Archibald James Montgomery. A man with a perfectly pretentious name and a crisp accent, whose precise manner of speech sounded like it belonged in an ancient costume drama about the rich upper class living in mansions and having tea parties all day.

To describe Archibald J. Montgomery, one might invite the reader to imagine an uptight, tightly-wound, arrogant man with perfectly slicked hair and one single beauty mark on his right cheek that begged to be bitten. Then, this entire package would have to be layered with the slightest air of being two seconds away from a nervous breakdown. 

Major Montgomery, the newest officer assigned to CSS Trout, looked like he needed to breathe in a paper bag, but in a startlingly condescending way. The lines of his orange officer jacket were so sharp that they looked surreal, his buttons were shined to a mirror gleam, and his boots didn’t give the impression of having ever seen — or even heard of the concept of — something as base as dirt. 

He was a tall and lean man, with pale skin and jet black hair, as well as a perfectly round butt hidden under the edges of his jacket. 

Long story short, Chuck wanted to bend him over a desk and mess him up. 

Unfortunately, he was the one assigned to giving Major Montgomery a tour of the base, which meant that he would also likely be assigned as one of his administrative aides. Chuck couldn’t even start to imagine the HR nightmare he’d have on his hands if he started hitting on his new superior officer less than an hour after having met him, so he had to rein himself in and do a proper job of showing the major around. 

It didn’t mean that Chuck couldn’t hit on him! But he had to find a way to subtly straddle the line between professional and flirty, without actually saying that he wanted to straddle Major Montgomery, because that sort of behavior would likely get him dismissed at best and scolded by Bee at worst. 

Time to be professional.

“So, Archie!” he said. “Can I call you Archie? You ever been in a bunker before? I hear you’re transferring from —” He checked the file on his comm “— Welch base. Huh. Never heard of a Welch base. Where’s that at?”

Major Montgomery made an aborted motion with his hand, something that looked like a nervous twitch. “It’s pronounced Welk.”

“Fascinating. All right! First stop on our tour, the lovely decontamination room!”

He wanted to drape an arm around the major’s shoulders and pull him along, but he had been (somewhat loosely) drilled on proper conduct with officers once upon a time, so Chuck settled on gently touching the man’s elbow with the tips of his fingers while gesturing with his other hand. Archie let himself be guided nicely, and Chuck filed it away as a flirting success. Hopefully the first of many.

They toured the base in the order that made the most logical sense to Chuck, meaning that they started by the first rooms that an evacuee in the event of a vaporizer incident would encounter (the decontam room) and then went from there. The public rooms were neutral and functional enough, but they weren’t — in his opinion — very friendly. Chuck was much more excited to show Major Archie the parts of the base where the soldiers regularly worked and lived, because they’d had the time by now to truly make them their own. Certainly, there were regulations to follow regarding what people could put up in their cubicles, and what sort of seasonal decorations were acceptable in the halls in order to acknowledge everyone’s religious holidays without being overbearing. But Chuck felt like it was still the part of the base that it was the most important for Archie to visit, because it was there that he could truly get a feel for the vibe of the place where he would be working and living from now on. 

Unfortunately, Archie seemed mostly baffled by what he saw.

“Pardon me,” he said suddenly, stopping in place and derailing Chuck half-way through his description of emergency procedures in the event of a blast valve failure. “But what is this? I keep seeing it everywhere.”

Chuck glanced at the poster that had so arrested Archie’s attention. It featured several large seabirds tearing a space shuttle apart with their beaks. The art style was what Bee described as ‘efficient’ and Chuck described as ‘a simplified blocky mess’. 

“Oh, it’s just the gull poster,” he said. 

Seeing Archie’s incomprehension, he clarified: “You know, Squealing Gulls Puncture Hulls?”

A second passed. 

“The… you know, the slogan? The slogan about not giving intel to enemy agents? You don’t know the slogan?”

“Ah, yes of course, the slogan!” Archie valiantly rallied. He gestured at the poster. “The slogan, yes. I knew that.”

Chuck smiled, glad that they were on the same page. “Yeah, buddy — I mean, sir. The slogan! We have tons of those posters, come on, I’ll show you a couple.”

Since the major had seemed interested in the gull poster, Chuck brought him around to see all of his favourites, including the one in the cafeteria about how enemy agents would try to seek out information from you via alcohol abuse, the one in the recreation room warning you about how they’d use gambling to make you talk, and obviously the infamous one in all of the dorm rooms about ~sexual promiscuity.

Then Chuck realized that the major looked visibly uncomfortable, so he docked himself one point from his flirting score. He figured he probably had come across a bit strongly on that last one, so he quickly realigned his tour on a safer, more boring path. 

For most of the morning, Major Montgomery seemed content to listen to Chuck ramble on and observe silently, but as they finished their visit of the base and looped back around to the decontamination showers, he finally stopped Chuck with an hand on his arm (YES!) and then hesitated.

“All of this is all well and good,” he said. “But, um… What about the pigment? Where does it… fit in with all this?”

“Right!” said Chuck, probably a tad bit too loudly and with too much enthusiasm. He tried again, modulating his tone. “Right, the pigment, good question. Come on, I’ll give you the rundown. Sir.”

He brought Archie into a nearby conference room, then fiddled with his comm in order to pull up the relevant files. He cursed himself a little for not having thought in advance to prepare a presentation about this, but in his defense he had thought that Major Montgomery would have been more thoroughly briefed before being transferred in. It wasn’t the norm for Castullan officers to come in with so little knowledge of bunker emergency procedures, for example, which meant that either someone had messed up their job and not briefed Archie, or he hadn’t been paying attention during his meetings. (Naughty boy.)

“Right, so,” he said again when he had located the proper files. “What do you know about the pigment? Let’s start there.”

The major shifted in his seat, looking possibly even paler than before in the shit lighting of the conference room. He looked completely vanilla-white and spotless aside from that one little intriguing beauty mark on his cheek, and Chuck wanted to lick him like an ice cream cone. 

“I know that moonlet Trout is the home of the chemical factory that first discovered the novel pigment Space Mega Black,” said Major Montgomery with the air of someone who was reciting from memory. “Which is blacker than any other black pigment and therefore has tremendous military and manufacturing application, especially when it comes to the nano coating of shield arrays for starships. And as it’s such a huge technological advancement, it’s also one that is in significant danger of being stolen by…” he hesitated then made a short hand motion towards one of the omnipresent posters in the room, a half-smile on his face. “Enemy agents.”

“Yes, exactly, sir!” enthused Chuck. Perhaps Major Montgomery had been briefed after all. “Space Mega Black is immensely useful for the shield arrays, and no one else has yet figured out how to manufacture it so we’ve been getting a lot of bargaining power with FREE by selling it to them. But of course, like you said, New Vakalos would kill to get their hands on the recipe, or any enemy agent from a dozen other faction who’d then sell it to New Vakalos. If they succeeded, it would be the single biggest and most impactful case of corporate theft in all of history.”

Chuck didn’t actually know how true that was. He was just repeating stuff that he’d heard, but Major Montgomery looked suitably impressed. He continued: “Which is why, as I’m sure you know, the Castullan government has asked the military to assign a full complement of soldiers to every facility that produces the pigment as security, in order to protect the workers and the technology from any… I don’t know, shenanigans from hostile parties.”

The major nodded, rapt with attention. “Quite fascinating. I was wondering if perhaps I would be allowed to see those facilities with my own eyes? Since we are all assigned here to protect them, of course.”

Chuck blinked at him. Oh. OH. So Archie hadn’t been briefed at all. 

“Sir… I don’t know how to tell you this, but we don’t make the pigment here anymore. All of the production has been moved elsewhere.”

Archie sat back, shock written clear on his face. “What do you mean, moved elsewhere?” he squeaked.

His voice had temporarily lost that lofty accent, revealing a muddy diction that took Chuck completely aback. He’d never heard anything like that before, and in the space of a few seconds Archibald James Montgomery had seemed like a completely different person. A working man, perhaps, or a traveler from a far away star system, where the slang was just different enough that it started affecting your vowels. Now that was a flash of intrigue and mystery that left Chuck dying to unravel. Then the mask of a highly-paid snob was back in place and the major leaned in again. 

“Is the pigment still produced on his moonlet, at all?”

“Sir, I’m sorry but, no. It’s not. I… I don’t know what you’ve been told, but we have a bunker here.”

Seriously? Wondered Chuck. Archie hadn’t been briefed at all, and it was his job to give him the relevant intel so the man could, you know, do his job? It was perplexing, and he had to wonder what the hell kind of nonsense was going on at command for the higher ups to let something like that even happen in the first place. What a mess. 

He tried to rally, because Chuck was nothing if not a consummate professional, and also Archie was too hot to be left in the dark like this. He deserved a proper explanation.

“Look sir, it’s like that. A few years ago, right after the discovery of SMB, the Castula government started their bunker project. You know, so that the king and his cabinet would have somewhere to hide if shit really hit the fan, what with the war and all. Part of the idea was that the bunkers should be secret, but it’s a bit hard to hide the construction and maintenance of something of this size, you know. Not just from the enemy but also from pretty much everyone else. I mean, all it takes is the one citizen who says the wrong thing to the wrong person about, I don’t know, a suspiciously large shipment of steel beams and then boom! The enemy finds out where the super-secret bunker is. It always happens, it’s a given. But then somebody figured: a Mega Black factory, especially the very first one to exist, is bound to have a lot of top secret construction going on around it, right? Not to mention a full complement of soldiers and everything. So the higher ups decided that actually, the pigment factory would make a great cover up story for a super secret governmental bunker!”

Major Montgomery just stared at him. “So let me get this straight… The factory, the pigment factory that I’ve been hired to run security for, it doesn’t exist? It’s a cover story?”

“Well I mean it exists, just not here. They moved all of the production elsewhere, like, years ago. And then they retrofitted the factory into this fancy bunker!” 

He made a sweeping gesture around himself, in a half-hearted attempt to raise the mood. Their bunker was pretty fancy, he thought, even if this particular conference room wasn’t quite it. Unfortunately, Archie didn’t play ball. He just kept frowning at him.

“Do you have any idea where it’s being produced, then? Where they moved the factory?”

He shrugged. “Sorry man — I mean, sir! — I don’t know.”

The man seemed disappointed by that, and they sat in silence for a tense moment, both chewing on what they had just learned. Eventually Chuck offered: “Well, huh. Do you want me to show you your office?”

Major Montgomery still looked upset, but now his voice had taken on a tinge of resignation. “I don’t know what purpose it will serve me, but sure. If you want.”

They got up to leave the room, but just as they reached the door, the major reached out and grabbed his arm once again. Chuck’s mood immediately lifted by about five hundred percent, his entire body buzzing at their point of contact. 

“Listen, huh, Sergeant Quillback —”

“Chuck. You can call me Chuck.”

The corner of Major Montgomery’s mouth quirked up in a small, private smile, and Chuck positively swooned.

“Chuck,” he said, and the sound of his name in that smooth rich baritone made him swoon even harder. 

Or maybe it was the frustratingly continuing lack of sleep — despite the sweet new house! Chuck honestly didn’t know what to try anymore! — making him unsteady on his feet. Either way, he tried to will his knees not to give up­ on him now. It would be pretty embarrassing to drop into Archie’s arms on the first day of their acquaintance, and besides his full weight might just be a tad too much to inflict on the poor reed of a man.

“It’s a bit… embarrassing for me to have been transferred here without being given the correct informations, you understand,” continued the Major. “I’d prefer if… you didn’t mention it around, perhaps?”

“Absolutely, yeah, sure,” he breathed. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

Archie made to move away, but Chuck pressed in, a completely instinctual reflex that his body never bothered to asked his brain permission for. He just barely stopped himself before his hands could go and grab the major’s jacket, knowing that this would be crossing a line that absolutely shouldn’t be crossed. Yet. 

“You want me to try to get the brief you should have had from command?” He babbled. “I could add in a complaint, too. I have the right forms and everything.”

“Oh, no, no!” blurted the major, looking somewhat alarmed. “No need for all this. I’ll take care of it myself. Don’t you worry about it, sergeant.”

Archie then patted his shoulder a few times — which made Chuck hot all over — then took a step back and inclined his head towards the door, a clear request for Chuck to keep going with the tour.