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Benny always has his helmet on.
It wasn't really that much of a secret, practically anyone who looked at him could tell you that. A dark blue helmet that was cracked on the right side crawling upwards to the left. The vizor dark and shaded, no light shining from underneath.
He's been dared before to take it off and only teases the thought. He's heard people debate and start rumors over what he looks like under it. He laughs and jokes about it and encourages the humor to go on, but never shows any motive to remove it.
Benny always has his helmet on.
At least, that's what he leads people to believe.
Sometimes, late at night in his small, blue apartment, he finds himself in his bathroom. Alone with the faucet dripping rhythmically, beating the ends of the white marble at a steady, consoling pace and Benny can't bear to turn it off.
Can't face the silence.
His hands clutch the marble sink so hard his knuckles turn white under the pressure, masked by his azure gloves, tension rising through the arms into hunched shoulders.
And he does nothing.
Nothing but stare.
Hazel eyes stare back into him from the mirror. A sickening, addictive judgement forces him to keep looking. It's as intoxicating as it is poisonous and Benny can’t look away.
His eyebrows are weighed down over his eyes. Light oak brown streaks colour the bushy area over his eyes. They're pulled down and angry and Benny can't seem to pull them up.
Benny’s nose is somewhat small and compact. It's not a perfect button nose, don't get him wrong. It's crooked on the left and looks like a triangle when he stares to the side.
His lips are thin and chapped. Whenever he smiles or frowns a dimple appears in his cheek. It's small and only on one side, but it's there.
Overall, Benny’s face looks normal. A tan, freckled, hazel-eyed face that looks like it could belong to any 30-something year old person on the street.
The only thing that makes him stand out, however, is his scar.
A thick, light line cutting right over his face from the bottom of his left jawline over his lip, extending over his nose and to his right eyebrow. It's a few shades lighter than his tawny, freckled face and shines whenever you flash a light on it.
It's not that he's necessarily disgusted by it. If it were brought on by something different, anything different, he'd be fine with it.
It's the story behind it that drives him mad.
So he does nothing but stare.
Stare and remember.
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"How long is this mission going to be, exactly?" Benny asks, crossing his arms with a lean on his chair.
Peggy chuckles and mirrors Benny’s arms, eyeing the spaceman up and down.
"Why, cadet? Are you itching to get back home?"
Benny barks out a laugh and rolls his eyes.
"Oh please, I'm in no rush to get anywhere. Not like I have someone waiting for me anywhere."
The corporal shrugs offhandedly, letting the answer roll over.
"If you say so. The mission should be five years long. A deep space output to measure and learn about what seems like a colorful astral anomaly in space."
Benny squints. "You… mean a nebula?"
"No. This… thing doesn't behave like a nebula. We have sent drones and probes up there to figure out what it actually is but always end up losing connection. Anything we send up there either gets lost or somehow destroyed. All we know is that it's moving and it's unnatural. We need something stronger than a machine to figure it out."
She chuckles and shakes her head before continuing.
"I know it sounds like something out of a science fiction novel but that's what the cameras picked up and that's what we'll send you to check out."
Benny nods a little apprehensively. It's not the worst mission he's had.
"Alright so I'll contact my siblings and we'll get going?"
Peggy shakes her head, lips pursed.
"Jennifer and Kenneth Blu Chu are being sent off to another post close by. A relay station to pick up communications and send them back to command."
"Stuck with the ol' office job huh? Well, at least they know how to handle that task." He mumbles the last part to himself. It’s not often his siblings and him go on separate missions. They entered the academy together as kids and stayed that way as long as they could. As far as he was concerned, they were the true definition of a triple threat.
"I heard that, Benjamin. And don't worry, your job isn't something you've never done before. You'll be fine."
Benny waves his hand, motioning for her to continue and raises his brows.
"Oh yeah? What would that be, exactly?"
She picks up a blue spacesuit up from her seat (Benny’s pretty sure that seat’s never been sat on in it’s entire existence, given how often he finds the corporeal just hovering around it) and slams it on the steel table between them.
"Security."
Benny's face falls.
"What?! Peg, c’mon! I-I I'm a scientist! A pilot! I'm not even physically fit enough to even lift someone up in space, let alone Earth! I mean sure I could've done this what, three years ago when I was on the Intergalactic Command Station but not now! How the hell do you expect me to be security?!"
Peggy’s mouth curls into a smile as she picks up the suit from where she slammed it and lazily drops the spacesuit into Benny’s half-surprised half-offended hands.
"Well then, I suppose it's time to start training."
Benny groans and crumples his new suit under his grip, picking at the mission badge on the torso and arm.
"Careful with that, it's government property."
With a scoff, Benny rolls his eyes. "At the very least tell me who I'm supposed to be protecting."
She winks. "I'm glad you asked."
The corporal walks to the corner of the room and opens up the top cabinet on the side of the room. After a minute of shuffling she pulls out what seems to be six files. Slowly sauntering back to the table, she pounds the files to face Benny, who is flinching as she does so.
"These are your crewmates." She points to the first file, directing Benny to open it. A woman in a bright red spacesuit smiling at the camera. Her face is lightly freckled and her brown hair is as frizzled and bouncy as her personality. Benny isn't surprised she's an astronaut; her hair itself looks as though it's defying gravity.
"Your commander is Emilia Sullivan with you second in command, should anything happen to her-which it better not, security." She adds on and points her finger at Benny who chuckles and lowers her finger down.
She moves on to the next file. A young man with a white suit stands tall. His face is serious and clearly uncomfortable with the photo being taken and Benny can practically feel the insomnia rolling off of his face. Jeez the kid's eyes are practically screaming for a speck of sleep.
"This is your pilot. Name’s Harrison Glenn. Youngest pilot to come out of the Academy but top of his class. This'll be his first mission so I expect you to ease him into the job. Show him the ropes as the more experienced pilot."
Benny nods. The kid looks like he's barely hit his 20s and Benny, a Certified Adult, is immediately impressed at the kid’s ability. Hell, Benny didn’t even get his first assigned mission until he was 24. Now at 32, Benny can’t help but see his new pilot as a child.
Peggy pulls up another file. A dark-skinned woman smiles lightly at the camera. Her yellow suit seems slightly stained with something Benny sincerely hopes isn’t blood but she doesn't seem to pay it any mind.
"Your scientist, Sherry Jemison. She's messy with her work but she'll get the job done. Don't put it past her to try and experiment on you up there, though. She has a passion for the "unorthodox sciences" as she likes to put it."
Benny can take one look at her and he can already tell she would beat him up. She seems intelligent but spastic and he can't wait to meet her.
"Next up, your engineer."
A person with a blowtorch stands in front of an engine. They're smirking at the camera and even though their suit is black, Benny can see the smudge of grease and soot on their uniform.
"Kellin Shepard, our fastest engineer. They won a scholarship to Space University after rebuilding the most efficient rocket engine we've ever produced-The Minos 69- in under an hour. They're young but they're spunky."
Benny whistles. He remembers seeing the senior engineer team develop and constantly debate on how to produce enough of those to power all of the spaceships used. For a kid to be able to make one under an hour, they've got to be a genius.
“Your mechs pilot is Mary Ride. She’s strong, sufficient and aside from Commander Emilia, the most responsible person on the crew.”
“Hey, what about me? I can be responsible too!”
“Do you want me to bring up Operation Armstrong?”
Benny pauses. “.... point taken.”
The corporeal pulls out a picture of Mary. Her black hair pulled into a tight bun above her head. She has a stern expression on her face and she somehow manages to make her bright green suit look serious. Great, Benny thought, an uptight crew member to be stuck with for five years.
“And lastly,” she opens the last file. “Your communications officer, Leonard Borman.”
Benny gazes at the picture of the officer, starstruck.
His bright pink suit looks dull compared to the beaming grin on his face. A freckled, blue eyed angel is looking back at him and Benny desperately hopes he’s not blushing.
“One of our most hardworking recruits. Always an overachiever and optimist. Honestly, it’s a little grating. Nevertheless, I’m sure you’ll do just fine on the crew.”
Benny doesn’t say anything, still completely enamoured with the man in the photograph.
She clears her throat and repeats loudly, trying to garner Benny’s attention. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine on the crew!”
Benny looks up, “Hm? Oh! Yes, yes I’ll be fine, thanks for the mission.” He rambles.
She laughs and shakes her head, waving her hand around. “Alright, loverboy go get ready. You leave in three months.”
“Copy that, ma’am.”
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Launch day came in what felt like a flash.
One second he was walking out of his boss’s office and the next he’s in the ship getting ready to leave.
“Okay, everything on your ship operational?”
“Seems to be working just fine.” Harry speaks into the comms, his deep voice slightly shaking. Benny pats his hand on the boy’s shoulders and smiles at him. Harry looks back, surprise melting into gratitude.
The younger pilot puts his hand on top of Benny’s and nods, signaling Benny that he’s fine. With slight hesitance, Benny returns to his chair and buckles himself in.
“How’s the engine?”
“Top notch and ready for action.” Kelly announces while buckling into their seat.
“Emilia, is everyone on board and ready for liftoff?” Command asks.
“Everyone is here and accounted for, darling. We’re ready to go.”
“Are we ready to begin the countdown?”
Lenny sighs. “As ready as we’ll ever be.”
“Ten.”
Benny looks over at Lenny.
“Nine.”
He doesn’t notice him.
“Eight.”
He turns back.
“Seven.”
Benny picks at the logo on his suit.
“Six.”
No turning back now.
“Five.”
Yeah, five years with complete strangers.
“Four.”
Who knows what’ll happen.
“Three.”
Hopefully, it’s something nice.
“Two.”
Benny takes a deep breath.
“One.”
Here we go.
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Man, Peggy wasn’t kidding when she said it looked like aurora borealis.
A bright streak of green blended into yellows and greens cascading into soft blues and whites. It blazed across the open field of space as though it was searching for a place to land. A quiet spot to fall into. An end and a start to a new search.
Or maybe you searched through it. Like a tunnel or a portal into some new world. A discovery of new lands and beginnings and just as much a discovery of oneself.
Or maybe he’s just being unnecessarily poetic and needs to stop gazing out the window like an idiot and actually go take care of his belongings in time to start doing his job.
“Beautiful view, isn't it?”
Benny jumps and whips his hands in front of his chest, ready to fend off an attack, heart racing in his chest.
Sherry laughs besides him.
“Don’t do that! I could have knocked out your teeth just then.”
She chortles. “Good luck with that.”
Benny grumbles, crossing his arms.
Sherry gazes out into the window in front of them.
“You know, in all my time as a scientist I’ve never actually gotten to be this close to such an anomaly.”
Benny cocks his head to the side. “Really? How come?”
She shrugs. “Eh, I usually just get put in posts where I play doctor and confirm things we already know. It’s not often I get to actually research something, you know?”
Benny nods to the side. “I get that. I’ve been on so many missions where the only thing I did was point and say ‘Yep! That’s a moonrock!’”
Sherry guffaws and Benny has to fight himself to not start laughing too. “No, no I’m serious! That’s happened before! Maybe not as many times as I said but it has happened.”
“Oh yeah? What do you do now, O’ Great Rock Pointer?” Sherry teases between laughs.
Benny sighs before replying, his expression dropping and his voice monotone.
“Security.”
Sherry is quiet for a moment before she wheezes, her laughing picks up again.
“Oh yeah, it’s funny now but wait until the moment you’re in the crossfire and I won’t be there to save you.”
She wheezes and tries to call out to Benny, who just keeps walking away, trying to hide a smile.
The halls of the station are long and bright. Blue streaks of wires lined up against the grey and white of the steel surrounding the station.
Every so often he'd cross a poster with a president's face on it, each declaring a different rule to follow. It's nothing out of the ordinary but Benny has to wonder how they managed to bring that up here.
With a shrug he moved onwards and located his personal quarter.
It… wasn’t much. Not yet, at least.
The bed’s neatly prepared, a light blue bedsheet covering the mattress along with a blanket and a pillow. Near the bed is a small shelf compartment, with a guidebook to the ship, The Nielsen.
The door to the closet is locked and Benny’s pretty sure he can hear the gears of the steel contraption moving inside it. His bathroom is stocked with a tube of toothpaste and one toothbrush.
Benny sighs and lays down on the bottom bunk of his bed. It’s slightly too rough and sturdy and Benny knows it’ll be hell on his back but hey, at least the pillows are soft. He turns his head to the side.
The ship’s personal clock reads 6:51 PM. His patrols start soon. Well, better start unpacking.
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Benny wakes up to the sound of an alarm ringing in his ears. Startled, he bangs his head on the top of the steel bed and collapses on the floor. Why he chose to turn on artificial gravity the night before he’ll never understand.
“Alright, good morning happy campers! This is your commander speaking live from the Comms room. Today’s agenda involves the usual routine: Studying the nebula, talking shit about our other crewmates behind their backs, Beating each other up in the gym and repairing anything wrong with the ship.”
Benny let out an amused, half-asleep chuckle at the chipperness of her tone. Whether Emmy was an early riser or just never went to bed remained one of the biggest mysteries among the crew.
Six months in and the bets are still going on. Kelly and Harry are on Team Insomniac while Benny and Sherry are Team Early Riser. Mary refused to take part on account of it being "unprofessional" and "a waste of time" as if there isn't a bet going around about whether she's a human or not.
After getting dressed, Benny heads out to the kitchen, knowing he'll find his other crewmates already eating and probably stealing his food, the jerks…
"-so I told him 'Charles… buddy… nobody's going to murder you while you're fixing the ship what do we look like to you, animals?' And you know what Charles says?"
"No, Kellin I do not. What does Charles say?"
"He says-"
Benny cuts in.
"You might not look like animals but you all sure as hell smell and behave like them."
Mary and Kelly snap their heads towards Benny standing in the doorway, hands in his pockets.
Kelly brightens at the sight of the security officer. "Oh, Benny! Great timing. I was just telling Mary about my last mission."
Benny moves to sit at their table and twists a chair around to rest his hands on the back of the armrests. "So I heard. I'm surprised you didn't tell her this story earlier, to be honest. You've told it to me like a hundred times."
Kelly shrugs. "Yeah well… you're easier to talk to." They add on with a whisper. "Plus, Mary is kind of scary."
"I'm right here, you two." Mary deadpans, passing death glares between the two.
"Oh we know. But now that Benny's here I can just hide behind him when you try to kill me." They grin with a boop of their coffee cup on Mary’s arm.
"Way to abuse the security, Kell."
Their smile drops as they attempt to placate their mistake. "Oh no, I didn't mean it like that I just meant it as a joke-"
Benny waves them off with a simper. "I know, I know, I was just teasing."
They sigh in relief. “Haha yeah, I knew that.”
Benny silently snickers, moving onto his query. "So Mary, what're your plans for today? Other than y'know.. Sulking around."
Mary’s face scrunched up as if the bare concept has personally offended her and stolen all of her belongings. "I do not sulk."
"You kinda do." Kelly defends, swirling their drink lazily.
"No I do not- you know what? It doesn't matter. Why do you want to know, Benjamin? Think I can't handle myself alone?"
In truth, Benny is lonely. Patrols usually involved just walking (or floating when the artificial gravity was turned off to save on power) around the station or just standing outside or near someone doing their tasks.
The problem was that everyone is good at performing said tasks and prefers to work alone most of the time so Benny never had to help or defend someone in case of an emergency. On most nights the best entertainment he could get was finding spelling errors in the rule posters.
Instead of revealing all of that, he says: "Just wondering."
Mary eyes him up and down before shrugging into a groan.
"Alright, you can join me today. I can practically hear you whining in your head."
Benny jumps from his chair and claps, which Kelly bursting out in laughter from.
"Don't get too excited, Blue Chu. You're just going to be standing guard while I do my more… let's say, flammable tests."
Benny pumps his fist in the air, speaking with enough gusto to knock out a Shakespearean actor. "I'll do anything to get away from the same old patrols around the ship!"
If he looks closer, Benny could almost see Mary's lip quirk into the smallest remnants of a smile.
"Now, don't go on and say that. You don't want me to report your detestment for your job to our commander, now do you?" She teases lightheartedly.
Benny theatrically guffaws. “As if she doesn't already know."
Mary rolls her eyes and with a shake of her head gets up. Benny can practically hear her internal whining lecture on the importance of professionalism that everyone seems to lack on the ship.
"Alright, Benjamin let’s move."
Benny points to the fridge and stutters. "But I didn't even eat yet!"
"Then you shouldn't have spent your time blabbering. Are you coming with me or staying here." She gives no indication of it being a question.
He throws his hands up.
"I'm coming, I'm coming."
She nods and turns to walk out the door, Benny following behind her.
Quickly he mouths to Kelly 'You can get me some food at the door right?'
They give him a thumbs up, sipping their coffee with reckless abandon.
Benny nods and delivers a near-inaudible “Thank you!” before jogging to catch up to Mary.
The walk is silent. Mary neither makes a move to start a conversation nor spares a glance at Benny at her side. The only sound to be heard is the constant whirring of the ship, the breathing of the two. Benny's especially. (Courtesy of a Certain-Operation-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named) and the clanking of their boots against the steel floor.
Benny sighs and desperately racks his brain for a conversation topic that Mary would want to engage in.
He's got nothing.
Mary's always been a little bit more on the independent side of the crew, very much a loner crewmate. The only time she's ever willingly spent time with someone and actually seemed to enjoy it was during mealtime and even then she seemed tired of any conversation two minutes after it started.
Dammit, why did he have to get stuck with two hermits for pilots?!
The walk to the workshop seemed to pass by in no time.
Mary unlocked the door with a quick, swift entry of her door’s code numbers and calmly entered what seemed to be a green-lit wonderland.
Fluorescent lights bounced off of nails stuck to the walls, hanging a seemingly never ending array of motivational cat posters. Under them, on the tables sprawled blueprints with differing sizes and very apparent eraser dust on them (along with at least ten snapped pencils, Benny notes) showing plans for new vehicles and robots. Red wires dangled from the ceiling, some exposed and some not. Power tools are scattered across the floor and tables alike. It was a mess of invention and science.
At the very least, it’s wonderland to Benny.
He whistles, impressed. "Love the whole theme going on here. I can’t believe I've never been in here before."
Mary raises her eyebrow.
"I mean, I've seen the outside and, like, had a peek of what it looked like on cameras, sure but I've never really stepped in." He says, poking one of the dangling wires.
"Is it not part of your job as security to make sure everything is safe?"
Benny stammers, slowly letting go of the wire. "I mean sure, I keep the general stuff secure but I don't usually delve into other people's work. Feels wrong. Invasive, y’know?"
"Well, now you're about to. I've been putting off this task for God knows how long but I have to get it done. Considering how much more experimental this job is, I need your help." Mary explains, walking to one of the tables in the room.
Benny scoffs and mumbles. "Right. Just another punching bag job."
"Do you want to be here or not." She seethes.
Benny puts his hands up and strides to her.
On the table is something Benny can only define as a mess. Jumbled wires, antennas reaching to every direction, some weird flashing red-green lights and Benny can barely see the box they're attached to under it.
"So… this is… interesting."
"It's a personal communications device. I only managed to nab a few pieces of information from Leonard to create it, hence the instability and uncertainty of this project.”
Benny blinks.
“Why would you need a personal one? Any message that needs to be sent can be done-’’
“It’s not for business, Benjamin.”
“So what? Like any of us actually use the comms professionally. Lenny’s pretty much the most talented communications officer Cape Space ever hired! If there’s any message you need to send- even to someone outside C.S.- he can manage it!” Benny cheers with a smiling defense of his comms officer.
“That’s not the issue, Benjamin.”
“Oh, yeah? Then what is?”
Mary casts her eyes down and puts away the screwdriver she was holding. She sighs and whispers, her voice breaking with emotion.
“I want to talk to my wife again.”
Benny’s eyebrows shoot up, almost reaching his hairline.
“Your wife?”
Mary nods sharply once. Not daring to make a single bit of eye contact with Benny.
“I didn’t even know you were dating anyone, not even to mention married! What’s she like?” Benny asks excitedly, leaning over the table.
Mary’s face is caught in a crossfire between scowling and distrust, if Benny were to look closer he might have even seen a hint of fear in her eyes.
“You’re…. alright with it?” She crosses her arms.
“With what, being married? I mean I personally love the idea of marriage and how glamorous it can be but I get that others don’t-”
She stutters at his response. “Marriage?- no. Let me clarify.”
Benny motions for her to go ahead, slightly confused.
“You’re alright with me being… gay?”
Benny stares at her in silence.
She stares back waiting for an answer.
He curtly breaks into squeaking laughter and doubles over where he stands, clutching the ends of the table for support to stay somewhat upright.
Mary’s face goes red as she slaps Benny in the arm. He lightly waves her handoff and tries to collect himself, shoulders still shaking from suppressed chuckles.
“Sorry, I’m sorry for laughing, it’s just… why wouldn’t I be? I’m literally gay and I’m pretty sure there’s not a single straight person on this ship. You have no reason to be afraid of coming out to any of us, especially not me.”
Her body begins to relax as she processes this new information, tension visibly alleviating from her neck and shoulders..
“Well… I did notice your inclinations to ogle at our communications officer during meetings and dinners. I had assumed you were interested in his line of work but now I can see the truth.”
Benny hands her the screw she was using before she stopped working, to which she handles and begins tinkering with the device, letting her continue with her small tirade of piecing together… something.
“You’ve become infatuated with our dear Leonard.”
Benny almost slips from the table he’s leaning against. He stutters and chuckles.
“Infatuation Is a strong word there, Mary.”
“Is it the wrong word?”
Benny groans.
“...No.”
Mary smiles and hands him a pair of lab goggles.
“That’s what I thought. Now put these on and follow me to the back. There’s an electric grid I need in there that happens to be slightly temperamental.”
Benny rolls his eyes and slips on the goggles, waving his arm to the even more dimly lit pathway to the back.
“After you, glorified engineer.”
“Call me that again and I will break your arm.”
Benny laughs.
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If there’s one thing Benny enjoyed doing, it definitely wasn’t outside repairs to the rocket engine.
Sure, the scenic view of a spaceship in aphelion to a nebulous astronomical anomaly is great, but boy does it get annoying to fix metal in space with screws that happen to be constantly floating away from you.
Thankfully, he didn’t have to do it alone this time. With this post being Harry’s first mission (and Benny’s most boring post to date. Trust him, he’s keeping track) he needed someone to help settle him into the job.
And Benny happily obliged to do just that.
It wasn’t very hard, the kid took to the job like a glove. The hard part was getting him to socialize.
“So, Harry. You know what kinda engine we got on this baby?” Benny says with a pat onto the hollow metal of the station.
“I… don’t remember. It’s one of the Minos engines, right?” He mumbled, not particularly interested in where any bit of the conversation was going.
Before Benny could reply a voice rang out from the speakers inside his helmet.
“Oh, it’s not just a Minos engine. It’s a Minos-69, baby! The most complicated engine Cape Space had ever seen! You know, I once built it-” Kell’s voice shouted to the comms before they presumably got pulled back from the intercom.
“I’m so sorry about them, they somehow managed to break into the comms room again even though I changed the lock code twice and- Kell, no! Don’t you dare touch that button!” The feedback cuts off as Lenny pounced after Kelly.
Benny and Harry stared at each other with dumbfounded expressions, quietly snorting at the antics of their engineer.
The two returned to a (un)comfortable silence. God, Benny hates the quiet.
Taking a deep breath, Benny tries again. “How’s the job treating you, man? Piloting’s fun right? Especially with a station this size.”
Harry does a quick double take at being addressed before going back to work. He mutters a soft reply.
‘Oh?- uhm, good. It’s been good.”
“You sure? Everything going okay in your area?”
“It’s been fine.”
Benny nods his head, internally screaming over the kid’s unresponsiveness.
“Must be pretty cool to pilot us closer to the nebula every day.”
“Yeah… guess so.”
Benny groans and sighs.
"Come on, Harry; why won't you talk to me?"
"Dunno. Just don't feel like it."
"Harry, buddy, you gotta open up at some point. It's been over six months and you haven't ever said anything to us unless it's part of your job. The only time I've ever seen you smile was during liftoff!"
"Doesn't Mary do the same thing?"
"Well, she actually talks with us on occasion! You'd know that if you actually hung out with us every once in a while."
Harry stays silent and Benny wishes he could see what's going on in the kid's head.
If Mary had been antisocial, Harry is a chronic shut-in. Benny can't even recall seeing him enter his quarters. The kid practically spends all his time piloting the ship and making sure they stay on course.
Well, Benny is nothing if not a good friend. Whether anyone likes it or not.
"Alright, Emmy pull us back in."
"Can do, sweet-pea."
Benny shakes himself from his thoughts and gathers himself and his tools.
Let's see, what did he bring out here? Drill, nails, blowtorch that somehow works in space, extra rope in case one snaps, even more nails and one screwdriver that also functions as a hammer, and one instruction manual. Seems like everything.
Harry pushes himself off of the rocket and lets the rope pull him back towards the hull door, Benny following closely behind.
Once the two reach the door, Emmy’s already there waiting to bring them in and help them unpack. While putting everything back, Sherry came through the door.
“Did y’all see anything weird out there?”
Emmy called out from the suit storage “Weirder than usual or our normal ‘nebulas-don’t-look-like-this-why-is-it-moving-so-fast’ weird?”
"Weirder than usual. The nebula seems to be spinning around. Not as in its orbiting anything, it's rotating around itself.”
“Didn’t we already know that it was spinning?”
“Moving around itself, sure. But this isn’t orbiting anything. Unless we can get closer to the inside of the nebula and see if there’s any trace of a star or some sort of planet it can orbit around I doubt it’s just spinning. Hell, I’ll take a black hole at this point.”
Emmy sighs and faces Harry. “You think you can bring us closer?”
Harry tries to hide his wince. “I mean… I can try. Probably’ll need more power down in the engines to keep from lunging into the gravitational field.”
“I’ll tell Kelly on my way back to the lab. It’s a good thing we just finished repairing one of the rockets, huh?”
Harry nods, the slightest peek of a smile on his face.
“As soon as we finish everything here I want you and Benny on it, alright?” Emmy addresses Harry, in her strange commanding way.
“Yeah alright.” Benny shrugs.
Harry stammers. “W-why Benny as well? I can handle things.”
Emmy smiles. “I know, sweetie, but the glass panel lost its protective layer three weeks ago, remember? We only just installed the new one and with no offence to Lenny and Sherry, but I don’t trust their installation abilities as much as I trust yours. Staying on track is not their strong suit.”
“Hey!”
Emmy sticks her tongue out and winks at Sherry, who grins back before continuing.
“Just in case anything happens and the glass breaks I don’t want you to be sucked into space and trust me, I’ve spooked Benny enough times before to know his reflexes are fast.”
“Unnecessary way of learning that.” Benny mutters under his breath.
Emmy waves him off. “Either way, it’d be good to have extra protection in case of an emergency.”
“I guess.” Harry grumbles.
Sherry mock salutes the three and turns to leave, screaming a muffled ‘Thank you!’ coming from the hall.
“Let’s get a move on, boys! I want this to be done before dinner.”
In just a quick few minutes, Benny and Harry already made their way to the pilot controls.
Harry said nothing as he sat down in the pilot’s seat and began flipping switches and twirling nonsense numbers onto the controls. Benny sat down beside him and fiddled his fingers, staring out into the window pretending to inspect the glass.
“Here we are, once more.”
Harry raises an eyebrow at the security’s vague sentence.
“We’ve returned to the awkward, stunted silence.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” Harry muttered.
“Well, you can tell me what things I can do to help you, for starters.”
Harry grunts under his breath something that sounds suspiciously like ‘Nothing better to do’. Benny sighs and leans back in his chair.
“If you think you’re all good then go ahead. Do your thing. I won’t stop you.”
Harry groans and returns to work. After five minutes of buttons and keyboards clacking the ship starts moving.
Harry turns on the intercom and states:
“Approaching the nebula’s outer field, twenty five meters.”
From within the engine room Kelly’s voice crackles in. “Copy that, Hare-bear. Need an extra boost from the rockets yet?”
Harry blushes at the nickname, looking down as if to avoid eye contact with the speaker and responds. “Not yet. Also don’t call me that.”
“Just tell me when to give the ol’ engine an extra hand and I’ll do it. Also no, you can’t stop me from using the nickname.” Kelly says.
“It’s not professional.”
“Get over yourself, Hare-bear. None of us care about professionalism except for like, maybe Mary but even then! I mean just look at this conversation that we’re having now!”
Out of nowhere, Mary's voice jumps into the conversation.
"I resent that."
Benny snickers from his seat. Harry turns to glare at him and Benny whips his head so quickly to the other side he could feel a pop.
“Okay, but what if Lenny doesn’t like this conversation and decides to cut comm lines?”
A third voice speaks.
“Oh no by all means continue your shenanigans. I am having the time of my life here.”
Sherry responds.
“God, I know right?”
Benny shakes in his chair, his face red from suppressing his laughs.
“Come on, guys, let's give our pilot some slack. He deserves it.”
That was Emmy.
Harry screams into the mic. “Have-have all of you been eavesdropping on this line?!”
A silence falls across the ship before the whole crew simultaneously respond, apprehensively and smug.
“No?”
Harry stutters and blushes. “Go back to work!”
Benny wheezes and falls off of his chair, his breath coming in short gasps while his whole body shakes with laughter.
“Okay nevermind he just lost his slacking privileges. Harry, you just lost your slacking privileges. I’m the only one who gets to boss people around here.”
“Don’t you have something better to do?” Harry exasperatedly whines and pinches his nose.
“Other than teasing you via intercom? Nope.”
He crosses his arms and mumbles. “This isn’t teasing, it's bullying.”
At this point, Benny is on the ground wheezing silently. Tears gather in his eyes as he attempts to grasp at his chair and climb back up.
“Increasing ship speed by 37%!” Harry yells. Whether it’s a smile on his face or a scowl nobody will be able to tell.
The ship rocks forward abruptly, sending Benny under the controls and the rest of the crew cursing through the comms.
“Alright, alright we’ll stay quiet for now. But that doesn’t mean we won’t listen in!” Emmy beeped herself out of the line and the rest followed suit, each with their own little goodbyes.
And then there were two.
Benny climbed back into his seat and took a deep, shaky breath.
Rolling his shoulders back and clearing his throat, Benny asks Harry.
"How close are we getting, Hare-bear?" He says, not bothering to hide a grin.
"Just nicking the edge. Close enough for the flight deck to enter the nebula but the rest of the ship to stay out."
Benny sharpens up. "Hold on, we're going into the nebula? Are we sure that's a good idea? I don't know if your briefing was like mine but Command told me that anything that goes into it gets destroyed or-"
"I know. But we won't know what happens to us unless we try, right?"
Benny groans and slowly reaches his hand to his neck and pops it. "I guess… but if we end up getting shoved into deep space from the glass cracking it's your fault."
"Aren't you here to prevent that?"
"This isn't about me, Harrison."
"Ugh, don’t use my full name."
Benny laughs in short bursts.
Looking over at Harry, Benny can spot a small smile on his lips as he stares intently at the fast-approaching nebula. His eyes shine with intent and Benny can tell he was made for this role. Passion radiates off of the kid in waves and even though Benny can see how hard his hands are clutching the controls (not to mention the slight shaking) he’s comfortable in his element.
“What’re you staring at?” Harry raises a brow.
“Nothing.”
Harry silently snickers. “Sure. just like how you never gaze at Len.”
“... Well played.” Benny replies with a grimace.
“So what were you staring at?”
“Uh……. space.”
Harry clicks his tongue and whispers. “Alright, Benny.”
The nerve of the kid…
As they approached the nebula, a strange feeling of uneasiness settled in Benny’s chest. The colors… Shifted? Was it shifting or was it his eyes? Benny blinks, trying to refocus his eyes. He opens them again, expecting it to look normal but…
"Hey Harry? Are you seeing this too?"
Harry's eyes were blown wide open. He swallows.
"Uh, yeah. I do.”
The nebula’s outer edge folded and shimmered in and out of itself. Comets attached and orbiting around a gaping, warbling wormhole in the middle. Streaks of gold whipped back and forth each with a different speed as if it were sensing the area, looking for something to attack. The wormhole didn’t seem to pull anything in, no. It looked to be clawing its way out of itself as if containing its form was poison. It stopped looking like a nebula and instead just looked like…. Chaos.
A deep red emerged from the inner tendrils of the nebula, twisting and pushing itself through what was once the green shaded hues of the side’s outer edge.
“That’s… not supposed to look like that.” Benny starts with a whisper getting more and more frantic as the tendril gets closer.
“No, really?”
Benny glares at Harry, trying not to let his fear show. “Yeah I know it’s not supposed to look like that but why didn’t it look like this when we were farther away from it?”
“Optical illusion?” Harry suggests.
“Even with cameras it didn’t look like this.”
Just as soon as Harry moved to get closer the intercom frantically beeped and Harry scrambled to pick up the message.
“Get away from there now!” Sherry’s scream entered the room from the comm.
“Sherry, wha-”
“Now!”
A golden streak stabs the glass of the ship, alarms shrieking in their ears as the room flooded with red light.
Harry gasps and covers his ears, falling onto the ground in terror, leaving Benny to jump into action and steer the ship away from the nebula.
The… thing kept attacking. Reaching out and haphazardly striking random parts of the ship as Benny pulls the ship back. They need to move quick. Even if the glass of the hull was just cracked.
Benny pulls the crying mess that is the pilot into his arms and opens the door, throwing Harry out. Just before Benny can get out of the room himself, the golden tendril breaks through the glass and grabs his leg.
Benny yelps and closes the door, not allowing any of the air out before he gets picked up and pulled out of the ship.
The tendril burns through his suit and burrows into his leg as he gets whipped back into the nebula. Desperately, he begins holding his breath, eyes tearing up and lungs burning, yet miraculously, he still lives.
Benny thrashes and tries to release himself from the burning hold, cursing himself for not bringing a gun with him.
While struggling to release himself, Benny catches a glimpse inside of the wormhole.
Instead of the black mass Benny expects to see, what stares back at him is… a warbling mess of colour and light. The bright green-blue illusion of what the nebula should be lies inside the distorted colored borders. A hurling, spinning tunnel seemed to stretch out for miles on end before going so deep that Benny couldn’t see the end.
What in the world did they find here…
“Benny!”
Strong arms envelop the soldier and Benny blinks, returning back from his wandering mind.
Benny’s eyes gaze down at the person embracing him and sees a pink suit and ohmygodLenny’shugginghim-
“Come on, let’s get you back to the ship. God, you had me so worried! I know you’re tough as nails but you still could get hurt and- why aren’t you moving?”
Benny shakes his head and tries to return to his senses. He looks down and sees the tendril holding him is gone. He sighs and scuttles across the small distance between him and Lenny, flinging his hands around until Lenny catches him.
“Oh good, you’re not dead!” Emmy cheers as she comes into view. Graceful as ever with her rocket boots dancing across empty space.
“Looks like you need some serious medical, sweetheart. Lenny, hook him up to your rope. Let’s lasso home a soldier.”
And that was the last thing Benny heard before passing out, the intense shivering and hyperventilating finally coming to a stop.
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Benny woke up to the sound of a monitor beeping and a frantic voice mumbling curses and profanities.
Someone made their way to Benny's line of view. His murky eyes picked up on something-no- someone.
'Sherry' his mind offered. Sherry was speaking to him. Asking him to look at her. That doesn't make sense, he's already doing that. Benny thinks he sees her sigh and walk away.
Benny tries to move his lips. To beg her to come back and not leave him alone. She returns with something in her hand and sits down.
She talks to him about doing something with the object in her hand. She brings the… cylinder up to his eyes and shines a light- oh, it’s a flashlight, Benny concludes.
Sherry shines it in his eyes. Her eyebrows soften and she turns off the flashlight.
“Can you blink, Benny? Can you do that for me?”
Well, at least he can hear her clearly now.
He blinks.
Sherry’s lips quirk upwards and her eyes crinkle, a twinkle of pride lights up in them. “Thank you, Ben. Can you see me clearly? Blink once for yes and twice for no.”
Benny blinks once.
She pats him on the head like he’s a dog, as if he completed some new trick she taught him. “You’re doing so well! If I’m completely honest I expected you to be dead so anything is a step up from there.”
Sherry moves across the dimly-lit room and pushes against a President Business poster saying “No running” near the hatch door, which opens a hidden compartment spotted with knobs and switches. Clicking one of the knobs, the gravity in the room lightened. Sherry hummed softly and watched as objects wafted about in the medical room. She lifts her hand to her kinky hair, which was currently held up on one side of her head and now floating in front of her face.
“Would you look at that, my hair levitates even more than before. Who knew that was possible?” Sherry jokes and Benny wrinkles his eyes, focusing on the humor instead of the uncomfortable ache present on his body.
Moving back to Benny with an extra bounce in her step. Sitting down in the chair near Benny’s hospital bed (since when was he on a bed?) she turns to the bedside table and pulls out a clipboard filled with stickers of things ranging from formulas to kittens to godzilla-like creatures and clips in a piece of paper and begins reading.
“While you sustained major injuries on your leg- mainly burns - the rest of your body seems relatively fine. I’m surprised your lungs didn’t collapse the moment you were practically whipped out into the nebula. ‘Course it only raises more questions about whatever the hell is out there but I won’t get into that now. Luckily, you didn’t get a concussion and any bodily trauma you received should be temporary and easily overcome at best.”
Benny tries to lift his eyebrow, painfully aware of the fact that it looks more like helpless twitching than a questionable brow raise.
Sherry clicks her tongue and leans towards Benny. “Why focus on the bad when you can focus on the good, Benster? Like I said, you’re going to be fine so there’s no reason to stress.”
Her smile drops and she gazes at her patient with tired, exhausted eyes.
“Do you know how long you’ve been out, Ben?”
He blinks twice.
“You’ve been unconscious for nearly a week. You certainly caused everyone on the ship a scare, especially Harry and Lenny. The two have been worried sick about you. The second I let you leave the bed you’re going to apologize to them and you’re going to have a day off.”
Benny squints his eyes.
“Oh, please the ship will be fine without you trampling all over it for one day. Besides, I’ve already collected enough data from the residue of the nebula debris on your suit and the satellite Command brought me to send out. Well, before it was destroyed…" She trails off. "Nevertheless, we'll be able to catch up with the big shiny thing in the sky in no time! But for right now let's focus on the inner workings of the ship, alright?”
Benny’s chest deflates. He tries to raise a hand to his throat but all it does is twitch and spasm helplessly at his side. He makes a noise somewhere between a groan and a whine.
“Your voice? Don’t worry, it’s nothing a little tea and honey won’t fix.”
Benny glares at her.
“I never said the tea wouldn’t be spiked with medicine.” Sherry defends herself as Benny rolls his eyes.
“Hey at least the honey is actual honey. You have no idea what I went through to smuggle that in here.”
Benny purses his lips and grins, a promise that he’ll tell on her.
“Oh, please. As if I was the only one who smuggled things up here. I heard Emmy snuck alcohol up here and you choose to snitch on me for bringing along honey? Shame on you, Blue Chu. Shame on you.”
She fell into silence before a small device on the desk beeped, making her jump and pull a hand to her excessively beating heart.
“Jesus fuck I forgot about that. I asked Mary to make you a personal anti-gravity device for you to use for the next three weeks. Not to use like you’re going to float all the time but just to release some pressure on your leg.” She hands him the small box.
“I mean, you can float with it if you want to, I’m not going to stop you, but at the very least remember to stretch and work your leg every once in a while. Don’t want your muscles to start shriveling up until you’re never able to use them again! Trust me, it’s not pretty.” Sherry rambles as Benny begins to inspect the machine.
The device is a cold black metal with a blue and grey knob. Small wires adorn the side of it, etching into it a design that Benny has walked by hundreds of times while Patrolling the ship. There’s an adjustable strap on the side with little white doodles on it depicting faces of varying emotions and inaccurate constellations (no doubt Kelly’s contribution) and a screen portraying the levels of gravity presently in the room versus his own personal levels.
“Now, hows about I help you out and get the thing strapped on your leg?”
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"Room for one more?" Emmy asks, standing near the door, red bag in hand.
Benny looks up from the punching bag he’s currently assaulting to a pulp and begins unwrapping the tape around his arms, moving to apply new ones. “Jump right in, dude.”
She nods and drops her duffel bag near her bench locker, taking off her red wrinkled jacket and stretching her legs in a wide split.
Benny chuckles. "Show off…"
It's been two weeks since “The Incident” (as the crew has started calling it) and Benny has just one week left of his weird mumbly-jumbly gravity left before he can walk normally again.
Since he's been allowed to actually leave the medical room without Sherry hovering (often quite literally) over him making sure he's alright, he's spent every day on patrols or in the gym trying to get used to the unusual temporary-normal gravity he's acquired. Normally, he’d be on the treadmill or doing some sort of kick exercise but today?
Today he just feels like punching something.
Benny rolls out his shoulders, grinning in satisfaction when he hears the joints pop and begins hitting the punching bag in front of him.
He can’t tell whether it’s from the object’s frankly annoyingly loud BLUE colour or the fact that he just can’t land his punches right, but he keeps slipping and hitting nothing. He scowls.
Can’t even hit a bag right and he’s expected to make sure everyone else on the ship is safe. What a pathetic excuse for security he is. God, he never should have been chosen for this job-
A hand catches his fist and Benny startles out from his mind’s spewing of beratement.
Emmy is studying him. Her eyes dart back and forth between his stance and his frantic, tearing up eyes. She stares into his eyes with a pitying smile and all Benny can feel at that moment is disgust at himself.
“You’re stressed.”
Benny snatches his arm back and rubs his wrist. “Good on you for noticing.” He comments dryly.
Emmy lifts her hand to his shoulder and locks eyes with him. For a moment, they do nothing but stare at each other. Benny’s face expressing confusion and Emmy’s a hardened locked expression. She doesn’t speak and Benny can barely detect movement from her uncharacteristically stiff posture.
“Uuhh…”
In a flash of a second she swipes her arm under his own and flips him over her shoulder, making him land on the gym floor with a hard thud, hovering barely an inch off the ground after the hit.
“Hey! What was that for?!”
Emmy closes her hands into fists, widening her stance. “Get up.”
“I- what?”
“Get up. Fight back. You wanna hit something? Try to land a hit on me.”
Benny waddles himself to something resembling a kneel and stutters at Emmy. While Benny is busy flapping his arms about and attempting to stand, Emmy rocks her weight back, not losing eye contact with Benny. She moves her leg and just as Benny gets up, Emmy aims to roundhouse kick him in his head.
Benny’s head whips just in time and ducks out of the way, lifting his arms to his head in a defensive position.
“What the hell, dude?!”
Emmy leaps towards the man and lunges her fist to his face only to be tripped by Benny on her descent.
She stumbles forward, arms flapping as she balances herself. Quickly she bounces back to face Benny, the two circling each other defensively. Benny hovering off the ground, Emmy dragging her feet on it.
“Come on, Blue Chu. You gonna hit me or are we gonna keep dancin’ in circles?” She taunts, her southern drawl peeking through her cocky grin.
“Never wanted to spar with you but you’ll keep attacking me if I don’t.” Benny retorts with an exhale, swinging his left arm at Emmy’s right shoulder.
She turns back and gazes at his fist inches away from her nose before turning to Benny and smirking.
“We’ll you’re darn right about that.”
Emmy ducks under his arm and swings her leg at his knee, sending him flying sideways and nearly crashing into the wall if not for Benny catching himself and using the wall to fling himself towards his commander.
“Just like in a swimming pool, right?” Emmy smiles.
“Yeah,’’ Benny lunges at her stomach. “If the swimming pool was just on you and prevented you from reaching the other swimmers not currently in the pool.”
Emmy flips away from the hit and raises a brow and simpers. “Is that what’s been eating at ya? Honey you saved everyone and the only person that got hurt was you. Why be stuck on somethin’ that happened weeks ago?”
"Because Harry could've died!" Benny roars and takes a leaping run at her slack, surprised figure. Emmy takes a step to the side and lets Benny fall to the ground and crumple, even as he starts levitating again.
He grapples his dirtied hair and starts shrinking in on himself, not noticing his commander's fallen expression. Nor how she puts her arms around his back. Once she starts running her arm up and down Benny's back, hot, wet tears flow from his eyes as he tries to speak.
"You didn't- didn't see what was in there it-it practically killed me! Harry's just so small and he doesn't have the-the strength I do. God, how am I supposed to keep all of you safe when I can barely keep myself from dying?!"
Emmy shushes him and moves in front of him, making sure he sees every movement she makes.
"Benny, listen to me. Harry is okay and you are okay. I don't know what you saw out there but it's not in front of you anymore, alright? I am. Can I hurt you, Benny?"
"Yes." Benny grovels.
Emmy rolls her eyes. "But will I hurt you? On purpose? With the intent of causing you pain?"
"...No."
"That's right. You're okay now. You just got a little shaken, is all. Everyone on the ship is safe and we'll all remain safe. We're okay, sweet pea. I promise."
Benny shudders in her hold and slowly brings his trembling arms around her shoulders. Deflating and letting himself breathe for the first time in weeks, Benny relaxes.
“There you go. Get it all out, honey.”
Benny breaks the hug and sniffles into his palm. “ ’M sorry for crying all over you.”
Emmy pats his shoulder.
“Don’t worry about it. Now, how about another round? Two out of three.” She stands up and holds a hand out to Benny.
He gives the smallest semblance of a smile. “You’re on.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Benny is floating.
Now, this wouldn’t be unusual considering the fact that he’s been wearing what is essentially an anti-gravity bracelet on his leg for the past month but he took it off hours ago. After waking up some thirty minutes ago he abandoned all notion of returning to sleep in exchange for something better.
Instead Benny opts to just hovering just a few inches off of his bed, gazing at nothing. His arms are limply moving down and up at his sides as he breathes while his legs swim aimlessly over his long-abandoned blanket.
Benny knows he should be worried or at the very least scared, but it’s late at night and patrols sucked today and Benny just can’t find it in him to give a shit right now. He’ll panic tomorrow.
But even floating alone in his room can get boring. Against his better judgement, Benny grabs the top end of the bed and flings himself to his door. It hisses open and Benny floats onward.
He could go to the kitchen and steal some of Sherry’s “secret” stash of nuts or head to the common room, the messiest and by all accounts the most fun place on the ship. He could mess around with the keyboard he and Kelly have been trying to make or load up that new Godzilla monster fighting video game.
Instead, Benny makes his usual patrol rounds. As he passes the signs plastered on every wall he chuckles. In the darkness it really does look like President Business’s eyes are following him.
The first place Benny hovers to is the kitchen. He knows it's a weird place to start his patrol but hey why not get a snack for the road?
Benny grabs himself a glass and secretly celebrates the fact that his freshly poured coffee isn’t floating away from the glass like he is from the ground. He picks up the handle and heads into the hallway, sluggishly sipping the drink with no care to the fact that his tongue is getting burnt to death.
The walk (if it could even be called that) is unsettlingly quiet compared to the usually boisterous atmosphere of the ship. The last time it was this quiet was when they just arrived on the ship on the first day. Even when the halls were evacuated, conversations were present inside rooms or labs. Even when there was no conversation, music could be heard creeping through the comms. The whirring of the ship from within the walls certainly didn’t help ease any feeling of discomfort present in Benny’s sinking gut.
The hall from the kitchen headed straight through the Mech hall and headed towards the Communications Office. On the left of the office the common room laid with stagnant silence and a static darkness leaves Benny with a twist in his stomach. He tries to move past the Comms room but stops.
There’s a noise coming from the inside. It sounds like… humming? Mumbling? Benny knocks on the door three times and barely a second later, crashes are heard through the muffled walls and a frazzled, beaming Lenny pries the door open.
“Hey Lenny, is everything alr- okay!” Lenny grabs Benny by the hand and pulls him in the office, shutting the door loudly behind him.
“Hey, what’s-”
Lenny interrupts him.
“You’re just the person I wanted to see! I honestly didn’t expect anyone to still be awake- well aside from Emmy but that’s besides the point- but hey, you’re here! I just thought about going to get you but decided against it and lo and behold there you are! Listen, there’s something I need help with and you are the perfect person for it!”
“Woah, woah, woah help with what?! At this hour you should be asleep! Hell, even I should be asleep yet here I am!”
Lenny’s smile drops. “Oh. Am I stopping you from going to bed? I just thought-”
“No, no I wasn’t heading to bed it’s just… super late at night.”
“It’s morning, actually.” Lenny mumbles.
“Even more of a reason to sleep. I don’t wanna see you asleep on the controls again ‘cause you overworked yourself. I care about you, Lenny.”
Lenny stares at Benny, eyes wide. An ever-present redness to his face seems to grow beyond its preferred boundaries and crawl over his freckled face. After a few moments of silence, Lenny shakes his head and starts to fidget with his hair.
“Well that’s- uh- That’s very kind of you Benny. For- for caring like that.”
He pauses speaking, suddenly extremely interested in the small blue wires on the wall.
“So you were gonna show me something?”
“Hm? Oh, right! C’mere there’s something super freaky I found in the sound sensor- but like the cool kinda creepy not the bad one.” Lenny rambles as he walks to the controls and sits down.
Benny tries to hide his grin while watching Lenny fiddle with the buttons and switches of the communications controls. The effortless way he manages to make something look so simple amazes Benny and he can’t help but feel inspired by him no matter what he does.
In such a rare moment of silence, Lenny continues to work.
There's such a wisdom to the enunciations of the officer that one can't help but listen. The way knowledge combines with unbridled passion for what he does comes through in every syllable, in every sound and it leaves Benny bewitched. Even with no sounds, his eyes spark with the glow of a thousand stars, each encompassing bright worlds and endless love inside them.
In the face of such passion, what can one do but watch?
It’s selfish, he knows it is, but Benny can’t help but want Lenny to have that spark with him.
But Benny can't have him. He knows that. Lenny is just… highly affectionate, there's no way he actually likes Benny.
Yet it doesn't stop him from dreaming.
“Hey, Ben, you good there?”
“Just fine, Lenny. Just fine.”
Lenny smiles, his dimples sink into his cheeks and the spark in his eyes returns in full force.
“Right! Well, while I was picking up feed from the midway Comms outpost- The Knudsen- a ways forward I came across a strange overlay in the audio recording. It was like a pitched whisper of the message in the actual audio. At first I chalked it up to interference from the nebula or something weird with the speakers but here’s where it gets weird.” He pauses for dramatic effects, raising his hands in front of Benny, who was standing next to Lenny’s seat with one hand on the table and one on the chair. (coffee mug set aside.)
“I fixed the speakers hundreds of times and the whispers were still there. I checked the mic and it had no problems. Then the only other option for what could be making it sound weird had to be the nebula right?” He points at Benny. Just before he gets a chance to speak, Lenny interrupts him.
“Wrong! There’s nothing the nebula can do that will cause distorted whispers like that and given how fucked up the thing is, it’s probably not some random magnetic pulse thing.”
Lenny types across his keyboard at lightspeed, not losing pace with his explanation.
“So what do I do? I check the nebula for sound! You know what I found out in it?” Benny shrugs.
“The nebula in itself is making sounds! Unnatural weird sounds that aren’t space-y sounds. Through recordings I heard it sound melodic at times and other times it sounds like random clicking or hell, even talking!”
“So what you’re saying is…”
Lenny nods enthusiastically and leans towards Benny’s face, booping him on the nose.
“The nebula is a radio speaker in and of itself.”
Benny’s eyes widen, screaming on the inside to force down his blush. “That’s incredible! But if it’s a radio, how do our transmissions get through?”
Lenny falters.
“Even with our UHF Link being as strong as it is, distortion that heavy and that strange from what we call a radio would be sure to fuck up any outgoing feed, right?”
Lenny groans. “You’re right… so it’s not a radio per se but it’s definitely something that sends out transmissions. Maybe it’d be more appropriate to call it a phone?”
He snorts shortly, picking the Cape Space on his uniform. “Waste of a phone call, imagine the bill coming from that.”
Lenny laughs and Benny can hear angels singing. “Yeah! And if it really is a phone call maybe we can find a way to send a transmission into the other side and get some answers.”
“You mean like… form a connection with the nebula? Not just go through it?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds insane.”
“So you’ll help me?”
“Of course I will.”
Lenny claps and bounces in his seat, much to Benny’s enjoyment. The two agreed that the best step to take would be to send a speaker and microphone into the nebula, but in order to do that they needed all hands on deck. Harry’s piloting skills, Mary and Kelly’s engineering abilities and Sherry’s knowledge of the anomaly along with Emmy’s planning abilities combined with Benny’s experience of actually being somewhat inside the thing and Lenny’s unmatched brilliance when it comes to all things sound.
After nearly eight months of dilly-dallying, the real mission begins.
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Lenny had ended up falling asleep in Benny’s room (his bed, no less. Thank goodness it’s a bunk bed, Benny doesn’t think he’ll manage to sleep in the same bed as Lenny without blushing the whole night unable to take his eyes off of him) after the two moved their conversation and hypothesizing banter to his room. After an hour or so Lenny climbed onto the lower bunk bed and in a snap fell asleep and Benny himself tried his best to sleep with his… compromised position.
A beep ringed it’s way into the room.
“Good morning, everybody! This is your lovely commander speaking live from the - for once - empty Comms room! Today’s agenda is the same as it is every day with the exception of congratulating our wonderful security personnel for finally finishing his recovery from The Incident and yes, it is mandatory to congratulate him. I will be expecting a report written on you all doing so in excruciating detail.”
He rolls his eyes at Emmy’s antics and peers over the edge of his bed to see Lenny, still asleep. Sprawled all over the bed and snoring as loud as the engine.
Now, Benny is not a violent person, nor does he have any malicious intent.
But Lenny is right there and Benny has a pillow in his hands and animalistic instinct has taken over him.
So he does the only reasonable thing and floats down to his sleeping crewmate and whacks him on the head.
Lenny sputters and falls off the bed in a tangle of limbs and blankets.
Benny guffaws at Lenny’s confused sleepy state, grinning when he squints up at Benny.
“Mornin’ Sleeping Beauty!”
Lenny just continues to stare at Benny, his mind stuck in what is essentially a loading screen. Benny practically sees the arrow going in circles.
“Big day today, Lenny! We gotta tell everyone about the plan!”
Lenny keeps staring at Benny for ten seconds before his eyes light up and he fully wakes up.
“Oh yeah!”
Benny laughs watching his crewmate scramble off of the floor and running towards the door.
“I’m gonna go get dressed and maybe style my hair a little I’ll see you during breakfast bye!” Lenny speeds through his conversation and bolts out the hallway.
Benny watches him leave with secret adoration in his eyes. A few seconds of staring at the door and Benny decides that he himself should get ready,
He floats down to the edge of his floor and instinctively reaches out for his anti-gravity device before pausing.
He doesn’t need it anymore. His leg is fine now. But he doesn’t have the time to worry his crewmates over his newly-acquired enigmatic gravity.
One more day with it on couldn't hurt, right? Even if he was faking it.
Through the walls of his dorm he could hear Kelly ramble to Emmy about their latest modification to the engine.
Benny whips his head back to the device sitting innocently on his dresser and in a split second decides to put it on and join the crew for the day.
Benny closes the door behind him and floats to his commander and engineer, who smile at his arrival. Benny pretends to ignore the hammering of his heart and eases into a smile himself, joining in on the banter.
“So, what’re you two talking about? Any hot gossip from within the walls of The Nielsen? Any aliens invading people’s minds? Robots impersonating people?”
Emmy lets out a breathy chuckle. “No, the only gossip you’ll find is about your recovery. Congratulations on that, sweetheart.”
Benny bows. “Why, thank you.’’
Kellin pipes up, peering over their planted hand on Emmy’s shoulder.
“Why’re you still wearing the anti-g thing? I thought you didn’t need it anymore?”
Benny blinks. Shit. “Oh it’s just for-uh- precaution. Y’know just in case for today.”
Kelly raises an eyebrow, clearly not impressed or satisfied with an answer but lets it slide.
“Well, either way it’s good to have you up and at it.” Emmy announced as the trio began their walk to the dining area. “I don’t want to see any more whining outta you for at least three months.”
“I promise nothing.” Benny deadpans. Emmy smacks him on the arm and whispers something that sounds suspiciously like “Jackass.”
The three entered the kitchen and found Harry and Sherry arguing over something with Mary that definitely is not appropriate to be talked about this early in the day.
“The only defining argument is defining whether or not a robot can actually have autonomy over its own decisions. If it’s programmed to do so but doesn't know it, it still doesn’t count as autonomy.”
“Fair point. So what if it didn’t have control?”
“It would still be guilty. The robot itself acted upon the action and the responsibility shifts to it.”
“But it didn’t have control since it wasn’t a suggestion.”
“If the robot has enough humanity to consider the morals of whether its actions are unjust or not it should have figured out a way around the code.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s just opening an entirely different can of worms.”
“Since when did the robot get access to worms?”
Kelly groaned. “Can’t you two discuss these things in private or at night like normal people? What are you two even talking about?”
Mary smirked into her coffee. “The ethics of a robot committing murder.”
They smiled. “Ah, okay that makes perfect sense! Why not talk about a robot committing the murder? If I may ask- and forgive me if this sounds harsh- Why?!”
Harry snorted at the engineer’s outburst. “Why not?”
Benny pats Kelly on the shoulder in pity. “Don’t try to understand it, dude. I tried to argue with those two once about morality and got a headache for the rest of the day.”
Kelly grumbled as they grabbed cereal that was probably not supposed to be brought to the station and milk.
Benny himself opted for nabbing one of the popsicles in the freezer and floating above the group before plopping down on top of the fridge.
The two pilots continue their heated argument as Lenny barrels into the room.
“Y’all would not believe what Ben and I found yesterday!”
Benny licks his lips, pointing to the hyper Lenny with his half-melting breakfast. “Technically you found it.”
“The point still stands! The anomaly sends out frequencies on its own! It’s like a radio station trying to hack into our own radio and send some sort of message.”
“Yeah, it’s super freaky. We need your guys’ help to send in a speaker and microphone into the thing and still be able to keep it in our control.” Benny says, motioning with his popsicle stick as if it were a magic wand.
“I tried and no go. Anything we send out there gets decimated beyond repair or lost.” Sherry frowns.
“Which is why we need all hands on deck. If we combine all of our shared knowledge we might be able to make something that survives.”
Emmy hums in thought. “Well, it ain’t like we got anything better to do.”
Lenny smiles hopefully, his eyes widening. “So you’ll help?”
“Sure, why not?” She shrugs.
Lenny scans the room. “Anyone else?”
Kelly slams their bowl on the table and screams. “As long as I get to boost the engine while we catch up with the nebula!”
Harry mumbles. “Isn’t that basically your job?”
“Yes!”
Benny raises a brow. “So you’re helping?”
“Also yes!”
“Great!” Lenny clapped. “What about the rest of you?”
"You had me at radio." Sherry winks.
"It's not like you can pilot and build at the same time." Harry adds.
Mary groans. "You realize this is insane? The fact that we need everyone pulling in all of their weight for a goddamn sound sample is ridiculous."
"I'm not hearing a no." Benny leans in with a smile.
Mary stares at the faces of her crewmates with incredulity, looking for some kind of flaw or hesitance to call out but finds nothing. Eventually, she gives in.
"Well someone has to make sure you're not all killing yourselves in the process."
Benny and Lenny cheer from their respective spots in the kitchen, ignoring the rolling eyes of their crewmates.
“Alright calm down, you two, we all need to eat first. After that we’ll discuss the next step.” Emmy snarks.
Benny smiles and salutes her, half teasing. “Aye aye captain.”
“Oof, yeah no never do that again. Obedience is a bad look for you.”
Benny snorts and resumes his breakfast, the rest of the crew following suit.
After eating the crew made their way to the Common room, where Sherry supposedly would give them a presentation and they would supposedly begin discussing how to build the speaker and supposedly ignore the fact that they have a meeting room that’s never used.
“Alright, listen up nerds! We’ve got a lot of shit to cover and I need all eyes and ears up here.” Sherry announces, walking into the room with a flash drive in her hand and a projector.
Sherry strides behind the couch and opens up the middle panel on the flat wall and places the projector on the opening. Mary catches a glimpse of her menacing smirk and grimaces.
"Please don't tell me that's a slide presentation on your findings."
Sherry picks up her remote and blinks at the mech pilot, feigning innocence. "Wherever would you get that idea?"
Mary glares at her.
"Alright, so it is. Sue me. I have free time and a sense of fun. A quality you desperately need to learn."
Mary scoffs and rolls her eyes the ghost of endearment hanging on her lips.
Sherry turns on the projector and the screen in front of the crew lights up, projecting a tacky, blue triangle title screen reading “What The Fuck Is That: A Guide To The Nielsen Nebula” and below it a smaller text reading “Made By Sherry Jemison”.
Benny loves it and judging by the proud, toothy grin on Sherry’s face, she does as well.
“This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” Mary says.
“I didn’t even start yet.”
“I hate it already.”
“Well that’s just too bad innit.” Sherry teases, putting her arms on her hips.
Kelly throws their long-empty bowl (nobody knows why they’ve been lugging it around all morning) at Sherry, tired of the argument. “Just get on with it!”
Sherry dodges the bowl and watches it shatter on the ground. “You’re gonna have to clean that up, you know.”
Kelly grunts at their missed shot and sits back down.
Sherry clears her throat. “Ignoring that little temper tantrum, please pay attention to the screen.”
She flips to the first slide, a colorful image shows the nebula on it’s side. Dark, murky colors spread across the blackened sky and illuminate what was once a clear view of the outer stars.
“The anomaly first showed up in our radars about 7 years ago. Our probe, The Futuron, caught it near moon 801 moving at a speed of 7.5 lightyears, otherwise calculated as a whopping whole 2.3 parsecs. So pretty quickly, if you ask me.”
Sherry clicked the remote and slid in a new picture. An illuminated and bright blueish greenish nebulous cylinder, much different from the muted colors of the first image.
“The first picture is the nebula as it was first discovered. The second one is a picture I took three months ago with the satellite sent in from Command. As you can see, some things have changed since then.”
“Yeah, not shit, Sherlock!” Kelly heckles with all the smugness of a cat staring down a dead mouse.
Choosing to ignore them, Sherry continues. “The levels of oxygen and hydrogen went way up and exceeded the normal levels we graph in our other nebulas. Even compared to our biggest ones, this is an anomaly.”
They suspected as such. As much as they’ve all secretly tried to deny it, this wasn’t any regular nebula.
“During our close call with the anomaly a while ago, I saw a gravitational pull within it’s center. I suspect the wormhole present inside of it is what makes it orbit around itself and what propels it forward. Like an engine of sorts.”
Lenny cut in. “Not just an engine. This thing’s practically an entire spaceship on it’s own. An engine wouldn’t be enough to do half of the thing’s it’s doing.”
Sherry glares at the officer. “Which brings me to my next point. The anomaly interferes with radio signals that we’ve received and transmissioned, as recorded and stated by our dear Lenny here. However, there’s been no recorded trace of any radioactivity that could have caused this. It’s unfortunate to say that this is pretty much all of the information we have gathered. At least the simplified version of it.” She sighs and turns off the projector. “Which leads us to today.” She turns to Emmy. “What’s the plan, commander?”
Emmy nods and stands up. “We’ve collected the blueprints of all probes and satellites that reached the nebula. Today we’ll comb through the data of those machines and find which ones were the most successful and combine the most useful assets to create a probe to send in.”
Benny raises his hand. “I thought we were building a radio?”
“We’re going to do that, honey. First things first we need to find a blindspot to plant the radio in such a way that it wouldn’t be destroyed upon immediate contact. Once we do that we can start building the radio.”
Benny sighs. Fuck, this is complicated. “Alright.”
Emmy moves across the couch patting Benny lightly on the cheek.
“Mary, I’m pretty sure you have all the blueprints, right?”
“That is correct. Would you like me to get them?”
She nods brightly. “If you can, yep!”
Mary sighs and heaves herself off the couch to retrieve her copies as Kelly runs after her, hollering about assisting her, Harry trudging close behind. Emmy moves to Sherry and begins to discuss the nebula in terms Benny wasn’t put on this mission to even begin to understand.
Lenny puts a hand on Benny’s shoulder and softly smiles. His eyes whispering reassurance and comfort.
Benny smiles back but for some reason, can’t seem to shake the feeling that something’s going to go wrong.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As it turns out, only 18 of 45 probes sent up actually got anything useful.
After combing through hours of data Mary and Kelly got to work on building a new probe in the middle of the goddamn common room instead of one of their workrooms because it’s a “team effort, Benny” and “Even if you’re not working on it you can be moral support” like he didn’t have anything better to do while Harry and Emmy started working on a new protective layer to the cockpit of the ship.
Luckily Lenny, angel that he is, got Benny to come with him to the comms room for a reading of the sounds recorded by the satellites.
Which sounds like it would be easy and all things considered it is! Except for…
“Dude, why are these all cassette tapes?”
“I have no clue.” Lenny snorted.
“Do we even have a cassette player here?”
“I fuckin’ hope so.”
Benny grins. “What, you don’t know if you have a cassette player in the comms room, officer?”
Lenny stares at him.
“I think I would have known if there was a cassette player here.”
“Fair enough.” Benny shrugs and floats to the door, grabbing the side and poking his head out to the hall.
“Hey Kelly!” Benny shouts.
A muffled voice response from the other side.
“What?!”
“D’we have a cassette player up here!?” He screams.
“Maybe. Why’re you asking!?”
“Cause all the sound files are recorded on cassette tapes!”
They’re quiet for a moment before shouting back.
“Why the fuck are they all recorded on cassette tapes!”
“That’s what we’ve been asking!”
“I mean, alright?! I can go check in the storage room near the engine if command left anything!”
“Thank you!” Benny smiles.
“You’re welcome!”
Benny shuts the door with a sigh and grins at his crewmate, whose smile is so wide his cheeks look just about ready to jump out of his face. He shudders a laugh.
“Was that really necessary?”
Benny raises a brow. “What do you mean?”
“This is the comms room. Communications. You know, the room with the most intercom control, able to reach every room in the station?”
Benny ‘ohs’ and stares at the ground, thinking about his action while Lenny guffaws in his chair, tapes falling out of his laps and clattering to the ground.
Blushing at Lenny's laughter, Benny sputters.
"Stop laughing, I wasn't thinking!"
Lenny wipes a tear. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry it's just… that was really cute." He gleams at Benny.
Benny clears his throat. “Oh-uh well I think you’re p-pretty cute yourself.”
Lenny smiles and it’s like fireworks in Benny’s eyes-
The door bursts open after one knock.
“‘Sup dudes! Sorry that took a while but to your luck and my amazement we actually do have a cassette player! Who’d thought, huh?” Kelly slides in, player in hand.
Lenny gets up. “Oh, sweet! Where’d you even find it?”
They shrug. “Between the walls and the vents. You’d be surprised how much you can hide in there.”
Lenny freezes. “You.. you hide in the vents?”
Kelly backs out of the room, not breaking eye contact with Lenny.
“I would tell you, but if I did I’d have to kill you.” They stand outside the door, unnervingly grinning at him. “Bye!” They scream and walk away, presumably to return to Mary’s aide.
Lenny turns to Benny with an inredicolous expression.
He snorts and starts softly laughing softly, Benny following suit with chuckles of his own.
“So what’s the plan? Chronologically going forward to the present or back?”
“I think forward would work best. Look at the cabinets behind you, there should be some tablets I can graph the things we find.”
Benny nods and turns to the cabinet. Sure enough, two standard-issue Cape Space tablets were present. Benny pulls them to his chest and turns to Lenny.
The officer sat back in his chair and pulled out a round surface from beneath the comms table. A dark grey platform with gold wires twisting and turning from the edges to the middle into a masterfully crafted tree, leaves dangling from each fold of the branch. It softly hovers above the ground, booster whirring softly.
“Did you make that?”
“Hm? Oh, yes! Mary returned to me a bunch of spare wires from her personal project and I had no real use for it so I figured I might as well use it for something creative instead of just letting it collect space dust.”
“It’s beautiful!” Benny says. ‘You’re beautiful.’ he wants to say.
“Aw, thank you, Ben!” He smiles. “Now, let’s get to work!”
Lenny clatters all of the tapes onto the table and picks out the oldest date. Almost 8 years ago. Sliding it into the player, Lenny closes his eyes, puts on the headphones, and with a deep breath he begins to listen to the record.
Benny can’t hear the record play. Can’t see the soundwaves form into moving images. Before, Benny was never quite sure how a communications job worked but watching Lenny in front of him, analyze and dissect glitches and voices into something tangible is enough for him to understand this work. Benny can see every twitch in his scrunched up eyebrows, every movement of his lips. Every emotion behind his eyelids and every breath slowly move in and out of him in a rhythm only he is privy to. Every small hum is a symphony to him and Benny can’t tear his eyes away.
In what seems like seconds masquerading as hours, the recording finishes and Lenny opens his eyes and sets down the headphones.
“What’s the verdict, officer? Anything of note to graph?”
Lenny nods enthusiastically.
“I think I can pick up some sort of voice talking with another. You won’t believe me when I say this but I legit heard a baby.”
“Like… a baby child?”
“Yes! Well- sort of. More like a toddler, really.”
“That’s… weird.”
Lenny hums in agreement, frantically typing away at his tablet.
“Just to make sure that wasn’t a random interference, I’ll try to look for similar noises like that one and if I get enough of those, then there’s something there we have to look into.”
“You’re the boss.”
Lenny rolls his eyes as he switches tapes, next one a little more recent, 7-something years instead of 8.
“1 down, 18 more to go. You ready?”
Benny grins.
“As I’ll ever be.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It only takes a week to get the demo probe ready and even less than that to shuffle through the audio tapes. Everything is ready to send it out for a test run (and hope it doesn’t get crushed like the others) and if they’re lucky, even scope out an area to put the radio in. All is in order except for one thing.
“Again, we’re not naming the probe Big Bastard.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s vulgar language!”
“You’re vulgar language!”
Mary crosses her arms. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You don’t make sense.”
“I will strike you dead where you stand, Kellin.”
“You can’t kill me, I'm the engineer! The ship won’t run without me!”
Benny floats into the cockpit, where Harry, Kelly, Mary and Sherry are currently arguing over the name of the newly built probe.
“Please name it Big Bastard. I will give you all of the twenty dollars I don’t have with me.” He decides to say as an introduction.
“No!”
Harry raises his hand lazily from his chair. “I second the notion.”
Sherry clicks a button on the probe, not bothering to look up. “Thirded.”
“And so it is decided!” Kelly cheers. “The probe will hereby be known as Big Bastard!"
The intercom crackles and out of it, Lenny's exhausted voice rasps out. "Amen!"
"You're all the worst." Mary crosses her arms and pouts.
"Aw, you love us anyways." Emmy strides into the room, clad in her red spacewalk suit and color-coordinated helmet tucked securely under her hand.
Harry turns back at the sound of her voice, looking her up and down. "Nice suit." He turns back.
"Thank you, Hare-Bear!" She bows, her hair flicking forwards as she descends. "Ben, where's your suit?"
"Closet." He grunts.
"Well, you're out of there and the suit should be too. Please go put it on, honey."
The team snickers at their commander’s response and Benny’s stammering that follows as he dejectedly floats towards his room.
A few days ago Sherry had suggested that two of their team take the probe into a patrol ship and take that one closer to the nebula than the entire Neilsen, Once the two arrived at the edge, they will release the probe into the nebula and have stronger control over the probe while searching for a spot to put the radio receiver in.
Emmy had volunteered herself and Benny as the two went out to the patrol ship, much to Benny’s disgruntlement.
Benny levitates to his closet and pulls out his blue spacesuit, bright and clean despite the fact that his suit is one of the most used suits of anyone on the ship.
He slips out of his blue jumpsuit and struggles through his spacesuit. He supposes he could have put on the standard suit but his ocean blue EMU security suit was sturdier, heavier and offered better protection if he needed to use himself as a shield. (Again.)
The personal gravitation device snags on his leg and Benny grumbles. Hiding the fact that he floats either way has been getting harder and harder throughout the week. Beginning to claim that he kept it on “for fun” didn’t ease any suspicion, from what Benny inferred at least. But, if he can avoid the conversation as long as he can, by god he will.
“Yo, Benster everybody’s waiting on you! Come to the hangar bay or face the consequences.” Kelly screams into the mic.
“What consequences?!” He yells to the walls.
“... I don’t know honestly, I didn’t think this far.”
Benny chortles and finishes zipping his suit, scurrying to the rest of the team with his helmet in his hand.
“Good to see you in that suit again, honey. From all the time you spent stalling I was beginning to think you’ve lost it.” Emmy winks in his direction.
“Why would I lose it? If anything I would have burned it.”
“Why the fuck would you- you know what never mind. Are you ready to go?”
Benny affirms. “Yep, how’s the probe?”
“Big Bastard is in top shape and ready for action.” Sherry pats the contraption before chucking it to Harry, who throws it to Kelly who in turn throws it in Benny’s direction.
The security man yelps and scrambles to catch Big Bastard before it falls on the ground.
“Why the fuck would you do that!” He screeches.
Emmy snorts and slaps his shoulder as he rises and inspects the probe.
“You need to lighten up, honey. Nothin’ bad happened to the thing, right? So what’s the harm?”
Benny sticks out his tongue and hovers towards the patrol ship, right next to the hangar bay outside of the control room, Emmy following closely behind.
Right next to the entrance, two helmets perched on their handles. A blue one and a red one. Right below them, four oxygen tanks.
“Thought the tanks would be inside the ship.” Benny raises a brow.
“Oh, they are! But just as backup; these are the ones we’re going to use first.”
“Gnarly.” He mumbles, picking up the blue helmet and attaches it to the PLSS with a click. He hears the suit hiss as it adjusts to the new attachment, he rolls back his shoulders with a satisfying pop and looks over at Emmy already punching in the code to enter the hangar bay.
The door hisses open, proudly showing off the contents inside.
Everything ranging from the shovel buggy to the mineral detector stood in its place, gleaming and practically begging to be used. Unfortunately for these motors, they’re not stationed near a moon or planetary railway system.
At the very end, the X1 Patrol ship stood ready for action. Emmy whistles, patting the sleek wings and the glass canopy of the top.
“What model is this again?”
“6861, I think. Been a while since I came in here so I didn’t get to check.” Benny answers as he inspects the condition of the vehicle.
“That’s a mighty old one. Classic.”
“Yup.”
“Ready to get in?”
“Not really but I don’t have a choice.”
Emmy winks and takes the probe from his hands, loading it into the ship and getting into the pilot’s seat.
“You’re right about that.”
Benny sinks into the seat next to her, flicking on the comms.
“Em and I are good on this side, how’s our mission control this fine… whatever time it is.”
“Benny, I love you, but please try to have a shred of professionalism.” Lenny begs from across the receiver.
“Can’t. Lost it upon launching.” Benny jokes, desperately attempting to not let his blush show from under his helmet.
Emmy scoffs, failing to hide her bemused expression and punches his shoulder.
“Patrol Ship X1 is ready for action, honey. “
“Copy that.” Lenny smiles over the comms. “Opening launchpad for sector C. Lowering platform.”
The ship whirs to life and rumbles from the rise. In the glass canopy above them, Benny could see the roof open up into an airlock.
Emmy toggles with the levers and buttons, getting ready to head into space.
“Can you count us off, sweet pea?”
“Departing station in 10 seconds.”
"9 seconds."
The ship hums.
"8 seconds."
A beeping starts on the console as the wheels back up as far as they can.
"7 seconds."
The seatbelts click and fasten into place, securing the two astronauts.
"6 seconds."
The fans whir at Benny's command.
"5 seconds."
Emmy straps the probe into the storage compartment behind them, locking it until it’s more secure than them.
"4 seconds."
The airlock clicks outside the patrol spaceship.
"3 seconds."
The door slowly opens, pulling the two astronauts and probe forward with a steady rumble.
"2 seconds."
Emmy latches the wheels back inside the ship.
"1 second."
The ship floats upwards.
"Liftoff."
The hull blasts open as Emmy bangs the engines on full speed, roaring as the Neilsen behind them disappears between the swirling mosaic hues of the green fields of the nebula drawing them closer.
The ship rumbles as the blasters frantically try to stabilize themselves under the ever-changing gravity inside the inner edges of the space anomaly.
“Oy vey, you weren’t kidding when you said the gravity in here was fucked. I can barely get the thrusters to balance us out!” Emmy shouts, gripping the wheel with enough force to choke a horse.
“Aim for the red spot to your right! There’s a gap in gravity if you get it just right!” Harry rushes through the comms.
“Copy that!” Emmy shouts, fighting through the push and pull of the ringling mass they’re caught in all the while Benny flips the gears and switches of the ship to keep what he can balanced.
The engines sputter into the red-coated space between deep space and the target.
“Alright, we’re here! Not much better than in the green areas but hey, at least we’re not being flung like ragdolls.” Benny grumbles.
“Live with it.” Harry says. “Next time let Mary and me drive.”
“Hey! We’re good at flying! A lot better than the general population...”
Emmy pouted, scanning through the computer scanner of the space.
“Which one of us is here as a pilot again?”
“.... Touche.”
“Look for a bright red area.” Harry instructs.
“Yeah, red or orange-ish spots. Those tend to be stationary from what I tracked. 'Course most of it should have already been stationary but what can you do." Sherry chimes in.
“Wait, wait, wait, not the spot we’re at right now?”
Lenny disagrees. “It’s not close enough to the center. All it’ll grab is the signal of the Knudsen Post.”
“Understood. Not particularly agreed with on the ‘not close enough’ part but understood.”
Emmy punches into the computer a new search coordinate while Benny grabs Big Bastard, ready to send it into deep space at Emmy’s command.
“Got a visual yet?” Benny asks, taking the floppy disk out of it’s compartment on the probe and inserting it into the spaceship.
“I think so. Port side approximately 3 miles away. Guys back at the station, can you confirm?”
“Seems like a good spot for a scout. Hopefully from there we’ll be able to get a radio in.” Kelly says.
“Gotcha.” Emmy nods, turning to Benny. “Send out Big Bastard, Ben! Let’s see how she fares.”
Benny hollers and opens the canopy above them, stretching out as far as he can, Benny plunges Big Bastard forward through the green mist that covers the space and scurries to get back in and close the hatch.
“Big Bastard has been deployed, everyone!”
The team cheers and screams through the speakers as Emmy takes the controls and maneuvers the probe into the blindspot.
“She’s made it to her spot not much worse for wear. I think Benny and I can head back to the ship.”
“We’ll be waiting.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A day such as this is treasured amongst the crew.
A day where nothing has happened or needs to happen.
A day where everyone gets to breathe and relax.
“I swear to any and all gods I will strike you dead where you stand!”
Well, relax in theory.
“Ah, come off it, Benny-boy. You’re just jealous I have a higher score than you.”
“I used to have the highest score and you took it.” He growled.
“Sure did.” She smiles.
“You took it from me, Sherry.”
Lenny snorts from the edge of the couch, plucking his guitar with reckless abandon. “Shame on you, Sharon. How dare you steal the score from Benny.”
“Oh, gross, never call me by my full name again.” She cringes.
“Why not?” He questions with a smirk, leaning towards the scientist.
“Unless you want that guitar shoved down your esophagus and permanently damage your internal organs, Leonard, I suggest you keep my full name out of your mouth.”
He blanches. “Alright, ma’am.”
She grins and turns back to the game with a chuckle. “No professionalism on this station. Business should put that on a poster instead of whatever the hell he’s doing now.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Emmy mumbles sleepily from the couch, almost passed out and snoring from tiredness.
“Don’t we have a ‘no drinking on the job’ rule?” Benny deadpans, slewing over which stage to play (absolutely decimate) with Sherry next.
“Do I look like I’m on the job?” She slurs, giving Benny a glare so hard it could burn the back of his head.
“Fair enough.”
Emmy snaps a finger gun to Benny and hears the startup for the level- some futuristic neon city setting fighting against some lizard-giant with a robot suit both players control.
Strange game…
Mary leisures into the common room. “You guys are fighting over insignificant matters again? What are you, Kellin?”
Harry snickers from the floor, messing with a loose string on his white jumpsuit sleeve.
“That’s so mean, dude.”
The mech pilot shrugs. “Live with it, Harold. Now scoot over so I can sit next to you.”
“Oh, so Mary can call people by their full names but I can’t? I see how it is.” Lenny touted, picking at his strings even harder.
“That’s because Mary is the grandmother of the ship, Len,” Sherry turns to him, ignoring Benny’s scream at yet another loss. “She gets a free pass and you don’t.”
“I feel like I should take offense to the fact that you called me a grandmother.” Mary deadpans with a bite of her cheek.
“It’s a compliment, sweetie.”
“Aren’t you older than me…”
“Where is Kelly anyway? It’s not like them to miss a chance to tinker here with us?” Sherry asks, looking around the common room to find no sign of said engineer.
“Probably in the engine room.” Emmy mumbles sleepily.
Sherry winces, loading up the next level. “I love my job as much as anyone else but that kid has got to learn to slow down and take a breather.”
Benny flipped upside down and handed the controller to a very surprised Harry. “Take over for me, I’ll go get them.”
“I… okay.” He says, slowly taking it from Benny’s grasp.
Taking off into the hallway, Benny swims on air and makes his way to the engine room around the corner.
“How do you play this game?” Harry questions, inspecting the remote in his hands.
Sherry grins a cold and heartless grin. “You survive.”
Benny stifles a laugh at his team’s sitcom-ish banter while he floats through the empty platinum halls to the engines when he hears a loud, almost too-violent clang.
He seizes and sharply inhales, eyes widening before shooting off the wall like a bullet towards the door at the end of the hall. He slams into the hatch and punches the code to the door, shoving himself through as fast as he can.
“Are you okay?! I heard something happen, what was that bang?!” Benny whips his head around the expansive pipe and wire filled floor to find the engineer before he hears a shout.
“I can’t hear you hold on, I'll be down in a second!”
Kelly jumps down from the pipe they were lounging on, holding something familiar that Benny couldn’t quite place in their hands. Gently, they floated down to meet Benny.
“Sup dude?” They mock-salute.
“Are - you’re not hurt?” Benny eyes them up and down, surveying for injuries or complications.
“Not to my knowledge, no. Why you askin’?”
“So what was the bang I heard from outside?!”
“Oh, yeah I threw the blowtorch at the wall. Sorry ‘bout worrying you.”
“W-why… why did you… you know what? Nevermind. What’s with the gizmo?” He points to the machine in Kelly’s hands.
“Just some fun stupid tinkering. I got shocked by a loose wire and dropped the blowtorch. Yeah, it might not have been the smartest choice but hey, it’s better than throwing away the thing I’m building.”
“Guess that makes sense.. But what even is it anyway? And why not build it with everyone else?” Benny inquires, flicking a loose wire on the rectangular device.
They shrug. “Sometimes a person wants some alone time. Is that such a bad thing?”
Benny scoffs at their tone, crossing his arms. “By itself it’s not a bad thing, but when the person who says it is known to hate being alone, even more than I do, then there’s some cause for concern.”
Kelly says nothing, instead strengthening the strain in their smile, picking and tapping the ends of their fingertips. They don’t meet his worried gaze, nor do they disguise the anxiety crawling through their eyes.
“Kell… what’s up?” Benny prodded.
They scoff, crossing their arms. “What’s up? What’s up is that I’m tinkering here so if you could leave me to my devices that’d be pretty rad.” They squeak.
Staring at the engineer, Benny reads his friend’s body language and shakes his head. “Don’t buy it. Spill the beans, Shephard.”
They groan and drop the gizmo into Benny’s hand, drifting to the door and slamming the hatch closed. “Uh-” He says as Kelly grabs him by the shoulders and hisses in his stunted face.
“What I’m going to tell you, you can’t tell anyone else, understood?”
“I mean, okay?”
“I’m communicating with allies on earth.”
Benny blinks, confusion etching into his face. “Allies on earth? What allies? You mean mission control?”
They cackle hysterically. “Ha! As if they’d help me out with any part of my cause.”
“Cause? What cause? And why say allies when you can say friends? Like I told Mary, you can always ask Lenny to send transmissions to people outside of Mission Con-”
“Oh no, most of the people I’m contacting aren’t my friends.”
Benny glances at the doohickey in Kelly’s hand. Now with context, it looks suspiciously like a phone. A very specific phone at that.
“Is that.. Mary’s communicator?”
Kelly rapidly blinks between a very confused Benny and the gizmo in their hands.
“No?”
Benny squints as he moves closer to Kelly, a rather pitiful attempt of intimidation. Somehow, it works.
“Alright, yes it is.”
“Why the hell would you need an independent communicator? Are you trying to hide something from the crew?”
“Yes.” They admit before backtracking at Benny’s offended expression. “Well, not hiding the messages from the crew, at least! Maybe a little. Look, it’s-it’s complicated!”
“If you’re not hiding the messages from the crew then who’re you trying to decieve here?”
Kelly bites their lip.
“You know about President Business right?”
Benny stares in bewilderment. "Not personally. He’s the trading partner with Cape Space, right?"
“Not like that.” They roll their eyes. “Do you know how he acts? How he feels about… strange people?”
“Strange people.” He echoes in confusion.
“You know... people who do strange things.”
“Strange things? Like… people who do illegal things? What, are you a criminal?” Benny laughs at the notion, trying to hide the growing anxiety bubbling in his chest.
“Crim- no I’m not a criminal!” Kelly yells. “But you’re not off on the whole ‘illegal’ thing.”
Benny motions for them to continue, mentally trying to piece together the story.
“So you know how I’m able to build things really quickly?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with-”
“Shut up and answer the question!” They sneer, pointing at Benny.
“Yes?”
Kelly continues, steadily growing more frantic with each syllable uttered. “Okay, and have you ever wondered why I’ve been able to do that?”
“If I say the wrong thing will I get in trouble?”
“Depends on your answer.”
“Then no, I have not.”
Kelly groans and moves their hands in an attempt to articulate themselves.
“I’m… I’m a master-”
The alarms dig into their ears abruptly as the red lights flash to life.
“Motherfucker!” Benny screams in surprise, pushing his palms into his ears.
“Benny and Kelly report to the hangar now! We have a problem and need everyone here, it's going to shit!” Emmy yells through the speakers.
Kelly and Benny lock eyes and run across the engine room, barely squeezing through the hastily opened door as they make their way to the team, communicator forgotten.
The station glows a bright red hue while the two veer their way into the cockpit, whose hatch is slammed open with everyone else already inside and barking commands at each other.
“What the hell is going on!?” Benny yells over the alarms.
“We lost all contact with the probe, I don't know how!" Sherry yells, her fingers flying over keyboards and buttons trying to reconnect the signal.
"W-how did that happen?! We put every stronghold we could think of on it and in virtually the safest place we could find?!" Kelly screeches, distress glazing over their panicked eyes.
Mary yells from the other side of the cockpit, left to Sherry and Harry in the middle. "We don't know how it happened but it did. Right now we just need to get it back and ourselves in balance!"
"Harry! Get us closer in, not all the way but just enough to connect with it again." Emmy shouts.
"No way. I can't even reach the outskirts without fucking up our orbit." He comments, pulling the steering wheel back as far as he can without snapping it off.
“Uh.. guys?” Benny started.
“We practically drive ourselves into orbit manually on a daily basis! What difference would it make this time?!” Kelly stumbles as the ship rocks.
“The station isn’t built to drive through the nebula, only to follow it! Reaching the edge of the nebula the first time nearly destroyed the front of the ship!” Sherry spouts.
“Guys?” Benny called a little louder.
“Can we back off? Maybe the connection will strengthen if we go back just a little bit?” Lenny suggests.
“Fixed orbit!” Harry and Sherry shout in unison.
Kelly argues. “It isn't fixed if we manually drive it!”
“It’s fixed in orbit but what it happens to be orbiting is moving!”
“Well that’s bullshi-”
“Guys!” Benny floats to the ground and stomps his feet, producing a ringing loud enough to snap everyone’s attention to him.
“What?!”
“The thing’s getting brighter!”
A pause hangs in the air. The crew turns to the window and sees exactly that.
The mossy green of the outside is rapidly turning into a radioactive green, the peeking streaks of maroonish purple becoming violet in the blink of an eye. Everyone’s blood ran cold.
“Hey Sherry?” Benny asks, eyes not leaving the nebula.
“Yeah?” She whispers, her voice ever-so-slightly quivering.
“Why is it doing that?”
“I don’t know.”
“How is it doing that?”
“I… don’t know.”
“Does it look like it’s getting closer or is that just me?”
The anomaly stalks the right of the Nielsen, creeping its way closer with it’s swampy edges. The bright green follows closely behind. Benny watches the light spasm and twitch under the clouds of gas and gasps.
“It’s a flare! Everybody out of the room now, now, now!”
Emmy punches the door open and Benny practically shoves her and Kelly to the other side before scrambling to the rest of his team, scurrying to get out of their seats.
Benny whips his head to the flare lighting it’s way to the cockpit and drags Mary out of her seat, shutting the door to the cockpit and racing to the safe-room as far away from their right as possible.
“Come on!” He yells to the crew.
Benny blasts through the living quarters to the door right next to his own room and kicks the metal open. “Everyone in, now!”
One by one they shuffle into the cramped space and Benny shuts the door just before the rumbling and shaking reaches their door.
Benny sighs and turns to his crewmates, each one standing or sitting on the cold steel floors, breathing ragged and shaken as they prepare for the next excruciating waiting process.
The flare lasted for 6 hours.
The crew had stayed in the shelter with time to spare. In the hours that passed at least 3 games of truth or dare have been played, 7 rounds of 2 truths and a lie (with Benny unsuccessfully attempting to get Kelly to confess the rest of their supposed “plan”) and other void-filling games until the stress and exhaustion that occurred with the previous hours led the group to fall asleep on top of each other in a jumbled pile.
At least until Emmy woke up with a jump.
“Morning alarms!”
Kelly and Lenny yell at their captain’s sudden movement, fully jolting awake, in turn waking up the rest of the crew sleeping under them.
“What th’ fuck?” Kelly grumbles. “I was havin’ a good dream.”
Emmy stares at her friends, all of which are getting up from their previously sprawled position on the ground into sitting positions.
“Ah jeez, I’m sorry about that. Force of habit.” She chuckles sheepishly.
“Well… at least we know that she actually does sleep.” Benny comments, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’ worry ‘bout it.” Kelly waves her off.
Mary yawns, recapping in her head the passing day. “How long have we been sleeping?”
Harry immediately shoots up, looking ahead at the clock above the door hatch. . “At least 8 hours.”
Lenny yelps, clutching his heart. “How d’you have that much energy ‘fter waking up?!”
“I don’t sleep. I stress out for a few minutes and pass out for 8 hours.”
“Not.. sure that’s healthy, dude.” Benny sleepily groans.
“Doesn’t matter. We have things to do.”
Sherry pipes up next to Mary. “Yeah, I’d be surprised if the flare didn’t leave any damage. There’s a big chance we’d have to repair the cockpit. Again.”
Harry groans and crumbles on the nearest person, who just so happens to be Kelly. “Poor place can’t catch a break, can it?”
Kelly chuckles and pats his heavily matted hair. “Apparently not.”
Opening the door to the hall, Emmy speaks up. “Looks like it’s a repair day, y’all. Look for anything slightly broken and out of place to heavily damaged and needs urgent care. After we’re done with that, we’ll read up on data from Big Bastard and figure out the next step.”
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Repairs take over 3 days and during each one Benny tries and fails to corner and interrogate Kelly.
Benny was fine with secrets. Really. He'd be a hypocrite if he said he didn't have any secrets of his own, especially of the floating variety.
The main difference, however, is that Benny's secret only harms his pride.
Benny knows, he knows that his excuses for the anti-gravity device are getting tired. He knows that at least someone on the team is brewing with silent suspicion.
Unfortunately, his game of cat and mouse went two ways and Benny found himself playing mouse.
"So, Big Blue, why do you still wear that?" Kelly prods offhandedly, fidgeting with the keyboard circuitry they snagged from the common room into the engine room. Each of the team decided to check up on their respective areas of expertise after the general damages have been done and Benny, whose expertise is his friends, chose to follow Kelly into the engine room.
"... What?" Benny blanches.
"Why do you still wear that thing? The anti-G device. I know you don’t need it anymore and I’ve seen your face when it snags on things. It’s annoying you but you still wear it. Spill the beans, Blue Chu.”
“I don-”
Kelly sticks their finger on Benny’s mouth. “Nope! You don’t get to deflect! Unless you’re spilling the beans you’re shutting up.”
That’s the game they want to play, then? Bring it on.
“Why should I tell you anything? Not like you’ve been entirely honest with me either.”
Kelly stares at him from their pipe lodge, dusty-brown hair falling on their face.
“For your information, Benny, I was going to tell you everything but because of “certain happenings,” They mockingly make quotations. “I didn’t. It’s nothing personal but sometimes the bullshit has to stay inside the bullpen, you feel me?”
Benny does. He sincerely, truly does. It takes everything in him not to say that, however. Instead retorting with a snap.
"Well when it could put your teammates in danger, it should be said shouldn't it?"
Kelly snorts loudly. "Yeah, like you're not doing the same thing."
"I'm not doing anything! I'm just wearing the device!”
Kelly jumps in his face. “But you don’t need it!”
“You don’t know that!”
Kelly backtracks, crossing their arms and furrows their brows.
Benny pauses.
Shit.
“Really now?”
“Yes, really now.”
They eye him up and down, judgement laced in every twitch of their eyes. They smirk.
“Then take it off.”
Once again, shit.
“What?”
“Take off the device. Prove to me you’re not hiding anything and take it off.”
Silence rings between the two. The whirring and the clanking of the engine room striking between the tension. Kelly’s smirk deepens.
“I knew it! I knew you were hiding something!”
Benny stumbles. “No, wait I didn’t-”
“Don’t bullshit me, Ben I can smell your lies from here! Why do you wear that thing?!” They clap the keyboard in their hands for dramatic effect.
“I don’t have to say anything!” Benny yells.
“Why not?!”
“Because-”
“Because you don’t trust me? Is that it? Has it never gone through your mind that maybe I can help you?” Kelly’s voice gets hushed as their shoulders drop.
They sigh, pressing down on muted keys. “Out of anyone here don’t you think that I would be the one to help you keep a secret?”
Benny softens his composure, nodding silently. “Okay.”
Kelly’s head snaps up. “Okay?”
“Yeah, I’ll tell you.”
Kelly smiles, opening their mouth to speak before Benny cuts them off.
“But, you have to finish telling me your secret. That way we’re even.”
“Deal.” They say, holding out their hand. Benny firmly shakes it and begins his confession.
“Okay so, you’re right. I don’t need the device.” He explains, reaching down, loosening the strap and holding the thing in his hand. “I float either way.”
Kelly’s eyes widen as their jaw slacks. Rapidly looking him up and down with a delighted spark in their eyes. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“That’s so fucking cool, dude! How long have you been doing that?” Kelly circles around Benny, prodding at the space under his levitating legs with their foot.
“Remember that time the pilot window broke and I got flung into the outer tendrils?”
They look at him, disbelief in cohorts with pure excitement. “No. You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Took off the device one night and all of a sudden I was in the air. Or… lack thereof.”
They spastically wave their free arm around Benny's legs. "So it just… happened? No ideas or theories as to why?" Benny shakes his head. "And here I thought you were a scientist."
"I am!" Benny whines, offended. "Just… haven't gotten around to asking why."
Kelly snorts shortly. "Too busy keeping up the excuses to get into it, huh? I feel that."
“Do you, now?” Benny teases.
“Yeah, yeah I’ll tell ya about it in a sec just get a place to put down the anti-g thing and sit- er float.” Kelly rolls their eyes, carefully placing the makeshift keyboard on the floor behind them. Benny raises his legs into a cross legged stance, inches above the floor.
“So,’’ Benny claps his hands. “President Business?”
Kelly nods. "I'll get to him in a sec, first of all, we have to talk about master builders."
Benny waves to Kelly, a motion to go on.
"Master builders are people with the ability to create basically anything they want out of… everything else. No instructions, no expertise. Just pure unhinged creative ability."
"Ignoring the fact that you essentially called yourself unhinged, I can assume you're one of them?" Benny guesses.
Kelly finger guns him. "Ah, he finally catches on! Good job Benny.”
"Oh hardy-har." He rolls his eyes. "Just get on with the story."
"Alright, so master builders are… not very liked by a certain someone in a certain position of power."
"President Business." Benny completes the statement.
Kelly sighs in agreement. "President Business. The guy's in charge of practically every company and corporation from Bricksburg to Cape Space and more. I mean, you’ve seen the ridiculous amounts of posters and propaganda he’s managed to spread out even in space! After bringing himself to power over the whole world you’d think he’d be capable of bringing everyone together right?”
“Well…”
Kelly shouts over him. “Well nothing! He takes one look at everyone mingling and sharing shit from their corners of the world and says ‘You know what? Fuck that’ and builds walls between them.”
“Walls?” Benny questions.
“Giant ones! He cuts off all communications between master builders living in between realms and starts a manhunt for them to help him create his stupid bullshit, he- he takes all of our ideas, all of that wonder and squeezes it into perfectly manufactured nothing!” They seethe, breathing raggedly with hunched shoulders.
“Kell…”
“All of that-that passion that goes into creating something new with nothin’ but your hands and your mind is sucked out with all of your other ideas for his goddamn perfectionist agenda!” They yell before devolving into hysterical laughs. “You know what the worst part is?”
Benny shakes his head in concern.
“The worst part is that I lost my best friends to that… asshole! He rounded them up and took ‘em hostage right in front of me and I did nothing to stop it! So I thought.. I thought I’d make myself useful and do something productive to fight against him.” They say, their usually boisterous voice dropping to a bare rasp. “God, I… I don’t even know what I thought. Tried coming here undercover to get a bird’s eye view of the world and… I don’t even know.. I don’t know what I tried.”
Silently, Benny crawls up behind them, hugging their shoulders and whispering comfort in their ear.
“We’ll find them. You, me and everyone else on the team will find them. We might not be master builders but we’re your friends. And there’s no way in hell we’re letting you fight this alone. I promise”
Kelly sobs into Benny’s arm, clutching him with silent hiccups.
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With his new secret alliance with Kelly and a newfound goal on the mission, the two diligently worked on ideas to drop into the radio more ways to communicate with master builders in different realms.
Of course, the hard part was doing it in a way that didn’t make everyone else on the station suspicious.
But let it be known, Benny never said he was one for subtlety. Which was, unfortunately, quickly becoming a problem as he tried more and more to get unknowing help from the rest of the team.
Everything ranging from the slightly nudging:
“What if we used the radio to reach hidden radio systems back on Earth? Just to see if we could. Come on, Sherry, I know you want to.”
To the on-the-nose forcing:
“Don’t you want to see who we could reach? What if we caught something important that we couldn’t find anywhere else?”
To the extremely ludicrous.
“Hey, what if we made it into an internet cafe?”
Let’s just say Benny was running out of options.
“Internet Cafe? Really?” Harry stares at him as if he grew a mushroom from his head.
“Just… throwing out suggestions. Heh.” Benny clears his throat.
“This was Lenny’s and your idea, Benjamin. Why now, when we’re very much chest-deep into development would you want to change it?”
“Oh, I don’t want to change it! I just want to add on to it!” He defends himself haphazardly.
Mary clangs the piece of metal in her lap with a wrench, listening to the echo of the hollow steel shell above wires. “Uh-huh. Are we sure it has nothing to do with your new frequent visits to the engine room?”
“Hey! I’ll have you know the engine room is a dangerous place to be in and especially with the nebula’s newest tendency to ‘lash out’,” he makes jazz hands. “It’s a safe bet one of the major fuck-ups of the station’ll be from there.”
Harry squints at him. “We… we have an engineer. It’s sort of their job to keep the engines in check.”
“Well, they could use an extra hand!” He lies.
In truth, Kelly absolutely doesn’t need any help. With their new ally-ship in Benny their spirit seems to have invigorated them to high extremes of productivity. Maybe a little too much productivity if the continuous sleepless rumbling of the engines is anything to go by…
Nevertheless, Benny comes as much as often to learn more about master builders and the cause they’re fighting for.
Even more recently, the idea of Kelly training him to become a master builder had sprung to mind, yet no action has been taken to act upon it.
“Patrols are that boring for you, huh?” Harry smirks at the soldier from the grease-coated floor.
“I resent that.”
“Unless your official file lied, you’re also not an engineer.”
Benny shudders and instinctively reaches for his nose. Yeah, absolutely not an engineer…
“Well, morale is better than loneliness.”
“And actual assistance is better than cheers from the sidelines, what exactly is your point?” He grouses, screwing in a piece of golden metal onto the radio.
“Touche, Harrison. Touche.” Benny pauses. “... So is that a ‘yes’ to the internet cafe?”
“Get out!” They shout in unison, pointing to the door with their respective tools.
Benny cackles as he makes his way out of the mech lab and into the hall. With the two of them properly annoyed and nowhere else to go pester about his new personal goal, Benny starts wandering the halls.
The bristle of machinery hums in his ears as he walks past the engine room and personal rooms to find the gym but stops halfway.
There’s music playing from somewhere.
And Benny has a sneaking suspicion he knows who’s behind it.
Sprinting (floating, really) down the hall he follows the synthesized melody to its origin and knows exactly where it came from.
The communications room.
Benny drums on the door in beat to the rhythm of the song, trying to get Lenny’s attention until he hears a scrambling noise and the song abruptly being cut down.
Lenny opens the door with a barely spared glance, yanks him into the office.
“Gah-okay! You gotta stop pulling me in here like that, man. One of these days I’ll hit my head on your equipment, just wait for it.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry I just really hate people standing in the doorway. Gives everything a slightly cold vibe, don’t you think?” Lenny smiles, sitting in front of his keyboard and sound system.
“Careful there, Lenny. Hate’s a four letter word.” He teases.
“Yeah, just like fear, love and fish.” Lenny banters.
Benny chortles.
“What were you doing, anyways? Not common for music to be playing on the station if it’s not on any makeshift instrument of ours.”
Lenny’s eyes light up, scooting closer and closer to Benny’s face.
“You’ll never believe what I found.”
“Hm?”
“I found… a real, bona fide copy of Everything Is Awesome by A Popular Band!”
“You’re kidding!” Benny screams in disbelief.
“I definitely am not!” Lenny smiles.
“Dude, how did you even get that? Where was it hiding?”
“It was with all the other cassette tapes. Somehow the bugger wormed its way into the records box.” Lenny exclaims, patting siad box to his left.
Benny whistles. “Damn. And you kept it from me, Lenny? Shame on you.”
“Hey, I didn’t even know you knew A Popular Band, how was I supposed to know you like them?”
He rolls his eyes. “Oh please, everyone knows them. Hell, even Mary probably knows them! Which says a lot considering she only listens to death metal.”
Lenny snickers into the tape in his hands. “Yeah, she’d probably kill me if she found me playing this song.”
Benny hums. “Probably a good thing you only played it here, then.”
Lenny slides into Benny’s face. “Well there is one more place we could play it."
“Sherry’s office.” Benny jokes.
“Wh- no! In the speakers, you oaf! Remember when we rebuilt the station from the flare? I got the outside repairs with Sherry and built in speakers around the front of the ship that can play for extreme lengths into space at over 140 decibels!” Lenny smiles maniacally at Benny’s face.
Blanching, Benny clears his throat to reply. “That’s… pretty loud.”
“I know! Isn’t it great!” Lenny smiles with a dangerous glint in his eyes.
Huffing out silent chuckles, Benny says. “See, this is why we don’t let you and Sherry be on a team. Unhinged chaos is all that you make, you don’t even repair anything, you just add more things to the ship.”
“Oh hush you love it.”
I love you, He wants to say. He wants to say it so badly.
But now is not the time.
“We’ll see if I love it if I don’t get permanent hearing damage.”
“Chill Ben, the only ones in danger of getting hearing damage are the aliens living in the deep, cold heart of space.”
Chuckling softly, Benny rolls his eyes and stares with amusement.
"If aliens exist, dude. If they exist."
"After all the things we have seen in the past 8 months and all of the things we have done you're telling me you still don't believe in aliens? Benny, come on, do better." Lenny fondly jokes.
"Calm down, radio star. Just put the song on the speakers before Em finds out you installed them without her permission."
Lenny winks, slipping the cassette into a poorly-hidden component on the side of the cabinet facing towards the window panel showcasing the stars outside.
All at once the ship rumbles to a steady beat, the bass echoing through space as the singer's voice pierces the halls and the instrumental wails.
Benny hollers, feeling the vibrations in the walls as Lenny screams in victory at the speaker’s success.
"I can't believe it worked!" He cheers.
Benny nudges Lenny's shoulder, yelling over the blaring music.
"Why not believe it? Think it wouldn't work? With you working on something there's no way it wouldn't be genius!"
“Aww, if anyone’s the genius here it’s you!” Lenny giggles, doing a small shimmy in his chair.
Benny shakes his head, eyes and nose scrunching up with a snicker. “No, no I’m serious! I could never be able to bring myself to do something like this, much less do it well.”
“Well-”
The door slams open, a glaring and frazzled Emmy whips her head to the comms officer who stares at her with primal fear settling into his eyes. Slowly, he sinks into his seat.
“How dare you!” She screams, lunging at the console and officer. Lenny jumps out of the chair and ducks behind Benny, grabbing his shoulders so hard he almost pulls him down.
Benny stumbles and with a wheeze, he holds a hand out to shield Lenny. “Calm down, Emmy! It’s just speakers! Unauthorized speakers but still...”
“That’s not the issue!” She barked with volume.
“Then what is?!” Benny yells,
“That goddamn song! I never want to hear it played on my station again, am I clear?!” Emmy shouts, going under his arm and pulling Lenny out from his protection.
“Alright, alright I won’t play it again just please don’t attack me.” Lenny whispers, shakingly rolling his hands into fists and shielding his face.
Emmy puts the comms officer down and folds her arms against her chest. “Fine. But tell me what song you play next time, cause I swear, Len, if I hear one note of generic pop I will assign you engine repair duty for three weeks. I get enough of that four-note tune from my partner back home. I don’t want it bothering me here.”
Lenny gulps, whispering meekly. “Okay, okay I will. I promise.”
“Good!” She smiles. “Now, let’s discuss final changes to the radio with everyone else.”
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“Due to last time’s bullshit, I’ve made the executive decision to assign Mary and Harry to put the thing in the thing. It’s purely logical thinking, not that I don’t want to do it, it just feels like the right choice.” Emmy announces, patting the shoulders of both Harry and Mary.
Sherry snickers from the co-pilot’s chair. “Yeah, try not to die, alright? Can’t lose both of our pilots in one day and I didn't clean any tools for an autopsy."
The intercom beeps, Lenny speaks from his communications residence. "Why would you say that? Sherry, I have the most hearing accessibility out of anyone on the station, if they die I'll be the first to hear it in high definition. Why would you say that?"
She guffaws loudly at Lenny’s distress.
"Come on, stop stressing out the pure ones, nobody's gonna die." Emmy says.
“I’d say ‘not if I can help it’ but I’m not coming along.” Benny sighs with a shrug. “But for my case and everyone else’s, please try and stay safe.” He says, hoping his anxiety doesn't come across his wavering voice.
Mary rolls her eyes, shaking her shoulders with a chuckle. “Unfortunately, I have very little say in the matter. If I do die, however, my cat posters go to Sherry.”
The aforementioned scientist whoops from her chair and raises her fists into the sky, letting her chair’s top skid forward and back on its hinges.
“You have cat posters?” Emmy murmurs with silent amusement.
“And what about it?” Mary cocks her head to the side, smirking in Emmy’s face.
She rolls her eyes and smiles. "Nothing, hon. It’s just… adorable of you.”
“Call me adorable again and you will be hearing from my wife.”
“Good!” Emmy says. “I’ve been wanting to meet her for some time now.”
Mary blankly looks ahead, a sour expression on her face. “I’m leaving.” She turns around.
The group laugh as she exits the cockpit, Harry staring at her walking out and following closely behind, not before turning to the others with a tiny grin.
“She was smiling. Don’t let her fool you."
Sherry awws, placing a hand on her heart. "I knew it, she does care about us!"
"I wouldn't say care as much as tolerate us cause she has no other choice, but that works just as well." Kelly says.
Harry snaps finger guns to the engineer with a wink and turns to walk out the door.
The group ranges in expressions from smirking softly to themselves to rolling their eyes, but continues with the operations as planned. Well, those that had a technical job, anway. Benny, however, was not one of those people.
So as everyone works, Benny sits in the air, fiddling with the seam on his sleeve. Maybe if he stares at it hard enough it’ll turn into a teleportation device and bring him into the ship...
Yeah, no. He’s still here. So are his nerves. Dammit.
“Are you sure I can’t go down there and join them? I mean- no offense to their skill but I think someone should be there to keep them safe-”
“Benny, they’re both expert pilots. Harry is one of the best maneuvering flyers in Cape Space and Mary’s job as a pilot is literally unconventional steering. They’ll be fine, honey. Let it go.” Emmy interrupts, striking her hand firmly on Benny’s shoulder.
“But that doesn’t ensure their safety,” Benny fights back, desperation creasing his brows. “I’ve been out there twice and almost died, you’ve been out there yourself and know how bad it is.”
She nods, her face contorted to fake a thinking expression. “Yeah, I’ve been out there and almost died with you, but did I?”
“What?” Benny asks.
“Did I die?” Emmy questions, smirk appearing on her face.
“...No?”
“Did you die?” She continues.
“No.”
“Exactly! From the looks of it there’s a good chance neither of them will die, hon. Let the anxiety go.” Emmy says, before patting him on the shoulder and moving to inspect the shuttle’s readings.
Benny stays silent. He trusts the two pilots, but the voice in the back of his head continues to whisper proclamations of hurt and tragedy which Benny finds himself at the mercy of paying attention.
"Alright, we're at the patroller. Mary's locking the radio in place." Harry speaks through the comms.
Emmy nods to herself, flicking buttons and gears on the controls. "Which patroller, hon? We've got at least seven down there."
"Model 6830. Sturdier than the X1, faster too." Mary answers.
"Also better than the X1 for the fact that it has lasers." Kelly pitches in, making themself visible from under the control panel to face Emmy.
"Lasers? Since when?" Sherry asks, her head snapping to Kelly from the screen of the control panel fast enough to cause whiplash.
"Since Mary and I put it on there like… last week, maybe?" Kelly answers.
"Without me? How dare you, Shepard. At the very least you could have let me build the actual lasers, come on.” Sherry pouts.
Kelly pats the scientist’s leg. “Don’t worry, we still didn’t have more to do on it. For instance, we wanted to attach on it a freeze ray-”
“You weren’t even supposed to build lasers on it in the first place, sugar.”
“Yet here we are, and the lasers are on there. What are you gonna do about it, Emilia?”
“Next time you try to install something on any of our vehicles I will bodyslam you into the ground as soon as you walk through the doors to the hangar.” Emmy sneers, a dangerous smile setting on her face.
“Is that a threat I smell or just the smell of space?” Kelly teases.
“Why don’t we find out next time you build something?”
“Okay, either you stop talking or I will take out my earpiece.” Mary cuts in from the speakers, ending the spout.
“In a second, Mary. I need to finish threatening Kelly!”
“So it is a threat!” Kelly yells, pointing a finger at Emmy.
“I don’t care, I’ll threaten them by myself when we return. For the time being, can we please focus on the task at hand?” She says.
“Right, right,” Emmy clears her throat and speaks into the comms. “You two ready, honey?”
“Have been for five minutes.” Harry responds, dryly.
This time, Sherry responds. “No need for sass, little man. We're on it.” She says, operating the switches with practiced ease.
“Lower the patroller to launchpad F.” Emmy follows through, tapping the code sequence and finishing with a flourish double tap of ‘88’ before applying it.
“Opening airlock doors in T-minus 10.” Kelly counts down.
Benny floats to the hangar bay's windows and rests an arm on the pilot's (currently Emmy's) seat. The countdown continues while the team barks off commands and operations.
The ship groans as the airlock yawns open and the space patroller slings into the variegated sky glowing in front of the Nielsen.
“Alright, let’s remember we’re going deeper into the nebula than before so be prepared to lose connection the further you go.” Lenny says. “The radio will accommodate that once it’s turned on and put in place.”
Emmy nods. “When we find a blindspot we need one of you to manually turn it on in position. I hope that you still kept the safety tethers when making unapproved changes to the ship.”
“Oh, we kept it, alright.” Kelly says. “Kept and reinforced it while adding an extra 10 feet of retractable cable!”
“The more you tell me the more hope I lose.”
“In me or just in general?”
“Take your pick.”
Harry dryly spoke through the speaker. "You all suck at focusing."
"Hey! I've been here monitoring and helping the whole time and so has Lenny!" Sherry argues. "Speaking of which, how's it going out there?"
"Well, we were right. This patroller is smoother than X1." He says, amusement creeping through his usually-tired rasp.
“Smooth sailing? That’s… rare. Especially for us.” Benny comments in surprise.
Sherry chuckles with a jest. “I wouldn’t call it smooth, per se, but considering the fact that they aren’t screaming constantly, it’s definitely better than our whole ‘Big Bastard’ incident . No offense, Ben.”
Benny rolls his eyes, but nods in agreement nonetheless.
"Yeah, yeah, none taken. How far in are they going exactly?" Benny asks, facing the speaker as if expecting it to form a mouth and talk.
Harry responds. "About 50-something miles."
"Very precise." Benny snarks with a smile.
"We're not looking for precise, Benjamin. We're following the graphing of the scout probe, which showed a heavier chance of blindspots near that depth." Mary explains curtly and Benny can almost see her rolling her eyes.
"Speaking of which," Sherry interrupts, voice rising with each word.
"You're about to go into the blind, connection will be lost until you either turn the radio on or back out. So good luck and please try not to die, I can't reanimate you yet." She finishes with a grin.
"Understood. I'll be the one turning the radio on as Harry pilots the ship. We’ll see you all soon. Patroller out." Mary says, right before static cuts her out.
Well, nothing to do now but wait.
Kelly looks up at Sherry with a frown. "Aww, why no reanimation yet?" They ask, trying to keep their frown from quirking up.
"Hey, I'm working on it! Do you think Frankenstein created the monster in one day?" She snapped, flicking her hand on top of Kelly's head.
Kelly snorts and crosses their hands while rolling their auburn eyes at the scientist above them. "I don't care what he did, he dropped out of college to play God, he's a dipshit."
Sherry gasps, clutching her heart as though it had just been shot. "How can you say that?! Have you no shame?"
"Yes, actually!" They cheer brightly. “I have never felt shame once in my life.”
“I don’t know whether to be extremely disappointed or extremely unsurprised.” Sherry says, trying to hide a discreetly amused roll of her eyes.
“That’s the Shepard charm, baby!”
Emmy leans back in her chair with a groan. “Come on kids, play nice. Y’all ain’t allowed to bicker over gothic literature, I’m not allowing it.”
Lenny chokes from the comms. “But you were fighting with Kelly just a few minutes ago! Why don’t we get to fight?”
“Oh Lenny, honey, you couldn’t hurt a fly. I don’t even think you’re capable of arguing without wanting to argue in five minutes.” Emmy gushes. “Last time I started an argument with you, you squeaked and hid behind Benny.”
“It wasn’t an argument, you tried to kill me!” Lenny shouts.
"Well yes, but I did so affectionately, hon."
“That doesn’t even… okay.” Lenny trails off.
Emmy snickers softly to herself before turning her attention to Benny. “Hey, Ben.”
Benny’s head snaps up, startled. “Yeah?”
“You’re floating near the ceiling, hon. If you keep up your thought-wandering you’re going to hit your head.”
He looks down and sure enough, he’s not even close to the ground. When did he let go of Emmy’s chair?
“Oh fuck. Didn’t even notice.” He mumbles, lowering down to eye level.
“You’ve gotten… really good at controlling that whole ‘floating’ thing.” Sherry smirks. “Glad to see my invention is being put to good use, even if you don’t need it.”
Snickering, Benny rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah well, floating’s fun.”
“I thought you didn’t like floating, though?” Emmy accuses with a crossing of her arms.
“People can change, Emmy.” Benny says, proud of his great fibbing ability..
Kelly glares at him from under the table, glaring at his horrible ability to lie.
The two catch each other’s gaze, Kelly with a stare that screams ‘I’ll cut your head off’ and Benny with a nervous expression that meekly says ‘Please buy the lie I can’t do this right now’
Benny tries to speak before snapping his attention to the blinking, beeping red signal on the console.
“The radio is in place. Bring us back in.” Harry says curtly. It isn't clear whether it's from the static of the transmission or a shift of his voice, but Benny's almost positive he hears Harry's voice shake.
The however-slight waiver of Harry's seems to fall on deaf ears as the rest of the crew cheer and Emmy happily responds. “Alright, hon we’ll bring y’all in as soon as possible and once you’re on the ship we can do something to celebrate this milestone in the mission, sound good?”
He doesn’t reply, but the steady beeping of the signal mixed with Lenny’s reassurance tells them the pilots heard the message loud and clear.
The team helps lodge the pilots back into the Knudsen and (after a quick shower on Mary’s part, her suit had particles of red dust all over it) went into the common room to celebrate.
If anyone saw Harry’s gaze spastically shifted from Mary to his point of focus, they didn't say anything.
If anyone saw Mary’s movements were sharper than before, unlike her usual fluid way of motion, they didn’t say anything.
If Benny saw the way Harry was the last to leave the common room, even when everyone else was asleep and he stayed alone on the couch, fiddling with his hands as the tv screen projected nothing but a grey and stale glow on his face, well…
Benny knows how to keep a secret.
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In the coming weeks, Harry seldom shows his face around the station. Any time a crew member spots the younger he quickly evades the premises, whether by running away or forcing the person to somewhere else. When he does join the team, he rarely speaks. His eyes drift to his never-ending shaking hands and his expression of resolve glints into a terror that hints of unspeakable horror.
Needless to say, it’s worrying everyone else. At the very least it’s worrying Benny.
Benny sighs and looks up from his keyboard (Kelly had tested him on his building abilities a few days ago and forced him to destroy and repair the thing in less than an hour. After screaming his heart out at the poor destruction of the instrument Benny managed to put it together in what was barely 30 minutes.) Solemnly gazing across his friends, all enraptured in their current new way of passing time.
His eyes land on Lenny, who’s currently playing announcer as Kelly and Sherry battle each other with tiny mechanized robots (ones Mary had been hiding from them, apparently, and brought them out after an impromptu workspace cleaning session) while Emmy and Mary root on the sidelines.
Sherry’s mech lands a punch on Kelly’s and it topples onto the floor with a metallic clang. Across the common room, Emmy and Sherry high five while Kelly groans and flops onto Mary’s lap. Lenny shoots up from the couch, using the tape recorder he was fiddling with as some kind of mock-microphone.
“And Lovell Sniper falls with a hearty clash! Round three goes to Soyuz Destruction and it’s pilot, Sherry Jemison!” He cheers, flourishing a hand towards the winning mech fighter.
Benny quirks a smile as he watches Lenny prance around the room, enraptured by his commentary on the latest fight as if he was speaking to an audience and not his closest friends.
To Benny, talking is just a thing people do. It’s as normal as eating or sleeping. But as he looks at the way Lenny walks across the floor and organizes the mechs back into place for the next round, Benny realizes something.
Lenny doesn’t talk, no.
He communicates.
He communicates as though he speaks some holy word, as though he can reveal the truth behind each of the world’s mysteries, yet it’s spoken with such a clear passion and excitement that it makes him seem as though the oldest person in the world as much as he is the youngest.
“Ben, Benster, hey Benny!” Lenny yells.
Benny jumps in his seat, shaken away from his wandering thoughts. “Hm, what? What was that?”
“I asked if you were okay.” Lenny snorts. “You were just… dozed off on your keyboard playing the same chord over and over again.”
“Oh,” Benny blushes. “Didn’t even notice, sorry about that.”
“All good, man. What were you thinking about so hard that made you zone out like that?” Lenny asks, conking his head to the side as he plops on the couch again.
Benny clears his throat, for once thankful that his friend isn’t in the area. “I-I was just thinking about Harry!” Nice save, Benny. Nobody suspects a thing. “I mean, he seems a little distant lately, right guys?”
Kelly scratches their chin. “Yeah, I did notice how wack he’s been acting. I just like, a few days ago woke up before him. That’s crazy! How in the deep black emptiness of space did me, of all people, wake up before ‘Mr. Insomniac’?”
“Some people have bad days, Kellin.” Mary says with a roll of her eyes.
“Bad days I get, but consistently being an anxious mess I don’t. He’s been super jumpy ever since the radio mission and we all know it. I mean, he’s acting like he did when we were only six weeks into the mission! Do you think something went wrong out there?” Sherry asks, concern settling in on her face.
“Nonsense. Both Harold and I are intact and on the ship. I can go get him if it will ease your worries.” Mary rebuffs with a huff and stands to retrieve the pilot.
“Alright but if we’re having an intervention right now we need to ease into it. Let’s just start by inviting him to play a round of mech fights or something first.” Sherry says, waving her remote control for emphasis.
“Understood.” Mary nods, marching stiffly across the station to find Harry.
They watch as Mary leaves the room, only her footsteps echoing aside the ever-constant whirring and humming of the station.
“Well someone’s eager to bring Harry here.” Kelly jokes after a period of silence.
Emmy sighs. “It ain’t like we can wrangle everyone into the same room that often, hon. If she hadn’t volunteered to go get him I would’ve.”
"I guess that's true..." Kelly gives in.
"Of course it's true, I said it." Emmy smirks, flicking her frizzy hair away from her shoulder.
Before anyone can respond, Mary comes in with Harry in tow.
Harry refuses to look at any of them. Instead, he stares at the ground, seemingly entranced by the blues and grays of the ship's metallic interior.
"Hey, there he is! Wanna join us in a good ol' fashioned game of mech fighting?" Lenny waves at the two metal toys in the middle of the room.
"Are those… model bots?" Harry mumbles and leaves Benny put off. Harry's voice is raspy, sure. But it's not so raspy it sounds like he hasn't used it in over a year.
Benny looks around the room and sees Sherry's smile falter. Good. She notices it too.
"Sure are! While you were cooped up in the little pilot's nest we call a cockpit, our good friend Mary here had a little cleaning session and cleared out her lab. I happened to be walking by when these particular bad boys were out of her sight and nabbed 'em up. The rest is history." She embellishes.
Harry's gaze moves back and forth between the robot. He says nothing but still shrugs and collapses onto the couch next to Lenny with his arms crossed.
Benny breathes a sigh of relief and turns his head to his keyboard, playing an indiscreet acoustic version of Everything Is Awesome (so he’s a little spiteful of Emmy’s disdain for pop music, sue him.) It’s a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.
Patting his hand on Harry’s shoulder, Lenny begins to speak. “So, I bet you’re wondering where we are in the game, huh? Well currently we’re on round 4 with Soyuz Destruction-Sherry’s mech-In the lead. The first person to knock down the other person’s mech down wins.”
“And with that,” Benny cuts in. “I think we’re ready to start the next round.”
As if nothing has happened, Lenny immediately returns to his character and the mechs spring into action. The crew screams and cheers as the rounds continue with vigor and cheer.
The rounds continue for some time, each person enraptured in their own strategy to ease Harry and show that everything is fine.
At least, until…
"Hey Hare-Bear? Can we talk with you?" Kelly starts uneasily.
Everyone pauses what they're doing, looking at the pilot with a staunch silence. Each person's face is lined with a different level of concern.
"Talk about... what?" He hesitates with a rasp, his shoulders rising, curling in on himself.
"Well, darlin' we've noticed you've been a little… distant lately and we wanted to know if there was a reason why. " Emmy tries to explain.
Harry’s body language stays stubbornly unreadable and hardened. Benny isn’t sure if it’s from the fluorescent overhead lights or from tears springing in the young man’s eyes, but the glazed-over look in his eyes doesn’t go unnoticed.
“M’ fine. Just a little sleepy is all.”
Mary shakes her head. “There’s a big distinction between “a little sleepy” and borderline depressive, Harold. What could have possibly been bothering you to the point of shutting yourself away from everyone?” She inquires, watching Harry’s movements as if he were a specimen under a microscope. “So what is it, Harold? What’s shaken you?”
Harry flinches away from Mary, his eyes rapidly whipping to the floor. He scowls, mumbling. “Nothing you need to know ‘bout.”
“Harry, if it’s causing you that much stress then shouldn’t it be important to tell someone? Especially if they could help?” Benny offers.
“I don’t need any help.”
“Your coffee intake says otherwise, dude.” Kelly says. “The only times I’ve ever seen you drink coffee was when we were like two days away from launching the radio. You only drink coffee when you’re either overworked or stressed and I sure as hell know you’re not overworked.”
“You don’t get to tell me how overworked I am.” He says with an agitated raise of his voice.
“Well if you don’t need help and you’re not overworked then what’s with the attitude, huh?” Sherry cuts in. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Harry but you’re not pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes. Something happened out there and you haven’t been the same since and as the medical professional on the mission it is unfortunately my job to make sure you're all alright. Mentally and physically.”
Harry grips his hair and screams out in frustration. “So what if something happened out there?! You don’t need to host some sort of fucking intervention to get me to talk about it! I don’t want to tell you what happened and you don’t have to know! Thanks for inviting me to be with you all, but I’m leaving now.”
And with that he storms out of the common room, leaving behind his flabbergasted teammates in the dust.
They sit in silence, each person trying to think of something to say or do, what the next step should be.
“Lenny?” Sherry questions, determination and grit etched onto her face. “You have access to the incoming transmissions from the radio right?”
“Uh, yes I think so? Why do you ask?” He replies slowly, eyeing the scientist’s blank body language.
“I want to see the records of the 6830 broadcast.”
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Benny thought he’d spend Saturday doing nothing.
Maybe read up on the instruction manual (mostly to rebel against it) or write a small song with no heaviness or meaning, just some mindless rest and recreation.
He certainly didn’t think he’d spend the day cooped up in the Comms office with Lenny and Sherry trying to break through static intermissions from the radio.
“So how’re we going about this? I mean, the audio file just gets more and more static the deeper in they went?” Benny asks while pulling out the table under the comms paneling, stuffing the President Business posters under the surface.
“The static should be easier to remove after the fact. I mean, it’ll be patchy but the context of most of it should be there.” Lenny answers, lightly grunting as he searches for his tablets. “Most of the patching up I do is through the tablets. After I record on the comms I do some last-minute polishing and only then send it out to the Knudsen. You’d think people whose only job is to listen to other people talk would also like to send messages out but I haven’t heard anything from them lately for some reason…. Anyways, let’s get this started shall we?”
Benny bops his head down and lifts his legs to a cross, hovering gently over the ground and using his arms on the table to keep him level. Next to him, Lenny sat in his own chair, as did Sherry.
“I think I’m gonna start playing the audio two minutes before all connection was lost. That’s where I think the static really started interfering.” Lenny explains, connecting the pad to his console with an elongated black wire before turning back to the elevated table. Wasting no time, he begins to type at lightspeed on the tablet screen,and pulls up the audio file with barely any hesitance. Through it, Mary’s voice crackles.
‘We’ll see you all soon. Patroller out.’
Lenny hums, squinting at the static’s interference, yanking the screen he flaps over the console. “That’s the last bit of audio you heard before static took over, right?”
Sherry nods.
“Cool, so I can take the static out with a basic noise reduction and high pass filter, no big deal. The big problem though, is that I don’t know if they turned the receiver off or not so it could just cut out entirely.”
A game of chance, then. Nothing new for any of them.
Lenny scurries across both tablet screen and console looking for the perfect way to work the audio. With a final press of ‘enter’ on his console keyboard, he brings the tablet back to the table. “Okay let’s see if it works.”
‘-Patroller out.’ They hear Mary speak before sighing ‘We’ve been cut out. There’s too much electrical interference.”
‘Thanks for the obvious, Mary.’ Harry said.
Mary scoffed. ‘Come off it, Glenn, we've got work to do.’
‘Opening the hull in… 60 seconds?’ He asks for confirmation.
‘60 Seconds.’ Mary confirms
Behind the crackles of an occasional thunder Mary’s shuffling is heard as she attached her suit to the tether and grabbed the radio, it’s metallic casing clanged in the (not) air.
‘Ready back there?’ Harry asked, the clicking of the patroller’s module beeping steadily as he pressed the keys.
‘I am ready to go. Open the hull.’
‘Opening hull.’
The hull beeped it’s jaws open as Mary zipped out into deep space.
‘Activating suit comms. Approaching blindspot ETA in 2 minutes.’
‘Copy that, Mary.’
Benny rolls his eyes. Ever the professionals, those two.
The communications office fills with quiet as the recording continues to play.
‘What the fuck is that?!’ Mary exclaimed after two minutes of pure silence. Everyone’s eyes snap to the tablet, alarm and anxiety rolling across the bodies of every member in the room.
‘What?! Mary, what do you see?’ Harry screamed. ‘Please repeat, Mary, what do you see?!’
‘It looks like some kind of… I don’t know- a ship?’
Benny blanches. Neither of the pilots ever mentioned anything about a ship.
‘I’m not picking up a ship. Are you sure it’s not debris?’ Harry screams, hysterical.
‘If it were debris it wouldn’t be careening to my position!’
‘It- it’s coming at you? Can you evade it?’
‘No go, it's following me- ugh!’
Benny flinches with a wince at the choking sound of Mary’s collision.
‘Mary?!’ Harry screamed.
‘Hey, let go!’ She grunted. ‘Glenn! Scratch my first comment. This isn’t a ship it’s a- augh-!’ Her sentence gets cut off by the heart-dropping sound of a cracked glass, compiled with the horrible sound of choking.
Sherry audibly gasps, her hand whipping to her mouth in shock. To her right, Lenny’s eyes widen with fear as he begins to hyperventilate silently. As they continue to hear her choking through her attempts to speak, Benny starts to tremble.
‘Mary? Mary! What’s happening?!’
Her suit’s radio crackles and glitches before settling down. A beep resounds before a voice starts to speak.
But it isn’t Mary who responds.
‘I have turned the radio on. Bring me inside, Harrison.’
Benny startles. That sounded like her but even she’s not that monotone.
That… robotic.
Harry doesn’t say anything on the recording, but the clicking of a button speaks enough. As they hear the shuffling of someone entering the Patroller again, nobody breathes.
The ship started to whir again, presumably moving back to the Nielsen.
‘You’re not Mary, are you?’
‘Affirmative.’ The voice said before clearing their throat, sounding much more human afterwards. Much more like… Mary. ‘My name is Dolly. I am a Spyrius droid and member of the super secret police. My superiors have sent me to keep you all in line.’
‘Wh-why are you telling me?’ Harry spoke, shaken.
‘Because,’ she started. ‘A secret kept by one is never as fun as a secret kept by two.’
A click of a gun.
A beep. Harry spoke again. ‘The radio is in place. Bring us back in.’
The audio cuts out.
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Benny’s heartbeat pulses in his ears as loud as the echoing sound of the clicking guns playing on the record. Blinking back tears, he paces against Sherry, catching a look at his friend’s face.
She’s downright furious.
As she storms through the halls in a maddened frenzy, Lenny and Benny follow closely behind, trying to calm her down, to get her to be rational but it all falls on deaf ears.
“Sherry, Sherry please take a moment we can’t just storm Mar-Dolly we need a plan.” Benny attempts to placate the scientist, flying around her face frantically.
“Fuck planning! Mary’s dead and her murderer is still here!”
“And you think that shouting about it when she can hear you is a good idea?!” Lenny retorts, running up in front of her and stopping her by the shoulders.
She looks down at the communications officer, warring between showing grief and showing anger.
“First things first we need to tell Harry we know what happened out there. If we go and barge into her lab she’ll suspect Harry told us.” He explains, keeping his voice low enough so that only the three of them can hear.
Sherry growls, whipping her head to the side in frustration but defeats her resolve to attack nevertheless.
“Fine…”
Lenny nods and enunciates each vowel. “Thank you.”
The group turns and heads for the cockpit as fast as they can, just narrowly avoiding the Mechs lab before entering the input code and scurrying in, Benny staying close by the door.
To their luck, Harry was sitting in the pilot’s seat, moving the station as needed. At the sound of the door opening and closing, he straightens up and faces the intruders.
“What do you want?” He mutters.
“Harry, we know.” Lenny begins to say.
The pilot makes no sudden movements but squints in curiosity.
“Know what, exactly?" He asks, his voice deepening in suspicion that he knows already.
“What happened on the Patroller. What happened with... Mary.”
Harry knocks back into his chair as if he was kicked in the lungs.
Sherry continues.
"We… Harry, we need to figure out a plan. What happened is awful but we need to find out what to do."
He laughs, tears accumulating in the corners of his eyes. "What can we do?" He says, helpless. "It's not like we can just kill her."
"But we can report what happened, right?" Lenny offers. "It's not ideal but what else can we do?”
“No. No reporting, no way. Cape Space works under President Business, we can’t tell them anything.” Benny asserts himself, crossing his arms on the cockpit door.
“W-why not?” Harry prods.
“Listen, we just can’t! We have to deal with this ourselves. I know I sound stupid right now but you’re gonna have to trust me.” He says desperately, pleading to be understood.
Harry sighs with a shrug. “So no killing and no reporting. Anything else?”
Lenny snaps his finger. “Deactivate! She’s a robot, right? All we have to do is figure out how to deactivate her.”
“I guess we could do that. But first, we hold her in captivity. Don’t want her thrashing about while we figure out how to do it, right?” Sherry says.
“That… just might work.” Benny admits. “How do we go about it, though?”
For the next hour, they discuss plans and figure out how to execute them the next day. Arguments and suggestions filled the cockpit at relative ease of conversation until there was nothing left to be said.
Harry, feeling better that he wasn’t alone, returned to piloting the station next to the nebula.
Sherry made her way back to her lab, spending the night in a rageous fury searching through all of the robotics resources she has to figure out a way to shut down the robotic impersonator. (If she caught herself crying silently, her hands shaking while reading through Mary’s robotic dissertation, she’s got much too pride to tell anyone of that)
Benny and Lenny walk aimlessly through the echoing halls of the Neilsen with no set destination and yet arrive at Benny’s room, unaware that both men were headed there.
Punching the code open, Benny floats into the room and motions for Lenny to follow.
Once inside with the door closed, Benny lowers himself to Lenny, whose face read an expression he couldn’t even begin to read.
“Hey Len?” Benny whispers, prompting Lenny to look up with a wavering expression. “You okay?”
Lenny nods erratically, pursing his lips. “Mhm! Yep, I’m doing great! Everything is fine, everything is awesome. Y’know it’s just that our friend is dead and has been for at least a week while our other friend had to grieve over her silently and none of us knew! Of course I’m fine! Of course I’m-”
His sentence cuts off with a sob as his knees buckle. Abruptly, he pulls a hand over his mouth.
Benny speeds to his side, curling his arms over the communications officer. He doesn’t say a word as Lenny cries without restraint into his shoulder.
He doesn’t say a word as tears of his own start spilling out.
He doesn’t say a word as they both fall asleep in each other’s arms, hoping for a brighter tomorrow, dreading what it would entail.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tomorrow arrives way too soon for anyone’s liking.
Sherry arrives at Benny's room in what would be the break of dawn and wakes the two to begin their plan, informing them that Harry is already awake.
The four agreed the day before to inform Kelly and Emmy of what’s been happening as soon as they can (emotionally, the toll would have been too much. Emotionally, none of the people who’ve heard Mary’s choking cries echoing with Harry’s screams of terror could explain what went down. Benny thinks he still may not be able to get through it even now.)
Agreeing to rendezvous in the engine room, Benny decides to nab his commander while Lenny brings Kell, although the two carried a sneaking suspicion that the engineer was already there.
Benny speeds through the halls, dread pressing into his chest harder and harder with every door he passes until he reaches Emmy’s room.
Grimacing, Benny takes a breath and lifts his hand to knock on her door.
“Hold on a sec darling, I’m coming!” Emmy yells, running to the door and throwing it open with gusto. She comes upon Benny’s face and smiles, her knotted hair bouncing with the motions. “Hey, Ben! What can I do for you this fine… 5 in the morning?"
“Listen, I need you to come with me to the engine room. Don’t have time to explain why but we gotta go now.” He speeds, grabbing her arm and floating with urgency.
“Wait, hold on a second! Benny!” She stumbles after the floating man.
“What?!” Benny whisper-shouts.
“Take it easy, will you? What’s the rush?"
"Didn't I say 'no time to explain' already?! Everything'll make sense if you just come with me." Benny asserts with a jump, fidgeting to speed along.
The two stare into each other's eyes, battling with frantic determination and confusion-laced concern.
Emmy gives in. "Lead the way."
Benny wastes no time in getting to the engine room. His blood pumps in his ears in sync with Emmy’s trampling footsteps. Silently evading coming across… Mary’s old lab, they continue moving until reaching their destination.
Benny raps his knuckles on the hatch, waiting for the door to swiftly open from the inside before stepping in, Emmy in tow.
Floating to stand next to Lenny, Benny watches as Emmy crosses her arms in confusion.
“Oh they got you too, huh?” Kelly grins at their commander’s presence from the floor. “Great! Here I was beginning to think I was just being kidnapped in my own workspace.”
“Nah we’re not kidnapping anyone yet.” Sherry laughs offhandedly.
Kelly closes their mouth, nodding slowly and starts to slide away from Sherry.
“Yet? What do you mean yet? Why are we all gathered here and why did we have to sneak around Mary to do so?!” Emmy asks.
“That’s… why we wanted to get you two here, actually.” Sherry begins to speak. “You remember yesterday, right? When Lenny, Ben and I went to review the transmission of the radio mission?”
Emmy gestures for her to continue.
“Well, we found some… less than ideal news.”
Sherry pauses, biting her lips in hesitance.
“Mary died, Emmy.” Harry finishes.
Kelly’s head snaps up, alarm striking down their spine. “What?” they whisper with terror-laced disbelief. Emmy’s eyes widen.
“I didn’t see her die, I just heard her but… whoever came back in wasn’t Mary.”
Lenny fidgets with his sleeve. “It was a robot, or at least, that’s what she said. She called herself Dolly, a spyrius robot.”
“Spyrius?!” Kelly screams, standing up at lightspeed. “Did- did she say anything else?!”
“Er- what?” Lenny says, taken aback.
“Did she say anything else?!”
“She said she was part of… a super secret police force?”
Kelly’s breath hitches as they slowly back away.
“No, no, no! They couldn’t have found me already!”
Benny gasps in alarm, anxiety rising as the pieces fall into place.
“Found you? Do you know that thing?” Sherry startles with an accusing glace.
“I…”
“Kell what’s going on?”
“I can’t…” They shake their head, looking at Benny for help.
“Who’s the super secret police force, Kelly?”
Kelly stutters, unable to explain themselves until Benny pipes up.
“I can tell them, Kell.”
All heads turn to Benny.
“Tell us... what?” Harry asks, warning and dread laid on his hesitance.
Benny turns to Kelly waiting for an affirmation.
They nod.
“Have you heard of President Business?”
The crew (sans Kelly) stare in confusion.
“Well, the guy has some sort of personal vendetta against these people called Master Builders-”
The door dents inward with a resounding metallic bang.
Everyone whips around to face the source of the impact.
It bangs again.
And again.
And again.
Rapidly but methodically, the door continues to slam with effort.
"Shit she found us!" Sherry yells and slams her body against the metal frame, barricading it closed.
Benny yelps and jumps to action beside her, ducking under the round glass window and pushes all of his body weight onto the door.
“Get out of there immediately!” The bot on the other side yells, monotone and strained. “I order you!”
Emmy gasps offendedly. “Hey! I’m the only one who gets to boss people around here!”
Benny grunts as the robot lets out another kick. “Not the best time for that, Em!”
Groaning at the impact, Sherry screams to the team. “We have to get her in here! We have to-”
The window shatters, a hand reaches through and grabs a shard. With one sharp motion, the glass skewers Sherry’s temple. With a startled, fading expression, she falls to the ground.
“Sherry!”
Screams ring out as the scientist collapses and Benny shuffles away from the door in terror. None of the crew members can tell whose guttural rage came from who but as the door finally opens and Dolly stomps inside, everyone's screaming dies out.
The rage however, doesn’t leave.
“If you please, follow me to the Communications office and report on your mission. Peggy Kartofski has been waiting for your reports for months.”
Benny growls. “Fuck the corporal! We’re not going anywhere for you.”
Dolly rocks her head to the side, mouth twitching into what could almost be a grin. (a grin that doesn’t belong to her. A grin that she stole)
“Unfortunately, Mr. Blue Chu, I'm not giving you a choice. Keeping Major Corporal Kartofski waiting will only make it worse for you.” She says, pulling out a gun and aiming directly for his head.
Benny inhales sharply and marches to Dolly’s face. She eyes him with disinterest.
He twitches his hand, signaling for the crew to follow.
Four pair footsteps resound against the whirring of the station. Benny floats the closest to Dolly, attention zipping back and forth between his team and the pile of scrap metal in front of them.
Abruptly stopping in front of the Comms office, Dolly flips to the humans. “Where is the communications officer?" She says with no indication of being anything other than a threat.
"Right here, right here." Lenny approaches, his arms held high above his head.
Benny strikes a hand out in front of Lenny's chest before he can get closer to Dolly.
"Woah, hold on. He's not going anywhere alone, especially with you. I'm coming along."
"If you so wish it, every single one of you can file in a report of your findings as long as it’s done.” She snaps with a step to the side.
As he punches in the code, Benny grumbles. What the hell are they supposed to do now…
Benny punches the final numbers in with way more aggressiveness than needed and floats into the room with the rest of his crewmates.
“Report.” Dolly seethes.
Lenny slowly, deliberately so, trudges to the comms and begins directing connection to the Knudsen. The red light announcing ‘online’ turns on, faintly flickering.
“Uh- this is the Nielsen Station calling in to the Knudsen outpost, Knudsen do you read me? Over.”
Static.
“I say again, This is the Nielsen Station calling into the Knudsen Outpost, Knudsen do you read me? Over.”
Quiet begins. The only sound is the deafening breathing of the crew as they wait for a response.
“Roger, Neilsen, this is the Knudsen, we read you. Over.” Someone replies from the other side.
Lenny takes a breath, scrambling his breath for the next thing to say before he hears the familiar click of the locking door and the rhythmic steps of running.
“Damn-it, she locked us in here!” Emmy yells, kicking the door with a body slam.
“She’s going after Kelly, we have to get to them!” Benny realizes with panic striking his heart. Fuck, why did they have to go and hide?!
“Shit,” Emmy curses and addresses her team right after. “Okay, Lenny send out a mayday, Benny you’re coming with me, Harry stay here and help Lenny, understood?”
Lenny salutes, grabbing Harry’s arm and pulling him to the controls as Benny and Emmy begin hurling towards the door, attempting to budge it open.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, all ships at sea. This is Nielsen Station, July 29th." He speeds through the message three times over. "Our station has been infiltrated by a s-spyrius robot and has murdered one of our crew and is going after another as we speak."
Emmy gives the hatch one good kick and with a clink the lock snaps.
Wasting no time, Benny thrusts the door open and blasts into the hall with Emmy, side by side.
Speeding across the ship, Benny feels his heart pound in his chest hard enough to deafen his ears. How did it go so wrong so quickly?!
The hatch to the engine room isn’t even closed by the time the two get to it. With the entry wide open, both commander and security can see everything occurring inside.
Everything including the tin-can impostor with her hand on Kelly’s throat and Kelly’s body thrashing and blindly slapping Dolly’s skin-toned metal. They choke and scream with desperate whines in every gag.
“No!” Benny screams, guttural and raw.
The robot's head snaps to the doorway as her hold on Kelly’s throat deepens. She twists her gun to the engine room’s entryway and rests a tense hand on the trigger.
“Let them go!”
Dolly sneers, paying no attention to the smacks and hits of the engineer progressively getting weaker and weaker. “You are to be reporting to the corporal.”
“I don’t care about reporting, just let them go!” He screams, wracking his brain for a way to get closer without getting shot.
Her grip tightens.
“Kellin Shepard is a master builder and an enemy of the Octan corporation. As such they must be eliminated.”
Emmy yells, running at lightspeed at Dolly and yanks the robot’s hand down, causing her to stumble.
Guns fire as the disoriented assailant tries dislodging Emmy from her arm and with one strong pull, Dolly lets go of Kelly.
They fall to the floor, unconscious.
Benny runs to Kelly with a yellow with a yelp and skids on his knees, wincing at the sight of the engineer’s red, irritated neck.
“Oh no…” He whispers, lifting their neck to inspect the damages.
Benny’s heart drops.
No pulse.
His hands begin to shake.
He promised Kelly they’d all get through this together.
That they’d be safe.
Benny stands with a growl and faces Dolly, who was still under assault from Emmy, with contempt.
Determination fills his mind as he starts running up to the tin can before the station abruptly falters to a halt.
The lights shut down.
As they do, the red blaring tell-tales spazz to life. With them, the shrieking alarm sirens.
Dolly smiles.
The comms ping, preparing for a message, but it isn’t Lenny who speaks.
“Well, hello to the crew of the Nielsen station! Or at least, those of you who are still alive.”
Benny watches as Emmy’s hands flail out and her legs rise off of the floor, Dolly much the same but with practiced calculation.
“Y’know, I’d have hoped you would have sent your updates on the movement of my portal sooner without me having to hijack your ship through a radio you flung in there. Oh, thanks for that, by the way. It made spying on you way easier than I could have imagined! Guess if you want something done right you have to do it yourself.” The man laughs heartily.
Emmy locks eyes with Benny, the alarm in her eyes almost as bright as the red flashing lights around them.
“Portal?” Benny whispers to himself.
“The radio! We have to turn it off!” She shouts.
Benny shakes his head out of his thoughts and nods, bursting to the hall, not paying attention to the fact Dolly isn’t chasing them.
“Oh this is President Business talking, by the way. Or really Lord Business I should say, no need to keep up the whole ‘president’ shtick.”
Benny ignores the speakers, focusing instead on the frantic shouts of Lenny and Harry floating out of the comms office.
“Benny!” Lenny yells upon spotting the guard. “What’s going on?!”
“We have to turn off the radio!” Emmy shouts.
Lenny pauses, confusion riddled with panic. “What?”
Benny crashes into Lenny’s arms, firmly holding him to balance back.
“We have to turn off the radio!”
Staring into Benny’s desperate and frantic face, Lenny asks no questions and turns to resolve, pushing himself back into the comms room.
“What are they doing in there?” They hear Lord Business ask away from the speaker. “Turning off the radio? Ah, I’m sorry to tell you but that’s not going to do much now. That was really more of a… shortcut to get to you. And hey, guess what? Now we’re here with a walking, talking radio on your ship.”
Emmy gasps, clutching Harry’s shoulder in stark realization. “Dolly!”
“We got a winner, folks! I’m surprised it took you this long to find that out, to be honest. Here I thought you were all professionals.”
Benny attempts to start out the door.
“Ah-ah-ah I wouldn’t do that if I were you. You see, I’ve got control over your whole ship over here- and he’s out the door. Great.”
Benny’s heart races as he searches for the bot.
“I gotta say, for ‘quote-unquote’ professionals you’re very bad at spotting what’s really science and what’s magic. The so-called ‘nebula’ you’ve been studying? Nothing but a magic portal. I’ve got no idea where it leads to but damn if it won’t make for a good addition to my office. You’ve been wondering why the thing keeps moving and yet you haven’t even looked at where it’s moving to, honestly it’s quite pathetic.”
She escaped the engine room, she’s not in the gym or the comms room so where the fuck-
Benny pauses as he reaches the common room. The robot stands right there, magnetically attached to the floor. He grabs onto the floor and propels himself to Dolly with a kick.
Her head twitches backwards as she ducks below his foot and seizes Benny by his gravity device. He gasps as the metal casing snaps and nails begin to fly across the tumbling space station.
Dolly yanks the surprise away in an instant as she slams the soldier into the ground with an empty clang.
Wheezing at the impact, Benny throws off of the cold steel with a tense fist. Dolly takes a sneering moment before she turns away.
Among the chaos of the ship’s alarms Benny still hears the rhythmic clanging of the robot walking away. He screams with a lunge towards her back, aiming directly for her neck.
Benny shivers at the freezing temperature of Dolly’s neck, paying no mind to her yelp of shock.
With a shaking hand he begins prying at the robot’s neck, looking for an access panel, loose wiring, anything that could be useful.
“I don’t think so, Blue Chu.” She snarls as the wire in Benny’s hand begins to spark.
Benny reluctantly stays on, swinging his legs across her throat and pulls her backwards, magnetic attachment clanging as she stumbles.
With a proud yell, Dolly slams her elbow into Benny’s abdomen and smiles as he lets go with a painful gargle.
Before Benny can manage to wrap his hands around the wound, the robot grabs his limp form and throws him into the back wall of the room, right into the television screen which shatters upon impact.
Dolly nods to herself and hastily exits the room, leaving Benny in solace to confront his pain.
He winces as his ribs shudder with a drawing breath and scours the room for any sign of Dolly.
She left again, Benny realizes as he attempts to regain himself.
Across the cacophony of ship destruction, he hears it.
A gunshot.
“Alright, I’ve got some news for you! Good news, the ship is out of orbit. Bad news, the ship is out of orbit.” President Business cheers.
“No!” Benny hears Harry roar and speed to the cockpit.
“Harry, wait!” Benny shoots out an arm, following the distressed pilot with a wince.
The ship rocks sharply sending Benny into the wall with a hard thud. He wheezes with a groan, ribs shaking as air rapidly leaves his lungs.
Business winced through the comms. "Oh, that one looked like it hurt. Here’s some good advice for you: If you get lost, the ground is down."
Benny coughs and holds his stomach before taking a leap across the rolling station. "What a bastard…”
Stumbling through the dizzying hall, Benny eventually manages to get to the cockpit.
“I’d have hoped to let you keep going with your useless research, but after discovering that one of your crewmembers was a master builder, well I had to interfere somehow! Especially after you cut communication with one of my best allies in Cape Space.”
Harry bangs on the door, punching the opening keys and hurling himself inside. Dolly turns to the pilot with no emotion imprinting on her face, legs glued to the floor.
Emmy and Lenny close in the distance just as Harry slips in.
He pays no attention to the robot as he attempts to fall into the pilot’s seat and steer the ship away from the neb- portal.
Dolly raises her handgun, aiming for a clear shot at Harry’s head.
“Oh I don’t think so!” Emmy barks, running in front of Harry. Dolly makes no resolve to move, lifting her finger to the trigger.
The station rocks to the side, sending Harry onto the polycarbonate glass of the cockpit with a grunt, Emmy catching the seat to keep herself balanced.
Benny grunts and catches a glance at the broken, frayed flotation device strapped to the end of his leg. He barely thinks, barely says a word as he unravels the strap and takes it apart at light speed, clutching at the debris around him.
He doesn’t think, doesn’t know what he’s doing, but somehow in his hands, he’s holding a pistol.
“Did- did the security guy just build a gun? Did he masterbuild?” President Business shrieks in the speaker.
Dolly snaps her vision to Benny, eyes glowing red as she switches targets. Releasing her magnetic connection to the ground she takes a running jump at Benny, handgun trained on him.
But Benny gets the first shot, straight through her robotic core.
And into the window of the cockpit.
A crack begins to form around the makeshift bullet of debris.
For a moment, the world seems to pause as Harry slowly gazes into Benny’s eyes with terror.
The crack continues to trail the window.
Emmy’s shoulders begin to tremble, she exhales shakily. Out of horror or resentment, who’s to say.
Dolly’s torso collapses over her legs as her lights flicker out.
The window continues to break down.
Lenny, right behind Benny, watches with dread, unable to utter a word.
In the middle of the screen, just to the right of where the bullet hit, a shard propels out.
Followed by another.
And another.
Benny’s heart drops.
The screen explodes into deep space as the world begins to turn again, sending humans and robot alike to the cold depths of the final frontier.
Benny wails a loud and awful roar as the cockpit hatch closes automatically and begins pounding on the door as what was the last of his friends, his family, is whisked out into deep space.
Lenny grabs his shoulders and turns him around, tears spilling out in every direction off of his cheeks. “Benny, Benny!” He rasps in desperation. “Look, we have to leave, we have to leave now. The place is falling apart and if we don’t leave we’ll end up dead.”
Benny shakes softly but nods in resolve. Lenny gives the smallest hint of a smile, taking a gloved hand and softly wiping away Benny’s tears.
Lord Business laughs hysterically. “Where in the world do you think you can even escape to? I have eyes everywhere, if you didn’t know and I know how to track you down.”
Lenny and Benny speed through the crumbling Nielsen to the hangar bay. Much like the rest of the ship, the vehicles inside were flung about and damaged.
Lenny and Benny grab their respective helmets in their hands and scout for a spaceship to use.
Luckily enough, two vehicles looked to be in… operational status.
The One-Man-Ship, 918 and the Space Shuttle 422.
Benny waves to Len, leading him to the 422 and helping him in.
“Lenny, listen, there’s something I need to tell you before we leave.” Benny says, gripping the shuttle hard enough to dent it.
He looks up after strapping himself in, curiosity mixing with urgency.
“Look, I just- I don’t know how to tell you this but I…I lo-” He gets cut off.
Lenny’s lips are on his. They’re kissing, Benny realizes. It’s warm and cracked and soaked with tears but it’s happening. He soaks it up, revels in the last moment of peace amongst this tragedy. A moment he might never see again.
Lenny lifts his lips, putting a gloved hand to his cheek.
“Tell me when we’re home.”
With that, he reaches a hand into his pocket and pulls out a thick silver rounded wire. It loops around itself with careful intricacy yet it doesn't break under Lenny's carefully thoughtful grasp.
Gently, Lenny takes Benny's hand and slips the ring onto his middle finger.
Benny's head snaps up to Lenny, mouth agape.
"I… I made it for you. It's a wire from the communication device I built. Just… just to have something to remember me by."
Benny nods, trying to keep the pressure of tears in his eyes from leaving.
Lenny takes one more look at Benny, a parting glance, and puts on his helmet. He pushes a button and the canopy closes down on him.
Running to the spaceship of his own, Benny hops inside the seat and attaches his own helmet, roaring the engine to life.
The shuttle powers up and with it’s overhead gun, shoots the hangar bay’s walls and sucks the vehicles out to space.
Benny waits for Lenny’s ship to lift off before powering his own, watching as Lenny directs himself to Earth.
Benny, however, has another plan.
Even with his spaceship falling apart as it is, he’ll have to do it.
He’s going to fly to the Knudsen Outpost to find his siblings. Someone has to warn them of what’s really going on.
And he’ll have to go across the portal to get there.
Taking a deep breath, Benny steers the spaceship into the green, lighting filled clouds.
The spaceship rumbles as Benny evades the golden electric tendrils. He groans, narrowly missing getting struck by the lighting and tries not to think about the spikes and needles in his leg.
Green shoddily trips into dark blue into purple. The deeper in he goes the force of the portal pulls him in deeper and deeper.
Benny yells after the ship releases a posse of nails into the air around him, clutching the steering wheel to death, he tries to fight the force trying to send him inside.
The purple clouds rapidly switch to a stark pink. Cursing, Benny locks the steering wheel in one position keeping the ship steadily moving forward. Benny breaks off a red herring off the ship’s walls, bending it into a screwdriver and begins scrambling to collect the nails and put them back in their place.
He groans as the spaceship rocks, causing him to slip the screw.
Abruptly, Benny feels the ship sink and throw him to the polycarbonate canopy.
“Fuck!” He curses as his helmet bangs on the ceiling. Wincing, he rapidly blinks away the tears forming in his eyes, whining as the feeling of disorientation and blurriness persists.
Placing a hand on the back of his head he checks for damage. A dent… that’s not good.
Benny grasps at empty space for the steering control, trying to pull up the ship with numb fingers.
Rocking up and down like an out of control elevator, Benny squints his eyes and regains some control over his vessel.
Driving through the deepest, darkest abyss of the portal should have caused him to look to the side, to see what threat is gaping at him but Benny keeps his unfocused attention to the other side.
Benny presses the engines until the spaceship can’t fly any faster.
He blazes through the edge of the abyssal midnight blue and into the stark pink turning purple.
The stale purple whips behind him faster than he can recognize it as the dark blue rolls over once again.
Dark blue trips into dark green into bright green into yellow and Benny makes it out the other side.
With no time to sigh and broken alarms burying into his ears, Benny grabs the makeshift screwdriver and attempts to hastily keep his spaceship together.
The alarms get louder and louder and Benny groans. God, he didn’t need more flashing warning signs today.
He looks over the controls to see what blurry, broken computer tells him he fucked up now and spots the radar flashing some… words.
‘Waning… appreciating import? No, that doesn’t seem right. ‘Appropriating imp-something?
Benny gazes to the cracked window in front of him and sees the Knudsen rapidly get closer and closer to him.
Huh… that’s… weird. Why would it be so close to his posi-
The ship crashes through the side of the station, breaking the glass with a mighty shatter and propels Benny through the window, sending him toppling to the hard steel floor.
He lies face down, miniscule shards of broken polycarbonate stemming from his helmet outwards to the cold gray floor.
Each shard tinted red.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Benny comes to with a weak need to wake up and a failing attempt to open his tar-stuck eyes.
His hand twitches numbly, trying to regain feeling.
Slowly, painfully so, blood begins to rush to the end of his fingertips.
Vision attempting to clear, failing at staying focused as nerves wake, Benny raises his head, letting the vacant, dull lights overhead fluoresce into his sight.
Brightness spittles through the helmet, casting a line of shadows across his shaded face and Benny barely has a minute to react with a gasp before he begins coughing, his throat closing up at the sudden and thin intake of air.
Right there, right in front of his alarmed gaze, a large crack protrudes from the bottom left of his helmet and stretches out to the farthest right point it can reach.
The shadows which line his face mirror that of the shattered pattern on his helmet.
That’s…. Not good. That’s very, very much not good. He was warned against something like this happening, it’s one of the worst case scenarios to have happened.
He needs assistance. Now.
“He- hello?” He chokes out. “I need… I need help.”
The station is dead silent.
“My helmet’s cracked.” He slurs, forcing every conscious power in him to keep his eyes open and head up. “I can’t- I can’t breathe.”
Nobody responds.
Benny’s helmet clanks to the floor as exhaustion pours on him.
There’s no humming of the engines. There’s nothing.
His eyes close once more.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The next time Benny wakes, his eyes open with a snap.
Rapidly, he looks around.
To his left the wall is lined with an endless paneling of communication machinery, buttons and knobs and switches and gears all turned off.
To his right, a stair platform seating an uncountable number of chairs sit from end to end.
Benny lets out a chuckle at the sight. Who needs that many chairs, let alone so far away from the paneling?
His chuckle gets louder and louder until it becomes a full blown laugh borderlining screaming.
His lungs burn and sting at each sharp exhale of breath as if syringes begin stabbing him with bloodlust and passion.
Benny gets up on shaking hands and knees, eyes not leaving the chairs.
With a panting grunt he wobbles to his feet and waves his hands to keep himself balanced. Slowly, he limps forward, unused leg prickling under every bit of pressure the floor hands him.
He arrives at the lowest row of chairs, staring at their cold steely frames. ‘What’s a joke without a punchline.’ he thinks.
With a flimsy yet sharp kick the chairs fall over, ringing and clanging as one row topples after another.
Benny screams at the ringing and shouts frustrations into thin air, grasping his cracked helmet with shaking hands.
God, everything is so loud, his eyes hurt and his head feels like it’s been pounded against the wall.
Why is this happening to him? What the fuck caused this?!
As his hands continue to claw on the plastic of his helmet, trying, pleading for some quiet, he catches a glimpse of something shining on his hand.
He stops clawing and stares at his shaking arm.
The ring.
The kiss.
The Nielsen.
Benny’s heart drops.
That’s right.
He needs help.
He needs to warn his siblings.
“J-Jenny! Kenny! Are you guys here?”
The only sound reaching Benny is the ringing of his ears.
“Is there anyone here?” He asks, quieter.
Nothing.
Benny coughs and floats himself to the hall at the end of the room, the end of his boots dragging on the ground.
He squints through the darkness of the hallway trying to find his family.
Where is everyone?
Benny puts a hand to the wall as he moves through the station, humming at his gloves’ thread gets caught in the scratches on the steel
Strange…
Benny wanders, vision going in and out of focus as he moves through the dark station.
The hangar bay doors are open, Benny realizes once he blindly arrives at it’s opening.
There’s no spaceships present. How were any of the crewmembers supposed to get home?
He startles.
How was he supposed to get home?
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He has no idea how long he’s been on… wherever he is and he’s getting really tired of the same old scenery.
Benny punches the large paneling again, making sure his ring doesn’t get bent.
There’s nobody left on this station just like there aren’t any left on his old one. They’re gone and he’s alone.
Well, maybe not entirely alone and gone.
There’s still someone. Someone waiting for him.
A red light flickers in and out, Benny grabs the mic.
“Can anyone hear me?”
He grips the steel comms harder.
“This is Benny- I mean- Benjamin Peckham Blue Chu. My ID is… 6824. I’m stranded on a communications outpost.” He licks his lips. “Can anyone hear me?”
A beat. The light continues to flicker softly, palpitating as if harmonizing with Benny’s own heartbeat.
Benny laughs, his head falling on the microphone with a thud.
“I’m on a communications outpost, of course someone can hear me! There’s a person waiting for me back home! He’s gotta be the one hearing this!”
He lifts his face, staring at the ceiling with a chuckle before shifting his view to his spaceship, front hull shattered and firmly stuck in the wall.
“My ship is broken. I… I don’t know how, but it’s broken. It’s as stuck here as I am…”
For a second, just a split second, Benny loses his ability to breathe. His heart clenches in his throat as pressure hammers behind his eyes.
Sharply taking a breath, Benny blinks away the pressure and whispers softly.
“I’ll… I’ll think of something.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Well, here’s some news! I found no instructions anywhere on this station for a new spaceship, meaning I have to build one by myself.” Benny grunts, pulling a box of burnt and frayed wires onto a busted chair.
“I’ve actually tried to build a couple already.” He cheers. “They all sort of exploded in my face but I’m sure it’ll work out!”
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“I found a friend in here. His name is Moppy!” An old, dirtied mop comes into view.
“He’s one of the most reliant and hardworking people on this station, one of the biggest helps in making the spaceship.” Benny says, ruffling the end of the mop’s bottom.
“We’re going to get home soon. I know it.” He whispers, hushed, wishing.
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“There’s someone listening to me, right? I’m not alone here. I can’t be!”
“I can’t be….”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Y’know Moppy, I was assigned the role of an engineer for a mission once. Only once! We were s’posed to build this big rocket engine and I made a mistake on the calculations.” Benny snorts.
“It was really bad! The thing blew up in everyone’s faces and broke my nose. Nobody’s put me on an engineering job since.”
“At least, I don’t think they did.” He says with a pause, squinting at the mop leaning against the long panelling, wooden base caked in ghoulish flickering red light. “Guess I gotta learn how to engineer now, right?”
“You’re right Moppy, I do have this in the bag! I can feel it this time, this one’s a winner.”
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“I can’t remember your face,” Benny mumbles, hands wringing against each other, picking at the ring on his finger.
He leans forward, elbows digging into shaking knees as chair grazes steel. Ashen dust covers the shaded, cracked surface of his helmet.
Every breath, every hum rinses his lungs into soot.
He feels like choking.
In a way, he guesses he already has.
“I can’t remember what you look like.” He whispers with fleeting awe in such realization.
“You… I loved you. I love you. Why can’t I… why can’t I see you?”
Benny picks his gaze to the flickering red light, it never stops it’s dull hum.
“I don’t remember your face. I don’t remember your smile.” He pauses. “But I remember your voice.”
“The way you used to chortle through your breathy laughs, the sleepy raspiness you had when you just woke up, your accent peeking through when you start to ramble...”
“Are you the one listening?”
He says nothing else, blankly staring into the infinite mass of black space.
How truly alone it is to be in space.
How truly deafening.
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There’s a comfort to being alone, Benny supposes. In the end of it all, the only person to witness your final moments is you.
In the end of it all, the tears shed in mourning are none but your own.
A funeral of your own grievance, a eulogy in your final breath.
But as you set yourself in your own casket, is your lament for the dead or the alive?
Benny sighs, ignoring the thoughts clenching in his heart and the incessant throbbing of his head.
One more try. One more attempt. One more failure.
Like clockwork, each gear of each spaceship Benny builds destructs itself as it destructs his hope.
One more try. One more attempt.
He chuckles dryly, climbing into his newest predestined loss.
One more try.
Pushing Moppy aside, Benny shudders and ignites the thrusters. The engine sputters to life screaming and the spaceship gently lifts off the floor.
The spaceman's eyes widen as he bursts out laughing in success, gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white under his gloved hands.
It flies. His spaceship flies!
Well, if he’s about to die now would be a good time to do it.
The glass of the Knudsen shatters as Benny speeds through the void between stars and moons. His heart beats fast enough to burst out of his chest as he navigates home.
He might be alone, but heading towards the deep blue planet he hasn’t seen in over a year Benny couldn't care less how true that might be.
Even if alone on the planet, the voice of the Earth moving forward remains an ever-constant company.
Blazing past comets and asteroids, past planets and satellites, Benny sees home.
As he propels towards the earth with a magnitude of speed, something flickers in the corner of his eyes.
A bright green dust swirls into the atmosphere. Greens and purples mix and mash into a cacophony of color that Benny swears he’s seen before-
The spaceship’s alarms blast as Benny snaps the steering out of its socket.
Benny curses, attempting to fix it while the ship burns in the dark blue beginnings of the sky.
Shards of metal peel and melt with the spinning spaceship succumbing to gravity.
Benny bites back the water in his eyes as his ears pop from the altitude change, trying to look out the window and see what lies in front of him.
The deep blue sea.
Benny’s eyes widen, hyperventilating as the crashing waves come closer and closer.
He scrambles to the floor, clutching Moppy’s base as strong as he can before the spaceship breaks from air into water and the shielding of the ship breaks down.
Benny’s head thuds against the wall, the last thing he sees as his vision goes dark is the glint of his ring, resting on his floating hand.
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“-Should wake soon-”
“Captain, he’s-”
“We have to-
“Borders in Cape Space-”
Groggily, Benny works his eyes open to face the cracked impression of his helmet, gazing upwards into the wooden ceiling. His ribs creak with every slow, shallow breath he takes until the emptiness in his lungs recedes into a faded memory. His hands twitch erratically as he tries to gain feeling once more.
“Mm, where- where ‘m I?” Benny asks, sitting up on his… bed?
“Ah, ye have woken up! See, I told ye it would happen soon, First Mate. Now, I wish to have a talk with the boy alone.”
“Aye, Captain.” The supposed first mate responds and leaves with hurried footsteps, but not before sending a sneer to Benny’s direction.
Benny pales at the sight of the captain facing him. A giant mass of wood and metal entwines into a vague humanoid form. Atop it, a man with a… metal beard and kind, old face smiles at him. His one uncovered eye wrinkling at the sight of Benny’s consciousness. “Yer on the Sea Cow, laddie! My proudest and best ship.”
“Spaceship?” Benny guesses slowly.
The captain barks a laugh. “Hardly! This be a pirate ship ye be restin’ at with me at the helm. The name be Metalbeard!”
Metalbeard… that’s… accurate. Hilariously accurate. Benny snorts quietly before breaking out into howling, choking guffaws.
“Aye, aye, I know it’s not a pretty name but there’s no need to laugh like that.” Metalbeard says, theatrical offense trying to disguise his smile.
“ ‘M sorry it’s just… it fits you.”
“That it does, my boy. Do ye happen to have a name?” Metalbeard inquires softly as he approaches Benny’s bedside.
“Uh, Ben. But you can call me Benny.”
"Benny," Metalbeard echoes with a smile. "That’s a nice name ye got there. So Benny, what were ye doing in the deep oceans of Pirate’s Cove with that tin can o’yers?”
“Tin can? Y-you mean my spaceship? I didn’t mean to crash it in the ocean, I was just trying to get home.” He attempts to recall, feeling a heaviness on his chest being lifted at the sight of the ring still present on his hand.
“And where might home be?” Metalbeard asks.
Benny’s gaze echoes out of focus, Metalbeard can’t see his face, but feels the weight behind Benny’s eyes all the same.
“I don’t know.”
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Benny barely said a word the following days. Metalbeard continued to try light conversation but every word uttered led to a dead end. Occasionally, some of the crew would pass by the room he’s in and hear strange lone mutterings about spaceships.
Needless to say, the Sea Cow could feel the tension infest in not only the unwilling stowaway, but in the captain himself. All it took now was just to wait for the other shoe to drop.
As most crewmates would come to realize, the shoe won’t drop.
It’ll slam down on the ocean floor harder and louder than a cannonball.
During a lulling night, one where the stinging scent of the saltwater on tongue and the cradled rocking of the waves, Benny sat up in his bed with a gasp.
“I have to find him.” He whispers. A desperate goal spills out of his mouth.
Benny throws his blanket off and tumbles to the floor before rising to a panicked hover. His eyes dart across the room, digits and instructions flying in his head over a spaceship to build.
That’s the only way he can get anywhere. He needs to build a spaceship and find him.
Benny slams into the wooden door, splintering it until it unlocks off its hinges and bolts through the hallways, picking bits of steel as he moves along.
Though he stumbles into the walls, his shaking hands continue to form and build as he bursts to the deck.
Behind him, Benny hears shouts and hollers calling to action over his manic building.
Two pairs of hands grapple his own, pulling him back by the elbows as he screams and thrashes about.
“Let me go! I have to finish the spaceship- I have to find him!”
Heavy rumbles ascend towards him just as he finishes the engine and grab him by his torso, out of reach for the crewmembers and into the arms of someone else.
“What in the seven seas are ye doing?!” Metalbeard shouts.
“I have to build the spaceship and find him!” Benny says, punching and thrashing in Metalbeard’s hold.
“Not in your condition you’re not! ‘Specially not in the middle of the night.”
“But I have to...I have to find him.” The captain lightens his hold, noticing the fight leaving Benny.
“Find who, lad?”
“He told me he’d be back home. I have to find him, to get home.”
Metalbeard bites his lip, eyes darting to the ocean as if asking it for advice.
“This… friend of yours. Does he happen to also be one o’yer space cavaliers?”
Benny does a double take before nodding apprehensively.
Metalbeard sighs, putting Benny back on the ground. “Lad… I don’t think you’ll be able to get to him.”
“W-why not?”
“The borders of Cape Space are being completed, my boy. None of us masterbuilders made a portal there yet from all the patrols ‘round it.”
Benny’s heart sinks like ice in a river.
“But… what ye just did there, with that spaceship contraption, that was masterbuilding. My boy, where did you learn how to do that?”
He wracks his brain for an answer and gets nothing.
“I don’t remember..”
Metalbeard smiles with warmth. Stark and bright against the blackened ocean night.
“Well, whoever taught ye must have been a hearty teacher.”
Benny, fully placated, moves towards the edge of the deck, gripping the splintering wood with uncertainty. The silence of the Knudsen ringing in his ears.
“Yeah… guess they were.”
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Days stretch into weeks aboard the Sea Cow and Benny finds himself somehow falling into routine.
Wake up, greet the crew, help with chores, work on spaceships and eat dinner. Rinse and repeat.
Now, Benny knows the chances of getting spotted at the border while sneaking inside in a spaceship are great, but god-dammit he has to try. There’s someone in there waiting for him and he’s not about to let them down.
(Vaguely, he remembers the sound of mortal screaming. Of the pulse fading out of a life’s throat. The betrayal and anger of his friend’s face being masqueraded in and the bittersweet goodbye of a kiss. A promise made and an enemy to take down. But anytime he tries to shape these thoughts in form, he gets nothing but static.)
Metalbeard had said something about the ship headed towards this… cloud city? Cloud land? He didn’t catch the specifics but he’s pretty sure it’s because someone found some sort of weapon to use against Business. While he’s excited for the liberation of the masterbuilders and taking down the bad guy, he’s got his own plans.
As soon as he can, he needs to start building the spaceship, getting to whoever’s waiting for him and finding home.
Wherever that is.
The door to his cabinet creaks open and shut.
“You knew Kellin, right?”
Benny passes his gaze to the first mate in confusion.
“Who?”
“Kellin. Kellin Shepard. They were stationed near the abyss-portal thing in space. You knew them right?”
Benny scrunches his nose in thought, scratching the back of his helmet.
“Can’t say it rings a bell.”
The first mate groans and punches the wall, Benny jumping at the sound.
“Your suit says you’re from the Nelson mission, right? Well so were they. We’ve been waiting for a signal from them for months and get nothing, then all of a sudden you show up, Nelson badge on your uniform and all and we’re just supposed to do what, accept that?” She rambles, bordering on hysterics as she comes closer to Benny.
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember that name. I-I can barely remember anything on the ship-”
She slaps Benny’s helmet, plastic slamming into his ear.
“Liar!”
“I swear, I don’t know who you’re talking about!” Benny shouts, keeping arms high above his head to protect from the hurling blows of the first mate.
She picks him up with a twist of his suit, breath fogging his helmet. “I don’t believe you for one second, you-”
“What do ye think you’re doin’, first mate?” Metalbeard announces, voice booming as he steps inside the cot.
“Sir, I was just-” The first mate drops him in surprise, hands held up in defense.
“Ye were doin’ nothing, ye hear me? Now move, go overhead and help with docking me ship.” He gives no option of defiance.
“Aye captain.” she says coldly and steps out of the way.
Waiting until she leaves the room, Metalbeard turns to Benny with a sigh.
“Cape Space be one of the most treasured places for Octan, and the most guarded. It be their tech which allows Octan to find the other masterbuilders easily. Most Cape Space masterbuilders have fled already but some chose to stay and protect their home. We had an ally there but haven’t gotten updates lately.”
Benny faces his table overflowing with sketches of spaceships and metal parts.
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for, lad. Twasn’t your fault. We masterbuilders lost a lot of brothers and sisters lately, it’s makin’ us tense.”
“Have you lost anyone?”
Metalbeard chuckles. “That be a story for later. We’ve arrived at Cloud Cuckoo Land.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, they weren’t kidding when they said it was Cuckoo land.
Colors flashing in every direction, people of all different shapes, sizes and costumes dancing, absolute chaos in every corner you looked.
It’s incredible.
Problem is, Benny has no clue where he is.
Somewhere in between Metalbeard and the crew giving the secret knock and being welcomed by a talking royal cat named Unikitty, Benny somehow became lost.
And is now flying on a cloud with a torpedo engine on it.
Benny whoops as he careens past another useless arc of light, from above he can see Unikitty welcoming another group of masterbuilders and giving them a tour of the place.
In the group is Vitruvius, who Benny is pretty sure Metalbeard has mentioned before as some sort of pseudo-leader of the masterbuilders, some girl with the raddest hoodie he’s ever seen, a construction worker who seems very confused and holy shit is that batman-
“Benny!” Metalbeard shouts just as he’s about to hit a disco ball. The spaceman yanks the cloud away from the ball and sends himself hurtling towards the ground near Metalbeard, who jumps out of the way just before Benny hits.
“Ugh- hey MB! I was wondering where you went.” He chuckles, stumbling off of the (somehow) broken cloud.
“We was looking for ye, lad! We be headed to the dog now, the meeting’s about to start.”
“The what now?”
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Benny’s first thought upon seeing the construction man- Emmet speak was: “Wow, he’s really underqualified for this.”
His second thought was: “What the fuck is stuck on his back.”
His third and most important thought was: “Holy shit these guys need help.”
The crowd around him boos while Emmet dejectedly walks off his platform and out to his friends. Benny tries to garner their attention, to make them see they have an ally in him but they pay him no mind.
Benny tries to fly closer until a giant plastic ball crashed through a window and spurred panic.
Screams erupt as robots invade their sanctuary and begin attacking his allies, gunshots barely heard over the sound of shouts and buildings collapsing.
Well, time to change course.
Veering to his closest exit, Benny bursts to the flaming streets of Cloud Cuckoo land.
He scours each platform and crevice for signs of The Special, trying to ignore the nagging familiarity of each robot he fights to get there.
Benny growls at another empty hall and takes off to get a better vantage point.
At first he sees nothing but the fire and smoke from the fighting. Damn-it, how did he lose them-
A glimpse of bright orange, black, purple and white catches his eyes.
Bingo.
He smiles behind his helmet, speeding to their location.
“Hey, I’m Ben, but you can call me Benny!”
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Sometimes, Benny finds himself extremely grateful that Metalbeard is one of his friends. He’s (begrudgingly) loyal, powerful and kind, if not a little stern.
But waiting for him to rescue the others and himself is taking way too long and Benny’s freezing his behind off.
“It’s the one thing that stayed together.” He comments at the surprised marveling of Emmet’s success. It’s no spaceship but he’ll take what he can get.
Batman begins some long-winded rant over how stranded they are, oblivious to Benny’s smirk under his helmet at the sound of the Sea Cow’s bell’s approaching.
Metalbeard hoists the double-decker couch by it’s handles and with no care in the world topples it to the empty deck.
“Metalbeard, I thought you said we were a lost cause?” He asks, feigning giddy laughter as surprise.
“Ye are! Did ye not hear me whole story circumcising the folly of this whole enterprise?”
Benny rolls his eyes, walking across the empty ship. For once, he’s thankful that there isn’t anyone else other than his friends present. The temporary crew Metalbeard’s been lugging around had just been masterbuilders hitching a ride and now they’re gone.
“Well, it’s kind of hard not to hear when you’re yelling everything.” Batman growls.
Unikitty interrupts before Batman starts an argument. “So why did you come back?”
“This bedoubled land couch.” Metalbeard starts, pointing at the object. “I watched Lord Business's forces completely overlook it, which means we need more ideas like it!”
Benny floats off ship hanging near the mast, smiling at Emmet’s face lighting up. “Oh, thank you!”
“Ideas so dumb and bad that no one would ever think that they could possibly be useful.”
Emmet’s confidence falters at the sentiment. “Oh. Thank you…”
“So, Special, what do we do?” Vitruvius asks. Benny flips upside down in the air to witness Emmet’s wince.
“Well,” He falters with a spark in his eyes. “What’s the last thing Lord Business expects masterbuilders to do?”
“Build a spaceship?” Benny offers with genuine interest. If they ever stood a fighting chance, it’d be with a spaceship. Weapons built onto an escape that he happens to be an expert at building? (practically the only thing he’s good at masterbuilding) It’d be the perfect thing to use!
“Kill a chicken?” Vitruvius says, holding a chicken he has with him -for some reason- by the neck.
“Marry a marshmallow!” Unikitty cheers.
Metalbeard slams his wooden chest. “Why, this!” He begins an animated tirade until Emmet interrupts.
“No! It’s follow the instructions.”
Benny groans along with the others, leaning back on the perch he’s settled in. “Don’t like that.”
“No. Now, listen. Wait, listen. Guys, you're all so talented and imaginative, but you can't work together as a team. I'm just a construction worker, but when I had a plan and we were working together, we could build a skyscraper. Now you're masterbuilders, just imagine what could happen if you did that.” Emmet says softly. “You could save the universe.”
Vitruvius nods thoughtfully. “Well said, Emmet.”
The man shakes his head in surprise, eyebrows perched up in hope.
“It be a fine speech there, laddy.” Metalbeard adds support, hand running through his beard.
Benny watches as Emmet releases a deep breath, his shoulders squared and hardening with determination.
“Okay, now somebody get me some markers, some construction paper, And some glitter glue!”
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There was something familiar about Lord Business's office and for the life of him Benny cannot figure out what.
As soon as they snuck in through the Octan spaceship, Benny felt a deep feeling of dread set in his chest.
He knows it’s not from the plan and what’s to come from it, no.
This felt like dread he knew. Something he felt before.
(Something he only felt leave after meeting Metalbeard. An echo of the Knudsen, maybe. Or at least what’s left of it and what came before.)
It’s only when he and Metalbeard get caught and taken into the Thinktank when he remembers, truly remembers what it is.
At the very end of the room, right next to the giant computer, was a window facing an uncomfortably familiar sight.
He can’t get another word or a thought in, however. Because one second he’s gazing out the window and the next Vitruvius’ head lies dead on the floor in front of them.
Benny puts up no fight as he gets handcuffed by the robot personnel closest to him, only gazing in mute horror at the dead masterbuilder in front of him. His lips begin wavering as he holds back tears, everything begins falling into place.
The Nielsen, his old team, Dolly and the nebula.
Lenny...
Protests ring out as the countdown on the computer continues to dwindle down, leading to their deaths.
It can’t end like this, he thinks. It can’t.
“Emmet, you-you’ll think of something, right? Like you always do?” He asks desperately, voice wavering.
Emmet lets out a wet chuckle. “Didn’t you hear him? I’m not The Special; and to think for a moment I thought I could be…”
His heart sinks to his stomach.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
They won.
They fought against Lord Business with the help of practically everyone in the universe and won. Benny got to broadcast, just like Lenny did and even managed to build a spaceship afterwards.
For just a few seconds, Benny can breathe.
Then the Duplos attack and any plans he has to find Lenny again are thrown out the window.
Before he knows it he’s flung into an apocalypse world where everything has to be tough and stone cold in order to survive.
During one stray battle, Benny makes a mistake. One that cost him his arm.
It wasn’t too bad, if he was honest to himself, it makes him look cool. (But it’s not like he can tell anyone that. Not in this tough world.)
With all the seas dried up, Metalbeard joined Benny in his makeshift workshop to rebuild and recreate vehicles for the people of Apocalypseburg. Most of what he does is just add spikes to an already functioning apocalypse vehicle.
But as it stands, anything bright, shiny or disruptive gets taken and mutilated by the Duplos which makes space travel 100 times more difficult than it already was.
Benny finishes his last transmission with a sigh. There’s no telling if Lenny can reach him in Cape Space or… wherever he is, but it’s one of the only shots Benny has left.
Exiting out to the workshop balcony, Benny turns to Metalbeard, who’s currently grumbling off to the distance.
“Hey MB, can you grab the box to your right? I got some new spiked wheels for the motorcycle design you wanted.”
“Aye, Ben.”
As he begins melding and working, Emmet passes the two of them on a crane in his normal happy fashion.
Shaking his head, he stares at the construction worker for just a little too long. Right beside him Metalbeard catches on fire and yelps.
“Ah, sorry!”
Benny releases his grip on the blowtorch and whiffs until the fire goes out.
Damage isn’t too big, luckily. Just a little charred is all.
He continues the methodical process of nailing, welding and piecing together until a bright, blinding light descends from the sky.
“Uh… should we be worried about that?” Benny asks.
Metalbeard hums. “Nah, it’s probably nothin’.”
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“Benny,” Metalbeard speaks from outside the bathroom door. “You coming, laddy?”
Benny startles from his staring contest with the mirror and does a double take at his helmet, perched on the sink.
“Uh- yeah, yeah I’ll be right there.” He says. With shaking hands, he slips his helmet back on and walks out the door, where Metalbeard is waiting, before heading out.
Batman and Watevra’s wedding, their true wedding, finishes with a giant party held in the center of Systar with people from every realm on their planet invited. The music booms across the giant dance hall so loud the bass can be felt in the fingertips. The lights and lasers shine in all different patterns, colors, shapes and sizes, bright enough to blind a man.
In the distance, Benny can see the newlyweds talking with Alfred and Robin, the latter practically jumping out of his skin in joy with every gaze at Watevra. Batman has the tiniest smile on his face when Alfred pats his shoulder and mouths something unintelligible from where Benny’s standing. No doubt something fatherly.
Emmet and Lucy sat on the edge of the band stage holding hands with their heads laying on each other’s shoulders. Even with the bright energy of Systar, the two found a quiet spot where only they exist and nothing else seems to matter in the world.
Unikitty, held by General Mayhem, is flying around the LED ceiling with joyous cheer and not a single red strand of fur on her body. Mayhem is right there beside the cat, her bright blue hair whipping at the speeds.
Benny finds himself hovering on an open window fiddling with the ring on his hand, staring at the celebration down below him.
Turning his head outside, Benny thinks of what Watevra sung to him.
“You can build the spaceship of your dreams, on your very own planet with your own spaceship-building team.”
Maybe he should take her up on that offer, now that they’re all safe. He could go out and find Lenny, once and for all.
Yeah, he should do that.
Benny turns back to the party, throwing himself off the window and landing gracefully on the floor with barely a thud. Moving around partying citizens, he tries to keep his eyes peeled for the sight of the shapeshifting queen.
As he passes through the crowd, his shoulders bump with those of another patron too hard, sending them colliding on the floor.
“Oh god, I’m so sorry, here let me help you up.” Benny stammers, holding out a hand.
“No, you’re okay I just wasn’t looking where I was going.” The man chuckles and Benny’s heart begins to race.
That voice.
He’ll never forget that voice.
“Lenny?”
The man looks at him, confusion on his face but recognition fighting to appear in his eyes.
“Benny?”
Benny chokes back a sob and with no thought, tackles Lenny into a hug.
“I found you. I can’t believe I found you!” He screams, tears present with every gasp between words.
“You were… looking for me?” Lenny says, astounded.
“Yes! I- I tried to find you but I couldn’t remember what you looked like or-or where you went I was just-”
Lenny releases the hug, placing a careful hand on Benny’s helmet. “I know, Benny. I know. I heard your messages and tried talking to you. Did you… never receive anything?”
Benny shakes his head, eyes wide. Someone did hear him.
Lenny bites his lip, looking past Benny and out the door. He motions for Benny to follow.
They arrive at one of the balconies littered with plants in every crevice, fireflies dancing about without a care in the world and ponds with flowing water, Lenny sits beside Benny, perched at the end of the fence.
“I… when we were escaping the Nielsen, I knew you’d try to fight back.” Lenny admits softly.
“You knew?”
He grins to himself. “You were never one to run away from anything. Especially a fight.” Lenny says with a sigh and rubs his arm. “It’s one of your best qualities.”
Benny studies the man before him. These last few years, Lenny’s grown older. His once rich brown hair now covered in glitter and dyed pink at the edges. The pink spacesuit he used to wear replaced by a pink and blue jumpsuit, much like his own.
“Were you… on Systar this whole time?” He asks, voice squeaking in anticipation.
“On accident, I swear! I got knocked into an asteroid field on my way home and it sent me to this system! I lost connection with you after you fled the Knudsen but I swear I tried looking for you!”
Benny releases a breath. So, he wasn’t in Cape Space at all. He was in an entirely different star system. And Benny spent all that time fussing, trying to get to nothing but a red herring.
His chest fluttering, Benny starts laughing. Tears mixing with ridiculous joy at the prospect.
Lenny raises his hands in alarm as Benny falls from the railing and into his arms.
“I thought you were in Cape Space.” He whispers as the laughter dies down. “I thought you were hiding there somewhere, waiting for me.”
Smiling, Lenny grabs the blue spaceman’s shoulder, propping him up near his lap. “Guess we both made some mistakes, huh?”
Benny chuckles. “Yeah..”
Silence falls on them as they gaze into the shining lights of the stars beyond their planet system.
“I made you a promise, right?” Benny says.
Lenny looks at him in confusion. “Did you?”
“I promised you I’d tell you when we’re back home.”
He sits up with dawning realization. “Oh, you don’t have to do anything, Ben!”
“No,” Benny begins with a shake of his head. “But I want to.”
Benny takes Lenny’s hands, leading them to his helmet and gently uses them to push it off. He takes a deep breath, and opens his eyes.
Lenny looks at him, starstruck, silently placing the helmet down beside him. Tenderly he takes his hand and places it on Benny’s cheek, stroking him with his thumb.
“Your eyes never lost their spark.”
Benny leans in for a kiss.