To the public and staff, Galactic absolutely began and ended with Cyrus. Behind a microphone he was electrifying, and behind a control panel he was fascinating. He was the guiding hand and spark of life all of them needed. The less you had to fall back on, the more that seemed to be true.
Even to those who knew him more intimately, the commanders who at least suspected there was less behind his words than one would hope, Cyrus was everything.
Behind the curtains, though, Galactic was actually Saturn. He managed projects, drafted schedules, and balanced the books. There were weeks on end when he wouldn't see sunlight because somebody had to make sure the heat stayed on and research stayed on track.
Had he accreditations rather than a juvenile record, he was sure that he could have been hired anywhere. Maybe if he'd tried harder to sell himself, maybe if he'd had more sympathetic interviewers, he could have excelled someplace else with what little he did have. That someplace wouldn't have had Cyrus, though, so he'd stayed.
But, of course, his real job wasn't why he was currently being held captive. This organization probably had an army of accountants, managers, and every other hat that Saturn had been forced to wear. He doubted Cyrus had even attributed any of those things to him. He'd certainly never bothered to pay attention to the minutiae of running an organization before. He hardly even paid attention to the progress of the master ball or red chain projects, and those had been vital.
It only took a moment of looking over the documents at his station to realize exactly why he'd been brought there. They wanted a recreation of his official contributions to the organization.
Rainbow Rocket had, through who knew what means, found the blueprints for the galactic bomb. Which would have been bad enough, certainly, but the scale they wanted now...
Saturn forced himself to recover and turn to face his newly–assigned superior.
This was a giant of a man, with wildly styled red hair, sharp suit, and hard eyes. He had to speak through a translator, so it was difficult to judge tone and word choice. But, as Saturn curtly answered increasingly specific logistical questions and the techs around him clued in to the monstrosity they'd be recreating, he felt like he had enough to make a proper read of his personality.
There was just something about him. Maybe it was the way he loomed over Saturn to oversee the schematics, the way his mouth moved as he listened to the translated answers, or how he troubled the thumb of his tightly closed fist. Regardless, there was no doubt he understood exactly what he was getting his hands on.
Cyrus at least had the decency to feign humanitarianism. This man seemed to not only be ready to use the technology, but was actively eager and didn't seem to care who knew it. Saturn had a feeling most of these leaders were close behind.
He and the rest of the team exchanged a look. But, with armed guards along the walls, there wasn't anything to do but set to work.
The uniforms that they'd woken up to were well designed for grunts. Each outfit was movable and comfortable, distinguishable but anonymizing. They also fit each new recruit perfectly, which was something every one of them tried to put out of their minds due to the sheer implications.
The issue, at least from a guard's perspective, was that they worked a bit too well.
They were meant to keep former comrades apart, in the same way they were kept from their leaders, since there was too much at stake to risk collusion. That task had been easy enough during work hours, where badge scans and keys kept people where they were meant to be. In open areas like the mess hall, however…
After a breakfast full of far more hassle than it was worth, the guards seemingly gave up on trying to figure out who wasn't meant to be anywhere near who. As long as everything played out like a normal meal, they would look the other way in the most inconspicuous manner possible.
That's what Saturn figured, anyway, as Mars hit him in the shoulder with her hip and made him drop his spoon.
"Move over," she ordered.
"There's a seat right there," he said, incredulously, as he motioned to his other side.
"I want to sit on the end of the bench. Move."
Saturn rolled his eyes, but dutifully moved himself and his tray to give her enough space to plop down. Jupiter took the empty seat across from them.
"Have you seen the dead man yet?" Saturn asked as he readied a spoonful.
"No," Jupiter said. "But I know he's here someplace."
"I don't think so," Mars said with a dismissive wave of her fork. "I think they just lied. I mean, it's not like our names weren't all over the news during the trials. We'd be easy to find."
"Everyone here is tied to someone," Jupiter said, plainly. "If they weren't lied to…"
She motioned with her eyes to a green-haired man who'd come into the mess hall for coffee, and the now-grunts that tried and failed to subtly call his attention to them.
It wasn't much of a stretch to think that they, too, could be so pathetically desperate for attention. They'd certainly spent more than enough time doing whatever it would take for a pat on the head.
"Doesn't prove anything," Mars said, and stabbed at her food harder than necessary. "Anyway, how are your roommates? Mine only speaks Galarian and I only know like five words in it. And she hasn't used any of them. Which is just rude, honestly?"
The issue was far from comfortable or settled. But, because it was much easier to deal with petty frustrations, they kept the conversation there for the rest of the meal.
Maxie, or so he had introduced himself, was tasked to lead the dig for resources. He had evidently spent his morning crafting an outright lecture about expectations and safety, and the entire rest of the work day would be spent delivering it.
The grunts were to listen to it attentively, because he had a very sharp eye and absolutely no patience for slacking.
Saturn had probably been assigned there because of his connection to the bomb, but they'd picked wrong. Mars absolutely lived for the hunt, and had always been their go-to for resource collection. Even Jupiter would have at least had the physicality to handle something as intensive as this mining would evidently be. Saturn, meanwhile, handled fieldwork so rarely that Cyrus nearly bordered on apologetic when it was assigned.
But that was Galactic, and nobody cared about such things here. In Rainbow Rocket he was 40 slides into a presentation on the literal grunt work he'd be participating in. There was consolation that it seemed he'd be doing analysis rather than extraction, but that was terribly minor.
It had been a long time since Saturn had pined for the old days. The tragedy that his hair would be mandatorily crushed under a hard hat, though… That got him as close as anything else could have.
"So what is Maxie like?"
Tabitha froze with his pajama shirt only half-buttoned. "How'd you know that I was on Magma?"
"I had a lot of time to think while he was lecturing," Saturn replied, lightly. "I just put your condition yesterday with the guy who doesn't know how to stop talking about rocks, and-"
"That's fair," Tabitha admitted. He returned to the task of dressing. "As long as you're competent and dedicated, he's pleasant to work for. I hadn't necessarily thought of him as personable, but after dealing with some of these others…"
"Almost makes you miss it?" Saturn asked as he slid into bed.
"If it had ended in any other way," he said, any wistfulness gone from his voice as he rubbed at a burn. "Which one was yours?"
"Cyrus." Saturn turned over to face his roommate. With a tone that was more hopeful than he'd meant it to be, he asked "You didn't happen to see him, did you?"
"No, sorry." Tabitha paused and added "Do you want me to keep an eye out?"
"If you don't mind," Saturn said as he rolled back to face the ceiling. "It'd be nice to know if he's survived."