Picture Hunt
Grif had more or less scoured Blood Gulch Outpost No.1 top to bottom, looking for any sort of picture of him from before he'd been run over by the tank. He hadn't been allowed to keep very much from his life before being drafted, and Blood Gulch wasn't exactly the kind of happenin' place where the guys took all that many pictures of one another out of armor, so he wasn't terribly surprised to come up empty-handed.
He didn't think he could call anyone from back home. He wasn't even really sure enough of his pre-military memories to be able to pinpoint anyone he could reliably say he knew from then, and even if he did, he lived in The Future now, and for all that he knew, all of those people were dead now, and he just didn't want to deal with that possibility. That left only one real option...
Laid out on his bunk, armor hooked up for maintenance, Grif activated his armor's built-in radio, patching into the base relay system to send his signal out into the distant stars. He'd had to read up a bit on the protocols that he hadn't ever needed to use much, but once he did, he was able to perform the necessary tuning and communications handshakes.
"Y'hello, y'hello, what's goin' oooon, dude?" A ridiculously relaxed drawl -- Texafornian, maybe? -- phased in as the call finished connecting.
"Uh, hey, this is Private Dexter Grif, lookin' to speak to someone at Red Command?"
"Are you sure you're lookin' for Red Command, dude? You could be lookin' for Blue Command, y'know what I'm sayin', dude?"
"What? Oh, d-- don't even start with that 'Are Red and Blue the same or not?' bullshit again."
"Whoa! Oookay, there, dude. Take it eeeeeasy. Have yourself a chill pill, y'know what I'm sayin', dude?"
"...Only occasionally. Okay, look, you're Vic Jr. at... whatever Command is nowadays, right? "
"That's right. What can I do for ya, dude?"
Vic Jr.'s accent was starting to grate, but Grif sucked it up for the sake of getting things done. "Okay, I was wondering if you could send me a copy of my UNSC file? I, uh..." Grif realized that he should've tried to think of a rationale for asking for his file before making the call, and raced to come up with something now. He couldn't exactly say anything about visiting interdimensional doctors to undo the damage that Command probably never got told he'd sustained in the first place. "I... thought it might be fun reading?"
There was a pause, as if Vic Jr. were pondering the question, but then it seemed to be a good enough reason to him. "Yeah, okay, dude. Just gimme a second to punch it up. Dexter Grif. Dexter Dex-Dex-Dexter... Grrrrrrif. Oh. Wow. Something really unhappy happened to some of these systems a really long time ago, dude, and it looks like yours was one of the files that got hit. There's a whole lot of stuff missing, dude."
A pit formed in his stomach. "Well, what is and isn't there, Vic?"
"Well, looks like pretty much just your service record, which isn't terribly long or interesting, I gotta say, dude."
"Ngggghhh." More of his past gone; more of him stranded in the now. "There's nothing else? Not even--" may as well go for it directly, man; just ask if it's there "-- What about my file photo? They had to have taken one of me when I got drafted, before they ran me through the program, right?"
"Well, lemme see... Yeah, dude! There's a photo on file." A pause. "Whoa! Jesus, dude!"
Did they somehow get a picture of him after Sarge's butcher-work? It didn't seem likely, but this whole thing was weird. "What? What is it?"
"Oh. Yeah, no, it's here. It's... just a bit of a shock, dude."
That, at least, sounded familiar; he'd never exactly been the handsomest of guys. "heh. Yeah, oka--"
"Lookin' a bit rough around the edges, dude."
"Right. So c--"
"You're an ugly sonofagun, is what I'm saying, dude."
Grif started getting a bit irritated. "I get it. Look, I don't suppose you could at least just send me that?"
"I suppose so, sure, dude. Anything to get it off my screen. Hang on." A sub-channel opened, piping a copy of the image, which Grif saved in his armor's onboard storage drive.
"Excellent. Thanks, Vic Jr."
"No problem, dude. Thanks for callin' UNSC Command. Have a nice day."
The signal disconnected. Grif signed off from the base relay, then opened the folder on the armor's drive where he saved the picture. Now he at least had something that showed who he was before he was a SPARTAN, that he could show to his new doctor so she'd know what he should look like when she finished working her miracles.
"Well, let's see what we got..."
((Brian Thompson, aka Eddie Fiori from Kindred: The EmbarrassmentEmbrace and the Alien Bounty Hunter from X-Files.))
"Gah!"