#earthcirca

[earthcirca]

whats going on with volume 2? you mentioned it and other stories in other posts. is there going to be a volume 2? 3?

sorry if this is rude. i just really like this series <3

I am planning volume 2! Right now I'm taking a short break from writing to finalise my EC 3.0 plan and write that (and then I'll take another break while I figure out Volume 2).

I want to keep it in line with each volume being 3 entries but so far, I only have 1 solid idea for Volume 2 (but it's one of my favourites, along with EC 3.0). I like writing and I am constantly coming up with ideas. I have a massive document of ideas for additional Volumes and 'side quests' (shorter one off stories) but I also want to slow down to avoid burn out.

It'll also likely be shorter. I've realised I naturally plan things out to be 20/21 chapters but EC 1,2,3 all have a very high word count so Volume 2 works might be less words.

I will say, I am genuinely every excited for EC 3 and Volume 2/Book 1.

[earthcirca]

GO READ LENA'S FILE

https://archiveofourown.org/works/82272831

[earthcirca]

MILLHAVEN & THE BASE

THE TOWN - MILLHAVEN, MARYLAND

Millhaven sits eleven miles from Hawthorne's main gate, connected by a state route that passes through enough unremarkable countryside that most people driving it aren't thinking about where it started or where it ends.

It is not a small town in the postcard sense. It has no particular charm that would make someone drive to it on purpose. But it has everything a person actually needs - a grocery store, a pharmacy, a hardware store that's been in the same family for three generations, a diner that opens at five-thirty in the morning, a laundromat, a barbershop, two churches, a gas station on each end of the main strip, and Millhaven Community College sitting on the eastern edge of town like an afterthought that turned out to matter.

The population sits somewhere around four thousand, depending on whether the college is in session.

Main Street is the spine of town. Four blocks of storefronts, some occupied, some not, with the particular rhythm of a town that has contracted slightly from what it once was but hasn't given up. There's a hardware store that smells of sawdust and WD-40. A small pharmacy where the owner still knows most customers by name. A Chinese buffet restaurant - Golden Dragon All-You-Can-Eat Buffet, established 1994 - that does a roaring trade on weekends and has the best spring rolls within a forty mile radius. A pizza place. A barbershop with a striped pole that actually rotates.

It is deeply ordinary. That is precisely what makes it valuable to the people who come here from eleven miles away.

WHAT MILLHAVEN KNOWS

The official story around town is that the facility in the woods is a private technology research firm. Caldwell Solutions, according to the minimal paperwork that exists in any accessible record. It has a registered address, a bland website that hasn't been updated since 2019, and a stated focus on "environmental data systems and infrastructure research."

Nobody has ever looked too hard at this.

The people of Millhaven are not naive. Over the decades, a particular kind of person has drifted into town - serious-faced, quietly alert, with the kind of physical bearing that doesn't come from sitting at a desk - and spent money at local businesses, kept to themselves without being unfriendly, and never talked about their work in any specific terms. These people tip well. They don't cause problems. They come and go with a regularity that has become, over time, simply part of the texture of Millhaven.

The town has made a collective, unspoken decision not to question it. The businesses appreciate the revenue. The locals who have been here long enough to notice patterns have noticed them, filed them away, and moved on. There is a general ambient awareness that something is out there in the woods - something government-adjacent, something that employs a specific kind of person - and a general ambient agreement that this is not Millhaven's business.

There are exceptions. Pete Calloway - no relation to DD Calloway, a coincidence that has never stopped being mildly funny to people at Hawthorne who know both - runs the gas station on the north end of Main Street and has been logging the faces of Caldwell Solutions employees in a notebook since 2011. He is not hostile. He has never done anything with this information. He simply watches, and records, and occasionally mentions to his wife that there are an awful lot of the same people coming through for a research firm that apparently produces nothing. His wife tells him to mind his own business. He agrees and keeps the notebook anyway.

There is also a woman named Ruth Adler who teaches history at Millhaven Community College and has, on three separate occasions, submitted quiet inquiries to county planning records about the land designation of the acreage surrounding the Caldwell Solutions facility. Each inquiry was returned with documentation that was technically complete and practically uninformative. She has not escalated. But she hasn't stopped either.

Neither Pete nor Ruth is a threat. They are simply people who notice things, in a town that has mostly agreed not to.

THE CROW & COMPASS

On the corner of Main Street and Henley Road, set back slightly from the pavement as though it grew there rather than being built, is The Crow & Compass.

It has been there since 1987, when Declan Maguire bought the building with savings, a loan, and a level of confidence in himself that he has since described as either brave or stupid depending on the night. The sign above the door is hand-painted - a black crow perched on an old nautical compass rose - and has been repainted exactly twice in thirty-eight years, each time maintaining the original design with minor improvements that nobody mentions because they look exactly right.

Inside: dark wood throughout - bar, booths, the paneling along the walls - worn to a smoothness that only comes with decades of use. The bar runs the length of the left wall, brass rail at the foot of it, stools that have held an enormous cumulative weight of human trouble over the years. The leather on the booth seats is cracked at the high-wear spots, patched with tape in three places - dark brown tape on dark brown leather, neat enough that you only notice if you're looking. Nobody has replaced the seats because nobody wants to. They're part of it now.

There is a pool table toward the back. One of the overhead lights has a very slight flicker that Declan has been meaning to fix since approximately 2018. The dartboard is regulation. The fireplace on the north wall is real, operational, and lit from October through March. There is a jukebox that plays actual vinyl, which Declan maintains with a seriousness that borders on devotional.

The beer is good. The whiskey selection is excellent. The food is limited to a short menu of things done properly - a beef stew on Tuesdays and Thursdays, sandwiches that are bigger than they need to be, and a scotch egg that has developed something of a local reputation.

Declan Maguire is sixty-one years old. He is broad and unhurried, with white hair cropped close and hands that look like they've done more physically demanding work than pulling pints, which they have. He spent sixteen years at Hawthorne - facilities and base operations, from 1990 to 2006 - and left on entirely good terms when his mother got sick and he decided, quietly and without drama, that he was done. He used his savings to buy what had been a failing bar on a corner in Millhaven and turned it into something that lasted.

He has no active clearance. He has never asked anyone at Hawthorne about their work. He has also never pretended, to himself or to them, that he doesn't know exactly what they are.

Garrett has been coming to The Crow & Compass since 2007. He sat at the bar on a Tuesday evening, ordered a whiskey, and Declan put it in front of him without comment. They talked about nothing consequential for an hour. Garrett came back the following Tuesday. This has continued, with variations for operational demand and occasional long absences, for nearly two decades. Declan calls him Bill. Nobody else at Hawthorne calls Garrett Bill. It is unclear whether Garrett has ever asked him to stop.

The senior agents use the back corner booth. This is not a reservation and it is not discussed. But when Okoye and Adams walk in, the booth is generally available, because Millhaven regulars have - through the same process of quiet observation that governs most of the town's relationship with Hawthorne - understood that this is how it works. Nobody minds. Okoye tips generously and once helped a local man change a flat tire in the pub car park at eleven o'clock at night without being asked. Adams fixed the wobbly leg on a bar stool with a pocket tool without mentioning it to anyone. These things get remembered.

Wes comes to The Crow & Compass and genuinely decompresses in it. He sits at the bar, drinks steadily and responsibly, talks to Declan about sport and local nonsense, and for two or three hours becomes, functionally, a person who does not run field operations for a classified facility. He is good at this. He has always been good at finding the off switch.

James comes when he can and is easy company - warm, present, genuinely interested in whoever he ends up talking to. He has, over the years, become a familiar enough face that several Millhaven regulars simply consider him a friend without knowing anything about him except that he's good to talk to and always buys a round before he leaves.

Diego comes and remains half-operational. He sits with his back to a wall. He tracks the room. He has a drink and sometimes two and is not exactly tense. He knows The Crow & Compass is safe, has assessed it thoroughly, trusts it - but he does not fully set down the part of himself that is always watching. James has stopped trying to talk him out of this. It is simply Diego in a bar, and there is a specific kind of companionable acceptance that has grown around it.

Declan knows. He noticed within Diego's first three visits and has never commented on it directly. He simply makes sure Diego's sightline to the door is unobstructed and puts his drink down without asking what he wants because he already knows. These are small things. They matter anyway.

LENA & MILLHAVEN

Lena's relationship with Millhaven exists, so far, in a single afternoon.

After she was offered her 24 month contract with Hawthorne - she was cleared for a supervised off-base excursion. Limited duration. Accompanied. The destination, her choice, was Golden Dragon on Main Street.

She ate an unreasonable amount of food. She sat by the window and watched people walk past on the street - ordinary people going about ordinary Millhaven afternoons - and was quiet in a way that meant something. Not sad exactly. Something more complicated than that. The feeling of being adjacent to a normal world you no longer fully belong to.

She didn't say this out loud. Michael refilled her plate twice without being asked. Andy kept a careful eye on the door and pretended he wasn't. The afternoon was, by any measurable standard, uneventful.

It is, for the moment, the only piece of Millhaven that's hers. There will be a conversation; already forming in the back of her mind, already being drafted and revised; where she asks for more. For time in town. For the particular kind of ordinary that Golden Dragon gave her for two hours on a Tuesday afternoon.

She is building the argument carefully. The people who would hear it are already, in their own quiet ways, hoping she makes it well enough to win.

[earthcirca]

OVERVIEW Hawthorne doesn't appear on any publicly accessible map. It sits in rural Maryland, deep enough into the woodland that the tree line swallows it entirely. From any civilian road, there's nothing - no signage, no visible structures, no indication that a fully operational classified facility exists less than two miles into the trees. The only thing that hints at human presence is the occasional gravel track branching off from unmarked rural routes, and those don't go anywhere a civilian would think to follow. The base does not officially exist. It has no public designation, no listed budget line, no acknowledgeable history. If you asked the right people in certain government buildings, they would look at you for a long moment and then talk about something else entirely. It is not denied. It is not confirmed. It simply isn't discussed. The people who work there know better than to bring it up.

HISTORY Hawthorne was established in 1943. The original installation was built fast - wartime construction, all function and no elegance. It began as an intelligence processing site, one of several scattered across the mid-Atlantic corridor for handling communications intercepts and coded material during the latter half of the war. The woodland location was deliberate. Maryland's forest coverage gave natural concealment without requiring the logistical complexity of a remote desert or mountain post. Close enough to Washington to matter. Invisible enough to be useful. After 1945, most sites like it were decommissioned. Hawthorne wasn't. The precise reasoning behind that decision is buried somewhere in a classification tier that very few living people have access to. What's known - within the base, in fragments, passed down through the kind of memory that lives in hallway conversations rather than official records - is that something happened in the late 1940s that made certain people very interested in keeping Hawthorne operational. Through the Cold War, it expanded. New buildings went up. Old ones were repurposed. The underground level - what the base now quietly refers to as the Lab - was constructed during this period, reinforced and deepened in stages across several decades. The official record of that construction, if it exists anywhere, has never been produced. By the 1980s, Hawthorne had evolved into something harder to categorize. Not purely intelligence. Not purely military. Something in between - a facility built around the study and management of things that didn't fit neatly into existing frameworks. It has been continuously staffed since 1943. There are personnel on base today who were born after the Cold War ended and have no memory of what Hawthorne looked like before the most recent renovation cycle. The old bones are still there, if you know where to look. But for most people who live and work here, Hawthorne is simply what it is - the place they came to, and stayed.

APPROACH & PERIMETER The approach to Hawthorne is unremarkable by design. The roads leading toward it are real roads - used by the occasional local, connecting small rural communities with the same quiet indifference they've had for decades. There are no signs warning of restricted land. The government owns the surrounding acreage under a series of holding designations that don't reference any active facility. To a passing driver, it's just trees. The perimeter begins before you can see anything. A boundary line of chain-link topped with barbed wire runs through the woodland, partially obscured by overgrowth that has been deliberately left untrimmed. It doesn't look maintained. That's intentional. The wire runs further than most people who've worked at Hawthorne have ever walked - a full perimeter enclosing not just the base structures but a substantial buffer of forested land between the facility and the outside world. Motion sensors are embedded throughout this buffer zone. The main gate is where the unremarkable ends. It sits at the end of a gravel track - the kind of approach that feels like a mistake until it doesn't - and it is staffed around the clock. Two checkpoint positions, vehicle barriers, ID verification, secondary confirmation for anyone above a standard clearance threshold. The security detail there is not decorative. They run the same rotating shifts as the rest of the base. They are not, as a rule, chatty. Beyond the gate, a paved internal road leads to the main cluster of buildings. The forest presses in on both sides.

THE BASE - LAYOUT & BUILDINGS Hawthorne is mid-sized, by classified facility standards. Large enough to contain everything it needs. Small enough that within six months of arrival, most personnel know most faces. The layout is not elegant. It evolved rather than being planned - buildings added as need arose, connected by covered walkways and internal corridors that occasionally require you to go slightly the wrong direction to reach where you're going. New staff find this disorienting.

MAIN ADMINISTRATIVE BLOCK The oldest standing structure on base. The bones of it date to the original 1943 construction - you can see it in the width of the walls, the ceiling height, the way the windows sit slightly too small for the frames that were later installed around them. It's been updated comprehensively. Climate control, modern wiring, renovated interiors. But the building resists full modernity in the way old things sometimes do. The floors creak in specific places that never got fixed. The radiators in the east corridor knock in winter. This is where Garrett's office is. Top floor, corner room, overlooking the courtyard. The kind of office that communicates authority without trying to. He's been in it long enough that it smells faintly of his coffee. Command staff, senior administration, and the offices of several senior agents are housed here. Andy's desk is on the second floor - positioned, whether by assignment or by Andy's own quiet maneuvering, with sightlines to both the main corridor and the courtyard below.

OPERATIONS BLOCK Connected to the Administrative Block by a covered internal walkway. Newer construction - 1970s, renovated in the early 2000s. Functional, efficient, stripped of anything that doesn't serve a purpose. Briefing rooms, tactical planning spaces, communications infrastructure, monitoring stations. The walls in the main briefing room are whiteboards on one side and reinforced display screens on the other. This is where most of the day-to-day operational work happens. The Communications department occupies the eastern wing of this block. They have not put a welcome mat outside their door. They have, however, installed a new surge protection system since the incident, which they mention whenever Lena walks past. Not loudly. But audibly.

MEDICAL BLOCK (MED BAY) Separate from the main buildings, connected by an enclosed walkway. Mid-century construction, extensively renovated. Bright, functional, and deliberately warm in design. Someone at some point made decisions about the lighting and the paint colour that turned out to matter. People don't dread coming here the way they dread some parts of the base. James and Rodriguez set the tone early. It stuck. The Med Bay has become something of an unofficial community anchor. People stop in when they don't strictly have to. Nurse Albright keeps biscuits at the front desk. Nash, P. has a rotating selection of terrible magazines that everyone reads anyway. There are two distinct wings - general medical and the research-adjacent section where Dr. Petrova works. The research wing is technically still the Med Bay. It feels different. The lighting is slightly cooler. People don't linger there.

ARMORY & TRAINING BLOCK Set back from the main cluster, connected by a longer covered walkway. The Training Block is the loudest building on base during daylight hours. The armory attached to it is not. D. Chen runs a tight room - organized, precise, and with the particular energy of someone who has a strong opinion about where things are put back. The indoor training spaces are large enough for close-quarters work, firearms practice, and the kind of physical drills that require a ceiling high enough not to be a liability. There is padding on specific walls that has clearly been replaced more than once.

ENGINEERING & HANGAR COMPLEX On the western edge of the base. The hangars are large, functional, and perpetually slightly too cold. They house base vehicles- transport, tactical, maintenance equipment - and serve as the primary workspace for the engineering and motor pool teams. There is no airstrip. The hangars were built large enough that this sometimes confuses new arrivals, who spend their first week assuming it's under construction somewhere. Engineer Rafiq has a corner of Hangar Two that is, by unspoken agreement, his. Nobody moves the things on his workbench. This is not a rule that was ever stated.

FOOD SERVICES & CANTEEN Central location, which was either deliberate planning or fortunate accident. The canteen is one of the few spaces on base that operates on all three shifts with full service. N. Patel runs a kitchen that has, over the years, developed a reputation for being significantly better than it has any right to be at a classified government facility. There are theories about this. The most popular one is that Patel simply refuses to serve food she wouldn't eat herself and has trained her staff accordingly. The canteen seats roughly eighty at capacity. During peak hours it holds more than that. Nobody says anything. There is a specific table near the east window that has, over time, become understood to be where Diego's team sits. This was never announced. It simply became true. New staff figure it out within their first week, usually by sitting there once and experiencing the ambient social recalibration that follows.

THE LAB Underground. Access via a secured stairwell in the Administrative Block and a secondary access point in the Research annex. Nobody talks about the Lab with warmth. This is not because anything overtly terrible happens there - or at least, nothing that anyone has been able to confirm in a way that would survive formal scrutiny. It's more that the Lab exists in a register that the rest of Hawthorne has quietly agreed to keep separate. The people who work down there are professional. The work they do is legitimate, in the sense that it has been authorized by people with sufficient clearance to authorize it. It just doesn't feel like the rest of the base. The Lab was built in stages during the Cold War, reinforced and expanded over decades. It sits two levels below ground. The air filtration is different down there - you notice it when the doors open, a pressure shift, a change in smell. The lighting is fluorescent and even and casts no shadows in the way that natural light does. Dr. Petrova operates primarily from the research wing of the Med Bay but consults in the Lab. Dr. Ren Ito is based there. Several other researchers whose names don't appear in most base-wide circulation work there full time. Lena has been in the Lab. The people who care about her would prefer she didn't have to go back. Garrett has, on at least two documented occasions, overruled Lab-originated requests regarding her testing schedule. He did not explain his reasoning in either case. He didn't need to.

OUTDOOR SPACES

THE COURTYARD Sits between the Administrative Block and the Medical Block. It is not large. It was not designed to be a destination. And yet it has become one. There are six benches - four original, two added sometime in the nineties - arranged around a central space that contains three trees old enough to predate the current buildings. The trees are Maryland oaks. In summer they provide genuine shade. In winter they're bare and the courtyard is cold, and people still use it. There is a fourth tree that died several years ago and was never removed. Someone planted a small flowering shrub at its base. Nobody knows who. It comes back every spring. The courtyard is where people eat lunch when the weather permits. Where arguments get finished in lower voices than they started. Where Rodriguez takes his coffee at seven-fifteen every morning, regardless of season, and where James has been known to sit at the end of a long shift and simply look at the sky for a few minutes before going back inside. Lena has been found asleep on the bench nearest the east wall on at least three separate occasions.

TRAINING GROUNDS & TRACK Behind the Training Block, set into a cleared area backed by the tree line. The running track is standard - oval, rubberized surface, distance markers. It is used at all hours. Wes runs at five-thirty in the morning with the regularity of a weather event. Tank O'Neill runs PT groups on it three times a week. Individual staff use it at odd hours for the particular kind of thinking that only happens when your body is moving. The training grounds adjacent to the track are used for outdoor drills, fitness assessments, and the kind of large-scale exercises that don't fit indoors. There is a section of the grounds that has been partially cleared and leveled - the area used for Lena's designated flight zones. Her flight is restricted to these zones and the airspace directly above them, to a specified altitude. The zones were marked out by Adams and adjusted twice after early training sessions demonstrated that the initial boundaries were optimistic. The surrounding woodland creates a natural visual barrier from the perimeter, which is part of why the location was chosen. She's pushed the boundaries of those zones on multiple occasions. The incidents are logged.

THE TREE LINE Where the base ends and the forest begins. There is a liminal quality to the edge of Hawthorne that people feel without necessarily articulating. The base hums with the sounds of generators, HVAC, shift changes. Just the constant low-frequency presence of human activity. Then you step past the last building and there's just the woods. Maryland oak and pine, dense enough that the light changes within twenty feet of the perimeter road. Some staff run into the tree line on the interior side of the perimeter for the quiet. There are informal trails worn into the undergrowth that don't appear on any base map. On clear nights, Karpov has been seen standing at the edge of the training grounds, watching the sky. He doesn't explain it. Nobody asks.

ATMOSPHERE Hawthorne operates on rotating shifts, around the clock, without pause. This creates a particular quality of life that people either adapt to or don't. The base is never fully asleep. The canteen is always open. The lights in the operational block are always on somewhere. There is always someone on the track, always a light in a window, always the distant sound of a vehicle in the hangar complex. It should feel relentless. For some people, it does. For others, it feels like continuity. Like a heartbeat. The base is always breathing, and that means you are never entirely alone in it, even at three in the morning. People come to Hawthorne on assignment. They stay because at some point, without it being a decision exactly, it became home. The institutional culture is specific in the way of places that have existed long enough to develop one. There are unwritten rules - table assignments, hallway hierarchies, the understanding that you don't take the last coffee in Medical without making a new pot. There are traditions nobody can date the origin of. There are grudges, some of them genuinely old. There is also a collective protectiveness that runs underneath everything. The base looks after its own. It does this imperfectly, sometimes bureaucratically, occasionally with a delay. But it does it. When someone has a bad week, food appears. When someone is struggling, shifts get covered. When something happens to someone on base, something real, the whole place absorbs it and recalibrates. Lena arrived as something unprecedented. She is now, in the way that Hawthorne does things, simply theirs. That happened without a meeting. Without paperwork. It just became true.

[earthcirca]

Base Hierarchy & Department Structure

EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP Highest clearance. Rarely seen on the floor.

Director Calloway (DD Calloway) — Executive oversight. Refers to Lena in briefings with detached formality. Rarely interfaces directly with field staff.

Director Garrett — Executive Director. Effectively the operational conscience of the building. Final say on deployments, clearance adjustments, and personnel decisions that no one questions twice. Known to Diego and Wes since they were teenagers.

OPERATIONS COMMAND The operational spine of the base. Reports to Garrett.

Diego Rivas — Senior Liaison / Field Operations Lead. The de facto ceiling between Lena and anyone who wants to use her poorly.

Wes Callahan — Senior Field Operations. Diego's longest-standing partner. Runs drills, manages field rotations, doesn't tolerate half-measures.

Chinedu Okoye — Senior Agent. Quietly one of the most respected people on base. His presence in a room changes the air pressure.

Thomas Adams — Senior Agent. The kind of man who stands slightly behind whoever's nominally in charge and is somehow still the one holding the line.

Rafael Mendoza — Senior Agent. Intelligence-adjacent. Treats everything like a puzzle, including people.

Yuri Karpov — Senior Agent. Old Cold War school. Unreadable to most; occasionally readable to Lena.

Marianne Daniels — Senior Agent. Court-martialled twice, promoted both times. Results-oriented to a fault - until she isn't.

Keiko Iwata — Senior Agent. Adams' closest colleague. Precise, perceptive, and surgically good at reading people without making them feel examined.

Adrian Graves — Senior Agent. Restless, perceptive, and more patient than he looks.

Carmella Vasquez — Senior Agent. Field-hardened, protective, and currently in what everyone has decided to tactfully not comment on, with Graves.

Amadou N'Dour — Senior Agent. Reconnaissance and environmental specialist. Teaches patience by embodying it.

Liang Chen — Senior Agent. Precise, efficient, faintly competitive in the way that makes training useful.

Patrick Sullivan — Senior Agent. Rarely speaks. When he does, no one talks over him.

Michael Torres — Junior Agent / Agent-in-Training. Works under Diego. The warmth the department didn't know it was missing.

Lt. Hale — Command Staff. Strictly formal.

Captain Moore — Strategy.

Lt. Daniels — Operations. (No relation to Marianne.)

Captain Reaves — Operations.

Agent Lopez — Internal Affairs. Cold, bureaucratic, viewed with mild suspicion by most of the floor.

Agent Monroe — Intel. Keeps clinical distance.

FIELD OPERATIONS & TRAINING Drills, PT, and the people who make sure you can survive what's coming.

Dr. Halvorsen — Training Coach. Stern mentorship style. Has somehow become Lena's de facto flight drill lead.

Lt. Grey — Training.

Lt. Vasquez — Tactics. (No relation to Carmella.)

Davis, M. — Training Division. Disciplinary in tone, occasionally ironic about it.

Sgt. Morales — Security / Field adjacent. Night rotation.

Sgt. "Tank" O'Neill — PT. Loud. Enthusiastic. Unmerciful.

Sgt. Pike — Field Ops. Standard grunt sensibility, genuinely fond.

Sgt. Vasili — Field Training. Calls people "Rookie" as a term of endearment.

Captain Yoon — Flight Operations. Takes Lena's capabilities seriously in the way a pilot would — with professional respect and barely concealed awe.

Captain Boone — Flight Operations. Casual, jokey camaraderie. References things from decades she definitely doesn't share with Lena.

Lt. Parker — Flight Operations.

Lieutenant Rhodes — Flight Operations. Technical, respectful.

Sgt. Kim — Security. Quiet. Watchful.

Officer Price — Security. Keeps tabs on where Lena is relative to the cameras.

Officer Trent — Security. Clocks her speed on the ground.

Private Lang — Security. Fond in a hyperbolic way.

Private McAdams — Logistics. Friendly.

Carter, B. — Logistics.

Private Salazar — Motor Pool / Field adjacent.

ADMINISTRATION & RECORDS The people who keep the base running on paper. Frequently underestimated.

Andy Kowalski — Administrative Officer / Handler-in-Training. Diego's logistical right hand. Keeps better records than anyone and genuinely means all of them.

Admin Leigh — HR. Formal. Quietly protective in a procedural way.

Donovan, K. — Records. Clinical shorthand, discouraged by Andy.

Archivist Mina — Records. Detail-oriented.

Archivist Drew — Records. Has a dry sense of administrative humour.

MEDICAL (MED BAY) Distinct from Research/Lab. Warm, functional, and well-liked.

Dr. James Reeves — Medical Officer / Combat Medic. Married to Diego Rivas.

Dr. Rodriguez (S. Rodriguez) — Primary Physician. Lena's main doctor on base. Fifty-something, dark humour, deep competence, James' best friend.

Dr. Ellis — Medical. Warm demeanour.

Nash, P. — Medical. Started out sarcastic about it, now entirely sincere.

Dr. Petrova — Medical Research. Clinical to a fault. Does not approve of nicknames and is the only person in the building who enforces this with any real commitment.

Dr. Serrano — Medical. Said something during surgery that became a whole thing.

Nurse Albright — Med Bay. Maternal.

Nurse Gillian — Med Bay. Efficient. Genuinely kind.

Nurse Collins — Med Bay.

Nurse Rowe — Med Bay. Picked up James' nickname without realizing it, which James found quietly delightful.

PSYCHOLOGY & COGNITIVE RESEARCH Distinct from the Lab. Patient-centered, collaborative in approach.

Dr. Kaur — Psychology. Gentle, consistent. Weekly sessions that Lena actually attends voluntarily.

Dr. Garvey — Psychology. Tracks emotional progress with something approaching quiet pride.

Dr. Hwang — Cognitive Research. Academic by nature. Has been corrected about clinical terminology more than once.

Keiko Iwata — Consults here, though her primary home is Operations.

RESEARCH DIVISION / THE LAB Most people don't talk about the Lab fondly. The Lab is fine with that.

K. Dalton — Intelligence / Research adjacent. Formal terminology. Rare contact.

Analyst Reed — Research. Dry, ironic in a way that doesn't quite land.

Analyst Pierce — Intelligence. Philosophical. Describes Lena in terms that would be flattering if they weren't so detached.

Dr. Ren Ito — Research Division. Was corrected by Andy about terminology. Has since adjusted, mostly.

Dr. Lynn Shaw — Biology. Dry humour, not always warmly received.

Dr. Meyers — Medical/Research overlap. (No relation.) Poetic in tone. Semi-serious about it.

Dr. Halvorsen — Crosses between Research and Training for assessment purposes.

INTELLIGENCE & INTERNAL AFFAIRS High clearance. Low warmth.

K. Dalton — Intelligence. Formal reports, minimal contact.

Agent Lopez — Internal Affairs. Not especially liked.

Agent Monroe — Intel. Classified terminology. Viewed with mild distrust.

Analyst Pierce — Intelligence.

Harper, J. — Communications-adjacent intel. Occasional radio contact.

COMMUNICATIONS Currently in a cold war with Lena. It is not being discussed professionally. It is absolutely being discussed.

Specialist Vega — Communications. The incident. Rare contact now.

Specialist Brooks — Comms. The nickname she gave Lena is not affectionate.

Harper, J. — Comms / Intel overlap.

Specialist Jordan — Comms. Still a little twitchy about it.

Lt. Harper — Field Training / Comms adjacent.

ARMORY Respect Lena, but professionally. Safety first, always.

D. Chen — Armory. (No relation to Liang Chen.) Teasing, comfortable.

Specialist Tyler — Armory. Has a startle reflex now.

MOTOR POOL Fond of Lena in the way people are fond of something they've watched nearly break their equipment a dozen times.

D. Ramirez — Armory. Has not entirely forgiven the vent incident.

R. Alvarez — Motor Pool. Affectionate observer.

Specialist Ng — Motor Pool. Gentle.

Mechanic Dorsey — Motor Pool.

Mechanic Jordan — Motor Pool. Witnessed the landing.

Private Salazar — Motor Pool / Field adjacent.

ENGINEERING & MAINTENANCE Pragmatic. Have seen things. Mostly unbothered.

Engineer Rafiq — Hangar Ops. Has watched Lena tinker with things in mid-air and made a decision to simply document it.

Engineer Paulsen — Hangar. Watches Lena fiddle with equipment with the resigned affection of someone who has accepted their fate.

Tech Sgt. Hall — Engineering. Jokingly affectionate in the way of someone who has rebuilt the same thing four times.

Specialist Ford — Engineering. Makes jokes about built-in equipment. Nobody stops him.

IT SUPPORT Technically supportive of Lena. Somewhat complicit in her chaos. Deny everything.

L. Jenkins — IT Support. Uses terminology that's been officially discouraged. Keeps using it anyway.

C. Martinez — IT. Has not forgiven the prank incident. The rivalry is real.

Tech Owens — IT. May or may not have assisted in the prank incident. Records are unclear.

Tech Carter — IT. Extends the prank streak diplomatically as "legacy behaviour."

FOOD SERVICES & KITCHEN Universally beloved. The emotional infrastructure of the base.

N. Patel — Food Services. Maternal. Has never once let Lena leave without eating something.

Cook Anders — Kitchen. Knows about the dessert. Has chosen to allow it.

Cooke, H. — Kitchen Staff.

Cook Lorna — Canteen. Grandmotherly.

Torres, L. — Canteen. (No relation to Michael.) Grandmotherly, different flavour.

QUARTERMASTER & SUPPLY Quiet, competent, more observant than they look.

O'Connor, J. — Quartermaster. Has been here long enough to find everything mildly amusing.

Supply Officer Reid — Logistics.

FACILITIES Custodial and building maintenance. See everything. Mentioned in no one's reports.

Custodian Frank — Facilities. Has strong opinions about indoor flight. Expresses them every single time.

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this is not an exhaustive list.