Henry and Baxel are a pair of roughnecks who travel the Sol system looking for night shifts maintaining any of the life-sustaining infrastructures supporting off-world colonies in every bend of orbit. Currently the pair are working within the substructure of Titan Garden maintaining the geothermal power generator, a dangerous and unenviable job that sees workers spending long shifts deep underground, far away from the light of the sun. Henry, the Martian, is the more quiet of the two, preferring to keep to his work and avoid getting himself caught up in the tangle of his crewmates' drama. Baxel, the Ganymedean, is much more confrontational, presenting a caustic and unpleasant personality in order to keep nosy crewmates from getting too cozy with themself or their buddy Henry. Whatever job they're on, they work the same shifts and they share the same quarters. Henry is a draftsman, in his free time he likes to draw mechanical designs and architectural layouts dreamed up from his own imagination; he prefers a pad of paper and pencils to the convenience of a digital tablet. Baxel loves to share gossip they overheard with Henry, usually while Henry is drawing. Those leaves can pick up all kinds of rumors, a lot of them salacious, but occasionally they overhear someone whispering about vampires. Henry likes to hear about those rumors as early as he can.
Titan is an enormous domed colony, but few people realize how deep its roots need to stretch beneath the moon's surface to keep the lights on and the air clean. In order to function autonomously, the Garden needs to access as many local and renewable resources as it can; its breathable atmosphere is maintained by an arboreum in the dome's upper deck, the G-District, but its power needs come from far beneath the surface. Titan Garden's substructure extends downward into four roots- there is a central, primary root which feeds the geothermal power generator, there are two well-water roots that sustain life functions and a third, separate wellwater root which is dedicated to providing coolant to the generators, with one of the two set up to serve as an auxillary cooling source should an emergency arise. Sitting on top of the generators and the root stack is a dense array of water collection and filtration, power distribution, data networking, life support and administrative services- the bulk of the Garden's technicians work here, in the Layer 3 strata. Someone still needs to go deeper, down into the generators and the roots to make sure everything is running, so any early signs of failure can be detected and addressed expediently. The problem is, it's hard to find people who want to go down there every day; it's dangerous work, and there are rumors abound as to what lurks beneath the Garden. An outbound extraction of bodies from the substructure help cement these rumors, and drastically limits the pool of candidates applying for training to perform this vital work. Henry and Baxel, being vampires, feel like they're well-suited to the task.
Like most people afflicted with vampirism, Henry and Baxel had not always been this way, and did not choose their unlife willingly. They'd been friends for longer than they'd been vampires, and they're familiar faces to old hands on many space rigs and mining sites- when they apply for new work, there's always someone from an old job who can vouch for the quality of their service. This was the case when the pair applied to a routine, unremarkable, run-of-the-mill job maintaining the drills on a deep space mineral extraction rig attached to a large natural satellite adrift in space between Saturn and Caelus. Henry and Baxel had worked plenty of these contracts before; there were a few details about this one that were different from prior jobs, but in ways that maybe didn't stand out as immediate red flags. For one, the company was a new outfit, as opposed to one of the old devils every roughneck already knows. For another, there was the recruiter's insistence on a member of the mining company's board of directors being present for the onboarding process. The brass doesn't often take that much of an interest in the minutiae of their pipefitters, they have people to handle that. The suits insisted; Henry and Baxel didn't see the harm of it, their history spoke for itself. They didn't see the harm, until the door latch clicked shut in the rig's interview chamber.
There are benefits to having a vampiric workforce, though most of them are not beneficial to the workers. Space is cold, heating is expensive, and a death-like body can do without too much of that particular luxury. Sourcing grains and proteins to stock the galley is also expensive, but blood packs can be stored in the cold for a long time. Sourcing that blood is another issue entirely, but it's a big system, whatever you're paying for transfusion bags nearing expiration is gonna be a lot less than you're paying for proper food. Your workers arrived pre-trained and skillful, afflicted with vampirism they are also stronger and tireless. The best part was? If they protested, where would they go? Management could open the shutters in any of the rig's hab blocks when Sol could see the satellite and your problem would simply disappear in a plume of ash. It was a high-income, low-cost operation in relative isolation with a captive workforce management could string along with promises of a cure once they'd served the time on their contracts. Start-ups, man. Never again.
Henry and Baxel's arrival on Titan implies a story they agreed to take to their graves, they would not breathe a word of where they'd been or what they'd done to escape it to anyone. Titan Garden was a two-hundred-year-old colony, it was also the nearest available starport between Saturn and Caelus. Word was Titan's always looking for good hands to work the underground, and there was always a job to be found there, since no one wants to work the Titan underground. No one wants to venture down into the roots, down into the geothermal power generators or the networks of centuries-old access tunnels built by disembodied Martian brains bolted into screeching steel coffins. People talk about Camerahead. They say it stalks the substructure, it knows every twist and turn of the Titanic colony and when it finds you, it squeezes the blood out of you to feed its decaying organic systems. It was the perfect assignment for a pair of newly-turned vampires to try and reintegrate with Solar society. The onboarding was a breeze.
Taking on the undesirable night shifts, Henry and Baxel try to keep to one another's company as best they can, avoiding getting too chummy with any of their crewmates. That's a bit of self-preservation, and a bit of easing the burdens of what they have to do in the roots. The pair didn't want to become vampires, but that's what they are now, and they need blood to keep themselves going until they can find that cure they were promised, that non-existant cure. They have a system worked out, a way to sate their needs without creating any more vampires- the catch is, they do need to prey on their crewmates. Baxel is the smaller of the two, they usually commence a hunt. When another worker is isolated, Baxel will use their vampiric speed to position themselves quietly in the shadows of the pipes and access tubes that weave throughout the substructure. As a Ganymedean vampire they don't have teeth or fangs, they instead use their twisting roots to ensnare their prey and draw blood through the tendrils they'd once used to digest food, drawing it in through their prickly barbs. Baxel takes point like this because it's easier for them to take their quarry by surprise, and once their vampiric sting has pacified their target, Henry can emerge to feed as well. They're careful not to over-draw from their crewmates, and make sure they are left in a safe place where they can be found; being drained of blood, the crew will often blame these attacks on Camerahead, who is believed to have a similar M.O. It's not something they enjoy doing, but they tend to pick out workers who are due for a bit of paid sick leave to get them up and out of the substructure for a while. They at least try to give their victims something back in return.
Turnover for work in the substructure is always high, so new crew come and go. The pay is substantial, but so are the risks; Henry and Baxel had to resign themselves to becoming one danger among many. Since their arrival on Titan, there's been rumors of an increase in Camerahead activity. They initially assumed their crew were talking about their hunting habits, but rumors talked about sightings- more people claim to have seen Camerahead make an appearance closer to the surface than they normally do. Something's happened in the depths of Titan that's got the colony's resident cryptid agitated. There's talk of "vampires." The rumors have been stressful for Henry and Baxel; sometimes it sounds like their jig is up, but then some other detail emerges that points in a different direction. Rumors of vampires in the substructure, and it's not them? That doesn't bode well.
Late at night, while Henry was sketching away in their quarters, Baxel mentioned a bit of gossip that made their leaves itch. Fear of "bloodsuckers in the pipes" among some of the Terran crew have made their way up the chain, and the central office has hired in a "professional" to investigate. They say they're a Caelian, goes by the name Thryzz. Says there aren't a whole lot of professionals who deal with the unknown, but Thryzz apparently has a curriculum vitae for this kind of work. Henry thinks it's a good idea to keep a low profile, the job's too perfect to leave but they need to make sure they don't get swept up in a search for anything with an appetite for blood, Camerahead or otherwise. Talk of people in the pipes, though... that's got to have come from somewhere. Something had to have stirred that particular idea into the collective imagination of the work crew. They'd need to keep an eye out while they're working their shift- if anyone else had survived their previous job, Titan would be where they'd have washed up, and if it was some suit they'd missed, they'd need to handle the work they'd left unfinished. If it wasn't, though, if it was someone else? That's a new problem, and they'll need to figure out the right side of it before they make a move. Until then, it's best to keep their heads down and their noses to the grindstone. They were promised a cure, they'll live long enough to see that promise delivered, one way or another.