When Inkie Pie entered that city, she knew nothing about playing the guitar.

Finding food and shelter was easy, but she found out very soon that she was too weak to continue her journey in less than a week. She needed rest, she needed energy, and she needed to think.

So the first thing she did when she woke up the next morning, once she felt a little better, was getting the black guitar, hanging it around her neck and shoulder, and start strumming its strings.

They felt as cold and sharp as she remembered. Its neck was a little too long for her, and her left hoof was too weak to press the strings without cutting herself. The body was a little too big, and she had to twist her body in a way that made her back ache. Playing it was extremely uncomfortable.

Inkie didn’t really mind.

Inkie knew nothing about music, but the old pony at the store had taught her how to tune her guitar. Every string had a different sound. The more they were to the left side of the guitar, the thicker they were, and the lower its sound would be. If she pressed the strings against the neck, the sound would be higher. The first and last strings gave the same note.

The guitar was a completely different world by itself. Inkie liked how it looked like it was alive, yet it was mechanical, soulless. It didn’t matter what you were feeling or thinking when you played with its strings, the guitar would create the same sound. The guitar wouldn’t sound better because she was hurting herself more, neither would it sound worse.

It wouldn’t show anypony what was inside Inkie’s mind, no matter what she did with it. If she wanted to express herself with it, she had to do it on her own. The guitar gave her a sense of intimacy, and at the same time it exposed herself. It was something that caused pain and joy.

She didn’t try to play any song at first. She only knew the ones Pinkie had sung when they were younger, and those were not songs she could create with her guitar. The instrument had a soft tone, a metallic voice that sometimes seemed to speak and sometimes seemed to cry. It was harsh, and it wasn’t as much a melody as a series or chords.

Eventually, she chose the three chords she liked better and played them. Using those three chords as a base, she realized she could sing whatever she wanted, including Pinkie’s songs. So she tried to hum them, and they fit, but they had a different feeling.

She tried to change the key she was singing in, and they had yet another different feeling in them.

Her voice wasn’t the same as the guitar. It would sound weaker or stronger depending on how she was feeling. But even at its weakest, the guitar would be there to support it, never leaving her voice alone.

At some point, she finished all of Pinkie’s songs, and then she tried to sing something else. The words came easily to her tongue.

By the time she felt strong enough to go on her way, her hooves were weaker than ever. The strumming had practically destroyed them, and she never walked without bleeding a little ever again, but never enough to pass out.

She didn’t bother. She had learned a little, just enough to create the skeleton of a melody, and she had learned to sing whatever came to mind, rhymed it or not. She was armed with three chords and the truth, and nothing else.

When Inkie Pie left that city, she knew everything she had to know about playing the guitar.