Chapter Text
Every night, without fail, Kay would hear the same jingle playing throughout his radio. Sometimes it would catch them while they were asleep, some other times he would be tinkering with some console or playing a game. But it always played, without fail.
After a few weeks, he couldn't bear the curiosity anymore, and tracked the radio, stayed awake, and waited, for what felt like countless hours.
As he felt like nothing was gonna happen, he stayed for 5 more minutes. And a static disrupted his peace, for just a moment, got him back on track, and started recording with a microphone.. and then the jingle played again, a few times.
"There it was again!" He thought, happy he had caught it on tape. This little melody had been haunting them for weeks and each night he would be greeted by it, and this time, he had finally managed to record it down.
The frequency of the radio never changed, which made it a lot easier to track down. But he wondered...
Where was this coming from? Why did it play every night? Was he the only one getting this strange jingle or had everyone else also got it?
There were so many questions and so little answers, that they couldn't even begin to think how to solve this mystery.
They sighs, putting the tape on their desktop, then walking off and back to bed, as he was ridiculously tired.
He laid in bed, still thinking about it, this soothing melody that played every single night. And yet, he had no answer to where this might've come from. And no one in the Labs had asked him about it either, so he wondered if it was just happening to him.
As their mind came up with more and more questions, they slowly drifted off to sleep.
They were then awoken by Rotteen a few hours later, as she barged into Kay's room, looking for something.
"Hey, Kay have you seen my-" Rotteen says, before realizing that she had woken up the poor guy.
"Oh... I'm sorry..." She muttered, taking a step back before Kay answered her.
"Don't worry..." They say, half-asleep, rubbing their eye and sitting up on the bed, trying to wake up properly. "I'm up..."
"Have I seen your what?" He says, properly opening their eyes and staring at the feline, who had a bit of a worried look as she had woken up her friend.
"I was looking for a radio inhibitor. Darius and I have been getting strange signals for a while and we can't take it anymore... Darius doesn't mind as he is usually up at night but I am tired.." She says, and Kay opened his eyes wide.
"You've been getting signals too?!" He says, practically jumping out the bed, curious to see if they were hearing the same.
"Sometimes-" She says, then lets out a yawn. "-But it's all gibberish.. Sounds like made-up words. Me and Darius tried to figure out what they were saying but no luck. He says that it was just a bunch of phonetics."
"Ah, so not the same." Kay sighs. "I have been getting the same melody every single night for the past month or so."
Rotteen changed her expression, as she was curious to see what the rat was talking about.
"I managed to record it last night." Kay says, walking towards his pile of junk next to the desktop and picking up the tape.
"Wanna hear it?"
Rotteen agreed.
"Can we take this to Darius as well? I bet he would love hearing this."
Kay nodded, as they walk out of their room to bring the tape up to Darius' office.
Rotteen opened the door, seeing Darius yet again browsing through the lab surveillance cameras.
"Hey." Rotteen says, tapping on his shoulder, and showing him the tape. "We have something fun for you."
Kay stepped forward as well, greeted Darius and told him the story.
"So.. Every night, for the past month, I have been getting a signal from somewhere. I don't know where it comes from or why I'm picking it up, but every night, it's the same melody. At the exact same radio frequency, at the same hour. Last night I managed to record it." Kay says, then sighs.
"Interesting..." Darius says, taking the tape that Rotteen had brought him, then put it in one of the devices attached to his supercomputer.
And so, it played.
"This is so interesting-" Darius says. "-I assume Rotty told you already.. but we have also been getting strange signals. Never a melody, though. Just scrambled words. Phonetics... I couldn't figure it out, I studied it for months. Do you want to hear them?"
"Yes, sure!" Kay says.
Darius then took Kay's tape out of his device then exchanged it for another one nearby.
The tape played, this one was a lot longer than the one Kay had..
..and he was right, it was all just scrambled words, things that made no sense, but it went on.
"Every so often it switches, one string of words will play every so often, then the week after, it's another string of words. I have not been able to figure them out yet."
"Do you think it has any correlation?" Rotteen adds. "I mean, I doubt that this is multiple people. It's too much of a coincidence."
"I doubt it is." Darius says. "But I also have no idea how to locate this person." He sighs.
"By the looks of it, they're using shortwave.." Kay says. "Was your receiver also set to it?"
"Yeah."
"Alright.." Kay sighs. "I wonder if we'll ever be able to locate them. Such a fascinating project, right?"
Darius and Rotteen nodded.
"Alright, thank you so much, the both of you, for showing me this. I gotta get back to my room now." Kay says. "May I have my tape back? I want to analyze it."
Darius muttered a "yeah" and handed it over to them.
"Thank you." Kay smiled, turning around and leaving for his room.
He closed the door behind him, sitting back down with the tape, playing it back on his computer.
"Despite the weird way I got this..." He thought. "...this melody is actually quite nice. It's so soothing, calming even. I could recreate this with my machines."
And so they did, booting up some software on his NES, switfly playing around, managing to make almost a perfect replica of the strange melody they had heard.
"I wonder.. if there's any way I could broadcast this back." He thought.
"Being able to broadcast this?" He muttered, slowly getting lost in his own train of thought. And he thought so hard, of different ways he might be able to broadcast a frequency, that his mind got foggy.
"I need to figure this out."
He sat down, made a list of all the possible ideas that he got, and tried calculating on the best route.
After a few hours, he ended up with a pretty concise plan.
That is, to use some form of shortwave transmitter.
He could make one, which would be difficult, or he could ask Darius. He seemed to know his way around radio frequencies and all things regarding such, so he did.
He got up, walking back to Darius' lab, and knocked on the door as it was locked and he had no way of entering.
After waiting for a little bit, the door opened.
"Why are you in the dark-" Kay asked, but got interrupted by Darius' letting out a 'shhh' sound.
Kay shut up, as Darius made a gesture with his palm indicating to follow him, and so he did.
The room was dark, except for a spot on the floor where it was glowing. It was Darius' radio receiver. It was chirring and making loud static noises, for a minute or two, until it stopped, and a breath could be heard. After a few seconds, it started.
The mysterious transmission was back, and this time, it was more interesting than ever.
Phonetics, as per usual, but this time accompanied by a soft synth.
"ɹiˈsɪntoʊ ɡəˈlinθi.ə ˈri.osɛnaː ɹɑˈtɑntoʊ ... 「Дарья」 sɨˈməʊ.əː sɨˈjɪs"
Both Kay and Darius stared at each other, then back at the receiver, which didn't seem to stop.
"sɪnˈseɪ.ja tɑnˈɡɑn.t̪ɑ tu.ɑ'sɑn ˈtanɑːɹa kɑˈneɪ ... 「Дарья」 sɨˈməʊ.əː sɨˈjɪs"
Darius glanced at Kay, then pointed at the little machine next to the receiver, which had a red light pulsating, indicating that he had been recording the entire time.
Kay nodded, then continued listening to the strange transmission, perplexed.
The melody changed, became a little more intricate, but the phonetic chanting stayed the same.
ɹiˈsɪntoʊ ɡəˈlinθi.ə ˈri.osɛnaː ɹɑˈtɑntoʊ ...
"「Дарья」 sɨˈməʊ.əː sɨˈjɪs"
sɪnˈseɪ.ja tɑnˈɡɑn.t̪ɑ tu.ɑ'sɑn ˈtanɑːɹa kɑˈneɪ ...
"「Дарья」 sɨˈməʊ.əː sɨˈjɪs"
A few moments later, the audio stopped, going back to weird static for about a minute, then cutting off entirely.
Darius reached to the small machine, cutting off the recording.
"This time..." Darius looked at the receiver. "Something that had never played before, played."
"You always says you got a melody, and I always got gibberish, but this time, they were combined. It wasn't like something neither of us had heard before." He adds.
"And the weird static.." Kay says. "It almost sounded like *something*. Not like normal radio static."
"It sounds like they're trying to tell us something." Darius says.
"Definitely.. I'll look into it. That was wonderful." Kay says, amazed at this new transmission.
"I'm going to the library." Kay affirmed, then walked down the hallway and down the stairs, down a few floors, where the big facility held their own library. Full of books, so much information, genuinely, such a privilege to have.
He skipped through the different areas, and focused his interest onto the radio section.
"The history of radio..." He looked at the few books they had. "How to create your own station... Radio for dummies... My first radio program???" He chuckled at all the books that were available. "That's nice."
"All about shortwave.." Bingo. "This might be of help."
He took it, and walked down to the little space they had to sit down, and started looking through the pages. Mostly fun facts, history of it's invention, the uses it's had through history until today, etcetera...
Until he found something spot on.
"Slow-scan television?" He muttered.
He read through it, how it worked, and he realized that the odd static at the end of each transmission, matched perfectly with the description of SSTV.
"This just might be it." He thought, taking the book, then rushing back upstairs to tell Darius.
The door is now semi-open, and his desktop lights are back on.
"I found something." Kay says, as he swings the door wide open. Darius gets a little startled, but nothing too much.
"What is it?" Darius says.
"On this book, they talk about Slow-scan television.. it seems like it matches perfectly with the loud static we hear at the end of each message." Kay stated.
"SSTV? That's interesting." Darius says, as Kay hands him the book he found at the library.
Darius opens it, looks around until he finds what Kay was talking about.
"I see.." He mutters. "You're right, this might just be it. Now we just have to find a way to decode it."
Darius turns back to their supercomputer, looking for answers everywhere, and it is like this for a few minutes, until they finally find something of help.
"With this software, I might just be able to decode what this is." He affirms. "Could you pass me the tape?"
Kay nods, looking around, finding the tape next to the receiver still.
"Here you go."
Darius loads up the tape into his small speaker, prepping the microphone, putting it next to the speaker, as he boots up the software.
"Now, let me forward right when the melody ends and the weird noises start." He says, as he skips over the tape, almost till the end.
Turning the software on, he lets go of the forward button and lets it play.
Suddenly, as the loud noises drown the silence in the room, an image is slowly scanned and showed in Darius' screen.
"No way..." Kay whispers to himself.
After a minute or so, the entire picture is displayed.
There is a little picture of someone, completely white, with very long ears, and a lot of text on the side. Some was gibberish, but at the end of it there was something that could be read.
"Meet me at the midpoint" and "The interstice" with an arrow pointing at the phonetics.
"These awful noises had been coming from every transmission.. now I can't help but feel like I've lost a lot of valuable info." Darius sighs.
"It's okay.." Kay tried to reassure him. "You say these have been repeating. Do you think you'll get one today?"
"Probably. They have been playing every single day, after all." He says. "This time I can't miss anything."
"You're right.." Kay says.
They stayed in silence for a moment, before Kay remembered the reason he came into Darius' room in the first place.
"Oh, yeah." Kay says. "The reason I came here earlier, was to ask you if you had a shortwave transmitter."
Darius nods.
"I spent hours figuring this out, but after realizing that every single transmission came from a shortwave frequency, we might be able to send something back.. and I know just what to send."
"What is it?" Darius asks.
"You see.." Kay says. "Before I came up with the plan, I recreated the melody I used to get in my receiver every day. It was stuck in my head, day and night, so I decided to replicate it in my machines. And I think it might just be the perfect thing we could send back."
"That's a good idea." Darius nods in approval. "I wonder if they'll catch it."
"I hope so." Kay says. "Let me go get the little melody, so we can transmit it, to wherever they are.."
Darius agrees, and Kay walks out of the room and onto his to put it on some floppy lying nearby.
He does, then brings it back to Darius.
"Here you go." Kay says, as Darius takes the floppy from Kay, and puts it into his supercomputer.
"Do you have everything plugged into that??" Kay wonders.
"Sort of. But it's easier to manage the transmitter through the computer."
"Makes sense." Kay says, as they load up his music file to be transmitted.
"Should we do this multiple times?" Darius says, then Kay nods in approval.
And so they do, they send it once every 5 minutes for around an hour, until they get a little tired.
"You should come listen to my transmission." Kay says. "I get it everyday at exactly 2:05 AM, so in about 20 minutes from now."
"Sure." Darius says, as he stands up from his chair and follows Kay into his room.
"Here's where I have everything." Kay says, bringing him into the corner of the room, with a bunch of tools and tinkered consoles, that including the little radio he's got.
"Every night, at 2:05 AM, at around 16.6 MHz... the melody. Every night without fail for the last month." He says, kneeling in front of the radio receiver, encouraging Darius to do the same.
"I have the recorder right here, ready to be used, so let's just wait..." Kay says, and not much else happens.
They both sit there, eager to hear what's coming tonight, wondering if the transmission will be different tonight, exchanging a few words, until a few chirring sounds broke the silence and Kay, excitedly, turned on the recorder as they waited for the transmission to fully sink in.
But this time it was different, the melody seemed a lot more detailed and complex, and a little after, Kay's own recreation played, accompanied to the other synth they had previously listened to, and he stared at Darius with his eyes wide open, and this played a few times, before ending and playing the minute-long SSTV noises they were also very expentant to hear.
After the transmission ended, Kay stopped the recording, a little bit shocked.
"They got it!!" He says, excitedly. "They got our transmission!!"
Darius was just as shocked as him, but also very happy.
"We need to go decode this right now!" Darius says, getting up, along with Kay that took the tape out, rushing back to Darius' office, putting the tape on the speaker and putting the previous used software to work.
After a few minutes, an image displayed on the screen again.
There it was again, the picture of this creature drawn on a side, with scrambled phonetics around it, but at the left, written with a different font and color:
"I can't see you, but I can hear you"
And scattered across the picture there were a few splotches of ink, presumably, but it was a vibrant red, and a mellow green.
"Fascinating.." Darius said, as Kay nodded in agreement.
"Could I borrow your transmitter?" Kay says, hopeful. "I know you're very busy with your work and I don't wish to disturb you for this all the time.. but I need to know more."
Darius nodded, gently disconnecting the transmitter from his supercomputer and giving it to Kay, who smiled and thanked him.
"One more thing.." Kay says. "Do you think I can have that decoder software? I'll bring you a floppy so you can copy it."
"No worries." Darius says, grabbing another floppy right next to him. "I have a whole bunch."
Kay waited, as Darius transferred the program over to the floppy, then putting it on top of the transmitter that was on Kay's arms.
"Here you go." He says.
"Dude, thank you so much.. really..." Kay smiles, then leaves the room and goes back to his own.
"Now... to figure out how to communicate with this person."