Trance. That was a good word for it.

She was a ‘Trance DJ’. That was a good way of saying it to anypony that asked.

Right now, Vinyl Scratch thot, I could kill everyone of these stupid motherfuckers.

It was true, mostly. The ponies danced to the beats she gave them, and the beats were, for the most part, calm and relaxing and resonated with a certain frequency to make your legs and the back of your neck tingle and all of a sudden you were caught, captured by this thing in your ears and in your body and beneath you and all around you at the same time—and that was a moment, and Vinyl Scratch could make it go on for as long as she wanted. She could fade, play samples, sing, dance, do anything—run into the audience and drag some random pony on stage with her and slap them in the face, record the sound, and distort its frequency, pitch, timbre, and every other element of its original composition to make it into anything she wanted. She could make Princess Celestia say “Suck my dick, you dumb shits!” And if she wanted she could make that sound by recording her voice and filtering it until she sounded like Princess Celestia sounded, and then adding more filters until it sounded like a Princess Celestia who might say “Suck my dick, you dumb shits!”, and then maybe everypony in the world would believe it was true.

It kept her up at night.

Out of raw mercy, Vinyl Scratch dropped the bass.

Ponies flooded into themselves and each other. Bob bob bob bob, bob bob bob bob. Four on the flour, it was called, because you had four beats, and you danced around on the floor (the dancefloor) with four hooves. Four on the floor. Four on the floor. Four on the floor.

Vinyl detested four on the flour.

She hated anything to do with the number four, in fact. She was her mother and father’s fourth child, and so she had hated herself all growing up not for being first or second or third or fourth, because she had lost the game of life and there was no going back.

But what was a game besides a series of second chances anyway?

A sandstorm, maybe, where every grain was another pony’s soul, and you could stop and try to catch them, or you could scream into the howling desert winds and never be heard, or you could point to a distant hill and reach the top and say “This is happiness, and I found and made it for myself, and no one can take it away from me.”

Vinyl Scratch felt buried under fifteen layers of bass drum. She hated sand, storms, and any part of them in combination. She hated a lot of things. The reasons were many and complicated.

And that was because Vinyl Scratch was, of her family, many and complicated. And a complication that other ponies detested. It was something of an issue—to be loved by the entire world, but hated the second your hoof put a pause on the record.

Vinyl Scratch put her hoof on the record.

But there were many records, and so what everypony heard instead of “UNCE UNCE UNCE BA WEEEEE~OOOOH!” was just “unce, unce, unce, unce”, and Vinyl had stripped everything down to its barest; just the beat of the drum. The heartbeat of everypony in the room in synchronization.

And Vinyl Scratch put her hoof on the record.

That was in the crate next to her. That she had never opened before.

Dance, dammit, the voice in her head said. Dance to the beautiful music.

And Vinyl Scratch did something she had never done.

She put on a piece of music she had built, herself.

From ‘Scratch’.

And it sounded like this.

It’s worth noting, of course, that Vinyl Scratch didn’t have a dick. That she knew of.

But what the lyric meant in pony language, perhaps, was, “I’ve never been more in heat than when I’m with you.”

And that made Vinyl Scratch think of Big Mac and Cheerilee, and the scandal about the Sex Ed class, that had turned into a town-wide discussion into a formal debate into everypony realizing there was nothing wrong w/ having sex, and in fact nothing wrong w/ having sex in front of somepony else, as long as that pony understood that sex was just something two or more ponies did to make each other feel good. And it didn’t have to be anything more than that, or an obligation, or a curse, or a binding, and ‘special somepony’, the town (with significant articulation assistance from Twilight) realized, could be anypony, and everypony, and that was how they’d come up with what we call ‘polyamoury’, but everyone else knows as ‘free love’. And so the whole of Equestria, by the time this story took place, was practicing Free Love. And darf is done talking now so he will hand back over to Vinyl Scratch.

The ponies in front of Vinyl Scratch weren’t dancing.

They were standing with their mouths open.

Because every time the drums came, the ponies flinched.

Vinyl Scratch had spent seventy-nine hours programming those drums.

She had meticulously placed every one.

And then the drop came.

She saw hope in the eyes of the ponies in the crowd.

And then she slit their throats.

She punched them in the face with her snare drum.

She cut their ears into pieces with high-hats.

And she juggled the concept of music between the left and right, holding it at foreleg’s length and dangling it above the crowd.

And that was why not one pony was goddamn dancing.

And Vinyl Scratch loved it.

Because she had finally done something that no other pony had done before.

She had made a piece of music that could not be listened to.

It could only be heard.

Because if you listened to it;

you became it.

And you became Vinyl Scratch’s head;

which was a very dangerous place to be indeed.

And Vinyl put on a new song.

It sounded like this.

Ponies took a moment to try to understand what was going on.

The majority of them were on some form of mind-enhancing or altering drug—a version of something to make them feel good, so good they wanted to do nothing but dance and hug and fool around (but there was another, more private room for that, and the bathroom for anypony who felt daring, as Vinyl had more than once).

And now all they could do was listen.

They’re finally listening, Vinyl thot.

She thot for a long time, even tho she had waited this moment all her life.

She thot about everything she was and wanted to be. She thot about how stupid it was a mark on her ass could control her destiny.

And then the song played.

And everypony began to shiver at first.

But then they started to dance.

The beat was very far away from four on the floor; no four in it.

Except what was four? Just a number to count to. One – two – three – four.

Vinyl had begun making ponies count to seven.

One – two – three – four – ONE – two – three, her song said.

Over and over, with every bar, every loop, every distinct repetition of chord and melody, but every single slice of 16 seconds the maximum amount of available entropy in the universe packaged into a sound.

And a million different sounds.

So fast, because everything was fast to Vinyl. Her brain worked that way; a problem approached and she solved it before it said ‘Hello’. She could have made friends, if making friends seemed like it was worthwhile. She could have made enemies, killed children, had sex with anypony in town. And she had tried that last one for a while, and almost felt like she’d achieved something.

But then the pony she loved left her.

Like everypony she had ever loved.

And Vinyl Scratch gave up on love.

That wasn’t hard to do, she thot afterwards. It was like I was waiting to do it my whole life.

So Vinyl Scratch put the old records back on.

And everypony who had been dancing to insanity calmed, and stilled, and took as many moments as they needed, and then found the beat again, a soft swinging bob that Vinyl covered in guitar and happy children’s voices. ‘Breathe’, the song said. It moved in a way no song in Equestria had ever moved, old and new and fast and slow and happy and strange at the same time. But it moved perfectly, and so did the dancefloor, and so Vinyl breathed a sigh of relief.

She had no way of know if that was going to work.

She had suspected highly that it wouldn’t, purely on the basis that she had a lifetime’s experience of failures to back her up. That was called provable evidence. Science. Hard facts. The wall of the death-bringing abyss.

Vinyl shivered and ducked down behind her turntables, down by the record crates where she had once sucked somepony off just because she was tripping balls and she had wanted to suck his. And now that pony was gone. And everypony was dancing except her. And that was fine.

What’s fine, Vinyl Scratch?, the voice in her head asked.

Shut up, she said.

And it did.

For now.