[center][h2]Rozaliya “Rose” Tarasova[/h2][/center]

Being a latecomer to breakfast, lunch or whatever meal it was they were eating, Rose didn’t have the context to fully understand the tail end of Hoshiko and Rune’s conversation. And as the talk at the table turned towards strategy and their upcoming mission, the pilot found her desire to continue listening in disappear completely.

Instead she directed her attention back to her food and the piece of chicken still gripped tightly between her chopsticks. It was good, golden brown and full of flavour; it was breaded, not battered like the kaarage had been, which meant she had solved one mystery today. The rice it was served with was plain, but it was plentiful and filling and truly it was a luxury that they could eat this kind of stuff at all. Why anyone would want to spend their meal time talking about their upcoming mission, worrying about what some overheard strategic briefing meant when they could be focusing on food or, well, literally [i]anything[/i] else baffled her. They would find out the parameters of their mission in the briefing and Rose would spend exactly 0 seconds more thinking about it than she had to.

Bunch of damn workaholics, honestly.

Still, it was impossible to completely block out every word that was said, so she ended up thinking about it regardless. Splitting the teams… that could be good or bad for them. Obviously it meant they were going out in smaller groups, which either meant the missions they would be going on were smaller scale, or it meant they were desperately spread thin and would be taking more risks with them. A rotating schedule was also possible, to give them breaks between deployments, but that only made sense with the smaller scale missions; otherwise they would be putting the smaller teams at risk just so the others wouldn’t get worn out. If this [i]was[/i] related to the on-going plan to reclaim Saitama then she suspected that they were just spread thin and all of their pilots would be run ragged being sent this way and that trying to compensate for the size of the operation. They would be thrown at the front line over and over again to clear out the biggest messes and the strongest threats and the risk of one or all of them…

Dammit.

Elise was going to pay for making her think about this kind of thing while she was off duty.