The pulse runs down my body and even with my headphones on I can hear the wall of sound, feel it running through my bones, the beat of the music matching the stomps of hooves, the hot breath of a thousand mouths sucking the air away from me as they breath in when I tell them to scream for me.

Behind my shades, I feel like I am watching the crowd separated by a window. They dance for me in the darkness, lit by strobes and flashes only to vanish, each time in a different pose. But they feel very real to my body. My hide prickles with sweat from the furnace that comes from so many living beings in the room.

I breathe out, and slow the music down. The crowd slows, with whoops and hollering, uncertain, as I leave just a backbeat going,slow, tickling down their horns, along their spines, leaving their hooves unable to stay still. But my hidden eyes hold them in place. They're waiting for my word. My permission.

"Are you ponies ready to kick this up a notch?" I yell over the crowd. They echo back their approval.

"I'm sorry, I didn't realise this was a bucking kindergarten! Make some NOISE, you foals!"

This time the pressure of the sound passes through my coat, making my hair stand on end.

"Who do you love?"

There's no hesitation as a thousand voices in the north side warehouse scream until the moon herself can hear the call.

"PON-3!"

My horn flares with magic and I feel it pass through me, as sound flows and washes over my audience in benediction.

This is my house.

These are my ponies.

My name is Vinyl Scratch, though I wasn't born that way. I wasn't born in Canterlot either, though this is where I throw down most of my beats. It's a big city, a bit prissy for me, but with a lot of money and influence, more importantly, it's also where my parents assume I'm still taking classes at the Canterlot Academy for Musical Sciences. I only do so when no other opportunity presents itself, like when there's a major test or paper do. Otherwise, I just ignore my schedule and most of my teachers ignore me.

CAMS is everything I'm not, which is to say, ancient, formal, and dull. Music speaks to me, breathes through me, is my blood and my life, but musical education is not listening to some elderly mare drone on and on about long dead musicians and killing any soul and life their music might have had with endless, endless bucking analysis.

It's in the streets, in the alleys, in the bars and in the clubs. Music is ponies, living breathing ponies who are moved by it. Concertos might have spoken to ponies hundreds of years in the past, but they leave me cold. They don't even whisper. And dissecting every note of a composer's work, even if she's long dead, is cruel and disrespectful. Music shouldn't be kept pristine, like butterflies pinned behind glass, either. It wants to breed. I want to see different beats flow together!

This morning, they're flowing, swimming before my eyes as I try to focus on some sheet music of Hayden.I  try to keep awake, in spite of the long night that ended mere moments before my alarm shook me out of bed and I staggered out of my dorm room to class. I poke at my quill listlessly with a pristine white hoof, staining it with some remnant of ink that was still hiding on the feather. After examining Mr. Inkspot for any further information he might want to reveal on why I was in this room listening to this nonsense, I stifle a yawn

There's a sharp rap from front of the room. I flick an ear and guiltily sit up straight as I hear the sharp voice of Madame Forza.

"Chicken Scratch! Are you paying attention?"

I wince at the name, then nod. Why couldn't she be like all my other professors and not give a buck about if her students were listening to her or not. Most of the upper level teachers come in, lecture for about as much time as I need to get a good nap at the back of the class, fill the board with tightly drawn notes, bark out homework and then leave their assistants to handle the actual labour.

Madame Forza wasn't just ancient, she looked like she needed a skilled team of archaeologists to get her ready each morning. Wrinkling her snout, she narrowed milky blue eyes at me and snorted.

"Take off those Moon-damned tinted spectacles... ah, just as I thought, red eyes!"

"They're magenta, Madame, they came with the coat and the horn..." I wearily try to explain, but she cuts me off, her voice and abrupt turn towards the board as dismissive as her words.

"Don't think I don't know about you and your ruffian ways, Miss Scratch! You might have gotten in to Advanced Musical Composition on merits I find questionable but you shall not leave until I am satisfied you have learned something. Now to begin again, Hayen ushered in the use of the ..."

There's a smattering of giggles and I slouch down into my seat. The sort of ponies who take advanced musical anything are the kind of ponies who stay up all night studying, who fight over who gets the practice rooms and who hound the teacher's assistant, in this case a sky-blue unicorn colt named Piccolo. In short, the sort of ponies who not only do not love my alter ego, DJ PON-3, they don't even know it exists. And I'm perfectly happy to keep the prissy colts and fillies that the academy bathes with praise fully ignorant. Piccolo flashes me an apologetic smile and rolls his eyes in sympathy, and I grin back slightly. Teachers, eh?

He's also not familiar with my disc wrangling skills, but he is familiar with trying to find ways to convince me to date him. Currently, I'm keeping him at forearms' length by telling him that we'd get in trouble if we were. Which is true, you're not supposed to date faculty. The interest does let him look the other way when occasionally my papers are a touch late, but he's told me Madame Forza has started asking to look into my work personally.

He's not a bad colt, but the stallions around here just aren't the type I want to be with. I'm too free a mare to find a nice colt to have as my special somepony, having a respectable courtship and a respectable marriage with two respectable foals and a respectable career as some bucking music teacher. More than once I've woken up, mane in my eyes and the taste of last light on my tongue, laying by some sweaty stud in a satisfied stupor. That's about as romantic as I care to get. Just get what you come for and go, there's nothing wrong with that, even if it's not what my parents want for me. Not everything is a sweet sonata. Sometimes love is nothing more than thrashing around on the dance floor, sweaty and frenetic, until exhausted.

I gaze over a sea of colourful horns and manes, making sure not to catch Piccolo's eye again, and ask myself for the thousandth time, as I try to pretend to focus on the lecture going on in the front of the room, how I've come to this. To lead two lives. I hate everything about this place, how it pins us all in and churns us all out, yet I can't bring myself to just not come anymore.

My life, my existence, has basically been around what my parents have wanted and expected from me, and how I've utterly failed them at each turn, starting with my name. It's always been clear that my parents expected me to go into some sort of literary field. With a father named Hot Scoop after his investigative prowess, and a mother named Bookmark, had a foal, they thought Chicken Scratch was an adorable name that would some how bend the very powers that be towards seeing that my first spells would be levitating a quill. I can only assume that my parents were never foals and instead somehow managed to sprout forth from the ground as the most lead-horned adults ever, because no filly deserves to be named Chicken. As it was, I survived my youth with only a few scars.

At first it was their dearest wish that I would follow in their hoofsteps and become a marvellous journalist or writer or librarian, maybe. As my father once pressed, before I came to school, I could even be a literary agent, as that didn't take any particular talent in the actual skills of writing itself. When my talent showed full on my flank, they then had aspirations for me to be the finest of concern pianists. Technically, that is what I remain in school for, and I am not half bad at the instrument. Currently, as of last month, their dearest wish is to get no more letters from school about bad behaviour and that I not, in my mothers words "get arrested, or if you do, try to stay out of the papers?". I told her I would not be. We were both laughing, but I know she was serious.

A hiss of breath through my teeth and my eyes dart to the clock ticking slowly over the door. Another 3 hours. Then sleep. Then, maybe, if I'm fortunate, I can live again tonight in my true home.

"MISS SCRATCH"

I sigh. Time cannot move fast enough. I need my people.