Twelve years ago, things were different.

You wouldn't be judged, you wouldn't be bullied, or ostracized, for your harmony or your bassline.

It didn't matter if the snare was a little off.

The tics and out of time high hat notes and too sharp tuba legatos were all just little things, experiences and battles that you'd survived, and they were good. You could go outside without the protesters fighting in the middle of the streets, screams and hatred filling the air, sounds gone sour. Music used to be all about being you, being who you were, being proud.

Now, it had to be perfect.

A wrong note could get you thrown out of a restaurant, key too sharp or too flat meant maybe that day the food wouldn't arrive from the grocery delivery service. A change of timing could get you mugged; your unfinished solo only ending on a knife wound and large hospital bill. If your music didn't stay together, you were ostracised. Notes off the beat, tune sounded funny, exotic instruments, anything at all really, could have you beaten up and maybe even jailed. The state of society was beginning to get pretty desperate by the time I was born.

I grew up pretty normal. I had the regular amount of limbs and parents, did pretty well in school (although I wasn't a straight A student). Had a pretty average amount of friends, who were all the same as me in all the things that mattered. I was told my music was pretty average too, which I couldn't help but be a little disappointed about. Even with all the fuss about it as I grew up (John, if you can't get that oboe under control, I'm afraid this school can't take you), I still heard tales about reformed tuners that saved hundreds of trapped citizens in the war, or single-handedly beat down protests with inspiring and hopeful speeches. There was something dangerously appealing about those with offbeat music, and well… I was just average. Well, I thought to myself around age 12, here's to a life of dreary normality. I'll find a partner, maybe have kids, get a job that, while paying for the cost of living, will probably also be incredibly boring. Desk job probably, that's what most ¾'s get. But at least I was happy, or as happy as I could be, anyway.

I was about 18 when things began to get worse. The ongoing war between Mariachi and Blues was escalating with no sign of stopping. No one predicted that Mariachi would decide to bomb half of Blues almost to dust, or that Blues would respond with a discord raze. Chamber was building numerous ships and probably guns and Hardcore Rock was responding in kind. Whispers of bigger and better weapons snuck out of the two countries on a basically hourly basis. No one knew what was truth, and no one knew what was fiction. Rock denied that it had any involvement with Hardcore Rock's arms race and had apparently vanished off the face of the Earth. Punk was still struggling to scrape together two cents, as was pretty much usual. I, in the meantime, was trying to get my driver's license. And failing. Badly.

'You realise that was a red light.'

'Uh… yeah.'

Tires were squealing, I was going 70 and there were ten cars behind me honking as loud as they could. My assessor seemed to be a pretty friendly guy, musically, but driving through three consecutive red lights and missing the give way sign three k's back didn't seem to soften him towards me. I yanked the wheel left and pulled over into a parking space, nearly bumping a car and stopping only a couple centimetres away from the bumper of the car in front of me. The assessor took a deep breath and met my gaze, steeling his eyes as he looked at my awkwardly stressed face.

'Three red lights, a give way sign, two broken reflectors, a bent bumper, pulled over by the police… do you want me to continue?'

It definitely had not been my day.

Interestingly enough, that was the day that all hell broke loose up north. Mariachi had spontaneously invaded the top of Theme in order to sneak up on Blues' western border, without alerting Theme. Of course, it was pretty much just a huge dick move, designed to drag Theme into the war. It worked. The army was being mobilised as fast as humanly possible, citizens were being warned that there could be armed and dangerous Mariachi soldiers in the country, and that was that. Instant terror.

A year later I had a knock or three on my door. I had come down with the shittiest version of the 'flu imaginable a couple days back, but I answered anyway, with a dripping nose and screaming muscles. It was the army. Come to recruit. 'Your country needs you' and all that shit. But as much as I wanted to lie, they knew I was over 18. Can't beat your unmuteable music for telling basic information. I was told to get to the nearest military base for sign up and that was that. Government incentives be damned, I'd just been conscripted.

They wanted me in tanks. I refused. My driver's test had shown me enough. Tanks were backup, not friendly fire.

They only gave us two months of intensive training, and then we were shipped to the front lines. Only as a figure of speech, since there was shit all water in between the war and us. I had eventually been placed in Fifth Discord Battalion, which specialised in messing with the enemies' musical harmony in order to throw them off. They mostly used discord launchers, guns the size of a rifle but a bit more bulky, to launch the little spheres anywhere from 600-1000 metres away. The things sent a blast of sound five hundred metres around it. Hurt like a bitch when you got hit, and left tinnitus effects for hours. I always felt like an asshole, messing with others' music, even if they were the assholes that invaded us. They hadn't hurt me personally and they were all people too. But it was my job, the government and my commanding officers were watching, and shame on those who show cowardice. And yeah, I did my job for a couple years, until things just got even worse.

Our unit was captured. We had thrown some less effective hand grenades in a close range scuffle and one of them had hit us. We were down for the count and no way around it.

Put on trial for war crimes and inhumane treatment of human beings. In Mariachi of course. Those bastards were using discord too, so I didn't see what laws of theirs we were breaking, but the damn government didn't pull us out of there with a money prize or anything.

My unit was put to death. Those fucking assholes decided there was nothing for us but to kill us all, what with us unable to fight back anymore and posing as much threat as two fruits and five vegetables a day.

They let me go free, to spread the word of their choice. I was the only one left alive, and by the skin of my teeth at that.

Even then, it was kill or be killed. It's not like they'd supply me with a safe way home.