Chapter Text
Rey’s phone pinged with a notification not long before her stop on the train into the city. She shuffled through her bag, intent on silencing it—she was on her way to a job interview, and though she didn’t think she’d be taking the job, she still wanted to maintain interview etiquette. When she saw that the notification was an email from the HR specialist who set up the interview, she opened it.
“Here’s a press briefing of the event you’ll (hopefully!) be working on. Good luck!”
Alderaanian royal family to host month-long Christmas celebration. In an effort to boost tourism, Prince Ben will be—
Rey looked up as the pleasant but mechanical voice notified her that the train had reached her stop. It was for the best that she stop reading the article anyway, because she suddenly felt queasy. She’d gotten it all wrong. When the “HR Specialist,” whom Rey now suspected was a senior royal staffer, reached out to recruit her, she’d been so infuriatingly vague about the project that Rey had almost refused to even interview for it. Now she knew why—they didn’t want anyone they interviewed to leak details to the press. Rey knew she was an excellent event planner. But the royal family? Her firm had done some impressive, large scale event planning before, but never anything involving the royals. She’d certainly never done anything that would garner this much media attention. And anything with Prince Ben’s name attached to it was certain to get more than its fair share of media hype.
Rey exited the train and followed the directions the HR person had emailed her. She huffed in annoyance as she thought of that “specialist” just casually dropping the royal bombshell on her twenty minutes before her interview. Now she had more questions for the interviewer than they were going to have for her. What was the real budget? Now that the royal family was going to be involved, shouldn’t this be an interfaith holiday celebration, not specifically Christmas? How involved was Prince Ben going to be? Would she need to work with him directly?
Just what, precisely, was she getting herself into?