“Ayyyy, who left a sock in the fridge?” Chen whines.

“LEFT a sock in the fridge? Don’t you mean who put a sock in the fridge? Don’t normalize it. Since when is the office refrigerator an appropriate place to store hosiery?” Wendy asks between bites of her muffin. She sits at the small table in the office break room and motions for Chen to hold the sock up for inspection. In addition to violating her hygiene standards, the bright orange and white polka-dotted sock apparently offends her sense of style, based on the face she makes. “Trash it.”

Jongin sighs as he tries to pour a cup of coffee from the communal pot… and finds it empty. Great, the last person that needed their caffeine fix couldn’t be bothered to brew a new batch. He hopes they get heart burn.

One would expect this office to be a bit more sophisticated, have a little more professionalism than a typical workplace, but no. Same , different cubicle. It only took a few days after he started working here for Jongin to realize Prudence Inc. was no different from any other office setting he’s worked in.

Well, aside from the fact that they’re a government contracted agency handling the most classified cases in South Korea. They’re a high-class espionage corporation, supposedly the best in the business.

Sometimes though, Jongin questions their hiring process. Mostly in moments like this: Baekhyun slips into the break room and snatches the sock out of Chen’s hand just before it reaches the garbage can, cheering “it’s like air con for my toesies, be jealous,” before dashing back out again.

Jongin adjusts the tight black tie around his neck and sighs. He sets a new batch of coffee to brew and reluctantly treads back to his work desk without the pick-me-up. It’s 3am, and he could use the boost, but at least he’s accustomed to working this late. He’s prepared to go until sunrise, like usual. Most of his assignments are after midnight since his particular line of work tends to benefit from the cover of darkness.

Jongin is a navigator. All of them on this floor of the office are, actually. They’re the “eyes in the sky” or more accurately, eyes on the screen, for the field agents, aka operatives. For the most part, each navigator is paired with two or three regular operatives to ensure smooth communication during missions. Jongin had already completed an assignment earlier this evening with Tao, one of his regulars. Might even be his favorite regular, if one could really develop an attachment to a faceless alias on the other end of the line.

Operatives are practically ghosts, completely unknown persons. They’re expected to be versatile chameleons, able to blend right into the fabric of the fast-paced, overcrowded streets of Seoul or be believable as countryside farm folk in the fields of Jeolla-do – whatever the current mission requires. Navigators and operatives never meet or see each other’s faces. “It’s for your mutually respective safety,” Jongin and his entering cadre had been told during training. No one wanted to tug at that thread to reveal the dangers behind it, and they’d all accepted it as part of the job, just like the formal business dress code.

As far as anyone here knows, Jongin’s name is Kai. They each chose a codename upon signing on and follow a strict policy of not exchanging personal information or maintaining contact outside the building.

Despite the eccentricities of his navigator team, Jongin knows they each take such restrictions very seriously when it comes to the actual nature of their jobs. There’s no way ‘Wendy’ is really called as such on the outside by her friends. Chen is quirky, but clearly keeps secrets well behind that mischievous smile of his. And Baekhyun… okay, so he’s not sure how Baek manages to keep quiet about work. Maybe he uses up all his breath in the office and simply has nothing left after his shifts end.

Jongin sits down at his desk and logs back into the system. After the fingerprinting scan is complete, his dashboard pops up and notifies him of a new mission in his queue. He clicks the Begin button, and stretches his arm out to snag the envelope that slides down his delivery chute in the wall before it can hit the collection box at the bottom.

Mission 1091

It’s a thin packet, just two items inside. Missions come in plain vanilla colored envelopes with a briefing memo and USB drives containing all the digital files the navigator will need for the job. Everything here is on a need-to-know basis, so information is usually sparse: Operative name, a general objective, the available maps of the anonymous city, and/or blueprints of unnamed buildings. Immediately following a successful operatio