Archive of Our Own ^beta

All things considered, the building was pretty intact. Orion carefully picked her way over the wreckage of a golden-age home in the European Dead Zone, turning over chunks of stone and fiberglass with her boot and ducking through rotten doorframes. Master Rahool had found a cryptic communication between two golden age civilians that referenced some historical media stored in a cache of engrams and there was nothing the guardian and her ghost loved more than some good old-fashioned detective work. 

“Maybe we’ll find some old news reports! I wonder what was in the news before the Traveller arrived.”

Stella scanned a corner of the room where the remains of a bookcase stood and flitted back to her guardian. 

“Rahool does love those old news reports, doesn’t he?” Orion bent to pick up the crumbling remains of a heavy wooden desk and began to haphazardly toss them out of the way. “That letter he found was so vague, it could really be anything.” 

The last piece of desk flew over the titan’s shoulder and hit the floor with an abrupt crack. The pair spun in place and fixed their eyes on the spot where the chunk of rotted wood was now barely peeking out from a hole in the floorboards. 

The hole was only an arm’s length deep and about twice as wide. Orion gently pulled the desk chunk out of the hole to reveal a sturdy box painted black with an anatomical heart emblazoned on the lid. Stella spun her shell and chirped in excitement as her guardian gently lifted the box onto the floorboards and fiddled with the clasp holding the lid shut. The gentle glow of engrams filtered into the dim room.

“Awesome,” breathed the guardian. 

“There are so many!” Stella eagerly scanned the cache. “There have to be at least ten!”

“He’s gonna be so excited, Stella. Will you transmat this whole box onto the ship?” 

Stella gave an affirmative whirr and the box vanished. Far above their heads, it reappeared safely in the cargo area of their jumpship. 

“I don’t decide what the engram contains, I just decrypt it,” Rahool drawled. The warlock facing him sighed and took the scratched-up shotgun from his hands. “Perhaps your next find will be more interesting.”

The warlock’s gentle footfalls faded into the quiet nighttime hum of the tower courtyard. It was late, even for Rahool, but he’d received an excited transmission from one of his guardians. A few days ago, he had told Orion about a golden age letter bundled in an engram from the EDZ. He knew she loved a challenge so when her face lit up with curiosity, he sent a copy of the message over to her ghost. He didn’t believe the cache mentioned in the note would still exist but if her last transmission was anything to go by, she’d found something. 

Heavy footsteps approaching from the hangar shook him from his reverie. Orion plodded over in full armor, carrying a large box. 

“Master Rahool! Thank you for waiting up - I couldn’t wait to show you this!” She plodded over to his courtyard setup, gently placed the box on the ground, and reached up to remove her helmet.

“We found it under some floorboards.” Stella offered. “There’s gotta be nine or ten engrams in there!”

“Unbelievable,” Rahool breathed as he crouched down to inspect the box. “Spectacular find, guardian. Regardless of what these contain, your skill in tracking down engrams is unmatched.”

Orion’s lips curled into a bashful grin at the compliment. She could feel Stella giggling through their connection - Rahool’s praise never failed to fill her with butterflies and the ghost would never let her live it down.

“You’re too sweet,” Orion muttered, scuffing her boot across the concrete. “Will you let me know what you find? Maybe over tea? I know this nice cafe on the South side of the city…” 

Rahool looked up from the box of engrams and fixed Orion with his inscrutable gaze. A beat passed and his expression softened almost imperceptibly. 

“An excellent idea. I’ll keep you updated on the decryption process and we can schedule some time to talk this weekend. For now, though, you should get back home and change - I understand titan armor is quite heavy.” 

The titan looked down at herself in surprise - she’d been so excited to see Rahool that she’d completely forgotten her armor. 

“You get used to it,” Orion chuckled. 

They said their goodbyes and Orion trudged off, leaving Rahool alone with the freshly recovered engram cache. With effort, he lifted the box onto a waiting cart and wheeled it through the tower to his private study.

Hey slut,

Great-aunt Pearl had a ton of pre-Traveller music on an ancient phone - an old Google phone, can you believe it? The interface was so weird but I managed to port all of the tunes she had saved over to a datapad. This datapad has a copy of everything, you gotta check it out. Auntie Pearl used to party, apparently. 

Can’t wait to break your back to Cupcakke xoxo
Kara

Rahool lowered the freshly decrypted datapad back down on his desk. The note had been open on the datapad when it had popped free from the engram and although he had initially been disappointed to find a fairly standard piece of tech, he was beginning to get excited. Pre-golden age music? If the first engram he decrypted had media like this on it, what could the others hold? While it was clear from his research that music and art were as important to humanity throughout history as they were now, much of it had been lost to the endless march of time. 

He began the process of syncing the contents over to the tower’s archive and stood to pour himself a cup of coffee from the urn in the corner. It was going to be an eventful evening and he needed to stay sharp. The Reef’s cryptarchs had no music archive like this, he was sure. Music had provided so much cultural context and insight into the linguistic intricacies of pre-collapse humanity - surely a datapad full of music would merit months, if not years, of study. 

A chime sounded from the datapad and he gingerly picked it up. Now that the sync was finished, he could actually listen to some of this music. 

The files were organized into lists - some of the list titles had been either partially corrupted or were some ancient form of shorthand that he couldn’t quite comprehend. He scrolled through the list titles and clicked into one that caught his eye.

SPKYSZN21
*Spooky Coochie: Doechii
*FMRN: Lilyisthatyou
*FTN: Buzz
*brutal: Olivia Rodrigo
*Cpr: cupcakKe
*Who Hurt You: Nina Chuba
*Feel Real Pretty: Paper Idol
*Halloweenie IV: Innards: Ashnikko

Hadn’t the note in the datapad mentioned an artist named Cupcakke? Something about breaking a back? Either this song was used as a battle cry or there was some cultural context he was missing. He connected the datapad to a speaker on his desk and hit play. 

With no preamble, a pulsing beat filled his study. 

No quick head in my bed I can't have that
I want that long neck not talking giraffe neck

Maybe it was a battle cry, he thought, taking a sip of coffee. Beheading had been a popular method of sending a message throughout history. 

Want your dick soaked? Place it down my throat
Tongue tickle your dick but not telling a joke

Rahool choked on his coffee and coughed. Had he heard that right?

Pussy already wet, don't need no lube ointment
Dick twisting in my stomach like food poisoning
That's how you know when you hit the spot
I'll make your pants unzip more than Ziploc

This song was definitely not a battle cry. The beat kept pounding on, the singer crooning the most filthy lyrics he had ever heard. His coffee sat, forgotten, on the desk as the song wound down, the singer moaning through the speaker. Stunned silence fell over the study and Rahool stared into the middle distance, lost in thought. 

The linguistic implications of this collection alone would be staggering. He would need to transcribe lyrics and pick them apart to analyze the slang, the sentence structure, the cultural context. This could be the key to unlocking the secrets of some more inscrutable personal communications in the archive’s pre-golden age collection. What could possibly be in the other engrams from the cache Orion had tracked down? One thing at a time - he would at least listen through and transcribe this music collection first and then get to decrypting the other engrams.

Maybe he had time to listen to that song again, though. For science.