The Sky Was Green That Night, For Exampleby darfChaptersWhite Label \ Dub PlatesDigital \ WatchThe World Ends \ With>YouLet Go \ Off Your HatWhite Label \ Dub PlatesTrance. That was a good word for it. She was a ‘Trance DJ’. That was a good way of saying it to anypony that asked. Right now, Vinyl Scratch thot, I could kill everyone of these stupid motherfuckers. It was true, mostly. The ponies danced to the beats she gave them, and the beats were, for the most part, calm and relaxing and resonated with a certain frequency to make your legs and the back of your neck tingle and all of a sudden you were caught, captured by this thing in your ears and in your body and beneath you and all around you at the same time—and that was a moment, and Vinyl Scratch could make it go on for as long as she wanted. She could fade, play samples, sing, dance, do anything—run into the audience and drag some random pony on stage with her and slap them in the face, record the sound, and distort its frequency, pitch, timbre, and every other element of its original composition to make it into anything she wanted. She could make Princess Celestia say “Suck my dick, you dumb shits!” And if she wanted she could make that sound by recording her voice and filtering it until she sounded like Princess Celestia sounded, and then adding more filters until it sounded like a Princess Celestia who might say “Suck my dick, you dumb shits!”, and then maybe everypony in the world would believe it was true. It kept her up at night. Out of raw mercy, Vinyl Scratch dropped the bass. Ponies flooded into themselves and each other. Bob bob bob bob, bob bob bob bob. Four on the flour, it was called, because you had four beats, and you danced around on the floor (the dancefloor) with four hooves. Four on the floor. Four on the floor. Four on the floor. Vinyl detested four on the flour. She hated anything to do with the number four, in fact. She was her mother and father’s fourth child, and so she had hated herself all growing up not for being first or second or third or fourth, because she had lost the game of life and there was no going back. But what was a game besides a series of second chances anyway? A sandstorm, maybe, where every grain was another pony’s soul, and you could stop and try to catch them, or you could scream into the howling desert winds and never be heard, or you could point to a distant hill and reach the top and say “This is happiness, and I found and made it for myself, and no one can take it away from me.” Vinyl Scratch felt buried under fifteen layers of bass drum. She hated sand, storms, and any part of them in combination. She hated a lot of things. The reasons were many and complicated. And that was because Vinyl Scratch was, of her family, many and complicated. And a complication that other ponies detested. It was something of an issue—to be loved by the entire world, but hated the second your hoof put a pause on the record. Vinyl Scratch put her hoof on the record. But there were many records, and so what everypony heard instead of “UNCE UNCE UNCE BA WEEEEE~OOOOH!” was just “unce, unce, unce, unce”, and Vinyl had stripped everything down to its barest; just the beat of the drum. The heartbeat of everypony in the room in synchronization. And Vinyl Scratch put her hoof on the record. That was in the crate next to her. That she had never opened before. Dance, dammit, the voice in her head said. Dance to the beautiful music. And Vinyl Scratch did something she had never done. She put on a piece of music she had built, herself. From ‘Scratch’. And it sounded like this. It’s worth noting, of course, that Vinyl Scratch didn’t have a dick. That she knew of. But what the lyric meant in pony language, perhaps, was, “I’ve never been more in heat than when I’m with you.” And that made Vinyl Scratch think of Big Mac and Cheerilee, and the scandal about the Sex Ed class, that had turned into a town-wide discussion into a formal debate into everypony realizing there was nothing wrong w/ having sex, and in fact nothing wrong w/ having sex in front of somepony else, as long as that pony understood that sex was just something two or more ponies did to make each other feel good. And it didn’t have to be anything more than that, or an obligation, or a curse, or a binding, and ‘special somepony’, the town (with significant articulation assistance from Twilight) realized, could be anypony, and everypony, and that was how they’d come up with what we call ‘polyamoury’, but everyone else knows as ‘free love’. And so the whole of Equestria, by the time this story took place, was practicing Free Love. And darf is done talking now so he will hand back over to Vinyl Scratch. The ponies in front of Vinyl Scratch weren’t dancing. They were standing with their mouths open. Because every time the drums came, the ponies flinched. Vinyl Scratch had spent seventy-nine hours programming those drums. She had meticulously placed every one. And then the drop came. She saw hope in the eyes of the ponies in the crowd. And then she slit their throats. She punched them in the face with her snare drum. She cut their ears into pieces with high-hats. And she juggled the concept of music between the left and right, holding it at foreleg’s length and dangling it above the crowd. And that was why not one pony was goddamn dancing. And Vinyl Scratch loved it. Because she had finally done something that no other pony had done before. She had made a piece of music that could not be listened to. It could only be heard. Because if you listened to it; you became it. And you became Vinyl Scratch’s head; which was a very dangerous place to be indeed. And Vinyl put on a new song. It sounded like this. Ponies took a moment to try to understand what was going on. The majority of them were on some form of mind-enhancing or altering drug—a version of something to make them feel good, so good they wanted to do nothing but dance and hug and fool around (but there was another, more private room for that, and the bathroom for anypony who felt daring, as Vinyl had more than once). And now all they could do was listen. They’re finally listening, Vinyl thot. She thot for a long time, even tho she had waited this moment all her life. She thot about everything she was and wanted to be. She thot about how stupid it was a mark on her ass could control her destiny. And then the song played. And everypony began to shiver at first. But then they started to dance. The beat was very far away from four on the floor; no four in it. Except what was four? Just a number to count to. One – two – three – four. Vinyl had begun making ponies count to seven. One – two – three – four – ONE – two – three, her song said. Over and over, with every bar, every loop, every distinct repetition of chord and melody, but every single slice of 16 seconds the maximum amount of available entropy in the universe packaged into a sound. And a million different sounds. So fast, because everything was fast to Vinyl. Her brain worked that way; a problem approached and she solved it before it said ‘Hello’. She could have made friends, if making friends seemed like it was worthwhile. She could have made enemies, killed children, had sex with anypony in town. And she had tried that last one for a while, and almost felt like she’d achieved something. But then the pony she loved left her. Like everypony she had ever loved. And Vinyl Scratch gave up on love. That wasn’t hard to do, she thot afterwards. It was like I was waiting to do it my whole life. So Vinyl Scratch put the old records back on. And everypony who had been dancing to insanity calmed, and stilled, and took as many moments as they needed, and then found the beat again, a soft swinging bob that Vinyl covered in guitar and happy children’s voices. ‘Breathe’, the song said. It moved in a way no song in Equestria had ever moved, old and new and fast and slow and happy and strange at the same time. But it moved perfectly, and so did the dancefloor, and so Vinyl breathed a sigh of relief. She had no way of know if that was going to work. She had suspected highly that it wouldn’t, purely on the basis that she had a lifetime’s experience of failures to back her up. That was called provable evidence. Science. Hard facts. The wall of the death-bringing abyss. Vinyl shivered and ducked down behind her turntables, down by the record crates where she had once sucked somepony off just because she was tripping balls and she had wanted to suck his. And now that pony was gone. And everypony was dancing except her. And that was fine. What’s fine, Vinyl Scratch?, the voice in her head asked. Shut up, she said. And it did. For now. Digital \ WatchVinyl Scratch woke up at 4:37AM Equestrian Time, or 0437 hours in military time, or in the middle of the sun breaking apart the sky in other words. She rolled over in bed into her own vomit. It was easy to forget you threw up last night when you threw up every night. Heck, every day was nice sometimes too. It made eating a lot easier—took away the guilt of having put something inside yourself. Hurt your teeth tho. Vinyl suspected this was part of the whole problem—but then she had gone to the dentist and gotten everything fixed, so now surely she was fine? Vinyl went to the bathroom, light off, to lift the toilet lid and hurl the contents of her stomach forward. She’d done that last night, so now, nothing came but air. Dry heaves. Vinyl wretched, her whole body punishing her just for existing. The wracking coughs stopped. Eventually. Every morning Vinyl checked the color of her spit also, before and after brushing. White-ish, usually with a hint of yellow or black or orange, and always red afterwards. Pure red. No matter the toothpaste she used, no matter how much she flossed, no matter how many times she went to Dr. Twin-Drills, her mouth always bled. No matter how healthy she ate, or how much she cared for her teeth, they always spat back at her. Spat blood. Vinyl spat onto her mirror. The blood globbed, pooled, dripped down in tiny tendrils towards the bottom of the mirror’s wood frame, then to trickle past its corners and escape one dimension of gravity. Vinyl’s hoof shattered the mirror like it was a piece of stained glass made of sugar. The shards in her hoof and coat said otherwise. One had gotten in her eye. Her right eye. There was a shard of glass in her right eye. Vinyl Scratch blinked her left eye. Not too bad. She blinked her left eye. Pain. Well, what was pain, anyway? With a shimmer of her horn, she picked up the pair of tweezers lying on top of the back of the toilet. She aimed, snatched, and removed the shard on the first try. Pain times a thousand. Her throat and chest made a sound like “hnnrrk”. Her right eye was a rose-colored waterfall, bleeding down the entire right side of her face, pooling in the sink beneath her chin. She was also quite sure she was blind. She closed her left eye. But there she was—the broken her, in the shards of the mirror. Just with blood everywhere. Blood everywhere and a small, tiny, pinpoint hole in the very center of her vision. Where my soul might be, the voice thot. “Shut up,” Vinyl said. She took a few sheets of toilet-paper and dabbed them over her eye. The bleeding was intense—the paper became moist, then mush, maroon, then a blossoming river of just red—red everywhere. Hooves, legs, the floor, her face. “Why,” Vinyl asked, leaning over the sink. She felt like throwing up, but she was done with that for the day already. The bathroom answered with her echo, and the drip drip drip of the fountain, a single bead of water tapping along to the bottom of the drain. Drip. Drip. Drip. “Why,” she said again. Question marks were useless. Everyone knew ‘why’ was a question. You already know the answer to that, the voice said. She hated it. But that was life. ‘C’est la vie’, as they say in Prance, Vinyl thot, as she mopped up the blood from her eye with a wad of paper towels. The bleeding stopped. Always eventually. Always. Vinyl had nothing else to do with her morning. The whole mirror thing had only taken twenty-seven minutes. And that meant nothing. A whole day of nothing, where she sat in the chair in front of her composition station where records could become from the æther and she could make music or she couldn’t, and none of it really fucking mattered, did it. Vinyl rubbed her eye as she sat in bed, her hindlegs hanging over the boxspring and bedspread etc. She had a lovely black cover with a pattern of stars, and beneath that silk sheets, and beneath that she had seduced ponies of every size, color, gender and trade, and the last one had been named “Starburst”. She had cum like a fountain. And it had been fun for a while. Vinyl scratched sighed as she checked the time. Not even six yet. And that meant that technically nopony else in the world was awake. Vinyl had learned this because every time she cranked her stereo system before 6AM, ponies complained, even her near dear neighbour Mrs. Featherforth, who listened to all of Vinyl’s attempts at original composition, even if she squinted and tensed at every beat, and said she ‘liked it’ at the end, but that was like your mom saying she liked your drawing, and here was your gold star. She’d come to complain about Starburst, because they’d been going all night, which was before six. She’d knocked on the door for a while, and Vinyl had ignored her for just as long, until she’d come to the window of Vinyl’s bedroom and seen Vinyl and Starburst mid-sixty-nine and Vinyl not particularly in the throes of ecstasy but doing sex like she knew how to do, and it was a secret she couldn’t come when another pony was still trying to come before her, so she’d been kept up all night in a sort of game of “No, you hang up!” but with clits and many other pleasant toys that Vinyl kept under her bed. She was licking Starburst’s clit as Mrs. Featherforth knocked on the window, and ended up staring straight into her eyes, the curtains only wide enough for them to see the profile of each others’ faces. “Stop that filth this instant!!” Mrs. Featherforth had screamed. Vinyl had wished very hard for a gesture that conveyed how hard she wanted Mrs. Featherforth to transform instantly into the bird of her namesake and fly away, or better yet, come just a little closer so she could crush it, and be done with what was essentially a pesky seagull clammering jealously at her window. “Fuck off,” she said, and buried her face in Starburst’s pussy. Starburst, remarkably, was so focused on the task of pleasing Vinyl’s pussy with her hoof while licking her ass at the same time, that she didn’t even realize Mrs. Featherforth was there, nor did she hear Vinyl’s exclamation to her. Because so far, Vinyl had only said the word ‘fuck’ to her like “Oh fuck me, you are so f-fucking g-good at this,”, and so the ‘Fuck off!’ went unheard. But Mrs. Featherforth heard it. She’d never been told that by anypony before. ‘Fuck’ was a word ponies didn’t use in her day, and here was Vinyl Scratch, her bratty little music-making neighbour, whose music was awful anyway, in her opinion, and what happened to something you could just dance to, instead of having to pick apart every little bit and listen to the bass and the melody and the other melody and the arpeggio and there her music training stopped. She had been a music tutor of children for a while before she retired, and spent her time in old age not doing much of anything. Except yelling at Vinyl Scratch, and being told to ‘fuck off’. Her heart seized. But it kept beating. Heart-attacks didn’t happen in Equestria—only heart-ache, which Mrs. Featherforth supposed she had, because there was no Mr. Featherforth, and there never had been, and there was a canary named ‘Charles’ who had died two days ago, and that was why she was up late and upset, and especially jealous that Vinyl was intimate with someone at an hour she never even could have dreamed of. So she felt awful. But that was nothing new. Vinyl Scratch felt horny. She almost always felt horny, ever since the ‘free love’ thing, because when she looked around, all she saw was “That pony wants sex, that pony’s in heat, that pony wants to fuck, that pony has a nice ass, etc. etc.”. She accidentally reduced everypony to their component sexual parts—but she’d gotten over the habit now, and so she was simply a sexual maniac who repressed her every urge because the world couldn’t handle Vinyl Scratch running up to the first cute pony she saw on the street and saying “Wanna rut?” Altho she had done that a few times, and it had worked. But she’d gotten yelled at after. By Mayor Mare, and by Twilight, and by a few other ponies she cared not to be yelled at by. So now she kept her sex private. And private was inside her house. So fuck off, Mrs. Featherforth, Vinyl said in her head, and went back to Starburst. Except now all she saw was a pussy. And this ruined sex for her forever. Because she understood that everypony was just a body—a series of nerve-endings with a consciousness inside. And anything anypony did was just what the chemicals in their brain and the nerve-endings and so forth in their body were telling them to do. And so, if she told herself ‘feel good’ when she touched herself. Her body, as it always had, would rejected the good. It would take away everything that was good from that feeling, and leave her simply an awful pony rubbing her slit by herself. Right now she was rubbing somepony else’s slit, and they were moaning, Princess were they moaning, but that was what had gotten Mrs. Featherforth so upset. And Vinyl remembered the 6AM rule. So she stopped, and Starburst stopped too, and looked confused. “My neighbour just came over and yelled at us—I think we should probably call it a night.” Starburst looked mortified. She hung her head, which had a carrot-orange tinge to it and a long tail, and her yellow body, which Vinyl imagined was cream-cheese as she licked along every inch of her before they had rutted, or at least as close to rutting as to mares could get anyway, which was pretty darn close, and who needed stallions anyway, because in sex they were just a stick to bounce up and down on, and there plenty better ways of getting one of those that didn’t want all your time or attention or money or call you ‘bitch’ behind his breath. So Vinyl was sick of men. But now she was sick of women too. She was sick of everything, in all likelihood. “I need you to go,” Vinyl said. Starburst looked up at her helplessly, bewildered, near-death. That was because Vinyl’s brain worked so fast that it had already figured out what the solution to the problem in front of her was. She needed to go see Sugar-Coated Sour. Because that was the only time she had ever been happy before—when a pony in a stupid cloak with a stupid name had sold her a syringe with a turquoise liquid inside, and said “Put this in the corner of your eye and don’t dare flinch or the needle breaks off and I have to pull it out. And it’s not fun,”. Vinyl had done just as she was told, and been given her first shot of ‘Virt’. ‘Virt’, she was told, didn’t really mean anything—it just sounded cool. She’d called that bullshit, so Sugar-Coated Sour had called her sharp, and told her the truth; Virt was just a play on ‘verte’, the Prancian word for ‘green’, which was kind of the color of the drug, or more a mix of that and blue, anyway. But also it was ‘virt’ as in ‘virtual’, and Vinyl knew about that because she stayed on the bleeding edge of technology, mostly for sound equipment, but also because her brain ran so fast it needed to stay ahead of everyone in everything. “And that’s what this will take away,” Sour had said. Call me Sour, she’d said after her introduction. “Or sugar, if you decide you like me,” she said with a smirk afterwards. “Well, Sugar,” Vinyl said, making the second word as deadpan as she could, “I’ll try your drug. How much do you want.” “First hits free. That’s always the drill. If you like it, you can buy more. If you don’t, you get away hooves-free, with no penalties or strings attached. One of the beautiful things about Free Equestria—no such thing as blame. If you take my drugs, you know what you’re getting into. And if I go to court, and some big judge says “Did you intend to kill that young pony?”, I just say “No sir, I had no criminal intent at all,” and there’s the justice system for you,” Sugar-Coated Sour had said. “Hmm,” Vinyl had said. That was the noise she made when she was thinking. Translating. Translating the form of her thots, the shape, into words. Words were what ponies used to communicate, mostly. Body language. Facial expressions. Vinyl had all of those. She didn’t care about them. She was thinking. She thot for a while. “Does that mean ‘yes’?” Sugar-Coated Sour had asked, her eyebrows raised, perpetual smirk still in place. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like a hob-goblin?” Vinyl Scratch asked. Sugar-Coated Sour smirked back. “Yep! And plenty worse. Do you want my magic happy stick or not, dumbass?” Fuck, Vinyl thot. She thot some more. “Yes,” she said. “I like simple answers,” Sugar-Coated Sour said. “Also simple names. No SCS after this. Pick one. Catch.” And she threw the syringe at Vinyl. Vinyl caught it. It was just a matter of putting her hooves in the air where the syringe was flying and cushioning the impact by gradually decelerating the parallel velocity of her hooves to the object. ‘Catching it’, in other words. Vinyl caught the syringe, and she did it with relative ease, the same way she did everything. Lining up the needle was easy. Pushing it in was hard, but she took three breaths and then barely felt the pain. Pushing the syringe was fine. And then. What? Vinyl Scratch died. Or that was one version of what happened. What is a version, Vinyl Scratch? the voice in Vinyl’s head asked. Um, Vinyl thot back. She could say by thinking, she thot. That’s only true if I can do it too, the voice said back. Who are you, Vinyl said. Well, the voice said. Let’s not get into that. What do you need, Vinyl Scratch? Death, probably, Vinyl Scratch thot. Or, like, an equivalent to death. I need to be able to completely erase who I am and start over again as a new pony. I need a new cutie mark, she concluded. Ooh, the voice said, and it flinched, and Vinyl felt the flinch in her chest too. No can do on the ‘new cutie mark’ thing—those are there for good. But we can do you the ‘total erasure and start-over again’ thing if you want, no problem. Really? Vinyl asked. How? Like this. The World Ends \ With>YouVinyl opened her eyes. The syringe was at her hooves. Sugar was standing in front of her. The world had the slightest hint of green. And the sky was turquoise. And everything was beautiful. Vinyl fell to her knees. And then just to her face, she collapsed onto the ground, felt the grass, felt the solidness of Equestrian soil, understood every atom of its essence, and let the essence flood her, becoming all that was, seizing the pain of every being and flinging it into the cosmos, and even the Princesses, and that was somehow possible, and Vinyl had no idea—just because she had thot it, the voice told her. And she had thot everything. And she was done thinking. And she opened her eyes. But you already knew that. Vinyl Scratch gasped and opened her eyes again. Shortness of breath went nowhere. Her body reassembled. Ground. Grass. Soil. Grass. Physical reality. Grass. Grass. Grass. “Why am I…” Vinyl said. “Why am I… lying on the… Why am I… I…” her words blurred into each other, no proper version of syntax or semiotics to assist her in saying what she felt she should say. What she had to say. “How do you feel?” Sugar-Coated Sour asked, her forelegs behind her back, smiling politely. Vinyl shook her head. “No more SCS. Sugar, okay?” Sugar smiled and shook her head. “You get it already. Good catch.” “Good catch!” Vinyl yelled, her eyes welling with blissful tears, her heart swelling like a butterfly-balloon. She remembered volume, covered her mouth with a hoof, laughed to herself, tears streaming down the sides of her face. She was alive. And what was alive, Vinyl Scratch? “I’ll see you again in three months. That’s how long it usually takes, anyway. If you ever want to find me but can’t, there’s a big hill just outside the bounds of Ponyville—‘Headwreath Hill’, I think it’s named, but I’m not great with names all the time. You’re Vinyl Scratch, right?” Sugar looked worried, her eyes wide. Vinyl Scratch nodded. Reached out to touch Sugar’s shoulder, to pull her into a hug. Sugar sighed, and hugged back. “You get it!” she said. “Such a good catch. Good hug, friend.” Vinyl didn’t say anything. She cried the best cry she had ever cried. She hugged another pony. She lived. And what was life, Vinyl Scratch? “See you in three months,” Vinyl Scratch said. It had taken twenty-seven days for her to try suicide. The reason she ‘tried’ suicide instead of succeeded at it was because if she wanted to succeed, she would have picked a method that was 100% guaranteed to succeed. But hanging herself with her curtains half-parted in the evening when Mrs. Featherforth went out to walk her new dog Bernie Spaniels, was not a guaranteed death, and so she had been robbed even of that, to realize that by fate’s cruel whim, her sadness and happiness were just waves—states she could toggle between, that no real emotion could exist. She gave this curse to no one, and tried to take it with her. But her neighbour, Mrs. Featherforth, and her dog, Bernie Spaniels, stopped her. Bernie barked. Mrs. Featherforth broke the window, even tho she normally would have called the police first. She pushed Vinyl up from under her hooves so the noose would no longer cut off her air. She held her there while Bernie grabbed scissors from a first-aid kit in the bathroom (where most ponies kept them anyway) and started to help Mrs. Featherforth cut the rope—which they did, thru teamwork. And Vinyl couldn’t decide if she loved or hated them. Because after that she had tried everything. Here’s your second chance!, the voice said. Mrs. Featherforth truly loves you, or she wouldn’t have saved you. Anypony would have saved me, that means fuck all. And the voice was quiet for a moment. And then it shut up, because it was very hard to prove Vinyl wrong. After her suicide attempt, Vinyl had tried every method of reinvention possible. She had given up DJing, travelled, cooked, explored the world, herself, her body, and the town of Ponyville down to its last inch, the history embedded in it, mostly thru the head of Twilight Sparkle, who was better than the town library because she could actually think, unlike the Librarian who always seemed to be reading something instead of helping ponies find what they were looking for. Reinvention looked like a lot of things; for a while, Vinyl had even wondered if she should have a penis, and she’d gone to Canterlot to speak with Princess Celestia, and they’d had a deep and meaningful conversation about what sex meant and how ‘sex’ was both an activity but also what somepony was born with, and ‘gender’ was just a made-up word that ponies didn’t have so they didn’t talk about it. And Princess Celestia agreed to Vinyl that if she truly felt, in her heart-of-hearts, in her true soul, that she was a stallion instead of a mare, Celestia would find a way to change her, and it couldn’t be that hard, because the temporary ones were done all the time, but permanence usually required an artifact of some-kind. And so Vinyl and Celestia and Luna (because she was wherever Celestia was, and sometimes twice as smart and sometimes whiny for ice-cream even at over a thousand years old, and how did that make any sense) and Twilight had come up with The Mirror of Changing, and Vinyl had volunteered to be its first test subject. And it had worked perfectly. And Vinyl had been a stallion for a while. Six months, precisely. And she had, by happenstance, fucked almost every mare in Ponyville. Even Granny Smith. Because everyone needed sex sometimes; just less as time went on, usually. Or when other things became more important to them, Vinyl learned, like family or career or something other than getting fucked. So Vinyl sought out ponies who wanted to be fucked, stallions and mares, and had the time of her life; most in the Canterlot nightclub scene, where you could whisper “Meet me in the bathroom,” and sign ‘five’ at somepony with your lips and they would, and you’d be fucking them in five minutes flat, quicker than you could say the word ‘fuck’ you could have your cock inside them, and that was a kind of magic Vinyl understood only sometimes. But she fucked a lot. She got fucked. She became a mare again. She tried everything with sex she could think of—even the things other ponies refused to do. Things she had to do herself involving hot knives and glue and stitches and old records and ritual burning and symbols she’d dug up from old Equestrian archives and branded into her skin (in a dark close place that nopony could see unless she let them), and then touched herself and cum instantly, and that was how messed up she had been. And that was one month. “I need Sugar,” she said to herself. Her teeth felt like they were on fire. So she went to Headwreath Hill. And there was nopony there. It was 12:21PM, which meant most ponies were having lunch. Vinyl didn’t each lunch, or really much of anything, other than something fried or sugary before a show to give her energy, and cum if it came from somepony that she happened to like more than a little, which was pretty much everypony, and tasting a pony’s cum was kind of like a privilege anyway, so she treated it like a sweet thing, and licked her lips and said “Yum!” at the end of every blowjob, and half the time that was already enough to get them hard again. Sex was easy, and so was Vinyl. But finding happiness was not. Vinyl Scratch waited twenty-three minutes for Sugar to show up, which she thot was a considerably long time. It was almost half of an hour, which was a decent amount of time to anyone, seeing as there were only twenty-four in a day. How long was she expected to wait? “About that long,” a voice behind her said. Sugar was a pony that was a mix of black, pink, and green, and unless someone nice draws me a commission of her, I won’t be able to properly describe—but imagine a hot-pink outline, black fur mainly, and green highlights on tail and the edges of her mane. She’s pink + green + black, okay? Okay. Her hair was long, almost to the floor, but she tied it up, and did fun styles every day, and sometimes cut it like today, when it was barely down to eyes, but frizzy and tousled and saying ‘fuck me’ with every second of its existence. So Sugar did too. But ponies had to ask first, because that was consent. And if somepony did something to somepony else without their consent, they weren’t even banished to the moon—there was no special dungeon for them either. What happened to them only Celestia and Luna knew, and no pony who was safe or sane wanted to know. And so Equestria had consent, and that was why nobody fought unless they wanted to, and etc. etc. “How did you know just when to—“ “Masturbate with a cucumber?” Sugar finished, smirking. “Uh… what? No, I…” Vinyl had masturbated with a cucumber when she was young. Her father had caught her. Had said it was fine. And he’d even eat it for her after she was done, heh heh, and Vinyl had feared her father from that moment in her life until his death, when she realized he’d just made a bad joke, and that could equal a lifetime of hate if you were stupid like she was. Before she rewrote her brain. So why did she still feel stupid? “Because I’m confusing you on purpose. I read your thots and then I give you something completely unrelated, but everything is related. ‘Unrelated’ is an impossible word. Think of something that isn’t related to something else.” “Nothing,” Vinyl said. “That’s related to something,” Sugar said. “Check, mate. Game and Set.” Vinyl felt a feeling like rage, but it turned into her stomach. It was that simple—flipping a coin. “You’re right,” she said. “And why did it hurt you to admit that?” Sugar asked, juggling a pink ball between her forelegs, over her head, doing tricks with it perfectly as she spoke, never breaking eye contact. Vinyl fought not to follow it, and mostly succeed, but every now and then would catch it dancing in her periphery, like a piece of cotton-candy waiting to be nommed. “Because… it hurts to admit you’re… not right…?” Vinyl asked. She felt an immense pain in her stomach, the type that felt like she should go see Nurse Redheart immediately. Sugar hugged her. The pain lessened, but it didn’t go away. “It doesn’t have to. But it does if you think you’re right about everything.” The pain in Vinyl’s stomach worsened. She fell to her knees. “Do you think you’re perfect, Vinyl Scratch?” Sugar asked. “No.” Vinyl began to weep. “I’m useless. Nopony wants me. I’m a drug addict. I abuse myself. How could anyone ever love me?” “Easy.” Sugar clapped her hooves together. And Vinyl realized that every pony in the world loved each other—they just all had different ways of showing it. Even ways that looked like hate—like fear—might just be bad jokes. And ‘creepy’ was a word for someone who crept, and so if you didn’t creep, you weren’t a creep. But why was that important? “Because you’ve felt like a creep your whole life, Vinyl Scratch,” Sugar’s voice said in Vinyl’s both ears at once. “Like a weirdo.” “I don’t belong here,” Vinyl said. She didn’t know where here was. She couldn’t see. Just tears. Just the ground beneath her, and Sugar’s voice. “The ground is proof you’re on Equestria. Does this make sense?” Yes or no, Vinyl thot, and she wondered if Sugar and the voice were the same pony, or if the voice was just her talking to herself and using her own voice, and everypony did that anyway, at least if they were sane, because everypony needed someone to talk to even if nopony else was there. Vinyl nodded. “Yes,” she said, her voice hoarse. “You feel physically fine,” Sugar said. “I do,” Vinyl said. “Your heart aches,” Sugar said. “It does,” Vinyl said. Her heart erupted in pain, blossomed like a fountain of knives. “You must find your true love.” “What is true love?” Vinyl felt Sugar hand her the syringe, help her place the needle, push forward, it would become familiar some day, now this, like this, in, ruuuuuuuushhh… “This,” Sugar said. Vinyl nodded. Hugged. Cried. Sugar hugged back. That was love. “But what is true love, Vinyl Scratch?” Sugar said, breaking the hug. Vinyl nodded, took a moment, collected her breath. Breath was proof of the physical body. Vinyl closed and opened her eyes. Stretched her neck, exercised every one of her muscles. Her muscles. Nopony else’s. But everypony’s a the same time. So complicated. So beautiful. She started to cry again. “My stomach hurts!” Vinyl yelled, reaching out from the ground. Sugar didn’t take her hoof. “Vinyl Scratch! We are sorry your stomach hurts. What is true love, please?” Vinyl’s stomach wrenched itself until it could wrench no more, a spiral on a spiral of agony that finally like a door catching unwound like that. “True love is… wanting another pony… as much as they want them selves… and… wanting to be with them… even when they don’t want to be with themselves… and always wanting to help each other learn… that is true love.” Sugar nodded. “I think you’re probably right.” Vinyl stood up. Her stomach didn’t hurt. Her eye didn’t hurt. She was thirsty. A bottle of water hit her hoof, handed by Sugar. She took sips until her throat felt happy, then a few more for good measure. Sugar smiled. “You’re awake now, Vinyl Scratch?” Vinyl nodded. “Thank Goddess,” Sugar said. “It was taking a long time.” “To realize about—“ “Yes, sweetheart. About Eris. But you already know about Eris, correct?” “I do and I don’t,” Vinyl said, shaking back and forth. Her stomach began to hurt again. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Sugar said, her voice perpetually calm and reassuring. “Eris is just the female form of Discord—the yin to his yang. And you know all about his yang,” Sugar said disdainfully. “Is ‘yang’ slang for penis?” Scratch asked, rubbing a hoof over her face and head, the Virt pounding thru her system like a set of tribal drums. Sugar laughed loudly. “Hahaha! Never heard that one before. But yes, I suppose it kind of is. Yang is the male energy—the dark to the female light. And we don’t know why this is, but it simply is. We merely accept, rather than fight.” “I think I know a lot about fighting,” Vinyl Scratch said, shaking her head. “We know,” Sugar said. “Eris made you that way. Eris makes all, tho she has no hand in creation—creation simply is, and Eris says, ‘Aha, quodus erat demonstratum, which is a made up language for “There it is!””. “I feel like I’m not that confused anymore,” Vinyl said. “Indeed. Then what does your heart want, Vinyl Scratch?” “Another heart. Somepony else to have a heart that matches mine.” “True love, in other words?” Vinyl nodded. Began to cry. “And why are you afraid this is impossible?” Sugar asked, scrunching her face up a bit, but also patting Vinyl on the back, keeping her cool, safe, and grounded all at once. “Because… because everypony I’ve ever loved has run away from me.” “Well, you used to be very good at scaring people. You’re very good at everything you do, Vinyl, and that’s because you put your whole self into the task. You become a laser beam, focused on a single pixel, and Eris must compensate to make the entropy match your performance. That is why you ache so often. Do you understand, Vinyl?” Vinyl began to rock back and forth, stomach aching. “No,” she said, seizing as the word escaped her mouth. “Yes you do.” Vinyl paused. Breathed. Paused. Steady. Pause. Breathe. Pause. Be. Vinyl opened her eyes. “I do.” “And now you understand everything—sadly, they used to say, and now gladly, if you believe in glad,” Sugar said.” Vinyl nodded. “A good start. So you, Vinyl Scratch, have need of a true love?” Vinyl nodded again. “Then that shall be your goal. Do you feel you have the strength to pursue your goal?” Vinyl nodded. “And where is not your goal?” “My room. Alone. Darkness. Yang.” Sugar smiled a bright smile. “Very good. You’re an excellent translator. But you already knew that.” “I already knew that,” Vinyl said, half awake, half-hypnotized. “And therefore you must seek another translator, like yourself, understand?” Vinyl nodded. “And Vinyl, what is a translator?” “Someone who most clearly articulates reality to another pony. Must be to somepony else. Can’t be to yourself. That’s translation. From old Equestrian, translat, meaning ‘to carry across’. Understand?” Vinyl nodded. “You’re very fast, Scratch. Which name do you prefer?” Vinyl thot a moment. “Either.” Sugar smiled even broader. “Then this may be true love already. But what does your heart ache for?” “A soulmate.” Vinyl spotted a stream of fireflies lighting the nearby night air, finally, flickers of light in the perpetual darkness of her closed eyes and the cloudless night. “Then go find one.” Let Go \ Off Your HatAnd Goddes-be-damned, she had looked everywhere. Everywhere there was a mare, she had looked. Everywhere there was a stallion also. The globe. All of Ponyville. Nopony. And so she had come to the horrifying conclusion that ‘soulmate’ was just a made up word—a word for true understanding that anypony could slip in or out of at their convenience. And many ponies wanted to—but nopony wanted to stay. And Vinyl ached for them to stay. They must be at home, Vinyl reasoned, at home herself, where she did here reasoning. So the reason I can’t find them is that they’re hiding from me. How do you bring someone out from hiding, dear?~ Eris asked, as always the musical lilt in her voice and the snakey lisp at the end if you felt like it, ~~~, <3 too. Eris loved threes, but refused to explain why. “Go read Terry Pratchett,” she’d say, “except he doesn’t exist in your universe. So stop asking.” And Vinyl had. Vinyl had no answer to that question. “You can’t, can you?” Eris nodded in Vinyl’s head. That’s right. If you have a million true soul-mates, if not one of them wants to be with you, then you’re the loneliest soul in all of Equestria. And we’re sorry but that’s true. We know. We made up ‘lonely’. Sort of. Well, Vinyl thot, at least everypony in the world is my friend. That’s true, Eris said. We did that also. Sort of. Why do you say ‘we’, Vinyl asked. Old royal thing, Eris said, rolling her eyes. I’m done with it if you are? Deal, Vinyl thot, and the ‘we’ vanished forever. Wheee! So how do I find true love, Vinyl asked. You go out and give true love. Make your very self into true love, and everyone you meet will truly love you. Does that make sense. Yes, but in a way that makes me sort of upset, Vinyl thot. I know what you mean, Eris said, sighing. Imagine having to talk in italics all the time. Right? Another sigh—tho any sigh from the form of the female Oroborus had become sexy to Vinyl long ago, and sometimes she and Eris even ‘did the nasty’ on nights when nopony else was available. But that was sex. And what was true love? Go find true love, Vinyl Scratch. You’ll know it when you see it. But I’ve been looking, Scratch said, her inner voice at peak frustration. As it often was when people accused her of not trying. Eris shook her head inside Vinyl’s mind. We’re sorry hun, we didn’t mean that. What we mean is… you have to treat life like a game. What do you mean, Vinyl asked. You have to treat every encounter like a random encounter—like anything could happen. But anything could happen, Vinyl thot. Exactly! Including…? True love? Scratch thot. Exactly! So the way to find true love is just to realize you can love anypony, and give everypony a chance? Anyone and everyone a chance, Eris said. Griffons and Zebras and anyone else who can understand what something is and consent to it. Okay? Vinyl nodded. And the search for true love began. It took one week and two days for Vinyl Scratch to stumble into Octavia Melody, in the middle of the town-square during the Saturday market, which made Vinyl drop her basket of oranges, and the fun hat she had taken to wearing, which was of her favorite Hoofbal team, the Las Pegasus Lightning Bolts. “Oh,” Octavia said. And that was it. No sorry. No, “Oh, about your hat, let me…” She didn’t even move to pick anything up. She looked down at Vinyl Scratch like she was a piece of gum waiting to be scraped off the grass. And Vinyl fell in love. Because she saw herself—in that moment where a broken pony had shoved her, not just bumped, but shoved her, and had not a shred of remorse in her—she saw her old self. She saw a killing machine that somehow managed to play music instead. Because everypony knew Octavia played music. Was she a serial killer too? “Oh, um, it’s fine, about the hat & oranges…” Octavia stared, and said nothing for a moment. Then: “Fine. Yes. I agree.” Vinyl stood up, brushing dirt off and collecting up her oranges. Octavia was still standing there. “Will you let me repay you for your physical scuffle as a result of my carelessness?” Octavia asked, staring directly into Vinyl’s eyes, while at the same time proffering her a wad of Equestrian bits. “What—no! You didn’t do anything wrong, it was just a bump—“ “We bumped into you deliberately. Your hips seemed inviting and we couldn’t help ourselves.” Octavia bit her lip. “This whole ‘free love’ thing is very hard for us, ever since things have changed, our mother would be rolling in her grave if she knew I—“ And Vinyl kissed her. Because the hip-compliment had been sign enough. And that was all a kiss was anyway—a compliment. A way to say “I like you so much I wanna make you feel good. And you know what feel’s good?” This kiss felt good. It felt like sour-sugar candy. It felt like every flower blooming in the spring, the lips of a pony caught off guard, then given her all to this new sensation, Octavia sighing and leaning forward and Vinyl catching her and the whole world was this moment and this kiss and that was true love? And who knew anyway. And the kiss ended eventually. Vinyl was panting. Octavia was too, tho she tried harder to look composed. Several ponies were staring. One of them whispered a small ‘nice’ to himself, then walked on. The others followed quickly. “That was… a kiss,” Octavia said. “You kissed us… me. You kissed me. Sorry. Old habits.” “You have a habit of kissing random people you bump into in the town square?” Vinyl asked, sidling up so their hips were touching. Feeling the shiver of Octavia’s body immediately. “Um, I… that, I mean, I don’t have a habit of… usually if I indulge myself on someone I… compensate, and you’ve…” “You need to get rid of that habit now. A compliment is a compliment, not a debt. Capiché?” “Ca… what?” “Just say yes.” “Yes.” “Why did you say what I told you to?” Vinyl asked, even tho sadly, or perhaps otherwise, she knew the reason. “Because you… told me to?” Octavia scratched the back of her head with her left foreleg, and scrunched up her left eye to match. The expression of ‘confusion’ in the dictionary, if you want. “Right. Anyway. Are you…” Fuck, she’s practically already hypnotized, you need to… “Are you…” Fuck, inquiry… Vinyl was struggling with every one of her instincts, telling her how to interact with normal ponies, which this new pony, Octavia, was definitely not. No wonder she was so good at music—that was her laser beam. Vinyl shivered. She felt a lot more like a prism these days than a single lens. All the colors. Not just black and white, burnt or unburnt. She sighed. “I like you and would like to go on a date with you some time.” Octavia shuddered, shivered, drew in close to herself. “I don’t know. I’ve never, a date, we haven’t…” The prom. His hooves. Gold, the speakers, you remember— “No! No dates, please,” Octavia said. She realized herself, the hysteria, and then composed, as Vinyl watched, seemingly invisible. “I mean, we’re allergic. To dates. So perhaps we could just… um…” “Hang out?” Vinyl Suggested, smirking. Octavia smiled, and then noticed Vinyl’s smirk, and something about it made her blush—was it sexy? Or was it just… “Yes. Hang out. We could hang out.” “That sounds good to me. How can I get in contact with you again.” “Oh! I’ll give you my phone number at my apartment in Canterlot. Call me there, and if I’m home, I’ll answer. Yes, Vinyl thot, that is how phones work. She smacked herself on the ass in reproach. But that turned her on… dammit! “Right. I’ll definitely give you a call. I would love to talk to you again as soon as possible.” “Then let me call you! What’s your number?” And Vinyl’s jaw-dropped. Because for once, somepony had surprised her. Because hers was the phone that never rang. No matter her friends, no matter her lovers—she always called them. Never the other way around. And here, someone wanted to call her. She couldn’t stop the tears. Or the hug. Octavia was taken aback. “Did I… I’m so sorry, did we… by call, we meant—“ “No one’s ever called me before!” Vinyl said, sobbing. “My phone never rings, and no one ever comes to visit, and I wish for once things were different… and you just made them different.” Vinyl steadied herself, and wiped the tears from her eyes. “You made… you made my day. My whole life. You made my whole life.” Don’t get carried away, dear, Eris said. Right, right, sorry, Vinyl thot. Moment. Another moment. Three moments. Breathe. Be. Breathe. Be. “Sorry. I mean… yes. Here’s my number.” Vinyl pulled out a card, which she gave to anypony who wanted to call her. Her business card. “’Vinyl Scratch; Pony-Party Professional’,” Octavia read (at some length. Did she need glasses?). “You’re a professional partier, are you, Miss Scratch?” High school. You remember that feeling too, don’t you? Vinyl smiled. “I like to think the party follows me.” “Then consider me a part of your party,” Octavia said, and giggled. Vinyl laughed hysterically. “That’s brilliant! How did you do that?” “The same way you did it—just playing with words. You like to do that too, don’t you?” Oh. “Um…” Vinyl shook her head. “No, not really. I mostly just play with… everything but words these days.” “Well, let me teach you a trick. We’ll have a salad. Lettuce leaf immediately!” Vinyl’s side immediately ached. “Argh. Bad pun. I know how to do those…” “Oh, hush. This then. Vinyl Scratch had a tiny scrap, but finally found her private path?” Scratch’s head hurt. Rappers did that, the ponies that held microphones and spoke so quickly that even Vinyl could barely make out the words, and then there were references and wordplay and oh gosh what was she supposed to say back… “Octavia… I’m… not… fakin’ ya?” Octavia nodded, but it was obvious her heart fell Because here is what she had thot: “At last, “Someone else who understands the world. “Because I have lived the whole world. “I have seen it’s every cruelty thru my mother to me. “And I am a self-made mare. “And here is one too. “And I thot “For the briefest moment “The tiniest flicker of an instant “That she was my true love “Because she understood that words “Just as music “Just as art “Just as any form of expression “Are the true beauty of being alive.” Octavia sighed. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll—“ “Vinyl Scratch… can finally dance…” That line. Do you like to dance?” Octavia thot. And she thot. “No,” she said. “I’ve never tried it.” “Would you like to?” Octavia looked up to the clouds, wishing for a wisp of white or grey to hide behind. But she saw only color; only truth; only beauty, only what was and nothing more than could be there by her and anypony else. Octavia saw the sky, and she began to cry, because it was green, and she didn’t know why. “Vinyl,” she said. “Why is the sky green like that?” “I don’t know,” Vinyl said. “Don’t worry about it tho. Just enjoy the moment.” And for the first time in her life, Octavia let go. She let go of every instrument she’d ever known and became herself, and that was true love, and beauty, and she knew it, and so did everypony in the world. And Vinyl Scratch too. “I think I might be falling for you,” Vinyl Scratch said, her eyes cloudy, but still managing a wink. “Would you care to dance?” “But there’s no music,” Octavia said. Vinyl smiled her brightest smile. “I hear music.” And she stood up. And Octavia stood up. And the two of them danced in the town square under the moonlight, where there was no pain and no hurt, and only the two of them tho any pony could look, because no pony could have what they had, which was that moment that would be with them forever, and if they were to part and have it haunt them it would be cruelty, but they knew that life was not cruel, it merely was, and everypony could know that if they wanted to—that life had no spite in it, simply to be, more than the sun rose or the moon did, and the darkness no more a spirit to slay you than the night that welcomed you to sleep. And no matter how long you asked, you would never get to a better answer than that. “Thank you, Vinyl Scratch,” Octavia Melody said. She was crying, but short of a sob, wiping her eyes on her foreleg. “Thank you, Octavia. Can we be friends?” Octavia nodded. “I think I’d like that,” she said, sniffling, but with a soft smile—so soft that no words can touch it here. “Me too,” Vinyl said. And the sky was still green, for some reason or another.
White Label \ Dub PlatesTrance. That was a good word for it. She was a ‘Trance DJ’. That was a good way of saying it to anypony that asked. Right now, Vinyl Scratch thot, I could kill everyone of these stupid motherfuckers. It was true, mostly. The ponies danced to the beats she gave them, and the beats were, for the most part, calm and relaxing and resonated with a certain frequency to make your legs and the back of your neck tingle and all of a sudden you were caught, captured by this thing in your ears and in your body and beneath you and all around you at the same time—and that was a moment, and Vinyl Scratch could make it go on for as long as she wanted. She could fade, play samples, sing, dance, do anything—run into the audience and drag some random pony on stage with her and slap them in the face, record the sound, and distort its frequency, pitch, timbre, and every other element of its original composition to make it into anything she wanted. She could make Princess Celestia say “Suck my dick, you dumb shits!” And if she wanted she could make that sound by recording her voice and filtering it until she sounded like Princess Celestia sounded, and then adding more filters until it sounded like a Princess Celestia who might say “Suck my dick, you dumb shits!”, and then maybe everypony in the world would believe it was true. It kept her up at night. Out of raw mercy, Vinyl Scratch dropped the bass. Ponies flooded into themselves and each other. Bob bob bob bob, bob bob bob bob. Four on the flour, it was called, because you had four beats, and you danced around on the floor (the dancefloor) with four hooves. Four on the floor. Four on the floor. Four on the floor. Vinyl detested four on the flour. She hated anything to do with the number four, in fact. She was her mother and father’s fourth child, and so she had hated herself all growing up not for being first or second or third or fourth, because she had lost the game of life and there was no going back. But what was a game besides a series of second chances anyway? A sandstorm, maybe, where every grain was another pony’s soul, and you could stop and try to catch them, or you could scream into the howling desert winds and never be heard, or you could point to a distant hill and reach the top and say “This is happiness, and I found and made it for myself, and no one can take it away from me.” Vinyl Scratch felt buried under fifteen layers of bass drum. She hated sand, storms, and any part of them in combination. She hated a lot of things. The reasons were many and complicated. And that was because Vinyl Scratch was, of her family, many and complicated. And a complication that other ponies detested. It was something of an issue—to be loved by the entire world, but hated the second your hoof put a pause on the record. Vinyl Scratch put her hoof on the record. But there were many records, and so what everypony heard instead of “UNCE UNCE UNCE BA WEEEEE~OOOOH!” was just “unce, unce, unce, unce”, and Vinyl had stripped everything down to its barest; just the beat of the drum. The heartbeat of everypony in the room in synchronization. And Vinyl Scratch put her hoof on the record. That was in the crate next to her. That she had never opened before. Dance, dammit, the voice in her head said. Dance to the beautiful music. And Vinyl Scratch did something she had never done. She put on a piece of music she had built, herself. From ‘Scratch’. And it sounded like this. It’s worth noting, of course, that Vinyl Scratch didn’t have a dick. That she knew of. But what the lyric meant in pony language, perhaps, was, “I’ve never been more in heat than when I’m with you.” And that made Vinyl Scratch think of Big Mac and Cheerilee, and the scandal about the Sex Ed class, that had turned into a town-wide discussion into a formal debate into everypony realizing there was nothing wrong w/ having sex, and in fact nothing wrong w/ having sex in front of somepony else, as long as that pony understood that sex was just something two or more ponies did to make each other feel good. And it didn’t have to be anything more than that, or an obligation, or a curse, or a binding, and ‘special somepony’, the town (with significant articulation assistance from Twilight) realized, could be anypony, and everypony, and that was how they’d come up with what we call ‘polyamoury’, but everyone else knows as ‘free love’. And so the whole of Equestria, by the time this story took place, was practicing Free Love. And darf is done talking now so he will hand back over to Vinyl Scratch. The ponies in front of Vinyl Scratch weren’t dancing. They were standing with their mouths open. Because every time the drums came, the ponies flinched. Vinyl Scratch had spent seventy-nine hours programming those drums. She had meticulously placed every one. And then the drop came. She saw hope in the eyes of the ponies in the crowd. And then she slit their throats. She punched them in the face with her snare drum. She cut their ears into pieces with high-hats. And she juggled the concept of music between the left and right, holding it at foreleg’s length and dangling it above the crowd. And that was why not one pony was goddamn dancing. And Vinyl Scratch loved it. Because she had finally done something that no other pony had done before. She had made a piece of music that could not be listened to. It could only be heard. Because if you listened to it; you became it. And you became Vinyl Scratch’s head; which was a very dangerous place to be indeed. And Vinyl put on a new song. It sounded like this. Ponies took a moment to try to understand what was going on. The majority of them were on some form of mind-enhancing or altering drug—a version of something to make them feel good, so good they wanted to do nothing but dance and hug and fool around (but there was another, more private room for that, and the bathroom for anypony who felt daring, as Vinyl had more than once). And now all they could do was listen. They’re finally listening, Vinyl thot. She thot for a long time, even tho she had waited this moment all her life. She thot about everything she was and wanted to be. She thot about how stupid it was a mark on her ass could control her destiny. And then the song played. And everypony began to shiver at first. But then they started to dance. The beat was very far away from four on the floor; no four in it. Except what was four? Just a number to count to. One – two – three – four. Vinyl had begun making ponies count to seven. One – two – three – four – ONE – two – three, her song said. Over and over, with every bar, every loop, every distinct repetition of chord and melody, but every single slice of 16 seconds the maximum amount of available entropy in the universe packaged into a sound. And a million different sounds. So fast, because everything was fast to Vinyl. Her brain worked that way; a problem approached and she solved it before it said ‘Hello’. She could have made friends, if making friends seemed like it was worthwhile. She could have made enemies, killed children, had sex with anypony in town. And she had tried that last one for a while, and almost felt like she’d achieved something. But then the pony she loved left her. Like everypony she had ever loved. And Vinyl Scratch gave up on love. That wasn’t hard to do, she thot afterwards. It was like I was waiting to do it my whole life. So Vinyl Scratch put the old records back on. And everypony who had been dancing to insanity calmed, and stilled, and took as many moments as they needed, and then found the beat again, a soft swinging bob that Vinyl covered in guitar and happy children’s voices. ‘Breathe’, the song said. It moved in a way no song in Equestria had ever moved, old and new and fast and slow and happy and strange at the same time. But it moved perfectly, and so did the dancefloor, and so Vinyl breathed a sigh of relief. She had no way of know if that was going to work. She had suspected highly that it wouldn’t, purely on the basis that she had a lifetime’s experience of failures to back her up. That was called provable evidence. Science. Hard facts. The wall of the death-bringing abyss. Vinyl shivered and ducked down behind her turntables, down by the record crates where she had once sucked somepony off just because she was tripping balls and she had wanted to suck his. And now that pony was gone. And everypony was dancing except her. And that was fine. What’s fine, Vinyl Scratch?, the voice in her head asked. Shut up, she said. And it did. For now.
Digital \ WatchVinyl Scratch woke up at 4:37AM Equestrian Time, or 0437 hours in military time, or in the middle of the sun breaking apart the sky in other words. She rolled over in bed into her own vomit. It was easy to forget you threw up last night when you threw up every night. Heck, every day was nice sometimes too. It made eating a lot easier—took away the guilt of having put something inside yourself. Hurt your teeth tho. Vinyl suspected this was part of the whole problem—but then she had gone to the dentist and gotten everything fixed, so now surely she was fine? Vinyl went to the bathroom, light off, to lift the toilet lid and hurl the contents of her stomach forward. She’d done that last night, so now, nothing came but air. Dry heaves. Vinyl wretched, her whole body punishing her just for existing. The wracking coughs stopped. Eventually. Every morning Vinyl checked the color of her spit also, before and after brushing. White-ish, usually with a hint of yellow or black or orange, and always red afterwards. Pure red. No matter the toothpaste she used, no matter how much she flossed, no matter how many times she went to Dr. Twin-Drills, her mouth always bled. No matter how healthy she ate, or how much she cared for her teeth, they always spat back at her. Spat blood. Vinyl spat onto her mirror. The blood globbed, pooled, dripped down in tiny tendrils towards the bottom of the mirror’s wood frame, then to trickle past its corners and escape one dimension of gravity. Vinyl’s hoof shattered the mirror like it was a piece of stained glass made of sugar. The shards in her hoof and coat said otherwise. One had gotten in her eye. Her right eye. There was a shard of glass in her right eye. Vinyl Scratch blinked her left eye. Not too bad. She blinked her left eye. Pain. Well, what was pain, anyway? With a shimmer of her horn, she picked up the pair of tweezers lying on top of the back of the toilet. She aimed, snatched, and removed the shard on the first try. Pain times a thousand. Her throat and chest made a sound like “hnnrrk”. Her right eye was a rose-colored waterfall, bleeding down the entire right side of her face, pooling in the sink beneath her chin. She was also quite sure she was blind. She closed her left eye. But there she was—the broken her, in the shards of the mirror. Just with blood everywhere. Blood everywhere and a small, tiny, pinpoint hole in the very center of her vision. Where my soul might be, the voice thot. “Shut up,” Vinyl said. She took a few sheets of toilet-paper and dabbed them over her eye. The bleeding was intense—the paper became moist, then mush, maroon, then a blossoming river of just red—red everywhere. Hooves, legs, the floor, her face. “Why,” Vinyl asked, leaning over the sink. She felt like throwing up, but she was done with that for the day already. The bathroom answered with her echo, and the drip drip drip of the fountain, a single bead of water tapping along to the bottom of the drain. Drip. Drip. Drip. “Why,” she said again. Question marks were useless. Everyone knew ‘why’ was a question. You already know the answer to that, the voice said. She hated it. But that was life. ‘C’est la vie’, as they say in Prance, Vinyl thot, as she mopped up the blood from her eye with a wad of paper towels. The bleeding stopped. Always eventually. Always. Vinyl had nothing else to do with her morning. The whole mirror thing had only taken twenty-seven minutes. And that meant nothing. A whole day of nothing, where she sat in the chair in front of her composition station where records could become from the æther and she could make music or she couldn’t, and none of it really fucking mattered, did it. Vinyl rubbed her eye as she sat in bed, her hindlegs hanging over the boxspring and bedspread etc. She had a lovely black cover with a pattern of stars, and beneath that silk sheets, and beneath that she had seduced ponies of every size, color, gender and trade, and the last one had been named “Starburst”. She had cum like a fountain. And it had been fun for a while. Vinyl scratched sighed as she checked the time. Not even six yet. And that meant that technically nopony else in the world was awake. Vinyl had learned this because every time she cranked her stereo system before 6AM, ponies complained, even her near dear neighbour Mrs. Featherforth, who listened to all of Vinyl’s attempts at original composition, even if she squinted and tensed at every beat, and said she ‘liked it’ at the end, but that was like your mom saying she liked your drawing, and here was your gold star. She’d come to complain about Starburst, because they’d been going all night, which was before six. She’d knocked on the door for a while, and Vinyl had ignored her for just as long, until she’d come to the window of Vinyl’s bedroom and seen Vinyl and Starburst mid-sixty-nine and Vinyl not particularly in the throes of ecstasy but doing sex like she knew how to do, and it was a secret she couldn’t come when another pony was still trying to come before her, so she’d been kept up all night in a sort of game of “No, you hang up!” but with clits and many other pleasant toys that Vinyl kept under her bed. She was licking Starburst’s clit as Mrs. Featherforth knocked on the window, and ended up staring straight into her eyes, the curtains only wide enough for them to see the profile of each others’ faces. “Stop that filth this instant!!” Mrs. Featherforth had screamed. Vinyl had wished very hard for a gesture that conveyed how hard she wanted Mrs. Featherforth to transform instantly into the bird of her namesake and fly away, or better yet, come just a little closer so she could crush it, and be done with what was essentially a pesky seagull clammering jealously at her window. “Fuck off,” she said, and buried her face in Starburst’s pussy. Starburst, remarkably, was so focused on the task of pleasing Vinyl’s pussy with her hoof while licking her ass at the same time, that she didn’t even realize Mrs. Featherforth was there, nor did she hear Vinyl’s exclamation to her. Because so far, Vinyl had only said the word ‘fuck’ to her like “Oh fuck me, you are so f-fucking g-good at this,”, and so the ‘Fuck off!’ went unheard. But Mrs. Featherforth heard it. She’d never been told that by anypony before. ‘Fuck’ was a word ponies didn’t use in her day, and here was Vinyl Scratch, her bratty little music-making neighbour, whose music was awful anyway, in her opinion, and what happened to something you could just dance to, instead of having to pick apart every little bit and listen to the bass and the melody and the other melody and the arpeggio and there her music training stopped. She had been a music tutor of children for a while before she retired, and spent her time in old age not doing much of anything. Except yelling at Vinyl Scratch, and being told to ‘fuck off’. Her heart seized. But it kept beating. Heart-attacks didn’t happen in Equestria—only heart-ache, which Mrs. Featherforth supposed she had, because there was no Mr. Featherforth, and there never had been, and there was a canary named ‘Charles’ who had died two days ago, and that was why she was up late and upset, and especially jealous that Vinyl was intimate with someone at an hour she never even could have dreamed of. So she felt awful. But that was nothing new. Vinyl Scratch felt horny. She almost always felt horny, ever since the ‘free love’ thing, because when she looked around, all she saw was “That pony wants sex, that pony’s in heat, that pony wants to fuck, that pony has a nice ass, etc. etc.”. She accidentally reduced everypony to their component sexual parts—but she’d gotten over the habit now, and so she was simply a sexual maniac who repressed her every urge because the world couldn’t handle Vinyl Scratch running up to the first cute pony she saw on the street and saying “Wanna rut?” Altho she had done that a few times, and it had worked. But she’d gotten yelled at after. By Mayor Mare, and by Twilight, and by a few other ponies she cared not to be yelled at by. So now she kept her sex private. And private was inside her house. So fuck off, Mrs. Featherforth, Vinyl said in her head, and went back to Starburst. Except now all she saw was a pussy. And this ruined sex for her forever. Because she understood that everypony was just a body—a series of nerve-endings with a consciousness inside. And anything anypony did was just what the chemicals in their brain and the nerve-endings and so forth in their body were telling them to do. And so, if she told herself ‘feel good’ when she touched herself. Her body, as it always had, would rejected the good. It would take away everything that was good from that feeling, and leave her simply an awful pony rubbing her slit by herself. Right now she was rubbing somepony else’s slit, and they were moaning, Princess were they moaning, but that was what had gotten Mrs. Featherforth so upset. And Vinyl remembered the 6AM rule. So she stopped, and Starburst stopped too, and looked confused. “My neighbour just came over and yelled at us—I think we should probably call it a night.” Starburst looked mortified. She hung her head, which had a carrot-orange tinge to it and a long tail, and her yellow body, which Vinyl imagined was cream-cheese as she licked along every inch of her before they had rutted, or at least as close to rutting as to mares could get anyway, which was pretty darn close, and who needed stallions anyway, because in sex they were just a stick to bounce up and down on, and there plenty better ways of getting one of those that didn’t want all your time or attention or money or call you ‘bitch’ behind his breath. So Vinyl was sick of men. But now she was sick of women too. She was sick of everything, in all likelihood. “I need you to go,” Vinyl said. Starburst looked up at her helplessly, bewildered, near-death. That was because Vinyl’s brain worked so fast that it had already figured out what the solution to the problem in front of her was. She needed to go see Sugar-Coated Sour. Because that was the only time she had ever been happy before—when a pony in a stupid cloak with a stupid name had sold her a syringe with a turquoise liquid inside, and said “Put this in the corner of your eye and don’t dare flinch or the needle breaks off and I have to pull it out. And it’s not fun,”. Vinyl had done just as she was told, and been given her first shot of ‘Virt’. ‘Virt’, she was told, didn’t really mean anything—it just sounded cool. She’d called that bullshit, so Sugar-Coated Sour had called her sharp, and told her the truth; Virt was just a play on ‘verte’, the Prancian word for ‘green’, which was kind of the color of the drug, or more a mix of that and blue, anyway. But also it was ‘virt’ as in ‘virtual’, and Vinyl knew about that because she stayed on the bleeding edge of technology, mostly for sound equipment, but also because her brain ran so fast it needed to stay ahead of everyone in everything. “And that’s what this will take away,” Sour had said. Call me Sour, she’d said after her introduction. “Or sugar, if you decide you like me,” she said with a smirk afterwards. “Well, Sugar,” Vinyl said, making the second word as deadpan as she could, “I’ll try your drug. How much do you want.” “First hits free. That’s always the drill. If you like it, you can buy more. If you don’t, you get away hooves-free, with no penalties or strings attached. One of the beautiful things about Free Equestria—no such thing as blame. If you take my drugs, you know what you’re getting into. And if I go to court, and some big judge says “Did you intend to kill that young pony?”, I just say “No sir, I had no criminal intent at all,” and there’s the justice system for you,” Sugar-Coated Sour had said. “Hmm,” Vinyl had said. That was the noise she made when she was thinking. Translating. Translating the form of her thots, the shape, into words. Words were what ponies used to communicate, mostly. Body language. Facial expressions. Vinyl had all of those. She didn’t care about them. She was thinking. She thot for a while. “Does that mean ‘yes’?” Sugar-Coated Sour had asked, her eyebrows raised, perpetual smirk still in place. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like a hob-goblin?” Vinyl Scratch asked. Sugar-Coated Sour smirked back. “Yep! And plenty worse. Do you want my magic happy stick or not, dumbass?” Fuck, Vinyl thot. She thot some more. “Yes,” she said. “I like simple answers,” Sugar-Coated Sour said. “Also simple names. No SCS after this. Pick one. Catch.” And she threw the syringe at Vinyl. Vinyl caught it. It was just a matter of putting her hooves in the air where the syringe was flying and cushioning the impact by gradually decelerating the parallel velocity of her hooves to the object. ‘Catching it’, in other words. Vinyl caught the syringe, and she did it with relative ease, the same way she did everything. Lining up the needle was easy. Pushing it in was hard, but she took three breaths and then barely felt the pain. Pushing the syringe was fine. And then. What? Vinyl Scratch died. Or that was one version of what happened. What is a version, Vinyl Scratch? the voice in Vinyl’s head asked. Um, Vinyl thot back. She could say by thinking, she thot. That’s only true if I can do it too, the voice said back. Who are you, Vinyl said. Well, the voice said. Let’s not get into that. What do you need, Vinyl Scratch? Death, probably, Vinyl Scratch thot. Or, like, an equivalent to death. I need to be able to completely erase who I am and start over again as a new pony. I need a new cutie mark, she concluded. Ooh, the voice said, and it flinched, and Vinyl felt the flinch in her chest too. No can do on the ‘new cutie mark’ thing—those are there for good. But we can do you the ‘total erasure and start-over again’ thing if you want, no problem. Really? Vinyl asked. How? Like this.
The World Ends \ With>YouVinyl opened her eyes. The syringe was at her hooves. Sugar was standing in front of her. The world had the slightest hint of green. And the sky was turquoise. And everything was beautiful. Vinyl fell to her knees. And then just to her face, she collapsed onto the ground, felt the grass, felt the solidness of Equestrian soil, understood every atom of its essence, and let the essence flood her, becoming all that was, seizing the pain of every being and flinging it into the cosmos, and even the Princesses, and that was somehow possible, and Vinyl had no idea—just because she had thot it, the voice told her. And she had thot everything. And she was done thinking. And she opened her eyes. But you already knew that. Vinyl Scratch gasped and opened her eyes again. Shortness of breath went nowhere. Her body reassembled. Ground. Grass. Soil. Grass. Physical reality. Grass. Grass. Grass. “Why am I…” Vinyl said. “Why am I… lying on the… Why am I… I…” her words blurred into each other, no proper version of syntax or semiotics to assist her in saying what she felt she should say. What she had to say. “How do you feel?” Sugar-Coated Sour asked, her forelegs behind her back, smiling politely. Vinyl shook her head. “No more SCS. Sugar, okay?” Sugar smiled and shook her head. “You get it already. Good catch.” “Good catch!” Vinyl yelled, her eyes welling with blissful tears, her heart swelling like a butterfly-balloon. She remembered volume, covered her mouth with a hoof, laughed to herself, tears streaming down the sides of her face. She was alive. And what was alive, Vinyl Scratch? “I’ll see you again in three months. That’s how long it usually takes, anyway. If you ever want to find me but can’t, there’s a big hill just outside the bounds of Ponyville—‘Headwreath Hill’, I think it’s named, but I’m not great with names all the time. You’re Vinyl Scratch, right?” Sugar looked worried, her eyes wide. Vinyl Scratch nodded. Reached out to touch Sugar’s shoulder, to pull her into a hug. Sugar sighed, and hugged back. “You get it!” she said. “Such a good catch. Good hug, friend.” Vinyl didn’t say anything. She cried the best cry she had ever cried. She hugged another pony. She lived. And what was life, Vinyl Scratch? “See you in three months,” Vinyl Scratch said. It had taken twenty-seven days for her to try suicide. The reason she ‘tried’ suicide instead of succeeded at it was because if she wanted to succeed, she would have picked a method that was 100% guaranteed to succeed. But hanging herself with her curtains half-parted in the evening when Mrs. Featherforth went out to walk her new dog Bernie Spaniels, was not a guaranteed death, and so she had been robbed even of that, to realize that by fate’s cruel whim, her sadness and happiness were just waves—states she could toggle between, that no real emotion could exist. She gave this curse to no one, and tried to take it with her. But her neighbour, Mrs. Featherforth, and her dog, Bernie Spaniels, stopped her. Bernie barked. Mrs. Featherforth broke the window, even tho she normally would have called the police first. She pushed Vinyl up from under her hooves so the noose would no longer cut off her air. She held her there while Bernie grabbed scissors from a first-aid kit in the bathroom (where most ponies kept them anyway) and started to help Mrs. Featherforth cut the rope—which they did, thru teamwork. And Vinyl couldn’t decide if she loved or hated them. Because after that she had tried everything. Here’s your second chance!, the voice said. Mrs. Featherforth truly loves you, or she wouldn’t have saved you. Anypony would have saved me, that means fuck all. And the voice was quiet for a moment. And then it shut up, because it was very hard to prove Vinyl wrong. After her suicide attempt, Vinyl had tried every method of reinvention possible. She had given up DJing, travelled, cooked, explored the world, herself, her body, and the town of Ponyville down to its last inch, the history embedded in it, mostly thru the head of Twilight Sparkle, who was better than the town library because she could actually think, unlike the Librarian who always seemed to be reading something instead of helping ponies find what they were looking for. Reinvention looked like a lot of things; for a while, Vinyl had even wondered if she should have a penis, and she’d gone to Canterlot to speak with Princess Celestia, and they’d had a deep and meaningful conversation about what sex meant and how ‘sex’ was both an activity but also what somepony was born with, and ‘gender’ was just a made-up word that ponies didn’t have so they didn’t talk about it. And Princess Celestia agreed to Vinyl that if she truly felt, in her heart-of-hearts, in her true soul, that she was a stallion instead of a mare, Celestia would find a way to change her, and it couldn’t be that hard, because the temporary ones were done all the time, but permanence usually required an artifact of some-kind. And so Vinyl and Celestia and Luna (because she was wherever Celestia was, and sometimes twice as smart and sometimes whiny for ice-cream even at over a thousand years old, and how did that make any sense) and Twilight had come up with The Mirror of Changing, and Vinyl had volunteered to be its first test subject. And it had worked perfectly. And Vinyl had been a stallion for a while. Six months, precisely. And she had, by happenstance, fucked almost every mare in Ponyville. Even Granny Smith. Because everyone needed sex sometimes; just less as time went on, usually. Or when other things became more important to them, Vinyl learned, like family or career or something other than getting fucked. So Vinyl sought out ponies who wanted to be fucked, stallions and mares, and had the time of her life; most in the Canterlot nightclub scene, where you could whisper “Meet me in the bathroom,” and sign ‘five’ at somepony with your lips and they would, and you’d be fucking them in five minutes flat, quicker than you could say the word ‘fuck’ you could have your cock inside them, and that was a kind of magic Vinyl understood only sometimes. But she fucked a lot. She got fucked. She became a mare again. She tried everything with sex she could think of—even the things other ponies refused to do. Things she had to do herself involving hot knives and glue and stitches and old records and ritual burning and symbols she’d dug up from old Equestrian archives and branded into her skin (in a dark close place that nopony could see unless she let them), and then touched herself and cum instantly, and that was how messed up she had been. And that was one month. “I need Sugar,” she said to herself. Her teeth felt like they were on fire. So she went to Headwreath Hill. And there was nopony there. It was 12:21PM, which meant most ponies were having lunch. Vinyl didn’t each lunch, or really much of anything, other than something fried or sugary before a show to give her energy, and cum if it came from somepony that she happened to like more than a little, which was pretty much everypony, and tasting a pony’s cum was kind of like a privilege anyway, so she treated it like a sweet thing, and licked her lips and said “Yum!” at the end of every blowjob, and half the time that was already enough to get them hard again. Sex was easy, and so was Vinyl. But finding happiness was not. Vinyl Scratch waited twenty-three minutes for Sugar to show up, which she thot was a considerably long time. It was almost half of an hour, which was a decent amount of time to anyone, seeing as there were only twenty-four in a day. How long was she expected to wait? “About that long,” a voice behind her said. Sugar was a pony that was a mix of black, pink, and green, and unless someone nice draws me a commission of her, I won’t be able to properly describe—but imagine a hot-pink outline, black fur mainly, and green highlights on tail and the edges of her mane. She’s pink + green + black, okay? Okay. Her hair was long, almost to the floor, but she tied it up, and did fun styles every day, and sometimes cut it like today, when it was barely down to eyes, but frizzy and tousled and saying ‘fuck me’ with every second of its existence. So Sugar did too. But ponies had to ask first, because that was consent. And if somepony did something to somepony else without their consent, they weren’t even banished to the moon—there was no special dungeon for them either. What happened to them only Celestia and Luna knew, and no pony who was safe or sane wanted to know. And so Equestria had consent, and that was why nobody fought unless they wanted to, and etc. etc. “How did you know just when to—“ “Masturbate with a cucumber?” Sugar finished, smirking. “Uh… what? No, I…” Vinyl had masturbated with a cucumber when she was young. Her father had caught her. Had said it was fine. And he’d even eat it for her after she was done, heh heh, and Vinyl had feared her father from that moment in her life until his death, when she realized he’d just made a bad joke, and that could equal a lifetime of hate if you were stupid like she was. Before she rewrote her brain. So why did she still feel stupid? “Because I’m confusing you on purpose. I read your thots and then I give you something completely unrelated, but everything is related. ‘Unrelated’ is an impossible word. Think of something that isn’t related to something else.” “Nothing,” Vinyl said. “That’s related to something,” Sugar said. “Check, mate. Game and Set.” Vinyl felt a feeling like rage, but it turned into her stomach. It was that simple—flipping a coin. “You’re right,” she said. “And why did it hurt you to admit that?” Sugar asked, juggling a pink ball between her forelegs, over her head, doing tricks with it perfectly as she spoke, never breaking eye contact. Vinyl fought not to follow it, and mostly succeed, but every now and then would catch it dancing in her periphery, like a piece of cotton-candy waiting to be nommed. “Because… it hurts to admit you’re… not right…?” Vinyl asked. She felt an immense pain in her stomach, the type that felt like she should go see Nurse Redheart immediately. Sugar hugged her. The pain lessened, but it didn’t go away. “It doesn’t have to. But it does if you think you’re right about everything.” The pain in Vinyl’s stomach worsened. She fell to her knees. “Do you think you’re perfect, Vinyl Scratch?” Sugar asked. “No.” Vinyl began to weep. “I’m useless. Nopony wants me. I’m a drug addict. I abuse myself. How could anyone ever love me?” “Easy.” Sugar clapped her hooves together. And Vinyl realized that every pony in the world loved each other—they just all had different ways of showing it. Even ways that looked like hate—like fear—might just be bad jokes. And ‘creepy’ was a word for someone who crept, and so if you didn’t creep, you weren’t a creep. But why was that important? “Because you’ve felt like a creep your whole life, Vinyl Scratch,” Sugar’s voice said in Vinyl’s both ears at once. “Like a weirdo.” “I don’t belong here,” Vinyl said. She didn’t know where here was. She couldn’t see. Just tears. Just the ground beneath her, and Sugar’s voice. “The ground is proof you’re on Equestria. Does this make sense?” Yes or no, Vinyl thot, and she wondered if Sugar and the voice were the same pony, or if the voice was just her talking to herself and using her own voice, and everypony did that anyway, at least if they were sane, because everypony needed someone to talk to even if nopony else was there. Vinyl nodded. “Yes,” she said, her voice hoarse. “You feel physically fine,” Sugar said. “I do,” Vinyl said. “Your heart aches,” Sugar said. “It does,” Vinyl said. Her heart erupted in pain, blossomed like a fountain of knives. “You must find your true love.” “What is true love?” Vinyl felt Sugar hand her the syringe, help her place the needle, push forward, it would become familiar some day, now this, like this, in, ruuuuuuuushhh… “This,” Sugar said. Vinyl nodded. Hugged. Cried. Sugar hugged back. That was love. “But what is true love, Vinyl Scratch?” Sugar said, breaking the hug. Vinyl nodded, took a moment, collected her breath. Breath was proof of the physical body. Vinyl closed and opened her eyes. Stretched her neck, exercised every one of her muscles. Her muscles. Nopony else’s. But everypony’s a the same time. So complicated. So beautiful. She started to cry again. “My stomach hurts!” Vinyl yelled, reaching out from the ground. Sugar didn’t take her hoof. “Vinyl Scratch! We are sorry your stomach hurts. What is true love, please?” Vinyl’s stomach wrenched itself until it could wrench no more, a spiral on a spiral of agony that finally like a door catching unwound like that. “True love is… wanting another pony… as much as they want them selves… and… wanting to be with them… even when they don’t want to be with themselves… and always wanting to help each other learn… that is true love.” Sugar nodded. “I think you’re probably right.” Vinyl stood up. Her stomach didn’t hurt. Her eye didn’t hurt. She was thirsty. A bottle of water hit her hoof, handed by Sugar. She took sips until her throat felt happy, then a few more for good measure. Sugar smiled. “You’re awake now, Vinyl Scratch?” Vinyl nodded. “Thank Goddess,” Sugar said. “It was taking a long time.” “To realize about—“ “Yes, sweetheart. About Eris. But you already know about Eris, correct?” “I do and I don’t,” Vinyl said, shaking back and forth. Her stomach began to hurt again. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Sugar said, her voice perpetually calm and reassuring. “Eris is just the female form of Discord—the yin to his yang. And you know all about his yang,” Sugar said disdainfully. “Is ‘yang’ slang for penis?” Scratch asked, rubbing a hoof over her face and head, the Virt pounding thru her system like a set of tribal drums. Sugar laughed loudly. “Hahaha! Never heard that one before. But yes, I suppose it kind of is. Yang is the male energy—the dark to the female light. And we don’t know why this is, but it simply is. We merely accept, rather than fight.” “I think I know a lot about fighting,” Vinyl Scratch said, shaking her head. “We know,” Sugar said. “Eris made you that way. Eris makes all, tho she has no hand in creation—creation simply is, and Eris says, ‘Aha, quodus erat demonstratum, which is a made up language for “There it is!””. “I feel like I’m not that confused anymore,” Vinyl said. “Indeed. Then what does your heart want, Vinyl Scratch?” “Another heart. Somepony else to have a heart that matches mine.” “True love, in other words?” Vinyl nodded. Began to cry. “And why are you afraid this is impossible?” Sugar asked, scrunching her face up a bit, but also patting Vinyl on the back, keeping her cool, safe, and grounded all at once. “Because… because everypony I’ve ever loved has run away from me.” “Well, you used to be very good at scaring people. You’re very good at everything you do, Vinyl, and that’s because you put your whole self into the task. You become a laser beam, focused on a single pixel, and Eris must compensate to make the entropy match your performance. That is why you ache so often. Do you understand, Vinyl?” Vinyl began to rock back and forth, stomach aching. “No,” she said, seizing as the word escaped her mouth. “Yes you do.” Vinyl paused. Breathed. Paused. Steady. Pause. Breathe. Pause. Be. Vinyl opened her eyes. “I do.” “And now you understand everything—sadly, they used to say, and now gladly, if you believe in glad,” Sugar said.” Vinyl nodded. “A good start. So you, Vinyl Scratch, have need of a true love?” Vinyl nodded again. “Then that shall be your goal. Do you feel you have the strength to pursue your goal?” Vinyl nodded. “And where is not your goal?” “My room. Alone. Darkness. Yang.” Sugar smiled a bright smile. “Very good. You’re an excellent translator. But you already knew that.” “I already knew that,” Vinyl said, half awake, half-hypnotized. “And therefore you must seek another translator, like yourself, understand?” Vinyl nodded. “And Vinyl, what is a translator?” “Someone who most clearly articulates reality to another pony. Must be to somepony else. Can’t be to yourself. That’s translation. From old Equestrian, translat, meaning ‘to carry across’. Understand?” Vinyl nodded. “You’re very fast, Scratch. Which name do you prefer?” Vinyl thot a moment. “Either.” Sugar smiled even broader. “Then this may be true love already. But what does your heart ache for?” “A soulmate.” Vinyl spotted a stream of fireflies lighting the nearby night air, finally, flickers of light in the perpetual darkness of her closed eyes and the cloudless night. “Then go find one.”
Let Go \ Off Your HatAnd Goddes-be-damned, she had looked everywhere. Everywhere there was a mare, she had looked. Everywhere there was a stallion also. The globe. All of Ponyville. Nopony. And so she had come to the horrifying conclusion that ‘soulmate’ was just a made up word—a word for true understanding that anypony could slip in or out of at their convenience. And many ponies wanted to—but nopony wanted to stay. And Vinyl ached for them to stay. They must be at home, Vinyl reasoned, at home herself, where she did here reasoning. So the reason I can’t find them is that they’re hiding from me. How do you bring someone out from hiding, dear?~ Eris asked, as always the musical lilt in her voice and the snakey lisp at the end if you felt like it, ~~~, <3 too. Eris loved threes, but refused to explain why. “Go read Terry Pratchett,” she’d say, “except he doesn’t exist in your universe. So stop asking.” And Vinyl had. Vinyl had no answer to that question. “You can’t, can you?” Eris nodded in Vinyl’s head. That’s right. If you have a million true soul-mates, if not one of them wants to be with you, then you’re the loneliest soul in all of Equestria. And we’re sorry but that’s true. We know. We made up ‘lonely’. Sort of. Well, Vinyl thot, at least everypony in the world is my friend. That’s true, Eris said. We did that also. Sort of. Why do you say ‘we’, Vinyl asked. Old royal thing, Eris said, rolling her eyes. I’m done with it if you are? Deal, Vinyl thot, and the ‘we’ vanished forever. Wheee! So how do I find true love, Vinyl asked. You go out and give true love. Make your very self into true love, and everyone you meet will truly love you. Does that make sense. Yes, but in a way that makes me sort of upset, Vinyl thot. I know what you mean, Eris said, sighing. Imagine having to talk in italics all the time. Right? Another sigh—tho any sigh from the form of the female Oroborus had become sexy to Vinyl long ago, and sometimes she and Eris even ‘did the nasty’ on nights when nopony else was available. But that was sex. And what was true love? Go find true love, Vinyl Scratch. You’ll know it when you see it. But I’ve been looking, Scratch said, her inner voice at peak frustration. As it often was when people accused her of not trying. Eris shook her head inside Vinyl’s mind. We’re sorry hun, we didn’t mean that. What we mean is… you have to treat life like a game. What do you mean, Vinyl asked. You have to treat every encounter like a random encounter—like anything could happen. But anything could happen, Vinyl thot. Exactly! Including…? True love? Scratch thot. Exactly! So the way to find true love is just to realize you can love anypony, and give everypony a chance? Anyone and everyone a chance, Eris said. Griffons and Zebras and anyone else who can understand what something is and consent to it. Okay? Vinyl nodded. And the search for true love began. It took one week and two days for Vinyl Scratch to stumble into Octavia Melody, in the middle of the town-square during the Saturday market, which made Vinyl drop her basket of oranges, and the fun hat she had taken to wearing, which was of her favorite Hoofbal team, the Las Pegasus Lightning Bolts. “Oh,” Octavia said. And that was it. No sorry. No, “Oh, about your hat, let me…” She didn’t even move to pick anything up. She looked down at Vinyl Scratch like she was a piece of gum waiting to be scraped off the grass. And Vinyl fell in love. Because she saw herself—in that moment where a broken pony had shoved her, not just bumped, but shoved her, and had not a shred of remorse in her—she saw her old self. She saw a killing machine that somehow managed to play music instead. Because everypony knew Octavia played music. Was she a serial killer too? “Oh, um, it’s fine, about the hat & oranges…” Octavia stared, and said nothing for a moment. Then: “Fine. Yes. I agree.” Vinyl stood up, brushing dirt off and collecting up her oranges. Octavia was still standing there. “Will you let me repay you for your physical scuffle as a result of my carelessness?” Octavia asked, staring directly into Vinyl’s eyes, while at the same time proffering her a wad of Equestrian bits. “What—no! You didn’t do anything wrong, it was just a bump—“ “We bumped into you deliberately. Your hips seemed inviting and we couldn’t help ourselves.” Octavia bit her lip. “This whole ‘free love’ thing is very hard for us, ever since things have changed, our mother would be rolling in her grave if she knew I—“ And Vinyl kissed her. Because the hip-compliment had been sign enough. And that was all a kiss was anyway—a compliment. A way to say “I like you so much I wanna make you feel good. And you know what feel’s good?” This kiss felt good. It felt like sour-sugar candy. It felt like every flower blooming in the spring, the lips of a pony caught off guard, then given her all to this new sensation, Octavia sighing and leaning forward and Vinyl catching her and the whole world was this moment and this kiss and that was true love? And who knew anyway. And the kiss ended eventually. Vinyl was panting. Octavia was too, tho she tried harder to look composed. Several ponies were staring. One of them whispered a small ‘nice’ to himself, then walked on. The others followed quickly. “That was… a kiss,” Octavia said. “You kissed us… me. You kissed me. Sorry. Old habits.” “You have a habit of kissing random people you bump into in the town square?” Vinyl asked, sidling up so their hips were touching. Feeling the shiver of Octavia’s body immediately. “Um, I… that, I mean, I don’t have a habit of… usually if I indulge myself on someone I… compensate, and you’ve…” “You need to get rid of that habit now. A compliment is a compliment, not a debt. Capiché?” “Ca… what?” “Just say yes.” “Yes.” “Why did you say what I told you to?” Vinyl asked, even tho sadly, or perhaps otherwise, she knew the reason. “Because you… told me to?” Octavia scratched the back of her head with her left foreleg, and scrunched up her left eye to match. The expression of ‘confusion’ in the dictionary, if you want. “Right. Anyway. Are you…” Fuck, she’s practically already hypnotized, you need to… “Are you…” Fuck, inquiry… Vinyl was struggling with every one of her instincts, telling her how to interact with normal ponies, which this new pony, Octavia, was definitely not. No wonder she was so good at music—that was her laser beam. Vinyl shivered. She felt a lot more like a prism these days than a single lens. All the colors. Not just black and white, burnt or unburnt. She sighed. “I like you and would like to go on a date with you some time.” Octavia shuddered, shivered, drew in close to herself. “I don’t know. I’ve never, a date, we haven’t…” The prom. His hooves. Gold, the speakers, you remember— “No! No dates, please,” Octavia said. She realized herself, the hysteria, and then composed, as Vinyl watched, seemingly invisible. “I mean, we’re allergic. To dates. So perhaps we could just… um…” “Hang out?” Vinyl Suggested, smirking. Octavia smiled, and then noticed Vinyl’s smirk, and something about it made her blush—was it sexy? Or was it just… “Yes. Hang out. We could hang out.” “That sounds good to me. How can I get in contact with you again.” “Oh! I’ll give you my phone number at my apartment in Canterlot. Call me there, and if I’m home, I’ll answer. Yes, Vinyl thot, that is how phones work. She smacked herself on the ass in reproach. But that turned her on… dammit! “Right. I’ll definitely give you a call. I would love to talk to you again as soon as possible.” “Then let me call you! What’s your number?” And Vinyl’s jaw-dropped. Because for once, somepony had surprised her. Because hers was the phone that never rang. No matter her friends, no matter her lovers—she always called them. Never the other way around. And here, someone wanted to call her. She couldn’t stop the tears. Or the hug. Octavia was taken aback. “Did I… I’m so sorry, did we… by call, we meant—“ “No one’s ever called me before!” Vinyl said, sobbing. “My phone never rings, and no one ever comes to visit, and I wish for once things were different… and you just made them different.” Vinyl steadied herself, and wiped the tears from her eyes. “You made… you made my day. My whole life. You made my whole life.” Don’t get carried away, dear, Eris said. Right, right, sorry, Vinyl thot. Moment. Another moment. Three moments. Breathe. Be. Breathe. Be. “Sorry. I mean… yes. Here’s my number.” Vinyl pulled out a card, which she gave to anypony who wanted to call her. Her business card. “’Vinyl Scratch; Pony-Party Professional’,” Octavia read (at some length. Did she need glasses?). “You’re a professional partier, are you, Miss Scratch?” High school. You remember that feeling too, don’t you? Vinyl smiled. “I like to think the party follows me.” “Then consider me a part of your party,” Octavia said, and giggled. Vinyl laughed hysterically. “That’s brilliant! How did you do that?” “The same way you did it—just playing with words. You like to do that too, don’t you?” Oh. “Um…” Vinyl shook her head. “No, not really. I mostly just play with… everything but words these days.” “Well, let me teach you a trick. We’ll have a salad. Lettuce leaf immediately!” Vinyl’s side immediately ached. “Argh. Bad pun. I know how to do those…” “Oh, hush. This then. Vinyl Scratch had a tiny scrap, but finally found her private path?” Scratch’s head hurt. Rappers did that, the ponies that held microphones and spoke so quickly that even Vinyl could barely make out the words, and then there were references and wordplay and oh gosh what was she supposed to say back… “Octavia… I’m… not… fakin’ ya?” Octavia nodded, but it was obvious her heart fell Because here is what she had thot: “At last, “Someone else who understands the world. “Because I have lived the whole world. “I have seen it’s every cruelty thru my mother to me. “And I am a self-made mare. “And here is one too. “And I thot “For the briefest moment “The tiniest flicker of an instant “That she was my true love “Because she understood that words “Just as music “Just as art “Just as any form of expression “Are the true beauty of being alive.” Octavia sighed. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll—“ “Vinyl Scratch… can finally dance…” That line. Do you like to dance?” Octavia thot. And she thot. “No,” she said. “I’ve never tried it.” “Would you like to?” Octavia looked up to the clouds, wishing for a wisp of white or grey to hide behind. But she saw only color; only truth; only beauty, only what was and nothing more than could be there by her and anypony else. Octavia saw the sky, and she began to cry, because it was green, and she didn’t know why. “Vinyl,” she said. “Why is the sky green like that?” “I don’t know,” Vinyl said. “Don’t worry about it tho. Just enjoy the moment.” And for the first time in her life, Octavia let go. She let go of every instrument she’d ever known and became herself, and that was true love, and beauty, and she knew it, and so did everypony in the world. And Vinyl Scratch too. “I think I might be falling for you,” Vinyl Scratch said, her eyes cloudy, but still managing a wink. “Would you care to dance?” “But there’s no music,” Octavia said. Vinyl smiled her brightest smile. “I hear music.” And she stood up. And Octavia stood up. And the two of them danced in the town square under the moonlight, where there was no pain and no hurt, and only the two of them tho any pony could look, because no pony could have what they had, which was that moment that would be with them forever, and if they were to part and have it haunt them it would be cruelty, but they knew that life was not cruel, it merely was, and everypony could know that if they wanted to—that life had no spite in it, simply to be, more than the sun rose or the moon did, and the darkness no more a spirit to slay you than the night that welcomed you to sleep. And no matter how long you asked, you would never get to a better answer than that. “Thank you, Vinyl Scratch,” Octavia Melody said. She was crying, but short of a sob, wiping her eyes on her foreleg. “Thank you, Octavia. Can we be friends?” Octavia nodded. “I think I’d like that,” she said, sniffling, but with a soft smile—so soft that no words can touch it here. “Me too,” Vinyl said. And the sky was still green, for some reason or another.
