Vinyl Scratch stood alone on the stage, the familiar throb of the music pulsing in her ears and under her hooves. The crowd of ponies on the dance floor was obscured by the brilliant stage lights and the haze of the club. To Vinyl, it looked like a brilliant, rainbow-colored sea, moving in time with her music. Manes, horns and wings moved in time with the gated drum kicks. Small eddies formed and disappeared in the wash of the dance as ponies broke time, moving against the wobbling bass or stopping to adjust their manes. Others joined the dance floor or left, moving through the sweat-soaked crowd like fish in rapids.
Vinyl loved it. As DJ P0n-3, for a few hours a night, three nights a week, this was her world to rule.
The night wore on as it always did. DJ P0n-3 wove her enchantments over the crowd, and they danced and paid their obeisances. Free drinks, bad requests and the occasional half-flanked proposition came her way in an endless stream of questionable offerings. The high priestess of the club remained aloof and above it all, though the drinks and the one-in-a-million request that wasn't awful were appreciated.
An empty glass disappeared from the small table next to Vinyl's turntables. It was almost instantly replaced by a full one, brought by a gushing fan. Vinyl looked down her muzzle coolly at the besotted brown earth pony, letting just the faintest trace of a smirk cross her face. He blushed hotly, visible clearly even through the glare, and disappeared back into the crowd. Vinyl allowed herself a grin. She definitely still had it.
Vinyl's horn glowed, levitating the fresh drink to her mouth as she absently tweaked the levels on her panel. She took a sip and grinned. Somepony had been doing his homework; Salty Dogs were her favorite drink. Salt, grapefruit juice and gin combined into the most perfect cocktail ever devised by ponykind.
Records spun and ponies danced, and Vinyl took a moment to enjoy it all. Her drink went down quickly. Vinyl happily licked stray salt crystals from her lips as she removed one exhausted record from her turntable and replaced it with a fresh one. The music continued, seamlessly transitioning from one pounding song to another. Vinyl bobbed her head, watching as the crowd swayed in front of her. She idly noted that the house lights seemed to be dimming. That was odd. Equally odd was the fact that the bar was now swaying along with the crowd, which it did not usually do.
Vinyl felt her feet go out from under her. Her treacherous turntable struck her in the face. There was a thud, the sound of a record scratching, and then the lights went out completely.
Blinking, Vinyl winced as light and harsh smoke attacked her eyes. It was bright, much brighter than the inside of the club, and her glasses were missing. Vinyl raised a foreleg to let her eyes adjust. The sounds of the club were gone, as well, replaced with a chorus of distant, metallic clanging noises and nearby gurgling, as of viscous liquid being pumped.
Once Vinyl's eyes adjusted to the light, she lowered her leg and staggered woozily to her feet. The club was gone. Ponyville was gone. She stood on a wide open sheet of gray concrete, cracked and pitted with age. The ground, such as it was, was littered with battered and broken pieces of machinery, rusted devices of unknown provenance and function. Many of them were torn open, spilling their clockwork insides across the ground in a macabre display. Others lay, seemingly intact but covered in years of rust and corrosion. The ground was pierced here and there by heavy bronze pipes, the source of the gurgling sounds.
Vinyl looked around for any signs of other ponies. All that Vinyl could see were ancient, ugly metal structures, built for function more than appearance and just as dead as the machine waste. Rust and corrosion caked these, too, and many of them were missing doors or had partially or completely caved in. She couldn't see anypony around, and given the state of things, Vinyl began to suspect that wherever she was hadn't seen anypony else in a long time.
Rubbing her eyes absently, Vinyl picked a direction. She began walking toward what appeared to be the largest group of buildings nearby, her hooves clacking uncomfortably on the uneven concrete. She picked her way gingerly, not wanting to tear her frog on a piece of rusty metal or give herself a stone bruise here, presumably far from medical attention.
A strange sound emerged from the hulk of what might have been a vehicle, something that sounded like a cat's hiss run through a vocoder, and Vinyl stopped in trepidation. She tentatively approached the hulk, craning her neck to look through a gaping rent in the thing's shell. At first, all she saw was more of the same confusing clockwork that littered the ground, as well as some rotting hoses. Suddenly, there was a blur of movement in the shadowed hole, and Vinyl stumbled back.
From the rent, something that could be loosely described as a cat emerged. Parts of the creature, if you could call it that, were identical to a cat, a scraggly-looking Stalliongrad Blue with a filthy coat. The rest of the 'cat', however, seemed to be machine. The right side of its head was brassy metal with a small, filthy lens set in in place of an eye and what appeared to be a small condenser microphone sticking up where the ear should be. Three legs were also mechanical, little hydraulic struts acting in place of muscle. The center of the cat's torso, too, was made of several interlocking, articulated metal rings that scraped together faintly as the thing moved.
The cat hissed again in its strange, electronic tone and Vinyl took another step back. It sat down on a rusty shard jutting out from the hulk, apparently satisfied, and began rhythmically thumping its its only natural leg behind it, against the side of the vehicle. The thumping was in perfect synchronization with the distant clanging sounds. All else aside, Vinyl had to admit that the cat could keep a good beat.
Opening its mouth, the cat began to call. Rather than a meow or whine, the sound that came from it was purely mechanical, a modulated bass thrum in time with the thumping of its leg. Other 'voices' began to call back in an electronic chorus that Vinyl would not have minded having on an LP.
After a moment of this strange serenade, Vinyl resumed walking. She watched the cat warily and it watched her but made no move to follow or stop her. As she walked, her pace began to match the rhythm the creatures were setting.
After many minutes, Vinyl approached her goal. The cluster of buildings she approached seemed no more intact than those she'd left behind. A large, ruined Quonset hut with a gaping, rusty hole in the side was the largest. Smaller outbuildings surrounded it, placed seemingly at random.
Vinyl paced around, investigating the smaller buildings. They were all small sheds or garages, the largest barely the size of Sugarcube Corner's front area. Doors were ripped off, roofs destroyed. They were almost all empty or littered with more of the same mechanical trash. One had one of the mysterious pipes leading into it and disgorging a viscous black liquid into a drain in the floor. Vinyl gagged at the stench of the black liquid and moved on quickly.
After inspecting what seemed like dozens of buildings, Vinyl encountered one that appeared intact. The outside was corroded, but there didn't appear to be any holes in the structure, and its doors were not only still on but secured with a padlock. She began searching around for something to remove the padlock with.
Something was nagging at the back of her mind as she searched. Something had changed. She stopped, looking around at the dead landscape. It was just as still and quiescent as it had been since Vinyl arrived. Vinyl realized then that it was also nearly silent. The strange singing had stopped, as had the distant clanging that set the beat for it. She put it out of her mind and resumed looking.
A droplet from the sky landed on the ground before Vinyl, then a second and a third. Rain, Vinyl noted idly. She saw that, with a slight sizzling sound and metallic tang in the air, new pockmarks appeared in the ground where the raindrops had fallen.
In panic, Vinyl ran back to the hut. Vinyl was no doctor, but if the rain was scoring holes in concrete she was reasonably sure it was not healthy for ponies. She ran up to the door and spun, kicking at the lock.
The ancient lock shattered under Vinyl's hooves, and she turned quickly. She grinned triumphantly as her horn glowed, swinging the doors open. With no time time to wonder whether the shed was safe or not she dove inside, away from the deadly downpour.
Light stabbed at Vinyl's eyes suddenly as the doors slammed shut behind her, and she squeezed them shut. The air seemed to be free of the acrid smoke that had been outside. Confusingly, it smelled clean, fresh and vegetal, not at all what Vinyl had expected inside an ancient shed. She gradually began to notice other oddities. The ground was soft and mossy under her feet. Instead of the sucking sounds of the strange pipes, Vinyl began to hear distant music.
She blinked, gradually letting her eyes adjust to the light. Rather than inside a shed, she found herself standing at the edge of White Tail Wood. The distant music seemed to be coming from the direction of Ponyville, which Vinyl knew was just down the nearby trail and over a small hillock. She turned, confused, but the doors she had come through were nowhere to be found among the majestic oak and ash trees around her.
Vinyl shook her head and began walking uncertainly back toward Ponyville. Had she been dreaming? Whatever had happened, she was here now, albeit still missing her glasses.
As she approach Ponyville, the sound of the music got louder, and Vinyl furrowed her brow. Four-on-the-floor beat, funk bass... Disco? She grimaced as she continued walking, the music getting louder. Even at this distance, the music was as loud as Vinyl would have expected it to be right outside the club, and was accompanied by what sounded like a rough drum line that was even louder. Was someone trying to both annoy and deafen Ponyville?
Coming over the hillock, Vinyl stopped as Ponyville came into view. There were ponies dancing. Not just ponies, a lot of ponies. From what Vinyl could see, the entire population of Ponyville could have been out in town square, dancing in time with the out-of-style music.
Walking down from the trail, as she got closer she could see that the ponies were all drenched in sweat and exhausted. Some looked like they were well past ready to pass out, but were still furiously dancing, hooves thundering on the flagstone. Some she recognized from the club. There was Rainbow Dash, her vibrant mane soaked in sweat and stained with dust, moaning in agony as she danced a cruel mockery of the Hustle. Over there, Cheerilee, tears streaming down her face as she did a series of painful-looking pivot turns on one foot. Junebug had apparently lapsed unconscious, but her hooves still moved without her, pounding viciously on hard stone.
Vinyl's mind spun. Before she could even finish processing what she was seeing, however, a loud peal of laughter cut through the music. The hair on her neck stood up. Vinyl had only heard that laugh up close once before, and that had been enough. Like so many other ponies in Equestria, it still occasionally haunted her nightmares. She turned, slowly, and looked up toward the source.
Hanging in the sky was Discord.
The blasphemous obscenity laughed outrageously at the spectacle before him. He was dressed head-to-tail in a yellow leisure suit. A huge matching leather top hat sat on his head, perched lopsidedly over his antler. His eyes were covered by a pair of rhinestone-studded pink sunglasses. Somehow, the absurdity of the apparition just made him all the more terrifying to Vinyl.
Discord looked down from his vantage, leering directly at Vinyl Scratch with a vicious grin. He reached his lion paw out and a giant turntable appeared before him in the air. Lightning lanced from Discord's paw, playing over the record, and with a resounding scratch the music changed to a faster tempo. Screams and cries erupted from the crowd. Vinyl looked away from Discord and saw ponies being jerked around as though they were puppets on unseen strings, their tortured dances changing to match the new music.
Vinyl's heart pounded in her chest, but she remained unaffected by Discord's spell, her hooves still obeying her as they always had. She looked around in panic, trying to decide where to go and what to do, when she felt an irresistible tug at her horn. She was fairly dragged by her head and found herself face to face with Twilight Sparkle.
Twilight looked terrible. Like everypony else, she was drenched in sweat. She whimpered piteously with every uncontrollable step, and Vinyl noted that her hooves had already developed cracks. She groaned and jerked her head in the direction of the library, then turned and began dancing toward the tree as quickly as her uncooperative hooves would allow. Vinyl set after her.
A roar erupted from the air behind them and the music changed again. Twilight jerked, her hooves going out from underneath her before she was once again dragged upright to dance to the new rhythm. She continued moving as quickly as she could, incoherent gasps coming from her mouth instead of words.
The duo reached the library. Twilight's horn glowed and sputtered, and the door was flung open. An incoherent scream came from behind the two unicorns. Vinyl looked over her shoulder and saw Discord descending toward the two like some gaudy avenging spirit. Twilight threw herself through the door and Vinyl dashed through behind her.
The ground spun underneath Vinyl's hooves and she slipped and fell on her side, heavily. Once again, the door was gone, as was Twilight. The ground was slick and black, covered in thin grooves, and was spinning rapidly.
Rising to her feet as quickly as the unsteady footing would allow, Vinyl took in her surroundings. She was standing on a round, spinning plateau with nothing around it but empty blue sky. Vinyl's mane fluttered in the breeze as the ground spun. She looked down and tapped the ground with her hoof, experimentally. It had the familiar feel of LPs made of her namesake.
A loud thump and the enormous record jumped, nearly sending Vinyl tumbling again. She turned rapidly, looking for the source of the thump.
Discord was there again, shed of his absurd costume. A giant record player arm seemed to jut from his back and his mismatched feet stood on the player head, the needle below him bouncing in the record's groove. He grinned malevolently down at Vinyl as the moving record brought her close to him.
Panicking, Vinyl began running against the record's motion, trying to keep as much distance between her and Discord as she could. As she ran, she felt the record speeding up. She ran faster and faster, the ground moving under her like a treadmill. Discord laughed that infuriating laugh as, even at a full gallop, Vinyl began to lose ground.
Vinyl grit her teeth angrily. Whatever was going to happen, she wouldn't go without a fight. She reached out with her magic and gave the record arm attached to Discord a good, hard shove.
The arm bounced. The needle skipped and there was a record scratch louder than thunder, followed by a sharp cracking sound and a scream from Discord. Vinyl watched as his antler simply sheared off as if the loud scratch itself had broken it. The antler bounced to the ground, sliding on the record surface.
Vinyl grinned and grabbed the broken antler with her telekinesis. She let herself be spun toward the enraged Discord, and dragged the antler roughly across the surface of the vinyl in one long scratch, from the outside to the inside.
The sound was unlike anything Vinyl had ever heard. It was thunder, earthquakes, winds and screaming all in one. It seemed to come from everywhere, the record, Discord, even Vinyl herself. Vinyl watched in fascinated horror as Discord began to simply fall apart. His horn, then his paw. Talon, then wings. Piece by piece, the ancient spirit of disharmony simply fell apart, screaming until even his head split in two, the two halves, frozen in mid-scream, bouncing from the record and falling into the void beyond.
Vinyl looked around. There was still no way to escape this, and it seemed as though the record was still picking up speed. Faster and faster it spun. Vinyl's inner ear spun unpleasantly. Her mane whipped and wind roared in her ears. Faster and faster. The wind stung her eyes, and she squeezed them shut.
"-k she's gonna be okay?"
"I-I don't know, Rainbow Dash, she hit her head pretty hard."
"Nurse Redheart's comin', y'all!"
Once again, Vinyl blinked. The world was a blur in front of her once again, but hearing the voices of ponies was already somewhat reassuring.
"Hey, I think she's coming around!" called an unfamiliar voice. In front of her, a green-and-purple splotch resolved itself into Spike, Twilight Sparkle's assistant.
"Vinyl! You okay?" Vinyl turned her head, looking toward Rainbow Dash.
"Don't move your head, please," a soft voice said. "We need to make sure you didn't hurt your neck."
Vinyl blinked again and reached a hoof up to rub her pounding forehead. "I'm fine, thanks," she said, shakily. "What happened?"
"You fell and hit your head on your console," Rainbow said, the pegasus looking down at Vinyl with concern.
Vinyl glanced around. She was lying on the ground outside the club, surrounded by ponies. Some of them were from the club, like Rainbow Dash, but the ones that were talking to her were Rainbow's friends and local celebrities. Even if she didn't recognize the voices, everypony knew about Twilight Sparkle and her friends. "What are you guys doing here?" she asked, trying her best to sound nonchalant. "They don't usually send heroes for head bumps."
"I got a letter from Princess Celestia a few minutes ago saying that we needed to come talk to you. It sounded like it was an emergency," Twilight Sparkle said, looking down at Vinyl. "so I went and got everypony and we came straight here."
"It does seem rather strange that the princess would send us for this," Rarity said.
Princess Celestia was concerned? Maybe there was more to her dream than Vinyl had thought. "Hey, uh," she said, "maybe I should tell you about this hallucination I had after I f-"
"Hey, guys, where'd this come from?" Rainbow Dash piped up.
Vinyl turned her head, against Fluttershy's orders, and looked toward Rainbow.
She was pointing at the broken antler.
"Planning to join us at Sugarcube Corner tonight, Vinyl?"
Twilight smiled and blinked guilelessly at Vinyl Scratch, and Vinyl smiled back. The two stood in the main room of the Books and Branches Library, Vinyl Scratch's home for the past few months. Sun shone through the windows and the open door, the hateful glare dampened by Vinyl's sunglasses. The sun was good, she reminded herself. Ponies liked it.
"You know it, Twi!" she said with exactly the right amount of enthusiasm. The bright, toothy smile that graced Vinyl's face was so typical of her; it should have been, she had practiced it carefully for months.
Twilight leapt up and clapped her front hooves together and let out a small squeaking noise. That meant she was happy, just as Vinyl had wanted. "Great! Spike and I are heading out for the rest of the day, so we'll see you at the party."
"Cool," Vinyl said, pushing her mane back from her glasses with a practiced sweep of one leg. "Can't wait! I'll be downstairs workin' on some new mixes for the rest of the day."
Spike perked up, as he always did when Vinyl mentioned her music. "Can I hear it when you're done?"
"Sure thing, squirt." Vinyl reached out with a hoof and ruffled Spike's dermal plates. The little dragon pumped a fist in the air before he turned to follow Twilight out of the library.
She watched Twilight and Spike leave, letting her expression go slack. She liked the little dragon, or at least she presumed she did. He seemed like someone she'd like. Abstractly, she remembered that at one point, she did. Thinking back to those times was hazy, though. Nothing really stuck in her mind.
She turned as the door to the library closed, and he walked to the stairs down to Twilight's laboratory. The space below the library was large and filled with Twilight's research apparatus. It was so large, in fact, that Twilight had given her a space next to the stairs to set up some of her DJ equipment. Vinyl's space in the dingy cellar was well away from Twilight's array of bizarre gear, which was fine with her. She needed room to work.
Vinyl's horn glowed and a heavy canvas tarp levitated up from her equipment. She stepped over to it, discarding the tarp haphazardly in the middle of the floor..
The first week after her fall in the club had been the worst. That, at least, had stuck in Vinyl's mind, an icy splinter of terror piercing her clouded memory. Every night she had woke up screaming and slick with sweat, haunted by nightmares she couldn't remember. At first, Twilight and Spike had leapt to her side, but after a bare few nights of this they were barely disturbed in their own sleep. The lack of memory was nearly as difficult to cope with as the feeling of horror, and between the two she barely slept that week, or the night after.
The ninth night was when everything changed. Once again, Vinyl went to sleep, hoping against hope for a peaceful night, and once again she awoke in the middle of the night, the icy grip of terror crushing her heart. She didn't scream, however. She was too entranced by the memory of what she had seen: A machine. A beautiful machine, one made of disused and broken machinery, new life and new utility brought to garbage. Whatever had left her soaked with sweat and nearly blind with terror, the machine wasn't it. The machine was perfect.
Every night since, she woke up the same way. Her sleep never really improved, but eventually the horror went away, replaced by a kind of numbness. She was numb and cold to everything now, but it hardly mattered. Every night, she saw more of the machine, understood the next piece that needed to be added. She was back on her feet; she started eating again, went back to work at the club. None of it mattered, however. It was all just to keep up appearances. The perfect machine, the machine that even now stood before her, was all that mattered.
The device that confronted Vinyl had started as a mixing console. Two turntables and a raft of sliders and dials, the console had once been Vinyl's lifeblood, and, in a sense, still was. The console was partially disassembled now and surrounded by a strange collection of devices, stacked haphazardly and bound together in a tangle of mismatched wires and lewdly exposed circuitry. There were several different synthesizers, their panels partly removed, stitched together with a mishmash of different sizes and lengths of cable into a strangely organic-looking mass, as if they were overgrown with vines. A keyboard had been fixed to the front of the console, wires spewing out of it in every direction, some vanishing into other pieces of hardware, some affixed to other lengths of wire with nuts and wads of electrical tape. Small monitor speakers, liberated from their cases and lashed to the bizarre contraption with baling wire, studded various surfaces. Thick cables snaked from the indescribable mass under the stairs.
Vinyl pushed the large contraption out into the lab, exposing the rest of her machine. As strange as the console was, the other half, previously concealed under the stairs, was truly bizarre, even macabre. The center of the extension was a large glass bell jar with a presently inert Jacob's Ladder inside it, which Vinyl had built from a few pieces of salvage based on what she remembered of the Super-Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000. The tube was affixed to a variety of seemingly broken pieces of hardware, more salvage turned into vital organs for Vinyl's machine. Half of a radio was affixed to a dented copper coil. An inscrutable piece of cloud factory hardware was tethered by a string and drizzled a thin stream of shimmering green into a length of pipe that vanished into the device. The body of the second half of the machine was formed of a wheelbarrow with strips of rusty metal bolted to it here and there as grounding strips for the mishmash electrical hardware it carried. Vinyl could no longer remember or recognize half of the other components, but she knew that it was right, and that her machine was ready. She had only been waiting for a chance to activate it.
Stepping back for a moment, Vinyl inspected her masterpiece. It was just as she'd seen it in her dreams, beautiful and incomprehensible. She had no idea what it did, or if it did anything. What did it matter?
Vinyl's horn glowed. There was only one component left, one she had carried with her for months.
Dear Twilight,
This news is alarming. If what your friend said of her experience is true, that could mean that Discord is somehow still able to affect Equestria from his prison. Though she says she beat him, and I no longer feel his influence in Ponyville, I would prefer if she would stay with you for the immediate future, so that if something does happen she'll be closer to help. I would also ask that you send me the antler you found. Please be careful with it, and don't handle it more than necessary before sending it to Canterlot.
Yours, Princess Celestia
The letter floated in front of Twilight as she read aloud and paced in the main room of the library. Vinyl lay on the floor near one of the bookshelves watching Twilight, her telekinesis pressing an ice pack to the lump on her head to keep it from growing any further. Her trials - hallucinations - earlier had seemed terrifying, hours lost in a freakish other world, but even now, a scant hour after Twilight and her friends had brought Vinyl to the library, the memories were fading as if they were a dream. Something, however, nagged at the back of her mind. She looked over at the table near the door, where the antler sat.
Don't let her take it away.
"Huh?" Vinyl said, leaning up and then wincing slightly as her head throbbed from the movement.
With a quick glance over at the white unicorn, Twilight stopped her pacing and trotted over. "Did you say something?"
"No," Vinyl said quickly. "Just wondering what the deal is. Celestia didn't say much in that letter."
Twilight shrugged a shoulder. "I don't think she knows what's going on any better than we do. I sure didn't know that Discord was going to be involved until after we found you."
She doesn't know anything. She just wants it for herself.
"What do you mean, she wants it for herself?" Vinyl asked. She pawed furtively at the hardwood floor of the library
A look of confusion crossed Twilight's face. "Who wants what?" she asked. "Vinyl, what are you talking about?"
"Can't you hear that?"
Twilight tilted her head, still wearing the look of confusion. "Hear what?"
No, she can't. Only you can.
"I..." Vinyl stammered. "It's..."
Nothing.
"Nothing," Vinyl said, her head sinking. "Sorry." She adjusted the icepack slightly, pressing it against her horn as well as the bump.
Heavy steps sounded on the wooden floor as Twilight slowly paced away from Vinyl. She watched over her shoulder, and Vinyl watched back, miserably. "I'm going to go make some willow bark tea," Twilight finally said, slowly. "For your headache. Is that okay?"
Yes.
"Yes." Vinyl said. "Um, please. Thanks."
Vinyl and Twilight watched each other for a moment more, and then Twilight turned and left the room, hooves clacking.
Take it.
Where was this voice coming from? Vinyl rubbed the side of her head painfully.
Take it.
She adjusted the ice pack and looked at the antler again. It sat there quietly, balanced on two points and the cleanly sheared base.
Take it. Hide it. She's lying. She wants it for herself.
Vinyl's horn glowed. She watched uncomprehendingly as the antler gently lifted from the table and floated toward her, closer and closer.
Hide it.
"How?"
I'll show you.
The antler dashed from the air. Vinyl was paralyzed as she watched the points fly toward her forehead and eyes.
The points of the antler drove into her, and Vinyl screamed.
The memory was distant and foggy. Vinyl Scratch felt a twinge of half-forgotten pain and saw images flash before her: Twilight Sparkle running back in alarm. Her staggering to her feet. Her mouth telling lies about how the antler had disappeared. More letters to and from Celestia. Royal guardponies crawling all over Ponyville. Weeks of suspicion, weeks of lies, and all the time the numbness descending over Vinyl's mind. The antler was with Vinyl the whole time, inside her, hidden in the back of her mind.
Her horn glowed and a flash of pain shot through her, real pain, not dulled by the fog that had shrouded her for months and seemed, from one second to the next, to have simply lifted. She felt as though something was forcing itself out and through her horn. A burst of sickly energy that hurt to look at forced its way from Vinyl, sparks spilling from her eyes and mouth. She felt a sticky, wet feeling around her ears.
The energy flash coalesced over Vinyl's strange contraption, gathering over the bell jar. Vinyl watched it solidify, her newly-clear head throbbing in agony. The energy ball quickly collapsed into a small, coruscating knot that twisted and turned in on itself.
With a silent flash of white light, the knot exploded, leaving behind the antler, smoothly affixed to the bell jar as if it had always been there.
Play.
"What the buck?" Vinyl asked the air, angrily. She looked about quickly, swinging her pounding head left and right. Blood spattered from her ears, leaving tiny red spots on the electronic abomination she had somehow created.
Play.
"Who's there?" Vinyl shouted.
Play. Play your song. Play.
Vinyl winced as her headache surged again. Play her song. She sat down petulantly on the cold dirt floor. She was quite certain that she had no desire to obey the voice.
Of course you do, Vinyl Scratch. You've listened to me this whole time. Now play.
"No!"
You want your freedom, don't you? You want to be rid of me, don't you?
"Who are you?" Vinyl's voice cracked and she leaned heavily on her forehooves, the ragged edges digging into the wooden floor. Her horn brushed the keyboard painfully.
Oh, come now, Vinyl, you know who I am.
Slowly, Vinyl stood and looked around at the dingy basement, at the strange equipment Twilight kept down there, at the piles of well-loved books stacked here and there. How long had she spent down here, hiding her twisted creation from Twilight? How long had she been lying to the world, pretending that everything was fine from behind a thought-dulling haze?
How long had she been in Discord's thrall?
Play, and it will all be over.
Slowly, Vinyl reached a hoof up toward the disemboweled keyboard. She wanted to ask what song, but in her heart, she knew. Memories of thundering pistons and shrieking cats, hollow mockeries of life, echoed loudly in her ears.
Though she was a DJ and not an instrumentalist, she played. The inert machine roared to life at the first keypress. The sounds came from somewhere deep inside the bizarre device, loud and dissonant, broken and artificial. Her hooves flew over the keys, pounding out a soft tattoo of their own as the device began to produce a pounding drum beat.
Her magic flared to life as she played. Knobs, dials and switches adjusted themselves. Echoes were introduced, strange reverb effects Vinyl would never have thought to add. Her eyes defocused as her hooves moved themselves. She felt the bottom drop out of her stomach as her horn flipped a switch and triggered a low, erratic bass thrum.
The gut-wrenching music shook the basement of the library. Vinyl found herself chanting in time with it, uttering strange, wordless vocalizations in a voice that wasn't hers. Sparks spat across the floor from the inexpertly-assembled knots of wires that jutted here and there from the machine, the popping sounds adding strangely to the already demented music.
Pain began to wash over Vinyl. Little pinpricks under her coat where sparks landed on her. Jabbing pains in the frogs of her forehooves where jagged chips from the formerly smooth, lacquered surface of the keys her hooves furiously hammered flew and struck painfully. The pounding in her head exacerbated by the rising cacophony. Through it all, she played.
As the music reached a sort of crescendo, Vinyl suddenly felt as though she were being ripped apart. She couldn't stop playing, and could only watch the source of her pain: Wires ripping themselves loose from the machine and burying themselves in her hide. She felt cuts all over and the sickening feeling of the wires moving under her skin. One of the long hoses coiled under the bell jar flew up and wrapped itself around her neck before the open end rammed into the base of her skull. Mercifully, after a moment of this torment she felt the pain ebb as she watched the laboratory around her fade into the distance, taking the pandemoniac din with it.
Vinyl hung by her neck, the wires and cables that buried themselves in her supporting her and keeping her from throttling. All around was dark. Not the darkness of night or of closed eyes, but what Vinyl imagined being blind must be like: Pure, impenetrable blackness. In the distance, she could hear horrifying echos of the music she had been playing, still roaring away, changing gradually in new and hideous variations but always recognizable.
Something clamped down on her forearm, a talon of some sort, the tip of one claw scraping across the callused chestnut on her inner leg.
"Hello, Vinyl Scratch," Discord's smooth, hateful voice said from the blackness, his hot breath on the side of her face. "Welcome back."
