Mech Pilot who has an addendum on their bounty board posting: known tomfooler.
"I've booked you to do a celebrity tour guide thing for the Naval Museum for their Armistice Day events," Hailey's agent Judy says over lunch.
"Is that the thing with schoolkids?" Hailey picks at a salad, sighing. "Why do you hate me."
"Ten per cent of your misery paid for this cheeseburger," Judy says cheerfully. "The Museum is mostly volunteer staffed, Hailey, you know what that means?"
Hailey knows several things that means, including the one she's being teased with. "No," she says.
"It means Sergeant Margot Scott." Judy gives her a sly grin and theatrically tosses her hair. "Oooh, Sergeant, fancy meeting you on this picket line, is this your mech, oh it's so big and strong and yet delicately precise, can I touch it?"
"I don't have to take this shit from someone who's been married four times already," Hailey says primly.
There's a tour, top of the hour every hour from ten till six. Whip through it efficiently, and there's time to sit down for half a cup of coffee in between. Children are, of course, the enemies of efficiency.
She stands in front of a Wanted poster from one of the Splinter Fiefs — a replica, from the Fulcrum set, but painstakingly reproduced from an actual example from Wallachia 7 — and gives an age-appropriate potted condemnation of dictatorship. Known tomfooler, the poster says; there's a complicated history of grassroots labour agitation and passive protest in the fiefs, here flattened to "the terrible Count of Wallachia had a bunch of workers arrested for playing in the street with a ball because he hated fun and thought if they had time to play games, they had time to work more building his war mechs." Also, implicitly: our war mechs are good, though, kids. 'Mocracy! Woo!
At the end of it, a couple of the older kids take advantage of Q&A to giggle at her about the kissing in Fulcrum, so she takes the opportunity to gently but firmly say that although her role was based on the real Sergeant Scott, both onscreen smooch Pilot Robbins and all of the kissing were made up for the film, and she appreciates everybody's enthusiasm today for historical facts.
Of course when she collapses into a chair after that one, actual Margot is in the break room. "Here you go, honey," she says, holding out a freshly steaming cup. "Holding up?"
"I wish I'd worn more comfortable shoes," Hailey sighs.
"Yeah, that'll get ya." Margot smiles sympathetically. "You're doing a nice job," she adds. "Last year the trustees got that soap actor — Morgan someone? Someone Morgan? — and he got the kids so fired up over the arrest poster they were chanting Tomfoolery is Freedom! and they were totally unmanageable."
"Oh no." Hailey's only seen normal unmanageable, and that was enough.
"Mm." Margot sips her coffee, and lets silence settle for a moment or two. "There was a bit of kissing," she adds, looking sideways at Hailey, one corner of her mouth quirked, and Hailey blushes.
"I just didn't want them to derail things," she says.
"Shipside gunner," Margot says, grinning. "Built like a whip antenna; definitely not any Robbins," and Hailey holds her hands up to jokingly fend it off.
"Scriptwriters!" she says.
"I know, honey. Not much of a story, anyway; she made officer and transferred to another ship."
"No dramatic postwar reunion?"
Margot snorts. "I left the Service; she went career. Rear Admiral, now."
Hailey glances at the clock, and makes a reluctant noise. "I'd better get down there for the next one," she says.
On the next break, she picks up the Staff Use Only tablet lying in the break room and tells herself she's doing wartime research in the Naval Museum, which is fine, and quickly narrows down current Rear Admirals who could have served with Margot and match the description "built like a whip antenna".
"Wow," she says to herself, "a looker," and then yelps at the amused chuckle right behind her.
"I was — um," she says.
"She was always saying I was punching beyond my weight," Margot says. She's grinning, unbothered, and Hailey swallows hard—
"How did she make gunner with eyesight that bad?" she says, heart still galloping, and Margot gives a delighted little crow of laughter.
"Oh, smooth," she says. "They teach that in actor school?"
"If I tell you my secrets now, what would we talk about over dinner?" Hailey says, surreptitiously crossing her fingers.
