof playing with Vinyl's ass, her right hoof between her own legs, pressing against the sensitive knob right as she planted another kiss on Vinyl's body, getting covered in streams of bodily lubrication, her nose absorbing every single molecule of that strong musky smell of a turned on mare.

And as Octavia moved down, she could feel waves of sensual heat, so dense almost palpable, coming from the lady bits of her marefriend, and then she could see in the nocturnal illumination the swollen, red, and shining from wetness treasure that she wanted so much, strings of fluid hanging from the outer lips, the clitoris a pink jewel amongst ridges of aroused red flesh, and without any regrets she would plunge her face into the slit, kissing the outer lips, licking the inner, eating the viscous fluid, feeling slight hinges of its taste as it dissolved in her palate, moving her tongue from the lower point of Vinyl's pussy till the upper, enjoying how smoothly it went against silky warm flesh till it reached a bump the touch of which made the white mare jerk and made her jerk in return as she applied pressure on her own centre of pleasure, legs tightly pressed, hoof imprisoned between them, her head burning in the furnace of Vinyl's desire, her lips and nose smeared with Vinyl's secretions, her mind utterly lost amidst the smell of her marefriend, which sent her further down the circles of mania. Utterly gone into the pits of passions, Octavia buried her face deeper and kissed and sucked and licked while her hoof pressed and pressed on her own pussy and her body shivered and twisted and twitched from sudden waves of extreme sensual energies. She was unable to stand still and had to rock her body or arch her body or twist from side to side but never stopping licking and sucking and kissing and getting higher from Vinyl's shudders and twitches and rocking and twitching and twisting and moans and gasps, and with every stroke of her tongue and every kiss and every lick reaching that point of release that drove them both further and further while the world was spinning round and rouunnd and rouuunnnd.

“I'm sorry,” somepony said from her left.

The visions of past dissolving, Octavia found herself back in the hallway. Apparently, she had stopped in the middle of it and somepony from the staff must have bumped into her.

The hallway was empty, but to Octavia it was filled to the brim with pure sexual energy. The illumination was tinged red, fluctuating from energetic crimson hues so typical to burlesque bars and theaters to soft pink ones bringing memories of sexual organs; and the air itself felt dense and musky, as physical as the inebriating heat surrounding her special somepony. Through the air golden spermatozoa floated, and left in their wake long trails that shone with all the colours of the rainbow. When two or more collided, they exploded with a milky white splash which seemed as gooey as semen, and which disappeared languidly into the shivering air.

Judging by the wetness slowly proceeding down her hindlegs, and the warm heaviness in the groin, passion had full her grip on her. It literally suffocated Octavia, made her sweat and gasp for air, brought a plethora of images, moments of dalliance she had shared with Vinyl, to the front. Their wet and hot adventures in dark alleys at night, at their homes in daylight, in Canterlot groves at sunset, and in other manifold places at manifold times, shifted in front of her as vividly as when she had been experiencing them. Sucking, kissing, caressing, gliding hooves over flesh, hugging, moaning, climaxing, shivering, convulsing, merging, dissolving, losing boundaries, bathed in electric warmth and vapours of sex, everything flashing red and yellow, mouth dripping from thick fluids, heart beating fast, mind blotted out - this was her new life, and each aspect of it energized by drugs. And how many drugs.

Since her first try of acid, many substances had burned her nervous system; though good old LSD took precedence over the others - it was the first she had tried; it was the most available; and it was the most pleasurable to her along with ecstasy.

At least once a week, when the two of them were free from musical duties, they tried something new. The choice of substances was big, ranging from stimulants like speed to occult phanerotymes like some root that Zecora used in certain potions. Octavia was usually careful in the consumption of new drugs, taking at first a minimal dose and then taking more and more, while Vinyl took large quantities without even a tinge of panic. Because of this, Octavia often worked like an anchor for Vinyl, who always wanted to go further, right to the edge. However, either out of sheer luck or their almost telepathic understanding of each other, they managed to avoid bad trips or embarrassment in public.

Of all the drugs, Octavia didn't like the most amphetamines, mushrooms, and ketamine.

Speed Octavia had always considered a drug for those plebeians that liked dubstep and equivalent types of music - you take the pills and then dance like an idiot until utter exhaustion. To a certain degree, her opinion about the substance had been right. While on speed, she had danced for several hours without stopping, and only by Vinyl's insistence to rehydrate herself had she stopped her frenzy. When she wasn't dancing, however, she talked, talked about the ideas she had, ideas about music, about how to improve their tracks, about the sonic qualities of the contrabass, how the contrabass came to be, how the contrabass could be used. Every time a new idea popped in her mind, a whole dozen more emerged from it, and when Octavia focused on one of the new ideas, the whole process repeated itself, and they were so many and she needed to tell them all to Vinyl lest she forget them. So she talked for hours, her whole being nothing but energy eager to manifest itself through some kind of activity, and while she talked she either tapped her hooves against the floor or shuffled her hooves against each other or rocked her body, for she felt like Pinkie Pie, and probably acted like Pinkie Pie. Maybe speed was a drug for idiots, but sometimes being an hyperactive idiot was good; and maybe in the end speed wasn't even a drug for idiots - she couldn't remember the last time she felt so intellectually active, new ideas and connections forming every second. And the drive. The drive. It was so intense no wonder she had decided to drop some more, and then some more, dancing through the night, making manic love with Vinyl in the morning, then spending the whole day in the studio without paying attention to such things as hunger and thirst. And time rushed by in an instant, and she was taking the pills again, not wanting to lose the rush, afraid that ideas and inspiration would go away.

On the third day, though, Octavia had reached her limit, and understood why meth heads and speed freaks were portrayed in media as a violent, aggressive, and paranoid folk that couldn't act according to reason. Hungry, without an ounce of sleep for three days, Octavia spent the last day of her speed binge hiding away in Vinyl's living room, windows closed by curtains and the entrance door propped by a chair. She was absolutely sure that ponies in black, with binoculars as cutie marks, were searching for her, since they needed her for some experiments. A glance outside the windows was enough to confirm her suspicions, for they definitely stood in the darkness of the alleys, or even watched from the neighbouring house. Vinyl, who shared the same delusion, tried to convince her to hide in the studio, the safest place in the house due to acoustic isolation and absence of windows, but Octavia declined the offer, afraid that the watchponies could listen to her through the radio.

Only toward the evening the psychosis lost its power, and Octavia fell asleep, drained and exhausted, on the floor of Vinyl's living room. Her sleep, though, wasn't very relaxing: unnerving dreams about eldritch and indescribable creatures haunted her, and she was sure that several times she had waken up and felt the presence of something dark looking at her and sliding over the walls. This experience, along with the aches and profound weakness and sluggishness of mind the next day, convinced Octavia not to touch speed, or any kind of stimulants, again.

Baby food was on the second place of drugs Octavia would never do again. Having snorted it in a club, Octavia soon had found herself disconnecting from the environment; and she hadn't liked the sensation the moment it had started. Her body tingled but at the same time it felt somehow numb, and whatever sensation came, be it a smell, a bump, a kiss from Vinyl, it seemed weaker than usual, dull, as if ghosts were hitting her, not real ponies. The worse of all was, of course, the club, which became distant and dreamlike. Octavia felt like if she were having a lucid dream, her being the awake one while everypony else was just a background, foggy, muddy, every movements of theirs leaving traces. The music also followed the pattern. It seemed distorted; every sound had a quality as if coming from another dimension, warped by the travel through the spaces between.

No matter where Octavia went, the feeling of not being there followed her. Outside, beneath the stars, she felt just as away from everything as in the club, and wherever she cast her glance, everything looked slightly skewed, distorted, and somehow unreal, like a prop taken out of from the Quiet Mound games. In fact, Octavia felt as a protagonist of Quiet Mound, walking through familiar yet so singular spaces in a foggy haze. Once the world returned back with its smells, sounds, touches, tastes, and sights, Octavia sighed in relief; and the first thing she did when sober was passionate love with Vinyl, which felt unbelievably great. Because being alive was infinitely better than feeling unreal, a ghost amongst the living, or a living being amongst ghosts, Octavia decided not to have further relationships with Vitamin K.

With mushrooms, the situation was a little different. The issue wasn't that she hadn't liked them at all - for most of the trip Octavia had enjoyed the slow geometric patterns that looked like something from Daring Do novels, or the landscapes of terraced pyramids elevating above the rainforest and the amorphous creatures made from geometric patterns that inhabited them - but the general feeling they had given to her. The mushroom trip felt exactly like that - a mushroom trip. It was heavy, slow, and earthy; everything - from the initial amorphous blobs to the visions of antediluvian civilizations of the peak time - moved slowly and looked more or less amorphous. While on mushrooms, Octavia often felt like if she were enveloped by thick roots, or the myriad of strings that formed the mushroom's mycelium, and she didn't like the sensation at all. She usually tried to fight it, but the hold of the roots became stronger as a result, and she had to dive further into the slow world as revealed by the mushrooms, moving eternally and languidly like waves of the sea on a quiet day. The visuals of the mushroom trips were incredibly beautiful and seemed to have a deeper, very ancient origin, but Octavia couldn't stomach the earthiness, the entanglement of the trip.

To Octavia's surprise, Vinyl had good connections with Zecora. As Octavia found out, it was the zebra who supplied Vinyl with mushrooms as well as with more esoteric stuff. Of the less known things Octavia had tried some root and some potion, both extremely bitter in taste and both extremely potent in their effects.

The root, consumed in the form of tea, had been one long trip. At first, it was great - a feeling of energy, beautiful and extremely complex neon like visuals floating through the environment, and overwhelming warping and motion in the field of her vision. After a few hours, however, visions started, showcasing ritual scenes that looked as if taken straight from the zebra confederation, with zebras of multiple colours, some shifting through all the spectrum, dancing and venerating short, dark, and fat spirits whose laughter was as roaring as thunder. However, amongst the ritual scenes emerged memories of Octavia's life, from a time so distant that she couldn't even believe it had imprinted on her mind to events that happened the day before.

The gray mare found the trip illuminating albeit very painful, for it showed how boring her life was and how closed she was to everypony else. By watching memories as vivid and intense as the experiences themselves, Octavia understood whence her rather secretive character appeared from, how the betrayal by her first friend made her wary of others, how the inability to be popular amongst the schoolmates led to an aura of snobbishness and disdain for the common folk, how an occasional insult thrown by a popular colt regarding her cutie mark led her to distance away from privileged males. Many times Octavia wanted it to stop, but the spirit of the root keep going and going, making her look with crystal clarity at her life, how clinging to certain accidents destroyed her happiness. When the root finally let go, Octavia felt cleansed, aware of the patterns that led to her current self, and as a sign of gratitude she hugged Vinyl. Since meeting Vinyl, her life had been a kaleidoscope of sex and altered states of consciousness, but she had never before felt so alive and, frankly, she didn't care how it will end. After full return, however, Octavia decided to avoid the stuff. The feeling of regurgitating all her past in her head wasn't an experience she wanted to repeat often.

Zecora's other choice had been much more pleasurable to Octavia, despite the initial discomfort. As she had sat in Zecora's hut with Vinyl and waited for the brew, foul smelling, bitter beyond description, to kick in while nausea moved in waves from her stomach to her throat, Octavia had regretted accepting the offer. If the physical side was a sign, then the trip itself would be heavy and dense. Vinyl suggested her to relax, saying that fighting the brew would only make the matters worse. Laying down, closing her eyes, and removing tension from every muscle of her body worked like a charm; and soon the gray mare was enjoying deep and neon green and blue and purple flower patterns that greeted her behind closed eyelids. They moved slowly and reminded of the Evefree forest but without the dangers. Shining and brilliant the patterns were, and then they turned into large fluorescent snakes whose skin was an ever shifting tapestry of geometric forms.

But the visual beauty and the feeling of sedate life existing in the depth of rainforests wasn't the thing which impressed Octavia the most. When she and Vinyl decided to take a stroll outside Zecora's place, Octavia was amazed by how peaceful, perfect, sensual, and intimate the nature looked. She was aware she stood amidst the Everfree forest, surrounded by bulbous trees and ichorous vegetation, but every branch, every blade, every spider looked harmless. The whole place felt like home; and the way leaves moved, or snakes glided, or spiders weaved their web brought memories of Vinyl's tender hooves that caressed every crevice of her body whilst they hid in bed at night. Octavia wondered if this was the way Fluttershy perceived the world around her, for at that moment she herself was utterly in love with Nature in its most wildest forms, and, what seemed the most peculiar, Nature itself seemed to love her back. For the whole duration of the trip Octavia watched enraptured the Evefree, how geometric patterns and faces formed amidst the waving foliage, how spectral snakes floated amidst the branches, how jaguars moved swiftly and gracefully on branches, only to jump and transform into birds. By the end of the trip, Octavia decided that, amongst all the substances she had tried, the brew was the most enjoyable.

Having found out that Octavia had enjoyed the brew, Vinyl proposed to experiment with DMT, the main thing that made the potion what it was. Octavia accepted the offer without a shadow of a doubt, expecting to experience the things introduced by the brew in a more intense form; and the next weekend she was inhaling crystals at Vinyl's place.

After the first toke, however, she had realized that the substance was more intense than she had presumed. As the walls and coach and ceiling and windows of Vinyl's place became obscured by plant like patterns shining with warm colours, and a buzz that made her feel like a lady's toy turned on vibration mode spread out through her whole body, Octavia panicked - she went too far. Vinyl, however, urged her to smoke more, the impish smile never leaving her face for a second. Octavia obliged, and took two more tokes, after which she lost all contact with the real world as an immense chrysanthemum composed from myriads of patterns shifting colours at breakneck speed engulfed her vision. Before Octavia could even comprehend what was happening, beings seemed to seep out of the space constructed from flowing forms, beings of such singular nature that Octavia knew not a single way how describe them. Composed from the kaleidoscopic tapestry, these entities moved toward Octavia, their hooves, which ended in five little appendages, outstretched and holding in the flat middle what looked like eggs of the same peculiar composure as the whole eldritch space. They seemed to talk to her, but Octavia couldn't understand what they were saying, and when she had more or less realized that they didn't mean to do any harm and wanted to give her the eggs as gift, she was pulled back into the real world. When she opened her eyes, she was greeted by the ebullience of patterns, all moving and flowing like waves of a stormy sea. In a few moments, they abated; Octavia was able to see the place again, which looked normal, save that every surface seemed shiny, polished, and throbbing with energy.

After the experience Octavia had decided to stay away from the stuff; and she refused with a stern no Vinyl's offer to try bufotenine or 5-methoxy-DMT. She would do better if she stuck to acid, ecstasy, and hashish.

The gray mare wasn't very fond of cannabinoid substances - reefers were fun, made her relaxed, and intensified sensations, but otherwise had no point. Octavia treated them more on the lines of alcohol. While other ponies used alcohol to intoxicate themselves, she used marijuana. The effect was more pleasurable, safer, and provided just the needed stimulus for a fun time.

Hashish, on the other hand, was something. It made weed look like a child's play; if to compare alcohol with cannabis products, then marijuana was medium beer and hashish vodka. Hashish had a Canterlot touch to it, an aura of superiority and refinement. Under hashish Octavia could enjoy for hours the spires of Canterlot, the curves of Celestia's castle, the twisted alleyways of lower Canterlot. When not enjoying the curvaceous, delicate, flowing forms of Canterlot palaces, Octavia laid down and enjoyed classical music, for every sound carried a story, and together they told epic tales of ancient times, which took visual form behind Octavia's closed eyes. If there was nothing to do, Octavia laid half reclined on her couch and enjoyed the swirling arabesques moving on every surface and at times obfuscating the air. Every movement was slow and delicate; the same applied to every action she made. No matter how small her activity was, like pouring sugar in her tea, for example, Octavia did it with utmost attention, her eyes paying attention at the curves of the spoon, the swirls of the tea, the sheen of every grain of sugar falling from the spoon into the tea. And the food and liquids...Octavia could taste things that she had barely noticed before, and even a simple thing like a piece of white bread exploded in her mouth in a firework of different shades of taste.

The thing hashish was suited the most for was, of course, dalliance with Vinyl. Time forgotten, Octavia played with Vinyl's body as much as she wanted, her hooves moving lazily from one spot to another, her tongue exploring the manifold tastes of the white mare. Almost as good was receiving Vinyl's attention in return, for every kiss and lick and stroke, no matter how small or distant from the main areas of delight, of the mare was like a little orgasm for Octavia. And the slower Vinyl went, the more Octavia enjoyed it, merging with Vinyl, barely aware where her body started and Vinyl's ended. Sometimes she saw Vinyl surrounded in a blue halo, but Octavia wasn't bothered by it. The way she was feeling - every sensation an orgasm, and her and Vinyl just an amorphous blob without boundaries - was too good to pay attention to hallucinations.

The most intense part was the orgasm, if they reached it, for often mere stimulation was enough to feel good. When the orgasm happened, however, it was the strongest sexual and spiritual experience Octavia ever had in her life. At the peak moment there was nothing but a field of boundless light, extremely potent and nothing but pure ecstasy. For how long the limitless bliss lasted Octavia couldn't tell, for time wasn't something of that dimension, just like her personality. In the light, there was no Octavia, or maybe Octavia was the light, or maybe the light was real while everything else was its mere shadow. Thoughts occupied Octavia's mind later, after the experience; at the peak, she enjoyed the ineffable sensation of total perfection and total unity and total harmony.

The afterglow was another experience of its own, especially when seeing Vinyl shining like a supernova, her light energetic, warm, and nothing but pure joy. Especially intense was seeing the same light reflected in Vinyl's onyx pupils, and understanding that beneath everything they were stars just as bright and important as the Sun. After sensual adventures on hashish, Octavia couldn't look at Vinyl without awe and respect and gratitude, for she saw how beautiful the white mare was behind the facade that was called “Vinyl”; and she couldn't resist smiling when she looked into Vinyl's eyes and saw the same.

Vinyl introduced her to many substances, some pleasurable, some not, but what impressed Octavia was the absence of the most used drug in Vinyl's arsenal - alcohol.

“I don't like it, even in small doses,” Vinyl had said after a gig as they relaxed in the bar, glasses of water in front of them. “It's impossible to create anything while on it or after it. It feels like swimming through mud. My credo is living as awake as possible, not existing one fucking step above sleep and getting drowned in liquid shit.”

Vinyl's revelation impressed Octavia, and made her feel guilty. She had always imagined Vinyl as a drunk slut because of her lifestyle; therefore Vinyl's opinions were a bit shocking and unexpected. They, however, made Octavia respect her marefriend more.

Keeping with the theme of sedatives, Octavia had asked about opiates and roofies. Vinyl answered that after reading Nude Breakfast, just thinking about needles or pills made her nauseous. A look at the recommended literature made Octavia realize why.

After Vinyl's experiments, however, Octavia wasn't sure if she really wanted to try any drugs at all. The ones introduced to her brought such singular effects that she decided to stay within the realm of the easy and comfortable.

Previous drug experiences passed through Octavia's mind as she walked to the door leading backstage. She moved slowly, because acid apparently kicked fully in and was working hard, very hard, on her being. The gray mare, however, got used to it.

When work was low and free time was aplenty, both mares went on a drug binge, taking tab after tab and going to clubs to dance and then home to enjoy each other or make music. Since acid wasn't as strong a stimulant as speed, they could even take naps, so the experience wasn't as exhausting as amphetamine binges. However, it definitely was bizarre. Wherever they went the places kept morphing into something else. A stroll through the Canterlot garden changed from a trip through a Daring Do land to a glide through the faerie realms to a visit into an empire of sentient trees that could remove themselves from the ground and roam freely through the grounds. The same happened with ponies. Faces that were so familiar took forms of bizarre and grotesque quality, sometimes assimilating features of other species living in Equestria, reminding of some chimerical abomination from the deepest pits of Tartarus. The weirdest things, however, were the spectral visitors, beings that were not rooted into the common reality but became visible after the consumption of drugs. Many they were, some looking like knights from ancient epochs, others looking like guests from the far future, and all of them looking uncannily there and vibrant, and most of the time paying no attention to the mares as they went on their errands. It was only necessary to stop at one place, and soon the sidereal fauna - insects with long curved legs and wings that seemed fused to the space around; snakes appearing out of flowing wood; miniature dragons flying through the sky - would crawl everywhere. At the peak the other reality completely obscured the real world, and it became difficult moving, let alone functioning.

Usually when this happened the two mares agreed that the limit was reached, although Vinyl always tried to push as further as possible, and often spent whole nights in visionary states, acid frying her from the inside. Octavia wasn't such an extremist - the other world looked beautiful, but she was afraid of its reality, ready to suck in and not allowing to return back - so she stopped when the pull of the acid realm was too strong and paid attention to Vinyl, who rolled on the floor, eyes closed.

The most intense experience was playing live on acid. When Vinyl coaxed her to perform while high, Octavia added only her contrabass to the mix. Even while on the bass, however, it was difficult to add the sound to Vinyl's tracks, for before her eyes the sounds manipulated the illumination of the club or changed the club into something else. What struck Octavia most was how the darkest corners of the club behind the crowd would transform into snowy mountain peaks emerging from layers of immaculate white clouds as she kept making the melodies on the bass, melodies that seemed to echo throughout the vastness of the mountain ranges, melodies that were vast as the ghost mountains. Later she would hear from Vinyl how perfect her playing was, sending everypony into space, making them fly.

Judging by her struggle with musical performance while on acid, Octavia was surprised how Vinyl managed to retain perfect control over the music while under the influence. She blamed unicorn physiology on this, but Vinyl explained to her that after all her years spent with the machines she knew intuitively what knob needed to be turned and what sound to be added and what to be removed.

This was the way they were doing: being sober when work demanded, and then walking through the electric realms of acid, driven forward by energies as powerful as lightning. As time went by, however, the times between lucidity and acidic alterations diminished. On many occasions the borders blended, and Octavia couldn't tell when she was truly sober and truly high. On the dancefloor, everything became a blur, and if she were into the music, she later had to remember who she was. This kind of dropping out started to happen a lot lately, when Octavia felt herself not as her usual self but a wave of impersonal energy, ecstatic, sensual, always moving. She danced till oblivion, a bolt of pure energy swirling on the dancefloor with other bolts, and once exhaustion settled in, she gathered the bits of her individuality and took time out in the chill out room, where the sounds of The Sphere, the Future Sound of Equestria, and Wub changed the twilit space into a tropical beach bathed in the glow of an otherworldly indigo sunset. Her existence was that of ecstasy now, boundless ecstasy, ecstasy that would lead to her annihilation, ecstasy so strong that Octavia didn't really care about the outcome.

Octavia ascended a group of stairs, and found herself backstage, looking at Vinyl from behind.

The white mare bounced left and right behind her mixing deck, and through the wiggling tail Octavia could see that slit, wet from sweat, succulent and inviting. Mouth dry, manic energy passing through every fiber of her body, Octavia could barely stand still. Fluids started gathering in the folds of her marehood again. She wanted to run toward Vinyl and bury her face beneath her blue tail, taking a good sniff of her musky and intoxicating essence that was fortified by sweat, her long tongue licking from the lowest point to the rosy jewel.

Her whole skin aflame, Octavia watched away from the rosy lips protruding from beneath the white puffiness. One look at the mixing deck's channels was enough to realize what technique Vinyl used. After the trip to Albion, Vinyl returned back with a new method of mixing tracks live. The musician put all the elements of his or her track - from the kick till some random sounds - into the deck channels, and then muted the ones he didn't need at the moment. As the music proceeded, he or she could add new sounds, twist the already present ones, prolong one section, or even make the track longer. Basically, the technique allowed to create remixes and new interpretations of one's tracks on the fly. Guessing by Vinyl's concerts, she became a professional at this art.

Albion was truly something, especially in the fronts of magic and arts. And it was after the Albion trip that Vinyl became the ecstatic horse Octavia fell in love in with.

“I was always like this,” Vinyl had said to her once after a several day long session in the studio during which Vinyl pushed herself and Octavia to the limits to achieve the perfect sound for a section of her track. “After Albion it just became more obvious.”

About what happened in Albion Vinyl had never told clearly. She had went there in search for inspiration, as hearing the screeches and farts of dubstep over and over again made her sick, but a stroll through the popular dance spots had not brought the things she was looking for. Everywhere she looked dubstep and its derivatives dominated, which infuriated her. She played at a few clubs; however, she didn't feel the joy in it anymore. Passion was missing, the thing that had kept her making beats and basses and screeches through manifold nights during high school and college until physical and mental exhaustion took its toll.

Then, by sheer coincidence, she had met somepony involved in scene unknown to mainstream musicians. Without a shadow of a doubt Vinyl accepted his offer, and plunged into the hidden dimension of the misty Albion. No matter how strongly Octavia pried, Vinyl didn't let out even a single word about the occult groups she mingled with.

“They like to stay obscure,” Vinyl explained to her. “Success for them is death of the intellect and imagination. I respect them. As a sign of that, I made a vow not to reveal them. Sorry.”

“What did they tell you for you to make such a gesture?” Octavia asked.

“One very important thing,” Vinyl said in such a cold and serious tone that Octavia had never heard before from the white mare. “You either put all your being, every single cell in your body, every piece of your mind, into your work, or you're making garbage.”

On their few visits to Albion, Octavia asked Vinyl to introduce her to the secret group, but Vinyl sternly refused.

“Some things are meant to be secret,” Vinyl had said, then kissed her insulted marefriend on the nose.

With rapt fascination Octavia watched how Vinyl's hooves manipulated different aspects of the track, then moved back to the laptop. Sometimes Octavia's stare fell down, and she looked at Vinyl's private parts, waiting for her mouth to attach itself to them, to suck them dry. How Octavia wanted to place her mouth on those folds of flesh, puffy, and warm to the touch, and kiss them tenderly, enjoying their softness and their silky surface that allowed to glide her lips so easily up and down, giving a lick to the pink nod which protruded between them, lapping the ambrosia generating within the folds and then covering the outer fluffiness in a thick shiny layer, sniffing the sweat and musk of the secret parts of a mare, sniffing and coming and sniffing and coming.

As Octavia watched the dancing horse or at her equipment, she contemplated about how passionate Vinyl was about music. She had always thought of her as dumb party goer - and from what she had heard, Vinyl's grades seemed to reflect her assumptions - but one of the first things that had happened when she got to know Vinyl had been destruction of all her views about the white mare, from her music life to her sex life.

“I've never had friends, or a special somepony, for that matter. Had some crushes on a few mares - never looked at colts. Don't ask why. It just the way things are,” Vinyl had explained to her after another night of clubbing in the formative months of their relationships, while they laid down on the floor of her living room, watching the Sun rise. “I liked you since the first moment I saw you. I know it sounds cheesy, but it's true. You looked so cool, intelligent, and your music was so great. I dreamed a lot about you and me working together. But I was afraid to approach you. You were a high class girl and a diligent student. I was just a dumb kid.”

Octavia, however, didn't know dumb kids that worked the way Vinyl worked. Despite her ruffled appearance, which suggested laziness and living the life on easy mode, Vinyl was a perfectionist. While working, she always made sure that every minute detail - whether a high hat in the middle of the track or a little swirly effect hidden well behind five or more sounds - sounded exactly as she intended it to sound. For several nights and days could Vinyl work in the studio without sleeping or eating, only taking a few sips of water when the necessity reached levels impossible to push away, as she tried to make a certain section of her track, or even just an element of it, sound right. Perfection achieved, she often sat down on the floor, back against the wall, and then slipped into the dreamlands. Octavia had to carry her to bed, and then she lay next to the exhausted mare, providing warmth, physical and emotional.

Vinyl's obsession with the most perfect sounds fell on every kind of music, be it dubstep, techno, house, goat trance, or intelligent clop music. Whether a pop song or experimental noise, everything must be done right; for making half baked products and introducing them to the floors was equivalent to cheating the public and, more importantly, herself.

Vinyl appreciated Octavia's help deeply. Vinyl often said that her music lacked a certain indescribable touch of harmony, and she blamed it on her inability to make good melodies. Having studied in Canterlot conservatory, Vinyl of course knew music theory by heart, and could recite it even if she were woken up at four in the morning and asked about it. Her training, though, didn't help her when making music that she wanted. In her opinion, everything she did sounded too cheery, too cheesy; and she wanted to do something dark, not dark as in violent and terrifying, but dark as mysterious, otherworldly, sidereal, and with tinges of sadness, in the vein of early Hoofnica and Flow 418. Octavia had exactly what Vinyl needed. Her touch added that sense of mystery Vinyl wanted so strongly, making the tracks sound somehow delicate and ephemeral as morning mist despite them being heavily layered and very driving.

“You make perfect trance,” Vinyl said to her every time they finished a track, and then, like usual, planted a kiss on the right corner of her mouth, Octavia's special place.

The beat of the track which Vinyl played slowed down, high hats and melodies stuttering, and warm and soft sounding noise entered into the mix. Octavia knew that the end of the performance was nigh, since it was a later development of Vinyl's to drive her set to the peak of frenzy, placing more and more fast and driving tracks, and then at the end wash the club with walls of noise in an effort to showcase the whole point of the underground scene - driving ponies right to the edge of their minds and blowing them away for good.

“We need this song to get LOUDER, LOUDER, LOUDER!,” Vinyl shouted on the top of her lungs, and the club drowned in layers of noise. “What do you got to lose?! What do you got to lose?! LOUDER! LOUDER! LOUDEEEEER!”

Speakers turned to the max, every single crevice of the stage was drowned in organic sounding noise that always brought up images of boiling porridge to Octavia. The stage filled with white spectral electricity, thick as fog and palpable as steam, obscuring everything, turning Octavia into a charged battery, flashing in her vision in bright lights, at times white, at times red as arterial blood, at times golden, but always charged with manic energy, energy of the storms, the tornadoes, the volcanic eruption, of the whole madness of nature.

Vinyl shouted words, standing in the middle of the stage, waving hooves, but they were lost in the sea of noise, which turned more intense every moment. As Octavia stared at her, the stage drowned in golden and crimson splashes, looking to the gray mare both as blood and as lava at the same time. Shining with singular light, they floated through the air like mist, their presence palpable and electrifying. Wherever she looked the amorphous mist floated in the air, hiding the moving and breathing objects in its dense coils. The most peculiar thing was how well was the spectral lava synced with the sound; for every time the noise got louder and more boiling, squelchy and bubbly sounds appearing more and more often in the mix, the fog thickened, and even changed its texture from that of a fog to something more tangible, like syrup. Octavia could feel its power pressing against her skin, making every hair of her body stand straight, transmutating her being into that of pure energy.

Due to the ever shifting, formless, and boundless mass that filled her vision, Octavia was unable to see the crowd, or even Vinyl's hardware which stood just several meters away from her. Only Vinyl stood out through the crimson red and yellow lava, but in a rather unusual way. Amidst the haze, slowly moving and shimmering, looking like a boiling tomato soup but passed through a psychedelic filter, Vinyl's body was embraced in golden flames which shone with the fierceness and energy of the midday sun. Sitting on her knees, Vinyl was burning, burning from the inside, the aurulent fire being the energy coming from inside her, electrifying the air. The boundaries between her skin and the bright yellow flames weren't clear; it seemed to Octavia that often there was no Vinyl at all, but only the manic, all devouring fire. When the astral fire became twice its size for a moment, shooting up like a pillar of pure magic, Vinyl bent down, one hoof to her head, the other still holding the microphone.

“They're the flames from your burning brains,” Vinyl shouted, loud enough for Octavia to hear, an explosion of gold enveloped in red and yellow pulsating electric goo. “They're the flames from your burniiinng braaainnns.”

Vinyl cast a glance back; and Octavia saw the gleam of utter madness or utter ecstasy in her ruby red eyes. She had seen it several times before, but for some reason she could remember at that moment the incident with the rose.

They had been at Vinyl's place, intoxicated on acid for the second day but still running. Music blasted through the house at full volume, and the two lost ponies were lost in a dancing frenzy, allowing themselves to do things not usually done amongst the crowds, Vinyl's hooves touching every place they wanted, Octavia going down and licking Vinyl from groin to neck, Vinyl going behind Octavia, pressing herself against Octavia, and placing her hoof on the gray mare's pussy, their bodies moving in swinging motions, tails brushing against each other thighs, the heat of their bodies driving them further into passion, loud, heavy breathing warming each other necks, moans and squeals and cries of pleasure drowned out by music, the energy of lust so physical it was visible.

Suddenly, Vinyl's eyes lit up with fire so intense that Octavia had felt a chill going down her spine. In a spur of a moment, Vinyl took one deep red rose from a vase and placed it in her mouth, unaware that the thorns hadn't been cut. Octavia was shocked, for she suspected that the thorns were cutting into Vinyl's tongue. As if reading Octavia's thoughts, Vinyl wrapped her tongue, pink, shiny, wet, around the rose. Not for a moment did the white mare cringe from pain; her portrait smile never weakened, and her eyes shone with Dionysian energy.

As Vinyl looked into Octavia's eyes, dancing with the rose in her mouth, the gray mare felt the madness pouring into her, obliterating her already ruined mind. If Vinyl would have asked her to take the rose in her mouth and grate it against her tongue and palate, Octavia would have done it without a blink, and then would have jumped on Vinyl and kissed and licked and sucked and stroked her everywhere, grinding her whole body against her while her hooves and tongue worked on the white mare, moaning at Vinyl's every touch and at every single grinding movement between their bodies, till they would reach that point when nothing but pure ecstatic sensation existed and then shiver and twist and arch and bend and stretch uncontrollably together as waves of orgasm crashed their selves, leaving behind nothing but pure consciousness gripped by ecstasy.

Vinyl took another look at Octavia and spat out the rose on the floor, blood, vibrant from the presence of life, trickling down the corners of her mouth, covering her tongue with an unearhly red hue. In one single motion the white mare lunged forward and kissed Octavia, and just as her lips met Octavia's, her hoof met with Octavia's burning pussy. Feeling Vinyl's wet lips, the metallic taste of her blood, and shivering from orgasmic pulsations going up her spine and making her grind against the gentle and soft hoof, all of it happening simultaneously, was too much for Octavia too handle; and she succumbed to passion. She wrapped her forelegs around Vinyl and moved her body as tightly as possibly against the white mare, her tongue absorbing the mix of saliva and blood from Vinyl's mouth, moaning from the movement's of Vinyl's hoof down south. It felt weird, it felt wrong, it felt right, it felt strong, it felt good.

What happened later had been a blur of sensual ecstasy. Vinyl dropped on her knees, trailing her head down against Octavia's body, leaving traces of bright red on Octavia's gray fur, and buried her face into Octavia's groin, her licks quicks but precise, hitting just the right spot, painting the aroused folds and knobs of her sensitive flesh with blood. Waves of sensual electricity made every hair on Octavia's body stand, made her shiver and twitch uncontrollably, made her cry from pleasure so strong it was almost unbearable. Unable to take the ecstasy, Octavia closed her eyes, but everything in the space behind closed eyelids was red and exploding and moving and shining and charged with energy.

And everything was red once the music ended. The sudden cessation of noise was such an extreme experience that it brought Octavia to the present. The first thing Octavia did was checking out her marefriend, who sat motionless on her knees, head bent to the left side as if she were a puppet whose strings had been cut. The golden flames still licked her, but not as intense as before; and she didn't glow like a supernova anymore.

Octavia didn't pay attention to the crowd's loud clapping, whistling, and clopping. All her attention was directed at the exhausted horse resting in the middle of the stage, breathing heavily, wet mane plastered against her body, sweat shining like gold. The fact that Vinyl didn't move unnerved her. Maybe the fire had finally burned her up. Maybe her body gave up due to the cyclopean amounts of energy passing through it. The fact that she continued to burn while the general mass of red and yellow dissipated into nothingness made Octavia's stomach twist.

As the gray mare was ready to go toward Vinyl, the white horse lifted her head, then slowly stood on all of her legs. Exhaustion was clearly visible in her shaking knees.

Vinyl turned around, saw Octavia, and smiled, energy returning back into her red eyes. She strolled toward Octavia, who stood silent and anxious, watching at the liquid fire moving across Vinyl's face, dancing at the tip of her ears, going in waves across her back. The red and gold haze finally disappeared - she could clearly see the stage now, and the redness looking and acting like boiling blood was gone, a fine mist of yellow reminding in its place. Vinyl's suit of flames, however, did not.

Seeing Octavia's stern face, Vinyl's smile grew bigger. When she reached the gray mare, she planted a kiss, soft but reassuring, on the right angle of Octavia's mouth.

“Don't be afraid,” she said, grinning but clearly tired. “It's only lightning.”