Aron was impressed with how big the place was. Glass and stainless steel were the main materials. Most walls were of a clinical white and the minimalistic furniture was spars. It seemed like a military organization out to impress investors. Except all the color accents were hot-pink.

He had been told that there were multiple phantom companies and legitimate businesses running to ensure the secret organization’s continued, undisturbed, clandestine operation.

A few scientists in white coats and paramilitary personnel in dark uniforms crossed his path, but no one seemed too bothered by the young man walking the corridors of the building at the edge of Seoul that didn’t exist in official records.

This was his first day back in Korea. He knew he was the last to arrive, though the boy named Junior had come by his room to tell him that everybody else was newly arrived as well. And everybody was about to meet for the first time.

***

The room was likely meant for conferences originally, going by the round table set-up, but on top of that the designers of the place had strewn around a bunch of distractions that young men might like. One wall was all glass, allowing a gorgeous view of the outside.

Aron was the first to arrive – after Junior – and watched the preppy boy’s painfully obvious attempts not to stare longingly at the X-Box in the corner. Good to know this weird Junior guy was still only a regular human boy after all.

After trading polite greetings, Aron sat down on one of the five chairs available. Not the one closest to Junior, but not the one furthest either. Meanwhile Junior himself didn’t sit down at all, only leaning on the table by his chair.

They were soon joined by a buff, muscular guy who introduced himself as Baekho and a tall, handsome boy named Minhyun who seemed excessively polite right of the bat, bowing to everyone on the room individually. They sat down to Aron’s left and right respectively.

The last one was a grumpy – or perhaps evil – looking person who was mind-blowingly pretty and seemed fully aware of it. For a moment Aron had thought the person was a girl. It was the hair that did it. Aron saw Junior swallow hard. The late-comer had no choice but to sit in the chair closest to Junior.

“Alright,” Junior finally started. He was the only one still standing. “I’m the leader of our new little family. Let me get a few things out of the way. You can leave anytime with no consequences. I promise you’re save here and we all are looking forward to- I mean I’m looking forward to working with you. Sorry, I’ve been sort of in an advisory position here for too long. It’s been some time since I wasn’t by far the youngest in a room. So, you’ve all had a tour through the facilities already, right? Do you like your accommodations? …Kay. For starters I want to explain why I called you all here and-“

Baekho raised his hand. “Um, excuse me, but… Can you just tell me what your powers are? If you can read my mind, I’m out.”

Junior chuckled. “I wanted to save the introduction round for later, but if you insist. Everyone in here is unique but we all seem to be part of the same meta-phenomenon. First, there’s Aron who can control kinetic, thermal, photonic and electric energy. He can even create it from nothing.”

Aron rose half and bowed slightly. “Uh, right. And the tranation thing, too.”

He got three curious stares and Junior’s encouraging hand motion. There wasn’t much in the room to work with so Aron laid his hands on the polished wooden table’s surface and turned it to rubber.

Ren jumped back in surprise. Baekho screeched. Minhyun’s eyes widened but he left his hands on the table, feeling it up.

***

“We’ve arranged everything for you to accompany us to Korea right away,” said Junior. They were in an expensive hotel’s lobby, enjoying an expensive coffee on expensive sofas.

“That’s a bit fast,” Aron said. There wasn’t much keeping him in America, but there wasn’t much he expected to gain from going anywhere else either. “I suppose I’m used to working with secret organizations, but the FBI is at least official business. What you’re proposing-“

“They’re getting worried, you know. The agents you work for. They talk about you like you’re an object – a weapon they can deploy. And some think you’re a sociopath with a god-complex. A few have begun working on a way to kill you. If you come to Korea, you wouldn’t work for us, you’d work with us.”

It took Aron a while to let the words sink in. But those only told him what he had already felt. Now that he thought about it, Junior was the only person who knew about his powers and wasn’t the least bit afraid of him.

“…Fine.”

***

Aron turned the table into Styrofoam next, broke off a piece and turned the rest back into the wood it had been. The missing chunk wasn’t missing anymore but the table’s total mass would have been less by that amount had somebody measured it.

He turned the styrofoam block in his hand to gummy bears and let them drop on the reestablished table.

Junior was the first to take one and munch it. The others followed his example.

“I can turn any solid into another,” Aron explained, “but it has to be a simple molecular structure. I can’t make things like compound metals.”

Junior took the cue and continued. “Then we have Baekho who can enter and leave wherever, whenever.”

The boy who insisted on being called the white tiger introduced himself and demonstrated by ‘shifting’ and ‘popping’ and explained the ‘rules’ he had empirically figured out.

He spoke with confidence but his voice was incredibly gentle, almost lulling Aron to sleep. There was a clear overall gentleness buried under a façade he had taken on through the life he lived. Which was a terrible one as far as Aron could hear. Baekho talked about the circumstances in his community as if he had never experienced a life where injustice wasn’t at every corner.

***

It was a sunny day and the café was quaint. But sitting across the boy who had ‘shot’ him yesterday made Baekho nervous. The sales pitch from the preppy boy wasn’t making him inclined to stay for long.

“I don’t care about your organization and this Nuest thing..”

Junior sipped his espresso. “You’d find guys like you who can-“

“I don’t care about making friends.”

“There are ways to develop your abilities beyond-“

“I don’t care about devel-“

“What do you care about, Baekho?”

He was stunned for a moment. “My family. My friends. The few people who haven’t screwed my over in that hellhole of a neighborhood.”

“How many of those people are there?”

“…a dozen or so. Why?”

“Are you guys particularly attached to the houses you live in?”

“What do you mean?”

Junior smiled like a man who knew he had already won. “How about a deal. You come with me and I pay for a dozen or so people to move to a better district. Or a different city. You choose. Perhaps we can even get them jobs.”

“Deal.”

“You won’t even think about it?”

“No. It’s a deal.”

***

Something else Aron took away was that Baekho seemed to be fairly dispassionate about anything not involving his family. At least he didn’t bother to mention anything else.

Then it was the next boy’s turn. Aron quickly found out that the one called Minhyun was quite talkative.

Junior chuckled already before Minhyun had even told them about his powers. Baekho was visibly taken aback by the idea that the handsome boy could read minds. Apparently he had spent years invading dreams before Junior had showed him how to expand his ability and he had made progress fast.

Minhyun established what he called a mindscape. Everyone sent their thoughts out into the room and the boys could hear each other. It was as if every boy’s voice came from directly next to Aron’s ear. It weren’t exactly the same voices as in vocal speech. Apparently he heard their inner voices that they used to talk to themselves.

He wondered what his inner voice sounded like to others by comparison to his real one.

It was jarring but Aron was comforted by the fact that he had to think very consciously to reach the others. He could still think in private even while in the mindscape. Minhyun’s story was perhaps even sadder than the tiger’s, with that vanished sister and all.

***

Two boys on a roof, the sun rising in front of them.

Junior had been right. He had woken up hungry. And he had no money left for much of a breakfast. After he thought he had thanked the boy for his breakfast enough times, he dared to ask.

“First question,” Minhyun said, “If I say no to your idea, will you still give me bus money?”

Junior nodded and chuckled.

“Secondly, what do you know about my sister?”

“Only that you’re looking for her.”

“And you can help?”

“We’ll try. The organization has staff looking for things across the globe all the time.”

“Third question. What is expected of me?”

“Just come with me for now. Meet the rest. Any more questions?”

“I don’t have money right now, so…”

“Ha ha. I’ll buy you lunch, too. Let’s get off this roof.”

***

As the telepathy demonstration ended it was Junior’s turn to speak again. “And then we have, Ren. Lovely, beautiful Ren, who would make a great couple with a certain someone.”

“The answer is still no,” said Ren towards nobody in particular, not elaborating any further about his powers.

Junior explained instead. “Pure and simple, Ren could kill us all if he wanted. Even me. Even Aron.”

“Wait,” Aron interjected, “How?”

Ren grinned. “I suppose the tension in here is quite thick.”

A cloud of gray smoke formed behind the pretty boy, taking on a monstrous, thin shape with antlers and claws.

Aron tried to push it but his powers reached into a void. There was nothing there to be telekinetically influenced. “I can’t sense it.”

“That,” said Junior, “is because these Conmotes as we call them are made from metaphysical manifestations, while your powers only extend to physically real objects. They can, however, very much hurt you.”

The Conmote’s arm became a crude blade to the smiling Ren’s obvious delight.

“Ren’s ability is to assess emotions inside people and in social situations as a whole. Actually, I have a theory that your powers, Aron, wouldn’t work in Baekho’s Twi either. Something to test later. Now, I promised to tell you something about me, right?”

***

The phone rang twice before someone picked up. Ren heard the voice on the other end. It wasn’t the weird boy from the park. Thank goodness.

“Yeah, hi. I got this number from a creepy guy who told me you’re a secret organization.”

“Yes, we thought it was better if somebody else spoke to you. From a phone, so your ability wouldn’t interfere.”

“Whatever. If I join you guy, how much do you pay and do I have to see that weirdo again?”

***

The Conmote vanished and the boys’ attention turned to the self-declared leader.

“I know things," he said. "I can see the future with perfect clarity, every path’s probability laid out. Other information pertaining to the past and present is fully clear to me. Though admittedly, that only works when it feels like it, which is very sporadically.”

“Wait,” Minhyun interrupted, “the future? How does that work? How far and what do you see?”

“Well, I can tell anything that might happen with about five or more percent of probability. Below that I can hardly ever see anything. I can predict a fighter’s next move the moment he decides on it. I know where Baekho will pop the moment he chooses a spot. I knew he’d be uneasy about Minhyun’s power as soon as it became likely we would talk about the subject.”

He looked around the room. “Let me give you more examples. If the screw in my chair was loose and it would collapse under me, I’d know to avoid it. Potentially days in advance. If one of you decided to loosen the screw to watch me tumble, I’d only know from the moment you decided to do it.”

Junior kicked an unoccupied chair he had been standing behind the whole time and it fell into two pieces. “This one – my random-information-sense tells me – was simply not set up right by the guy who furnished this room for us. This is our designated common room by the way. Are any of you decent at gaming? Or we could watch anime.”

“What is that random-information-sense?” Aron asked.

“Right. I have more knowledge sometimes. About all kind of things. We don’t know where it comes from. It seems like a contextual ability that depends on a trigger. This is how I knew about all of your existence. It popped into my head. That happens occasionally. So does other stuff. For example, Aron’s phone unlocks with the code one-one-one-eight. Ren is mildly allergic to certain laundry detergents. Minhyun stubbed his toe on the way to the meeting and Baekho-“

 “This is so creepy,” the white tiger yelled. “Just keep your mouth shut.”

Junior nodded. “See, I knew in advance you would say that. There was a ninety percent chance.”

“Keep it shut I said.”

A/N: Your thoughts so far? See you in the first story arc.