Vinyl Scratch woke up at 4:37AM Equestrian Time, or 0437 hours in military time, or in the middle of the sun breaking apart the sky in other words.

She rolled over in bed into her own vomit.

It was easy to forget you threw up last night when you threw up every night. Heck, every day was nice sometimes too. It made eating a lot easier—took away the guilt of having put something inside yourself. Hurt your teeth tho. Vinyl suspected this was part of the whole problem—but then she had gone to the dentist and gotten everything fixed, so now surely she was fine?

Vinyl went to the bathroom, light off, to lift the toilet lid and hurl the contents of her stomach forward.

She’d done that last night, so now, nothing came but air. Dry heaves. Vinyl wretched, her whole body punishing her just for existing.

The wracking coughs stopped.

Eventually.

Every morning Vinyl checked the color of her spit also, before and after brushing. White-ish, usually with a hint of yellow or black or orange, and always red afterwards. Pure red. No matter the toothpaste she used, no matter how much she flossed, no matter how many times she went to Dr. Twin-Drills, her mouth always bled. No matter how healthy she ate, or how much she cared for her teeth, they always spat back at her. Spat blood.

Vinyl spat onto her mirror. The blood globbed, pooled, dripped down in tiny tendrils towards the bottom of the mirror’s wood frame, then to trickle past its corners and escape one dimension of gravity.

Vinyl’s hoof shattered the mirror like it was a piece of stained glass made of sugar.

The shards in her hoof and coat said otherwise.

One had gotten in her eye.

Her right eye.

There was a shard of glass in her right eye.

Vinyl Scratch blinked her left eye.

Not too bad.

She blinked her left eye.

Pain.

Well, what was pain, anyway?

With a shimmer of her horn, she picked up the pair of tweezers lying on top of the back of the toilet.

She aimed, snatched, and removed the shard on the first try.

Pain times a thousand.

Her throat and chest made a sound like “hnnrrk”.

Her right eye was a rose-colored waterfall, bleeding down the entire right side of her face, pooling in the sink beneath her chin.

She was also quite sure she was blind.

She closed her left eye.

But there she was—the broken her, in the shards of the mirror. Just with blood everywhere. Blood everywhere and a small, tiny, pinpoint hole in the very center of her vision.

Where my soul might be, the voice thot.

“Shut up,” Vinyl said. She took a few sheets of toilet-paper and dabbed them over her eye. The bleeding was intense—the paper became moist, then mush, maroon, then a blossoming river of just red—red everywhere. Hooves, legs, the floor, her face.

“Why,” Vinyl asked, leaning over the sink. She felt like throwing up, but she was done with that for the day already.

The bathroom answered with her echo, and the drip drip drip of the fountain, a single bead of water tapping along to the bottom of the drain. Drip. Drip. Drip.

“Why,” she said again. Question marks were useless. Everyone knew ‘why’ was a question.

You already know the answer to that, the voice said.

She hated it.

But that was life.

‘C’est la vie’, as they say in Prance, Vinyl thot, as she mopped up the blood from her eye with a wad of paper towels.

The bleeding stopped. Always eventually. Always.

Vinyl had nothing else to do with her morning. The whole mirror thing had only taken twenty-seven minutes. And that meant nothing. A whole day of nothing, where she sat in the chair in front of her composition station where records could become from the æther and she could make music or she couldn’t, and none of it really fucking mattered, did it.

Vinyl rubbed her eye as she sat in bed, her hindlegs hanging over the boxspring and bedspread etc. She had a lovely black cover with a pattern of stars, and beneath that silk sheets, and beneath that she had seduced ponies of every size, color, gender and trade, and the last one had been named “Starburst”.

She had cum like a fountain.

And it had been fun for a while.

Vinyl scratched sighed as she checked the time. Not even six yet. And that meant that technically nopony else in the world was awake. Vinyl had learned this because every time she cranked her stereo system before 6AM, ponies complained, even her near dear neighbour Mrs. Featherforth, who listened to all of Vinyl’s attempts at original composition, even if she squinted and tensed at every beat, and said she ‘liked it’ at the end, but that was like your mom saying she liked your drawing, and here was your gold star. She’d come to complain about Starburst, because they’d been going all night, which was before six.

She’d knocked on the door for a while, and Vinyl had ignored her for just as long, until she’d come to the window of Vinyl’s bedroom and seen Vinyl and Starburst mid-sixty-nine and Vinyl not particularly in the throes of ecstasy but doing sex like she knew how to do, and it was a secret she couldn’t come when another pony was still trying to come before her, so she’d been kept up all night in a sort of game of “No, you hang up!” but with clits and many other pleasant toys that Vinyl kept under her bed. She was licking Starburst’s clit as Mrs. Featherforth knocked on the window, and ended up staring straight into her eyes, the curtains only wide enough for them to see the profile of each others’ faces.

“Stop that filth this instant!!” Mrs. Featherforth had screamed.

Vinyl had wished very hard for a gesture that conveyed how hard she wanted Mrs. Featherforth to transform instantly into the bird of her namesake and fly away, or better yet, come just a little closer so she could crush it, and be done with what was essentially a pesky seagull clammering jealously at her window.

“Fuck off,” she said, and buried her face in Starburst’s pussy. Starburst, remarkably, was so focused on the task of pleasing Vinyl’s pussy with her hoof while licking her ass at the same time, that she didn’t even realize Mrs. Featherforth was there, nor did she hear Vinyl’s exclamation to her. Because so far, Vinyl had only said the word ‘fuck’ to her like “Oh fuck me, you are so f-fucking g-good at this,”, and so the ‘Fuck off!’ went unheard.

But Mrs. Featherforth heard it.

She’d never been told that by anypony before. ‘Fuck’ was a word ponies didn’t use in her day, and here was Vinyl Scratch, her bratty little music-making neighbour, whose music was awful anyway, in her opinion, and what happened to something you could just dance to, instead of having to pick apart every little bit and listen to the bass and the melody and the other melody and the arpeggio and there her music training stopped. She had been a music tutor of children for a while before she retired, and spent her time in old age not doing much of anything.

Except yelling at Vinyl Scratch, and being told to ‘fuck off’.

Her heart seized.

But it kept beating. Heart-attacks didn’t happen in Equestria—only heart-ache, which Mrs. Featherforth supposed she had, because there was no Mr. Featherforth, and there never had been, and there was a canary named ‘Charles’ who had died two days ago, and that was why she was up late and upset, and especially jealous that Vinyl was intimate with someone at an hour she never even could have dreamed of.

So she felt awful.

But that was nothing new.

Vinyl Scratch felt horny. She almost always felt horny, ever since the ‘free love’ thing, because when she looked around, all she saw was “That pony wants sex, that pony’s in heat, that pony wants to fuck, that pony has a nice ass, etc. etc.”. She accidentally reduced everypony to their component sexual parts—but she’d gotten over the habit now, and so she was simply a sexual maniac who repressed her every urge because the world couldn’t handle Vinyl Scratch running up to the first cute pony she saw on the street and saying “Wanna rut?”

Altho she had done that a few times, and it had worked.

But she’d gotten yelled at after. By Mayor Mare, and by Twilight, and by a few other ponies she cared not to be yelled at by. So now she kept her sex private. And private was inside her house. So fuck off, Mrs. Featherforth, Vinyl said in her head, and went back to Starburst.

Except now all she saw was a pussy.

And this ruined sex for her forever.

Because she understood that everypony was just a body—a series of nerve-endings with a consciousness inside.

And anything anypony did was just what the chemicals in their brain and the nerve-endings and so forth in their body were telling them to do.

And so, if she told herself ‘feel good’ when she touched herself.

Her body, as it always had, would rejected the good. It would take away everything that was good from that feeling, and leave her simply an awful pony rubbing her slit by herself. Right now she was rubbing somepony else’s slit, and they were moaning, Princess were they moaning, but that was what had gotten Mrs. Featherforth so upset. And Vinyl remembered the 6AM rule. So she stopped, and Starburst stopped too, and looked confused.

“My neighbour just came over and yelled at us—I think we should probably call it a night.”

Starburst looked mortified. She hung her head, which had a carrot-orange tinge to it and a long tail, and her yellow body, which Vinyl imagined was cream-cheese as she licked along every inch of her before they had rutted, or at least as close to rutting as to mares could get anyway, which was pretty darn close, and who needed stallions anyway, because in sex they were just a stick to bounce up and down on, and there plenty better ways of getting one of those that didn’t want all your time or attention or money or call you ‘bitch’ behind his breath. So Vinyl was sick of men. But now she was sick of women too.

She was sick of everything, in all likelihood.

“I need you to go,” Vinyl said.

Starburst looked up at her helplessly, bewildered, near-death.

That was because Vinyl’s brain worked so fast that it had already figured out what the solution to the problem in front of her was.

She needed to go see Sugar-Coated Sour.

Because that was the only time she had ever been happy before—when a pony in a stupid cloak with a stupid name had sold her a syringe with a turquoise liquid inside, and said “Put this in the corner of your eye and don’t dare flinch or the needle breaks off and I have to pull it out. And it’s not fun,”. Vinyl had done just as she was told, and been given her first shot of ‘Virt’. ‘Virt’, she was told, didn’t really mean anything—it just sounded cool. She’d called that bullshit, so Sugar-Coated Sour had called her sharp, and told her the truth; Virt was just a play on ‘verte’, the Prancian word for ‘green’, which was kind of the color of the drug, or more a mix of that and blue, anyway. But also it was ‘virt’ as in ‘virtual’, and Vinyl knew about that because she stayed on the bleeding edge of technology, mostly for sound equipment, but also because her brain ran so fast it needed to stay ahead of everyone in everything.

“And that’s what this will take away,” Sour had said. Call me Sour, she’d said after her introduction. “Or sugar, if you decide you like me,” she said with a  smirk afterwards.

“Well, Sugar,” Vinyl said, making the second word as deadpan as she could, “I’ll try your drug. How much do you want.”

“First hits free. That’s always the drill. If you like it, you can buy more. If you don’t, you get away hooves-free, with no penalties or strings attached. One of the beautiful things about Free Equestria—no such thing as blame. If you take my drugs, you know what you’re getting into. And if I go to court, and some big judge says “Did you intend to kill that young pony?”, I just say “No sir, I had no criminal intent at all,” and there’s the justice system for you,” Sugar-Coated Sour had said.

“Hmm,” Vinyl had said.

That was the noise she made when she was thinking. Translating. Translating the form of her thots, the shape, into words. Words were what ponies used to communicate, mostly. Body language. Facial expressions. Vinyl had all of those. She didn’t care about them. She was thinking.

She thot for a while.

“Does that mean ‘yes’?” Sugar-Coated Sour had asked, her eyebrows raised, perpetual smirk still in place.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like a hob-goblin?” Vinyl Scratch asked.

Sugar-Coated Sour smirked back.

“Yep! And plenty worse. Do you want my magic happy stick or not, dumbass?”

Fuck, Vinyl thot.

She thot some more.

“Yes,” she said.

“I like simple answers,” Sugar-Coated Sour said. “Also simple names. No SCS after this. Pick one. Catch.” And she threw the syringe at Vinyl.

Vinyl caught it. It was just a matter of putting her hooves in the air where the syringe was flying and cushioning the impact by gradually decelerating the parallel velocity of her hooves to the object. ‘Catching it’, in other words. Vinyl caught the syringe, and she did it with relative ease, the same way she did everything.

Lining up the needle was easy.

Pushing it in was hard, but she took three breaths and then barely felt the pain.

Pushing the syringe was fine.

And then.

What?

Vinyl Scratch died.

Or that was one version of what happened.

What is a version, Vinyl Scratch? the voice in Vinyl’s head asked.

Um, Vinyl thot back.

She could say by thinking, she thot.

That’s only true if I can do it too, the voice said back.

Who are you, Vinyl said.

Well, the voice said. Let’s not get into that.

What do you need, Vinyl Scratch?

Death, probably, Vinyl Scratch thot. Or, like, an equivalent to death. I need to be able to completely erase who I am and start over again as a new pony. I need a new cutie mark, she concluded.

Ooh, the voice said, and it flinched, and Vinyl felt the flinch in her chest too. No can do on the ‘new cutie mark’ thing—those are there for good. But we can do you the ‘total erasure and start-over again’ thing if you want, no problem.

Really? Vinyl asked. How?

Like this.