Chapter Text
Robert couldn’t get the sight out of his head.
Brown hair that had been soaked in darkened red blood, all pooled around her body. Soft brown eyes that had just started to regain some bits of their life to them, then blank, unfocused; pupils blown wide in one eye and pinprick in another. Her glasses still perched on her nose with a broken lens on the left side where her head had landed on the floor. But of course the largest offense in the room being the wide swaths of blood that had been sprayed onto the walls, all of which a blood expert in their team had determined had come from her very own neck - skin slashed open in two swipes - and one final desperate scribble from her finger dipped in blood. That final message asked - begged - a simple request for whoever found her.
Don’t look at the camera footage of my death, or the picture I got.
“Yo, Robbie, you alive in there?”
Robert knew pretty well it had to have been Sonar who was waving both a hand in front of his face and asking that. No other of his Z-Team really gave him nicknames like that one, and also for the obvious fact that Sonar had been the one team member he had taken along for this mission. For good reason; the amount of danger would be extremely small for him.
“Just thinking,” Robert mumbled simply behind his hand that idly rubbed his stubble now that his mind was split in two thoughts. One was on Sonar with his silly tilt of his large bat ears like he was an expressive dog, the other on the vivid death - the way her writing was sloppy, simply because she didn’t have the liberty of another go at the letters.
“See, that’s kinda what I was worried about anyway,” Sonar continued on as he inelegantly threw himself onto the other side of the couch Robert sat on. The movement was so abrupt it shifted Robert even though in his non-monstrous form Sonar probably weighed as much as he did. “Mal and Blazer were worried about you thinking about things too much in your head anyway. Even Visi and Flambae told me to knock you out of those thoughts if I could tell they were there, and you know it’s bad when those two have to point it out.”
Robert didn’t respond to that. The team had clued into his typical denial methods so even the more oblivious members of the team (yes that included Sonar, but don’t tell him otherwise his feelings get hurt) knew them off by heart. And the opposite, admitting something was wrong?… Well, he never really had that luxury outside of Chase. And even with that, it was quite second nature to just bury it deeper until he could focus on hero work that needed him right that second.
And so, his mind just went back to Victoria’s death. What a shitty turn of events to happen to someone, Robert thought to himself. Just barely surviving your entire lab filled with countless monsters and anomalies - the sight of red she hadn’t managed to wipe away from around her mouth when their coalition had found her trapped in a freezer, the remnants of clothes, viscera and bones pushed up against her side - not long after being dragged through a portal to the very group of people their coalition had been formed to catch.
Robert had just barely managed to crash his way through the portal himself just before it closed, and laid eyes on the man who had started it all… Frankly, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Khan decided that he and Victoria were hero and victim respectively, he didn’t know what would have happened to them both. Victoria had gone with them willingly, but seemed irked when villains around them murmured that Robert would be a handy hostage. She angrily demanded that they both be returned unharmed back to the coalition, and to Robert’s endless surprise Khan… Complied and ordered their safe return.
Robert didn’t fully understand why Khan allowed that. He even more didn’t understand why Victoria - dead eyed and angry at the universe after what happened to her and her colleagues at the SCP foundation - so easily changed her mind when Robert was the one in danger. Maybe it was just something as simple as a desire to not see someone come to harm who had been kind to you already.
He had hoped it was a sign that Victoria would want to find that kind of meaning again. The desire to live, a purpose that extended beyond the anger that she had used to survive.
All of that, just to end up dead a few days later. Robert was still livid about it; it wasn’t fucking fair.
Now the anger that had festered in her had passed onto him, and it felt like it wouldn’t leave until he found out who had killed her.
“Seriously?” Sonar knocked Robert out of his funk, both literally and figuratively by smacking his shoulder roughly and by talking into his ear loudly. Sonar already had a tendency to talk louder if nobody else was doing so, just to make his echolocation more clear to his senses. Robert far preferred it when he would chirp or whistle instead to get the same effect. “I can tell when you’re getting all moody and broody; you cross your hands in front of your face like the world’s most stereotyped supervillian.”
“I wasn’t doing that,” Robert grumpily said as he removed his interlocked fingers from each other. He was doing that, it was another of his bad habits. Not like he didn’t have a million of those already.
“C’mon Rob, don’t shut yourself off from me,” Sonar softly asked of him, and a good portion of Robert’s anger settled again. He wasn’t mad at Sonar, and he had frankly gone along with everything Robert had asked of him to find Victoria’s killer. With a sigh, Robert tried to let his shoulders untense and to clear his mind.
“...You’re right,” Robert quietly mumbled his agreement, and Sonar naturally only chimed in with a ‘of course I am’. “Seen any sign of our would-be guide yet?”
“Not a single hair.”
Their investigation into Victoria’s death led them to send in Sonar; someone who quite literally could not behold what was on the picture she had received in the mail. He was able to feel that it was glossy like a picture, and that it was the average size of one too, but nothing more concrete because of the nontextured paper. It was only once he retrieved the outer slip of the letter that they realised it had been a very weird type of address that led it to her.
Rather than literally list an address or a name, the letter simply had written that it was to be brought to ‘SCP Staff’. Victoria had been rescued from her ordeal in the lab a week prior, and nobody outside of Khan seemed to have gotten wind that she even existed - let alone was alive. Whoever had given the mail had some form of supernatural ability to recognise who needed it, or they were the killer themselves.
The members of the coalition who pursued what happened to Victoria decided to investigate the first possibility, as they had no real evidence of the latter. Most members planets hadn’t heard of that particular tale, but when asked around in the council and the independent factions several returned a distinct possiblity.
A not all too uncommon function for those planets who had no form of real mail or electronic signals was a special supernatural being that most referred to as ‘the white rider’. If you rung a bell that shone with a soft white glow, he would appear wherever you managed to be and would take your mail to the intended recipient regardless of how long it took or how far they were.
One family had given Robert their bell to help find out more, and the white rider came the moment he rang it in the middle of their space station. A distant bike bell was all they heard before around a corner of the station a similarly white glowing man seemed to pedal on in.
Robert remembered feeling slightly uneasy around the rider. Considering how absurdly skinny they seemed to be - bones sharply jutting out from skin that barely seemed to not rip apart when he moved - one could wonder whether the rider even was alive anymore or simply continued on out of some darker power they had no knowledge of.
To top it off, the rider only seemed to wear a thick layer of bandages around its torso, legs, hands and parts of his face. Only some vague bits of black hair stuck out from the top of the head, and Robert tried not to cringe when the rider grinned an unnaturally toothy grin at him. It probably was impossible to not have a toothy grin, what with the skin that taut that it seemed as if there were no lips to be had.
“What can I deliver for you?” The white rider asked, sounding chipper and not at all phased with the strange looks he received. Robert wondered whether the bandages across the body simply were for modesty (maybe he got complaints from his senders if he was naked?) as they certainly weren’t there to stop the constant soft white glow, that reminded the dispatcher of moonlight. The ends of the bandages even seemed to softly float upwards as if trailing towards the nearest celestial body.
“I’m not really here to ask you to deliver something,” Robert said to the rider, but pressed his foot against the front wheel to stop the rider from immediately leaving. “Instead, can you tell me about this particular letter?”
He realised as he held out the letter to the rider that it possibly was a foolish question; as the bandages over their face also extended firmly over where one would contain their eyes. The rider clearly couldn’t see like Sonar or hadn’t ever needed to.
“Ah, this one,” despite first impressions, all it took was the outer shell of the letter to land in the rider’s hands for them to recognise it. “I remember it quite well. Slightly unusual location compared to most others, and they had a bunch of them prepared. Only took the one though, didn’t need the others.”
“Who sent it?” Robert asked, but the rider waggled their finger and tutted at him.
“I don’t get names of who sends the letters. And even if I did, it would certainly make me a poor mailman to tell everyone who asked,” the white rider began to say.
“You’re not a doctor; mailmen don’t have a version of HIPPA,” Sonar snarkily interrupted.
“But I can certainly tell you where I got it from,” he continued, as if expecting the interruption.
Although appearing supernatural in nature, the white rider knew well enough about coordinates to give an exact location. A precise planet not too far out from a council run planet, deep within the dirt and earth. Further investigations showed that it wasn’t just a random location underneath the surface; it was a semi-well known cave system that had been recognised as too dangerous to travel for most untrained civilians.
With the rest of the coalition always away on missions, Robert ran ahead with Sonar and promised they would take proper precautions to come back safe to the rest there. And that meant getting a professional caver to lead them in and out safely.
The international space cavers association (ISCA) didn’t have all too many trained members, and even less who were willing to take absolute novices into a cave system. Their first sign of approval had come from one caver who had simply titled herself in the system as ‘Kelly’. Most of the others had extra awards or qualifications they showed off on their profile, but she simply had her name and the amount of successful caves she had gone through. Around six hundred, which made her the fifth most experienced caver there out of the total of twenty seven.
Robert had always believed in proving who you were with actions rather than fancy titles or words, so he decided that she was the safest caver guide they were going to get. However, nearly a few hours after they were supposed to have started suiting up, she hadn’t yet arrived. Robert was starting to wonder whether she was a bad choice for the mission.
Sonar’s ears turned heavily at the sound of a door sliding open, and he chirped softly under his breath to get an idea of who exactly had entered the room they were waiting in. This in itself was enough to clue Robert in even more than the sound of the door opening, and he turned his head to see… A space helmet that stared back at him.
Whoever had entered the room was fully equipped in what the two of them could only describe as an astronaut suit. The helmet looked very much like the kinds that their planet would have used to walk on the moon several years back, tinted a dark blackish blue to block out most of the light in the room. Was it supposed to work like a pair of sunglasses?
“I apologise for showing up like this, but considering I was running late I thought this would speed up the process a lot,” the person inside the suit pressed a button on the outer edges of their collar which made their voice speak out of a speaker located on the outside of the suit. “I was told you wanted to descend into Gamma-163 which is a pretty safe system, but I looked at the coordinates and realised they got it wrong. Quebec-55 is a pretty dangerous one, did you get told that?”
“...We were told it was not recommended for untrained civilians,” Robert found his voice a few seconds after realising this really was how they were going to be introduced to each other. Sonar right next to him muttered how would have preferred to see their guide’s face before going into danger with them, but he was placated with a gentle pat to his thigh from Robert.
“What they meant by that is that going in there without a proper suit on like mine will be very dangerous,” their guide continued, and gestured length wise to the full light blue astronaut suit. It seemed bulky and sturdy at the legs and waist, but seemed to narrow at the arms and hands to allow for precise movements. “There’s microbes in the air that are poisonous for your lungs in the long term, and any heat produced by your body will attract tunnelers to your location - which you definitely want to avoid. But with a suit on, it should be relatively without incident.”
Sonar chittered again, but only got the general shape of the cave suit once more. As much as he would have liked it, he wasn’t going to get more than that.
“Have you taken people through cave systems before?” Robert nervously asked her, as his hand rested over his lungs. It really had been good that he hadn’t tried to charge in with just the Mecha-Man suit or with Sonar’s monster form.
“A few times before,” she admitted as she typed a message onto the far console of the room; a message to inform her fellow cavers when they were going to depart and when they expected to arrive back in case they were late for either. Truth be told she already had to change the start time; she really wanted to make sure there wasn’t any other kind of danger that hadn’t been told to her or the two people she was going to be in charge of, so most of her time had been spent on that. “Most people get frightened off with the mention of suits and danger.”
Robert remembered well why he was going in there himself - Victoria’s fingers stained red from her last message - and threw the little bits of fears he had away. Sonar, he just wanted to be there to keep Robert safe, and because he knew his particular gift would make him the best man for the job.
“Okay, since I haven’t seemingly scared the two of you out of this, let’s get those suits on.”
Off in another room, it was filled with the pieces of suits and what seemed like endless hordes of electronics, bags of fluids and some strange form of mesh cloth. The two men didn’t have the slightest idea where to begin.
“Alright, so the first part of this transformation is that you’ll have to take off your pants and underwear,” Kelly very bluntly pointed out this information to the two men she was sizing up, before she put the first piece of suit she picked up back down. “No, you look more like a small in terms of legs.”
If it weren’t for the part about the underwear, Robert almost would have made a joke about how it seemed to be a trend for random women to ask him to strip. The thing that really stopped him was when his hands hovered over his waist, and Sonar noticed the pause as well. Robert didn’t really want to have to deal with some bigotry if it turned out their guide was prejudiced.
“...Why are we getting undressed exactly?” Robert tentatively asked, and noticed that Kelly hardly even turned her helmet back in their direction when she responded.
“Upper clothes are okay because the mesh cloth does most of the temperature regulation so that mostly comes down to comfort - but the bottom of the suit has a filtration system so pants and underwear get in the way for the fluids to pass into the system,” Kelly explained as she held an upper part of the suit and nodded in approval that it was the right size.
“We’re drinking our own piss?!” Sonar blurted out, and Kelly waved her suit hand casually in response.
“It gets filtered, don’t worry about that. All of the negative parts of urine get taken out and you can’t taste anything but water after the suit is done with it,” she continued just as easily. “Quebec-55 is a very deep system so we might be down there for days before we find what you are looking for. It’s far better to keep the pouches of glucose water for real emergencies, which shouldn’t happen if we all are safe.”
“Do you have different kinds of bottom suit parts depending on what gender the person is?” Robert poked a little closer to the subject, which finally seemed to catch Kelly’s attention fully.
“We have various different suits for alien species and other beings, why?”
Robert sighed, but realised the quickest method would simply be to show her. His belt unclicked and a few popped buttons on his pants were enough for him to be able to shimmy both his pants and underwear down enough to show what the potential problem was.
“Oh, you’re trans,” Kelly was unfased by the sight, and turned to rifle through a different set of parts to adapt. “It’s no problem, we’ve definitely got a different attachment that’ll work better. I learned all about the different attachments when I first started caving.”
“And, uh- Mine’s also a bit different than usual,” Sonar nervously joined in before Kelly could grab the wrong one for him and have an awkward interaction later.
“Are you okay with showing me?” Kelly asked him, and Sonar somewhat more begrudgingly lowered his clothes. It was times like these that he liked having a thick layer of dark blue fur on his skin, lest the amount of red show on his cheeks like it did for Robert. “Ah, your penis is in a sheath facing upwards. That’s also fine, a Turian would often wear something similar, so I could use one of theirs.”
Robert and Sonar were far more comfortable once the suit pants had been put on - Kelly very professionally tucking the both of them into the parts of the suit that would recycle fluids - and the chest pieces were slid up and over their heads like the world’s largest type of hoodie.
“A lot of the buttons on the outer edge of your collar here change the internal display for the helmet, but frankly we should settle with the communication settings,” Kelly explained this part to them both as she firmly connected the chest piece to the pants Robert wore. Sonar felt along the collar of his suit, but found that the thick gloves of the suit made it difficult for him to tell how many buttons there were. “Because the tunnelers often react to heat we won’t be using much light, primarily the ping echolocation system that the suit automatically has on. Frankly the visual display of the helmet is more precise than we would be able to see with the lights on anyway.”
Sonar’s head slightly tilted to Robert the moment the word ‘visual’ came up, but Robert didn’t dare look back at him in case Kelly would notice. With the thick light blocking helmet already on Kelly, had she not seen that Sonar’s eyes were milky white; that he couldn’t see?
One of his fanged teeth lightly grazed his bottom lip in worry. Sonar definitely knew he had to go along, to keep Robert safe, and he had a heavy worry that mentioning his lack of sight would stop Kelly from taking them in. And so, because Robert said nothing Sonar simply copied him.
Sonar couldn’t help but hold his breath as Kelly fastened him into the suit. Now that she stood closer to him, would she notice something was off about him?
From the look of how her helmet was tilted, Kelly fastidiously was focused on making sure her two charges were safely strapped in. Once she was done fastening the chest, she shook both upper and lower part of the suit to double check they wouldn’t knock loose and nodded in satisfaction when they remained solid.
“And the last part, the helmet,” Kelly helped Robert into the last part first, and both men got front row seats to how she lowered the large dome over Robert’s head, and then let the helmet click once before she rotated it right a full rotation before it clicked again. With a sharp hiss, the helmet blocked off the atmosphere around it and Robert could feel the suit power up and cycle air around his head. “And here’s yours. Sorry about the ears, they’ll be a little bit squashed in this.”
Sonar, again, held his breath as the dome lowered over his head. The first click scared him far more than he expected it to, and the second one just felt like encroaching doom. Just as Robert’s had, it hissed and sounded like it started to flare into life as it removed itself from the outside world.
Sonar clicked his tongue, but his echolocation only returned the few centimetres left in front of his nose. He felt eerily warm already; claustrophobic. It didn’t help that the tops of his ears were slightly pushed down and would soon start to hurt ever so slightly, but consistently.
“The two most important buttons you have to keep in mind for this journey are these first two, starting from the leftmost,” the two of them could hear Kelly’s external microphone ever so slightly through the suit, which showed that they could at least hear something from outside of their suits. She waited patiently until both men raised their fingers and hovered over the buttons in question - Sonar had to pat with two fingers around awkwardly before he found the buttons. “The first one will activate the internal speaker for the two other helmets.”
“Hello?” Robert tried the first button. He couldn’t hear himself through the suit into theirs, but the slight jump from Sonar and Kelly’s helmet turning to him told him they had definitely heard him.
“Yep, you got it. It’s going to be our best way to communicate with each other in the dark because it travels a pretty sizable distance,” Kelly continued. Robert could just barely note in his green echolocation kind of display that her finger wasn’t pressed on the first button, but the second. Sonar’s helmet didn’t move at all; the visual display made a soft pinging noise that reminded him of a air radar, but it told him nothing else. “The second one is doing precisely what I am doing now; activating the external speaker. We can still talk to each other like this, but it’s not that great unless you’re trying to talk to someone outside of the suits.”
The explanation of the rest of the buttons flew Sonar by as he tried to remember where the first and second button were located. Changing the visual display made no difference to him. He just had to be able to talk to Robbie and he would be alright…
“Okay, let’s get underway then,” Kelly confirmed that they both understood, and then led the way. Sonar could hear her step by - the suit was loud enough to carry through the slight muffle - but it wasn’t much more than a general indication of where Kelly had been rather than where she was going or what direction.
“Robbie,” Sonar called for him successfully, and almost immediately he could feel another gloved hand take his right one.
“It’ll be alright; Kelly knows what she’s talking about here.” Robbie knew well that that was not the thing Sonar was worried about, but Sonar went along with it by nodding his head. “Come on, let’s follow her.”
With Robert to pull him along, the three fitted out explorers headed to the airship that would drop them off in front of the cave entrance. Sonar hated losing most of his senses - it made him feel like he had been defanged and declawed - and he clung tight onto Robert’s hand as his lifeline.
As the airship took off towards the surface of the planet, Sonar felt around with his foot until he found a set of feet that seemed far enough away that it couldn’t be Robert’s. There she was, as much as he could really behold of her in that moment.
“I’m Sonar by the way,” he finally found a time to introduce himself, although by the sounds of the outside of the suit he had pressed the wrong button by accident.
“And I’m Robert,” Robert followed suit a beat after his companion had. “The non-bat one, in case our voices aren’t distinct enough from each other.”
Robert noticed that Kelly’s suit seemed to move ever so slightly - a laugh? - before she pressed the first button to speak to them directly.
“Right, I was rushing so much I didn’t even introduce myself. As you probably guessed, I’m Kelly,” the two of them finally got to hear her say her name, and Sonar listened intently to the way her overal serious tone had turned a little more cheerful and friendly. “And for the record, you don’t have a thing to worry about as long as you’re with me. I know my stuff, and I look after my people well.”
Sonar couldn’t help but smile, right up until he remembered that neither of them could see what kind of face he was making. He couldn’t wait until they were out of the caves again and he could smile at her and Robert for real. He wanted to know what she looked like, her face through all of the little quirks she might have.
As for Robert, it felt like finding someone like him. Kelly was simultaneously very focused but was able to back up the kind of confidence she carried. He liked that about her.
To Kelly, the two of them were still quite the set of strangers. It was a strange kind of joy she felt when she saw that they held hands with each other when one was nervous. And sure, all they were were paying customers at that point, but Kelly had often been referred to as a ride-or-die by those that knew her. Unbeknownst to the three of them, that’d certainly come true on this trip.