There was little noise in the cab, save perhaps for the clicking of hooves on floorboard as the other passengers moved around her. However, it was filled with a golden dimming evening light that kept distracting the now-alone passenger, the musician, as she scanned her sheet music over for the last few times.

   This was it. Finally, after endless hours of practice, practice, practice, she'd finished. It was the longest piece she'd ever memorized; this, besides the fact that she could play it to the note, made her proud of herself.

   Iambica Heartstring's Twentieth Sonata, D major. Octavia loved the Heartstrings' pieces (all four generations of them); she remembered in school that she tended to lean towards music instead of her other studies just because of their composures. The was they were written fascinated her; the way they were ableto blend a quick-paced section smoothly and beautifully into a slower-paced, undertonal section, the fantastic crescendos and the smooth, pulse-slowing decrescendos, the tied notes fitting into one another like the pieces of a perfectly-made jigsaw puzzle...

   She sighed contentedly, before shaking her head and getting back on track. The most difficult part, as she'd noticed before, would be the bridge. It was made entirely out of sixteenth and thirty-second notes. Insane for most celloists: not in their wildest dreams would they play that. Not even attempt.

   But, Octavia sighed, I made a commitment. She brushed her mane back into its neatly styled position and adjusted her bow tie, all the while steeling herself. Of course she could do it. Nonstop practice came with benefits, of course.

   She glanced down at her right hoof, illuminated by the sunlight pouring with its last strength through the train window. She smiled when the string-player's groove caught her eye. Tonight, I suppose you'll be worn even deeper, she chuckled to herself.

   The train rolled to a stop right in the center of Canterlot with a quiet screech. Octavia was last out, but she compensated for it by breaking into a quick trot the moment she stepped off the deck.

   Her hoofsteps echoed around the almost-empty main street, reverberating against what seemed to be an urban static. Octavia tilted her head, moving her back slighty and taking some of the weight of the cello off her forelegs: yes, there was definitely a background noise, but she couldn't tell what it was. Ooh, concentration, Octavia! her mind shouted at her, and she continued her trot around the branching web of roads making up the great Capitol city.

   She arrived with mere minutes to spare. She waved off the greetings from the staff and other musicians and ran through the Sonata again in her mind. Such a lovely piece; she couldn't ruin a sonata of that quality with shoddy recitation. She just had to calm down and remember. Remember correctly. Remember correctly with right timing.

   She was taken by total surprise when she was up. It was a thirty-eight minute piece; she needed all the concentration she could gather, and the lineup didn't allow her to gather anything but a chunk.

   At least she wasn't the center of attention. The banquet before her was bustling with prim-and-proper pony aristocrats, a few of which seemed familiar. Another reason to play well.

   She cleared her throat, stood up her cello, drew her freshly-rosined bow from her case, and closed her eyes.

   As her bow touched the instrument in front of her, its being as a bow ceased abruptly. The bow became part of Octavia. As her left hoof moved deftly over the neck, the bow danced and bobbed and weaved in front of her, each time throwing an ecstasy of sound into the open hall. Note offer note, line after line, her cello and the two supporting violins threw tittering, fluttering, and flowing notes around the room.

   Octavia could feel the world leave. She closed her eyes and smiled, the notes coming to her as a second nature. She was drawn momentarily back into the physical world when she noticed subconsciously that everypony in the banquet was silent. She almost wanted to laugh, but kept her mind on her music.

   Finally, after twenty minutes of Heartstring's beautiful Twentieth Sonata, it was time for bridge. Two measures and a beat of rest was all she was allowed, and, as the violins' volume fell as smoothly as the setting sun's light had left the world that evening, Octavia began to play.

   Her hooves raced against one another. A tie, a key change, rapid-fire. Octavia exhaled during a two-beat break and endured. Just ten more measures. Just nine more measures.

   G, E, D, B, *SNAP*.

   The terrible crack was heard throughout the entire hall. A few ponies gasped. Octavia's eyes snapped open, and she shimmered, barely clinging on to the hope that everything she knew was wrong.

   Its neck was snapped. Snapped in two. The strings dangled loosely like tendons from the now-useless piece of maple.

   She could hear a short sob escape her throat, and put the neck slowly back into the cello case. Tears began to flow freely down her cheeks as she packed away the body as well. Her lavender eyes could be seen glinting with tears as she pulled the cello case onto her back and walked professionally, solemnly, out of the mansion.

   She never would forget the last words her mother said to her. She was lying broken on the clean white hospital bed, with her eight-year-old filly standing on the rail. She gasped, and whispered two things into her ear.

   I wanted to hear you play your grandmother's cello. Just once.

   I love you, Octavia.

   And with that, she was unceremoniously gone. No nurses were nearby, no other family members. Octavia was then alone in the world. Eventually, she began to prefer it that way: her and her music, alone. No more tears. No more heartbreak.

   She left the orphanage after graduating music school, moved to the outskirts of Ponyville when she finally got a steady job, and she'd been there since, playing her cello. The cello that had always meant so much to her.

   And it was gone. Forever.

   She'd been running blindly through the dark streets of Canterlot for what must have been hours. She didn't cry as she ran. She didn't feel the need to. She just wanted to get away from that disaster, that terrifying untruth. That impossibility.

   She slowed, suddenly out of energy and out of breath, on a broken street corner. She looked vaguely around at the shabby and peeling buildings, with the flickering street lamps and the rundown concrete sidewalks, and one phrase passed through her mind:

   The wrong side of the track.

   Now, Octavia began to feel something deep in her chest. She walked miserably to the corner of an oddly-coloured, apparently abandoned townhouse, sat down, raised her hooves to her eyes, and began to sob quiety into the still, empty night. She was lost. Her first love was ruined, possibly beyond repair. Things had gone past bad; they'd fallen to depths so low Octavia didn't see how she should climb back up.

   Her sobs, rebounding through the empty streets, brought something new back to her ear: she could again sense that strange urban static. That sound that was filling the city quietly. It softened her depression for a moment, made her forget about her problems, made her curious.

   She stood shakily and walked out onto the open street, feeling the full weight of her instrument and groaning. The sound became clearer, more realistic. She could feel a vibration in the air, and was drawn on unsteady hooves to its source: a small brick passage leading to a basement.

   Above the passage entrance was a small, colourful wooden sign, neatly decorated with the words "Smooth Club" in bright neon green. She looked down at her hooves, at the words "Bass" and "Liquid". She gasped, and looked quickly to her right, She adjusted the case on her back. Did she really want to be entering such an off-looking establishment?

   Suddenly, a pitch change in the staticy sound made her shudder. A tune erupted form the basement, full of low, scratchy sounds that tickled her spine. If anything, maybe she could ask a few questions to the club's patrons. What kind of music, besides her beautiful classical, of course, could affect her like that?

   She took a deep breath and stepped down into the dimly glowing passage and through the pink and green curtains.

   No. No, this isn't my kind of place at all, Octavia thought as she stepped timidly into the main room and glanced around at the various, odd-looking ponies sitting at the circular tables scattered patternlessly around the room.

   There was a silhouette of something Octavia couldn't recognize at the front of the room, with a pony - maybe two - moving back and forth, back and forth behind it. She couldn't help but feel something strange towards the music pounding from it. Her head felt light for a moment, and the dim neon lights turned to a swatch of smeared colour before she inhaled, cleared her head, and took a seat at an empty table nearby with visible intimation.

   She threw a glance once more around the room, and gasped as another pony slid into view from the shadowed corner. Turned out that she wasn't alone at the table: another mare, shockingly white against the blackened background, shifted into view.

   She and the other pony stared at one another for a second or two, maybe a minute; at least she assumed that the other mare was staring back. She couldn't see through the pair of oversized sunglasses covering most of her face. The blue in her mane seemed dulled by the surroundings, but Octavia could still sense its bold colour.

   Eventually, she found the mind to speak. "H-How long have you been there?" she asked, practically wincing as she felt her nervousness hamper her eloquence.

   The other pony chuckled under her breath. "Just long enough." She spoke softly, in a disparity to her appearance. There was a rougher edge to her voice, suggesting a retirement from a life on the streets. It wasn't close to as refined as Octavia's.

   "You're new here, right? Never seen you around before," she continued, prodding for information. "I guess you're a musician? Band-geek style?" she added jokingly.

   "Yes, of course. I - um - I play the cello," she replied, choosing not to discuss the recent chain of events. Her mood dropped slightly, but was perked up again as the music coming from the stage a the front flowed back to her ears. She sighed happily.

   "Cello. Right. Well, you know, anypony's welcome here."

   "Where is 'here', speaking of?" Octavia asked after a brief pause.

   "The Smooth Club. Didn't you see the sign?"

   "Yes, I know, but - what is the 'Smooth Club'?"

   "Well, we play around with a lot here. There's liquid garage, UK garage, dubs, drum-n'-bass every other Thursday, and a huge acid-and-dubstep rave-y thing every Sunday night," she responded, her voice picking up to a cheerfulness now.

   Octavia looked at her, up at the stage, and back to her. "I'm not sure what any of that means."

   The white mare turned back to her, cocking her head and grinning almost condescendingly. "You serious?"

   Octavia turned her head, a light, embarrassed blush appearing on her cheeks. "I - I heard sound coming from the basement, and I just..."

   The other mare's smile turned genuine quickly. "Did you like it?"

   Octavia shot a glance at her cello case. "Well, I've only ever liked classical... you know, Hayden, Heartstrings, Ponnell... anything?"

   "Nope."

   Octavia sighed. Looks like she was right. She was better off sticking with her own genre. She stood, picked up her cello case, and began strapping it to her back before a low voice echoed through the room. "That was Koda7, everypony. Second-to last for tonight is three hours' worth of Vinyl Scratch. Vinyl?"

   The white mare, who was sitting across from her mere moments ago, was gone when she turned back around. Movement caught her eye near the front, and, as she watched, a flash of sky-blue mane crossed the light befor the silhouette began to change.

   Box after rectangle after wire began to disappear, and, as an olive-coloured stallion dragged a cart full of equipment off of the stage, a tan stallion dragged a shadowed cart onto the stage. It took the stallion and the white mare (Vinyl Scratch, right?) a few minutes to put together the new boxes and rectangles and wires before the tan stallion trotted off the stage following a wave from the mare.

   Suddenly, a deep, synthetic scratch swept through the room, rippling through Octavia's body until it began to vibrate her bones themselves. Vinyl Scratch's hooves became a darkened blur as layer after layer of sound was added to the growing musical track, each different than the last. Beats, unlike anything Octavia had heard before. A reverse-sweeping tone that tickled her nerves. And finally, a blipping, popping, stabbing electronic melody set in a minor key that gave her a chill.

   Octavia closed her eyes and let the cello case fall to the floor behind her. She sat slowly in the padded chair again, leaned back, and absorbed this new ambrosia of music into her core. There was a certain beautiful tone to the liquid and reverberating drums and notes that wavered and wobbled through the air. Of course, it couldn't beat classical... right?

   Hours passed. The melodies changed and varied, stopping for short breaks before returning to the staticy sound, leading in, sometimes, violently throwing the track for an electronic loop. Octavia wished it wouldn't end.

  But it did. And almost the second after it did, Octavia's eyelids became terribly heavy. The symphonies she'd played blended into this new musical discovery in her head, creating a sound in her mind unlike any other. She'd experimented with other sounds before, from rock to rap to metal to reggae to soundscape to - to country, for Celestia's sake. And nothing would ever come close to this.

   She was brought back into reality by a tap on her shoulder.'"Morning, sleepyhead," the white mare laughed. "Go home."

   Octavia shuddered, and her eyes snapped open. She turned her chair around and coughed, standing to greet her. "Hello again... um... Vinyl Scratch?"

   "Friends call me Vinyl, best friends call me Scratch," she replied, laughing again. Octavia could see even in the dim light that she was absolutely exhausted; she was flushed red and sweating, and half her mane was matted to her head.

   "Oh. Um, anyway, I just wanted to tell you that... that was beautiful. It truly was. Fantastic work. I'm still not sure what it is, but I loved every second of it." Octavia smiled as affably as she could for how tired she was.

   Vinyl Scratch beamed proudly. "Why thank you, miss..."

   "Octavia."

   "Right. Well, Octavia, I'll have to tell you all about the wide world of electronica. Here," she said, snatching a newspaper and levitating a pencil out of her ear. "Here's my address. Send me a letter if you get the chance."

   "Thanks. I will." Octavia accepted the paper and stuck it quickly in her cello case before Vinyl interrupted her.

   "You're gonna have to show me how you play that cello, too," she said, tapping what was left of the newspaper.

   "Oh, of course. I live in Ponyville, though, so it might be a little travel..."

   "Woah!" Vinyl nearly shouted. "No way! I live, like, just on the edge of Ponyville! Tonight was my only scheduled Smooth Club date in two weeks!"

   Octavia smiled. "What a coincidence, then. Anyways, I'll mail you when I have time. You have to show me how to use those machines."

   "Of course, madam," Vinyl joked, bowing lowly and hammily.

   Octavia was too tired to be offended. Instead, she just giggled like a schoolfilly, threw her case over her shoulder and walked briskly out into the chill night air in the dark city streets. Her head was calm enough that she was able to leave the city with relative ease.

   Her dreams that night were filled with the sounds of music.