The One Where Vinyl Sells Some Records
“Hello, is Sundance available?” Vinyl Scratch squinted at her horrid hornwriting as she placed the call.
“Speaking.” The feminine voice responded quietly, slightly muffled.
“This is Vinyl Scratch from the Record Crate calling to let you know that I’ve found it. Your record is here at the shop.” A grin tugged at the edge of her mouth. She had spent the better part of the past four months hunting damn near all over the world for this record. She had finally found a copy in Saddle Arabia, in an adventure worthy of Daring Do herself. “Feel free to stop on by whenever you get a chance.”
“Thank you. I’ll be down there shortly.” With a murmured response, Vinyl gently shut down the audio crystal. She watched until she could be sure that the magic had faded, then tucked it away in its box and got ready to let the day in.
Trotting out from behind the counter, Vinyl reached out with her magic and took hold of the store. With one quick, practiced pulse, she flipped the sign in the window to “Open”, turned on the shop’s hidden speakers and slotted a soothing jazz record into the record player. She walked the few paces to the front door, then shoved it open with her shoulder and propped a decorative cat statue against it to keep it that way.
Vinyl inhaled deeply, savoring the scents of the new day. There were the soft notes of freshly trimmed grass, the charmingly bombastic aromas of a plethora of flowers, and a small hint of cinnamon to accent it all. She had no idea where all of these scents were coming from on a side street in the heart of Canterlot, but she wasn’t one to complain. She looked up and smiled at the clear blue sky, dotted with one or two wispy clouds to cast a bit of shade. It was a perfect day for music.
After one final look up and down the streets, Vinyl stepped back inside. She swept a practiced eye over her small shop, unable to hold back a smile at the rows of records that sat waiting for the right customer. Every sleeve was free of dust, every album sorted neatly by genre and artist. It was a diverse collection, with everything from folk songs to the latest in new-age hyperelectronica. The Record Crate had something for everypony, she had made sure of that.
Everything was in place. The shelves were full, the back room was well-stocked, and every order for the day had been filled. Vinyl took up her position behind the counter, and smiled at the open street. She was ready.
~~~
The best part of running a record store, Vinyl had long ago realized, was that her customers actually wanted to be there, and knew about what they were buying. There wasn’t always a massive rush, but there was always an active interest. There was a certain simple grace to recognizing the voice of a pony, drawing the record out from under the counter, and accepting their bits with nothing but a nod and a smile. She especially liked the ones who moved in time to the music. A real appreciation for the arts, they had.
Of course, not all of them were experts. Vinyl spent just as much time among the rows helping her customers browse as she did ringing up their orders. As with every day, she lost count of how many times she swapped out the store’s background music just to sample an album and see if it was what one pony or another was looking for. It wasn’t as tedious or mood-shattering as it might seem, though.
She had a little trick she liked to do when switching tracks; she’d feel the two records in her magic, wait for the perfect moment where the grooves lined up, then teleport them to switch their places. Nine times out of ten, it went flawlessly, and any customer who hadn’t been watching would suddenly ask how she had Death’s Chord and Melody Maker on the same album.
Things slowed down around lunchtime, as is usually the case with any store that caters to collectors. Nopony wanted to get crumbs on their one-in-a-thousand 857 pressing of Tempo Rubato’s Concerta Sublime, after all. With only about three customers meandering their way through the shelves, Vinyl was content to just stand there and bob her head to the rhythm of the music.
Or at least, she was until somepony gently cleared their throat, and she looked up into the kind of horrifically clean smile that only a dentist can have.
“Hey, Minuette! What brings you over? Finally decided to let me pick something to replace those stuffy Johann Sebastian Beak tracks you’ve got playing in your waiting room?” Vinyl shot a cocky grin to the blue mare, who responded by huffing in indignation.
“Excuse me? I’ll have you know that those records were a gift from a very good friend. On top of that, some of us can enjoy music that wasn’t written this century.” Minuette tried to keep up her imperious anger, but it was barely two seconds before she cracked and started laughing. Once she got her giggles under control, she wandered around to behind the counter. “Besides, I’m supposed to meet her here soon.”
“Oh ho ho!” Vinyl chortled with glee, “You have another friend besides me?”
Minuette opened her mouth to respond, but then she saw something out of the corner that left her speechless. Vinyl turned to see, and she just barely stopped herself from letting her jaw drop.
A pegasus with a sparkling blue coat and a fiery sunshine-blonde mane had just touched down outside of the Record Crate. Despite the intensity of her colors, her expression suggested near-complete disinterest in the world around her, until her eyes alit on Vinyl Scratch. Vinyl felt an itch in the back of her mind, as though there were something very important that she should be realizing, but put it down to jitters. The mare approached, downright sauntering between two rows of shelves, then stopping just in front of the counter. Only then did she smile, and it seemed an almost unbelievably soft smile for such a mare.
“Hey there, Sundance.” Vinyl’s voice was calm and collected, a stark contrast to her wildly beating heart. “Now, that was one test pressing of Moon Trotter’s Bad, right?” She reached under the counter, producing the album in question with as much reverent ceremony as she could muster while grunge rock was playing through the store.
Sundance’s eyebrows raised, and her smile fell just a little. “You actually managed to find one? How? No, seriously, how? Every scrap of history I was able to find on this album said the test pressings were lost in a fire!”
“History also neglected to mention Princess Luna, but guess who turned out to be real.” Vinyl slid the all-white record out of the dust jacket, spinning it idly in her magic while Sundance’s eyes scanned it for any imperfections. “As for how... well, it wasn’t easy, I’ll tell you that for free. Those Saddle Arabians sure love their Moon Trotter.” The record stopped spinning, and in the brief instant where Sundance was blinking, Vinyl tucked it back into the dust jacket. “Satisfied?”
Sundance nodded dumbly as Vinyl rang up the order. “It’s... it’s amazing. I just... you actually, seriously did it. And in Saddle Arabia, of all places? I can’t even imagine.”
“Yeah, try being there. Things got real crazy, real fast.” There was a final ding from the cash register, and Vinyl slid the record into a bag. “After everything's said and done, that’ll be… five thousand bits.”
Sundance cocked her head to the side and raised an eyebrow. “Five thousand, eh? Mind if I ask how you arrived at that figure?”
Vinyl took a deep breath. “Let’s see... travel expenses, meals, weaponry, informants, the cat... Oh, and the actual record itself came at a bit of a cost.” Vinyl’s right front leg chose that moment to twitch in pain. “The previous owner wasn’t really in a selling mood.”
Sundance’s smile returned in full force. She turned her head and dipped into her saddlebags, from which she produced five slender golden bars and set them on the counter as casually as if she were just counting out bits. “I hope this is sufficient.”
Vinyl stared dumbfounded at the gold bars. She had heard of thousand-bit bars, of course, but she had never thought they were actually used by anypony. “Um, I do accept checks and banknotes, you know.”
“Nonsense. An impossible purchase deserves an impossible payment.” There was a strange warmth to Sundance’s voice all of a sudden, as though she were a mother congratulating a child rather than a normal paying customer.
Vinyl stared at the bars. Even if they would fit in the register, this was not the kind of money to just leave sitting there. “I’ll be right back.” She grabbed the five bars in her magic, then stepped into the back room.
The walls of her back room were plastered with old and faded posters from nearly every band who had posters made, the sort of posters that the adventure-conscious mind knew must be there to conceal safes. In truth, they were there to distract. The safe was actually hidden behind the only section of wall that didn’t have an eye-catching poster covering it.
Once the bars had been safely locked away, Vinyl returned to the counter and gave a bright smile to Sundance. With a quick and perhaps overly-stylized flourish of her magic, she wrote out the receipt for the sale and tucked it into Sundance’s bag along with the record.
Sundance smiled as she took her purchase and tucked it into her saddlebag. She turned to go, but as with so many customers before her, she was quite clearly intrigued by everything else that the Record Crate had to offer. “Do you mind if I take a look around?”
Vinyl smiled and chuckled. “Sure, knock yourself out. If you see anything you like, bring it here and we’ll add it to your haul.” With that, the pegasus got busy with admiring the rows and rows of diverse albums.
At some point during the conversation, Minuette had slipped away from the counter without Vinyl noticing. In fact, she didn’t actually notice that the dentist was gone until she re-appeared in front of the counter with a yellow mare in tow. “Vinyl, I’d like you to meet my friend, Lemon Hearts. She’s the one who gave me those J.S.B. records you’re so sick of.”
Lemon Hearts giggled a little at that, flashing a brief smile to Vinyl before very deliberately shifting her focus to the shop. “Gosh, this is quite the shop you have here! I mean, wow! If we weren’t in such a rush, I could probably get completely lost in here!”
“You can find the same thing anywhere that ponies care about music,” Vinyl shot back, keeping a nice smile despite her quick-fire tone. “I was just teasing Minny about the Beak, honest. He’s a fine composer, I just think she needs a bit more variety.”
Lemon blushed, her relief so obvious she may as well have written it in the air with her magic. “I’m so glad to hear that, DJ P0N3—”
There was no sound of a record scratching. That would have been unprofessional, and unpleasant, and would have made half of Vinyl’s customers and Vinyl herself scream in anguish. But there was the sound of teeth grinding against teeth, and the faint crackle of magic on Vinyl’s horn.
“Easy, Vinyl,” Minuette whispered as she stepped between the two unicorns. “She didn’t know, okay? It was just an honest mistake.”
“Honest mistake?” Vinyl’s leg twinged again, and she swore she could hear the sandstorms rolling in. “I don’t know about that. Seems pretty hard to mistake a living mare for a dead one.”
Minuette’s horn lit up, and anything resembling a smile disappeared. “Take a deep breath, Vinyl. You know she didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Um... Miss Scratch?”
The three of them turned on the new voice, and Sundance took a nervous step back. She had a small selection of records tucked under one wing, which Vinyl’s brain seized upon as the safest point of focus. Jazz, pop rock, even a Greatest Hits of the Long-Since-Dead album.
“What in the name of Shadowfax is your musical taste?”
Sundance smiled, laying the records on the counter and simply saying, “Unique.” She produced a few bits from her saddlebags and set those beside the records. “Will this cover it?”
Vinyl nodded, not really listening as she rang up the new albums and tucked them into a new bag. “Two more bits, if you please.”
“Uh, Vinyl?” Minuette waved a hoof to get her friend’s attention. “We, uh... we cool?”
Vinyl made a point of looking Lemon Hearts right in the eye before nodding. “Yeah. We cool.” The two of them seemed to take that as their invitation to leave, scampering out of the store so fast that Vinyl could barely see them move.
“Does that happen often?” Sundance asked, taking her bag.
“I would rather not talk about it,” Vinyl growled. Gold bars or not, this mare’s transactions were over, so there was no reason left to hold back.
“Fair enough, fair enough.” Instead of leaving the store or going back to browsing, Sundance just stood there for a few seconds. She had a weird look in her eye, as though she were doing complex math. “Miss Scratch, what would you say if I invited you to have dinner with me?”
“I’d say that I just had lunch,” Vinyl shot back on instinct. Then Sundance’s words actually sank in, and she cocked her head in confusion. “Wait, why would you want to invite me to dinner?”
“You’re a far more interesting mare than I gave you credit for, Vinyl Scratch. It’s been quite a while since I met anypony willing to go so far for a simple thing like a record, and I must confess I’ve always been an enthusiast for a good adventure story. So, with that said...”
Sundance gave a little flutter of her eyelashes and smiled an entirely different kind of smile. “Vinyl Scratch, would you do me the honor of accompanying me to dinner to regale me with tales of your sun-scorched adventures?”
It was certainly a charming mental image. The two of them, sat across from each other at an elegant table in some overblown five-star restaurant, Vinyl going on and on about the hoof-biting twists and turns she had taken while Sundance watched enraptured. It took a lot of restraint to keep a dumb, goofy smile from dominating her face, and Vinyl tried her best to play it cool. “Yeah, sure, I can do that. Sounds fun.”
Sundance beamed. “Wonderful! I’ll come pick you up at closing time!” She practically bounced out of the shop, there was so much spring in her step. Vinyl smiled at the mare’s retreating form, then got back to work.
For the first time since she had opened the Record Crate, Vinyl Scratch could feel the clock ticking. With every order that she wrote down, every song that ended, and every record that she sold, she found herself glancing at the clock and reminding herself when the store closed.
Eventually, the flow of customers slowed down to a trickle before stopping altogether. Vinyl watched the last two collectors leave, then wandered to the center of the store. She waited for the last record of the day to finish, bobbing her head to Journey of the Sorcerer until it wound down and the record stopped. Her magic pulsed, and the shop closed.
Normally, Vinyl would have pushed the cat statue away from the door with her magic, locked the door from where she stood, then turn around and wander upstairs to make a half-decent stir fry and go to sleep. Instead, she walked through the open door, picking the statue up for just long enough to let the door swing shut behind her. With the simple flicker of a locking spell, the Record Crate was closed for the night.
A grin tugged at her lips. She didn’t usually lock up from outside unless she was heading off on some grand adventure to track down an elusive album, or going to get groceries. Going out for dinner... that didn’t happen a whole lot. Especially not these days.
The sudden flutter of wings was a welcome distraction, and Vinyl looked up with a wide smile to see Sundance coming in for a landing. Despite the waning sunlight, the mare seemed to shine just as bright as she had at noon.
Sundance touched down with only the slightest clack of hoof against stone, barely louder than a normal hoof-fall. Her face was eerily stony until she turned to face Vinyl, but her smile when she did was so bright and genuine that Vinyl barely noticed.
“Hey, you.” Vinyl had barely any idea what to say. What was she supposed to say when someone invited her out to just... hear a story? Was it a date? Was it just two friends? Was it a business lunch?
“Hey yourself.” Sundance fluffed her wings, and even in the low light of the street lanterns Vinyl could see her blushing just a little. It looked like Sundance was just as nervous and confused as she was. Well, that was a relief.
“So. Where are we headed?”
Sundance smiled. “Why, Restaurant Row, of course.”
Vinyl rolled her eyes. “Be more specific.”
“No.” Sundance charged ahead, and Vinyl laughed and followed.
