A/N # 1: Yep, it's that wonderful time of the year again--back to school. Which means, unfortunately, that I won't be able to update as frequently as I used to--between all the AP classes, the SAT prep courses, not to mention the actual SAT's themselves, I'll be lucky if I make it out of this wonderful scholastic year with my sanity intact. Yech. Anyways, please don't freak out if you check in next Thursday and don't find a nice, nifty, new chapter of Vinyl Act up, it doesn't mean I've abandoned this story like so many other authors have their Mary Sues, it simply means I'm currently buried under a load of schoolwork, and couldn't quite get any writing done. Keep an eye out, though, because I'm determined to push this baby into the double-digits. Until then, see you all around...unless conks out again, like it seems to be doing each time I happen to upload a new chapter.

A/N # 2 (yes, I get to have two of these, since I'm the author!): By the way, for all those of you who might be wondering by the end of this chapter, the song that Urban Trash performs is called "One Way Or Another," by Blondie, while Verbena's song is Katie Cassidy's version of "I Think I Love You."

A/N # 3 (I'll stop after this one, I promise!): Enjoy the story! And please don't forget to review at the end--they're what keep me going. A happy Katherinea creative Katherine


A sea of roughly thirty-five thousand people greeted Vinyl Act's opening act, punk band Urban Trash, as they prepared to kick off the first show of the tour. Melody spun around on her heels as she walked up the steps and onto the stage, her long skirt flowing with her twirling movement while she smiled contentedly to herself, silently grateful that she'd met a friend as nice and sweet as Kurt on this summer festival. Max, meanwhile, was confidently tapping her drumsticks against the front parts of her thighs as she walked, a huge smirk on her features as she recalled back to rehearsals, where through her and Kyrie's combined efforts they'd managed to eventually strip all three North Carolina boys down to their boxers at the end of their strip poker game. Connor merely walked at a silent gait, his bass slung low across his waist, his reddish-purple nose in a cast and swollen to the size of a jumbo hot dog, all thanks to Lita's coquetries back at the amphitheater in Stamford.

All three band members took their respective positions on the stage, Melody walking up to the microphone stand, her guitar swaying back and forth with her movements as she greeted warmly, "Hi, our name's Urban Trash, and we're very happy to be playing here for all of you people."
"Yeah, rock on!" Max shouted from her place behind her drum set, hollering the three words loud enough so as to be heard without the aid of an amplifying device. Melody grinned at Max's words, before saying, "All right, then, guess we're all ready to rock out here, so my bandmates and I will just get to the first song!" She stepped back a couple of paces, before exchanging meaningful looks with the rest of Urban Trash as they crashed into the first song of their setlist.

Song lyrics to Blondie's "One Way or Another" removed, in accordance with FFN's newest brilliant idea

Melody paused and took a very brief break from singing, but before she could resume her duties on vocals, an unexpected barrage of colorful fireworks simultaneously went off over the stage, startling all three band members who, used to the stripped-down sound and anti-frippery ideals of punk, hadn't even thought of including pyrotechnics in their set. Much to the bewilderment and dismay of Urban Trash, the fireworks and explosions ceased to stop even after the two-minute mark had passed and Max had nearly screamed herself hoarse hollering at the backstage crew to "cut out the goddamn poor man's Fourth of July celebration already!"

Suddenly, a flash pot exploded right underneath Connor's feet, sending a burst of fireworks rocketing right up to his butt as he let out a high-pitched, strangled little squeal. Melody and Max could only watch in horror and just the teensiest bit of fascination as their bandmate continued to frantically run around trying to put out his flaming ass, before a hidden trapdoor suddenly opened below Urban Trash's frontwoman and guitarist. Melody let out a shrill wail, as she promptly plunged down and under the stage, much to the confusion of their audience.

"Thanks a lot, you two," Max fumed, angrily tapping her drumsticks against her knees when she realized she was now the only remaining member of Urban Trash who was still able to play. "Yeah, sure, let's just all leave and dump the workload onto Shorty, why don't we all!" Before the petite drummer could fully launch into an angry tirade against her bandmates, a second blast of pyro gone awry caused her drum kit to explode right in front of her face in a glorious flash of crimson sparks. When the smoke cleared up, Max emerged into view, thankfully still alive and sitting on her stool behind what little remained of her drum set. Her normally dark red hair was singed so badly that all of it had been turned as black as their charcoal-colored tips, and her tattered and scorched fishnet shirt and bondage pants weren't in much better condition. Max drew in a shaky breath, automatically working her mouth into a weak grin while she peeped in what she hoped was a tongue-in-cheek way, "Heh. That would be my Keith Moon impression."

Backstage, the ever reliable, dependable roadies--otherwise known as Brian "Spanky" Kendrick and Zach Gowen--turned to each other and freaked out at the same time, "I can't believe you set off Scarlet Rage's stage theatrics during Urban Trash's set!" Spanky leaned back, huffing insultedly, "Me! You were the one who rigged the wrong set! Does this look like the headliners' stage to you!" Zach blinked, a bit startled by the angry outburst coming from such a baby-faced, happy-go-lucky little blonde, before hurriedly puffing back, "Yeah, well you were the one who just had to know what those nifty little red and blue buttons and switches did!" Spanky pouted.
"But they were so shiny, I just had to touch them," he sulked, idly drawing circles on the ground with the tip of his left sneaker. Zach shot him a smirk.
"You do realize that a person overhearing this conversation would be more likely to assume you were talking about Jericho's pants, don't you?" he jibed, causing Spanky to give the smaller cruiserweight his meanest frown, which looked downright alien on his cherubic face.

"Melody!" a sudden male voice blubbered loudly behind the two, causing both startled "roadies" to nearly rocket right through the roof, as Kurt pushed past both Spanky and Zach and blundered out to rescue the singer/guitarist who was still trapped underneath the stage. As the two little cruiserweights watched in bemusement--and certain degrees of amusement as well--Kurt floundered down the stage with a warrior cry of, "Don't worry, Melly, I'll save you!" tripped so very gracefully over the microphone stand, and went sailing through the air like some human cannonball, before landing with a solid smack right down the trapdoor entrance and onto Melly.
"Ahck! My spine!" the dark-haired Aussie gasped painfully. As Kurt scrambled around to ease the pressure from Melody's spine, his foot unwittingly hit a switch, causing the platform they'd both fallen onto to slowly begin to rise.

Onstage, Max was too preoccupied with trying to salvage what she could of her drum set to either notice or help out Melody and Kurt from their platform constructed underneath the stage--the one meant for Scarlet Rage's Deron Cutler to spring up and out of at the beginning of his band's performance.
"Hey," she snapped with a frown, her voice floating over to the backstage area where Spanky and Zach were still bickering back and forth, "I need a damn drumstick, where's my drumstick! It better not have gone up in flames like Connor's Irish ass!" Spanky overheard her complaint and went about in search for a new drumstick for Max, then brightened up when he saw a nice little staff just lying around by an equipment crate near Zach, and bent over to pick it up, wrenching the sucker loose from where it'd been rather stubbornly attached to.
"Here you go, Miss Winters!" he called out, chucking it in the direction of the Urban Trash percussionist with surprising strength. "It's a bit on the heftier side, and it's got this weird little shoe-shaped thingie attached to one end, but it'll do!" Zach's eyes widened, and he stopped uttering the curses that had fallen on Spanky's deaf ears, opting instead to squall, "Spanky, you dumb blonde! That was my prosthetic leg you just threw at her!"

While the two little cruiserweights-turned-incompetent-roadies waited tensely, a screeching yelp flew back at them from onstage, where Max had let out a shrill squawk when Zach's prosthetic leg had hurtled through the air toward her and smacked right against her forehead, effectively knocking the poor drummer out cold. The plastic appendage bounced off Max's head and sailed across the stage, landing right at the feet of a blushing Melody, who'd finally managed to disengage herself from Kurt after several whistles and catcalls had resounded throughout the audience when the two had risen from the trapdoor tangled up in a rather suggestive position. The Australian-born frontwoman took one good look at the leg that had just plopped down in front of her like some prop from a bad horror flick, and wasted no time in letting out a terrified siren wail.
"Oh, my God!" the poor singer/guitarist howled in a keening soprano, raising her hands to her face and crying, "That's a leg! That's somebody's amputated leg! Oh, God, get it away from me! Connor! Kurt! Anybody!"

Of the two men she'd named who might help her out, Connor at least was obviously going to be unable to rush to her aid. The Urban Trash bassist had long since collapsed after his fiery experience with a flash pot, and a team of EMT's was currently putting out the bonfire on his ass, before loading him onto a stretcher and discreetly wheeling the blonde Irishman off the stage and away from the chaos.


Caitlin's grass-green eyes widened in alarm when she heard Stephanie's urgent request, before spluttering into her cell phone, "N-n-now? But I thought we weren't supposed to go on until seven o' clock--" She paused as Smackdown!'s general manager cut her off and hastily explained that the three members of Vinyl Act's original opening act were currently all incapacitated--Melody was decisively sick after Kurt had dumped an entire gallon of milk down her throat in an effort to cure her fake-leg-induced hysteria, Max had developed a temporary bout of amnesia from Spanky's accidental conk to her head, and Connor was currently being treated for first-degree burns at the nearest E.R. The festival needed Verbena to take Urban Trash's slot on the program, and it needed them to take the stage now! Caitlin frowned thoughtfully, biting down on her lower lip as her mind digested this piece of news, before she sighed and reluctantly agreed with a shrug of her slender shoulders, "All right, then. I guess the other girls and I have no choice but to go on earlier than we'd thought."

Kyrie, lounging on a velvet loveseat in the spacious Verbena dressing room and idly flipping through a copy of Vogue, glanced up and asked curiously once Caitlin had finished her conversation, "We're going on early today?"
"Yup," Caitlin nodded, hurriedly straightening out her Carolina-blue halter top and cargo capris, before informing her bandmate, "We have no choice, Urban Trash is physically unable to go on." Kyrie sighed, closing her glossy magazine and stretching as she got off her seat before telling her fellow Texan, "Well, I'm as ready as I'll ever be. Let's go."

The two girls started to leave their dressing room and head out onto the stage, when Caitlin suddenly paused and motioned for her fellow Verbena vixen to halt as well.
"Hold on, Kyrie," she began. "We can't go on just yet--Manda and Kel are nowhere to be found, remember?" Kyrie stopped and frowned, listening to the impatient roar of the crowds and jerking her thumb in the general direction of the stage area.
"Cait, are you sure it's very wise to let thirty-five thousand people swelter in the hot summer sun without any live entertainment for much longer?" she pointed out with an arch of her eyebrows. "They're going to riot if we keep them waiting while we run around trying to find those two Scarlett O'Hara wannabes!" Caitlin went over this possibility in her mind, before reluctantly conceding, "All right, then. I guess it'll just be us two until someone finds Amanda and Kelly for us. They'll have to turn up sooner or later anyway, right?" Kyrie nodded.
"Of course they do," she reassured her friend. "Now come, let's go already."

Caitlin and Kyrie hurriedly jogged the rest of the way, sprinting onto their stage before the announcer was even finished introducing them and quickly cueing the live band backing them up to start the music. A series of sweet, surprisingly catchy notes floated over the air, and the two Verbena girls automatically launched into their intricately choreographed song-and-dance routine.
"This morning I woke up with this feeling/I didn't know how to deal with/And so I just decided to myself I'd hide it to myself/And never talk about it/And didn't I go and shout it when you walked into the room," Caitlin sang first, before both her and Kyrie delved into the chorus together.
"I think I love you--I think I love you, so what am I so afraid of/I'm afraid that I'm not sure of--a love there is no cure for," the two girls sang together, their voices soaring over the musical instruments backing them up. "I think I love you--isn't that what life is made of/Though it worries me to say that I've never felt this way." The two girls exchanged significant looks as the first part of their song was finished, both silently wondering just where the hell the rest of their band had scattered to.

Cue over to the backstage area, where Amanda and Kelly had seemingly inveigled themselves into a boyfriend-catching contest to see which of them could snag the most guys. Kelly had her arm looped firmly around Sylvan's elbow, and was currently flirting outrageously with both him and Edge, consciously tossing back her lustrous chestnut hair as often as she could get away with so that her earrings danced and jingled like tiny golden bells. Amanda quickly covered up a jealous scowl with her most dazzling smile, one hand locked in René's larger one, the other stroking Shane's biceps as she giggled and chatted him up, much to Kelly's impotent rage. The North Carolinian singer could only watch as her own brother fell for the girlish charm and giggles of her rival, before fuming and redoubling her efforts with Sylvan and Edge.

At that moment, both girls spotted the same victim--er, potential boyfriend--at the same time, and practically trampled over all the other beaus they'd already collected to get to Randy at the same time.
"Randy, you handsome old thing, you," Amanda called out laughingly in what she hoped was a charming Georgian accent, while at the same time trying to disengage herself from Christian, who was proving to be much harder to shake off than either Shane or René. "I'll bet you left Missouri for the WWE just to break the poor little heart of this fellow Southerner, huh?" Kelly rolled her eyes, muttering snidely under her breath, "Damn, girl, that was a God-awful impression of Scarlett O'Hara if I ever saw one," earning herself a nasty look from Amanda which she ignored as she declared brightly, "Randy, long time no see! Think you can spare me a little peek at those abs of steel there, pretty please?"

Back on the Verbena stage, Kyrie and Caitlin were trying to juggle singing, dancing, and plotting out ways to torture and then kill Amanda and Kelly at the same time. I'm telling you, watching the Muppets movie twenty times in a row is the way to go, Kyrie was mouthing silently to her fellow Texas native, before quickly plastering an automatic million-watt smile on her face and singing out obediently upon her cue, "I think I love you, so what am I so afraid of/I'm afraid I'm not too sure of a love there is no cure for..."

At that moment, a certain blonde MF'r happened to peek his head out from the side of the stage to whisper some directions into a stage technician's ear. Kyrie conveniently glanced over in Shannon Moore's direction at the exact moment that he appeared, causing her to freeze on the spot. Caitlin, still dancing and unaware that Shannon had made his entrance, wound up bumping into her fellow Verbena girl and nearly falling right onto her nose. As the blonde San Antonio native winced and tried to regain her balance, Kyrie stared, entranced, at Shannon while he spoke some words with a lighting guy. Conveniently forgetting that she was currently on a stage and performing for thirty-five thousand people, Kyrie giggled happily, "Ooh, I know I love you!" in the blonde MF'rs direction, before scampering right off the stage without a second thought.
"Shanny, wait for me!" she called out breathlessly, tottering after him when his head disappeared behind the curtains.

Caitlin, left all alone on the stage to face the wrath of the audience, glanced around uncertainly before letting out a startled yelp and ducking as a rotten tomato was chucked in her direction.
"Go back to Barbie Hell, blondie!"
"You're awful purtty; show us your tits already!"
"Teenyboppers suck, we came here to see Urban Trash!"
"Get off the stage, where are Jeffykins and Matty-poo?"
Caitlin gawked wide-eyed at the sea of disenfranchised fans, then tittered nervously and squeaked out, "Um, Amanda? Kelly? Kyrie? Anybody? Help!"

Unfortunately for Caitlin, however, none of her fellow bandmates did quite manage to make it to the stage and help her out. Amanda and Kelly were still backstage fighting over Randy, each having gotten a hold of one of his arms and jerking vigorously until the youngest member of Evolution was nearly ripped in two. Kyrie was stumbling adoringly after Shannon, practically exuding idol worship as she followed the blonde cruiserweight around the winding backstage area...and then right into the men's restroom.
"Ow," she groaned painfully, wincing as she discovered the hard way that she'd been too captivated by her Shannon-sighting to even realize he'd closed the door of his bathroom stall until she'd walked right into it and ended up bumping her forehead against the stiff, beige-painted plastic.


Stephanie's eyebrows practically flew right off her forehead when she heard the unwelcome news, before screeching frantically, "What! What do you mean you can't find them!" Standing a few feet in front of her, Matt winced and rubbed gingerly at his kaput ears, before repeating, "I mean all the members of Scarlet Rage are firmly MIA...Well, except for this one, but it's kind of hard to put on a headlining show with just a drummer." Here he jerked his thumb in the direction of Shannon Sumter, who was leaning against a wall with a glazed expression on her face, obviously high out of her mind as she cursed weakly while clutching an empty plastic Doggie bag in one hand and a near-empty bottle of vodka in the other. Stephanie groaned loudly at this bleak sight, nearly tearing her hair out in frustration as she lamented, "Great, just great! It's just our luck to be stuck with the poor man's Guns N' Roses on this tour!" At this, Shannon shot a glassy-eyed glare at the taller brunette, struggling to pull herself to her full height while snapping huffily, "Hey, we aren't the poor man's Guns N' fucking Roses! We're the poor fucking man's Stonewall Jackson!" Stephanie turned to Matt, hissing angrily, "And just what the hell does she mean by that?" Matt shrugged helplessly, guessing, "She probably means the Rolling Stones instead of that Civil War guy. You know, Rolling Stones, Stonewall Jackson? I hear that you tend to get these things confused when you're under the influence of smack and vodka at the same time." Stephanie sighed impatiently, rubbing at her temples before yelling sulkily, "Whatever, I don't care! Look, just assemble a search party and go flush out the rest of Scarlet Rage! They're supposed to go on in less than half an hour, and we can't properly close a concert if the headliners don't show up on time!" Matt backed off, looking terrified by her supersonic assault, before saluting and squeaking, "Yes, ma'am!" and scrambling off. Shannon wandered away as well, hunting for a lighter.

Meanwhile, in a little dressing room, Rusty was grinning and celebrating, "See, I told you we would make it on time." Jericho smirked at her words, teasing, "Yes, it's quite a shocker that all five of you managed to get out of jail in time to make it up to Stamford." Rusty flashed him a mock scowl, warning in her most threatening voice, "Watch it there, Jerky--technically I'm still supposed to be PMS'ing, and the last thing you'd want is to be locked in a room all alone with me while I'm in my bitchy mode." Jericho tossed her a lazy grin, bragging with exaggerated macho swagger, "I think I can handle you in all of your quirky moods, Miss Briar." Rusty smiled and crossed the room, snuggling up to him and murmuring, "Well, so long as you don't go announcing it to the entire world. You know the others will give us utter hell if they find out that we've been dating for the past year-and-a-half!"
"I'll say," Jericho agreed, running a hand through his long blonde hair before he added, "Just how long do you think we can keep this up, though?" Rusty frowned, leaning back in her seat and biting down on her lower lip.
"I'm not sure," she admitted. "I know we can't hide our relationship forever, but..."
"But, we can always cross that bridge once we get there," Jericho cut her off, drawing her closer toward him. Rusty grinned and playfully slapped him on the chest.
"That's a pretty unromantic thing to say," she teased. Jericho shrugged, pulling her in for a kiss as he murmured, "Hey, if you want romantic, I can always dress up as Romeo and come serenade you at your tour bus window!" Rusty giggled, kissing him lightly on the lips before revealing, "Then you'd be getting slapped all the way back to Winnipeg for your troubles, Mr. Christopher Irvine, because only Shannon and Camryn have window-side beds, and they've both made it pretty clear that neither of them appreciate being woken up in the middle of the night by some guy screeching out a love song under their windows."
"Ouch," Jericho remarked good-naturedly, before leaning in for another kiss.

Before the couple could get too cozy, however, a loud, rather obnoxious pounding started sounding at their door, as Shannon's inebriated voice drifted in to announce, "Hey, we're supposed to take the fucking stage in less than half a fucking hour! Rusty, I know you're fucking in there, I heard you say something about fucking serenades!" Rusty and Jericho exchanged frantic looks.
"We can't let her see us together like this, she'll know we're dating no matter how smashed she is," Rusty hissed fretfully, as Jericho seemed to get an idea and grabbed at a light tan trench coat hanging on the wall near him.
"Quick," he whispered, tossing the coat at her just as Shannon succeeded in barging inside.

The raven-haired drummer peered with glazed dark brown eyes at her fellow bandmate, noting how she suddenly seemed to have grown three or four feet in the space of a few hours.
"Rusty?" Shannon asked, blinking and rubbing her eyes while silently wondering whether she'd taken too many hits of coke and was hallucinating. "That is you, isn't it?" Rusty plastered what she hoped was a convincing smile onto her face.
"Definitely," she reassured Shannon, before hastily adding, "And, uh, I know we're supposed to go on next. Just let me, um, change my outfit and I'll be out in five. Can you give me some privacy here?" Shannon shrugged.
"Suit yourself," she mumbled, before exiting the dressing room and closing the door behind her, muttering something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like, "Shit, I think I need a goddamn pair of glasses."

As soon as Shannon had left, what looked like Rusty's legs suddenly buckled and collapsed under her. Scarlet Rage's second guitarist quickly opened her trench coat, to reveal that she'd been sitting on Jericho's shoulders the whole time she'd been conversing with Shannon. Jericho dredged up what he hoped was a macho grin, cracking, "No offense or anything, Rust, but you need to seriously look into Jenny Craig." Rusty swatted playfully at the back of his head for his jibe, causing the blonde Canadian to quip in his best John Travolta imitation, "Would you just watch the hair!"

Once Shannon had left Rusty's dressing room, the dark-haired drummer walked a couple of paces away before stopping and pulling a joint out of her jeans pocket, trying to light it with no success whatsoever. Finally, she grew fed up and tossed both joint and lighter into a nearby trash can, before getting ready to stalk off--presumably in the direction of the stage--and promptly bumping right into Sean O'Haire. The force of the impact caused Shannon to bounce off his muscular chest, but just as it looked like she was about to regain her footing, Test happened to walk by, too engrossed in Torrie Wilson's Playboy pictorial to watch where he was going and unwittingly bouncing Shannon back into O'Haire.
"Fuck you!" Shannon screeched indignantly, as she bounced off of O'Haire and back into Test, then back into O'Haire, then Test, then O'Haire, until the poor drummer was ping ponging back and forth between the two muscular wrestlers like some ridiculous and angrily cursing monkey in the middle. Finally, Shannon managed to stop all the madness, when the amount of vodka and cocaine in her bloodstream combined with all the bumps she'd taken to her head to knock her out cold just as she bounced once again into O'Haire. The ex-Devil's Advocate smirked and stroked his goatee as he reached over to gallantly catch the unconscious dark-eyed Rager before she fell, cocking an eyebrow and boasting, "Yep, I just seem to have that effect on women."

While Rusty had been sneaking around with Jericho and Shannon was serving as O'Haire and Test's human ping pong ball, the Innovator of Mattitude had been bullied into looking for one Raven Emerald, since Stephanie's logic deduced that the dark-haired bassist would be most likely found schmoozing with Matt's younger brother. The older Hardy Boy stomped without hesitation toward the candy machine, where he found with no problem Raven and Jeff, the latter carefully painting a little pink flower on the former's cheek. Matt pointedly cleared his throat, so startling his brother that the more colorful Hardy's hand jumped and he wound up smearing a big glob of glow-in-the-dark pink paint across Raven's cheek.
"Honestly, some hot girls just have the worst taste in men," Matt complained under his breath, rolling his eyes at the two lovebirds. As Jeff hurriedly went to work on wiping away the paint he'd coated over Raven's face, the latter began gushing enthusiastically about all the wonders that were Jeffrey Nero Hardy, causing his older brother to roll his eyes in disgust.

Unlike Matt, who'd managed to find a member of Scarlet Rage in less than five minutes, John had fared pitifully as far as his search went, managing to stumble across frontman Deron Cutler with Stacy Keibler only when he'd decided that he'd had enough of searching and needed to pee. John had then found Deron chatting Stacy up by a column across from the restrooms, standing up on tiptoes to match her height and bragging about all his sexy stage moves.
"Yo, your whole band's supposed to go on in less den twenty minutes," John informed the blonde Miami native, who grinned carelessly and chirped, "Cool, guess Cruise better come out of the bathroom, then." John's eyebrows snapped up at those words, as he echoed incredulously, "She's been in da bathroom all dis time!" Deron shrugged, as though he saw nothing peculiar in that particular decision.
"Sure, isn't that where you were going, anyway?" he asked simply, before returning to the giggling Stacy and bragging loudly about how he had the best tan out of all the other rock frontmen in the industry. John removed his backwards baseball cap to scratch absently at his short-cropped dark hair, admitting with somewhat reluctance, "Well, yeah--but not da women's bathroom! Dat'd be wack!"
"Oh, no, it's okay, feel free to go in and join her," Deron turned his attention from Stacy long enough to reassure John, adding helpfully, "Everybody barges in on Cruise when she's in the bathroom, anyway! Go ahead, it's not like she'll throttle you for it or anything." John's eyes widened when he heard those words, muttering something under his breath about how the whole band was wack...but that didn't stop him from taking Deron's advice and going into the women's restroom.

Once inside, he had no problem locating Camryn sitting on the marble-topped sink, casually smoking a cigarette while a pair of headphones, which had slid down from her ears to around her neck, blasted AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long" loud enough for John to hear all the way across the room from her. Camryn stared up at the rapper from inside a haze of smoke, narrowing her eyes as though to try and focus them on his face as he began tentatively, "Your band's going on in fifteen...Are you really smoking in da bathroom?" Camryn shrugged his question away, as though what she was currently doing was the most natural pre-show activity in the world.
"Sure, why not? It's more private in here." She then tilted languid emerald eyes in his direction, asking seductively, "Why do you find that so hard to relate to? Haven't you ever done it in a bathroom before?"
"Eeep..." John swallowed hard, continuing to gawk as she uncrossed her long legs and stood up, nonchalantly putting out the burning tip of her cigarette before tossing it into the trash. Straightening out her clothes and picking up her guitar--a sleek, wine-colored PRS which had been lying carelessly on the sink--Camryn pushed past John and walked out, flashing him another suggestive smile as though to extend an invitation about "doing it" in the bathroom together some time in the future.

Outside, Deron was still bragging and showing his stage moves to Stacy, who would giggle and clap her hands after each demonstration.
"And this is my favorite move," Deron was saying, grabbing a beer can and holding it in his right hand like a microphone. "Basically, I take the mike off its stand and then sort of drop it below my waistline, catching it right in front of you-know-what--" here he paused and winked good-humoredly, before continuing--"while simultaneously (whoa, big word!) using my hips and legs to thrust forward in a short, fast grinding movement. The ladies go absolutely nuts for that move, if I do say so myself. Make sure you look out for it during our performance tonight, all right?" As Stacy nodded and smiled, Deron began tossing his beer can from one hand to another, admitting with a frown, "Of course, that move would look even better if done by someone with really long legs. Someone like you, Stace. I'll teach it to you later, if you want, but right now--"

Just then, Camryn happened to exit the restroom, with John following closely behind, and Deron's eyes lit up as he said cheerfully, "Oh, how convenient. Cruise, come here a minute and show our loyal fans the Raging Grind." Camryn shrugged, before obligingly crossing over to the center and demonstrating the same move Deron had performed just a short while earlier. John goggled wide-eyed at the sight, causing Stacy to roll her eyes and sneer, "Men: you're so easily turned on by these little things, aren't you?"

At that moment, the announcer's voice was heard all the way from the main stage, as he introduced Vinyl Act's headliners with a loud cry of, "Ladies and gentlemen, straight from detox, here's our final band, Scarlet Raaaaaaaaaaage!" John and Stacy turned around to stare at Deron and Camryn, demanding incredulously at the same time, "Straight from detox?" Deron shuffled uncomfortably under their combined disbelieving glares, bringing his hands up and defending himself, "Hey, don't look at me, the most I've ever had is a couple of shots!" All three then turned to shift their attention to Camryn, who glared irritably at all the questioning looks she was getting before shrugging and muttering, "Which detox? I've been packed off to so many of them, it's become rather hard to keep track of their names."

The sober members of the little group were about to fall down in frustration, when at that moment the various other members of Scarlet Rage emerged. Rusty was the first one to scuttle over, smoothing down her hair and silently hoping that nobody would get too suspicious if they realized she was now wearing Jericho's clear silver-tinted sunglasses pushed up her coffee-colored locks. She flashed everyone a guilty smile, just as Shannon came into view. The heavy metal drummer was only now regaining her consciousness, and was being supported by a smirking O'Haire, at the same time that Raven and Jeff bounced over, happily holding hands while Matt behind them muttered something about how the dysfunctional couple couldn't be pried apart with crowbars. As Raven continued to bubble about how her darling Jeffykins's favorite Skittles flavor was orange, Scarlet Rage gathered its members together and collectively stumbled off toward the main stage.

John and Stacy gaped after the disappearing backs of the five hard rockers, then exchanged wary looks.
"Yo, lemme get dis right," John began. "Dem wackos are our main act, right?" Stacy sighed, flipping back her long blonde hair as she gave an averse nod.
"Unfortunately, yes," she admitted. John frowned at those two words.
"Man, we'll be deader den Vanilla Ice's career if dey continue to headline!" he complained, a vivid image running through his head of the venue up in flames while the members of Scarlet Rage happily led the crowds in a Woodstock-worthy riot.
"Word life," Stacy agreed tersely.