Cheating the Cycle of Life- A Padded Pony Collab

The crowd was cheering, the lights were on, the microphone was up and running, the stool had been polished with the best of the best wood cleaners and her lute had been tuned and tested to the point of near-perfection.

Lyra Heartstrings sighed, as she gave one last re-reead to her musical hseets, one last before going on the stage.

"Do-re-mi-re-re-re-re-, do-do-do-do..." she muttered ot herself "la-la! Okay, done."

Lyra got up and grabbed her lute in her magic, letting out a sigh.

"Let's do this."

She then walked forward, past the cardboard primes painted blue and full of star-shaped stickers. As soon as she stepped outside the protection given by the primes, the crowd's cheer grew louder and stronger, followed by a handful of flowers and a few coins, which made Lyra smile and sigh again.

She sat on the stool, placing the lute at her side and tapping the microphone with her right hoof, which caused a loud boom to come out of the loudspeakers and quelling the cheering noises in an instant. Lyra Heartstrings faked a cough, grabbed the lute with her magic and set it next to her front hooves.

"Good evening, ma'am and milords," she said. "My first piece tonight will be a remake of one of my dearest compositions fro my foal hood, played on a lute, an instrument that has sadly little recognition in the general public."

With a small smile on her face, she plucked a string slowly a couple of times, producing a soft but snappy noise, before starting to actually play the composition.

Lyra quickly immersed herself in the musical composition, to the point of completely alienating herself from her surroundings for as long as she played her lute. She played from the shrillest to the gravest note, from the simplest union to the most complex part, until, with a quick plucking, she closed off her first piece.

With her immersion broken, Lyra bowed a little towards her audience. However, unexpectedly for her, no applauses came.

"Oh no, they've abandoned my concern midway through my very first piece!" Lyra thought panicking, as she quickly looked at the audience's seats. Instead of finding them empty, she saw something even more jarring and surprising.

Some in the audience were staring at her, empty in the eyes and drooling. Some were sleeping with a hoof in their mouths. Some members of the audience were even wailing, making guttural sounds that anyone with some experience with babies could tell was a call for their parents to come and take care of them. A foul smell of urine and excrements was rising from the crowd.

Lyra gasped, dropping the lute on the ground and placing her front hooves on  her mouth.

"Oh Celestia, what have I done? What have I done?" she said "I've got a call security and tell them to haul my spectators away."

And, with this, Lyra Heartstrings grabbed her instrument, rapidly went behind the stage and rushed into her changing room to put down her lute and go fetch somebody.