In retrospect, that hadn’t been the longest lesson she had ever had with Dinky Hooves. Nor had it been the hardest, the most chaotic, or the most destructive. It said quite a bit about her mother’s atrocious luck that it was still on track to be the most exhausting one out of her entire ten-foal schedule for the day.

The mail-carrier pegasus did look a bit contrite as she left with her daughter.
“Sorry again about the sheet stand! And, um, the other chair.”

Some teachers would have asked Octavia why she dealt with the stress of such a troublesome client. They had clearly never met this particular mare. Derpy Hooves was a phenomenal mother, a diligent worker, and quite smart in her way. It was no real wonder she had quickly become one of Octavia’s closest friends outside of Canterlot.
“It’s no problem at all, Derpy- It is all replaceable. We’re still on for Friday, right?”

Her friend smiled.
“Yup! Dinner at six, drinks at ten, same as always?”

“Vinyl and I will meet you there.”

They waved goodbye, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Even being one of her closest friends, Derpy Hooves could not help but be a bit of a stressor. But Octavia did not mind, and never had. If all else failed, it prepared her for the trials ahead of her, such as...

“Daddy! I thought you were going to be making sure I had a different teacher!”

Filthy Rich shook his head and nudged his daughter into the room.
“Now listen here Diamond, honey. As much as you rant and rave, we come out to Canterlot every other week because Octavia is the best theory teacher out there, hooves down. And if you don’t like her, that’s fine- Just put all that emotion in your music, ya hear?”

Diamond Tiara, as always, rolled her eyes and walked into the classroom without even looking at her. Filthy just grimaced and flipped her a small pouch of bits- Their weekly commission for dealing with the inevitable tantrums and threats of ludicrous overblown legal action.
“See you in two hours?”

“Assuming that, by Celestia’s grace, I am alive by then.”

Once, she had made the joke with a slight change- Questioning if Diamond would be alive by then. And while the filly’s father had laughed, he had also proceeded to withhold her extra payment and make very sure he had misheard her. She backpedalled quite quickly, at which point he slipped her even more bonus pay with a sly wink. The day likely would never come when she understood that family.

In the music room, the self-centered young filly was already tapping one hoof on the floor.
“Are you going to teach me my lesson now, or am I going to have to tell Daddy that you wasted our time and money again?”

She sighed loudly, although not enough for the girl to hear.
“...One moment please.”

--------

Vinyl couldn’t wait another moment. Her hooves were already gliding across consoles, looking through the settings with a well-trained eye. It took no concentration to keep a quill and clipboard floating behind her, writing fast and with as little mental input as she could afford. Skills she hadn’t practiced since the old days (even if they were just a few years ago) were coming back up to the surface, and she was very glad she’d worn her -real- shades today. During a lot of shows, she had no need for distance vision, and the rowdy crowd risked her losing a pair, so she wore plain old sunglasses, in her iconic tint. Right now, she had an actual prescription pair, not that anypony could tell through the glaze and the tint.

A few feet away, Nickel was obviously struggling not to laugh, or maybe just not to comment. She didn’t really care though- let her think and say whatever she wanted. It didn’t hurt anything, and Vinyl had a lot of planning to get done. After all, she didn’t even know what kind of spell base... Wait.

“Do you two even have a spell in mind? Like, I just realized, you came to me for help with the sonic side of it all... But do you have a base?”

Nickel smiled and reached into a drawer with her power. What she withdrew was... a pretty basic tuning fork.
“You might want to prepare yourself for this one- Maybe brace a bit. I’m not very good with it yet, but it can still be pretty intense.”

Vinyl did her best to look confused, although with her glasses it was more of a flat stare of “Oh really?” than confusion. Just one of the many benefits... She nodded her assent to the girl. The other mare furrowed her brow in concentration, and then slammed the tuning fork against a table, producing...

No sound at all. The tuning fork was wrapped tight in Nickel’s magic, which quickly stripped away from the metal and bent, forming a fluid figure-eight in the air. Her face was scrunched in concentration as she moved the dense packet of magic towards Vinyl.
“Go ahead, touch it. I can only maintain it for a minute or so with no tools.”

Vinyl could just feel how her face was full of trepidation as she put one hoof close to the strange little spell. She still didn’t hear a thing, even as she touched the ma-

-TIIIING-

The sound didn’t ring through her ears. Instead, the moment she brushed against it, she felt a tiny burst of static as the trapped tone went through her, rolled up her hooves and into her head, ruffling her fur and coruscating up her nerves as it went. The sensation was halfway between being touched or pressured by a hoof, and the crackle-tingle of static electricity. She sighed and relaxed, letting the pure F-sharp (even feeling it this way was enough to recognize the note) resonate until Nickel, panting and sweating, let the spell fade.

She looked over at the shop-owner with admiration.
“That... How? I just wanna know how.”

“Well hay, that’s part of why we got you on board- So you can learn it. Think you’re ready?”

Vinyl couldn’t help but laugh as she plopped down on the cold floor, smiling at her underclassman and temporary teacher.
“Drop some knowledge, Nickel- I’m all ears.”

--------

After the twice-monthly fiasco that was “teaching” Diamond Tiara the dead basics of musical theory, again, starting from co-operation with your fellow musicians and... frankly ending there as well, Octavia was tired. Her remaining lessons before the mid-day break (she always called it lunch despite it being much closer to sunset and a rational pony’s dinner) were a blur, but she suffered through them gladly- Some good, some bad, all better than dealing with Diamond Tiara for even one extra minute.

And so Octavia came home for her dinner break, a pleasant stretch of an hour or two where she could greet Vinyl and... Right. She wasn’t home. That was a change of pace, and a slightly too-quiet and uncomfortable one to be sure. She was used to having her marefriend close to hoof after a stressful day, even though they would likely meet again that night. Rather than stress further over it, she simply threw together a simple salad, broke out the sourest lemonade in the house (their mutual love of the bitter and tart made every summer harvest into a feasting season) and sat down to think.

Vinyl. Voluntarily taking additional work. During daylight hours, no less. She had ruled out an imposter, some kind of shapeshifting creature, an evil twin sister, a good twin sister, and a vengeful mime. So the only option left was that Vinyl actually was doing this, and the only question left was... Why?

If she were a more paranoid mare, Octavia would have worried that it was for an illicit or illegal reason. Supporting some kind of habit, or doing something shameful to work off a past debt. She removed those thoughts from her head with surgical precision and minimal thought- If that were the case, Vinyl would have simply come to her, and they would have found a way through. No, it had to be something... Simpler. Some relatively immediate need for a large amount of money which she was keeping suspiciously secret from her marefriend.

Her marefriend who she lived with. And had been living with for several years. The only real need such a long-term couple would have for a quick infusion of cash was... A brief image of Vinyl Scratch in a tuxedo suit, one hoof around her neck, left her a blushing wreck in her chair. No, it couldn’t possibly be... Could it, though? Could it really? But we said... What they had said was “When we’re able to handle it”, now that she thought about it. And certainly, an additional income would make it easier to handle. And now that the idea was loose in her head, it would not get out with even the most vigorous effort. She pushed away from her salad, suddenly far less hungry, and slammed down the entire glass of her drink in one shot. The stinging in her throat did little to calm her nerves.

“Oh... Oh buck.”

--------

Vinyl had expected a lot of things when she came to this shop. Ridiculous toys, sure. Risque photos and strange film, absolutely. But what she had not expected was to have every single thing she knew about magical theory flipped inside out.

“No. Just... Nope. That doesn’t work.”

Nickel, for her part, was just smiling and running her hoof over the spell diagram. It definitely looked simple... Deceptively simple. And that was part of the problem.

“Seriously Nick’, I mean... Look, this is way too basic for the amount of effort you just put into it. How does that even...”

Her host sighed.
“Look, you know my name name, right? Not the ‘stage’ one I started using when I moved here?”

“Um, yeah? But what does that have to do with it?”

“OK, keep that in mind and look at the spell again. Think about why you don’t think it will work.”

Vinyl looked over the diagram again, frowning. The matrix of the spell was simple, practically on par with foalhood telekinetics. The execution was equally simple, just a matter of dumping power into the right circuits (she had always visualized her magic as circuitry, even before she got her first electronics kit from her Uncle on a glorious birthday) and pushing forward. Stripping it off afterwards seemed tough, but doable. So the only step she was missing was... Oh.

“Ah. Gotcha. That is why you want to make toys, rather than teach the spell itself.”

The other mare giggled.
“Well, that and our rather large contingent of pegasus and earth pony customers.”

Now it all made sense. If the rest of the spell was glaringly, obscenely simple, then the bottleneck was power, the raw energy required to actually run the spell. And if it took so much power just to get it started, much less keep it going, no wonder nopony had ever made it viable before. But that was the trick, wasn’t it?

“So that’s why such a weird little spell came from ol’ Nicky Charge, eh?”

Nickel blushed.
“I... yeah. I was so used to taking vast quantities of power for making magical batteries that dumping that much into one spell didn’t really faze me. But it’s still not good enough, and that’s why we got you on board.”

No questions about that. Her engineering work had all been focused around efficiency and improving yield, and most of her class projects had taken a special emphasis on low-power devices. After all, Vinyl was a lazy mare underneath it all, even back in her tech-head days. But that’s what Blue Gates, her favorite teacher, had always said was her best quality: “If I want a hard job done well, I give it to a lazy pony. Because they’ll find the easy solution.”

With the trick firmly in her head, she looked over the spell again. It was now or never...
“Let’s get some work done here.”

--------

Work was done. Finally, blessedly, after a barrage of ridiculous students and kind ones, terrible musicians and virtuosos, Octavia could sit down and relax. Or try to relax, as the sound of distant celebratory bells kept ringing in the back of her head. She would never be accused of outright paranoia, but she certainly could latch onto an idea and refuse to let go. And with her marefriend buck-knows-where, doing work, actual extra work, the inevitable conclusion was starting to make headway to leaving her senseless. Worries assailed her, just barely hiding the gigantic supernova of joy over the fact that Vinyl might actually be saying that soon.

Her trip back to the house was going to be a nice and simple one, totally uninterrupted by any of this mad worrying about ludicrous things like... proposals. There. She had put a name to it, a face to it, and that meant she could confront the problem without shying away, like a big mare. She was worried because the thought had gotten stuck (embedded (entrenched (burrowed buck-deep))) in her head that Vinyl Scratch, the lazy non-committal party pony with a penchant for flirting, might actually propose to her. And now that Octavia was thinking about it, she could not even remotely STOP thinking about it, no matter how she tried. That made her distracted when she walked in the front door, which was never wise at their house...

As evidenced when she managed to impressively faceplant her marefriend’s waiting neck, suddenly (and pleasantly) stuck with a face full of white fur. Vinyl, looking down, just smirked. There were a lot of things Octavia didn’t like about having a marefriend who was so much taller than herself... This was one of the good things, thankfully.

“Hey babe! Happy to see me?”

She would have given a more coherent response, but for now she just nuzzled closer.
“Mmmh. Longest day. Tiara. Ditzy. Pain.”

A soft hoof traced little circles across the back of her neck, spiraling up into her mane and making her shiver a bit.
“Good pain tho, right? Educating the youth and all that?”

“Mmhmm. Don’t stop that, please.”

Vinyl laughed.
“Wasn’t planning on it. Now come inside- I wanted to... talk.”

Well, there went her peaceful serenity. Octavia cleared her throat and stood up tall, pulling away from her marefriend with a bit of effort. There were only a few times they ever ‘talked’, with the emphasis and the pause and everything. Financial worries, house issues, family stuff, and... Well, that was it. So unless today had been some kind of emergency situation after all, then this was it. Vinyl was going to be asking the question she had been dreading (anticipating) all day.

And Octavia still had no clue what her answer was going to be.